‘In that case they must have been rubber bullets. Could that sort of ammunition have caused any of Bengt Andersson’s injuries?’
‘No, they cause a very particular type of bleeding. I’ve seen it before.’
Engine noise.
Malin, alone in her car, on her way to see a mute, raped woman.
‘Malin, you’ve gone quiet,’ Karin’s voice comes over the phone. ‘Have you gone off the road?’
‘It’s just me thinking,’ Malin says. ‘Could you go back to Bengt Andersson’s flat and see if you can find anything new? Take Zeke with you.’
Karin sighs, then says, ‘I know what you’re looking for, Malin. You can rely on me.’
‘Will you tell Sven Sjoman?’
‘He’s had an email already.’
What is it I, we, can’t see? Malin thinks as she presses the accelerator.
This police officer, senior physician Charlotta Niima thinks, must be ten years younger than me, and the way she looks at you, through you, watchful and weary at the same time, as if she could do with a decent holiday away from all this cold. Same thing with her body: athletic, but still slow in its movements, hesitant in front of me somehow. Hiding behind matter-of-factness.
She’s pretty, but she’d probably hate that word. And behind the penetrating eyes? What do I see there? Sorrow? But that must be to do with her work. What can’t she have seen? Just like me. It’s all a matter of compartmentalising, turning on and off like any other piece of machinery.
The black-framed glasses make Charlotta Niima look stern, but together with her big, red, permed hair, the glasses give her a slightly crazy look.
Maybe you have to be crazy to work with crazy people? Malin thinks. Unless you have to be entirely uncrazy?
There’s something manic about Dr Niima, as if she maybe uses her patients’ illnesses to keep her own problems under control.
Prejudices.
The hospital is housed in three whitewashed fifties buildings in a fenced-in area on the edge of Vadstena. Through the windows of Dr Niima’s room Malin can see the ice-covered Vattern, frozen almost to the bottom: stiff fish panting below the ice, trying to force their way through a viscous, treacherous liquid. Soon we won’t be able to breathe under here.
On the left, beyond the fence, she can make out the red-brick walls of the convent.
Birgitta. Prayer. Saints. Convent life.
She’s here alone. Woman to woman. Zeke didn’t protest.
The old madhouse, famous across the plain as a dumping ground for the lost, has been rebuilt as private apartments. Malin drove past the white art nouveau building on her way into the town. The white facades of the madhouse looked grey, and the drooping black branches of trees in the surrounding parkland must have heard a thousand madmen scream at night.
How could anyone choose to live in a place like that?
‘Maria has been here almost five years now. She hasn’t spoken once in that time.’ Niima’s voice, sympathetic, intimate, yet still distant. ‘She doesn’t express any wishes at all.’
‘Does she look after herself?’
‘Yes, she washes and eats. Goes to the toilet. But she doesn’t talk, and refuses to leave her room. The first year we had her under watch, and she tried to hang herself from the radiator a few times. But now, as far as we can determine, she isn’t suicidal.’
‘Could she live in a flat outside the hospital? With proper support?’
‘She fights if we try to get her out of her room. I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s completely incapable, in our evaluation, of surviving out in wider society. She appears to view her whole body as a sort of prosthesis, a replacement for something she’s lost. She’s methodical in her daily hygiene, and puts on the clothes we lay out for her.’
Dr Niima pauses before going on.
‘And she eats, three meals a day, but not enough to put on any weight. Complete control. But we can’t get through to her. Our words, even us as people, it’s like we don’t exist. Acutely autistic people can demonstrate similar symptoms.’
‘Drugs?’
‘We’ve tried. But none of our chemical keys has managed to break through Maria Murvall’s complex locking mechanisms.’
‘And why no men?’
‘She starts to cramp. Not always, but sometimes. Her brothers visit her occasionally. That goes okay. Brothers aren’t men.’
‘Any other visitors?’
Dr Niima shakes her head. ‘Her mother stays away. Her father died long ago.’
‘And her physical injuries?’
‘They’ve healed. But she had to have a hysterectomy. The things she had pushed inside her out in the forest did
