The man sounds resigned, but also annoyed.
‘Probably nothing,’ Malin says. ‘But we need to talk to him.’
The man points towards a door with a plastic window.
‘My son’s in the stockroom. You can go through.’
Ali Shakbari is standing at a bench screwed into white tiles, trimming some red roses. The whole room has a strange, pleasant perfume. When he catches sight of them he grows afraid, the look in his brown eyes oddly watery. You want to run, don’t you? Malin thinks.
‘Ali,’ Zeke says. ‘How are things?’
No answer, and Ali puts the secateurs down on the bench slowly, his thin, sinewy body in perfect shape under his white cotton overalls.
‘What were you doing the night before last?’
‘What do you mean?’
Defiant now.
Malin explains about Josefin being found in the Horticultural Society Park.
‘And you think I had something to do with it?’
‘We don’t think anything,’ Malin says. ‘So, what were you doing?’
‘Dad and I were cleaning the stockroom. We didn’t finish until 3.00 a.m. It’s so fucking hot that it’s easier to work at night.’
‘It’s true.’
Ali’s father is standing in the doorway to the stockroom, holding the door open and radiating authority.
‘Then I drove him home. He was home by about 3.30.’
Malin looks around the stockroom.
Every inch of the room is sparkling clean, well ordered.
Too clean? Malin thinks before picking up one of the red roses from the bench.
‘These are lovely,’ she says.
‘Finest quality,’ Ali Shakbari’s father says.
There are two sorts of people in the world. Hunters, and the hunted.
So far in this investigation those roles haven’t been fixed.
Are we the ones being hunted, drifting like motes of dust on the hot breeze? Malin wonders. So far we haven’t reached the point where we’re doing the stalking. Not yet. But maybe now, as a result of what I can see under the glass, in the hot light of the four lamps placed around the small but powerful microscope. The answer may lie in this blue substance, a blue truth.
The fragments are so tiny that they’re hard to focus on.
The edges of the tiny blue fragments almost jagged.
A windowless laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab, which smells of chemicals and disinfectant. A humming noise from a fume cupboard.
Zeke’s heavy breathing beside Malin, Karin’s voice in her head:
‘What you’re looking at is fragments of paint,’ Karin says. ‘The sort of paint that’s normally used to colour plastic.’
The blue fragments blur in front of Malin’s eyes. Floating.
Is the truth moving about somewhere down there?
Or something else?
A first clue.
A blue colour, dead particles moving, as if they had been buried alive under the glass.
Malin raises her head from the microscope and looks at Karin.
‘What could the paint have come from, what sort of object?’
Zeke sounds impatient, irritable because of July’s never-ending hot weather, or possibly just because Karin is in the room.
Karin’s voice is mild: ‘It’s impossible to say, it could be any one of a thousand things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as a garden hose, the handle of a cheap mop, a salad server, a lamp-stand, a toy spade.’
Malin, Zeke and Karin fall silent.
Josefin Davidsson penetrated without knowing it.
Theresa missing. Hints of lesbian activity on her Facebook page. Lovelygirl.
Does all of this fit together?
Nathalie Falck. Almost like a man. What do men have that women don’t?
What’s the voice?
Here and now.
Malin listens to the room. Something is taking shape in front of her eyes.
What are the girls in this investigation saying? Theresa, Josefin, Nathalie?
‘Such as a dildo,’ Malin says. ‘A dildo.’
And she doesn’t know where the words come from, but they’re there in the room.
‘Sure, such as a dildo,’ Karin responds. ‘Not at all impossible.’
‘How do we go about looking into this?’ Malin says, turning to face Karin. ‘Is it even possible to get any closer than guesswork?’
‘Manufacturers keep records. We can start by checking the most likely products, I mean the sorts of thing this paint could have been applied to. Such as a dildo.’
‘What do you think, Malin?’ Zeke asks.
‘I don’t know. But a dildo doesn’t seem unlikely. Her vagina wasn’t really injured, just penetrated. As if the object had been designed to do that.’
‘But surely it’s possible to cause damage with a dildo?’
‘Yes, if you’re hard-handed. But then, you can cause damage with anything.’
‘My experience is that the vagina almost always shows serious damage when hostile penetration occurs with an object that isn’t designed for the purpose,’ Karin says. ‘It could very well be a dildo. You can get both hard and soft models.’
‘You’re an expert?’ Zeke says.
‘No,’ Karin says. ‘But that much I do know.’
And then the realisation of where the paint came from, that it was scraped out from within Josefin. Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, the young girl who was raped in Tjallmo forest several years ago and now sits mute in a mental institution. The crass words in the report about her shredded innards, her body lying on the bed of her room in Vadstena last winter, when Malin visited in connection with another case.
Probability, Malin thinks. Forces herself back to concrete facts.
Thousands of things and their language, listen to the language of these things instead, to what they’re saying now. The air conditioning in the room splutters, a slow coughing sound spreading through the ventilation pipes before it falls silent and almost at once a debilitating heat starts to take over the room.
‘God, how stupid,’ Karin says. ‘Now it’s packed up and who knows how long they’ll take to fix it in the middle of the holidays like this, if there are any of them working at all.’
‘They’re probably working,’ Zeke says.
‘A dildo,’ Malin says. ‘That makes sense, even if our perpetrator could in theory have used pretty much anything.’
She says nothing about her earlier thought about a lesbian connection. But surely lesbians often use dildos? Or is that just prejudice? No, one of her classmates at Police Academy had proudly shown her her collection and given her detailed descriptions of dildo technique.
Zeke nods in agreement, no trace of doubt in his eyes.
‘I was thinking that I could get Forensics to check dildo manufacturers,’ Karin says. ‘See what sort of paint they use. It might take a while, but you’d be surprised how much even the strangest businesses know.’
Then Karin leans forward and puts her eye to the microscope, saying: ‘It really is a beautiful shade of blue,
