just a bit shaken up still.’
‘It’s a bit bloody macabre, having a hundred-and-fifty-kilo frozen-solid corpse land on you,’ Johan Jakobsson said.
Then waiting for someone to say what they all knew. That they had nothing to go on. Waiting for Skoglund the funeral director to finish his work, get the picture taken and sent out.
Borje: ‘What was it I said? That no one would recognise him from those first pictures.’
Waiting for waiting itself, all energy sucked out of tired police officers who know that the case is urgent but who can do little but throw up their hands and say, ‘We’ll see!’ When every citizen, every journalist, wants to hear the police recount what happened, and who did it.
Waiting for Karim Akbar, who was late as well, if only late answering the phone out in his villa in Lambohov. Waiting for his son’s stereo to be turned down in the background, then waiting for Karim’s voice to stop resounding from the speakerphone.
‘This isn’t good enough, you know that perfectly well. Sven, you’ll have to arrange another press conference tomorrow where you let them know what we’ve got so far. That’ll calm them down.’
And you get another chance to show off, Malin thinks. Then: but you do stand there and soak up the questions, the aggression, and make sure we can work in peace and quiet. And you do stand for something, Karim. You understand the power of the group when everyone has a well-defined role.
Sven’s tired words after Karim had hung up. ‘If only we were like Stockholm. With our own press officer.’
‘You’re the one who’s been on the media management course,’ Zeke said. ‘Couldn’t you do it?’
Laughter. Release. Sven: ‘I’m close to getting my pension and you want to throw me to the hyenas, Zeke? Thanks a lot.’
The red light turns green, the Volvo hesitates then rolls off along Drottninggatan into the city.
‘How’s Mum doing, Dad? The plants are fine, I promise.’
‘She’s having a nap. It’s twenty-five degrees and glorious sunshine down here. How is it up there?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Well I’m not going to tell you, Dad.’
‘Well, it’s sunny here in Tenerife, anyway. How’s Tove?’
‘She’s with Jan-Erik.’
‘Malin, I’m going to go now, otherwise it’ll get expensive. Don’t forget the plants.’
The plants, Malin thinks as she pulls up outside the ochre-coloured building on Elsa Brannstroms gata where her parents have their four-room apartment. The plants must never be kept waiting.
Malin moves through her parents’ apartment, a ghost in her own past. The furniture she grew up with.
Am I really so old?
The smells, the colours, the shapes can all get me going, make me remember things that make me remember other things.
Four rooms: one for best, a dining room, a living room and a bedroom. Nowhere for their grandchild to stay the night. They took out the contract on the apartment when they sold the villa in Sturefors thirteen years ago. In those days the housing market in Linkoping was very different. If your affairs were in order and you could afford a decent rent, you had options. Today there’s nothing, only shady deals can get you a contract. Or improbably good contacts.
Malin looks out of the sitting-room window.
From the third floor there is a good view of Infection Park, named after the clinic that was once housed in the barracks that have now been turned into housing.
The sofa she was never allowed to sit on.
The brown leather shines like new to this day. The table, lovely then, overblown now. The shelves full of books from Reader’s Digest. Maya Angelou, Lars Jarlestad, Lars Widding, Anne Tyler.
The dining table and chairs. Having friends over, children who had to sit and eat in the kitchen. Nothing odd about that. Everyone did the same, and children don’t like sitting round the table anyway.
Dad, the welder, promoted to team-leader, then part-owner of a roofing company. Mum a secretary at the county administrative board.
The smell of people getting old. Even if Malin opened the window and aired the place the smell wouldn’t go. Maybe, she thinks, the cold might make the apartment scentless at best.
The plants are drooping. But none of them is actually dead. She won’t let it go that far. She looks at the framed pictures on the bureau, none of her or Tove, just her parents in different settings: a beach, a city, a mountain, a jungle. ‘Can you water the plants?’
Of course I can water them.
‘You can come down whenever you like.’
And how do we afford that?
She sits down on the armchair in the hall and the memory of the silent springs is in her body: she is five years old again, kicking her sandalled feet; there is water a little way away and behind her she can hear Mum and Dad’s voices, not shouting at each other exactly, but in their tone of voice there is a chasm, and the gap between their voices conceals all that is painful, all that the five-year-old in the chair near the water feels but does not yet have a
