A lot of people even though it’s a Sunday.
The air is still warm, but people are daring to venture out, eager for the condensation running down the outside of a well-filled glass. There is a rumbling sound from down on Agatan, the whole street full of bars, and in the winter, spring and autumn there’s always trouble there at weekends. The
Probably no one I know there.
And if anyone I do know should happen to be there, I don’t want to meet them.
Zeke dropped her off outside the flat, and under the cold water of the shower she felt how much she missed Tove, Janne, Daniel Hogfeldt; she wanted to call him and tell him to come over, drive out some of what she’s seen today.
Let him work off some of her frustration.
But he didn’t answer and instead she lay down for a while on Tove’s bed, pretending to watch over her daughter, who is on the other side of the planet, in paradise, not far from crazy bombers.
And Tove’s scent, caught in the sheets.
And Malin began to cry.
Sad in a simple and obvious way about the way everything had turned out with her and Janne, with her and herself, and the unmentionable thing that the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord had glimpsed just by looking at her. But then Malin did what she always does. Forced herself back, the tears, all the sorrow, then got up and left the flat. Some types of loneliness are worse than anything else.
All the customers in the terrace bars. The chink of glasses. The twirling waitresses. There is still life in summertime Linkoping, even if this heat, this evil, are doing their best to drive any sense of joy into the ground.
Shall I sit down here? Among everyone else?
She stands still, letting the evening enter her body.
Evil. Where does it start?
In front of her the square transforms into a volcanic landscape, as hot, glowing magma seeps out between the paving slabs in destructive black streams. Evil, a human undercurrent that history sometimes gathers up into an eruption, in one place, one person, in several people. You can become evil, or come close to it, sometimes so close that you can feel its breath, and then you realise that it’s the breath from your own lungs hitting you in the face. Malevolence, fear, the way Janne once told her after drinking too much whisky that he thought that war lay at the heart of human nature, that we are really all longing for war, that God is war and that violence is only the start, that the whole fucking world is just one vast act of abuse, a pain that will only end when humankind is wiped out.
‘We want war,’ Janne said. ‘There’s no such thing as evil. It’s just a made-up word, a pathetic attempt to give a name to the violence that’s bound to happen. You, Malin, you cops, you’re just fucking tracker dogs, you sniff about, trying to keep something utterly fundamental at bay.’
The magma is oozing and flowing around the feet of the people drinking beer in the square of this small city in this small, small corner of the world.
Here I stand.
I have to embrace violence, love it the way that I understand love. Evil is scentless, soundless, is has no texture, yet at the same time it is every smell, every sound, and all the experiences of the world that a person can feel against their skin.
A buried girl.
A boy kicked to death after a party.
A thirty-three-year-old student blown into a thousand pieces on a bus.
A bomb buried in the sand of a beach in paradise.
I refuse, I refuse, I refuse to believe you, Janne.
But you’ve seen war.
Maybe a beer in the square?
No.
Your society isn’t mine.
Not tonight.
I’m Batman, Malin thinks. Damaged goods, yet trying to watch over something.
She carries on along Hamngatan, up towards the Hamlet bar. A hint of smoke from the forest fires reaches her nose. They’re still open, and she takes a seat at the bar, feeling safe there, surrounded by the decades-old wooden panelling.
Only her and a few of the closet alcoholics at a table in the corner.
The beer is cheap here.
‘Evening, Inspector,’ they call.
She nods in their direction as her beer appears in front of her.
‘And a tequila, double,’ she says to the bartender.
‘Sure thing, Malin,’ he says with a smile. ‘One of those evenings?’
‘You’ve no idea,’ Malin replies. ‘No idea.’
Daniel Hogfeldt has switched off his phone, his articles about the murder ready for tomorrow. He’s gone into one of the paper’s conference rooms and is resting his body in one of the uncomfortable chairs.
Wants to be alone.
His body somehow demanding silence.
He thinks about Malin.
Where are you now?
We’re two unhappy souls moving around each other in this city and sometimes we meet and play a static game. For a while he mistook their game for love. But not any longer. He knows, or believes that he knows, exactly what he wants from Malin Fors. And what she wants from him. A conduit to relieve a mass of sexual energy, and that’s why they work so well together in bed: they want the same thing and they both know that the harder they play, the better.
But sometimes.
When she’s fallen asleep beside him and he’s lying there looking at her, he wonders.
Is she the one he’s been waiting for?
His?
No, don’t lay yourself open to that sort of disappointment. He doesn’t know much about her, but she has several photographs of her ex-husband Janne in her flat. He seems to be able to calm her down. Like her daughter.
Where are you now, Fors?
Daniel gets up.
Starts walking about the room restlessly, as if to combat the feeling that time is passing far too slowly.
There’s burning in her dreams.
It sometimes happens when she’s been drinking. Cold flames eating her legs, trying to pull her into the darkness, whispering: We’ll destroy you, Malin, destroy you, even if you listen to what we’ve got to say.
What do you want? What do you want to say?
Nothing, Malin, nothing. We just want to destroy you.
There are snakes in the dream, and animals with hooves and when she wakes up she remembers the dreams clearly, their constantly changing images, impossible to sort out.
There’s a boy in the dreams.
Malin doesn’t know who he is, but she forces him away, as if she had some sort of conscious consciousness even in the dream. That’s the darkest of dreams, like the one Janne has when he dreams about the children in Rwanda, the ones who’d had their hands cut off, the ones he fed in the hospital of the refugee camp. Their eyes. Six-, seven-, eight-year-old eyes full of wisdom about how life would turn out, about how it could have turned
