28
Ought to call Tove.
I’m her mum, Malin thinks.
Maybe she can come this evening.
It’s already long past lunch by the time Zeke and Malin go through the swing doors into the police station.
The open-plan office is Sunday empty, the rain like a never-ending wall outside the windows.
Ought to, ought to, ought to call Tove, but I’ve had my mobile switched off for hours now. I’m longing to get down to the gym.
How can I bear to let you out of my sight now, Tove? It was impossible for the first ten months after the catastrophe in Finspang. I was like a leech, at least that’s how it must have felt for you. To protect you, or to calm my own fears? My sense of guilt?
Malin sits down at her desk and switches on her computer, and Zeke does the same. It isn’t long before Sven Sjoman comes over to their desks. He tells them what Fredrik Fagelsjo has just said.
‘Could he have done it?’ Malin asks.
‘Who knows? Maybe they had a fight? And he killed Petersson by mistake?’
Malin looks at Sven, at the doubt that has started to take shape in his eyes. Maybe Fredrik Fagelsjo isn’t their man? She knows Sven must have considered this. But she also knows that he will carry on regarding Fagelsjo as their prime suspect until there’s any evidence to the contrary.
‘If Fredrik Fagelsjo murdered Petersson when he was there on Thursday evening, the timings don’t fit,’ Malin says. ‘According to Karin, the body had only been in the water for a couple of hours, four at the most. And he had been dead for a maximum of five hours, so after approximately four o’clock that morning. And Forensics haven’t found any traces of blood in Fagelsjo’s car, which they certainly ought to have done, because the perpetrator must have been covered in blood. The fact that the gravel in the tyres matches the gravel out at Skogsa is explained by the fact that he admits to having been there the previous evening, but it doesn’t tie him to the murder. Unless he’s lying about the times, of course.’
‘Do you think he could have gone back the following morning?’ Zeke asks.
‘I don’t know, but his wife has given him an alibi and we can’t force her to testify against her husband. She might just be trying to protect her family.’
‘I got the impression that he’s telling the truth,’ Sven says. ‘But you never know. He could have gone back. The dark car that old Mrs Sjostedt saw could have been his, even if she wasn’t quite with it.’
‘Who knows what he might have done,’ Zeke says.
‘Yes, to appease his father,’ Sven says. ‘He seems to be a real patriarch. Fredrik seems almost to forget that he has a family of his own when you talk to him about his father.’
‘A search warrant?’ Zeke asks. ‘To help us get a bit more clarity?’
Sven shakes his head.
‘We simply can’t get a search warrant for Fredrik’s home in connection with the murder at the moment. He’s in custody for other reasons, and Ehrenstierna would put a stop to that at once. If we did search his house in connection with those other offences, we wouldn’t be able to use anything we found in any eventual murder prosecution.’
‘What about Katarina Fagelsjo?’ Zeke says.
‘We can interview her again,’ Malin says. ‘That feels like a natural next step.’
She hears herself say the words, even though all she wants is to get down into the gym and beat the shit out of the punchbag.
‘Have we got her address?’
‘Yes,’ Sven says, ‘we’ve got it.’
Malin switches on her mobile.
No new messages.
Then she dials Tove’s number, but gets straight through to the messaging service.
Where are you? Malin thinks. Tove? Has something happened? And she sees the beast looming over Tove, and feels that she herself is the beast.
Tove, where are you?
‘It’s Mum here. Where are you? You have to realise that I worry. Call me when you get this.’
Tove lets herself be swallowed up by the darkness of the cinema. Filippa is sitting beside her and they’re both gawping at how handsome Brad Pitt is. She likes silly films, lots of kissing and cuddling and people in love in a nice way. Books are a different matter entirely, she likes the ones that everyone else thinks are difficult.
She tries not to think about Mum.
Doesn’t want to think about the fact that she’s probably not coming back to them, and about what she’s decided to do herself.
How can I tell Mum about it? She’ll be sad, she’ll go crazy, maybe do something really stupid. But like Dad said, I can’t live with her at the moment, not with her the way she is, when she can’t cope without a drink.
And then there’s what Dad is going to do today. Does he have to do it so soon?
Brad Pitt smiles.
His teeth are white.
Tove wants to sink into that whiteness, wrap it around all her feelings, leaving just the nice things.
Waldemar Ekenberg runs one hand over his ever more swollen bruises, and puts the other on Lovisa Segerberg’s shoulder, giving it a proper squeeze as he says: ‘I bet you’ve got softer bits on your body, Segerberg. Haven’t you?’
Lovisa feels like standing up and screaming at this evidently severely socially handicapped hillbilly cop to drop the sexist remarks, but she knows his type all too well: macho officers, of all ages, who can’t help making the most bizarre, insulting comments to and about female police officers.
Once she raised a similar event with her boss, but she had just shaken her head and said: ‘If someone as attractive as you wants to be in the police, you’d better be prepared for a whole load of comments. Try to take it as a compliment.’
Lovisa is having trouble seeing the hand squeezing her shoulder as a compliment, and without saying anything she slides from his grasp and puts the papers in her hand on the desk.
She, Waldemar, and Johan Jakobsson have spent all day in paperwork Hades. And have only got through a fraction of the material.
But there’s one thing they can say with certainty: the tenancy agreements were legitimate, and the IT business seemed to be entirely above board. Petersson appeared to have got his fair share of the money, no more,
