Summertime Death

‘We’ve got him here, we’re coming in. No, nothing. He hasn’t said a word.’

Without letting go of the wheel Waldemar turns to look at the back seat, saying: ‘OK, you randy little Paki, we’ve got you now.’

Then he turns into a side road and drives deep into the forest, and Per knows what’s going to happen now, doesn’t want it to happen, but lets it happen.

Zeke’s reaction to the information about the dildo: ‘So we don’t have to bother with the hypnosis? It’s as good as sorted now. We must be able to get a confession out of him now.’

‘It’s not sorted,’ Malin says without taking her eyes from the road. ‘We’ll go through with the hypnosis as planned. Josefin Davidsson is probably already at Viveka’s office. The best we can hope for is that we get ourselves a witness, and no matter what that witness says, it will give us more information, won’t it?’

Zeke nods.

Knows she’s right.

‘I want this case to be over,’ Zeke says. ‘I want the people living in the city to be able to read in tomorrow’s Correspondent that we’ve caught the bastard and that they can let their girls play wherever they like again, that they don’t have to be worried or frightened.’

Tove.

Am I worried?

No.

Actually, yes.

‘It’s coming, Zeke,’ Malin says. ‘In principle, the case is cracked. Now we just have to join all the dots.’

Waldemar Ekenberg clenches his fist and punches Suliman Hajif just under his ribs, the place that causes most pain without leaving any visible physical evidence.

Suliman Hajif collapses.

Per Sundsten is pretending to help, picking Suliman Hajif up, but only so he can be hit again.

The young man is still silent.

No words, just groaning as he lies on the ground, hands over his eyes, and the forest around the gravel road is still, the moss thick and yellow and dry on the ground, the maples have lost their chlorophyll, but life is clinging on in there, begging for rain.

‘You raped and murdered Theresa Eckeved and Sofia Freden. Didn’t you? And you raped Josefin Davidsson. Didn’t you? You perverse little fucker. I’m going to kill you out here if you don’t confess.’

He must be able to hear from Ekenberg’s voice that he’s serious.

Suliman Hajif tries to get up, but his legs don’t want to obey, he lurches back and forth and Per can see the fear in his eyes.

Waldemar takes his pistol from its holster.

Crouches down beside Suliman Hajif and puts the barrel to his back.

‘It’s easy. We say you tried to escape and were forced to shoot to stop you. A double-murderer and rapist. No one’s going to wonder. People will thank us.’

Per unsure.

‘Get up!’ Waldemar screams.

And Suliman Hajif scrambles, tries to get up, screaming: ‘I can’t confess to something I didn’t do!’

The pistol against his temple now.

‘Don’t try to escape.’

Then Per takes a step forward, knocks the pistol from Waldemar’s hand.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘That’s enough. Get it? That’s enough.’

A wind blows through the maples’ shrivelled branches and a thousand yellow leaves decide to let go, falling like a golden rain over the scene in the forest.

‘I bought the dildo from Stene at Blue Rose,’ Suliman Hajif screams. ‘He said he’d sold dozens of them, so how do you know it was mine?’

‘Shit,’ Waldemar whispers, and Per thinks: You’re right there, Waldemar, you’re absolutely right.

‘Why the hell hasn’t anyone checked which dildos are sold in the only porn shop in the city? Fucking Internet. People still buy things in shops, don’t they?’

Per grabs Waldemar’s arm.

‘Calm down. This is a crazy summer. We’re under pressure from all sides. Sometimes you don’t see what’s right in front of your nose.’

A quarter of an hour later Waldemar is standing at the counter of Blue Rose on Djurgardsgatan, the city’s long-established porn shop.

Stene, the owner, smiles with his puffy, stubbled face.

‘A blue dildo?’

Stene goes over to a shelf at the back of the dimly lit premises. Comes back with a pink and orange package in his hand, the blue object inside the pack half-obscured by the loud, shouting lettering: ‘Hard and Horny!’

‘These have been selling like hot cakes. I must have sold forty or so in the last eighteen months. None in the last month or so, mind you.’

Waldemar spits out a question: ‘Do you keep a list of your customers?’

‘No, are you mad? Nothing of the sort. Discretion is my watchword. And I have a bad memory for faces.’

‘Credit cards?’

‘Those bastards take seven per cent. Here it’s cash that counts.’

Malin pulls up in the car park of the Philadelphia Church and doesn’t bother to get a ticket from the machine. She and Zeke cross over Drottninggatan, ignoring how hungry they are and fighting the urge to stop in McDonald’s on the way.

They press the buzzer of number twelve Drottninggatan, and Viveka Crafoord lets them in.

In the treatment room, on the paisley-patterned chaise longue, sits Josefin Davidsson, her mother sitting nervously beside her.

Viveka is sitting in her leather chair behind the desk, her face lit up by the light falling from the window looking onto Drottninggatan. A strange, mystical light, Malin thinks.

‘OK,’ Josefin says. ‘I want to know what happened.’

You’re not the only one, Malin thinks.

50

The memory of violence.

It’s somewhere inside you, Josefin.

Synapses need to be connected to synapses, and then you’ll remember. But do you really want to remember?

We remember. We can see what happened to us, how we disappeared, we’d rather call it that, a disappearance, then how, after a lot of loneliness, we found each other in our shapeless space.

Sofia and I have each other.

Perhaps we’re in the beautiful place that exists before consciousness, unconsciousness? Before everything that human beings mistake for life?

We can just make out the people we once were, our space can assume whatever colour we like, and we can be exactly the people we want to be, wherever we like.

We’re with you, now, Josefin, in the lady psychologist’s room.

We need your memories.

Because somehow we need the closure provided by the truth in order to achieve real peace, to stop being scared of the dark. Because that’s what our space is like, it can adopt a colour that makes black seem