stumbles towards the kitchen on tired, stiff legs, freshly showered and dressed.
In spite of the darkness she can read the headline, which, in its urgent, tabloid manner, bears Daniel Hogfeldt’s unmistakable signature: POLICE SUSPECT RITUAL KILLING.
You made the front page, Daniel. Congratulations.
An archive picture of a serious Karim Akbar, a statement given over the phone late yesterday evening:
Secret networks? The ?sir belief-system?
Daniel has interviewed Professor Soderkvist, who claims to have been questioned by the police for information, and that he had explained ritual killings to them during the day.
Then a screenshot of a website about the ?sir faith, and a passport photograph of a Rickard Skoglof from Maspelosa, who is identified as a central character in such circles.
A fact box about midwinter sacrifices.
Nothing else.
Malin folds the paper and puts it on the kitchen table, and makes a cup of coffee.
Her body. Muscles and sinews, bones and joints. Everything aches.
Then the sound of a car-horn down in the street.
Zeke. Are you here already?
The Ikea clock on the wall says quarter to seven.
I’m the one who’s late.
What exactly is this winter doing to me?
Zeke at the wheel of the green Volvo. Tired shoulders, limp hands. German choral music in a minor key fills the car. The pair of them are equally tired. The E4 cuts through white-clad fields and the frozen landscape of the plain.
Mobilia outside Mantorp, a retail park, Tove’s favourite outing, Malin’s nightmare. Mjolby, Granna, Lake Vattern as a strip of white hope in front of a horizon where nuances of grey meet other nuances of grey, forming a confusion of cold and darkness, an eternal lack of light.
Zeke’s voice comes as a liberation, loud enough to drown out the music.
‘What do you think about this Old Norse stuff?’
‘Karim seemed fairly positive about it.’
‘Mr Akbar. What do factory-farmed police chiefs like him know about anything?’
‘Zeke. He’s not that bad.’
‘No, I suppose not. Mr Akbar presumably has to give the impression that we’re making progress. And the holes in the window, have you had any more thoughts about them now you’ve had time to sleep on it?’
‘No idea. Maybe they’ll lead to something. But what, I don’t know.’ Malin thinks that this is just like every big investigation, that obvious connections are hidden somewhere close to them, just out of reach, mocking them.
‘When was Karin going to have her analysis of the glass finished?’
‘Today or tomorrow.’
‘Just one thing,’ Zeke goes on. ‘The more I think about Ball-Bengt up there in the tree, the more it all feels like some sort of pagan invocation.’
‘I’ve been feeling the same,’ Malin says. ‘Well, it remains to be seen if there are any links to Valhalla or anything else.’
Malin rings the doorbell of Rebecka Stenlundh’s flat. She lives on the second floor of a yellow-brick block in the hills just south of Jonkoping.
The view from the flat must be wonderful, and in the summer the area must be lush with the green of all the birch trees. Even the garages a little way down towards the road look attractive, with orange-painted doors, surrounded by well-maintained hedges.
The place where Rebecka Stenlundh lives is neither one thing nor the other. Not lovely, but nice enough, a
Not a dumping-ground for social service cases and immigrants. The sort of place where people live out their lives unobserved, largely unnoticed and unwanted, but still well thought of. A life on the fault-line, close to the boundary of dysfunction. Malin is just as surprised every time she finds herself in a place like this, by the fact that they still exist. The quiet happiness of the old Social-Democratic ‘people’s home’. Two point three swings and slides per child.
No answer.
It is just after nine o’clock; perhaps they should have called and announced their arrival, but does she even know about what happened to her brother?
‘No, we’ll just head over there.’ Zeke’s words.
‘We might be bringing bad news.’
