You must have walked a long way.
You were breathing. The night-chill fled in panic when you crept out on to the road. The car headlights.
You had walked so far.
The lights grow, blind, corrode.
Is it death that is coming? Evil?
Again?
It came yesterday, didn’t it, with quick steps it ran up, from where it lay hidden behind scarred bushes.
26
‘Maria Murvall.’
Zeke rubs his fingers against the steering-wheel.
‘I knew I’d heard the name before. Shit. Me and names. She was the girl who was raped up by Hultsjon four years ago. A really nasty case.’
‘Motala Police.’
‘Right on the boundary, so they took it. They found her wandering about on a road almost ten kilometres from where it happened. Some truck-driver taking a load of shingle to a building site up in Tjallmo found her. She’d been torn to shreds, badly beaten as well.’
‘And they never caught him.’
‘No. I think it even got on to
Malin shuts her eyes. Listens to the sound of the engine.
A man hanging in a tree.
His concerned social worker raped four years ago. Wandering the forest.
Cornerhouse-Kalle. The debauched, mad father.
And it all keeps popping up in the investigation, all mixed up, yet it still fits together, somehow.
Coincidence?
Try the theory out on Zeke.
‘Bengt Andersson. He must have come up during that investigation. If she really did care as much about him as everyone says.’
‘Must have done,’ Zeke says, pointing at a car they are overtaking. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting one of those Seats. They’re owned by Volkswagen these days.’
I know, Zeke, Malin thinks. Janne must have told me ten times or more when he got on to the subject of his cars.
‘Isn’t the car you’ve got now good enough?’
‘Murvall,’ Zeke says. ‘Isn’t that name familiar for some other reason as well?’
Malin shakes her head.
‘Me and names, Malin,’ Zeke says.
‘I’ll call Sjoman and ask him to order over the case files from Motala Police. Nordstrom there will get it sorted at once.’
Just as they are turning into Police Headquarters, the third social worker on the list calls, the one who took over after Maria Murvall.
‘It’s awful, what’s happened. Dreadful. Bengt Andersson was depressed, withdrawn. At one meeting he just mumbled, “What does keeping clean matter? What does keeping clean matter?” If I’m honest, I never drew any connection to the rape. But perhaps there was a link? But the rapist? Bengt Andersson? He wasn’t that sort of person. A woman can tell.’
Malin gets out of the car, her face forming an involuntary grimace as the cold hits her skin.
‘At any rate, I never got as close to him as Maria Murvall. She evidently cared about him outside her work as well, she got him to pull himself together. Almost like a big sister, as I understand it.’
They walk into the station.
Sjoman is standing at Malin’s desk, waving a bundle of fax paper in the air.
Their colleague in Motala evidently hadn’t needed to be asked twice.
Sven Sjoman is talking in a strained voice. Malin and Zeke are standing beside him. Malin wants to tell him to calm down, to think of his heart.
‘Bengt Andersson was one of the people the Motala force interviewed in connection with the rape of Maria Murvall. He had no alibi for that night, but none of the evidence found at the scene, nor anything else, ever pointed to him. He was just one of twenty-five of Maria’s clients who were questioned.
‘It’s pretty grim reading,’ Sjoman says, handing the papers to Zeke.
‘Reality is always worse than fiction,’ Zeke says.
