Malin is pacing up and down beside the bed in her flat, freshly showered and wearing just her pants and bra. She’s laid three summer dresses out on the bedspread, wondering which one to choose: blue with white flowers, the short yellow one, or the longer white one that goes down to her ankles.
She chooses the yellow one, pulls it over her head and looks at herself in the hall mirror, and she thinks that anticipation is making her beautiful, or at least more beautiful than she has felt for ages.
The interview with Svea Svensson just an hour before. The words echoing inside her: cold hands on the covers, under the covers, snakes on her body.
She remembers what an old man said to her during a previous case: ‘Desire is what kills, Miss Fors. Desire is what kills.’
They had asked about Louise, if Svea Svensson knew anything about her daughter that she thought they should know, but Svea Svensson had refused to answer the question at all.
‘Is Sture Folkman still alive?’
Zeke’s question to Svea.
‘Sture Folkman is alive.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘I think he lives in Finspang with his wife. He had a family.’
‘And?’
Malin could sense another story.
‘God help those poor people.’
And then silence, the lips clamped shut as if they’d let out enough memories for a lifetime.
Maybe the white dress after all?
No.
Malin looks around the flat, it looks tidy enough.
She goes down to the car in the car park by the church, starts the engine, sees from the clock that she’s early, it’s only half past seven, Tove and Janne’s plane lands at quarter to two. It takes at most an hour and a half to get to Skavsta. Even if she sticks to the speed limit. But she wants to be there in good time, and might as well be somewhere else with her longing.
As she drives up Jarnvagsgatan towards the Berg roundabout, a face appears inside her, she doesn’t know why, but she knows the face is important.
Slavenca Visnic smiles as she opens the door of her flat in Skaggetorp.
And a minute later Malin is sitting with a glass of Fanta in her living room, trying to think of something to ask, and it’s as if the caution she felt just now, the watchfulness around a person featuring in a murder investigation, has blown away, leaving just a vague sense of significance.
‘What do you want to know?’
Slavenca Visnic doesn’t seem surprised by the visit, just curious about what Malin wants.
‘I don’t really know. I just wanted to ask you to try to think if there’s anything important that you might not have told us.’
‘What could that be? I just try to be a good citizen, mind my own business, that’s all.’
Malin can see how ridiculous her visit must seem to such a down-to-earth person as the woman before her.
‘Oh, well.’
‘Don’t worry. Finish your drink. I’ve got to go up to Glyttinge to collect the day’s takings, and have my evening swim. They start cleaning the water at half past nine, and if you swim at the far end of the pool it actually feels clean there then.’
‘An evening swim? Nice. I’m heading to Skavsta to pick up my husband and daughter.’
Malin regrets saying this at once, Slavenca Visnic lost her whole family, but her eyes show nothing but calm, warmth.
‘I’d like to show you something,’ Slavenca Visnic says. ‘Follow me.’
The next minute they’re sitting at a computer in her bedroom, the light of the screen flickering.
Slavenca Visnic has opened ten documents that look like pages of a child’s picture-book. On the pages she’s loaded the few pictures she has of her family, alongside short texts about her childhood, her children’s lives, the short lives they got to live.
Slavenca Visnic looks younger in the pictures, her face full of innocent anticipation and responsibility. The children in her arms, beautiful round faces beneath black hair that’s been allowed to grow long, her husband: a friendly, fluid face defined by a strong chin.
‘It feels good to keep busy doing this,’ Slavenca Visnic says. ‘Writing. Trying to recreate life the way it was when it was at its best, all that simple love.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Malin says.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think they can ever come back?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ and Slavenca Visnic’s question seems entirely natural to Malin, as if resurrection from the dead were possible sometimes, at least for the love itself.
‘But some day you’ll get to meet them again,’ Malin says. ‘And their love is still here in this room. I can feel it.’
Slavenca Visnic shuts down her computer and follows Malin out into the hall.
‘Drive carefully, they’d probably prefer you to get there in one piece. Your husband and daughter.’
‘We’re divorced,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve been divorced more than ten years.’
46
Shimmering dusk.
The day on its way into inescapable darkness, its death throes in shifting shades of yellow, red and orange.
Forest, open fields, water, red-painted houses huddling by the tree line, cars parked in driveways, light in windows, sometimes silhouettes behind the glass, people like dark dreams, hungry, still not ready to let go of the day.
But the day itself muttering: I’ve had enough. That’ll do.
The car creeps up to one hundred and twenty. Can go much faster than that.
A metal bird high up in the atmosphere, where the summer air is too thin to breathe. Soon on its way down, the metal cocoon protecting your bodies.
Keep your eyes on the road.
Dangerously tired.
And the tarmac is a snake sliding past Norrkoping, Kolmarden and on into the night.
Stockholm.
The road ends up there. Sometimes she wishes she were back there, in a larger setting, with more regular cases to fire up a detective’s soul.
A case like theirs.
Threads like unexploded shells, howling as they approach the ground, and all the police officers involved wait for the explosion, waiting for the truth to burst out and take shape before their eyes. But instead just an unexploded bomb lying in the meeting room and emitting a foul stench, in the open-plan office of the police station, a whistling sound that mocks them, reminding them of their shortcomings.
The media going crazy.
Karim Akbar getting softer each day, and simultaneously worse as a media performer, but better as a police chief.
Sven Sjoman.
