‘Yes, why do you ask?’
‘I just wondered.’
They sit down at a table with a view of the entrance to the flats. Five minutes later the man places two pizzas in front of them, the cheese has melted and the fat is floating in pools over the tomato sauce, ham and mushrooms.
‘Bon appetit,’ he says.
‘Great,’ Zeke says.
They eat, looking out at Tanneforsvagen, at the cars driving past, at the angry grey-white exhaust fumes falling heavily to the ground.
What would cause such a breach between people who share the same blood? Sven Sjoman wonders.
He has just finished questioning Jakob Murvall. His words have stuck in his head.
‘He lives his life. We live ours.’
‘But you’re still brothers.’
‘Brothers aren’t always brothers, are they?’
What makes people who ought to make each other happy, who ought to help each other, turn their backs on each other? Become something like enemies instead? People can fall out over any number of things: money, love, beliefs, pretty much anything. But family? Within a family? If we can’t even hold things together on a small scale, how on earth are we going to manage on a larger one?
It is half past one.
The pizza is sitting like sluggish concrete in their stomachs and they lean back against the flexible wicker backrests.
‘He’s not coming,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll have to come back tonight.’
Zeke nods. ‘I thought I might go back to the station. Write up the report from yesterday,’ he says. ‘Do you mind going out to Ljungsbro on your own to talk to Niklas Nyren?’
‘Okay, I’ve got a few other things I want to check out,’ Malin says.
‘Do you need any help?’
‘I’m happy to go alone.’
Zeke nods. ‘Like you did with Gottfrid Karlsson in the home?’
‘Hmm.’
They wave in thanks at the restaurant-owner as they leave.
‘Pretty good pizza,’ Zeke says.
Karl Murvall is a human being, but he is at best uninteresting in the eyes of his family, that much is clear.
‘Karl?’
Elias Murvall looks at Sven Sjoman blankly.
‘Don’t talk about that jumped-up cry-baby.’
‘What did he do?’
Elias Murvall seems to consider this, to soften slightly. Then he says, ‘He’s always been different, he’s not like us.’
43
Malin’s vision clears as she gets closer to the tree in the field.
Doesn’t want to believe what her eyes are telling her.
The lonely tree in the field is no longer so alone. A green estate car with a roof-box is parked on the road, and on the snow, right where Bengt Andersson’s body must have fallen, stands a woman wearing a white sheet, no, she isn’t wearing anything, and she’s holding her arms out from her body, her eyes closed.
She doesn’t open her eyes even as Malin’s car approaches.
Not a single muscle of the woman’s face moves, and her skin is whiter than the snow, her pubic hair improbably black, and Malin stops the car and there is still no reaction from the woman.
Frozen to ice?
Dead?
Standing upright, but then Malin sees her ribcage moving gently in and out, and she seems to be swaying slightly in the wind.
Malin feels the midwinter open its door wide as she gets out of the car, how the season takes command of her senses, as if it were resetting her body and condensing the distance between impressions, thoughts and deeds. A naked woman in a field. This just gets madder and madder.
The car door slams shut, but it’s as if the noise was nothing to do with any effort she herself made.
The woman must be freezing, and Malin approaches in silence.
