Malin is standing in Lollo Svensson’s kitchen, waiting, listening. Trying to understand, because in Lollo’s words there is a hint of the feelings that will lead them in the right direction in this case.
The uniforms are back by the car out in the farmyard again, restless now that they’ve realised that the anticipated drama has become a yawn.
Malin and Zeke gave them the task of searching the barns and smaller outbuildings, but they didn’t come up with anything, just snuffling pigs and rabbits in cages and a load of clutter that must have been left behind by the farmer who sold the place to Lollo Svensson. The dogs were asleep in a fenced run, almost drugged by the heat, or something else. No signs of violence, of evil, just things, abandoned things, unfettered by memories, of no value except as pieces of a puzzle for the archaeologists of future civilisations.
‘I want to be left in peace,’ Lollo Svensson says. ‘That’s why I bought the farm. Can you understand that?’
She’s sitting on a ladder-backed chair at the kitchen table. Back to her cocky, blunt, unpleasant, butch self again. The gentle individual they found downstairs among the toys in the basement vanished the moment they came back upstairs.
A human wall, Malin thinks. A grey dressing gown over the pink dress. What’s happened to her? To you? How did you end up like this?
Malin sees herself in the kitchen.
Snooping about in the dark. In the most private things. In the pain. And she knows she’s good at it, and she knows she likes doing it.
Damn you, Fors.
How did you end up like this?
‘I didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on those girls. Are you going to talk to the whole fucking women’s football team now as well, then? There are supposed to be loads of dykes there, aren’t there? Go and talk to them!’
‘What about the toys in the basement? How do you explain those?’ Zeke doesn’t succeed in concealing his curiosity, a desire to understand that stretches far beyond their investigation.
‘I don’t explain them at all. They’re toys from when I was small. I get them out sometimes. Nothing odd about that.’
Linda Karla is standing still on the sawdust trail. There’s something close by. But what?
Something is moving in the forest, even though everything’s still. Is that a crawling sound? A person? The smell of decay, or cleanliness? Thoughts fly through her head and on into her heart and stomach, forming themselves into fear.
No.
I’m not scared.
The forest is big, it’s making her small and alone even though it’s no more than a few hundred metres to the yellow blocks of flats and villas over in Valla on the other side of Vallavagen.
No movement over by the tree. But there’s someone there.
I’m sure.
And then she thinks of the girls again, the one they found murdered, the one they found raped and disorientated in the Horticultural Society Park, and she’s struck by how foolhardy it was of her to set out alone on a running track, now that real evil has shown its face in Linkoping.
How stupid can you be, Linda?
A movement.
A person on the track?
Heading towards me?
Sweat on my white vest. My breasts hard under the sports bra.
I’m so scared that I can’t move.
Zeke is rocking from foot to foot in one corner of the farmyard.
No dildo. No sex toys at all.
The evening is still debilitatingly hot. Lollo Svensson is inside the farmhouse, watching them through the kitchen window, can’t seem to get shot of them soon enough. In the dull light the barns look crooked, almost ready to collapse under the weight of the mournful evening sky.
The dogs have started barking over in their run.
The car with the uniforms is disappearing down the gravel drive, soon no more than a misplaced noise from the dense forest, a pulse through old leaves and desiccated moss.
‘She’s mad,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’s Lovelygirl?’
‘We’ll have to see what Forensics find on the computer.’
‘But is she mad?’
‘Because she likes looking at her old toys? I’m not sure. But she’s certainly different,’ Malin says. ‘Who knows what sort of crap she’s been through? And what wouldn’t a person do to survive?’
‘Can we find out?’
‘Do we need to?’
‘Do we want to?’
‘I don’t think she’s got anything to do with this,’ Malin says.
‘Me neither,’ Zeke says. ‘But she still hasn’t got an alibi.’
My heart.
Where is it?
There, holding all of my fear.
It’s about to burst beneath my ribs.
Linda Karla is running, her trainers conquering metre after metre of the trail, as the forest twists around her.
Is someone chasing me?
It sounds like something enormous is slithering after me, as if the tree roots are lifting from the ground and trying to trip me up, burrow through me with a thousand sharp, calcified nodules, then hide me under a thin layer of soil, consuming me slowly, but I can run so fast.
Faster now.
The sound of hooves. Hooves?
She runs.
Finally the vegetation opens up.
The car park.
Her car on its own. No one following.
She throws herself into the residual heat of her Seat.
A deer?
Something else was watching me out there as well.
I’m sure of it, Linda Karla thinks as she starts the car and drives away.
But what?
The sound of hooves disappearing into the forest. The darkness that was snapping at her heels.
28
Stora torget is vibrant with artificial light from the big open-air bars and the surrounding buildings. Morners Inn, Stora Hotellet, Burger King, their chairs and tables set out on the tarmac and paving stones, the first of these boasting tall canopies that turn its customers’ conversation into indistinct chatter, a sound full of expectation and happiness.
It is just past ten o’clock.
