But no.
Not now.
The key in the door of the flat.
A stale smell, clothes and everything else just one big mess.
Malin stops, looks at herself in the mirror.
Heat wrinkles?
Whatever, they’re certainly new, those little lines in the skin around her eyes.
I’m thirty-four, Malin thinks. And I still don’t recognise my own reflection, I still don’t know who I’m looking at.
They come to her again. Like summer ghosts.
Janne.
Tove.
And Daniel Hogfeldt.
And she is consumed by a sudden painful sense that life is over, even while she’s slaving away at it.
17
Her voice fills the bedroom. She’s talking about the girls.
It doesn’t really matter what she says.
It’s the movement of her voice, its vitality, that’s the important thing.
The presenter on local P4. Her friend.
Helen Aneman must be working evenings now, unless she works at pretty much any time of day.
‘And to all you girls out there in Linkoping. Please, don’t take any risks. Whatever you’re doing, don’t go out alone. We don’t know what this summer has let loose.’
Then Helen introduces a track and Malin lies on her bed with the blinds closed, listening to her friend’s voice in the relative darkness.
She sounds sexy.
Alone, but not tragic, as if she were waiting for someone to come to her in the studio and take her away.
Her prince charming? Well, why not?
The music starts. A hard-rock track. The words of the lyrics mean nothing. Malin is jerked back, gets up, slamming one hand down on the radio’s off-switch.
Sven Sjoman called half an hour ago, just after nine o’clock.
‘You’re going to see Nathalie Falck?’
‘I called her. We’re meeting up in a little while. She sounded reluctant, to say the least.’
‘It’s good that you’re working, Malin.’
‘So you don’t think I’ve got anything better to do?’
‘No, actually I don’t, Fors.’
The defiance in Nathalie Falck’s dark eyes.
The lies beyond the defiance.
Or truth withheld.
Nathalie agreed to meet her after some persuasion, but maintained in a razor-sharp voice that she had nothing to add.
Chosen location: the cathedral.
‘I can meet you in the cathedral at ten. I go there sometimes.’
‘Is it open that late?’
‘They don’t lock the doors before eleven in the summer. Some new accessibility thing. And it’s cool in there.’
And now they’re sitting in one of the brown-painted wooden pews towards the front, near the modern painted altarpiece, and above their heads grey stones of different shades reach upward to form an arch, stones that have spent centuries trying to disprove the law of gravity.
Nathalie is wearing a black vest and skirt. She radiates a courage and determination that Malin wishes she could have had as a teenager.
‘What do you want to know?’ she asks without looking at Malin.
‘Yes, what do I want to know? Why don’t you tell me? I’m sure you haven’t told us everything that might be of interest to us. Nice skirt, by the way.’
‘Don’t try to manipulate me. It isn’t a nice skirt. H&M crap.’
‘Who’s Lovelygirl?’
Malin looks for a reaction in the girl sitting beside her.
Nothing.
‘I don’t know any Lovelygirl.’
‘It’s an alias on . . .’
‘I’ve seen it on Theresa’s Facebook page. Don’t know who it is.’
That came a bit too quickly, Malin thinks.
‘You’re sure?’
No answer.
Nathalie huddles up, as if to say: thus far, but no further.
Malin falls silent. Lets the church’s faint knocking sounds take over for a few short moments.
‘Is it hard being different?’ she asks eventually, and she can see Nathalie Falck relax.
‘Do you think I’m different?’
‘Yes. It shows. In a good way.’
‘It’s not hard. It’s just different.’
‘Theresa is missing, Nathalie. You have to tell me what you know.’
And Nathalie Falck turns her round face towards Malin, looks her deep in the eyes.
‘But I don’t know anything else. I know Theresa, but I don’t know everything about her.’
Her pupils contract. A sign of lying.
But are you really, actually lying?
‘What about Josefin Davidsson, do you know her?’
‘You mean the girl in the park? Oh, come on! I’d never even heard of her until I read about her in the paper.’
By the entrance to the cathedral, some seventy-five metres behind them, someone turns a rack of postcards.
‘Why do you come here?’ Malin asks, recognising her own visits to the memorial grove up in the Old Cemetery, and thinking that Tove would never come here of her own accord, the library is her place.
‘I like the way it’s so peaceful. And big. There’s room for me in here, somehow.’
‘It’s certainly big.’
‘What do you think has happened to Theresa?’ Nathalie Falck asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Malin answers. ‘Do you?’
Then Nathalie points to the altarpiece, at the angular, painted figure of Christ.
‘Do you believe in virgin birth?’
Malin doesn’t know how to react to the question.
Virgin birth?
‘I mean,’ Nathalie Falck says, ‘what’s the point of innocence when everything pure and beautiful always ends up dirty? Is it actually possible to talk about such a thing as fucking innocence in the first place?’
It’s just after midnight when Malin lies down on her bed for the second time that evening. It’s just as hot and
