Midwinter Sacrifice

Linkoping.

Domain of flyboys. The home of the aeronautics industry. Steel crows croaking in the air: the Flying Barrel, Draken, Viggen, Jas. It all bubbles up and spills over and suddenly the newly wealthy are strolling the streets, their technology companies sold to the Americans.

Then there are the surrounding plains and forests. Home to all those whose genes cannot accommodate rapid change, those whose coding protests, refuses. Those who feel that they never have their feet on firm ground.

Janne. Are you one of them?

Is it that our coding doesn’t work at the same pace?

Indians of the primal forests. People in communities like Ukna, Nykil and Ledberg. You can see the natives in tracksuit bottoms and clogs alongside the doctors and engineers and test pilots out at Ikea on Saturdays. People forced to live side by side. But if their coding objects? If loving your neighbour is impossible? In the fracture between then and now, between here and there, inside and outside, sometimes violence is born as the only option.

They drive past Skaggetorp.

Happy white houses from the building boom of the sixties, around a deserted centre, their rented apartments now housing people from far away. People who know how it feels when your uniformed torturers knock on the door at night, who have heard machetes whine through the air just as dawn is waking the jungle, people who are not exactly the toast of the Immigration Office.

‘Do we want to go through Vreta Kloster, or shall we take the Ledberg road?’

‘This isn’t really my territory,’ Malin replies. ‘But it should be straight on, I think. So, how was the match last night?’

‘Don’t . . . Those red seats there are torture on the backside.’

Zeke drives past the turning for the Ledberg road and carries on towards Vreta Kloster.

Off to the east Lake Roxen opens out. Covered in ice, like a misplaced glacier, and ahead of them, beyond the lake, the villas on Vreta Kloster’s millionaires’ row clinging to the slope rising from the reeds. The locks on the Gota Canal alongside, waiting for the summer’s hobby sailors and canal boats full of rich American tourists.

The clock on the dashboard: 7.22.

A bloody awful sight.

She wants to tell Zeke to put his foot down, but stays quiet, closing her eyes instead.

By this time people have usually started to arrive at the station, and she would be saying good morning to the others in the Investigation Section of Linkoping’s Crime Unit from her place behind her desk in the open-plan office. She could work out their mood, identify precisely which tone would apply that day. She would think, Good morning, Borje Svard. You’ve been up and walked your dogs; it’s never too cold to show your Alsatians a bit of love, is it? There’s dog hair on your sweater, on your jacket, in your own ever-thinning hair. Your dogs’ barks are like voices to you. And how do you cope, really? What must it be like to see someone you love suffer the way your wife suffers every day?

Good morning, Johan Jakobsson. Trouble getting the kids to bed last night? Or are they ill? There’s a winter vomiting bug going around. Have you been up cleaning sick all night, you and your wife? Or did you experience the simple joy of children falling asleep early and happy? Is your wife dropping them off today, and you picking them up? You’re on time, you’re always on time, Johan, even if there’s never enough time. And the worry, Johan, I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice, it never goes. I know what it means because I’ve got it as well.

Good morning, boss. And how is Inspector Sven Sjoman today? Be careful. That stomach is far too big, in quite the wrong way. A heart-attack stomach, as the doctors at the University Hospital say. A widow-making stomach, as they joke in the staffroom of the intensive care unit before bypass operations. Don’t look at me in that beseeching way, Sven; you know I always do my best. Be careful. I need everyone who believes in me to stay believing, because it’s so easy to have doubts, even if our driving force is far greater than we might think. And then his words, advice: You’ve got a talent for this, Malin, a real talent. Look after it. There are many talents in the world, but there aren’t many realised ones. Look at what’s in front of you, but don’t rely on your eyes alone, rely on your gut feeling, Malin. Rely on your instincts. An investigation consists of a mass of voices, the sort you can hear, and the sort you can’t. Our own, and others’. You have to listen to the soundless voices, Malin. That’s where the truth is hidden.

Good morning, Karim Akbar. You know that even the youngest, most media-friendly police chief in the country needs to stay on the right side of us ground troops? You glide through the room in your well-pressed, shiny Italian suits and it’s always impossible to guess which way you’ll go. You never talk about your Skaggetorp, about the orange panel-fronted blocks in Nacksta up in Sundsvall, where you grew up alone with your mother and six brothers and sisters after you fled Turkish Kurdistan and your father had committed suicide in his despair at never finding a decent job in his new country.

‘Malin, what are you thinking? You look like you’re miles away.’

Now Zeke’s words are the crack of a whip and Malin is yanked back from her game, back to the car, back to their progress towards the incident, towards the violence that exists in the cracks, back to the winter-bitten landscape.

‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘I was just thinking about how nice and warm it must be in the station right now.’

‘You’ve got this cold weather on the brain, Malin.’

‘How could I not get it on the brain?’

‘If you harden yourself against it, it’ll go away.’

‘The cold?’

‘No, thinking about it.’

They pass Sjovik’s fruit farm. Malin points through the window, towards the frost-covered greenhouses. ‘Now, over there,’ she says, ‘you can buy tulips in spring. Tulips in every colour you can think of.’