making a comment about her ancient sweater when he picked her up, asked if she’d bought it at the Salvation Army. When he saw her jeans he grinned: ‘Eastern European fashion’s the next big thing, is it?’
But he didn’t remark upon the fact that he was picking her up from the flat, even if he must have wondered what she was doing there.
The cold helps her head to clear.
Helps her gaze focus, so she can concentrate on the corpse floating on the surface, on the blond hair, on the eye staring up at them.
Zeke by her side.
Wide awake. Curious.
‘How the hell are we going to get him out?’
‘We’ll have to get divers from the fire brigade.’
The report of the body had reached the police station at a quarter past eight. Malin had heard the phone ringing when she got out of the shower and it had had an unmistakable note of urgency, as if the phone had its own consciousness and could change the way it sounded according to the circumstances.
Zeke’s voice: ‘Some farmers have called in to say that they’ve found a man murdered out at Skogsa Castle.’
She had thrown on her clothes and they had set off south towards Skogsa. He had commented on her breath and told her she looked terrible, wondered if she’d been drinking, but she just said she’d had a couple of glasses of tequila yesterday evening, joking that he must have a very sensitive nose.
They had been the first unit on the scene, and as they arrived and parked at the edge of the forest, the large castle doors had opened and out came the two men that she now knows are the tenant farmers, Ingmar Johansson and Gote Lindman.
They had waited where they had been told while she and Zeke looked at the scene and led the dog away, carefully, without contaminating the crime scene. The pair had explained that they were supposed to be hunting deer with Jerry Petersson, but that he hadn’t met them at the agreed time, and that they had found him, or at least what they assumed to be his body, down in the moat.
‘I mean, you can’t really see for sure,’ Johansson had said.
‘But it’s him,’ Lindman had added. ‘He had a coat just like that.’
The corpse in the water.
Jerry Petersson.
Hotshot lawyer. Businessman. The slightly dodgy commercial lawyer who had made a fortune in Stockholm and moved back home when he got the chance to buy Skogsa Castle. Malin had read the profile in the
If it really is him.
The throbbing in her head. The dog’s barking. Two patrol cars had just arrived at the edge of the forest. No holding back with a suspected murder.
Jerry Petersson.
But who else could it be? Malin closes her eyes, feeling her headache, listening to the air, and she imagines she can hear the rain falling on an invisible body, someone whispering words she can’t understand, words that want to make the world comprehensible, easy to understand and absorb, but they vanish before she has time to work out what they mean.
The divers arrived thirty minutes later, and now their red emergency vehicle is parked alongside Zeke’s car, forensics expert Karin Johannison’s blue Mercedes, and Sven Sjoman’s red Volvo. The cars are parked in a clearing on the other side of the moat, a long way from Petersson’s Range Rover and the tenant farmers’ Saab. The journalists have started to appear, and they are standing in a huddle with cameras of all sizes, flashing as though they were some huge lightning-filled stormcloud. They’re shouting at the police, but are ignored.
They can smell something tasty, the reporters. Front pages. A paper-selling story that will appeal to people’s desire to read about death and violence from a safe distance.
Just like some shoddy thriller, Malin thinks. Life imitating art.
None of the police or fire brigade have driven up in front of the castle.
No one wants to spoil any tyre tracks, footprints or signs of a struggle on the gravel, or whatever else Karin Johannison can find. Malin can see Karin moving around the Range Rover, taking pictures, shaking her head, wiping the rain from her forehead. Even in a yellow raincoat, that woman still manages to look glamorous.
She nodded to Zeke when she arrived, and he pulled his dark-blue raincoat tighter round him.
The nod back took far too long, Malin thinks, knowing that it hides something she’d rather not know about, a truth made visible in the way that only a real hangover can give a new slant on things.
With listlessness comes clarity.
But what do I know about what they get up to? Maybe I’m just imagining it.
None of the firemen, the divers is anyone she recognises.
Thank God. But they must know who she is, they must know all about her and their colleague Janne.
Don’t think about yesterday.
Just thank God for this case. Think about the victim in the moat instead, whoever he is, however he got there. Malin watches as the divers, in their black frogmen’s outfits and yellow visors, lower themselves down from the bridge over the moat on thick ropes, their bodies slowly penetrating the surface of the black water.
Karin beside her and Zeke now.
The rain is horizontal, hitting them straight in the eyes, and over at the edge of the forest, two hundred metres away, on the far side of a meadow, there are low banks of fog.
‘Careful!’ Karin shouts as the divers approach the body. ‘As gently as you can.’ And they fasten a sling around the corpse, give the thumbs-up to a third fireman who is standing on the bridge with a winch, and then there is a whirring sound and the body in the water starts to rise, held carefully by the divers treading water.
‘What a shit morning,’ Zeke says.
Sven Sjoman, wearing a green raincoat, has joined them.
‘So, what do we think?’
‘Well, he didn’t jump in of his own volition,’ Malin says. ‘Or fall in. Grown men don’t often fall into water, unless they’re seriously drunk or have a heart attack or something like that.’
‘If it is Petersson, he’s somewhere around forty-five. Not many heart attacks at that age.’
‘No. He probably had some help.’
‘That seems most likely. We’ll know for sure when Karin’s got the body up.’
Malin nods.
‘If it is Petersson, and if he has been murdered, it’s every journalist’s wet dream.’
‘Careful!’ Karin calls as the rotating body is lifted clear of the water and is left hanging, feet down, the water dripping from its yellow raincoat, brown trousers and a pair of black leather boots.
The dripping water is coloured red. The yellow raincoat has been perforated by masses of holes and Malin can see a number of deep injuries to the body, and a mixture of blood and water is streaming from what must be dozens of stab wounds. The blood mixes with the rain. It’s raining blood, Malin thinks. So you didn’t exactly fall into the moat drunk, did you?
Little silver fish are falling from the victim’s mouth, wriggling like abandoned babies on their way down to the safety of the water.
Snake fish, Malin thinks.
A black eye staring right out into the rain and the thin fog that has drifted down into the moat. The corpse’s other eye is closed.
You look surprised, Malin thinks. But are you really?
