A new tap on the back.
She turns around.
‘Time to go home now, Malin,’ the bartender says, close to her face.
She shakes her head.
‘I’m OK. Give me a double. Please.’
21
Malin’s head rocks from a gentle blow.
Her body, if it’s where it ought to be, feels swollen, and every muscle and sinew aches, and what’s going on with her head?
Am I dreaming?
I’m still Malin, and the little round planets a metre or so above my eyes, why do they look like the drawer handles on the cupboard in the hall?
The bed feels hard beneath me, but I still just want to sleep, sleep, sleep.
Don’t want to wake up. And why’s the bed so hard?
The sheet is scratching my cheek, it’s blue, hard as an old rag-rug, and that circle way up there looks like the light in the hall. There’s a smell of newsprint, pain. Light flooding in from the left hurting my eyes, what is it that’s wrong?
Go back to sleep, Malin.
Forget about today.
Gradually her gaze clears and she realises that she’s lying on the floor of the hall, just behind the door. She must have fallen asleep there last night, so drunk that she couldn’t even get to bed.
But the blow to her head?
A copy of
Malin crawls up into a sitting position. She pushes away the bag of clothes that she must have managed to bring home from the pub in spite of everything.
The newspaper’s type is restrained.
She slithers to the kitchen, looks at the Ikea clock. Half past seven. A working weekend.
If I concentrate I can still make it to the morning meeting, she thinks, but I’ll have to hurry.
She gets up, comes close to falling, fainting, and there’s only one solution. The bottle of tequila is still on the floor of the living room where she left it the day before yesterday. She gets the bottle, takes seven deep swigs, and by the second she can feel the aches and pains and nausea leaving her body.
A shower. Teeth-brushing, mouthwash and I’m ready for the morning meeting.
She pulls on the jeans and long-sleeved red cotton top she bought yesterday, the damn trousers are hard to fasten, her stomach is swollen with alcohol and the red top makes her face look even more like a tomato than it already does.
She calls a taxi, they’ll have to use another car for work today, she left yesterday’s outside the Hamlet.
In the taxi on the way to the police station she reads the paper that the churchy students were probably missing by now.
About their case.
About lawyer Jerry Petersson, the fact that he had been murdered, a bit about his dealings with Goldman, his dubious reputation. Money, figures. Nothing they don’t already know.
The taxi blows its horn. The rain is clinging to its chassis.
Her body seems to be working.
She tosses the newspaper on the back seat.
When they reach the turning into the old barracks building where the police and other authorities are based, she asks the taxi-driver to stop.
‘I can drive all the way to the police station,’ he says. ‘That’s where you’re going, isn’t it? I recognise you from the paper.’
‘I’ll get out here.’
Evidently I still care a bit about what my colleagues think, Malin thinks as she slams the door of the taxi.
Outside the police station a group of reporters is standing in the rain, Daniel Hogfeldt among them. Even in shitty weather like this he manages to look alert.
She goes into the station the back way, through the premises of the district court. As she walks down the corridor past the pale wooden doors of the courtrooms she imagines she can hear rifle shots. She hears them, but realises the sounds are only inside her, and she can’t even be bothered to wonder why.
‘This is Lovisa Segerberg,’ Sven Sjoman says, putting one hand on the shoulder of the attractive, blonde, plain-clothed woman, maybe thirty years old. ‘She’s from Economic Crime in Stockholm. She’s here to help us with Petersson’s files. A qualified civil economist. And a police officer. Maybe we should introduce ourselves?’
Zeke, Johan Jakobsson, Waldemar Ekenberg and Malin all say hello and welcome Lovisa to the investigative team.
‘Take a seat,’ Sven says, and Lovisa sits down on an empty chair next to Malin, smiling a polite woman-to- woman smile that Malin doesn’t return. Instead she looks at her clothes, how her black knitted sweater with a rosette below her chest looks fashionable, that her black wool trousers are neatly pressed, and that there’s something unmistakably Stockholm about her whole appearance, and it makes Malin feel hopelessly unfashionable and obsolete in her jeans and cheap red cotton top.
‘Let’s start by summing up the state of the case so far,’ Sven says. ‘Day two. You know we have a suspect in custody, Fredrik Fagelsjo, but let’s start from the beginning. What else have we managed to find out about the murder of Jerry Petersson?’
The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 08.15.
The formalities and pleasantries took five minutes. It’s a good thing Lovisa’s here, Malin thinks. The rest of us can barely make sense of a simple tax declaration.
Sven begins by taking it upon himself to put together a timetable of Jerry Petersson’s last twenty-four hours alive. Then he goes on: ‘Unfortunately the examination of the crime scene hasn’t given us anything definite. The rain took care of that. No bloodstains on the gravel. We’ve had divers searching the bottom of the moat, but they haven’t found a knife or anything else that could be the murder weapon. We’ve drained the moat, but that didn’t give us anything either. And I’ve just received the forensic report on Petersson’s car. Nothing. At least we can rule out robbery as a motive, as we suspected yesterday. Nothing seems to be missing from the castle, and there are no signs that anyone searched through the building. And Petersson’s wallet was in the inside pocket of the Prada coat he was wearing, with more than three thousand in cash. We’re still checking Fredrik Fagelsjo’s Volvo.’
‘Which is black,’ Zeke adds.
The fish, Malin thinks. What’s happened to them? They can’t have anywhere to go if the moat’s been drained? I’m one of those fish. I’m drowning in the air, isn’t that what fish do?
‘Prada?’ Waldemar says.
‘Karin noted the label in her report,’ Sven says. ‘So it must be fairly smart.’
Then he turns to Malin, says: ‘Petersson was found by tenant farmers, Gote Lindman and Ingmar Johansson, who came to the castle to go deer hunting with Petersson. What did they have to say?’
Malin takes a deep breath.
Recalls the conversations from memory.
She can still taste the tequila in her mouth, and wants more, but instead she gives a short summary of the interviews.
