Which one of Tove’s friends is that?
Then she remembers the woman in the room of the rehabilitation centre in Soderkoping, beside her daughter’s wheelchair. The sense that her love for her daughter was boundless. If anything like that happened to Tove, could I handle it? The question was back again.
Raindrops on her face, pattering against her coat, the impatient look on Zeke’s face inside the car.
‘Hello. Is there something I can help you with?’
‘I had a dream last night,’ Jasmin Sandsten’s mother says.
Not again, not another dreamer, Malin thinks, seeing Linnea Sjostedt’s face in front of her. We need something concrete now, not more bloody dreams.
‘You had a dream?’
‘I had a dream about a boy with long black hair. I don’t remember his name, but he used to visit Jasmin in the beginning, after the accident. He said they hardly knew each other but he’d been friends with Andreas, the boy who died in the crash. Jasmin’s friends didn’t know anything about him. I remember thinking it was strange that he kept coming, but he was friendly and most of them never came at all. I thought that the sound of people her own age might help her to come back.’
‘And you’ve just had a dream about him?’
Malin doesn’t wait for Jasmin Sandsten’s mother to reply, instead she’s thinking that Anders Dalstrom, the folk singer from the forest, has got long black hair.
So now he’s popped up in the investigation again. In a dream.
‘Long black hair. You don’t remember his name?’
‘No, I’m sorry. But a very well-dressed young man without a face came to me in the dream. He showed me a film of the young man who used to visit Jasmin. A black-and-white film. Jerky and old.
‘Wait a moment. I think his name might have been Anders. His surname was something like Fahlstrom.’
58
Anders Dalstrom takes a sip of his coffee in the branch of Robert’s Coffee attached to the Academic Bookshop, not far from Stadium and Gyllentorget. One of the showy American coffee shops that have successfully seen off the traditional old cafes. Latte hell, Malin thinks.
A lot of people, Saturday. Money burning a hole in their wallets.
The bookshop must do well in this sort of weather, when people are huddled up at home.
‘I’m in the city,’ Anders Dalstrom had said when Malin called: they didn’t want to drive all the way out to the forests outside Bjorsater if he wasn’t home. ‘I’ve come in to get some books. We could meet now if you like.’
And now he’s sitting opposite her and Zeke wearing a blue hooded top and a yellow T-shirt with a green Bruce Springsteen on the chest. He looks tired, has bags under his eyes, and his long black hair looks greasy and unwashed.
You look ten years older than you did out at the cottage, Malin thinks. Is it right to disturb you again? But Malin wants to follow the threads of her conversation with Jasmin’s mother, asking Anders Dalstrom about Jasmin.
‘Why did you visit her? You didn’t really know her, did you?’
‘No. But it used to make me feel better.’
‘Better in what way?’ Zeke asks.
Anders Dalstrom closes his eyes with a sigh.
‘I was working last night. I’m too tired for this.’
‘Better in what way?’ Zeke asks again, sounding firmer this time, and Malin notes that he’s taken her place, asking questions that match her intuition rather than his own, perhaps.
‘I don’t know. It just felt better. It’s so long ago now.’
‘So you didn’t have any sort of relationship with Jasmin?’
‘No. I didn’t know her. Not at all. But I still felt sorry for her. I can hardly remember it now. It was like her silence was my own somehow. I liked the silence.’
‘And you didn’t know that Jerry Petersson was driving the car that New Year’s Eve?’
‘I told you I didn’t last time.’
A bag of books by Anders Dalstrom’s side, a few DVDs.
‘What have you bought?’
‘A new Springsteen biography. A couple of thrillers. Two films of Bob Dylan concerts. And
‘My daughter loves reading,’ Malin says. ‘But mostly literary novels. Ideally with a bit of romance. But
Anders Dalstrom looks at her, staring into her eyes for a few moments before saying: ‘Speaking of romance: you’ve probably heard it from other people, but there were rumours in high school around the time of the accident that Jerry Petersson was seeing Katarina Fagelsjo.’
I can sniff out an unhappy relationship from a thousand miles away, Malin thinks. And I can pick up the smell of it here, here in Katarina Fagelsjo’s living room, it’s seeping out of this bitter woman’s skin, and you want to tell us, don’t you? You’re the woman in the Anna Ancher painting on the wall, the woman who wants to turn around and tell her story.
‘I’ll go and see her on my own. I might be able to get her to talk.’
Zeke had nodded.
Let her go to see Katarina. It might be dangerous, but probably not. ‘Go. Find out what we need to know.’
White tights. Blue skirt, one leg crossed over the other. High heels, even at home.
Open up. Tell me. You want to, I saw your reaction when I told you what Anders Dalstrom had told us. About the rumours. The romance.
‘You’re mourning Jerry Petersson, aren’t you?’
The perfectly balanced upholstery from Svenskt Tenn behind her back, Josef Frank’s speckled, smiling snakes.
And Katarina’s mask falls. Shatters into a tormented grimace and she starts to cry.
‘Don’t touch me,’ Katarina sobs when Malin makes a move to put her arm around her.
‘Sit down again and I’ll tell you.’
And soon the words are pouring from the puffy, tear-streaked face.
‘I was in love with Jerry Petersson the autumn before the accident. I saw him in the corridors at school, I knew he was off limits for a girl like me, but you should have seen him, Malin, he was ridiculously handsome. Then we ended up at the same party, at the headquarters of the youth wing of the Moderate Party, by mistake, and I don’t remember why but we ended up sitting in the cemetery all night, and then we went down to the river. There used to be an abandoned pump house there, it’s been demolished now.’
Katarina gets up. Goes over to the window facing the river, and with her back to Malin she points, waiting for Malin to join her before she goes on.
‘Over there, on that little island, that’s where the pump house was. It was cold, but I still felt warmer than ever that autumn. Jerry and I used to meet without anyone else knowing. I was head-over-heels in love with him. But Father wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him. And that was that.’
Then Katarina falls silent, seems to be trying to keep the moment alive, by keeping her memories to herself.
Malin opens her mouth to say something, but Katarina hushes her, giving her a look that tells her to listen, to listen to her, and not to herself.
‘Then he disappeared off to Lund. But he didn’t leave me. I kept an eye on him all those years, through my failed marriage to that idiot Father loved. I never forgot Jerry, I wanted to get back in touch, but I never did, I devoted myself to art instead, buried myself in paintings. Why, why, why did he have to come home again, why did he want the castle? I never understood. If he wanted to get back into my life, surely he could have just called?
