On the way back to the car Malin looks over at the edge of the dark forest.
Karl Murvall didn’t want to talk about his stepfather, didn’t want to talk about what it was like growing up in Blasvadret, didn’t want to say anything about his relationship with his brothers, his sister. ‘Not another word. You’ve got what you wanted. What do you know about what it’s like being me? If there’s nothing else you want to know, duty calls.’
‘But Maria?’
‘What about Maria?’
‘Was she as kind to you as she was to Ball-Bengt? Kinder than Elias, Adam and Jakob? We understand that she was kind to Bengt. Did she know that you were his half-brother?’
Silence.
Karl Murvall’s grey cheeks, little twitches at the corners of his mouth.
The boom across the entrance opens and they walk out.
Farewell, prison, Malin thinks.
Duty.
How miserable it can make a place.
Karl Murvall is also Rebecka Stenlundh’s half-brother, she his half-sister.
But that isn’t my duty, Malin thinks. They’ll have to discover that for themselves, if they don’t already know. Rebecka Stenlundh would probably rather be left in peace.
58
‘Do you think Maria Murvall knew that Bengt Andersson and her half-brother had the same father? That that was why she took him on?’ Zeke’s voice is muffled by the food they are eating.
Malin takes a bite of her chorizo.
The fast-food joint at the Valla roundabout. Best sausage in the city.
The car is idling with the heater on, and behind them sit the yellow-brick council blocks and student accommodation of Ryd, quiet, as if aware of their position on the housing hierarchy; here live only people who don’t have enough dosh, short-term, or for life, unless they win the lottery.
In the other direction is the motorway, and on the far side of some thin clumps of trees the buildings of the university. How scornful they must seem to a lot of the people living in Ryd, Malin thinks. There they sit every day like images of unattainable dreams, missed opportunities, bad choices, limitations. The architecture of bitterness, perhaps.
But not for everyone. Far from everyone.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘I don’t know,’ Malin replies. ‘Maybe she felt there was a connection. Instinctively. Or else she knew.’
‘Female intuition?’ Zeke is chuckling.
‘Well, we can’t exactly ask her,’ Malin says.
Play with a scorpion and it will sting you. Stick your hand in an earth and the badger will bite you. Tease a rattlesnake and it will bite. The same with darkness: force darkness into a corner and it will attack.
But the truth.
Which is it?
She whispers the word to herself as she and Zeke cross the yard to Rakel Murvall’s house. Behind them the sun is sinking towards the horizon; the transition between light and dark is swift and cold.
They knock.
The mother has doubtless seen them coming, thinking, Not again.
But she opens.
‘You two?’
‘We’d like to come in,’ Zeke says.
‘Surely you’ve been here quite enough already.’
Rakel Murvall moves her thin body, backs up and stops in the hall with her arms by her sides, yet still oddly dismissive. Thus far, but no further.
‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ Malin says. ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle. He was the father of your son Karl.’
Her eyes turn black, keener. ‘Where have you heard that?’
‘There are tests,’ Malin says. ‘We know.’
‘That makes Karl the half-brother of the murder victim,’ Zeke says.
‘What do you want to know? That I invented the entire story of that sodomite sailor when his ship sank? That I gave myself to Cornerhouse-Kalle in the park one night? I wasn’t the only one who did that.’
Rakel Murvall looks at Zeke with calm derision in her eyes, then she turns round. Goes into the living room and
