Summertime Death

‘No, not at the moment.’

‘So the search warrant wasn’t called for?’

Karim closes his eyes. Waits a couple of seconds, then hears a new voice: ‘But you must have something to go on?’

He opens his eyes just as one of the journalists says: ‘According to our information, she’s a lesbian. Do you suspect a sexual connection of that kind?’

‘No comment.’

Worse than usual today, more excitable than ever before. Suddenly he wants to get away from the podium, back to the jetty of the house in Vastervik. He has to give them something just to get them to shut up.

So he says the words, and the moment they leave his mouth he knows it was a mistake.

‘Our investigation has led us to look into the LFC women’s football team.’

‘Why?’

‘Do you suspect a lesbian connection?’

‘I can’t . . .’

‘Is it just prejudice within the police force that has led you to turn your attention to the women’s team?’

‘Any particular player?’

‘How do you think this will affect the general attitude towards women’s football?’

Questions flying at him like bullets, like jagged shrapnel from something exploding.

Shit, Karim thinks. Then he shuts his eyes for a moment again, thinking about his family, his eight-year-old son, who learned to swim just last week.

The kiosk at the beach outside Sturefors is closed.

The tape of the cordon around the oak where they dug up Theresa Eckeved’s body as recently as yesterday is still taut, and there are very few bathers; one family with two small children. They’re sitting on a blanket down by the water, apparently unaffected by what has happened, by what to Malin seems to control and own this entire place, its air, its sounds.

Slavenca Visnic.

The owner of this kiosk, another one at the beach in Hjulsbro, and one outside the pool at Glyttinge: the county council provided them with that information. She runs all three as a trading company. But today the kiosk is closed, and Malin can understand why.

‘I wouldn’t have opened up either,’ she says to Zeke as they pace uneasily up and down in the morning heat in front of the kiosk, taking care to stay in the shade of the trees, sweaty enough already. Zeke’s white shirt is stuck to his body, and her beige blouse is faring no better.

‘No, people are staying away.’

‘Let’s go to Hjulsbro. She might be there.’

There was a mobile number on the licence documents. But no answer when they rang.

‘You go back to the car,’ Malin says, and Zeke looks at her, nods, then heads up the slope towards the meadow, where the heat seems to be creating a new sort of stillness, natural yet somehow frightening, as if the heat were making every living creature go into hibernation.

Malin goes down to the tree, bends over and steps under the tape of the cordon.

The hole in the ground.

No glowing worms, but still a feeling that the ground could open up at any moment, spewing out destructive masses of livid, liquid fire.

Theresa.

She isn’t here, but Malin can still see her face.

One eye open, the other closed. The strangulation marks around her neck. Her cleanly scrubbed white body and the dark wounds like lost planets in a shimmering, irregular cosmos.

And Malin wonders: How did you get here? Who would want to do this to you? Don’t be scared. I never, ever give up.

Promise me that, Malin Fors, promise that you’ll never give up trying to find the person who committed this ultimate act of abuse.

I’m trying to touch your warm, blonde hair, but my fingers, my hands don’t exist where you are, even if I can see you quite clearly from where I’m drifting in the sky just above you.

The girls.

Me. Nathalie.

Peter. You know so well what we had together. But you don’t realise what it means, not yet. Dad never understood, didn’t want to see, perhaps, what I was, am.

The same thing for you, Malin, with your dad, yet not quite. You blame your mum, thinking that she was in the way, muddying and diminishing his concern for you.

Maybe.

But it could be something else. Couldn’t it?

You’re far below me, Malin.

But still near.

But you’re a long way from one thing, Malin: certainty.

So don’t give up.

Because even if I know what happened, only you can convey the story to Mum and Dad, and show them the truth.

Maybe the truth could help them?

It doesn’t really make much difference to me any more.

Maybe I am the truth now. The only pure, clear truth that a person needs.

The wind is blowing through the leaves of the oak, rustling them. It’s a warm wind. But where are the connections, the threads twining together that can lead me, us, in the right direction?

The water of the lake almost seems to bubble in the heat. Boiling and stagnant, deadly poisonous yet still endlessly tempting: Jump in, and I’ll drag you down to the bottom of the lake.

What were you doing out here?

Not an intrinsically evil place, not really.

Malin sinks to her knees beside the hole, the former grave.

She touches the ground with her hand.

It turns her fingers brown. And the sun reflects off the water of the lake, which looks unnaturally clean in the cutting heat. The reflections are like lightning in her eyes, like sharpened knives in her retinas, but she doesn’t want to put on her Ray-Bans, wants to see reality just as it is.

Her blouse is sticking to her back.

‘Hello!’ A man’s voice. ‘You probably shouldn’t be in there.’

The man over on the blanket.

Law-abiding.

But he’s showing you respect, Theresa.

Malin stands up.

Pulls out her wallet from the front pocket of her denim skirt.

Holds up her ID.

‘Malin Fors. Police.’

‘I hope you get the bastard,’ the man says in her direction, his eyes staring somewhere up towards the pale green of the meadow.

31

The kiosk by the beach in Hjulsbro is closed as well. Even though it would surely have been possible to rake in some serious money on a day like this. There must be at least a hundred people lying on the slope down towards