‘Not really.’
Kungsbro on another sign, Stjarnorp, Ljungsbro.
They turn off by a red-painted stable and a stone-built cowshed, no horses in sight. Only a few teenage girls in thermal clothes and moonboots carrying bales of hay between two outhouses.
They approach the houses along millionaires’ row.
When they reach the top of another hill they catch a glimpse of the Cloetta chimney.
‘You know,’ Zeke says, ‘I swear I can smell chocolate in the air today. From the factory.’
‘I’d better put the GPS on, so we can find where we’re going. The first name on the list.’
She didn’t want to let them in.
Pamela Karlsson, thirty-six years old, blonde pageboy cut, single, sales assistant at H&M. She lived in a council block just behind the hideous white Hemkop supermarket. Only four flats in the grey-painted wooden building. She spoke to them with the safety chain on, freezing in white vest and pants, evidently woken by them knocking at the door.
‘Do you have to come in? It’s such a mess.’
‘It’s cold out here in the stairwell,’ Malin said, thinking, A man has been found murdered, hanging in a tree, and she’s worried about a bit of mess. Oh well. At least she phoned.
‘I had a party yesterday.’
‘Another one,’ Zeke said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ Malin said. ‘It really doesn’t matter to us if it’s a bit messy. It won’t take long.’
‘Well, okay.’ The door closed, the chain rattled, then the door opened again.
‘Come in.’
A one-room flat, sofa-bed, a small table, a tiny kitchenette. Furniture from Ikea, lace curtains and a stripped, rustic wooden bench, probably inherited. Pizza boxes, beer cans, a box of white wine. On the windowsill an ashtray, full to overflowing.
She saw Malin looking at the ashtray.
‘I don’t usually let them smoke in here. But I couldn’t make them go outside yesterday.’
‘Them?’
‘My friends. We were doing some surfing last night as we drank, and that was when we saw him and the request for people to call in. I phoned straight away. Well, almost straight away.’
She sat down on the bed. She wasn’t fat, but her vest bulged as she sat.
Zeke sat on a chair. ‘What do you know about him?’
‘Not much, except that he lives round here. And his name. Apart from that, nothing. Is it him?’
‘Yes, we’re almost certain.’
‘God, it was all everyone was talking about last night.’
False memories, Malin thought. Recollections of other people are juicy conversation topics at parties.
‘So you don’t know anything about who he was really?’
‘Not much. I think he was on the sick. And everyone called him Ball-Bengt. I thought it was because he was so fat, but the
They left Pamela Karlsson with her mess and her headache and went on to an address on Ugglebovagen, an architect-designed villa on four levels, where every room seemed to have a view of the fields and, in the distance, Lake Roxen. A hollow-eyed insurance broker named Stig Unning opened the door after they knocked on the gilded lion’s head.
‘It was my son who made the call. You’ll have to talk to him, he’s down in the basement.’
The son, Fredrik, was playing a computer game. Thirteen maybe, thin, acne, dressed in jeans and an orange T-shirt that were too big for him. Dwarfs and elves were dying in droves on the screen.
‘You called us,’ Zeke said.
‘Yes,’ Fredrik Unning said without looking away from the game.
‘Why?’
‘Because I recognised the picture. I thought maybe there was some sort of reward. Is there?’
‘No, sorry,’ Malin said. ‘You don’t get paid for recognising a murder victim.’
A gnu was blown to pieces, a troll had its limbs torn off.
‘Should have called
Bang. Dead, dead, dead.
Fredrik Unning looked up at them.
‘Did you know him?’ Malin asked.
