The doors glide open and three uniformed officers walk past her with quick nods.
‘I don’t take much persuading. Can you come round in half an hour?’
‘Yes.’
She can already feel him inside her as she ends the call.
And exactly thirty-five minutes later Malin is kneeling on all fours on his bed in his sparsely furnished flat on Linnegatan and holding onto the thin metal bedstead as he pumps hard and deep into her and she screams out loud and he is hot and hard and unknown and familiar all at the same time.
He’s like a whip inside me, she thinks.
His hands are sharp barbed wire on my back. She wants to shout: Faster, deeper, you bastard, further in, harder, and it’s as if he can hear her thoughts because he thrusts harder into her each time his body moves and he digs his nails into her neck and she can feel his sweat dripping like cold rain down through her skin and into her flesh and bones and soul.
Don’t resist.
Explode instead.
Let consciousness disappear in pain and beauty, let the little snakes with their many and varied faces retreat to their darkness.
He’s lying on his back beside her on the grey sheet and his toned body stands out against the closed venetian blind. He’s talking, his voice is calm and clear, with all its hardness and warmth intact and she tries to understand what it is he’s asking her.
‘So you’ve split up?’
She’s lying beside him and hears herself reply, with breathless, drifting words.
‘It wasn’t working. I ended up hitting him.’
‘It never works. How could you believe it could?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘What about the Petersson case? Are you getting anywhere? If I were you, I’d take a good look at Goldman.’
‘Sod the case, Daniel.’
His hoarse laughter. And she wants to creep next to him, lay her arms around him, but it’s as if he’s not really there beside her, unless it’s her capacity for closeness that doesn’t really exist?
‘Shall we go another round?’ His hand on my thigh, but I can’t feel it, and his neutral words seem to contain a desire to express something else, as if he had actually been waiting for me, as if he thinks it might somehow be possible to discover something together.
Wasn’t that what we were just doing? Malin thinks.
Then she stands up, gets dressed, and he watches her silently.
‘You’re going?’
Idiotic question.
‘What do you think?’
‘You can stay. I can make some sandwiches if you’re hungry. You look tired, maybe you could do with someone making a fuss of you for a while.’
‘Don’t talk crap, Daniel. I can’t think of a worse suggestion.’
‘Go on, then. The Hamlet’s probably still open.’
‘Shut up, Daniel. Just shut up.’
Zacharias Martinsson has pushed Karin Johannison’s skirt high up over her stomach, he’s pulled off her white nylon tights and carried her through the laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab and put her down on her back on a stainless steel workbench.
She is writhing before him and he is eating her, absorbing her moisture and sweet scent and taste, and he hears her groaning, is that the tenth, the twentieth time now?
Gunilla back at home. No doubt waiting with the evening meal when he called to say he had to work late, that he probably wouldn’t be home until eleven at the earliest.
He tries to bat away the image of his wife alone in the kitchen at home, but it refuses to budge.
He found a reason to pay Karin a visit once last autumn, and she made time for him, leading him down to the laboratory to show him something, and it just happened. They had both been longing for it, and she whispers: Now, come inside, come in Zacharias, and he lifts her down onto the floor, pulls down his trousers and he’s hard and she’s warm and soft and pliable and she looks at him, whispers, My neck’s sweaty, lick the sweat from my neck.
Maria Murvall’s face in front of Malin.
The photo of the bruised rape victim’s face is lying on the parquet floor of the living room, and she twists and turns the image of her own obsession.
Maria.
Your secret.
Preserved within you.
Within your silently screaming body in the white room of Vadstena Mental Hospital, tomorrow I’m going to another hospital, to another mute person.
The bells of St Lars Church strike ten and Malin wonders if Maria is asleep now, and if she is asleep, what would she be dreaming of?
Tove.
Probably on the bus with her friend now.
She won’t come here. And who can blame her, the way I’ve been behaving? I pleaded with her, and she’s probably like everyone else deep down. If they catch a glimpse of weakness, they take the chance to show their own power.
Did I really just think that, about my own daughter?
Malin stops mid-thought, feels shame take a sucking grasp of her body.
Thrusts the thought away.
Who was she going to the cinema with? A boy? How can I let go after what happened? The evil disappears, diminishes in memory over time. Only a hesitant electricity remains as a vague fear, doesn’t it? A fear that can excuse anything.
I don’t understand all this. I don’t understand myself.
And Janne. His warmth like a vanishing dream deep inside a memory. She doesn’t want to talk to him, doesn’t want to ask for forgiveness. What sort of person am I? she wonders. Capable of feeling such derision towards my own love?
Malin goes out into the kitchen and gets the bottle of tequila from the cupboard above the fridge.
Half left.
She raises the bottle to her lips.
