Midwinter Sacrifice (27 page)

Henrietta Kalmvik opens the door wide.

No hesitant little crack.

‘You’re from the police? Aren’t you?’

Big red hair, green eyes, sharp features. An elegant white blouse over stylish dark blue trousers: a woman in her mid-forties who knows what she looks good in.

‘Is that your car?’ Malin asks. ‘Out on the street?’

‘Yes. Nice, isn’t it?’

Henrietta Kalmvik leads them into the house, gesturing to them to hang up their jackets in the second of two halls. As Malin shrugs off her padded jacket she sees her almost glide over the parquet floor into the living room, where two white leather sofas frame a table whose legs look like a fat lion’s paws in red marble.

Henrietta Kalmvik sits down on the smaller of the sofas and waits for them.

There’s a pink Chinese rug on the floor. On the wall above the larger sofa hangs a mostly orange painting of a naked couple on a beach at sunset. Outside the window is a snow-covered pool lit up by a floodlight, and Malin thinks how nice it must be to take a morning swim out there when the weather’s warmer.

‘Sit down.’

And Malin and Zeke sit down next to each other on the larger sofa, the leather sinking beneath them. It feels like she’s disappearing into the soft padding. She notices a turned wooden bowl on the table, full of shiny green apples.

‘I presume the head of the school called you,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says.

And then the same questions they asked Margaretha Svensson.

The same answers, yet somehow not the same.

Henrietta Kalmvik’s green eyes fixed on the pool outside the window as she says, ‘I gave up on Markus a long time ago. He’s impossible, but as long as he stays within the law he can do what he likes. He has his own room in the basement, with his own entrance, so he can come and go as he pleases. If you tell me he was tormenting Bengt Andersson, I’d say he probably was. And guns? Not impossible. He stopped listening to me when he was nine. He used to call me a “stupid fucking bitch” when he didn’t get what he wanted. And in the end I stopped trying. Now he comes home to eat. Nothing else. I do my own thing, I’m a member of the Lions, and the Jazz Club in town.’

Henrietta Kalmvik falls silent, as if she’s said all she has to say.

‘I suppose you want to see his room?’

She gets up and heads down some stairs leading to the basement.

They follow her once more.

In the basement they walk through a laundry room and another room containing a sauna and a large Jacuzzi, before Henrietta Kalmvik stops in front of a door.

‘His room.’

She steps aside.

Lets Zeke open the door.

The room is a mess, the king-size bed unmade, oddly positioned in the middle of the room. There are clothes scattered all over the stone floor, along with comic books and sweet wrappers and empty drinks cans. The white walls are bare and Malin thinks that very little light must get in through the windows.

‘Believe it or not,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says, ‘he likes being down here.’

They look in the chest of drawers, pick through the things on the floor.

‘Nothing out of the ordinary here,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you know where Jimmy is now?’

‘No idea. I dare say they’re just hanging about somewhere, him and Jocke. They’re like brothers, those two.’

‘And Jimmy’s father? Is there any chance we could talk to him?’

‘He works on an oil rig out in the North Sea. Somewhere off Narvik. He’s away three weeks, then home two.’

‘It must get lonely,’ Zeke says, closing the door to Jimmy Kalmvik’s room.

‘Not really,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says. ‘It suits us both not to be in each other’s pockets. And he earns an awful lot of money.’

‘Has he got a mobile out there?’

‘No, but you can call the oil rig itself if it’s urgent.’

‘When will he be home?’

‘Saturday morning. On the morning train from Oslo. But call the rig if it’s urgent.’

40

A voice at the other end of the line, the crackling makes the Norwegian unclear, dreamlike, as Zeke reverses out of the Kalmviks’ drive.

‘Yes, hello? You wanted Göran Kalmvik? He hasn’t been here for just over a week now. His shift ended last Thursday, and he’s not expected back for two weeks. I can’t hear you very well, not . . . Where he might be? At home . . . oh, I see . . . in that case I’ve no idea . . . yes, he works two weeks and is off for three.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says when she has hung up. ‘Kalmvik’s dad isn’t on the rig. Hasn’t been there for over a week.’

‘Henrietta didn’t seem to have any idea about that,’ Zeke says. ‘What do you think it means?’

‘It could mean anything. That he was at home last week when Bengt Andersson was murdered and that he could have helped the boys if they managed to go a bit too far with one of their pranks against him. Or he’s been deceiving his wife and has a mistress or something even juicier somewhere else. Or maybe he’s just having some time off on his own.’

‘Is it Saturday he’s due home?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll be hard to get hold of him before that. Do you think Henrietta’s lying? That she’s only pretending not to know anything? Trying to protect him and their son?’

‘It didn’t look like it,’ Malin says. ‘I’d say not.’

‘Okay, let’s drop Kalmvik for now, Fors. Let’s brave the cold and darkness and go and take a look at the Murvalls’ cabin in the forest. It would be just as well to get a bit further with all this.’

Just as well, Malin thinks, closing her eyes and relaxing and letting the images in her head come and go as they like.

Tove on the sofa at home in the flat.

Daniel Högfeldt, bare-chested.

Janne’s picture beside the bed.

And then the image that forces all the others aside, that expands and burns into her consciousness, an image impossible to shift: Maria Murvall on her bed in her room in the hospital, Maria Murvall among dark tree trunks one raw, damp night.

The car headlights illuminate the forest road, the trees like frozen figures from a horror film around them, deserted summer cottages turned to black outlines, stiff dreams of good days by the water; frozen now like a light grey smudge in the pale moonlight filtering through the gaps in the veils of cloud.

The directions Elias Murvall gave them earlier in his mother’s house: ‘Hultsjön, then after Ljungsbro head towards Olstorp, past the golf course and on to the Tjällmo road. After ten kilometres you’ll get to the lake; the road to the other cottages is kept cleared, then you’ll have to walk. The path is marked out. But you won’t find anything there.’

Before that Jakob Murvall, suddenly talkative, as if his mother had pressed the play button. He went on about their organised hunting expeditions, about the sale of meat, about deer-traps, about how Russian millionaires were crazy about deer-traps.

‘We’ll head out there tonight. Now. Sjöman will have to sort out a warrant.’

Zeke hesitant. ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow? The brothers are being taken into custody, they can’t do anything.’

‘No.’

‘But I’ve got choir practice tonight, Fors.’

‘What?’

‘Okay, okay, Malin. But we’ll deal with Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s parents first,’ and this time the hoarseness of his voice betrayed his awareness that she would tease him for months if he let choir practice with Da Capo take precedence over an entirely new lead.

The warrant went through, Sven Sjöman called to confirm.

And now Zeke has one hand on the wheel as some choir led by Kjell Lönnå is blasting through ‘Swing it, Magistern!’ Choral music: the non-negotiable condition for them driving out to the cabin. Zeke is dealing with the ice, pushing the car on by accelerating, braking, accelerating. The ditches alongside the road like a white-edged abyss beside them. Malin peers out in search of animals’ glowing eyes: deer, elk, a stag that might decide to cross the road just as they approach. Few people can drive like Zeke, not with the uncompromising self-confidence of the professional driver, but with careful concentration on the goal: getting there.

They skirt round the lake, but get an idea of the frozen water continuing into the forest, narrowing to something like a river, leading right into the heart of darkness and night.

The clock on the dashboard reads 22.34. An ungodly hour for work like this.

Tove at home, never made it to Markus’s: ‘I heated up the rest of the stew. I’m fine, Mum.’

‘As soon as things calm down at work we’ll do something fun.’

Fun? Malin thinks as she sees the pile of snow ahead of them at the end of the road, how someone had forced a gap through the heap, and how reflecting patches fastened to the trees shine like stars in a line off into the distance.

What do you think is fun, Tove? It was easier when you were younger. We used to go to the swimming pool. And you’d rather go to the cinema with other people. You like shopping, but you’re not as crazy about it as other girls your age. Maybe we could go to a concert in Stockholm, you’d like that. We’ve talked about doing that before but never managed it. Or maybe go to the book fair in Gothenburg? But that’s in the autumn, isn’t it?

‘This must be the right place,’ Zeke says, switching off the engine. ‘I hope it’s not too far to walk. Fuck, it feels even colder tonight.’

The geography of evil.

What does it look like? What sort of topography?

It wasn’t far from here that traces of the attack on Maria Murvall were found, five kilometres to the west. None of her brothers knew what she was doing in the forest, no one mentioned the cabin then, the property they’ve got on loan free of charge from farmer Kvarnström for reasons no one wants to go into.

‘We look after it, simple as that.’

Maria in the forest.

Cut up from inside.

A chill autumn night.

Damp-dripping world.

Ball-Bengt in the tree.

The cold of the plain.

Branches like snakes, leaves and rotting mushrooms like spiders, and then the worms under your feet, sharp thorns that cut into the soles of your feet. Who’s that hanging there in the tree? Bats, owls, some fresh evil?

Is the geography of evil small outcrops of rock and shallow hollows? Half-grown forest, a woman with the tatters of black clothing hanging from her body, dragging herself along a deserted forest road at dawn.

Is the beast here in the forest?

Malin has time to think all this as she and Zeke pad through the snow towards the Murvall brothers’ cabin. They light up the trees with their pocket torches, the reflecting patches shine, making the black trees tremble in the utterly silent night, making the snow crystals on the ground twinkle like countless watchful lemmings’ eyes, little beacons for navigating through the unknown.

‘How far, Fors? It’s got to be at least minus fifteen and I’m still dripping with sweat.’

Zeke is walking ahead, heaving his way through the snow; no one has been this way since the last fall of snow, even if there are still earlier tracks to follow. Snowmobile tracks alongside.

The animals, Malin thinks. That must be how they get them out, by snowmobile.

‘Pretty tough going,’ Malin says, trying to instil a bit of courage in Zeke by showing that she shares his pain. ‘We must have trudged a good kilometre by now.’

‘How far was it supposed to be?’

‘They wouldn’t say.’

They stop next to each other, breathing out silently.

‘Maybe we should have waited?’ Malin says.

‘Let’s go on,’ Zeke says.

After thirty minutes of struggling against the snow and the cold the forest opens out into a small clearing in front of them, and at its centre stands a small house, probably several hundred years old, with drifts of snow up to the eaves.

They train their torches on the cabin; long shadows fall from the beams of light and the trees in the forest become a curtain of dark nuances behind the snow-covered roof.

‘Okay, let’s go in,’ Zeke says.

The key is hanging where the brothers said, on a hook under the soffit. The lock creaks in the cold.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any electricity,’ Zeke says as the door opens. ‘No point looking for a light switch.’

Cones of light dance across a single, frozen room. Neat, Malin thinks. Rag rugs on the floor, a gas stove on a simple wooden worktop, a camping table in the middle of the room, four chairs, candles, no lamps, and three double beds along the windowless end walls.

Malin goes over to the table.

Its top is stained with light oil.

‘Gun grease,’ she says, and Zeke mutters in agreement.

On a dresser beside the kitchen worktop stand tins of pea soup and ravioli and meatballs, and in a box alongside are bottles of spirits.

‘It reminds me somehow of a changing room,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes, it’s very neutral. No feeling.’

‘What were you expecting, Fors? They let us come out here precisely because we wouldn’t find anything.’

‘I don’t know. Just a feeling.’

A room without feelings. What is there beyond that?

If you have wicked hearts, deep down inside, you Murvalls, then what sort of damage have you done?

Then Zeke hushes her and Malin turns round, sees him put a glove to his lips and then point out through the door as they simultaneously put their hands over the beams of their torches.

The resulting darkness is unshakable.

‘Did you hear something?’ Malin whispers.

Zeke says, ‘Hmm,’ and they stand there in silence and listen. A dragging sound coming towards them: a limping animal? Wounded by a misplaced shot? Dragging its way into the clearing? Then it is quiet once more. Has the animal stopped? The Murvall brothers are in custody. The old woman? Not here, not now. Maybe she can change her shape? The bullies? But what would they be doing here?

Malin and Zeke creep towards the open door, lean out carefully from either side, look at each other, then the noise starts up again, but further away now, and they leap out, training their torches in the direction the sound is coming from.

Something black drifts quickly towards the edge of the forest; a meditative movement. A person?