‘Well, good work so far,’ Karim said, and it struck Malin that the divorce seemed to have taken all the fight out of him, and she knew he shared her sense of loss, that he longed for his wife and son, that he was trying to find an opening back to everyday life, a crack to crawl through.
Malin has sat down in the living room.
She’s resisting, just as Ake Petersson must have done. The most sensible thing would be to pour the remaining contents of the bottle of tequila down the sink out in the kitchen, but she can’t bring herself to do that.
You never know when it might come in handy. Now, perhaps?
I should have told Tove to get a taxi. Any other mother would have done anything to see their daughter.
But not me.
I let the conversation run into the sand, I couldn’t handle it.
How did Tove sound? Disappointed? Alone? Neutral? Keeping her distance? She didn’t actually want to come.
Have I given in to my fear now? Malin wonders. Have I realised that I can’t keep you safe for ever, Tove?
You can actually die, beloved daughter.
I learned that last summer.
And that’s why I daren’t love you, look after you, because I’m so damn scared of that pain, just the thought of it makes me want to wipe out my own consciousness.
What’s wrong with me, unable to deal with the most basic genetic love of all. Tove, I understand if you hate me.
I should have asked to talk to Janne. Checked if I could pick up my things.
But out of all the possessions she has out in the house in Malmslatt, the only ones she misses are the files relating to the case of Maria Murvall. She would have liked to have them with her now, spread out across the floor, trying to fit reality into a system, construct a pattern, a structure that would explain all the mysteries, make all the subtleties look obvious, a solution to a riddle that might help her understand herself.
But maybe it’s just as well that the files are out in Malmslatt.
Because it must be a hopeless case.
Jerry Petersson.
Jerry.
A rented flat in Berga, maybe no bigger than mine, possibly even smaller. Did he hit you? Did he? When he was drunk. Or did he just frighten you? I hit Janne. The same thing? No. Hitting a child is different, isn’t it? And your mother, was she drugged up with all her painkillers? Did she take the cortisone to put an end to it all? And you watched all this happen, not the subdued drama I had out in the villa in Sturefors, with Mum and Dad living in silence, all the words that should have been said, but which remained unspoken, the way Mum avoided me without me even realising, how all I wanted was her embrace, but it was never open to me. It’s possible to hit someone without actually doing so physically.
We both made it to Stockholm, Jerry, but your driving force must have been much stronger, more focused than mine, because mine had no focus at all really, did it? You hit a home run, while I hit a punchbag in the gym. Drinking. But there’s not really much difference.
You broke away from your father. My own break with my father was slow and painful, but with Mum it occurred at the start of my adult life.
Or earlier? Had Mum broken with me from the start?
Malin wants to stop thinking, so she turns on the television. The evening news is coming to an end, and she doesn’t know if they’ve covered her case tonight, but they must have had something about it. The final item is some footage from a courtroom somewhere in the USA, an anti-abortion activist shooting a doctor who carried out abortions in his clinic.
She turns off the television.
An early night.
Her whole body is itching with nerves and she lies down in bed, but the only colour she sees when she closes her eyes is the dark brown colour of the tequila, endlessly enticing.
Then she opens her eyes.
Fredrik Fagelsjo.
The look of fear on his face. His body under the blanket on the bunk in his cell. Were you just scared? Or did you actually give in to your fury and kill Jerry Petersson?
If your poor business sense cost your family the castle, then your father must despise you, hate you. Maybe your sister Katarina feels the same, but she’s still your sister. Malin feels her stomach contract, in a gentle but painful longing for the brother or sister she never had.
And Jerry Petersson. Who pops up in the middle of the family scandal and is later found dead in a moat that is said to house the unquiet spirits of Russian soldiers. Jochen Goldman.
People who are said to have disappeared. Murdered.
Ruthlessness and inadequacies.
Malin closes her eyes again.
Waits for sleep, feeling her consciousness drift away inside itself, and soon the world outside is just one electrical impulse among many for her memories to navigate by.
The world outside the window gradually disappears, turning into a crackling sound, and she hears someone whisper, wonders: who’s trying to tell me something?
Is it the voice from the forest, from the bar in the Hamlet?
The figures aren’t there, don’t want to show themselves, and in the borderlands between sleep and waking Malin gets a sense that he, or they, or whoever it is, is afraid for their own fate, afraid to entertain the idea of their own pain.
Then she sees a lawnmower in the beginning of a dream, moving across grass, and she sees it from the perspective of the blades.
Not a manual rotary mower like her dad had, but a red Stiga chasing a pair of filthy feet across dew-wet grass. She sees the blades lick the boy’s ankles, hears a voice shout: ‘Now they’re going to eat up your feet, now they’re going to tear your little feet to shreds.’
The images in the dream are black and white, but the machine and the blades are red and the noise of the engine and the petrol fumes blur her thoughts.
Then the boy stops. Lets the mower’s blades run over his feet.
Malin wants to see the boy’s face, but he keeps looking the other way.
Then he runs, on bloody stumps now, he takes aim and drifts right out of her vision.
26
Malin Fors has dreamed a dream about a person who is a mistake, not an unwanted person, but a mistake. She can’t remember the person, she can’t even remember the dream, but its narrative is inside her like a slow earth tremor as she stands in front of the counter of freshly baked bread in the Filbyter patisserie that has started opening on Sundays to fight off the competition from the cafes out at the Tornby shopping centre.
Empty fridge. Waking up hungry. Toiletries, clothes, and that was where her shopping spree had ended.
Zeke on his way there for a quick breakfast before the morning meeting at the station. Sunday like a normal Monday when they’re dealing with a case of this size, Saturday working yesterday, Sabbath working today.
Two days since they found the body, no chance of any time off while the investigation is still in its infancy.
She should really have had the day off today. Come up with something to do with Tove. Going to the pool, anything. Maybe even picking up her wretched things, talking to Janne, they could have had lunch together, Sunday steak and cream sauce.
