Don’t leave me out here.
I’m freezing.
36
It is no bad dream.
It is just how it is.
Janne is walking up and down in the living room. The young boys from the refugee camp in Kigali came to him again tonight, just now. They were carrying their hacked-off feet on their upturned hands, approaching his bed with them like bloody trophies. The dark red blood dripped on to his sheets, steaming and smelling freshly of iron.
He woke up in a soaking wet bed.
Sweat.
As usual.
It’s as if his body remembers the humid nights in the jungle and is adapting itself to the memory rather than the present.
He creeps upstairs and peers into Tove’s room. She’s asleep inside, safe in the warm.
Markus is asleep in the guest room. He seems an okay kid, from what Janne could tell during their short meal, before Tove and Markus disappeared into Tove’s room.
He hadn’t said anything to Malin about Markus staying over. She didn’t seem to know, though he would always be able to say that he assumed she did. She would protest, but that’s okay, Janne thinks, as he creeps back downstairs again. Better that we keep an eye on them than the alternative, so they don’t have to sneak into his father-in-law’s flat.
His father-in-law?
Did I just think that?
But I did phone Markus’s dad to make sure it was okay with them.
He seemed friendly. Not full of himself like a lot of the doctors you run into at the hospital when you show up with an ambulance.
In the morning the Murvall family reports at Police Headquarters.
They arrive in the green Range Rover and a Peugeot minibus soon after eight.
The sun made the vehicles’ paint shine, as they spewed out people, as Malin thought it looked.
The Murvall clan: men, women, child after child besieging the foyer of Police Headquarters.
Restless chatter.
People on the fault-line.
Waiting not to do what the authorities asked of them: talk. A conscious mix of obstinacy and resignation in every movement, every expression, every blink. Shabby clothes, faded jeans, jumpers and jackets in shrill, unfashionable colours, all thrown together, dirt, stains, children’s snot as the glue holding it all together.
‘Gypsies,’ Borje Svard whispered in Malin’s ear as they looked out on the scene from the office. ‘They’re like a band of gypsies.’
In the middle of the group sat the mother.
Somehow alone among all the others.
‘You have a fine family,’ Sven Sjoman says, drumming his fingers on the table of the interview room.
‘We stick together,’ the mother states. ‘Like in the old days.’
‘That’s unusual these days.’
‘Yes, but we stick together.’
‘And you have a lot of fine grandchildren, Mrs Murvall.’
‘Nine in total.’
‘It could have been more, perhaps. If Maria hadn’t—’
‘Maria? What do you want with her?’
‘What were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’
‘Sleeping. That’s what an old woman does at nights.’
‘And your sons?’
‘The boys? As far as I know, they were sleeping too.’
‘Did you know Bengt Andersson, Mrs Murvall?’
‘Bengt who, Inspector? I’ve read about him in the paper, if you mean the man they hung in the tree.’
‘They?’
