PART TWO
In the eyes of summer angels
On the way towards the final room
You were left to rest and wait close to purifying water.
Murdered, but perhaps not yet dead.
I know that rebirth is possible, that innocence can come back. It didn’t work with you, my earthbound angel, but it will work with someone else, because how else are the spiders’ legs to disappear, how else can I put a stop to the rabbits’ claws tearing away deep within me?
Our love couldn’t evaporate, no matter how much pain the hot summers brought with them, no matter how much the tentacles crept over our legs.
This city has masses of trees, parks and forests. I am there among the black, silvery trees. You are also there somewhere. I just haven’t found you yet.
I want to get there now, feel your breath on my cheek. I want to have you here with me.
So don’t be scared.
No one will ever be able to hurt you again.
22
The blue and white tape of the cordon. The steaming water of the lake in the early afternoon light, like the bare skin of the people standing in the shadows of the trees on the slope, on the other side of the tape, watching the police officers with curious, hungry eyes.
The uniforms are fine-combing the ground down towards the shore where Malin, Zeke and Sven Sjoman, together with Karin Johannison, the duty Forensics officer, are carefully freeing the body from the soil and transparent plastic. It’s unnaturally white, scrubbed, its cleansed wounds like the craters of dark, red-blue volcanoes in a dead human landscape, the greyish skin recently touched by hungry worms for the first time.
‘Careful, careful.’ Karin’s words, and they are careful, slow, keen to preserve any evidence that might be left in the location where the body was found.
Mingling with the bathers are the journalists, from local radio, television, from the papers, from the
Where’s Daniel?
He doesn’t usually miss something like this.
But presumably even he gets Sundays off. And if that’s true, good luck to him.
The muffled sound of digital cameras.
Eyes eager to get closer, to document events so that they can be sold on.
Malin takes a deep breath.
Is it possible to get used to this heat?
No.
But it’s better than freezing cold.
Can nature self-combust as a result of events caused by human beings? Attack us in protest at all the stupid things we do to one another? In her mind’s eye Malin can see the trees on the meadow, the oaks and limes, tear their roots from the earth and furiously beat everyone to the ground with their sharp branches. Burying us with our wicked deeds.
The sweat is dripping from Zeke’s brow and Sven is panting, his heart-attack gut juddering up and down above his belt as he squats on the ground with a blank expression on his face.
‘It has to be Theresa Eckeved,’ he says. ‘It looks like she’s been wrapped in ordinary transparent bin bags.’
‘No chance of tracing them,’ Malin says.
The girl’s face scrubbed clean under the plastic, her body naked, as white as her face, almost entirely uncovered now, also scrubbed clean. There’s a deep open wound in the back of her head, and wounds as big as saucers on her arms, stomach, thighs, all cleaned and somehow trimmed at the edges, like neatly tended flowerbeds, blue-black, nurtured.
‘It’s her,’ Malin says, noting the stench of decay, no smell of bleach here. ‘I recognise her from the photographs. It’s her, no doubt about it.’
‘No doubt at all,’ Zeke agrees.
And Sven mutters: ‘Just because it’s hot as hell, surely the whole world doesn’t have to go to hell.’
Malin looks at the body.
‘It’s like someone’s cleaned her really, really carefully,’ Malin says.
‘Like someone wanted to make her, the wounds, as clean and neat as possible. Like with Josefin, only even more so.’
White skin, black wounds.
‘Yes,’ Zeke says. ‘Almost like a ritual.’
‘She doesn’t smell of bleach.’
‘No, she smells of decay,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks: You’re no older than Tove, what if it was you, Tove? What would I have done then? And then she sees herself sitting on the edge of her bed with her service pistol in her hand, raising it slowly to her mouth, ready to let a bullet explode her consciousness for ever.
Fear. You were scared, weren’t you?
You must have been scared.
How did you get there in the ground?
‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin says, and Zeke and Karin and Sven all look at her.
‘Just thinking out loud,’ Malin says. ‘How long has she been here?’
‘Considering how damp the skin is from the plastic it was wrapped in, and how the body has started to bloat in spite of the earth on top of it, I’d guess three days, maybe four. It’s impossible to say for sure.’
‘Three days?’ Zeke says. ‘She could have disappeared up to six days ago.’
‘I can’t say right now if she was moved here after she died,’ Karin says. ‘I’ll try to figure that out.’
‘So she could have been held captive somewhere for a couple of days,’ Sven says. ‘And then moved here.’
‘Someone might have seen something,’ Zeke says.
‘You think so?’ Malin says. ‘This is a pretty remote spot if you’re not here to go swimming.’
‘People, Malin. They’re always on the move, you know that as well as I do.’
Malin sees herself in the Horticultural Society Park the other night.
Did you see me then? You who did this?
You who are doing this, you’re trying to put something right, that has to be it. It must have been dark when you dragged the body down here, the trees bearing witness as you buried her in the ground. And why so close to the water where most people are? Maybe you wanted us to find her. What is it that you want from us?
‘How did she die?’ Malin asks, as an unexpectedly cold wind blows past her legs and out across the lake.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Karin replies. ‘The head injury was probably the cause of death, but as you can see there are clear strangulation marks around her neck.’
‘Sexual violence?’
‘No clear signs of penetration. But I’ll have to examine her more closely.’
Karin.
Smart, not to say driven, but her view of the dead is like an engineer looking at a machine.
