Sven sounds almost pleading, but there’s a note of relief in his voice. A Lovelygirl, something to go on.
‘She’s got a Yahoo email account as well,’ Willy Andersson says. ‘But I can’t get into it.’
‘Are Yahoo likely to be any quicker than Facebook?’
‘I doubt it. I’ll try them both, and we’ll see.’
‘Get onto it,’ Sven says. ‘And make sure they know why it’s urgent.’
‘Nothing on MySpace? YouTube?’
Malin remembers the videos on YouTube a year or so ago of a teenage girl being raped and abused. It turned out to be her best friends torturing her.
Peter Skold. Nathalie Falck. Torturers?
‘Nothing on MySpace. I haven’t checked YouTube, but I can do some searches today.’
‘Get onto it,’ Sven says again. ‘Get onto it.’
‘And Peter Skold and Nathalie Falck haven’t got their own pages either?’
‘No, not as far as I can see,’ Willy Andersson says, getting up, and his thin, beige cotton trousers hang slack around his skinny legs.
Andersson.
Forty years old.
Looks more like fifty.
‘Good work,’ Sven says.
‘It was pretty straightforward,’ Willy Andersson says as he unplugs the computer and puts it under his arm. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he says, and then he’s gone, and only the heat and the sound of the door closing linger in the meeting room.
‘So, you two. What are you up to?’
‘We’re going to see Behzad Karami.’
And a silence descends on the room. A quite specific silence that Malin recognises and likes, the silence in an investigation where the thoughts of the officers coalesce around an idea, a line of inquiry worth following up.
‘Lesbians,’ Sven says. ‘Could there be a lesbian angle to this case? That Lovelygirl on Facebook certainly gave the impression of being homosexual.’
‘And Nathalie Falck is pretty masculine,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks that he’s being prejudiced, but deep down she agrees. She can feel the suggestions in the room.
‘So, there could be a lesbian angle. Keep it in the back of your minds,’ Sven says.
‘Maybe Nathalie Falck knows who that Lovelygirl is?’ Malin says.
‘OK, time for the gangbangers,’ Zeke says, standing up. His eyes full of expectation.
A code.
We need a damn code for the lock.
It’s just after half past nine. They’re standing in the shade under the porch in front of the door of a run-down block of flats. The once-yellow brick of the facade has faded to ochre, and the surrounding grass and flowerbeds look as if no one cares or is paid enough to look after them. Cigarette ends, cans, broken green bottles.
Malin can see herself in the glass of the door, her face improbably long and her skin somehow glowing.
Berga.
Only a few kilometres from the centre of the city, and just seven hundred metres from Ramshall.
Another world.
Unemployment.
Immigrants.
And the usual: single mothers trying to raise their children to be decent people, as best they can with underpaid jobs that swallow up ten hours a day.
Absentee fathers are no myth here.
Most of the inhabitants of Berga are probably at home, even though it’s summer.
Two blocks away from where they are now standing Malin found one of her old school friends, dead from a drugs overdose. In a small one-room flat on the first floor, her first year with the Linkoping Police, when she moved back with Tove after graduating from the Police Academy.
A smell had been coming from the flat.
The neighbours had reported it.
And she and a colleague had gone around, and he had been lying on the floor beside the bed, the place an absolute tip, and he stank and his body must have swollen up but by the time they arrived it looked almost shrivelled.
Jimmy Svennson with three Ns.
He used to be quite a charmer. Pothead turned junkie turned dead.
What’s the smell now?
Scorched summer.
‘What are we going to do about the door, Malin?’
‘Wait until someone comes.’
‘You mean . . .’
‘I was joking, Zeke. A little morning joke,’ and Malin pulls her key-ring from the inside pocket of her pale-blue jacket, sticks the skeleton key in the lock and twists. ‘This sort of lock’s easy.’
Zeke looks at her admiringly.
‘I have to say, you’re bloody good at that, Fors.’
The stairwell smells of mould, and the lime-green walls are in serious need of a coat of paint.
No lift.
They’re panting by the time they reach the third floor.
‘Bet you he’s asleep,’ Zeke says as he presses the doorbell beside Behzad Karami’s door.
They ring again and again.
Malin calls Behzad Karami’s mobile number, there’s no landline listed.
There must be a terrible amount of ringing inside the flat.
Then the voice on the mobile, with just a faint trace of an accent in his Ostergotland Swedish even though Karami was already eight years old when he moved here.
‘Do you know what time it is, you bastard?’
‘This is Malin Fors. Police. If you open the front door, the ringing will stop.’
Zeke’s finger on the bell.
‘What?’
‘Open the door. We’re standing outside.’
‘Fuck.’
Over the phone Malin hears a body moving, then there’s rattling behind the door, Zeke’s finger ringing constantly now, and the sound of the doorbell getting louder and louder the more the door opens.
‘Good morning, Behzad. So you’ve gone and messed things up for yourself again, have you?’
Zeke’s voice full of distaste as he lets go of the bell.
Behzad Karami’s face puffy with sleep and possibly alcohol, and who knows what else? Tattooed torso, powerful shoulders, a choker of animal claws and teeth around his neck. Nineteen years old, his big, black, shiny BMW parked closer to the centre.
On the other hand.
After a spell in youth custody he was never found guilty of anything. And we couldn’t get him for the rapes, and maybe his ‘business’ is going well? What do I know? Malin thinks.
‘We’ll come in,’ Zeke says, and before Behzad Karami can protest Zeke has pushed him aside, stepped inside the hall and on into the single room.
Behzad Karami hesitant.
Branded since he sat in jail while they investigated whether or not the gangbang of the paralytic Lovisa Hjelmstedt could be classed as rape or serious sexual assault.
