‘We don’t yet know for certain that he was murdered.’
Microphones from TV4 in the foreground. A question from the mass of journalists; she recognises Daniel Hogfeldt’s voice.
‘Why have you left the body hanging there?’
Daniel. What are you up to now?
Karim answers confidently. ‘For technical reasons concerned with the investigation. As yet we don’t know anything. We’re keeping an entirely open mind.’
‘Mum, have you seen my red polo-neck?’ Tove’s voice from her own room now.
‘Have you looked in the drawer?’
A few short seconds, then a triumphant voice. ‘Found it!’
Good, Malin thinks, then ponders what keeping an open mind means and is likely to mean: going round to every farm and cottage within a three-kilometre radius from the tree, knocking on the doors of farmers, commuters and workshy folk on sick leave.
‘Really? No, I haven’t noticed anything.’
‘I’m always asleep at that time of day.’
‘In this sort of cold I stay indoors.’
‘I keep myself to myself, it’s better that way.’
The same response for Johan and Borje as for her and Zeke: no one knows anything, no one has seen anything. It’s as if the hundred-and-fifty-kilo body flew up into the noose in the tree, parking itself on the end of the rope in anticipation of attention.
Back to the studio.
‘Naturally we’ll be following developments in Linkoping.’ Pause. ‘In London . . .’
Then Tove is standing in the door to the living room.
‘I read about that on the net,’ she says. ‘Are you in charge of it?’
But Malin can’t answer her daughter’s question. Instead she just gawps when she sees her, the child who was lying in bed this morning; the little girl who went into the bathroom just quarter of an hour ago is transformed. She is wearing make-up and has tied up her hair, and something has happened, a hint of a woman has superimposed itself over her daughter’s appearance.
‘Mum? Mum, hello?’
‘You look lovely.’
‘Thanks, I’m going to the cinema.’
‘I’m working on the case.’
‘It’s a good thing I’m going to Dad’s tomorrow, so you can work late.’
‘Tove. Please. Don’t say that.’
‘I’m off now. I’ll be home by eleven. The last screening ends about then, but we’re having coffee first.’
‘Who are you going with?’
‘Anna.’
‘If I said I didn’t believe you, what would you say?’
Tove shrugs. ‘We’re going to see the new Tom Cruise film,’ then Tove gives the name of a film Malin has never heard of. Tove is as liberal in her choice of film as she is selective in her taste in books.
‘I haven’t heard of that one.’
‘Oh Mum, you don’t know anything about stuff like this.’
Tove turns and disappears from Malin’s sight, but Malin can hear her rummaging in the hall. She calls, ‘Do you need any money?’
‘No.’
And Malin wants to follow her, doesn’t believe any of this, but knows that she shouldn’t, can’t, won’t. Unless she will?
‘Bye!’
Anxiety.
Johan Jakobsson, Borje Svard, Zeke: all parents are familiar with it, that anxiety.
It’s cold out.
‘Bye, Tove.’
And the flat closes around Malin.
She turns off the television with the remote.
Leans back on the sofa and takes a sip of her tequila, the one she poured herself after they’d eaten.
She and Zeke had been out to Borensberg and spoken to Liedbergh’s lover. The woman was around forty,
