the shade under the tree, the paper of the book under her fingers, but what sort of dream is this, what does it want with me? Markus, is that you, and she can feel how she’s breathing, recognises the smell of detergent and she tries to get up, but her legs are stuck.
She tries to push herself up with her arms, but they’re stuck, and Mum, Mum, Mum where are you, I can’t be dead already, is this my grave Mum? and Tove tries to scream but no sound comes out of her mouth.
Cloth in her mouth.
Why would I have cloth in my mouth if I were dead?
Or if I were dreaming?
Malin looks out across the office.
It’s just gone six o’clock.
Where has the afternoon gone?
Writing reports.
Looking through the register of companies to try to find any with names resembling Linkoping Water Technicians.
Nothing.
You are out.
Waiting for one of the patrols to call in with something positive.
But that never happened.
The search for Vera Folkman and the surveillance on her flat has led nowhere, the shadow remains a shadow. And Slavenca Visnic seems to have gone up in smoke, she isn’t at any of her kiosks, and the patrol that went up to the fires couldn’t find her either.
One piece of news, though. Andersson in Forensics rang. Facebook had finally got back to him. Confirming that Lovelygirl was Louise Svensson, they’d managed to trace her IP number.
She spoke to Janne over the phone.
He called her. Said that they’d had to run from the fire down by Hultsjon, that one of their generators had been lost to the flames, that a hunting cottage had burned down and that a few idiots came close to being cut off by the fire in their attempts to save the cottage.
The Murvall brothers’ cottage, the brothers in the fire. The Bengt Andersson case.
‘I’m so damn tired, Malin.’
‘Go home and sleep.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘They need me here. And I’m filled with this anxiety that I can’t shake off.’
‘Me too.’
Janne’s restlessness.
Hultsjon. That was where everything came to a head last winter in connection with another case. That was where evil caught up with Maria Murvall.
The same evil?
No.
But who knows?
When we get hold of Vera Folkman she’ll have to provide DNA samples that can be compared with those of Maria Murvall’s attacker. Slavenca Visnic? I’ve already asked Karin to take care of that.
The clock on the computer says 18.52.
She calls home, hoping Tove will answer.
But no.
Her mobile.
Five rings, then the answering service.
Anxiety. Hardly unexpected, Malin thinks as she quickly shuts down her computer and leaves the station.
61
When the room gets too cold and I hear the floorboards creaking out on the landing I try to think of summer instead of the monster.
The summer, like when Elisabeth and I are cycling along the canal, and the warm wind catches our thin fair hair and I see your white cotton dress pressed tight to your body, stroking your skin more and more and more with each pedal, and you’re my big sister, I try to keep up with you but for you there’s no contest. You stop and wait for me. The light falls through the oak leaves of the ancient trees along the canal and you’re standing beside your red bicycle smiling at me.
Was I cycling too fast? I didn’t mean to. You go first, I’ll be right behind you, you don’t have to keep looking back, I’ll be there, making sure nothing bad happens.
I’m twelve, you’re fourteen.
You are the whole of my summertime world and we go skinny-dipping together, there’s no embarrassment between us, and if we cycle far enough along the path that runs along the shore of Lake Vattern we can get to places where we can be on our own. Where the summer can drive the pain from our bodies.
Where he can’t reach us.
We share the secrets of the darkness, you and I, sister.
He comes just as often to each of us, and I want to scream and you want to scream, but he puts his long white fingers on our lips, then fingers his way down and we let it happen, because what else can we do?
It is his house and we are stuck in his life.
And it hurts so much and I want to scream, but instead I cry and I hear you cry in the hours when light is about to return, when the pink-painted panelling in our room takes shape again and our whole bodies ache.
A spider is weaving its web across the window in the moonlight, the spider’s legs are white and outside in the garden his rabbits are scratching in their cages.
We can never wash ourselves thoroughly enough.
Soap isn’t enough. We find washing-up liquid under the sink in the kitchen and in the garage we find blue bottles containing a milky liquid that smells like his breath, and the liquid stings inside us, gives us more sores, but somehow it feels good to spoil what he wants to take from us. As if there can never be enough pain, and he is so strong, so hard and his fingers so cold, his whole being is determination.
You choose not to see, Mum, why won’t you see anything? Because surely you must see?
He’s our dad.
We’re his children.
And he comes in the night and there is no way out except deeper in.
How wonderful the summer is.
The wind as we speed along the bank of the canal. The way we pretend it isn’t painful to sit on the saddle. The way we still have each other and how our love might yet conquer his fingers, all of him.
And then you see, Mum.
You choose to see, and you take us to Grandma, to her two-room flat in Borensberg, and you argue and fight and I’m scared that he’s going to come after us, but he doesn’t come and it takes a long time before I realise that he will always be with us anyway.
We huddle in the two-room flat we move into in Klockrike.
I’m thirteen when we go to the doctor, speechless meetings where no one asks for an explanation, cold steel implements inside me, and I see the distance and the sympathy, but also the fear and derision in their eyes.
It’s me they’re looking at.
The reincarnation of the monster must be driven out.
And I am living proof of how painful it is to live, a pain that few want or dare to look in the eye.
