Zeke sounds the way he always does just before he explodes, just before violence.
‘Well? Have you?’
‘Zeke.’
Sture Folkman raises his hands towards them, his white fingers a jagged fence.
‘What do you really want? What do you want?’
On the way back to the car Malin can see Zeke trembling with loathing and anger.
He tosses the keys to her.
‘You drive.’
And Malin sits behind the wheel as they leave Finspang behind them. They’re surrounded by dense forest when Zeke finally speaks.
‘He had a point, the old bastard. What were we doing there really?’
‘Following up on a line of inquiry, Zeke. That’s what we do. We look back in case it helps us move forward.’
‘But still. It feels so remote that it’s bordering on desperation.’
Malin doesn’t reply.
Instead she fixes her eyes on the road, thinking about what must happen to your soul if you get nightly visits from those white fingers throughout the years when your faith in other people assumes its final form.
It makes you watchful.
Scared.
A conviction that everyone probably wants to hurt you.
That everyone hates you.
An inability to fit in, instead an urge to seek out anything broken, to validate what’s broken within yourself.
Life as a lonely, aimless wanderer.
Everything that could be defined as self-esteem fingered to destruction.
Cracks in doors concealing a darkness into which you could tumble helplessly.
49
The beach outside Sturefors in the dying afternoon light. The heat is making Waldemar Ekenberg’s jacket stick to his body as he stands beneath the oak inside the cordon.
The holstered pistol is warm against his chest, not even metal shielded by cloth and shade can resist the heat.
Suliman Hajif is standing beside what was Theresa Eckeved’s grave, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, allowed not to wear custody clothing for this excursion. His hands are behind his back, the handcuffs fastened tight to make sure he doesn’t try anything.
The bathers have found their way back.
When they arrived the bathers stared in their direction from behind their sunglasses, now they’ve gone back to swimming. Presumably they think that the reason for their visit is too frightening to be allowed to blemish such a dreamy summer’s day as this:
Only two boys, wearing identical blue swimming trunks, are standing outside the cordon and staring up at them through blue-tinted glass. The ice cream kiosk is closed, otherwise the boys would probably each be clutching a cone.
Inquisitive.
‘Off you go, now.’
Per Sundsten tries to make his voice sound authoritative.
Sven Sjoman hadn’t been convinced about their idea: taking him out to the crime scenes to get him to break down, confess.
‘His lawyer will have to go too.’
‘Sod the lawyer. We haven’t got time for that,’ Waldemar said. ‘The girls, Sjoman, think of the girls.’
‘OK, but take it easy. Nothing unnecessary.’
As he sat at his desk in the open-plan office, Sven hesitated, his face wrinkling with awareness of their excesses.
‘Get lost.’
And Waldemar fixes a stare on the boys until they lumber off, embarrassed, down the little beach and back into the water.
‘So this was where you buried her. And was this where you killed her as well?’
Suliman Hajif shakes his head, whispering: ‘My lawyer should be here.’
‘We tried to get hold of him,’ Waldemar says. ‘But he wasn’t answering the phone. He doesn’t give a damn about you.’
‘It would make sense to confess,’ Per says. ‘You’d feel better. Anytime now we’re expecting the results from Forensics, and then we’ll know it was you, and that it was your dildo that was used on these girls.’
Suliman Hajif shakes his head again.
Waldemar takes a step forward, grabs him by the neck, hard, but in a way that could look almost paternal to the other people on the beach.
‘So you’re playing the silent game, are you?’
A groan.
But no words.
‘Let’s go to the next one,’ Waldemar says, dragging Suliman Hajif with him, back the way from which they came.
Malin gets the call just as they’re passing the turning to Tornby.
Karin Johannison’s voice, excited behind the formal tone.
‘It’s the same paint. The paint on Suliman Hajif’s dildo matches the paint on the one used in the attacks.’
‘So it’s the same dildo?’
‘It isn’t possible to say that for sure. But certainly the same sort. As to whether the fragments of paint match the pieces that are missing from Suliman Hajif’s dildo . . . Well, I’ve tried, but there isn’t a hope in hell of doing that.’
Malin feels her stomach clench.
All due respect to the chances of matching the fragments. But how likely is it that two different dildos of the same model would turn up in the same investigation?
‘Any other traces on it?’
‘No.’
‘Any other news?’
‘Sorry Malin. No new evidence.’
The same dildo.
Synchronicity.
Freud.
On the way to Viveka Crafoord now for the session of hypnosis. Is that even necessary now?
‘Thanks, Karin. Are you going to call Sven Sjoman?’
‘Of course.’
‘So it’s the same dildo? OK, just the same model. But then it’s sorted, isn’t it?’
Waldemar elated behind the wheel of their blue Saab; Sundsten and Suliman Hajif in the back seat, they’ve just driven through the idyll of Sturefors. Beside them on the cycle path an elderly couple is wobbling along on a brand-new tandem.
