a great deal of damage.’
‘Is she in pain?’
‘Physical pain? I don’t think so.’
‘Therapy?’
‘You have to understand, Inspector Fors, it’s practically impossible to conduct therapy with someone who doesn’t speak. Silence is the soul’s most powerful weapon.’
‘So you think she’s somehow clinging on to herself through silence?’
‘Yes. If she talked, she’d lose her grip.’
‘This is where Maria lives.’
The female care assistant carefully opens the door, the third of seven in a corridor on the second floor of the building. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling make the linoleum floor of the corridor shine, and from inside one of the rooms comes a low groaning sound. Different detergent here to the old people’s home. Perfumed. Lemongrass. Like in the spa at the Hotel Ekoxen.
‘Let me go first and tell her who’s come to see her.’
Through the crack in the door Malin can hear the care assistant’s voice; it sounds like she’s talking to a child.
‘There’s a girl from the police who’d like to talk to you. Is that okay?’
No answer.
Then the care assistant comes back. ‘You can go in now.’
Malin opens the door wide, goes in through a little hall where the door to the shower and toilet is ajar.
A lunch tray with half-eaten food is on a table, there’s a television, a blue-green rug on the floor, a few motorbike and dragster posters on the walls.
And on a bed in one corner of the room, Maria Murvall. Her body seems not to exist, her whole being is a vanishing face surrounded by well-brushed blonde tresses.
You’re like me, Malin thinks. You’re a lot like me.
The woman on the bed takes no notice when Maria comes in. She sits still, her legs hanging over the edge of the bed, down to the floor; her feet are wearing yellow socks, her head is hanging forward. Her eyes are open; an empty yet strangely bright gaze, fixed on some indefinable point in the air filling the room.
Cascades of snow against the window-pane. It’s started to snow again. Maybe it will finally get a few degrees warmer.
‘My name is Malin Fors. I work as a detective inspector with the Linkoping Police.’
No reaction.
Just silence and stillness in Maria Murvall’s body.
‘It’s very cold today. Windy, too,’ Malin says.
Idiot. Babbling. Better to get straight to the point. Do or die.
‘One of your clients at social services in Ljungsbro has been found murdered.’
Maria Murvall blinks, stays in the same position.
‘Bengt Andersson. He was found hanging in a tree. Naked.’
She breathes. Blinks again.
‘Was it Bengt that you ran into in the forest?’
A foot moving under yellow cotton.
‘I understand that you helped Bengt. That you tried extra hard for him to have a better life. Is that right?’
New cascades of snow.
‘Why did you care about him? Why was he different? Or were you like that with everyone?’
Words in the silence:
‘Do you know anything about Bengt Andersson that could help us?’
Why am I persisting with this? Because you know something?
Maria Murvall lifts her legs from the edge of the bed, shifts her spindly body to a lying position, her gaze following the same path as her body.
Just like an animal.
Tell me what you know, Maria. Use those words.
A black beast of prey in the forest. The same man as on a snow-clad, windswept plain?
Maybe?
No.
