teacher feels distaste towards him, but he doesn’t yet know why. He doesn’t see the dirt on his clothes. The filth in his ears. His long, greasy hair. The holes in his sweater. He gives her the eyes instead, and something happens during the third year. She becomes his protector, takes him on, sees who he is and what he might become.
He stays out in the evenings. Creeping home, but sometimes Dad’s awake.
And he does what Dad might have wanted to do in the evenings once he’s quenched his thirst with wine and cheap beer. What Dad would never dare do: he hits when he says he’s going to.
He hits anyone who gets in his way. He hits the headteacher when Mum and Grandma have come to school for a meeting.
But he is allowed to stay.
An exceptional talent, his teacher says.
After that he hits people when they’re not looking.
He hits his way out of all the feelings, the nameless feelings that have nowhere to go in the closed circle of the backyard in Berga, the flat’s two rooms, Anestad Junior School, Grandma’s various homes, and his nimble feet drum restlessly on the ground, wondering what on earth this world is good for.
14
The ambulance with the perforated body.
It’s heading purposefully off towards the forest, slowly, as if anxious not to wake or upset the dead man. The dog in the car barks after the ambulance, jumping up at the window.
Standing in front of the castle, Malin can see the green lanterns swaying in the wind, and their forest-tinted light makes the grey daylight hazy. Mouldering heaps of leaves at the edge of the forest. Like crumpled paper painted in bright colours by the children at a closure-threatened nursery school. And the trees, their bare crowns watching the day’s peculiar performance from their elevated position above the leaves, waving goodbye when the wind helps the branches to move.
The same questions as always at the start of an investigation. Malin poses them to herself, aware that all the others in the team will be asking the same things.
How to make sense of this?
What’s happened?
Who was he, Jerry Petersson? The answer to the question of where the violence came from is always hidden in the victim’s life. And death. What prompted him to return to the city and surrounding area? He had been back for about a year, but sometimes evil moves slowly.
Then the forest seems to open up before her eyes, the gaps in the trees seem to get wider, and the space is filled with a darkness teeming with shapeless figures.
Malin imagines she can hear a voice, as if all the figures were speaking with one voice, saying the same thing: ‘I shall drift here for a thousand years. I shall be lord of this land.
‘Save me!’ the voice goes on. ‘I was guilty of many things, but save me, grant me forgiveness.’
Then it calms down, whispering: ‘Why did I become the person I ended up as?’
Young snakes, pale yellow, seem to be slithering around Malin’s boots. She stamps her feet but they don’t disappear.
She blinks slowly.
The snakes and the shapes are gone.
An ordinary, depressing, grey, misty, autumn forest. Gravel beneath her feet.
What was that all about? Am I going mad? But she isn’t worried, the drinking and all the rest of it has probably just got a bit much. Then she thinks about the fact that just a few hours ago someone was wielding a knife here.
Murdering.
Killing Jerry Petersson.
She switches on her mobile again, she’s had it turned off since she arrived.
Two missed calls. Both from Tove, but no messages. I ought to call her now, I really ought to.
The dog is quiet, calm. Must have lain down on the back seat.
‘Malin! Malin!’
She recognises Daniel Hogfeldt’s voice. He’s calling to her from the driver’s seat of one of the
She feels like giving him the finger.
Instead she waves at him.
‘What have you got for me?’
His voice, eager.
‘Forget it, Daniel,’ she calls.
‘He was murdered, wasn’t he? And it was Petersson.’
‘You’ll find out later. Karim’s bound to call a press conference.’
‘Come on, Malin.’
She shakes her head, and he smiles a warm, gentle smile, exactly the sort of smile she needs.
Is it that obvious?
Daniel wrote the article about Petersson. Might he know something? Can’t ask him now, that would be giving too much away.
She had thought that her trysts with Daniel would come to an end when she moved back in with Janne. Then one evening, after she’d sweated everything out in the gym in the basement of the police station and still felt it wasn’t enough to calm her down, he had called when she was about to get in the car and go home.
‘Can you come over?’
Ten minutes later she was lying in his bed in Linnegatan.
They didn’t say a word to each other. Not then. Nor the next time, or the next, or the next.
He simply took her as hard as he could, and she took him in return, and they yelled out together, looked at each other, seeming to ask, what the hell is this? What are we doing? What’s wrong with us?
Daniel Hogfeldt looks at Malin, and can’t help thinking that she looks terrible, almost so terrible that she isn’t sexy any more.
He’s tried to get her to see him as more than just a body, but that hasn’t been possible. She can’t seem to shake her low opinion of him, assuming he only wants information about cases, when in actual fact it’s her that he wants to find out more about.
She’s moved back in with her ex-husband again. But how well can that really be going? When she still wants to fuck my brains out?
It’s fairly obvious that she isn’t happy. But if I tried to say anything she’d turn on her heel, do anything to avoid the issue.
Daniel leans back in his seat. Sees the bald detective that he knows is called Zeke go over to Malin.
Daniel closes his eyes. Gets ready to play at being the tough reporter when he tries to get something out of the other officers.
As Malin and Zeke approach the car the dog stands up on the back seat. Its cropped stump of a tail is wagging, and it’s staring greedily at the bowl of water in Zeke’s hand. But when they open the doors the dog backs away. It lies down on the floor behind the driver’s seat and seems to be waiting for something. Zeke gives him the water and they can hear it lapping at it.
‘Let’s get it to Borje,’ Malin says.
‘OK,’ Zeke replies.
Malin goes for the passenger seat. Zeke can do the driving.
The dog whimpers in the back seat.
Daniel Hogfeldt’s naked body.
What’s wrong with me? Malin thinks.
The red-painted cottage sits beside the road leading up towards Skogsa, not far from the turning to
