‘Yes, I read that there was probably more than one of them.’
‘Like your sons.’
Malin looks into Sofia Murvall’s eyes. The bags beneath them hang way down on to her cheeks but her brown hair looks freshly washed, tied up in a neat ponytail at the back of her head. The meeting room is acting as an interview room.
Wife of Jakob, the middle brother. Four children, seven months to ten years. Exhausted from nursing, from sleepless nights, worn down to the bone.
‘Four children,’ Malin says. ‘You should count yourself lucky. I only got one.’
‘Can I smoke in here?’
‘Sorry, no. They’re very tough on that. But maybe I could make an exception, just this once,’ Malin says, and pushes her empty coffee cup across the table. ‘Use that as an ashtray.’
Sofia Murvall digs in the pockets of her grey hooded jacket, pulls out a packet of Blend Menthol and a free lighter from a haulage company. She lights a cigarette and the sweet, mint-like smell makes Malin feel sick, and she makes an effort to smile.
‘It must be tough out there on the plain.’
‘It isn’t always fun,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘But who says it has to be fun all the time?’
‘How did you and Jakob meet?’
Sofia looks over her shoulder, takes a drag on the cigarette.
‘That’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Are the two of you happy?’
‘Really, really happy.’
‘Even after what happened to Maria?’
‘That didn’t make any difference.’
‘I can’t really believe that,’ Malin says. ‘Jakob and his brothers must have been incredibly frustrated.’
‘They looked after their sister, if that’s what you mean, and now they’re doing it again.’
‘Did they take care of the person they thought did it as well? When they strung up Bengt Andersson in the tree?’
There’s a knock on the door of the room.
‘Come in!’ Malin calls, and a newly recruited police constable called Sara looks through a gap in the door.
‘There’s a little boy crying out here. They’re saying he needs feeding. Is that okay?’
The expression on Sofia Murvall’s face doesn’t change.
Malin nods.
The woman who must be Adam Murvall’s wife carries in a fat, screaming baby and puts him in Sofia’s arms. The boy opens his mouth wide and scrambles towards the nearest nipple, and Sofia Murvall puts out her cigarette and the hoodie goes up, revealing a bare breast, a pink nipple that the boy stretches out for and catches.
Sofia strokes the boy’s head.
‘Are you hungry, darling?’ Then: ‘Jakob couldn’t have had anything to do with that. It’s impossible. He’s been asleep at home every single night, and he spends every day in the workshop. I can see him from the kitchen window whenever I look out.’
‘And your mother-in-law. Do you get on well with her?’
‘Yes,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘You won’t find a better person.’
Elias Murvall is shut off, his memories a clamped clam-shell.
‘I’m not saying anything. I stopped talking to the police fifteen years ago.’
Sven Sjoman’s voice: ‘Oh, we’re not that bad, are we, especially for a tough guy like you?’
‘If I don’t say anything, how will you find out what I have or haven’t done? Do you really think I’m so weak that I’m going to give in to you?’
‘That’s just it,’ Sven says. ‘We don’t think you’re weak. But if you don’t say anything, things get difficult for us. Do you want things to be difficult for us?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Was it you who shot . . . ?’
Elias Murvall’s mouth is sealed with invisible surgical thread, his tongue limp, slack in his mouth. The room is silent, apart from the sound of the air-conditioning.
From her place in the observation room Malin can’t hear the noise, but she knows it’s there, a gentle mechanical hum: fresh air for people trapped indoors.
Jakob Murvall laughs at the question: ‘You think we had anything to do with that? You’re crazy, we’re law- abiding citizens now, we’ve kept quiet, within the bounds of the law. We’re just ordinary car mechanics.’
