She sits down next to Paul Anderlov on the sturdy arm of the chair, put he pushes her away.
‘Go to hell,’ he says. ‘After all, I’ve been there long enough.’
Paul Anderlov collects himself, seems to pull himself together, makes coffee, puts away a pair of white washing-up gloves as he asks them to take a seat in the kitchen, with a view of the civic centre in Ryd.
‘I’m not so stupid that I can’t work out the way you’re thinking,’ he says. Resignation in his voice, but also relief. Perhaps because he knows that they’re going to listen to him.
‘I read about the dildo and I understand perfectly well, and I’m not even going to comment on the fact that it’s idiotic and superficial and simplistic. But I understand your thinking. Could he be sexually frustrated? Mad?
‘Well, I’m not mad. Sexually frustrated? You bet I am, what do you think it’s like living like this, you should see what I look like down there,’ and Zeke looks involuntarily away from Paul Anderlov and out of the window, but the shabby brick and panelled facade of the civic centre give little comfort and he notices a spider outside the window, and an almost invisible web stretching from one side of the frame to the other.
‘Anyway, how did you find me? Actually, I don’t even want to know. Maybe it was through Janne, your ex, Fors, I know him. We were in Bosnia together, in ’94. We’ve had a few beers together, talking about our time in the field, or rather: I talk about my memories to him. He’s as quiet as a broken car stereo.’
‘Janne hasn’t said anything about you.’
‘Oh, so it wasn’t Janne? No, I didn’t really think it would be.’
And Paul Anderlov starts talking, and they listen.
‘It happened on a mountain road outside Sarajevo. I was one of the IFOR troops, and it was the sort of shitty, grey, rainy day when it was practically ordained that something was going to be fucked up. It was that sort of day, and it did get seriously fucked up; the jeep hit a mine that had been buried outside a village called Tsika. I remember an explosion, a great sucking explosion, and then I was lying in the road some twenty metres from something burning, and I could hear someone screaming and screaming and screaming, loud enough to bring down the mountains, and then I realised I was the one doing the screaming. Everything down there was just black, no pain, just black and empty.
‘Two men died.
‘One lost a leg.
‘And then there was me.
‘I’d happily have changed places with one of the others.
‘And now you show up, a couple of fucking cops, and what the hell do you know about anything? You know nothing.’
They let the silence do its work.
Then they ask the questions that have to be asked.
The cretinous, asinine questions.
From haze to clarity, as the poet Lars Forssell wrote, Malin thinks. From clarity to haze.
‘What were you doing on the night between Thursday and Friday?’
‘Have you ever met Josefin Davidsson?’
‘Can anyone give you an alibi?’
‘So you still have the desire even if the ability is gone. Did your frustration make something snap?’
‘So you weren’t in the Horticultural Society Park?’
‘But you do like teenage girls, then?’
Paul Anderlov’s eyes are fixed to the Ikea clock, the same sort I’ve got in my kitchen, Malin thinks. But the second-hand still works on yours.
Paul Anderlov doesn’t respond to Zeke’s insinuations.
Relinquishes the day to the unending ticking of the clock.
‘Why do I feel like a complete bastard, Zeke?’
The heat envelops them, forcing sweat from their pores, the sunlight reflected in the cars around them.
‘Because you are a bastard, Fors. A case like this one turns us all into bastards, Malin.’
‘The price of truth.’
‘Stop philosophising.’
Boundaries crossed, moved.
‘Lunch?’ Zeke says. ‘I could murder a pizza.’
Conya on St Larsgatan.
Best pizza in the city. Big, greasy, unhealthy.
The owner usually lets them off paying when he’s there.
‘Police, free of charge.’
Like an American cop film. Zeke loves it. Corrupt? Maybe a little, but the owner refuses to let them pay.
One of the many hard-working, frowned-upon immigrants in this city, Malin thinks as she takes a bite of her Capricciosa.
The piece of paper Viktoria Solhage gave her is on the table in front of her.
The name on it: Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson. An address, a phone number.
‘Louise,’ Zeke says. ‘Could a Louise have Lovelygirl as a nickname?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t you think?’
‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says. ‘A healthy dose of self-irony?’
‘It’s a long shot, Zeke, to put it mildly,’ Malin says, feeling how the pizza is making her feel fatter and greasier with every passing second.
‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says once more. ‘Isn’t that what all men want, really? A Lovelygirl?’
‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Bloody good pizza,’ Zeke says, giving a thumbs-up in the general direction of the open kitchen.
The man standing by the pizza oven smiles, picking out ingredients from small plastic tubs and burying some of them in tomato sauce on a freshly spun base.
21
