Their words slip past each other. Time runs out and their daughter arrives, the sunbeam to end all sunbeams, and they play happy families. A few years pass and a silence falls. Things turn out differently from the way they were planned, if they were planned at all, and each of those involved moves off in his or her own direction, without rhyme or reason.
No explosions, just a damp squib leaving a long trail into history, and even further into the soul.
The serfdom of love, Malin thinks.
Bittersweet. As she thought back then, after they’d separated, when the removal van was heading for Stockholm and the Police Academy, when Janne moved to Bosnia: If I become really good at getting rid of evil, then goodness will come to me.
Surely it could be as simple as that?
Then love might be possible again. Mightn’t it?
On her way out of the flat Malin feels the pistol pressing against her ribcage. She carefully opens the door to Tove’s bedroom. She can make out the walls in the darkness, the rows of books on the shelves, can sense Tove’s oddly proportioned teenage body under the turquoise duvet. Tove sleeps almost soundlessly, has done ever since she was two. Before that her sleep was disturbed, she used to wake several times a night, but then it was as if she realised that silence and calm were necessary, at least at night, as if the two-year-old instinctively knew that a person needs to keep the night free for dreams.
Malin leaves the flat.
Goes down the three flights of stairs to the door of the building. With every step she feels the cold come closer. It’s practically below zero in the stairwell.
Please let the car start. It’s almost cold enough to freeze the petrol to ice.
She pauses at the door. The chill mist is drifting in waves through the streetlamps’ cones of light. She wants to run back upstairs, go into the apartment, tear off her clothes and creep back into bed. Then it comes again, her longing for Police Headquarters. So: pull the door open, run to the car, fumble with the key, open the door, throw yourself in, start the engine and drive off.
The cold takes a stranglehold when she walks out; she imagines she can hear the hairs in her nose crackle with every breath, and feels her tear-ducts grow treacly, but she can still read the inscription above one of the side doors of St Lars: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’.
Where’s the car? The silver Volvo, a 2004 model, is in its place, opposite the St Lars Gallery.
Padded, bulky arms.
With difficulty Malin gets her hand into the pocket where she thinks the car keys are. No keys. The next pocket, then the next. Damn. She must have left them upstairs. Then she remembers: they’re in the front pocket of her jeans.
Her stiff fingers ache as she thrusts them into the pocket. But the keys are there.
Open now, bloody door. The ice has somehow spared the keyhole and soon Malin is sitting in the driver’s seat swearing: about the cold, about an engine that merely splutters and refuses to start.
She tries again and again.
But the car refuses.
Malin gets out. Thinks: I have to take the bus, which way does it go?
Damn, it’s cold, fucking bloody car-fucker, then her mobile rings.
A clawed hand on the angry plastic gadget. She can’t be bothered to see who it is.
‘Hello, Malin Fors.’
‘It’s Zeke.’
‘My fucking car won’t start.’
‘Calm down, Malin. Calm down. Just listen. Something big’s happened. I’ll tell you when I see you. Be with you in ten minutes.’
Zeke’s words hang in the air. From his tone of voice Malin can hear that something serious has indeed happened, that the coldest winter in living memory just got a few degrees less forgiving, that the cold has just shown its true face.
2
German choral music blasts through the car as Zacharius ‘Zeke’ Martinsson keeps a firm grip on the wheel and drives past the detached houses on the outskirts of Hjulsterbro. Through the side window he glimpses the red and green gables of the rows of generously proportioned houses. The painted wood is covered with frost and the trees that have grown tall in the thirty years since the houses were built look emaciated and malnourished in the cold. But, even so, the whole area looks unusually cosy and well-cared-for; it looks prosperous.
The doctors’ ghetto, Zeke thinks. That’s how the area is known in town. And it is undeniably popular among the doctors at the hospital. Opposite, on the other side of the main Sturefors road, on the far side of a car park, are the squat white blocks of flats in Ekholmen, home to thousands of immigrants and Swedes at the bottom of the pecking order.
Malin sounded tired, but not newly woken. Perhaps she slept badly. Maybe I should ask if anything particular has happened? No, best let it be. She only gets cross if you ask how she is. Zeke tries to keep his mind off what they are on their way to. Doesn’t even want to know what it’s going to look like. They’ll see soon enough, but the boys in the patrol car sounded seriously shaken, and no wonder, if it was as bad as they said. He’s got good at this over the years, delaying, postponing the crap even if it sometimes hits him hard.
Johannelund.
