Midwinter Sacrifice

Hardly.

More likely the hyenas on the Ostgota Correspondent who’ve got wind of Picture of the Year. Is it him? Malin has time to wonder as the top of the oak creaks disconcertingly and she turns and sees the body quivering, and thinks, It can’t be much fun hanging there.

Just hang on and we’ll get you down.

4

‘Malin, Malin, what have you got for me?’

The cold seems to eat up Daniel Hogfeldt’s words, muting the sound waves midway through the air. Even though he is wearing a padded jacket with a fur collar, there is something direct yet elegant about the way his body moves, his way of somehow owning and exercising power over the ground he’s walking on.

She meets his gaze, and she sees a glimpse of a mocking smile in it, a story beyond this moment, a secret history that he knows she doesn’t want anyone here to be aware of. And she sees the calculation: I know, you know, and I’m going to use that to get what I want, here and now. Extortion, Malin thinks. It won’t work on me. When are you going to play your trump card, Daniel? Now? Why not? It’s a good opportunity. But I won’t back down. We may be the same age, but we’re really not that similar.

‘Was he murdered, Malin? How did he get up in the tree? You have to give me something.’

Suddenly Daniel Hogfeldt is very close; his straight nose seems to be almost touching hers. ‘Malin?’

‘Not another step. And I’m saying nothing. I don’t have to do anything.’

And the mocking smile in his eyes gets even clearer, but Daniel decides to retreat.

The photographer’s camera clicks as she moves about just beyond the cordon round the tree and body.

‘Not so close, you idiot,’ Zeke shouts, and from the corner of her eye Malin sees the two uniformed officers rush off towards the photographer, who slowly lowers her camera and backs away nearer their car.

‘Malin, he must have been murdered if you need to keep the site clean, so you have to say something. It doesn’t look like a suicide, if you ask me.’

She shoves Daniel aside, feels her elbow touch his, wants to go back and repeat the gesture again, but instead she hears him calling after her, and thinks, How the hell could I? How could I be so stupid?

Then she turns back to face the journalist from the Correspondent: ‘Not one step on to that field. Back to your car, and stay there, or, even better, get out of here. It’s cold and there’s nothing else going on; you’ve got pictures of the body, haven’t you?’

Daniel smiles a practised boyish smile, which, unlike his words, cuts right through the cold.

‘But Malin, I’m only doing my job.’

‘All that’s going to happen now is that the forensics team are going to turn up and start doing their job, that’s all. We’ll take it from there.’

‘I’m done,’ the photographer calls, and Malin thinks that she can’t be more than eight or nine years older than Tove, and how her bare fingers must ache.

‘She’s freezing,’ Malin says.

‘I dare say she is,’ Daniel says. Then he pushes past Malin towards the car without looking back.

When the thought first occurred to me, that she was actually going to help me down, I grew tired of hanging here. Because that is my state. I drift, and I am here. I am in one place, and everywhere. But this tree is no place of rest; perhaps rest will never come. I don’t know yet.

So, all these people in their padded clothes.

Don’t they see how vain they are?

Do they imagine they can keep out the cold?

Can’t they get me down now?

I’m tired of hanging around like this, of this game you’re playing with me down there in the snow below me. It’s fun watching how your steps in the snow become tracks, tracks I can amuse myself by following, round, round, like restless memories hidden in inaccessible synapses.

‘I can’t stand that man,’ Zeke says as the Correspondent’s car disappears off in the cold. ‘He’s like a cocaine-fuelled leech with ADHD.’

‘And that’s why he’s so good at his job,’ Malin says.

Zeke’s American-inspired metaphors turn up when you least expect them, and Malin has often wondered where they come from. As far as she knows, Zeke has never shown any fondness for American popular culture, and he probably hardly knows who Philip Marlowe is.

‘If he’s so fucking clever, what’s he doing on a local paper?’

‘Maybe he’s happy here?’

‘Yeah, right.’

Then Malin looks over at the body. ‘What do you think it’s like, hanging up there?’

The words hung in the cold air.

‘It’s just meat now,’ Zeke says. ‘Meat can’t feel anything. Whoever that person was, whatever sort of human being he was, he isn’t here any longer.’