On the floor of Karin Johannison’s room a humidifier is fighting for decibel supremacy against a portable air- conditioning unit. The humidity is fighting an uneven battle against the cold, but together the two machines make Karin’s room the most bearable that Malin has been in for ages, even though there are no windows, and in spite of the mess of books and reports and files and journals all over the desk, the shelves and the floor.
Malin and Zeke are sitting on the two ladder-backed chairs Karin has for visitors, while she leans back in a futuristic black designer office chair, which she almost certainly bought herself with her own money, just like the humidifier and the air conditioner.
‘Nice chair,’ Malin says.
‘Thanks,’ Karin says. ‘It’s an Oscar Niemeyer, I got it off the internet from South America, some site in Brazil.’
‘Did you buy those contraptions there as well?’ Zeke asks. ‘They sound like they come from the Third World.’
Karin ignores Zeke’s insult and moves on to what they’ve come for, switching to her professional persona: ‘Theresa Eckeved had been penetrated, subjected to sexual violence. I couldn’t find any sperm, just traces of the same paint that was found inside Josefin Davidsson. In all likelihood, we’re talking about the same perpetrator.’
‘But it’s good to support the poor, isn’t it?’
Zeke couldn’t stop the words once they were on their way out of his mouth, and Malin can see in his eyes that he regrets them and is feeling foolish, and Karin continues to ignore Zeke, pretending that he hasn’t spoken.
She goes on: ‘She’s been carefully washed, and if she was scrubbed clean it was done thoroughly. I’ve found traces of bleach on her skin. Just like Josefin Davidsson.
‘The wounds have been cleaned, maybe with surgical spirit, maybe bleach, and the perpetrator has tidied up the edges with an extremely sharp implement, possibly a scalpel, but it’s impossible to say for sure.’
‘Like Josefin Davidsson’s wounds?’ Zeke asked.
What had been used, Malin wondered. A rough knife? A large spike? Or something brutal, like an animal’s tooth? If not these, then what?
‘Those were just cleaned,’ Karin says. ‘These have been trimmed at the edges.’
‘Trimmed?’
‘Yes, trimmed. The wound to her head wasn’t fatal. Nor any of the wounds to her body. She was strangled. The soil under her fingernails was identical with the soil on the beach, which suggests that she was murdered there.’
‘So she wasn’t moved there?’
‘Probably not.’
‘So she could have gone there with the perpetrator?’
‘What do I know, Malin?’
‘Her mum mentioned that she used to cycle up there sometimes,’ Zeke says. ‘Maybe Theresa was just taking an evening swim?’
‘How long was she in the ground?’ Malin asks.
‘A week, I’d say. Maybe a few days more. It’s impossible to say for certain.’
What were you doing out there? Malin thinks. It must have been late, and you were alone.
Evil is on the loose.
God help us.
God help all the girls who are still in Linkoping this summer.
‘Do you know where the traces of paint came from?’
Zeke clear and focused now, his antipathy towards Karin set aside, stashed away somewhere inside himself.
‘No idea, but it’s the same object, no doubt about that. But I haven’t been able to identify the source of the paint. It’s not one of the more common ones used in Sweden. But you’re chasing the same perpetrator, you can be sure of that.’
‘Forensics have started looking at different makes of dildo.’
‘Good,’ Karin says. ‘There are any number of them. As far as I’m aware.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No traces of sperm, no hair, no skin, no strands of fabric, nothing, nothing, nothing,’ Karin says, unable to hide her dissatisfaction and annoyance that she can’t give them anything more, anything concrete to go on, anything to latch onto in their hunt for whatever is on the move out in the city.
‘Shit,’ Malin says.
‘You’ll get him,’ Karin says.
‘If it is a him,’ Malin says.
The smoke from the fires in the Tjallmo forest is noticeable in the car park in front of the police station and the National Forensics Lab where Karin works.
The forests north of Ljungsbro are burning now, and the fire is spreading. There are extra bulletins of both local television news programmes about the advance of the flames.
Are the fires deliberate?
Who started them?
Why have fires broken out in so many places at the same time?
Zeke gets into the driver’s seat of the Volvo.
Malin pauses by the door, hears him curse the heat inside the car and closes her eyes, trying to follow the smell of the fire up above the city, seeing in her mind’s eye how the heat presses the few people left, little more than dots, towards the tarmac, and she follows herself out over the plain, the scorched fields and the blue of Lake Roxen, and she sees the fires, the way they’re eating and jumping their way through the forest, leaping recklessly from treetop to treetop in an explosive dance, destroying pretty much everything in their path, but also creating the possibility of new life.
And Janne, wanting to be back home with the rest of his crew, wanting to put on his protective clothing and head out into the boiling, smoke-fogged darkness to save whatever can still be saved.
‘Malin, are you going to stand there all day?’
Soot, Malin thinks. Dirt. How long do firefighters have to scrub their faces after a day like this?
‘Malin!’
She jerks herself free of her thoughts and gets into the heat of the car.
