Midwinter Sacrifice (45 page)

It’s warm here. No one will find me.

The earth roof above me is a heavenly vault of its own. There are biscuit crumbs on the ground.

Is she hanging?

If not, I shall have to try again and again and again. Because if I get rid of the blood you’ll have to let me in. If I sacrifice it to you, you’ll let me in.

It was easier with him, Bengt. He was heavy, but not too heavy, and I drugged him by the car park up in Härna when he was walking past. I had my other car, the one I bought with a normal boot. Then the same as with her, brought out here by sledge.

But he died too soon.

The pulleys came from the factory. I’d disconnected the sensors in the server room before I cut a hole in the fence. Not easy. A coat on a hanger was me through the frosted glass when the guards walked past.

That night, in the forest, I took him. I drove out the blood, took away the blood, so you would let me in. I made it clean.

The chains, the noose. The sacrifice.

I had made a sacrifice for you.

But what happened with her?

I remember waking up in the field and she was gone. I snaked back to the car, crept in and managed to start it. I made my way back here.

But was she hanging in the tree?

Or was she somewhere else?

She must have been hanging. I drove out what was wrong, I made the sacrifice.

So you’ll soon be here to open the door.

You’ll be coming with love, won’t you?

What’s happened? What’s been done?

It smells of apples in my hole. Apples, biscuits and smoke.

The Philadelphia Church sign is illuminated in the middle of the day, as if to advertise: God is here! You just have to step inside and meet Him. The church building is right next to McDonald’s on the other side of Drottninggatan, and it has a faithful and well-heeled congregation. She remembers Free Church people from her sixth-form days. They were polite, wore fairly trendy clothes, but they were still geeks, or at least that was how she saw them. As if there were something missing. As if there were a remarkable hardness in all that fluff and softness. Like candy-floss with sharp tacks in.

Malin peers up the street.

Where’s Zeke?

She’s just called him, told him to pick her up outside the church, that they were going out to Collins to bring in Karl Murvall.

There’s the Volvo.

He pulls in, and before he has completely stopped the car Malin has opened the door and jumped into the passenger seat.

Zeke eager: ‘What did the psychologist say?’

‘I promised not to say.’

‘Malin,’ Zeke sighed.

‘But it was Karl Murvall who murdered Bengt Andersson and tried to murder Rebecka Stenlundh. There’s absolutely no doubt at all.’

‘How do you know that? Didn’t he have an alibi?’

Zeke is heading along Drottninggatan.

‘Female intuition. And what’s to say he couldn’t have disconnected the sensors with the help of the computer system, cut a hole in the fence surrounding Collins, and just crept out that night? That he didn’t sort out the business of the update beforehand?’

Zeke accelerates. ‘Okay, why not, maybe the sensors were controlled from inside that server room,’ he says. ‘But they saw him in the room.’

‘Maybe they only looked through the frosted glass,’ Malin says.

Zeke nods, says, ‘Family’s always worst, isn’t it?’

The gate at the entrance to the Collins site seems to have grown since they were last there, and the forest by the car park gives the impression that it’s got thicker, become more enclosed. The factory buildings slouch like the depressed barracks of an internment camp behind the fence, ready to be shipped off to China any day now, and filled with workers earning a hundredth of what those working inside currently earn.

You again, the guard at the gate seems to think. Won’t you ever stop asking me to open this hatch and let in the cold?

‘We’re looking for Karl Murvall,’ Malin says.

The guard smiles and shakes his head. ‘Then you’ve come to the wrong place,’ he says. ‘He was fired the day before yesterday.’

‘So he got fired. You don’t happen to know why? I don’t suppose you get to hear things like that?’ Zeke says.

The guard looks insulted. ‘Why does anyone get fired?’ he asks.

‘What do I know? You tell us,’ Zeke says.

‘In his case it was for strange and threatening behaviour against his work colleagues. Anything else you want to know?’

‘That’ll do,’ Malin says. She doesn’t feel up to asking about the night of the murder and the fence. Somehow Karl Murvall managed to get out that night.

‘Can’t we put out an alert for him?’ Malin asks Zeke as they are heading away from Collins’ car park towards the main road. They pass a lorry whose trailer is weaving alarmingly on the road.

‘No. You have to have something concrete to go on.’

‘I have.’

‘Which you can’t reveal.’

‘It’s him.’

‘You’ve got to come up with something else, Fors. You can always take him in for questioning.’

They pull out on to the main road, swerving to avoid a black BMW patrol car driving at least forty kilometres an hour too fast.

‘But we have to find him.’

‘Do you think he’ll be at home?’

‘We can always give it a try.’

‘Is it okay if I put on some music?’

‘Whatever you want, Zeke.’

Seconds later the car is filled with a hundred German voices.

‘Ein bisschen Frieden, ein bisschen Sonne . . .’

‘Eurovision classic as a choral work,’ Zeke shouts. ‘Always cheers you up, doesn’t it?’

It’s half past three by the time they ring on the door of Karl Murvall’s flat on Tanneforsvägen. The varnish on the door is peeling and for the first time Malin notices that the whole stairwell could do with some work; no one seems to look after the communal areas.

No one opens.

Malin looks in through the letterbox. Newspapers and post untouched on the floor.

‘We can’t ask for a sodding search warrant either,’ Malin says. ‘I can’t refer to what Viveka Crafoord told me, and just because Rebecka Stenlundh has been attacked doesn’t mean we can march in here.’

‘Where can he be?’ Zeke wonders in a loud voice.

‘Rebecka Stenlundh mentioned a forest and a hole.’

‘You don’t mean we have to go out in the forest again?’

‘Who else could we have seen that night? It must have been him.’

‘Do you think he’s staying in the hunting cabin?’

‘Hardly. But there’s something in the forest. I just know there is.’

‘No point waiting, then,’ Zeke says.

The world shrinks in the snow. Collapses into a dark space that contains everything under the atmosphere. Packed together into a sluggish black hole.

You’re hiding secrets, Malin thinks. You dark old Östgöta forest. The snow is harder than last time, the crust is bearing my weight. Maybe the cold has slowly turned the snow into ice? An ice age created in just a few months, forever changing the vegetation, the landscape, the tone of the forest. The trees around them are rough, abandoned ancient pillars.

One foot in front of the other.

Of all the children whom no one sees, who are abandoned, whose fathers and mothers don’t care about them, who are forsaken by the world, some will always fall out, go mad, and the world that deserted them will have to take the consequences.

In Karin’s Thailand.

In Janne’s Bosnia and Rwanda.

In Stockholm.

In Linköping.

In Ljungsbro, Blåsvädret.

It’s no more complicated than that, Malin thinks. Look after those who are small, those who are weak. Show them love. There is no innate evil. Evil is created. But I still believe that there is such a thing as innate goodness. But not now, not in this forest; goodness fled from here long ago. Here there is only survival.

Aching fingers in gloves that can’t be made thick enough.

‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ Zeke says, and it feels as if Malin’s heard him say that a thousand times in the past month.

Her legs are becoming less and less willing the more darkness descends, the more the cold seeps into her body. Her toes have vanished, as well as her fingers. Not even pain is left.

The Murvall cabin lies cold and deserted. The snowfall has erased any trace of ski tracks.

Malin and Zeke stand still in front of the cabin.

Listening, but there is nothing to hear, only an odourless, silent winter forest around them.

But I feel it, I feel it, you’re close now.

I must have nodded off, the stove is cold, no burning lumps of wood. I’m freezing, have to get the fire going again, so it’s warm when they come to let me in.

My hole is my home.

Has always been my only home. The flat on Tanneforsvägen was never home. It was just rooms where I slept and thought and tried to understand.

I get the wood ready, light a match, but my fingers slip.

I’m freezing.

But it has to be warm when they come to let me in, when I’m to receive her love.

‘There’s nothing here, Fors. Listen to me.’

The clearing in front of the cabin: a completely soundless place, encircled by trees, by the forest, and an impenetrable darkness.

‘You’re wrong, Zeke.’

There’s something here. Something moving. Is it evil? The devil? I can smell something.

‘It’s going to be completely dark in five minutes. I’m going back now.’

‘Just a bit further,’ Malin says, and starts walking.

They walk perhaps four hundred metres into the dense forest before Zeke says, ‘Okay, we’re going back.’

‘Just a bit further.’

‘No.’

And Malin turns round, walks back, never sees the clump of trees fifty metres further on, where grey smoke is starting to seep out of a narrow chimney in the roof of an earthen cellar.

The engine roars as the car gets going properly, just as they are passing the golf course at Vreta Kloster.

Peculiar, Malin thinks. They leave the flags out over the winter. I’ve never noticed them before. It’s like they’ve hung them out in someone’s honour.

Then she says, ‘Let’s go and see Rakel Murvall. She knows where he is.’

‘You’re mad, Malin. You’re not going within five hundred metres of the old woman. I’ll make sure of that.’

‘She knows where he is.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘No. She’s reported you for harassment. Turning up there now would be career suicide.’

‘Shit.’ Malin bangs the dashboard. ‘Take me back to my car. It’s in the multistorey near McDonald’s.’

‘You look energetic, Mum,’ Tove says from her place on the sofa, looking up from the paperback she’s reading.

‘What are you reading?’

‘
The Wild Duck
. Ibsen. A play.’

‘Isn’t it a bit odd, reading a play? Aren’t you supposed to watch them?’

‘It works if you’ve got a bit of imagination, Mum.’

The television is on:
Jeopardy!
Adam Alsing fat and over-familiar in a yellow suit.

How can Tove read proper literature with that on in the background?

‘Have you been out, Mum?’

‘Yep, in the forest, actually.’

‘Why?’

‘Zeke and I were looking for something.’

Tove nods, not worried about whether they found what they were looking for, and returns to her book.

He murdered Bengt Andersson. Tried to murder Rebecka Stenlundh.

Who is Karl Murvall? Where is he?

Damn Rakel Murvall.

Her sons.

A social science book is open on the table in front of Tove. The section heading is ‘The Constitution’, and it is illustrated with pictures of Göran Persson and an imam Malin has never seen before. People can be turned into anything at all. That’s it.

‘Tove. Grandad called today. You’d both be welcome to go. You and Markus, to Tenerife.’

Tove looks away from the television.

‘I don’t really want to go any more,’ she says. ‘And it would be hard to explain to Grandad that he has to play along with our lie that they were supposed to have other guests.’

‘Good grief,’ Malin says. ‘How can something so simple get so complicated?’

‘I don’t want to go, Mum. Do I really have to tell Markus that Grandad’s changed his mind?’

‘No.’

‘But what if we go some other time, and Grandad suddenly starts talking about how we didn’t want to go last time even though we’d been asked?’

Malin sighs. ‘Why not tell Markus how it really is?’

‘But how is it, though?’

‘That Grandad’s changed his mind but you don’t want to go.’

‘What about the lie? Doesn’t that matter?’

‘I don’t know, Tove. A little lie like that can’t cause too much trouble, can it?’

‘Well, in that case we could go then.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to go.’

‘No, but I could if I wanted to. It’s better for Grandad to be disappointed. Then maybe he’ll learn his lesson.’

‘So you’re going to Åre?’

‘Mmm.’

Tove turns away from Malin and reaches for the remote.

When Tove has gone to bed Malin sits alone on the sofa for a while before getting up and going into the hall, pulling on her holster and pistol, and then her jacket. Before leaving the flat she hunts through the top drawer of the chest in the hall. She finds what she’s looking for and puts it in the front pocket of her jeans.

74

Friday, 17 February

Linköping at midnight, on the night between Thursday and Friday, in the depths of February. The illuminated signs on the buildings in the centre struggle to match the streetlamps and lend a bit of apparent warmth to the streets where the thirsty and the lonely and the pleasure-seekers hurry between different restaurants and bars, clumsy polar explorers hunting for company.

No queues anywhere.

Too cold for that.

Malin’s hands on the wheel.

The city beyond the car windows.

The red and orange buses are idling in Trädgårdstorget; inside them sit teenagers on their way home, tired, but with expectation still in their eyes.

She turns the wheel and swings into Drottninggatan, towards the river, past the windows of the Swedish Real-Estate Agency.