‘Playing Gnu Warriors.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You came to ask me about—’
‘Now I remember,’ Malin says, and sees Fredrik Unning sitting in the basement of the smart house, joystick in hand, sees the father looking at his son, aloof.
‘Yes, I asked you if there was anything else we ought to know.’
‘Yes, that’s right. I heard on the radio.’
The same fear in his voice now as there was in his eyes then. A quick, fleeting feeling, gone as soon as it appeared.
‘And you know something?’
‘Can you come out here, you and that other bloke?’
‘We’re heading out towards Ljungsbro later today. It may take a while, but we’ll be there.’
‘No one needs to know, do they? That you’re coming?’
‘No, we can keep this between us,’ Malin says, thinking, It depends on what you’ve got to say, of course. And it strikes her how easily she is prepared to lie outright to a young person, as long as it helps the investigation. And she knows she would hate to be treated like that. But still she says, ‘This is just between us.’
‘Okay.’
Then a click, and Zeke’s curious expression on the other side of the desk.
‘Who was that?’ he says.
‘Do you remember Fredrik Unning? The teenager playing computer games in that posh house?’
‘What, him?’
‘Yes, he’s got something to tell, but we’ll do the Murvalls first. Don’t you think?’
‘Murvalls,’ Zeke says, gesturing towards the door. ‘Now what could be troubling young Unning?’
‘When you cross this road property prices sink by thirty per cent,’ Zeke says, as they turn off at a deserted Preem garage on to the road leading to the collection of houses that goes by the horribly appropriate name of Blasvadret, ‘windy weather’. The cold crackles through the melancholy outside the car. The chill seems to twist in the wind, picking up snow from the dead drifts, throwing it in transparent waves across the windscreen.
‘God, it’s windy,’ Malin says.
‘And the sky is white.’
‘Shut up, Zeke. Just shut up.’
‘I love it when you use platitudes, Malin, I just love it.’
An eerie place. That’s the immediate feeling.
Good to have Zeke alongside. Because if anything happens, he can switch in a fraction of a second. Like when that junkie whipped out a syringe and held it to her neck. She didn’t even have time to see what was happening, but Zeke lashed out and knocked the syringe from the junkie’s hand. Then she saw Zeke kick the man to the ground and carry on kicking him in the stomach.
She had to drag Zeke off to stop him.
‘Don’t worry, Fors, it’ll look like a couple of punches. But it’ll hurt more. He was trying to kill you, and we can’t have that, now, can we?’
Another, even more powerful, gust.
‘God, this is weird, there was hardly any wind on the main road. What is this?’
‘Blasvadret is a Bermuda triangle,’ Zeke says. ‘Anything can happen here.’
One single street.
Blasstigen, ‘windy way’.
Five red-painted wooden houses on one side, garages and workshops on the other, one breezeblock building with drawn blinds. Another larger whitewashed house further on at the end of the road, almost invisible through the swirling snow.
The houses in Blasvadret that aren’t inhabited by the Murvall family are silent, their owners presumably at work. The clock on the dashboard says 11.30, almost lunchtime, and Malin feels her stomach rumble.
Food, please, not coffee.
The Murvall brothers live next to each other. The last two wooden houses and the breezeblock building are theirs, the white house their mother’s. The windows of the wooden houses are dark, and car wrecks are randomly strewn about the plots, half covered by snow and ice. But there are lights on behind the blinds of the brick building. A broken, bowed, black iron-railing rocks in the wind. The workshop opposite has heavy, rusty metal doors, and in front of it stands an old green Range Rover.
Zeke stops the car.
‘Adam’s house,’ Zeke says.
‘Okay, let’s see if he’s at home.’
They do up their jackets, get out. More wrecked cars. But not like Janne’s. These are wrecked beyond
