Heat on special offer this year. Stocks are way too high.
She stops at a red light near McDonald’s at the corner of Drottninggatan, adjusts her beige skirt and runs her hand over her white cotton blouse.
Summer clothes. Ladylike clothes. They work OK, and in this heat skirts are always better than trousers.
Her pistol and holster are concealed beneath a thin cotton jacket. She recalls the last time she and Zeke were out at the firing range, the way they frenetically fired off shot after shot at the black cardboard shapes.
The burger chain is in a building from the fifties, a grey stone facade with concave white balconies. On the other side of the street sits the heavy brown building from the turn of the century where the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord has her clinic.
The shrink.
She saw right through me.
Malin remembers what Viveka said to her during a conversation they had had towards the end of a murder investigation.
‘What about you, why are you so sad?’ Then: ‘I’m here if you want to talk.’
Talk.
There were already far too many words in the world, far too little silence. She never called Viveka Crafoord about herself, but had called several times in connection with cases where she wanted ‘psychological input’, as Viveka herself put it. And they’d had coffee several times when they’d bumped into each other around town.
Malin turns around.
Looks back towards Tradgardstorget, towards the flashy new bus-stops and containers full of reluctant flowers on the patterned paving, the red-plastered facade of the building containing the seed shop and Schelin’s cafe.
A pleasant square, in a pleasant city.
A plastered facade, shielding insecure people. Anything can happen in this city, where old and new collide, where rich and poor, educated and uneducated are in fact constantly colliding with each other, where prejudices about those around you are aired like bedclothes. Last week she had been in a taxi with a middle-aged taxi-driver who had had a go at the city’s immigrant community: ‘Spongers. They don’t do a stroke of work, we should use them as fuel for the incinerator at Gardstad, then we’d get some use out of them.’
She had wanted to get out of the car, show her ID, tell him she was going to arrest him for incitement to racial hatred, the bastard, but she had stayed silent.
A black man in green overalls is walking across the square. He is equipped with a pair of long-handled pincers to save him having to bend over to pick up litter and cigarette ends. The bottles and cans have already been taken care of by Deposit-Gunnar or another of the city’s eccentrics.
Malin looks in front of her, as St Larsgatan forms a straight line out of the centre of the city, only turning when it reaches the edge of the smartest district, Ramshall.
Hasse and Biggan live there, Markus’s parents. Close to the hospital, both of them doctors.
The light turns green and Malin pedals onwards.
The beer and tequila from last night have left no trace in her body. Nor has Daniel Hogfeldt. He crept out while she was asleep, and if she knows him at all he’ll be in the newsroom now, cursing the lack of news, waiting for something to happen.
Malin cycles past the medical school, hidden behind leafy maples, and a hundred metres off to the right, at the end of Linnegatan, she can make out the Horticultural Society Park. Beyond the school the buildings thin out, making way for a car park, beyond which lies the Hotel Ekoxen, generally regarded as the best in the city. But Malin turns the other way, down towards the entrance of the Tinnerback Swimming Pool. Tinnis, as the pool is known locally, opens at seven, and in the car park by the entrance there are just two cars. An elderly red Volvo estate and an anonymous white van, possibly a Ford.
She jumps off her bike, parks it in the stand beside the doors, and takes her bag from the rack on the back.
There’s no one at the desk by the turnstile.
Instead there’s a note on the smeared glass: ‘The pool opens at 7.00 a.m. Free entry before 8.00 a.m.’
Malin goes through the turnstile. The sun is just creeping above the stands of the Folkungavallen Stadium further down the road, hitting her in the face, and in just a few seconds the relative cool of morning is forced out by an angry heat.
Before her Malin sees the twenty-five-metre pool, the abandoned indoor pool, the bathing area in the lake and the grass slopes surrounding it. Water everywhere. She longs for the water.
The changing room smells variously of mould and disinfectant.
She pulls her red bathing suit over her thighs, feeling how taut they are, and thinking that her exercise regime is holding the years at bay, and that there can’t be many thirty-four-year-olds in better shape. Then she gets up, pulling the bathing suit over her breasts, and the touch makes her nipples stiffen under the synthetic fabric.
She shakes her arms. Pulls the goggles out of her bag. Too warm in the gym at the station these days. Better to swim.
She takes her wallet, pistol and mobile and goes out of the changing room towards the outdoor pool. She walks past the showers. She doesn’t want to shower even though she knows those are the rules, prefers the first water to touch her skin to be the water she’s going to be swimming in.
No holiday until the middle of August.
Her colleagues are taking their well-earned breaks now, in July, most of them, apart from Zeke and the duty officer and Detective Inspector Sven Sjoman.
Johan Jakobsson is with his wife and children at her family’s summer place by some lake outside Nassjo. Johan had a pained look on his face when he outlined his plans for the summer to Malin in the police-station kitchen.
‘Mother- and father-in-law have built another two little cottages, one for us and one for Petra, Jessica’s sister. With their own kitchen and bathroom, the whole works. Everything so that we don’t have a legitimate excuse not to go.’
‘Johan. You’re thirty-five. You should be able to do what you want.’
‘But Jessica loves it there. Wants the kids to have their own childhood memories of the place.’
‘Lots of arguments?’
‘Arguments? Like you wouldn’t believe. My mother-in-law is the most passive-aggressive person you can imagine. The victim mentality comes completely naturally to her.’
Johan had taken a gulp of his hot coffee, far too large a gulp, and was forced to spit it out in the sink when he burned his mouth.
‘Fuck, that was hot.’
Just like the summer.
Malin steps out onto the narrow concrete path that leads down to the banked seats that in turn form a staircase down towards the pool, feeling her bathing suit cut in between her buttocks.
Borje Svard.
His wife, Anna, who has MS, is in a respite ward at the University Hospital. Three weeks away from the villa she had furnished with her assured taste, three weeks in a hospital room, entirely dependent on strangers. But dependency is nothing new for her, completely paralysed for years.
Borje himself on a much longed-for hunting trip in Tanzania, Malin knew he’d been saving up for it for several years.
She also knew that he had left his dogs at a kennels up on Jagarvallen, and it was the dogs he had chosen to talk about when he gave her a lift home one Friday evening towards the end of June.
‘Malin,’ he had said, his waxed moustache twitching. ‘I feel so damn guilty about leaving the dogs.’
‘Borje. They’ll be fine. The kennels in Jagarvallen has a good reputation.’
‘Yes, but . . . You can’t just leave animals like that. I mean, they’re like members of the family.’
In the weeks before he left, Borje’s body seemed to shrink under the weight of guilt, as if it were already regretting going.
‘Anna will be fine as well, Borje,’ Malin had said as they pulled up outside the door on Agatan. ‘She’ll be well
