currants in his garden at home?
She looks past him.
Then into his eyes.
She smiles.
Light in her eyes.
And she falls into his arms.
The twelve-kilo dumbbell doesn’t want to leave the floor no matter how hard Malin tries to lift it.
Damn, that’s heavy, and I ought to manage at least ten reps.
Johan Jakobsson beside her, came down just after her and now he is driving her on, as if he wants them to drive out the bad news together.
Johan had managed to get into the last folder in Rickard Skoglof’s hard drive last night at home, once the children had gone to bed. The only thing in the folder had been more pictures, of Rickard Skoglof himself and Valkyria Karlsson in various sexual positions on a large animal skin, their bodies painted with patterns resembling tribal tattoos.
‘Come on, Malin!’
She raises the dumbbell, pushes it upwards.
‘Come on, damn it!’
But it won’t work. She lets the weight fall to the floor.
A dull rattle.
‘I’m going to do a bit of running,’ she tells Johan.
The sweat is pouring from her brow. The alcohol from dinner last night is being forced out, step by step, on the treadmill.
Malin looks at herself in the mirror as she runs, the sweat dripping down her brow; how pale she is even if the exercise is making her cheeks red. Her face. The face of a thirty-three-year-old. Lips that look plumper than usual because of the workout.
In recent years her face seems to have found itself, as if the skin has settled into its proper place over her cheekbones at last. The girlish quality she used to have has gone for good, no trace of it left after the exertion of the past few weeks. She looks at the clock on the wall: 9.24.
Johan has just gone.
Time for her to shower and then head off to Viveka Crafoord.
The internal phone rings.
Malin sprints across the room and picks up the receiver.
Zeke on the line. Agitated.
‘We’ve just had a call from A&E. A Johnny Axelsson has brought in a woman he found naked and badly beaten up out on the plain.’
‘I’m coming.’
‘She’s in a bad way, but according to the doctor I spoke to she evidently whispered your name, Malin.’
‘What did you say?’
‘The woman whispered your name, Malin.’
69
Viveka Crafoord will have to wait.
Everyone else will have to wait.
Apart from three.
Bengt Andersson.
Maria Murvall.
And now this other woman, found in exactly the same state.
The victims run out of the black forests, out across the white fields. Where’s the source of the violence?
Zeke is driving at seventy kilometres an hour; forty too fast. The stereo is silent. Nothing but the abrupt, stressed sounds of the engine. They’ve had to take a detour, there are roadworks; a frozen pipe must have burst.
Djurgardsgatan, the trees of the Horticultural Society, grey and straggly, but still somehow sparkling. Lasarettsgatan and the pink-brick blocks of flats put up in the eighties.
Postmodernism.
Malin read the article about the architect in the
They swing up towards the hospital, the yellow facade of the main building faded by the sun, but the council’s
