bushes not watered, forgotten.
They ring the bell and Sigvard Eckeved opens the door half a minute later.
Surprise and suspicion, but also anticipation.
Have you got him?
And Malin sees the hope in his green-blue eyes, a flash of life, and she says that they have reason to believe that their daughter may have been murdered in a different location from the beach and that they would therefore like to conduct a cursory search of the house, just to rule out the possibility that she was attacked at home.
‘You can’t imagine that I, we . . .’
‘Not for a second,’ Zeke says, and Sigvard Eckeved steps aside and his body is heavy, as if the true note of grief had penetrated his system and taken it over.
‘If it would help your inquiries, you’re welcome to burn the whole house down.’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘There are probably enough fires around here as it is.’
‘True enough,’ Sigvard Eckeved says. ‘Well, do whatever you need to. The wife’s in the city seeing her shrink.’
Malin is going through the beds around the terrace and pool, searching for clues, broken twigs, signs of a struggle, but all she can find are withered red roses that long ago gave up in the heat.
She’s out in the sun and has to keep wiping the sweat from her eyes and forehead. She can see Zeke on the other side of the lawn, where there’s a large vegetable patch between the lawn and the neighbour’s fence.
Karin inside the house.
Malin had just been thinking how well she fits in with this chic pool environment, in her skirt and her silly pale-mauve armless designer top.
Then Zeke calls out: ‘Over here!’
And Malin can hear from his voice that he’s confident, that he’s found something important.
‘She must have tried to escape next door.’
The vegetable patch is full of drooping potatoes, bolted carrots, rhubarb that no one bothered to pick. The signs of a struggle are obvious, almost solidified in the drought and lack of rain and absence of watering, and they can see footsteps, the way her body must have fallen into the plants, then how someone had tried to pull Theresa backwards and she had struggled, digging her fingers in the soil, trying to cling to life.
‘We need Karin,’ Zeke says. ‘Whatever she’s up to. I imagine she’s inside, in the cool.’
Sigvard Eckeved has slumped onto one of the chairs on the terrace, his daughter’s death even closer now, physically in their home, and it seems to Malin that he’s been struck with the realisation that they can’t possibly go on living here, now that this is/has become a place of violence.
Malin crouches down beside him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘It’s OK,’ Sigvard Eckeved says, and Malin realises what this loss means for him, that things can’t get any worse, that there might even be some small comfort in the fact that his daughter was at home when she was attacked.
‘But I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How am I going to tell the wife? It’ll break her.’
Once Karin has finished in the vegetable garden she turns to Malin, who has been watching from the shade of a pear tree.
‘She most likely would have come from the pool,’ Karin says. ‘The perpetrator probably attacked her there and she tried to escape in this direction. I didn’t find anything inside, no traces of blood or anything.’
‘You’ll need to check around the pool.’
‘That’s where I’m heading next, Malin.’
A minute later Karin is going around the pool, and the water seems to simmer in the heat, inviting and off- putting at the same time in its ostentatious blueness. Karin sprays Luminol on the wooden decking and the stone edge of the pool, hoping that the liquid will make any traces of blood glow in the relative darkness as she goes along shading the ground with a blue towel.
‘I knew it,’ Karin says when she reaches the part of the pool closest to the garage. ‘I knew it,’ she repeats.
Malin hurries over, and Zeke emerges from inside the house.
Sigvard Eckeved remains seated on his chair, his face expressionless.
‘Look here,’ Karin says, waving them over, and under the towel are some twenty small patches surrounded by splashes. ‘The perpetrator tried to get rid of it. But I can promise you that this was where Theresa received that blow to the head.’
‘Can you get a blood-type or anything from that?’
Zeke hopeful.
‘I’m afraid not. Nothing like that,’ Karin replies. ‘What you see here are just little ghosts of reality.’
Malin is crouching beside Sigvard Eckeved again.
‘Who would have had any reason to be here?’
‘Who?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s no one who comes to mind?’
‘No one. Sorry.’
‘No one?’
‘No, it could have been anyone.’
‘No gardener? No one like that?’
‘I usually do all the work myself. Together with my wife.’
‘And the pool?’
‘We have someone who comes in early May each year. When we fill it. But this year I did it myself. Last summer we had workmen here, doing improvements to the terrace.’
Malin’s mobile rings from her jacket pocket.
‘Fors here.’
‘Malin? This is Aronsson. I’ve finished the expanded background check of Sture Folkman. Do you want me to go through it over the phone?’
‘I’m busy right now. Can we take it in an hour or so? Back at the station?’
‘Sure. There are a couple of slightly unclear things I want to sort out.’
Malin puts the phone away.
Sigvard Eckeved has started to cry, his whole body shaking, and Malin wants to help him but doesn’t know how, and instead she puts her hand silently on his arm and doesn’t say that everything will be all right, that it will all sort itself out.
