A pause.
A chain on the door.
A woman’s face through the gap.
Waldemar is panting beside Per, out of breath from the stairs, says ‘POLICE!’ as he holds up his ID.
‘Let us in,’ he says, and his voice leaves no room for doubt, and the door closes and then opens again.
‘I bet you’re growing potatoes in the living room,’ Waldemar says, and laughs. ‘Either that or cannabis, eh?’
In the living room there’s a large, black leather sofa along one wall, heavy curtains, deep-red velvet, hanging by the windows, garish paintings of ?Tehran on the patterned brown wallpaper.
‘Looks like a brothel,’ Waldemar says to the dark-skinned man sitting on the sofa. Per thinks that the man looks ready to be bullied, must know why they’re there, but also that he’s been lying, trying to deceive them. Per can see the lies in the tension in his face, the look in his eyes, not anxious, just restless, the way a liar’s eyes look. He has a pleasant face, his features serene in spite of his large nose and what look like acne scars on his cheeks. He isn’t a large man, and the home gives the impression of being well-kept, cherished, and Per imagines that Ekenberg has noticed the same thing, and that that’s where he’s going to focus his violence.
‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Waldemar says to Karami’s wife in a thick Ostergotland accent, and she sinks down, and her thin body, swathed in shiny dark cloth, seems to disappear into the sofa.
‘Well, then,’ and without further ado Waldemar picks up a vase from the top of the television and throws it at the wall, sending shards of porcelain across the room, over the faces and clothes of the Karamis.
The woman cries something unintelligible in Arabic or Persian or whatever it is.
The man: ‘What the hell are you doing?’
And Waldemar picks up a family photograph, drops it on the floor and crushes it with the heel of his heavy shoes.
‘Shut up!’ he shouts. ‘You don’t get away unpunished if you lie to the police.’
‘Am I supposed to have lied to you?’
Per is standing silently in the doorway, wants to intervene, tell Waldemar that that’s enough, to pull himself together, this isn’t how we do things, but he can see from Karami that he’s close to breaking, that he’s fond of his possessions.
‘Your son,’ Waldemar yells. ‘He wasn’t here the night Josefin Davidsson was raped, as you claimed! I bet there wasn’t even a family party going on at all. So where was he? What was he doing? NOW!’
A samovar flies into the radiator under the window onto the balcony, a clanking sound as the thin metal breaks.
‘Do you think I’d betray my son? He was here. We had a party.’
And Waldemar overturns the coffee table with a force that shocks Per, then he’s in front of Arash Karami, striking him across the nose and causing little trickles of blood to pour from both nostrils.
‘Do you really imagine I haven’t had to deal with worse than this? Well? This is nothing.’
Karami’s words are scornful when he’s collected himself again. He spits at Waldemar, his eyes full of deep loathing.
And Waldemar strikes again, then again, and Per is about to jump in and stop him when the wife starts yelling on the sofa, in heavily accented Swedish.
‘He wasn’t here. We had a party, but he never came. We don’t know what he does, but he never comes here any more. Find him, and tell him to come home more often.’
Waldemar calms down, stopping just before dealing a fourth blow.
‘So you don’t know what he gets up to?’
The Karamis sit in silence, Arash Karami’s left hand pressing the bridge of his nose, trying to stem the flow of blood.
Neither of them answers Waldemar’s question.
‘Do you know what? I believe you. You haven’t the faintest idea what your Paki son does, because he does some completely fucked up stuff. Doesn’t he? Christ, you can’t even raise your own kids properly.’
Waldemar heads towards the door, Per takes a step back, says in a calm voice: ‘You realise there’s no point reporting this. There are two of us who can confirm that Arash put up a struggle when we tried to take him to the station for questioning.’
The wife is sitting in tears on the sofa, and Arash Karami doesn’t even deign to look at them.
‘Fucking towel-heads,’ Waldemar says. ‘Lying to the police.’
Outside the building, in the relentless heat from a sun that seems to have gone mad, Waldemar says to Per: ‘That went well, you playing good cop, me bad cop. And we didn’t even plan it in advance.’
Really bloody well, Per thinks, suddenly feeling sick.
But.
They got what they wanted.
Per feels his face getting hot, the same feeling as when his mother found out he’d been stealing from her purse when he was little.
Brutality.
In the course of his few short years as a police officer he’s seen it all too often.
38
How does anyone survive what Slavenca Visnic has been through without losing their mind?
Abuse running like a poisonous thread through history. Does violence stem from abuse? Is time really a sort of volcanic ground that regularly erupts into violence? Huge explosions, with smaller intermittent sighs.
Maybe, Malin thinks, as she watches Slavenca Visnic’s Fiat van disappear among the cars along the gravel road through the ash-covered forest.
Slavenca Visnic hadn’t been surprised to see her and Zeke appear in the forest, and had been completely open with them, as if she had nothing to hide, as if the fact that one of the victims had been found near her kiosk in Stavsatter and another victim had worked for her was in no way compromising.
Once Slavenca Visnic had said hello to them she washed herself with water from a greyish white container that she had brought with her, scrubbing the soot from her face with strongly scented detergent as Malin and Zeke waited. Slavenca Visnic was demonstrating with her actions that she worked to her own agenda, and neither Malin nor Zeke protested. Malin coughed as the smoke irritated her eyes and nose. Once the dirt was gone from Slavenca Visnic’s face you could see that she must once have been beautiful, but that was long ago now, as experience and work had aged her prematurely.
‘I realised that you’d want to talk to me,’ Slavenca Visnic said once she’d finished washing and had put on a clean T-shirt. Firefighters and volunteers were running past them, dragging hoses and steaming blankets. Helicopters were still circling overhead, and the relentless sound of the rotors made them raise their voices.
‘You know,’ Slavenca Visnic said, ‘it’s like the fire comes from under the ground, like the flames and embers are bubbling up from the centre of the earth.’
Malin noted that she spoke almost without any trace of an accent, thinking: You must have fought really hard for that.
Slavenca Visnic took a drink of water from the tap of her water tank.
‘Thirsty?’
‘No,’ Zeke said, before going on: ‘You know why we’re here?’
‘I see the papers and the internet, I listen to the news. I’m not stupid.’
‘Theresa Eckeved was found buried at the beach where you’ve got one of your kiosks. Josefin Davidsson, who was found raped in the Horticultural Society Park, worked for you at the start of July.’
‘I can understand why the connection would interest you,’ Slavenca Visnic said, wiping some beads of sweat from her forehead. ‘But there’s nothing behind the connection. Nothing at all.’
‘Have you got alibis for the night between Thursday and Friday last week, and the night between Saturday and Sunday?’
Malin wanted to see if a direct question would rouse any reaction.
Slavenca Visnic laughed.
