Elias breathes deeply, feeling the determination of the vehicle’s motion, as if it had been on its way to this very destination long before it was even made.
Elias turns round.
Looks down into the baggage compartment.
It holds a stained wooden box, and in the box three grenades from a break-in at a weapons store, freshly unearthed from their hiding-place under an outhouse floor; a hiding-place the police missed during their raid the other week.
‘Bloody lucky the cops didn’t find the grenades,’ Jakob said when Mother explained her plan to them back in the house.
‘You’re right there, Jakob,’ Mother said. ‘Bloody lucky.’
Malin and Zeke are wandering the plain, searching for another isolated tree.
But the trees they find show no signs of struggle. They are just lonely, windswept, frost-damaged trees.
Zeke is at the wheel as they head towards Klockrike, along a scarcely ploughed road by the edge of an apparently endless field, when Malin’s mobile rings.
Karin Johannison’s number on the display.
‘Malin here.’
‘Negative, Fors,’ Karin says. ‘Karl Murvall didn’t rape Maria Murvall.’
‘No similarities at all?’
‘He didn’t do it, that much is certain.’
‘Thanks, Karin.’
‘Was it that important, Malin? Did you really think it was him?’
‘I don’t know what I thought. But I do now. Thanks again.’ Malin ends the call.
‘He didn’t rape Maria Murvall,’ she says to Zeke, who receives the information without taking his eyes from the road.
‘So that case still isn’t solved,’ Zeke says, his voice gruff, a statement that sets Malin thinking.
The brothers walking towards Rakel’s house just after she and Zeke had left.
Brothers who don’t know that Karl didn’t rape Maria.
Who listen to their mother. Obey her.
A mother with secrets to keep.
And only one way of keeping them.
Zeke stops the car at yet another tree.
Roots, Malin thinks. Blood that has to be eradicated. Actions that must be avenged. That’s what we do.
And so he must be eradicated. Rakel doesn’t know we got hold of Karl’s DNA, that everything is going to come out.
Or else she knows deep down, but is suppressing the knowledge, grasping at one last imaginary straw.
‘I know why she let us in earlier,’ Malin yells, just as Zeke is opening the driver’s door. ‘Get us to the cabin, as fast as you can.’
77
The houses of Vreta Kloster line the road.
A sense of wellbeing shelters behind the facades, close but still far away.
After this journey she doesn’t want to come this way again for a thousand years.
They drive across the bridge down by Kungsbro and swing up towards Olstorp, past the Montessori school in Bjorko where the blue- and pink-painted buildings, with their anthroposophically angular architecture, look just as browbeaten by the cold as every other building.
Hope they raise good people in there.
Janne had once talked of Tove going to a Montessori school but Malin refused, had heard that children who go to school in protected environments like that could rarely deal with the competition outside the security of the school walls.
Cutting out dolls.
Making their own books.
Learning that the world is full of love.
How much love is there up in the forest? How much dammed-up hate?
The car slides along the slippery road surface as Zeke hits the accelerator.
‘Just drive, Zeke. It’s urgent. I promise you, he’s out there somewhere.’
