most suffering.
The woman in the kitchen wanted children.
I wasn’t that fussed, Waldemar thinks. But God knows, they tried. Test tubes all over the place, wanking into little pots in dimly lit bathrooms with a cheap porn magazine in his lap.
Then she hit forty-five and all that stopped.
They share that fate with a lot of other couples.
And here I stand in our garden. The sky getting darker. Stars lighting up in distant galaxies. Earthly life huddling together, and I can honestly say that I still love her.
Per Sundsten is standing at the hotdog kiosk in Borensberg. Built in the fifties, it’s the archetypal Swedish kiosk with an adjoining waiting room for bus passengers. He’s ordered a pork-burger with cheese, and is planning to take it down to the Gota Canal to eat it in peace and quiet as he watches the boats, before heading home to his flat in Motala.
The advantages of the single life.
I do what I want with my time. No one to tell me what to do.
‘There you go.’
The kiosk owner, an immigrant, hands him the burger, the cheese almost running down the sides of the meat.
He sits down on a bench overlooking the canal.
A man and woman, about the same age as him, go past on a blue yacht. They’re sitting in the cockpit drinking wine, and they wave to him and he takes a sip of his Pucko chocolate milkshake and waves back.
Ekenberg is crazy.
But at the same time it’s reassuring to have him by his side. He knows how to do this. I’m probably better suited to the Financial Crime Unit in Stockholm.
Motala. Not too dissimilar to Kalmar, where he grew up, an old industrial town now full of drugs and problems, but still with the appearance of a small-town idyll. But hardly the best place for a thirty-year-old to live.
The case they’re working on. He can’t get a grip on any of it. The threads are running together and it feels as though he’s mostly a passenger, that he doesn’t have anything to contribute.
Fors.
She’s driven and manic and a bit scary. She almost seems frightened of herself. But if anyone can solve this case it’s her.
He takes a bite of the fried meat.
Another boat goes past.
A man is sitting in the cockpit. He looks lonely, Per thinks.
Zeke shovels another mouthful of plaice into his mouth. His wife looks at him, then she looks down at the kitchen table, with a pointed glance at the holiday brochures opened at various destinations: Sunny Beach in Bulgaria; Crete; Costa Dorada. Dreams packaged as dreams.
‘I can’t begin to think about that at the moment. About going anywhere.’
She’s sitting opposite him, pointing at Sunny Beach.
‘This one’s supposed to be cheap. What do you think?’
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’
The kitchen suddenly seems extremely small, the brown pine units are crowding in on me, Zeke thinks, and he wants to escape into the garden, but she’s not about to let go.
‘Lennart and Siv went to Crete last summer. They said it was lovely. And it’s easy to get deals now that the weather’s so good here.’
‘This fish is good. Plaice is always good at this time of year.’
‘Or what do you think about Spain? That’s still the classic, after all.’
She leafs through one of the brochures.
‘How about Rimini?’
He looks at her. Martin’s mother, his wife. Who are you? he thinks. The investigation, the heat, the light, the dust, and Karin Johannison’s legs under white fabric in the car. Everything creates new perspectives, making him a stranger in his own life.
Karin Johannison is standing naked by the swimming pool on the terrace behind the house, one of the largest in Ramshall, the garden not overlooked at all thanks to the mature shrubs. The evening smells of sulphur and pine resin.
Kalle in front of the television in the living room.
He’s watching one of those old films on TCM that he’s so fond of, a Frank Capra comedy.
They had the pool installed back in the spring, they’d both wanted one for years.
They have help maintaining it, a neighbour put them onto a woman who looks after pools. She comes when they aren’t at home, cleans it up, adjusts the chlorine levels, and Karin has never met her, but Kalle says she seems to know what she’s doing, although she never says much and always wants to be paid in cash.
Whatever.
She thinks about what Martinsson said in the car.
About him.
Almost ten years older, and she’s often wondered what he had against her, but she believed him, that there would be no more bad feeling from now on. And the way he looked at me. I could have stopped the car and done what people do at the side of the road.
A long hot crazy summer.
Heat all around me.
Heat within me.
I know how to escape it, Karin thinks, and pushes off with her feet, sailing through the air before her body cleaves the surface and everything becomes cool and miraculously silent.
Malin has crept in beside Tove.
She was lying in bed, still tired after the flight. Malin woke her, told her off: ‘The battery in my mobile ran out, I just met up with Julia and we got an ice cream from Bosse’s, then did some people-watching in Stora torget. Mum, it’s no big deal.’
And Tove fell asleep again. Malin was feeling tired too. In the kitchen she drank half a tumbler of tequila, thinking that they were finally getting somewhere now, that soon this would all be over. And she sensed how worried she was.
Then she went back in to Tove.
Took off all her clothes but her underwear.
Crept under the sheet and felt her daughter’s warm skin and the gentle vibrations from her beating heart, reason enough to carry on fighting, living.
56
What are we going to do with all these people? The ones who can’t control their desires, the ones who damage other people because they themselves have been damaged?
A bloody big camp up in Norrland.
A suicidal cliff of desire.
Chemical castration.
Real castration.
Electronic surveillance.
