‘Maria Murvall’s clothes. Or the remains of them.’
Margaretha Svensson is tired when she opens the door of her flat. There is a smell of coffee from the kitchen and she doesn’t seem surprised to see Malin and Zeke again, just gestures to them to come in and sit down at the kitchen table.
Is Niklas Nyren here? Malin thinks, but if he was he would probably be sitting at the table or in the living room already. He would have been visible by now.
‘Would you like coffee?’
Malin and Zeke stop in the hall once they’ve shut the door behind them.
‘No thanks,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got a couple of quick questions.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Do you know what your son was doing yesterday evening and last night?’
‘Yes, he was at home. He and I had dinner with Niklas, then we all watched television together.’
‘And he didn’t go out at all?’
‘No, I know that for certain. He’s asleep upstairs at the moment. You can wake him and ask him.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Zeke says. ‘Is Niklas here now?’
‘He’s gone home. Went late last night.’
‘I’ve asked him to call me, I left messages.’
‘He told me. But he’s been so busy with work.’
A murder investigation, Malin thinks. A fucking murder investigation and people can’t even be bothered to call back. And they complain that the police are slow? Sometimes Malin wishes that people understood that the police are only the last link in a network covering the whole of society, where everyone, each and every one of us, has to do their bit to hold things together.
But everyone relies on everyone else doing their bit. And do nothing themselves.
SEP, as it’s called in
‘What do you think?’ Zeke asks as they head back to the car.
‘She’s telling the truth. He was at home last night. And Jimmy Kalmvik would hardly have done it on his own. Next stop the farmer.’
The group of buildings on a field a few kilometres outside Klockrike is covered in snow and cold, and the surrounding clusters of birches and a lovely dry-stone wall provide only slight protection for the garden in front of the newly built farmhouse.
The house is constructed of sandstone, with green shutters over the windows. In front of the porch, painted Mediterranean blue, stands a Range Rover.
It ought to smell of lavender, thyme and rosemary, but instead it smells of ice. At the end of the avenue leading to the house is a gate where someone has put up a sign saying: ‘Finca de Hambergo’.
The green-painted door of the house opens and a man in his forties with bleached hair puts his head out.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly. Come in.’
The ground floor of the house is a single open room, hall, kitchen and living room in one. When Malin sees the stone walls, the patterned tiles, the open kitchen cupboards, terracotta floor and earth colours, she feels transported to Tuscany or Majorca. Or Provence, maybe?
She’s only been to Majorca, and the buildings didn’t look like this. The flats where she and Tove were staying looked more like an overblown version of the council blocks in Skaggetorp. But nonetheless, she knows from interior design magazines that this is what the dream of the south looks like for a lot of people.
Dennis Hamberg notices them staring.
‘We wanted it to look like a mixture of an Andalusian
‘Where are your family now?’
‘In town, shopping.’
And you’ve got the urge to talk to someone, way out here on a desolate winter plain, Malin thinks.
‘And the break-in to the barn?’
‘Of course. Follow me.’
Dennis Hamberg pulls on a black Canadian Goose parka and leads them across the yard to a red-painted barn, and points to the marks left by a crowbar in the door frame.
‘This is where they got in.’
‘More than one?’
‘Yes, there are loads of footprints inside.’
‘Okay, we’ll have to try not to stand on them,’ Zeke says.
