Karin Johannison’s office at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science has no windows, apart from a glass partition on to the corridor. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling with simple bookcases, and on the desk are stacks of files. The yellow linoleum floor is covered with a thick, red, high-quality carpet that Malin knows Karin has brought in herself. The carpet makes the whole room noble and pleasant, in spite of all the mess.
Karin is sitting behind the desk, as impossibly fresh as ever.
She invites Malin to sit down, and she settles on to the small stool by the door.
‘I’ve had the results from Birmingham,’ Karin says. ‘And I’ve compared the results with Bengt Andersson’s profile. They don’t match. It wasn’t him who raped his Maria Murvall in the forest.’
‘Was it a man or a woman?’
‘We can’t tell. But we can tell that it wasn’t him. Did you think it was?’
Malin shakes her head. ‘No, but now we know.’
‘Now we know,’ Karin says. ‘And the Murvall brothers can be told. Do you think one of them killed Bengt Andersson? And would maybe want to confess if they found out they got it wrong?’
Malin smiles.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘You’re good at chemistry, Karin,’ Malin says. ‘But you’re not quite so good at people.’
The two women sit in silence.
‘Why couldn’t you have told me this over the phone?’ Malin asks.
‘I just wanted to tell you in person,’ Karin replies. ‘It seemed better somehow.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re so shut off sometimes, Malin, tense. And we keep bumping into each other in the course of our work. It’s no bad thing to meet like this, in a calmer setting occasionally. Don’t you think?’
As she is walking out of the lab, Malin’s mobile rings.
Malin talks as she crosses the car park, past a garage with its doors closed, towards the parking spaces over by the bushes where her Volvo is parked next to Karin’s grey, shiny Lexus.
Tove.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Are you at school?’
‘On a break between maths and English. Mum, you remember that Markus’s parents want to have you over for dinner?’
‘I remember.’
‘Can you do tonight? They’d like to do it this evening.’
Smart doctors.
The same evening.
Don’t they know that other people have busy lives?
‘Okay, Tove. I can manage that. But not before seven o’clock. Tell Markus I’m looking forward to it.’
They hang up.
As Malin opens the car door she thinks, What happens when you lie to your children? When you do your children harm? Does a star go out in the sky?
62
‘Are there stones left unturned?’ Zeke asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘I can’t see the whole thing properly right now. All the pieces, they don’t seem to fit together.’
The clock on the brick wall is slowly ticking towards twelve.
The office at the station is almost deserted. Zeke is sitting behind his desk, Malin on a chair next to it.
Desperate? Us?
Not desperate, but fumbling.
When Malin got back from the forensics lab they had an endless meeting where they went through the state of the investigation.
First the bad news.
The disappointment in Johan Jakobsson’s voice from his seat along one side of the table: ‘The penultimate folder on Rickard Skoglof’s computer only contained a load of average porn,
