that, so cold against my legs?
I don’t want anything to do with this, and who are those people talking?
Janne.
Yell: ‘Daniel, fucking stop doing that!’
Fucking stop.
And the drops keep drumming and they’re icy cold and what am I doing outside with no clothes on in this weather and what are they saying?
Sven. Zeke.
What the hell are you doing here?
‘Hold onto her.’
‘Sit still.’
Fabric against my body. Zeke’s face, his shaved head, and he looks focused, Sven, are you there, and I see the bathroom now, the shower, I can feel it against my head and shit, shit, the water’s cold, and I see them now, both of them, I’m sitting in the bath and they’re showering me and my T-shirt’s clinging to my body and my knickers, the stupidest pair I’ve got, they hardly even cover the hair down there, and just stop. .
‘Stop it, I know what your fucking game is!’
She flails with her arms.
Tries to force the shower-head away.
Drops.
But the liquid ice, the small sharp needles batter her, forcing her back.
‘Let me sleep, you bastards!’
The dressing gown is warm against her skin and the coffee slipping down her throat is hot. Her head is throbbing, and Malin wonders if she’s seeing double, with two Svens and two Zekes and she wants to scream out loud, or drink more, but the look in their eyes holds her back.
Sven on a chair by the window. Zeke standing by the sink, looking first at the broken Ikea clock and then at a pigeon that settles on the windowsill for a few seconds before flying off towards the church tower.
Say something.
Tell me off.
Tell me I’m a bloody awful person.
A weak-willed drunk, just someone else who can’t resist the slightest internal demon.
Call me a shit. An arsehole.
But neither of her two colleagues says anything.
They’ve forced her to take two aspirins and two hydration tablets, and now she knows they’re expecting her to finish the coffee.
They go out into the hall, she can hear them talking. Hears Sven say: ‘I’ll keep an eye out, keep her on her feet, we can’t manage without. .’
Zeke: ‘She needs a detox clinic.’
Is that really what he says? I must have heard wrong. He’d never say something like that.
They come back. They stand beside her in the kitchen without speaking.
And when the coffee is finished Sven says: ‘Get some clothes on, then you and Zeke get over to Soderkoping. You’ve got a job to do.’
Somehow Malin has survived the drive, she has no idea how, and now, just before lunchtime, she and Zeke are standing in a room with flowery wallpaper in Soderkoping’s rehabilitation home. In front of them sits Ingeborg Sandsten in a deep-red armchair. Beside her lies Jasmin Sandsten in a blue wheelchair, and under a leaf-green blanket they can see her spastic body, twisted by years of involuntary muscle spasms. One of her brown eyes is open, the other closed, and her gaze betrays no sign of conscious life. Jasmin Sandsten breathes in heavy rattles and sometimes lets out a growling sound, and every time the sound escapes from her mouth her mother reaches over and wipes the saliva from the corner of her lips with her right hand.
A window in the background. A bare, wind-tormented tree, a desolate canal path that seems to be waiting for summer visitors on bikes and the canal company’s old white-painted passenger boats full of American tourists.
A mother who has never strayed from her daughter’s side, Malin thinks, feeling a deep respect for the two strangers in the room. Even if Jasmin doesn’t know what’s going on around her, she must know that she hasn’t been abandoned. Do you know, Malin thinks as she looks at the girl in the wheelchair, that you’ve got pure love on your side? Your mother is what people ought to be like. Isn’t she?
If Tove had ended up like this.
What would I have done? I can’t even bear to think about it.
‘We should have been in Tenerife,’ Ingeborg Sandsten said, laying her thin hands on her equally thin thighs. ‘At the Vintersol rehabilitation centre, but they turned us down at the last minute when they found out how badly handicapped Jasmin is. So we came here instead. This is very nice too.’
Malin’s first thought is: ‘What a coincidence. I’m just back from there,’ but that would have been an insult to the mother and daughter who never made it.
Ingeborg Sandsten’s face is thin and lined, showing signs of never-ending exhaustion, and the woman’s tiredness makes Malin feel more alert.
‘I’ve looked after Jasmin since the accident. I get money from the council to be her carer.’
‘Can she hear us?’ Zeke asks.
‘The doctors say she can’t. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think she can.’
‘Our colleagues spoke to your former husband yesterday,’ Malin says.
‘He’s still angry.’
‘Has he spoken to you? Have you heard what we suspect happened on the night of the accident?’
‘Yes, he called me.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘It might be true, but it doesn’t make any difference, does it?’
‘You didn’t know anything about that?’ Malin asks.
‘I see what you’re getting at. I didn’t know. And I was here with Jasmin all last week.’
Then the growl from Jasmin as her face contorts in unimaginable pain. She must have been very pretty once upon a time. Ingeborg wipes her grown-up daughter’s mouth.
‘Did Jasmin know Jerry Petersson before the evening of the accident? Do you remember?’ Malin asks, aware that she’s fishing, casting out nets and hooks, trying to catch underwater voices.
‘I don’t think so. She’d never mentioned him. But what do any of us know about the lives of teenagers?’
‘And the Fagelsjo youngsters? Did she know them?’
‘She was in a parallel class to Katarina Fagelsjo. But I don’t think they were friends.’
‘So you didn’t know anything about what happened that night?’ Zeke asks again. ‘That it might have been Jerry Petersson driving?’
‘What do you think?’ Ingeborg Sandsten said. ‘That Jasmin might have told me?’
Two dozen heavy raindrops hit the windowpane like a salvo.
‘Deep inside her dreams Jasmin remembers what happened,’ she goes on. ‘Deep, deep inside.’
The car pushes through the waterlogged landscape of Ostergotland. Grey, lifeless forests, lonely grey fields, grey houses.
Zeke’s hands firmly gripping the steering wheel.
Malin takes a couple of deep breaths.
‘It was you who asked Sven to talk to me, wasn’t it?’ she asks.
Zeke takes his eyes from the road for a moment. Looks at her. Then nods.
‘So are you angry now, Malin? I had to do something.’
‘You could have said something to me directly.’
‘And you’d have listened, would you? Sure, Malin, sure.’
‘You went behind my back.’
‘For your own good.’
‘You go behind a lot of people’s backs, Zeke. Think about what you could lose.’
