‘You should be here with us. It’s nice here.’
Bali.
Be there, Malin thinks, just disappear from the heat here and those unfortunate girls?
The way he disappeared to Bosnia, to Rwanda, to Somalia, anywhere that didn’t involve the impossibility of their love. She has heard his voice a thousand times over crackling phone lines and felt her stomach clench and fill with a hot, black, anxious lump.
Sarajevo. Kigali. Mogadishu.
Janne’s voice on those crackling lines, a message of what could have been, a greeting from a life that never was.
The same thing now.
‘I read about the forest fires on the
And she gets angry. Thinks: I could do with you now. But you, we, never realised it. You always gave in to your damn restlessness. Will you ever grow up enough to put your foot down and say that this is my place on the earth? It doesn’t automatically follow that it’s grown-up to build latrines in a refugee camp or drive a truckload of flour along mined roads. Being grown-up can mean staying put.
The anger dissipates as rapidly as it blew up.
‘The others can cope, Janne.’
‘But it said that one fireman has been seriously injured.’
‘I miss you both,’ Malin says. ‘Give Tove a kiss from me. It’s time she was in bed.’
The
The computer illuminates the bedroom, which would be completely dark without the flickering light from the screen.
The blinds closed tight, their jaws clenching to keep out the evening light.
Forest fires holding the area in their grip. One fireman injured when he tripped over on burning moss. Burns to his face and hands, that must be the one Janne had read about. The pictures in the paper are dramatic, with firemen like little clay figures in front of a huge wall of flame that is ready to set fire to them, burn them.
Daniel Hogfeldt hasn’t called her again, but he called Sven five times during the day.
He links the cases in one article. And writes about them in separate pieces as well.
Linkoping shaken?
Sleepy, more like. Drowsy with heatstroke.
The articles are short on detail. They’re leaving things open for the time being.
Daniel and the media make their own evaluations. For them the cases are one and the same, Theresa’s disappearance no ordinary disappearance, the connection is good for them, even if Sven doesn’t want anyone to link the cases together and thus help conjure up an evil monster for summer in Linkoping.
She’s just seen him on the local news. His eyes flicking to and fro, showing an uncertainty that Malin has never seen before, as if the camera were devouring him. ‘At this point we can’t say for certain . . . we are continuing to investigate . . . no connection . . .’
Karim Akbar had called in from holiday. Wondered if he ought to come in, look after the hyenas, as he put it to Sven.
Sven’s reply: ‘Take your son fishing, Karim. Write your book.’
Then she reads an article about the heatwave. About a stream of deaths among elderly inhabitants in sheltered accommodation, how home helps have found several elderly clients dead from heart attacks; how they can’t cope with the heat or the dry atmosphere of the air conditioning. One district nurse quoted as saying: ‘It’s terribly hot in our patients’ flats. They’re having trouble drinking enough fluids and regulating their body temperature. And we don’t even have time for our regular rounds when so many people are on holiday.’
Malin turns off the computer and goes into the living room, stands by the open window and listens to the buzz of conversation from the pub on the ground floor.
Go down?
No, not today.
Even if her whole body is screaming for a tequila.
Instead she goes into the bedroom, lies on the bed and closes her eyes.
The harsh daylight lingers in the form of burning pricks of light on her retinas, but from the darkness around her a figure emerges.
Malin sees Nathalie Falck in the cemetery, her mouth is moving but it’s not Nathalie’s voice, it’s Peter Skold’s over the phone.
Two youngsters united in a lie.
But they’re old enough to know that they have the right to silence, that if they just stay quiet they can make the police’s job practically impossible.
Someone who stays silent can get away with pretty much anything. Language is the greatest enemy of the guilty.
Malin opens her eyes again.
She hears the voices from the pub, livelier than any she has heard so far today, but she can’t make out any words in the chatter. She closes her eyes. Feels Daniel’s body against hers, his weight. Maybe I should . . .
No.
Sleep instead.
Tired as hell.
In a room in the University Hospital, Josefin Davidsson lies under a thin white sheet, willing her conscious mind to remember what her body remembers, what has happened to her. Her parents are still sitting in armchairs by the window, looking out over the flickering lights of Linkoping, also wondering: what happened in the Horticultural Society Park? Or somewhere else? What secrets are concealed by the scorched grass and bark and leaves, the night and the darkness? At the same time they long to be far away, at home in their perfectly ordinary beds.
I want to remember, Josefin thinks, but I don’t remember anything.
Do I want to remember? What happened still exists, even though I can’t remember it, doesn’t it?
Soon I’ll be able to go home.
I shall lie on the porch and try to remember, I shall whisper to myself: remember, remember, remember!
Tove’s voice is in the room, in the dream.
‘Look after yourself, Mum, I’ll be home soon.’
From a hiding place deep within Malin’s sleep, the voice says the words she wants to hear.
‘I’ll be home soon.’
What would I be without you, Tove?
Without both of you?
