Summertime Death

isn’t it? Clean and pure, like spring water.’

Outside the heat has taken a firm grip on the air, and the wind, insofar as there is any, is hot, dragging through already parched treetops. The smoke from the forest fires is pungent on the air, the wind must be coming from Tjallmo today.

The fires keep getting worse. This morning an elderly couple had to be evacuated from the house they’d lived in for sixty years.

The light seems to attack your eyes, any sunglasses that let you see anything at all are helpless against it. And she could really do with clear vision right now, to see all the connections that are scraping away at her consciousness like little shards of metal.

Malin and Zeke retreat to the lobby of the National Forensics Lab and its relative cool, where they sit down on one of the red Lammhult sofas, panting, unable to summon the energy to walk the hundred metres to the police station.

‘Shit,’ Zeke said. ‘I didn’t think it could get any hotter.’

‘Oh, it can,’ Malin says. ‘And this damn light. Even the thought of it gives me a headache.’

‘So, a dildo?’

‘I don’t know, Zeke. Maybe.’

Zeke runs a hand over his shaved head.

‘So who uses dildos?’ he says.

Malin thinks, not answering Zeke’s question, preferring to leave it open and let Zeke see the connection for himself.

‘Someone who’s been chemically castrated? Someone suffering from impotence? Someone who just feels like it? Lesbians?’

‘Lesbians,’ Malin says, lingering over the word to let Zeke realise what she means.

‘So that’s what you’re thinking?’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘Lovelygirl on Theresa’s Facebook page. Nathalie. And Josefin? Do you think she’s lesbian as well?’

‘No. But the perpetrator could be. A definite line of inquiry, anyway.’

Zeke nods.

‘So who else would use a dildo?’

‘I can’t think of anyone else.’

‘Maybe some unlucky bastard who’s lost his crown jewels altogether?’

‘You reckon?’ Malin says.

‘How can we know? Or else the scum in Berga have come up with a new way of humiliating women,’ Zeke says.

Malin stares in front of her.

Sees how Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami filled Josefin Davidsson with cheap wine, then took turns raping her on a sofa with a blue-painted dildo. Sees them laughing, exhibiting the very worst of masculinity, even though they’re scarcely more than boys.

That’s racist, Malin thinks.

Shrugs off the image of the boys.

Malin and Zeke sit in silence beside each other on the sofa. Breathing in the air, cool and dry, looking out at the heat, at the way it’s making the air in the police station car park vibrate and snake.

Tove and Janne in Bali, cooler than here.

It’s ten past nine and Malin is sitting at her kitchen table, eating a dish of soured milk and oat-grits. She’s so tired she couldn’t even be bothered to slice a banana.

Hot in the flat.

No air conditioning.

She raised the dildo idea with Sven over the phone, he thought it sounded like a lead worth pursuing, and said that he’d get some uniforms to check places where you could buy blue dildos on the net, in parallel with Karin’s work: ‘That’s how people buy that sort of stuff these days, isn’t it?’

Daniel Hogfeldt.

She thought for a while that there could be something more than just the physical between them, and maybe there is, but mostly it’s this: the way their paths cross, day after day, until they meet up in his or her flat. But not tonight, he’s still in the city, Malin knows that much, and not in this heat, this isolation. Her own sweat is enough, and exhaustion is making every muscle wither and buckle, and she’s missing Tove and Janne so badly that it’s on the point of turning into grief.

Her mobile rings.

It’s in the living room.

Malin puts the spoon down, gets up, hurries through to find it. Guesses that something’s wrong.

Karim Akbar’s number.

‘Malin here.’

‘Malin, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Just because there’s been a rape, you start harassing local immigrants?’

How could he know?

‘We . . .’

‘No excuses, Malin. Take a look at the Correspondent’s website, it’s all there in black and white.’

‘Hang on, Karim, calm down.’

‘And now every single bloody media organisation in the country is calling me for an opinion.’

Karim’s in his element.

Malin can’t work out if he’s genuinely angry or just pretending to be, and is actually happy to get some media coverage in the news drought. All his articles and appearances are controversial, but politically safe in the attitude towards integration that he represents. What’s Karim’s long-term goal? A ministerial post? But he doesn’t even belong to a political party.

Her computer is on in the bedroom.

Click, click, click.

The Correspondent’s website.

A photograph of Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami standing outside the blocks of flats in Berga.

Headline: No Evidence: Police Harassing Immigrants.

The caption to the picture: We had nothing to do with the rape in the Horticultural Society Park, but the police are hassling us just because we’re immigrants.

Daniel’s tabloid angle: The Correspondent has tried to obtain a statement from representatives of the Linkoping Police today, but no one was available.

A blatant lie to fit the story.

And you’ve been in my bed?

And doubtless will be again.

‘Are you still there, Malin?’

There must have been a two-minute silence on the line, quite unlike Karim.

‘I’m here, Karim. It was just an idea, one of many leads, you can see that, can’t you?’

‘I can see that.’

‘And they were the suspects in the Lovisa Hjelmstedt case.’

‘I know, Malin, but surely you can see how bad this looks?’

‘Enjoy the attention,’ Malin says.

Karim laughs, but his laughter is hollow and tired.

14

The phone on the table in front of Malin.