‘. . . the fact that I got a bit cross last time we met.’
‘I would have done as well,’ Markus says with a smile.
Tove comes out of the kitchen.
‘Mum’s made spaghetti with home-made pesto. Do you like garlic?’
‘Last summer we rented a house in Provence. There was fresh garlic growing in the garden.’
‘We mostly go on day trips in the summer,’ Malin says, then quickly: ‘Shall we sit down straight away? Or would you rather have something to drink first? A Coke, perhaps?’
‘I’m quite hungry,’ Markus says. ‘I’d be happy to eat now.’
Malin watches him shovelling it in. He’s trying to resist, to behave the way his parents must have tried to tell him, but Malin can see how he keeps losing the battle with teenage hunger.
‘I think I might have overdone the parmesan . . .’
‘This is great,’ Markus says. ‘Really good.’
Tove clears her throat. ‘Mum. I’ve been thinking about what Grandad said. It sounds great. Really good. But couldn’t Markus come too? We’ve spoken to his parents and they can get him a ticket.’
Hang on now. What’s this?
Then she sees herself and Janne before her. She’s fourteen, him sixteen. They’re lying on a bed in an unidentified room, fingers on the buttons of each other’s clothes. How shall we ever manage to be apart from each other for more than a couple of hours? The same feeling in Tove’s eyes now.
Expectant, but with a first suspicion that time is finite.
‘Good idea,’ Malin says. ‘They’ve got two extra bedrooms.’
Then she smiles. A teenage couple in love. With her mum and dad. On Tenerife.
‘It’s fine with me,’ she says. ‘But we’ll have to ask Grandad.’
Then Markus says, ‘Mum and Dad would like you to come to dinner some time soon.’
Help.
No. No.
Doctors’ coats and a stuck-up woman around a table. Practised handshakes. Apologies.
‘How lovely,’ Malin says. ‘Tell your parents that I’d love to come.’
When Markus has gone Malin and Tove are sitting at the kitchen table. Their bodies become black silhouettes reflected in the window facing the church.
‘Isn’t he sweet?’
‘He’s very well behaved.’
‘But not too much.’
‘No, Tove, not too much. But enough for you to watch out for him. The well-behaved ones are always the worst when it comes down to it.’
‘What do you mean, Mum?’
‘Nothing, I’m just rambling, Tove. He’s fine.’
‘I’ll call Grandad tomorrow.’
An internal alarm clock rings and Malin is awake, wide awake, even though the clock on the bedside table says it’s 2.34 and her whole body is screaming for rest.
Malin twists and turns in bed, trying to get back to sleep, and she manages to shut out all thoughts of the investigation, of Tove, Janne and everyone else, but sleep still won’t come.
Have to sleep, have to sleep.
The mantra makes her more awake each time she thinks it, and in the end she gets up, goes out into the kitchen and drinks some milk directly from the carton, thinking how cross she used to get when Janne did that, how she thought it was disgusting and utterly uncivilised; and in another house, outside Linkoping, Janne is lying awake and wondering if he’s ever going to stop dreaming and then, to get rid of his memories of the jungle and the mountain roads, he conjures up Malin’s and Tove’s faces in his mind’s eye and becomes calm and happy and sad, and thinks that only the people you really love can arouse such contradictory feelings inside you, and he pretends that his daughter is lying there, thinks about how she’s growing away from them, that he never wants to let her go; and in the flat in the city Malin is standing beside Tove’s bed and wondering if things could ever have been different or if everything was, is, already predetermined somehow.
She wants to stroke Tove’s hair.
But maybe that would wake her up? Don’t want to wake you, Tove, but I do want to hold you tight.
The early morning meeting was postponed yesterday, ‘No point if you aren’t here, Fors,’ as Sven Sjoman said over the phone.
The others’ breath is hanging heavy in the meeting room and they all seem more alert than her.
Maybe because they’ve had the results from the forensics lab?
The rubber bullets in Bengt Andersson’s flat were fired from the small-bore rifle found in Niklas Nyren’s flat, and Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s fingerprints were found on the weapon.
