Midwinter Sacrifice (8 page)

The most practical face of death.

White walls, small windows at ceiling height, stainless-steel cabinets and shelves along the wall holding textbooks and bandages, compresses, surgical gloves and so on. The linoleum floor is a bluish colour, easy to clean, hardwearing, cheap. Malin never gets used to this room, to its role and function, but she is nevertheless drawn to it.

‘He didn’t die from the rope,’ Karin says. ‘He was dead by the time he was hauled up into the tree. If he’d died of strangulation the blood wouldn’t have run to his head the way it did. With a hanging the blood vessels are shut off directly, to put it in layman’s terms, but here the physical blows made the heart pump faster, which accounts for the abnormal amount of blood.’

‘How long has he been dead?’ Malin asks.

‘You mean now?’

‘No, before he was strung up in the tree.’

‘I’d say at least five hours, maybe a bit longer. Considering there was no great quantity of blood in his legs even though he was found hanging.’

‘What about the blows to the body?’ Zeke says.

‘What about them?’

‘What have you got to say about them?’

‘Doubtless very painful, if he was conscious at the time, but they weren’t fatal. There are marks on the legs that show he was dragged, that someone hauled the body over damp ground. The wounds have dirt in them, and fragments of fabric. Someone undressed him after the beating, and then moved the body. At least that’s what I believe happened. He was finished off with a knife.’

‘And his teeth?’ Zeke asks.

‘In too poor a state to be useful, most of his teeth were broken.’

Karin takes hold of one of the wrists. ‘Do you see these marks here?’

Malin nods.

‘They were made by chains. That’s how they got him up into the tree.’

‘They?’

‘I don’t know. But do you imagine a single man could have done this, considering the amount of physical strength required?’

‘Not impossible,’ Malin says.

Zeke shakes his head. ‘We don’t know yet.’

The snow had concealed nothing.

The only thing Karin and her colleagues found were a few cigarette butts, a biscuit wrapper and an ice-cream wrapper that didn’t quite seem to belong in the field. Ice cream? Hardly at this time of year. And the wrappers and butts looked older, as if they’d been there several years. They, or he, or she, hadn’t left any traces behind them on the ground.

‘Did you find anything else?’

‘Nothing under the nails. No signs of a struggle. Which suggests he must have been taken by surprise. Have you had any tip-offs? Anyone who’s said anything?’

‘It’s been completely quiet,’ Malin says. ‘Nada, niente.’

‘Not missed by anyone, then,’ Karin says.

‘We don’t know that either yet,’ Zeke says.

If I were still able to talk the way you do, if I could get up and tell you, cure your deafness, I would tell you to stop with all these questions.

What good are they?

It is the way it is, it’s turned out the way it’s turned out. I know who did it, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, had time to see death coming, slow, quick, black.

Then it went white, death.

White as freshly fallen snow. White is the colour when the brain fades, an optimistic firework burst, shorter than a breath. And then, when vision returned to me again I could see everything, I was free and unfree at the same time.

So do you really want to know?

Do you really want to hear this story? I don’t think so. It is worse, nastier, darker, more merciless than you can imagine. If you carry on from here, you are choosing a path that leads right into the heart of the place where only the body, not the soul, can live and breathe, where we are chemistry, where we are code, the place outside, where the word feeling does not exist.

At the end of the path, in an apple-scented darkness clad in white, you will find waking dreams so black that they make this winter seem warm and welcoming. But I know that you will choose that path. Because you are human beings. And that is how you are.

‘How long will it take you to fix him up?’

‘Fix him up how?’

‘Ideally we need to get his face sorted out,’ Malin says. ‘So we can give a picture to the press. So that maybe someone will realise he’s missing, or at least recognise him.’

‘I understand. I’ll phone Skoglund at Fonus funeral services. He can probably help me with a quick reconstruction. We ought to be able to come up with something decent anyway.’

‘Call Skoglund. The sooner we have a picture the better.’

‘Okay, let’s go,’ Zeke says, and from the tone of his voice Malin knows he’s had enough. Of the body, of the sterile room, but mainly of Karin Johannison.

Malin knows that Zeke thinks Karin gives herself airs and graces, and maybe he’s also put out by the fact that she doesn’t ask about Martin like everyone else does, no matter where or when. And, for Zeke, Karin’s lack of interest in ice hockey and his son has become proof that she’s arrogant. He’s clearly tired of all the questions about Martin, but is still not happy if people don’t ask.

‘Do you use spray-tan?’ Zeke asks Karin when they’re on their way out of the lab.

Malin laughs, against her will.

‘No, I use a solarium to keep up my suntan from Thailand over Christmas,’ Karin says. ‘There’s a place on Drottninggatan that does spray-tans, but I don’t know. It seems so vulgar. Maybe just my face, though.’

‘Thailand? At Christmas?’ Zeke says. ‘Isn’t that the most expensive time? I’ve heard that people who really know Thailand go at other times.’

9

‘Malin, have you watered the plants? They won’t make it through the winter otherwise.’

The question is so obvious, Malin thinks, that there was really no need to ask it. And the explanation just as unnecessary: his tendency to be overtly pedagogical to promote his own interests.

‘I’m on my way to your flat to do it now.’

‘Haven’t you done it already?’

‘Not since we last spoke, no.’

She got the call just as she was leaving Police Headquarters, waiting for a green light at the corner of the cemetery and the old fire station. The Volvo had deigned to start today, even though it was just as cold.

It was like she knew it was Dad by the way the phone rang. Annoyed, lovable, demanding, self-centred, kind: give me all your attention, I’m not giving up until you answer, I’m not interrupting anything, am I?

The meeting of the investigating team had been largely concerned with waiting.

Waiting for Börje Svärd who was late, something to do with his wife.

Waiting for someone to ask about Nysvärd’s broken arm, injured when the body fell from the tree.

‘On sick-leave for two and half weeks,’ Sven Sjöman said. ‘He seemed cheerful enough when I spoke to him, just a bit shaken up still.’

‘It’s a bit bloody macabre, having a hundred-and-fifty-kilo frozen-solid corpse land on you,’ Johan Jakobsson said.

Then waiting for someone to say what they all knew. That they had nothing to go on. Waiting for Skoglund the funeral director to finish his work, get the picture taken and sent out.

Börje: ‘What was it I said? That no one would recognise him from those first pictures.’

Waiting for waiting itself, all energy sucked out of tired police officers who know that the case is urgent but who can do little but throw up their hands and say, ‘We’ll see!’ When every citizen, every journalist, wants to hear the police recount what happened, and who did it.

Waiting for Karim Akbar, who was late as well, if only late answering the phone out in his villa in Lambohov. Waiting for his son’s stereo to be turned down in the background, then waiting for Karim’s voice to stop resounding from the speakerphone.

‘This isn’t good enough, you know that perfectly well. Sven, you’ll have to arrange another press conference tomorrow where you let them know what we’ve got so far. That’ll calm them down.’

And you get another chance to show off, Malin thinks. Then: but you do stand there and soak up the questions, the aggression, and make sure we can work in peace and quiet. And you do stand for something, Karim. You understand the power of the group when everyone has a well-defined role.

Sven’s tired words after Karim had hung up. ‘If only we were like Stockholm. With our own press officer.’

‘You’re the one who’s been on the media management course,’ Zeke said. ‘Couldn’t you do it?’

Laughter. Release. Sven: ‘I’m close to getting my pension and you want to throw me to the hyenas, Zeke? Thanks a lot.’

The red light turns green, the Volvo hesitates then rolls off along Drottninggatan into the city.

‘How’s Mum doing, Dad? The plants are fine, I promise.’

‘She’s having a nap. It’s twenty-five degrees and glorious sunshine down here. How is it up there?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘Well I’m not going to tell you, Dad.’

‘Well, it’s sunny here in Tenerife, anyway. How’s Tove?’

‘She’s with Jan-Erik.’

‘Malin, I’m going to go now, otherwise it’ll get expensive. Don’t forget the plants.’

The plants, Malin thinks as she pulls up outside the ochre-coloured building on Elsa Brännströms gata where her parents have their four-room apartment. The plants must never be kept waiting.

Malin moves through her parents’ apartment, a ghost in her own past. The furniture she grew up with.

Am I really so old?

The smells, the colours, the shapes can all get me going, make me remember things that make me remember other things.

Four rooms: one for best, a dining room, a living room and a bedroom. Nowhere for their grandchild to stay the night. They took out the contract on the apartment when they sold the villa in Sturefors thirteen years ago. In those days the housing market in Linköping was very different. If your affairs were in order and you could afford a decent rent, you had options. Today there’s nothing, only shady deals can get you a contract. Or improbably good contacts.

Malin looks out of the sitting-room window.

From the third floor there is a good view of Infection Park, named after the clinic that was once housed in the barracks that have now been turned into housing.

The sofa she was never allowed to sit on.

The brown leather shines like new to this day. The table, lovely then, overblown now. The shelves full of books from Reader’s Digest. Maya Angelou, Lars Järlestad, Lars Widding, Anne Tyler.

The dining table and chairs. Having friends over, children who had to sit and eat in the kitchen. Nothing odd about that. Everyone did the same, and children don’t like sitting round the table anyway.

Dad, the welder, promoted to team-leader, then part-owner of a roofing company. Mum a secretary at the county administrative board.

The smell of people getting old. Even if Malin opened the window and aired the place the smell wouldn’t go. Maybe, she thinks, the cold might make the apartment scentless at best.

The plants are drooping. But none of them is actually dead. She won’t let it go that far. She looks at the framed pictures on the bureau, none of her or Tove, just her parents in different settings: a beach, a city, a mountain, a jungle. ‘Can you water the plants?’

Of course I can water them.

‘You can come down whenever you like.’

And how do we afford that?

She sits down on the armchair in the hall and the memory of the silent springs is in her body: she is five years old again, kicking her sandalled feet; there is water a little way away and behind her she can hear Mum and Dad’s voices, not shouting at each other exactly, but in their tone of voice there is a chasm, and the gap between their voices conceals all that is painful, all that the five-year-old in the chair near the water feels but does not yet have a name for.

Impossible love. The coolness of some marriages.

Does it ever get a name? That feeling?

Then she is back.

The watering can in her hand.

Plant by plant. Methodically, in a way her father the team-leader would appreciate.

I’m not hoovering, Malin thinks. Dustballs on the floor. When she used to hoover, as part of her tasks in exchange for pocket money on Saturdays, Mum would follow her round the house, checking that she didn’t knock against the furniture or door frames. When she was finished her mum would hoover again, hoovering the same places, right in front of her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

What can a child do?

What does a child know?

A child is shaped.

And then it is finished.

All the plants watered. Now they will live a bit longer.

Malin sits down on her parents’ bed.

It’s a Dux. They’ve had it for years, but would they be able to sleep in it if they knew what had happened in this bed, that this was where she lost, or rather made sure she got rid of, her virginity?

Not Janne.

Someone else.

Earlier. She was fourteen and alone at home while her parents were at a party, staying the night with friends in Torshälla.

Whatever. No matter what had happened in this bed, it wasn’t hers. She can’t walk through this apartment, alone or with other people, without a sense of loss. She gets up from the bed, forcing herself through the thick veils of longing that seem to hang in the air. What’s missing?

Her parents in pictures without frames.

In sun-loungers at the house on Tenerife. Three years since they bought it, but she and Tove have never been there.

‘You’re doing the watering?’

Of course I’m watering.

She has lived with these people, she comes from them, but even so the people in the pictures are strangers. Mum, mostly.

She empties the watering can in the kitchen sink.

There are secrets hidden in those drops, behind the green doors of the kitchen cupboards, in the freezer, rumbling away, full of last year’s chanterelles.

Shall I take a bag?

No.

The last thing she sees before she closes the door of her parents’ apartment behind her are the thick wool rugs on the floor of the sitting room. She sees them through the open double doors from the hall, average quality. They’re not as good as Mum always pretends they are. The whole room, the whole home is full of things that aren’t what they seem, veneers concealing a different veneer.