Over by the park’s open-air stage the large lawn is surrounded by fully grown oaks, and the park is a regular venue for sixth formers’ drunken parties in the spring. Malin imagines she can still pick up the smell of alcohol, vomit and used condoms. Down to the right is the summerhouse, which was built on the site of the park restaurant that burned down long ago.
The white paint of the patrol car is like a shimmering mirage further up the park.
Cycle faster.
She can feel the violence now. Has been in its vicinity often enough to recognise the traces left by its scent.
The patrol car is parked by the little summerhouse at the foot of a small hillock. Beside the car is an ambulance. In the background Malin can make out white blocks of flats with walkway balconies, and through the trees she can just make out a yellow stuccoed building from the turn of the century.
She folds out the bike’s footrest.
Takes in the scene. Makes it her own.
Close to her, behind a green-stained wooden fence, there are swings made of car tyres. There is a patch of sand with a climbing frame and three small spring-loaded rocking horses that look like cows. A sandpit.
Two uniformed police wearing outsized pilot glasses, beefy Johansson and rotund Rydstrom, wandering back and forth on the grass beyond the sandpit. They haven’t seen her yet, as she’s hidden by the patrol car as she approaches.
Comatose.
They should have heard her. Or noticed the paramedics waving in greeting from the bench where they are sitting on either side of an orange, blanket-wrapped bundle. A thickset older man, she knows his name is Jimmy Niklasson, and a young girl, blonde, around twenty or so.
She must be new.
Malin knows they’ve been having trouble finding women. A lot fall by the wayside on the physical tests.
Niklasson looks at Malin, worried.
The orange figure, the person between them on the bench.
Wrapped in a health service blanket, and they’re holding onto her, her head is covered by the blanket, head bowed, it’s as though there’s simultaneously something and nothing between them.
Malin walks slowly towards the bench.
Niklasson nods to her, the blonde girl does the same.
Johansson and Rydstrom have seen her, shouting across each other:
‘We think . . .’
‘She’s probably . . .’
‘. . . been raped.’
And when the words split the air and find their way across the playground and the park, the figure in the blanket looks up and Malin sees a young girl’s face, its features distorted with fear, with the insight that life can present you with dark gifts at any place and at any time.
Brown eyes staring at Malin.
Seeming to wonder: What happened? What’s going to happen to me now?
Dear God, Malin thinks. She’s no older than you, Tove.
‘Shut up,’ Malin shouts at the uniforms.
Where’s Zeke?
The girl has bowed her head again. Jimmy Niklasson removes his arm from her and stands up. The new blonde girl stays where she is. When Malin sees Niklasson coming towards her she wishes that Zeke had got to the scene first instead of her, that he could have dispensed the calming words that she will now have to give.
He’s good at calm, Zeke. Even if he’s also good at tempest.
Johansson and Rydstrom have come over as well, a wall of male flesh suddenly very close to her.
Rydstrom’s gravelly voice: ‘We found her over there, in the summerhouse, she was lying on the planks of the floor.’
Johansson: ‘We helped her up. But she was completely silent, we couldn’t get any response from her, so we called for an ambulance.’
‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘Good. Did you touch anything over there?’
‘No,’ Rydstrom says. ‘Just her. We sat her on the bench, exactly like she’s sitting now. We gave her the blanket we had in the back of the car. They brought more blankets with them.’
‘Are there any clothes over there?’
‘No.’
‘She’s bleeding from her genitals,’ Niklasson says, and his voice is strangely high for such a large man. ‘And as far as I can tell, she’s been beaten on her lower arms and shins. But she’s remarkably clean, almost like she’s been scrubbed.’
‘She smells of bleach,’ Rydstrom adds. ‘Her whole body is sort of white. The wounds on her arms and legs also seem to have been rinsed and cleaned up, very carefully.’
‘Get her into the ambulance,’ Malin says. ‘It’ll be calmer for her in there.’
‘She doesn’t want to,’ Niklasson says. ‘We’ve tried, but she just shakes her head.’
‘Does she seem to know where she is?’
‘She hasn’t said a word.’
Malin turns to Rydstrom and Johansson.
‘No one else was here when you got here?’
‘No. Like who?’ Johansson says.
‘The person who called in, for instance.’
‘There was no one here.’
Malin pauses.
‘You two,’ Malin says. ‘Cordon off the crime scene. Start by the fountain down there and draw a ring around us here.’
Malin sits down slowly on the bench. Careful not to invade the girl’s space, trying to get closer to her with friendliness.
‘Can you hear me?’ Malin asks, looking at her gleaming white skin, the wounds on her arms like neat islands. The girl looks as though she’s been outside naked through a whole cold winter’s night, in spite of the heat. There’s an innocence to her white skin, as if she has danced with the devil on the edge of death and somehow survived.
The girl remains still, mute.
A faint smell of bleach in Malin’s nostrils.
It reminds her of the pool at Tinnis.
The young paramedic on her other side is sitting in silence, doesn’t seem bothered that Malin hasn’t introduced herself.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
Silence, but a very small sideways movement.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Can you remember?’
‘You don’t have to be afraid.’
But no reaction, no answer, nothing.
‘Stay with her,’ Malin says, getting up. ‘Don’t leave her alone.’
Down by the fountain the two uniformed officers are attaching the cordon tape to a tree, and Niklasson is busy inside the ambulance.
‘Can we take her to the hospital?’
The young paramedic’s voice is soft and amenable, soothing.
‘My name’s Ellinor, by the way. Ellinor Getlund.’
