It’s early in the morning and Per Sundsten can’t work out what he thinks as he and Waldemar Ekenberg follow a still sleepy Arto Sovalaski through the hall of his red wooden cottage on the outskirts of Linghem, a dormitory suburb just to the east of Linkoping. They just passed through a neatly tended garden, parched like everything green, with gooseberry bushes in close formation along the gravel path leading to the house.
‘I know why you’re here. And on a Saturday and all. Shouldn’t you be having a day off?’
‘At least we didn’t have to have a morning meeting,’ Per says, watching Arto Sovalaski shuffle in front of them. Possibly the most exhausted man in the world, his face wrecked from drink and smoking, with no trace at all of any dreams for the future.
The stench of sweat in the house.
‘We shouldn’t be working,’ Per goes on, ‘but right now Linkoping has been visited by the big bad.’
Arto Sovalaski, the last name on the list of known sex offenders in their district.
His torso covered by a stained yellow T-shirt with a picture of a digger on the front.
‘Do you work?’
Waldemar’s question as they enter the living room and Arto Sovalaski has settled onto the yellow and brown patterned sofa, the only piece of furniture in the room. Bottles and overflowing ashtrays all over the wooden floor.
‘No, I got an early pension.’
Well, thinks Per, I daresay no one really wants to have you around. Four rapes in four months ten years ago in different places, Vaxjo, Karlstad, Orebro, and one here in Linkoping. Since then, nothing.
‘So you know why we’re here?’
‘Yes, it’s happened before when there’s been some sex-related crime in the city. Then you come running. But you can clear off again, because I was away when it happened, visiting friends over on Oland. Call them.’
Waldemar goes closer.
Not again, Per thinks.
But Waldemar backs down this time.
‘Have you got the number for your friends?’
‘Sure.’
Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the car on the way back in to the city, Arto Sovalaski’s alibi confirmed by a drunk Finn on the other side of the Kalmar Sound.
‘Well, that’s that line of inquiry exhausted,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘Let’s get back to the station and put the squeeze on Suliman one last time before he gets out.’
‘They let him go last night,’ Per says.
‘Did they, now?’ Waldemar says. ‘Did they, now?’
A bit of a lie-in.
They indulged themselves seeing as it’s Saturday, and it’s nine o’clock when Malin goes downstairs to meet Zeke
The second Saturday of this case. Just over a week has passed since the eruption. But it feels like several years, as if they’re dealing with a drawn-out plague.
The heat hasn’t improved. It may even be a bit worse.
The grey stone facade of the church is quivering in the air, fading into a sickly yellow nuance, and the quiver in the air means that Malin can’t make out the inscription.
Zeke, where are you?
He called ten minutes ago as he was passing Berga, so he should be here by now.
Tove still asleep up in the flat.
Malin walks down the street, taking a look in the windows of the St Lars gallery, at the colourful paintings by artists like Madeleine Pyk and Lasse Aberg. She doesn’t know much about art, but what she sees hanging on the walls of the gallery makes her feel ill.
Vera Folkman.
How broken is she?
Damaged, damaged goods. We should put in a claim for the damage.
Like that couple in the US who adopted a little girl from Ukraine who turned out to have learning difficulties. The story goes that they sent her back in a FedEx box and that she froze to death en route, in a plane ten thousand metres above the ground.
A car horn.
Zeke.
The next minute she’s sitting in the air-conditioned cool of the car. She breathes out. Doesn’t notice the white van parked at the top of Agatan.
Tove stretches out in bed, her mum’s bed, it’s still nice to sleep there sometimes.
She’s meeting Markus later, and today she’s going to tell him, it’s over, that she still likes him, just not like that, and that they can still be friends.
But he won’t want that.
She sits up.
Just from the light creeping through the gaps in the Venetian blinds she can tell this is likely to be the hottest day since she got home from Bali.
They ring the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. She lives on the first floor, but there’s no answer, the whole flat gives a strangely abandoned impression from the outside.
‘Gone, baby, gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Damn, it’s hot already. Hotter by the second.’
The longer they stand outside the flat, the more they become aware of a smell coming from inside.
‘It smells of animal crap,’ Zeke says.
‘Maybe she keeps cats in there?’
‘Well, whatever it is, it stinks.’
‘Maybe she’s in Australia,’ Malin says, turning on her heel and starting to go back downstairs. ‘She could have left her pets inside.’
‘It’s probably cooler there than it is here, even in Alice Springs,’ Zeke says.
‘That’s supposed to be the hottest place in the world.’
‘Wrong. Linkoping’s the hottest place in the world.’
Tove sitting firmly on her bicycle.
Her pink top tight against her body.
The world sleepy and yellow through her sunglasses.
She pedals past Tinnis, but instead of heading up Ramshallsbacken she turns off towards the hospital, heading back down towards the Hotel Ekoxen. She has a funny feeling that someone’s following her, that someone’s watching her, trying to get closer. But she carries on pedalling, getting slightly out of breath, and she thinks it must be her nerves ahead of her conversation with Markus that are making her twitchy.
She’d felt it ever since she got her bike from the stand down by the church.
But where were the eyes?
She looked around, nothing suspicious, nothing different, just fewer people in this hot, summertime empty city.
And now she is coasting down towards the hotel, and turns around, and isn’t that the same van that was parked outside the flat? At home? The one that drove past her outside Markus’s yesterday?
Scared now.
And she stops at the hotel.
Opens the gate leading to the airy, yellowing Horticultural Society Park.
That was where they found one of the girls.
But at least the van can’t follow me in there.
A dark figure behind the wheel. Who?
