Forgiveness.
The word zigzags through Janne’s head as he makes a sandwich for Tove, and he looks over at the kitchen worktop where Malin stood screaming just a week ago, where she raised her hand and hit him.
Can you spread forgiveness over time?
How can we approach forgiveness, Malin and me? Because somehow it’s as if we can only do one thing together: feel that we have some sort of debt to each other, that our lives are nothing but an insult, an inadequacy, an injustice that needs to be apologised for.
Have we grown too old, Malin?
How long must an apology be allowed to work between people like us? Twelve years. Thirteen?
Tove likes liver pate with pickled gherkins.
She’s sitting watching television upstairs.
Curled up in its glow.
At home here.
You’re going to want me to apologise for her making that choice, Malin. Aren’t you?
She’s been to the cinema with her friend Frida.
Seems to steer clear of boyfriends, hasn’t really had one since Markus. Since Finspang.
‘The sandwiches are ready, Tove. Do you want herbal or ginger tea?’
No answer from upstairs.
Maybe she’s fallen asleep.
Tove leans back on the sofa and zaps through the channels.
As if they refused to accept that there were people who were forced to jump from the buildings.
She takes a bite of her sandwich.
She couldn’t handle going to see Mum. Not tonight. Tonight she just wants to sit in the darkness and watch television, hear Dad doing whatever he’s doing downstairs.
And the sculpture on television.
A crouching bronze figure. Slight in the wind, just like in the real world. It looks like you, Mum, Tove thinks. And she wants to go down to Dad, ask him to take her home to Mum’s, see how she is, maybe stay there with her. But Dad probably wouldn’t want to do that. And maybe Mum would be cross if they just showed up like that.
Her mobile buzzes.
A text message from Sara. Tove taps a reply as the television shows a close-up of the sculpture’s frightened face, its shimmering bronze hair floating in the wind.
44
Zeke Martinsson looks at the clock at the top corner of the screen.
8.49. Still relatively calm in the station, everyone must be busy somewhere else. No morning meeting today, they went through everything in enough detail yesterday, everyone knows what they’ve got to do.
Malin should have been here long ago. They ought to be well on their way to Soderkoping by now.
Where are you, Malin?
Down in the gym? Hardly.
Has something come up to keep you away? Doesn’t seem likely.
Did you feel like giving in to the pain yesterday?
To drink?
Gunilla wondered why he got home so late, even though he’d called to say he’d be working. He stood in the kitchen and lied straight to her face without a moment’s hesitation, and without managing to feel any shame. Instead he felt sorry for her, for having a man who could betray her without hesitation after so many years of marriage. And he had fallen asleep quickly, imagining Karin Johannison’s thighs around him.
Zeke looks around at his colleagues. Some in uniforms. Some without. Focused yet somehow aimless. What do you all want, really?
Malin doesn’t know what she wants, yet she still does it every day. Here, in this open-plan office she gets straight down to the task of trying to make people believe that no harm can come to them.
So where are you, Malin? Zeke’s phoned three times, twice on her mobile and once on her landline, but no answer. Maybe she’s at Janne’s?
No answer at Janne’s either.
Hogfeldt?
Too complicated. I don’t know anything about what they get up to.
‘Where’s Malin? Shouldn’t you be in Soderkoping by now?’
Sven Sjoman’s tired, somehow compressed voice as he calls from the lift door.
Zeke gets up.
Gives Sven a look, and Sven frowns and looks as if he’s thinking that she might have messed up badly, maybe we should have taken her problems even more seriously?
The two detectives meet in the middle of the room.
Look at each other.
‘I think she’s at home,’ Zeke says.
‘Let’s go,’ Sven says.
Zeke rings Malin’s doorbell and hears the angry signal on the other side of the door.
Sven standing silently beside him, wearing one of the force’s dark-blue padded raincoats.
No talking in the car.
What would they say?
Zeke rings again.
Again.
Sven opens the letterbox and peers in, and the sound of heavy breathing, a sleeping person’s movements, seeps out to the stairwell.
‘Have you got a skeleton key?’
‘I keep one on my key ring,’ Zeke says.
‘She’s lying on the hall floor.’
Zeke shakes his head, suppresses the instinctive anxiety gripping his stomach and focuses on action.
She’s breathing.
Asleep.
Could be injured.
‘Give me the key,’ Sven says, and a few seconds later the door is open and they see Malin on the hall floor, a white T-shirt pulled up above her navel, little pink hearts on her underwear.
No blood.
No bruising, no wounds, just the sound of heavy, longed-for sleep, and a strong smell of alcohol.
An empty tequila bottle.
The
They kneel at her side, look at each other, no need to ask the question that’s going through both their heads.
What are we going to do now?
Turn off the rain. It’s too cold. And it’s drumming on my skin in a bloody annoying way, and what on earth’s
