looked after at the University Hospital.’
‘But they don’t even understand what she says.’
She’d had the words ‘try not to worry about it’ on the tip of her tongue, but left them unsaid. Instead she had silently put her hand on Borje’s arm, and at the usual morning meeting the next day Sven had said:
‘Go, Borje. It’ll do you good.’
Borje, who would usually have been annoyed by a remark like that, had leaned back in his chair and thrown out his arms.
‘Is it so obvious that I’d rather not go?’
‘No,’ Sven had said. ‘It’s obvious that you should go. Go to Tanzania and shoot an antelope. That’s an order.’
Malin is down at the pool now, her nostrils full of the smell of chlorine. She walks along the long side towards the end where the starting blocks look like grey sugar lumps above the flaking black lane-markers. Beyond the pool stands a line of tall elms, their leaves yellowing, and she’s still alone at the pool, presumably none of the other people left in the city has the energy to get up so early?
Karim Akbar.
Police Chief.
Not as controversial in his choice of holiday as his choice of career. He, his wife and their eight-year-old son have rented a cottage outside Vastervik. Three weeks’ holiday for Karim. But not really a holiday. He’s told Malin that he’s going to write a book about integration based on his own experiences, while his wife and son take day- trips and go swimming.
Malin already knows what the book will be about: the little Kurdish boy in the far too cramped flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall. The father who committed suicide in his despair at being excluded from society. The son who takes revenge by studying law and becoming the youngest police chief in the country, the only one from an immigrant background. Articles in the press, appearances on television discussion programmes.
Malin climbs up onto the starting block. She likes swimming in the middle of the pool, where she isn’t troubled by the swell at the edges. She crouches down and carefully puts her towel and mobile down on the asphalt, hiding her pistol inside the towel and pulling on her goggles before getting ready to dive in.
Degerstad would be back from his course up in Stockholm in early September. Andersson is still off sick.
Malin stretches her ankles, feeling her body get ready to split the surface of the water, as her unconscious checks off every muscle, organ, cell and drop of blood from a list that is as long as it is quickly ticked off.
Muscles tensing. And off.
She doesn’t hear the mobile phone ringing, angrily announcing that something has happened, that Linkoping has been woken from its hot summer lethargy.
One arm forward, the other back. Breathing every fifth stroke, swimming eighty lengths of the twenty-five metre pool, that’s the plan.
She vaults at the end of the first length, enjoying the response of her body, the fact that the hours in the gym at the station are showing results, the feeling that she is in control of her body, and not the other way around.
Of course it’s an illusion.
Because what is a human being if not a body?
Her body like a bullet in the water, the bathing suit like a red flash of blood. The surrounding buildings and trees as vague images when she breathes, otherwise not there at all.
She approaches the end, the first circuit of forty almost over, and she tenses her body for another turn when she hears a voice, a calm deep voice that sounds insistent.
‘Excuse me, sorry . . .’
She wants to swim, doesn’t want to stop and talk to anyone, answer any questions, wants to use her body and escape from all thought, from all . . . yes, what, exactly?
‘Your mobile . . .’
Could have been Tove. Janne.
She slows down instead of turning, her hands on the metal steps of the ladder.
A distant voice between her quick breaths, a face dark against the sun.
‘I’m sorry, but your mobile was ringing when I walked past.’
‘Thanks,’ Malin says as she tries to catch her breath.
‘Don’t mention it,’ the voice says, and the large, dark figure disappears, seeming to shrivel up in the sunlight blazing behind it. Malin heaves herself out of the pool, sitting on the edge with her feet still in the water. She reaches for her mobile over on the towel.
It’s waterproof, a fairly basic model.
Zeke’s number on the display.
A new message received.
Doesn’t feel like listening to it.
Zeke answers on the third ring.
‘Malin, is that you?’
‘Who else?’
‘The Horticultural Society Park,’ Zeke says. ‘Get there as fast as you can. You’re fairly close, aren’t you?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Don’t know exactly. We got a call here at the station. See you at the playground up by Djurgardsgatan as soon as you can get there.’
The words take the chill of the water from her body. Sun and heat, the tone in Zeke’s voice.
The cracks in the ground are opening up, Malin thinks. The time of glowing worms has arrived.
3
Malin hurries to the changing room with her towel around her neck, the wet footprints left by her feet on the concrete of the steps drying before she gets there.
She tears off the bathing suit, giving up any idea of showering off the chlorine from the pool. She puts on some deodorant but doesn’t bother to comb her hair. She pulls on her skirt, her white blouse, the holster and jacket and the white sneaker-style shoes.
Through the turnstile.
Onto the bicycle.
Breathing.
Now.
Now something is happening.
What’s waiting for me in the Horticultural Society Park?
Something has happened, that much is clear. Zeke’s words before he hung up, quickly telling her about the call received at the station fifteen minutes earlier, put through to his desk from reception, how the gender-neutral voice at the other end of the line had been indistinct, upset: ‘There’s a naked woman in the Horticultural Society Park, she’s sitting in the summerhouse by the playground. Something terrible must have happened.’
A naked woman.
In the largest park in the city.
The person who called hadn’t said anything about how old the woman was, nor whether she was alive or dead, nothing about anything really. A patrol had probably got there by now.
Maybe a false alarm?
But Malin could tell from Zeke’s voice that he was sure something serious was going on, that evil was on the move again, the indefinable dark undercurrent that flows beneath all human activity.
Who made the call?
Unclear. A panting voice.
No caller number had been indicated on Zeke’s phone, or out in reception.
Malin heads for the gate to the park beside the Hotel Ekoxen, cycling past the entrance to the hotel bar. They mostly have bus-loads of German tourists at this time of year, and as Malin rides past the dining room she can see the elderly Germans swarming around the breakfast buffet.
