hundreds of ventilation units. The indistinct sound of voices.
A sliding door opening.
Soon the sounds of the city are stifled by the rhythm of the words in her head.
I’m heading towards you now.
No one can see anything, it’s early afternoon but we’re alone here, and I’m going to take you.
No one by the castle, or the county administration office, or in the park.
Or on the path to the library, or inside the big glass windows, and I am approaching your rebirth. I shall take you with me to him for the final act.
They’ll say that I’m mad.
And maybe I am not really myself.
But I shall do this now.
Fill you with nothing.
The tarmac of the car park becomes grass under my feet, I’m close to you now, we’re sharing the shade. The ether in my hand, a soaked rag, and my white clothes are spotless and you don’t hear me and I’m kneeling on your orange towel, putting the rag over your nose.
What’s this?
A sharp, bitter smell and something damp burning against her nose and Tove twists around, but her body doesn’t want to, why doesn’t her body want to, and in the corner of her eye she can see a white figure, feeling the weight of someone’s arm and the edges of the world start to dissolve and I’m sleepy, so sleepy, but I can’t fall asleep here, not here, not now, and I can feel something dragging me over the grass, then something harder, tarmac? And then my sight disappears and the world becomes a dream before everything goes black and cold, dreamless and empty.
Before the world becomes mute, wordless, and therefore ceases to exist.
The heavens quake.
And as if in an enchanting dream, full of whiteness, she reaches out one hand against a transparent white film, and feels the film tremble before she pulls her hand back, resting, dreaming herself still in the world, nightmaring herself alive again.
60
Fire is everywhere.
It’s jumping from treetop to treetop, thundering as it tears everything in its path into burning fragments.
This summer is hot.
But the hell in the forest is even hotter. Slowly the fire has spread down towards Lake Hultsjon, and Janne and his colleagues have their backs to the lake, their hoses snaking through the vegetation, zigzagging through the still living soil down to the warm water of the lake, where generators are driving great pumps.
He slept on the floor of the fire engine last night, in the empty space where the hoses are usually kept, the night singing all around him, crackling and rumbling and stinking of smoke, of cremated animals and insects, of soil turned to ash.
The flames an unquiet wall some hundred metres away from them. Approaching faster and faster. Human beings against fire, fire against human beings.
He’s wet with sweat, feels like tearing off his clothes and fleeing the heat into the water of the lake.
The fire is the beast.
They stand firm, sticking their gushing knives right into its throat.
Afternoon meeting.
Karim Akbar clears his throat and looks around the meeting room with empty eyes, perhaps trying to find a dancing mote of dust in the air to focus on.
Malin has just outlined her suspicions about Vera Folkman, about the pools, about the false information about her company, a company that may not even exist. She’s explained that they haven’t been able to find her, that she’s ‘like the smoke from the forest fires, you can’t see it, but you know it’s there’.
‘We’ve got her flat under surveillance,’ Sven Sjoman says from his chair beside Zeke. The blinds are open, the playground behind them deserted, the nursery still closed for the summer. ‘Does anyone have any other ideas of how to get hold of her?’
‘We don’t even know if this Elisabeth is actually Vera Folkman,’ Karim says.
‘We’ll have to assume that she is,’ Malin says.
‘We’re keeping an eye out for white vans,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s what she drives. But there are loads of them in the city.’
‘And we’re checking to see if there are any registered companies with similar names,’ Malin says.
‘Any other ideas?’ Sven says once more. ‘We haven’t got enough to go into her flat, you know that, Malin. Even if the smell might suggest that she’s maltreating animals in there.’
Malin thinks: it’s starting to fit, Sven, the voices of this case are telling us that, aren’t they? And then the other maxim:
Waldemar Ekenberg and Per Sundsten are silent.
Silent as only police officers who’ve caught a scent of the truth in a meeting room can be.
‘We spoke to the last sex offender on the list this morning. Nothing,’ Per says.
‘As much of a dead-end as Suliman Hajif and Louise Svensson. And Slavenca Visnic, she’s been busy with her kiosks, although apparently they lost her this morning.’
‘And she drives a white van,’ Per says. ‘So in theory Slavenca Visnic could be this Elisabeth.’
‘We saw the interior of her van in the forest,’ Malin says. ‘She didn’t have anything in there that could be connected to pool maintenance. No chemicals, nothing. And the manager at Glyttinge would have recognised her from the kiosk outside.’
‘Check again, just to make sure,’ Sven says. ‘You take that, Sundsten.’
Then Waldemar’s voice, full of scepticism: ‘Could a woman really have done this? Dildo or not? Doesn’t this go against a woman’s nature?’
‘Prejudice,’ Malin says. ‘There’s no shortage of female thugs and sex offenders in the past, and most of them were the victims of abuse themselves, just like Vera Folkman.’
‘And Slavenca Visnic,’ Per says.
‘I think we should put the squeeze on Suliman Hajif again,’ Waldemar says, but no one has the energy even to comment on his suggestion, and Malin shuts out the others’ voices, thinking about what it must be like to be Vera Folkman, thinking about synchronicity, how the pools and all the other connections in the case could be coincidence. And maybe Vera Folkman isn’t even this Elisabeth?
People who are people who are people who are one and the same person.
A desire to dissolve, to be reborn as someone else.
A person as drifting smoke, above a charred landscape. Personified as one single feeling, one single characteristic.
Love and evil.
False company names.
The desire to be invisible.
Cold white hands.
But how?
‘Come on,’ Karim pleads. ‘No ideas about Vera Folkman?’
And where are you now? Malin thinks.
Where am I?
Why is it dark, and what’s this over my eyes? My head aches and I feel sick, but that isn’t the biggest problem, there’s something worse, but what? I’m breathing, Tove thinks, and this is a dream, and she remembers
