Midwinter Sacrifice

He mentioned Malin in his article about the man in the tree: Malin Fors of Linkoping Police did not want to give any . . .

Back and forth.

Just like most crime investigations he had covered.

The clatter of keyboards, the sound of people calling across the newsroom, and the smell of bitter coffee.

Several of his colleagues are so cynical it is affecting their productivity. But not him. It is a matter of maintaining respect for the people whose stories and mishaps are his daily bread.

A naked man in a tree. Hanged.

A blessing for anyone with newspaper pages to fill and sell.

But also something else.

The city will wake up. No question at all.

I’m good at what I do, because I know how to play the ‘journalistic game’, but also because I know how to keep my distance and how to play people.

Cynical?

Hamngatan was swept in winter outside.

Crumpled sheets in Malin Fors’s apartment. Only two blocks away.

Sven Sjoman’s wrinkled brow, his bulging gut, the denim shirt carelessly tucked into his brown wool trousers. His face as lifeless and grey as the jacket he is wearing, his thin hair the same colour as the whiteboard he is standing in front of. Sven prefers to keep meetings small, then to inform anyone else involved as and when. In his opinion, large meetings like they have in other police districts are never as productive.

He starts the way he usually does with a meeting of this sort, when they are about to start work on a big new case. The question who? needs to be answered, and it is his responsibility to set the question in motion, to give it a direction that will hopefully lead to the answer: him, her, them.

There is a deceptive emptiness, a trickling poison in the meeting room. Because all five of the officers assembled know that when that question is left hanging in the air, it can influence and change an entire community, a region, a country, a whole world.

The room is on the ground floor in one of the old military barracks in the A1-district that was rebuilt as the central police station about ten years ago when the regiment was disbanded: military out, law and order in.

Outside the barred windows is a ten-metre-wide, snow-covered lawn, then a playground, empty and desolate; the swings and climbing-frames are painted in primary colours but the white frost has turned them all into a collage of grey. Beyond the park, inside the nursery school’s large windows, Malin can see children playing, running to and fro, doing all the things that make up their world.

Tove.

It’s been a long time since you ran about like that.

Malin called her from the car, and Tove answered on her way out of the flat: ‘Of course I got up.’

‘Wrap up warm.’

‘What, do you think I’m stupid or something?’

Zeke: ‘Teenagers. They’re like horses on a racecourse. They never do what you want.’

Sometimes when they’ve been working on particularly violent cases, with pictures pinned up on the walls of the meeting room, they close the blinds to shield the children in the nursery, so that they don’t see the sort of thing they probably see on television every day, flickering past on an unguarded set, image added to image, as the child learns to trust its own eyes.

A slit throat. A burned corpse hanging from a lamppost, a swollen body in a flooded town.

And now Sjoman’s words, the same words as always, his gruff voice: ‘So, what do you think we’ve got here? Any ideas, anyone? There have been no new missing person reports, and if that was going to happen it would probably have happened by now. So what do we think?’ A question tossed into the room by a standing man to people sitting round an oblong table, his finger pressing the play button, words like music, like notes, hard and brittle between the four walls.

Johan Jakobsson speaks up, and it is obvious he has been waiting to hear his own voice, that he has been wanting to say something, anything, if only to put an end to his own tiredness.

‘It’s got ritual written all over it.’

‘We don’t even know for sure that he was murdered,’ Sven Sjoman says. ‘We can’t be sure until Karin Johannison is finished. But we can presume that he was murdered. That much is clear.’

You don’t know anything for certain, Malin. Until you know. Until then: the virtue of ignorance.

‘It looks like a ritual.’

‘We have to keep an open mind.’

‘We don’t know who he is,’ Zeke says. ‘That would be a good start, finding out who he is.’

‘Maybe someone will call in. The pictures are in the paper already,’ Johan says, and Borje Svard, who has been silent up to now, sighs.

‘Those pictures? You can’t see the face.’