fire engine.
‘Couldn’t wait another second.’
‘You’re so similar, Malin, you know that?’
‘In what way?’
‘Loads of ways. But I suppose I mean the way you treat your work. You both love your work beyond reason, it’s your way of escaping from reality.’
‘Zeke. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that last bit. How’s Martin’s pre-season training going?’
‘Great, I expect. He loves circuit training.’
‘Any more offers from the States yet?’
‘Apparently his agent is talking to a number of clubs. I daresay it’ll all work out once the baby’s here.’
Martin was picked for the national team for the first time back in May for the World Championships. Zeke travelled to Prague to see one of the matches, forced to go by his wife. Malin knows he hates flying almost as much as he hates ice hockey.
‘He’s going to be seriously rich, then,’ Malin says.
‘Yes, for hitting a damn puck and sliding about the ice on a pair of skates.’
‘For entertaining the rest of us, Zeke,’ Malin says, and considers her dreams for Tove: becoming a teacher or a lawyer, one of the nice, straightforward professions that all parents dream of for their children. Or an author, seeing as she reads like a maniac and writes essays for school that astonish her teachers.
‘Hockey’s for morons,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s all there is to it.’
‘Don’t be so hard on him.’
‘The lad can do what he likes, but there’s no way I’m ever going to love that game.’
The road forces its way through the forest.
The world around them is deserted, all the animals have long since fled the flames. Fifty minutes later they reach Finspang.
Home to the De Geer industrial empire.
A town built up around the production of cannons.
Neglected.
But a good place to raise children. And a good place to hide yourself away.
Their satnav leads them to the right place.
The street where Sture Folkman lives is an obscure cul-de-sac just behind a run of shops right in the centre of town, and number twelve is a three-storey block of flats. The ground-floor shop is occupied by the National Federation of Disabled Persons.
They park.
Take it for granted that the old man is home.
The door to the flats isn’t locked, Finspang so small that they don’t need coded locks, people free to come and go as they please all day long.
They read his name on the grey-green list of names in movable white lettering, he lives on the third floor.
‘That’s the bastard,’ Zeke says.
‘Take it easy now,’ Malin says. ‘He’s an old man.’
‘OK, so he’s old. But some crimes never go away, and can never be forgiven.’
‘Get lost,’ says a hoarse voice through the letterbox, and it contains a meanness, a malice that is evident in a way that Malin has never experienced before, and the pink walls of the stairwell seem to turn blood-red and collapse in on them as they stand there.
‘I don’t want anything. Get lost.’
‘We’re not selling anything. We’re from the Linkoping Police, and we’d like to talk to you. Open the door.’
‘Get lost.’
‘Open up. Now. Or I’ll break the door in,’ and the man inside seems to hear that Zeke is serious and the door is unlocked and opened.
A tall, thin man with a bent back, his body frozen by what looks like Parkinson’s.
You didn’t do it, Malin thinks, but then they never really thought he had.
A long nose that distracts attention from a weak chin, and Sture Folkman stares right at them, his eyes grey and cold.
Cold as the tundra.
Cold as the Arctic.
Like a world without light, that’s how cold your eyes are.
Black gabardine trousers. A white nylon shirt and a grey cardigan in spite of the heat.
‘What the hell do you want?’
Malin looks at his hands.
Long, white, bloodless fingers dangling towards the rag-rugs in the hall, tentacles ready to feel their way up, in.
Green plush sofas.
Black and white photographs of family farms long since sold off.
Heavy red velvet curtains shutting out all the light. A bookcase with books about chemistry, and a complete set of the Duden encyclopaedia in German.
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
Sture Folkman’s response when they explained why they were there.
But Malin and Zeke still went into the living room, sitting down in a couple of armchairs, waiting.
Sture Folkman hesitated in the hall.
They heard him moving around in the kitchen, scrupulously clean, Malin noticed that as they went past, old- fashioned knives with Bakelite handles in a block on the draining board.
Then he came in to them.
‘Get lost.’
‘Not until you answer our questions.’
‘Get lost, back to Linkoping. That’s where you said you were from, isn’t it? Fucking stuck-up dump. I was at your oh-so-wonderful hospital last month. Fucking shit urologist.’
He slumped onto a ladder-backed chair beside the bookcase.
‘I’ve never had any dealings with the cops.’
‘You should have done.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You subjected Louise Svensson to sexual abuse, repeatedly. There’s no point trying to deny it, we know all about it.’
‘I . . .’
‘And doubtless you went on to do the same to your new family. Where are they now?’
‘My last wife died four years ago. A brain tumour.’
‘And your two daughters?’
‘What do you want with them?’
‘Answer.’
‘She’s a long way away. In Australia.’
‘Do they live there?’
Sture Folkman doesn’t answer.
‘Do you know anything about the murders of young girls in Linkoping?’
‘What would I know about that?’
‘Do you think Louise could have had anything to do with them?’
Sture Folkman knits his fingers, sniffs them, then lets his hands rest on his black trousers.
‘Have you got any other assaults on your conscience?’
