54
The house is empty of people, but when Malin looks in through the living-room window and sees the mess of toys, she can hear the sound of children shouting, happy laughter, yelling and crying resulting from clashes about who gets the toy car, the stuffed animal, the crayon.
A young family lives in the house in which she grew up.
She told Zeke and Karin to go on ahead, said she wanted to walk around the area for a bit and that she’d get a taxi back. But Karin said that Zeke could go with her, and Zeke didn’t protest, just said, to Malin’s surprise: ‘That makes sense.’
She rang the bell, but guessed no one was home, and now she’s walking around to the back of the house. The grass is scorched to ruination, probably not watered all summer, and the fence around the terrace is flaking, the wood dry, no one’s found time to oil it for several years.
Dad would be upset if he could see this, Malin thinks. The pedant, Mr Careful, cheered on by Mum, Mrs Better Than She Really Is.
Mum.
Why couldn’t, why can’t you be happy with what you are? Excuses about the flat in Tenerife: ‘We were going to buy a house, but looking after a garden and pool is so much work.’
The hedge between the garden and the neighbours, younger people living there as well now, and she remembers chasing a football around the lawn on her own on summer evenings, with Dad shouting at her not to hit the apple trees and currant bushes with the ball, and Mum lying in the hammock drinking chilled white wine and staring out into space rather than at her, looking as if she’d rather be somewhere else.
Winter.
Snowmen and secret paths through the snow, days and nights of darkness that never ended, her glowing cheeks, and how she used to fight with Ida, the neighbours’ daughter, once making her nose bleed, and she felt so bad afterwards, the violence made her feel sick.
Mum and Dad’s silence. The way they would circle each other like silent snakes, Malin with a big black pit in her stomach, the sense that something had gone wrong and must be kept secret at all costs.
What was it that I couldn’t see?
Why was I so abrupt with Dad on the phone last time he rang?
And she misses them at that moment. Sees them before her in the flat in Tenerife that she’s never been to, Mum in a flowery dress, Dad in a tennis T-shirt and shorts, eating breakfast on the terrace and talking about their neighbours, the neighbourhood, the weather, but never about her or Tove.
Why don’t they care more about Tove?
Dutiful love. The love of least resistance. She’s you, for God’s sake, Malin feels like shouting. You.
She breathes in the warm summer air, feeling the years and all the unreachable memories take hold of the person she has become. She crouches down.
What is it that I’m not seeing?
Snow turning to water.
She goes over to the terrace, looks in through the kitchen window and in spite of the glass she can hear a tap dripping.
The kitchen is new, white Ikea cabinets, the Faktum range, shining in the relative darkness, the dining room off to the left, a table similar to the one they had, white-painted pine with uncomfortable, high-backed chairs.
A dripping tap.
Water.
Always this water.
Chlorinated pools, beaches for summer swimming. The apparently aimless movements of girls working over the summer.
What is it about water? Malin thinks. You want something to do with purity, with water, don’t you?
Malin walks quickly away from the house, can’t get away fast enough.
‘What have you got against me, Zacharias?’
Karin Johannison presses the accelerator and Zeke sees the white, long, lace-edged cotton skirt mould itself to her thigh, sees her fine, long blonde hair draped across her sharp cheekbones.
‘I haven’t got anything against you,’ Zeke says.
‘We work together so much,’ Karin says, ‘and it would be easier if we got on.’
Zeke looks out through the windscreen, sits in silence watching the trees on the far side of the cycle path, and wonders why he instinctively dislikes Karin so much. Is it her money? The self-confidence that comes of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth? Is it her nonchalant manner? Or is the cause of his dislike somewhere inside him? A woman. Does he have a problem with the fact that she’s a woman, and so damn attractive, and that she doesn’t fit the image of what a Forensics expert should be?
But that’s just my own prejudice, Zeke thinks. Then he realises what it is. Realises that he’s known ever since the first time he saw her. Impossible attraction means that you keep your distance. If I can’t have you, I can always make you feel bad, feel worthless, even if that’s the exact opposite of what I want.
‘I don’t know,’ Zeke says.
‘Don’t know what?’
‘Why I’ve always been so abrupt with you. But that’s all over now.’
Karin doesn’t say anything. But after a few long moments she takes her eyes off the road and looks at him with gratitude and warmth, and perhaps also desire.
Police Constable Aronsson has been blessed with an outsized bust that is scarcely contained within her grey police shirt, and Malin knows that she’s already a running joke among her male colleagues: Bustbuster, give us this day our daily breasts, making a clean breast of things . . .
But Aronsson is smart and tenacious and has no delusions or testosterone-dreams about what the profession is or should be.
She puts her notes down on Malin’s desk and Malin and Zeke lean forward in their chairs, listening carefully to what she has to say.
‘I’ve done the expanded background check on Sture Folkman, like you asked.’
Aronsson’s face is gentle, but her unfortunately protruding top teeth make her less attractive than she would otherwise be.
‘He arrived here as a wartime evacuee from Finland. Evidently saw his whole family burned alive in Karelia. He ended up at a farm in the north of Skane, outside Angelholm. That’s where he took his school diploma.’
Aronsson pauses for breath before going on: ‘He divorced his second wife in 1980. They had two daughters. One of them killed herself in 1985, the investigation seems to have been fairly straightforward if you read the report, she was found hanged and had apparently been in and out of psychiatric institutions for years.’
Cold white hands under the covers.
Stop, Dad, stop, I’m your daughter.
There there, there there.
Malin forces the image from her mind. Some men should be castrated and strung up in public.
‘And the other daughter lives in Australia? That’s what Folkman implied.’
Aronsson shakes her head.
