‘God, it’s sticky today,’ Zeke says. ‘Don’t you think it’s humid as hell?’
Malin doesn’t have time to reply before her mobile rings. She clicks to take the call without checking to see who the caller is.
‘Malin!’
Dad’s voice.
Not now.
But when else?
‘Dad!’
Zeke grins beside her.
‘How are you both?’
‘It’s really lovely down here.’
‘It’s hot as hell up here.’
‘You should see how green the golf courses are, and there are no problems getting a round.’
‘Tove and Janne are having a good time in Bali.’
‘Malin. How’s the apartment?’
‘I haven’t had time to go.’
‘But . . .’
‘I was joking, Dad, the plants are fine. How’s Mum?’
‘Oh, the same as usual, I suppose.’
They’ve reached the door to the block of flats. Zeke presses the entryphone, sweat dripping onto his wrist. Malin sees her reflection in the glass of the door, a vague image impossible to bring into focus.
‘Did you want anything in particular, Dad?’
The first time he’s called in over a week.
‘No.’
So why are you calling? Malin thinks. Seeing as you’re evidently completely uninterested in anything that’s happening to me and Tove.
A buzzing sound from the door.
‘Dad. Good to talk to you. But I’m on my way into a meeting.’
‘Don’t worry, Malin. I’ll call again another day.’
A minute later Malin is standing in a lift that’s shaking its way up through the building floor by floor. She can see her face clearly in the mirror in the lift, how the heat seems to be bringing out more wrinkles.
Parents, she thinks. What the hell are they good for?
‘Everything has its price.’
Svea Svensson’s voice hoarse after many long years of smoking, her face shrunken with wrinkles, hair grey, in thin strips above her green eyes, eyes watchful but well-meaning, as if the pupils are hiding a desire to let go of the secrets held in the electrical byways of the brain.
Her flat is on the top floor of the tallest block at the start of Tanneforsvagen.
Period furniture crammed into the living room, baroque chairs made in the fifties, an empire-style sofa, Wilton carpets and prints of Johan Krouthen paintings on silvery grey wallpaper, porcelain ornaments and a carriage clock that has just struck six.
Through the small windows of the living room they can see the Ostgota plain spreading out beyond the rooftops of the city as it unfurls towards Ljungsbro. They can make out the hot waters of Lake Roxen, almost see the steam rising over on the horizon, how it envelops the tormented, scorched fields in a fleeting, invisible mist that hides the obstinate remnants of life that are still clinging on.
The pillars of smoke from the forest on one side have gathered into an angry black cloud that doesn’t know which way to go in the absence of wind.
It looks as if the world is standing still, Malin thinks, just as Svea Svensson repeats: ‘Everything has its price. If life has taught me anything, it’s that.’
Zeke and Malin each slumped in a baroque chair.
Svea Svensson on the sofa behind the coffee table, her mouth moving, the words shaping a history that should never have needed to be told, but which is nonetheless all too common.
Zeke: ‘Can you tell us about Louise’s life as a child?’
‘Is it important?’
Malin: ‘It’s important.’
‘I’ll start at the very beginning. If that’s all right? Before she was born. Back when I was a little girl?’
‘Start wherever you’d like to,’ Zeke says, and the words start pouring from Svea’s mouth, as if they had missed the sound they made.
‘When I was seven years old my father left my mother and me. We lived on my grandfather’s farm, Ovraby, outside Brokind, in one of the old outhouses. My father was a travelling salesman and one day he didn’t come home, and Mother found out that he had a new woman in Soderkoping. We were short of money, so Mother took a job as a cook on an estate thirty kilometres away, down towards Kisa. I stayed behind with my grandparents, and I remember that time as the happiest days of my life. Then Mother met a new man. He had a shoe shop in Kisa, lived in a flat over the shop, and Mother and I moved in there. After just three nights he came into my room, I can remember his cold hands pushing the covers off me, and it happened again and again, and one night Mother appeared in the doorway while he was doing it, and she looked for a while before carrying on to the toilet, as if nothing had happened.
‘Do I blame her?
‘No.
‘Where would we have gone? Grandfather had had a stroke, the farm was gone.
‘So he had his way, the shoe shop bastard, and I left when I was seventeen, I ended up in Motala, in the kitchen at the factory, and I met a man in the Town Hotel.
‘He was a travelling salesman, just like my father, although he sold industrial chemicals, and he got me pregnant, and I gave birth to Louise. And when she was eight years old he left us alone with the flat in Motala. He’d got a new woman in Nassjo.
‘We lived on our own for a few years, just the girl and me. Then I met a new man, just like my mother had done, Sture Folkman by name. He bought and sold agricultural produce and we moved into his house down by the canal in Motala.
‘Louise never said anything.
‘I’ve often wondered why she didn’t tell me what was going on.
‘We’d been living there for three years when I found out what he was doing at night, what his cold hands were doing at night, what he was doing with his body.
‘Where could we go?
‘But I didn’t let him have his way.
‘I hit him on the head with a saucepan and we waited all night at the bus stop in the rain, Louise and I. It was a cold October night and the bushes and trees in the gardens around us turned into monsters, silhouettes of the devil’s children.
‘In the morning, just after it was light enough to make out the real shape of the bushes and trees, the bus came. It was heading for Linkoping, and I’ve never been back to Motala since, and I’ve never seen the bastard since then. And my first husband, Louise’s father, drowned while he was out fishing.
‘I blame myself, you know, Inspectors.
‘I let my child down, my girl, and no matter what pain a person has suffered themselves, you must never turn your back on a child. And that’s what I did by not seeing.
‘We ended up in a hotel room near the station. I reported him to the police, but there was nothing they could do. The nice ladies in the social security office sorted out a flat for us, and I got a job in a cafe and Louise started school. But even so, ever since then everything has somehow always been too late.
‘I never let any man come into my home after that.’
