Then the body starts to make a noise; a scream of pain, despair and fear, maybe also confusion, cuts through the walls of the residential area.
Johan runs up to Borje.
‘He stopped and took aim at me,’ Borje pants through the screaming. Then he points at the weapon in the snow. ‘A fucking plastic replica. The sort of thing you can buy from a thousand websites. But how the hell was I supposed to see that?’
Borje crouches down next to the boy, says, ‘Take it easy now. It’ll get sorted.’
But the boy carries on screaming, holding his leg.
‘We have to get an ambulance out here,’ Johan says.
Malin looks out over the empty playground.
Thinks: What’s going on round here? Why is all this happening now? She doesn’t know why, but maybe it’s because a breaking point has been reached, and something is collapsing right now, in a torrent of violence and confusion.
Young people.
Drifts of confused young people.
And it doesn’t seem to fit.
‘They’ve operated on him. We’ll talk to him later.’ Sven Sjoman’s weary voice. ‘His dad confirms that it was their dog, that he bought it for the boy.’
‘What else did the father have to say?’ Zeke asks.
‘That the boy wasn’t at home last night, that he’s spent the last few years living in a world of computer games, Internet, death metal and, as his father put it, “a general interest in the occult”.’
‘Poor sod,’ Zeke says, and Malin can see that he seems to be reflecting. Maybe he’s getting a bit of sensible perspective and thinking that his anxieties before Martin’s matches are ridiculous, that he knows his worries are silly and that he really ought to get over them, once and for all. There are ten thousand dads in Linkoping who’d love to have a son like Martin. And when’s the next home match?
Presumably Zeke has no idea.
He probably gets a sore backside at the very thought of the Cloetta Centre.
‘The father’s a sales executive for Saab,’ Sven goes on. ‘Spends three hundred days travelling each year. Places like Pakistan and South Africa.’
‘Any friends?’ Malin asks.
‘None that the father could name.’
‘Borje?’ Johan Jakobsson, anxiety in his voice.
‘You know how it is. Taken off active duties until the incident has been investigated.’
‘It’s open and shut,’ Malin says. ‘He fired in self-defence. Those replicas look exactly like the real thing.’
‘I know,’ Sven says. ‘But when was anything that simple, Fors?’
Room ten of ward five in Linkoping University Hospital is dark, apart from the light cast by the reading lamp above the bed.
Sivert Norling is sitting in a green armchair in the gloom by the window. He is a tall, gangly man, and even in the dim light Malin can see that his blue eyes are hard. His hair is cropped and his legs stick out across the floor. Beside him sits his wife, Birgitta. She’s blonde, dressed in jeans and a red blouse that makes her face, already red from crying, look even more swollen.
In the bed lies the boy, Andreas Norling.
He seems vaguely familiar to Malin, but she can’t place him.
The boy’s leg is in traction, and his eyes are cloudy with painkillers and narcotics, but according to the doctors he can manage some questions.
Zeke and Malin are standing beside his bed, and a uniformed officer is sitting on guard outside the door.
The boy refused to say hello when they came in, and now he has defiantly turned his head away from them, his black hair looks like angry streaks of ink across the white pillow.
‘You’ve got something to tell us,’ Malin says.
The boy lies there silent.
‘We’re investigating a murder. We’re not saying you did it, but we have to know what happened out at that tree last night.’
‘I haven’t been near any tree.’
The boy’s father gets up, shouts, ‘Now you just have the common damn decency to tell them what you know. This is serious. It’s not some bloody game.’
‘He’s right,’ Malin says calmly. ‘You’re in a whole lot of trouble, but if you talk to us perhaps things will get a bit easier for you.’
Then the boy looks at Malin. She tries to calm him with her eyes, persuade him that everything will all be all right, and maybe he believes her, maybe he decides that none of it matters.
He starts to talk.
