Midwinter Sacrifice (22 page)

The child holding out its arms to its mother, to a nursery-school assistant.

Look after me, carry me.

Of course I’ll carry you.

I won’t just abandon you
.

‘Mum, I was thinking of staying at Dad’s tonight, is that all right?’

Tove’s message on her mobile. Malin listens to the message as she walks through the open-plan office.

Malin calls her.

‘It’s Mum.’

‘Mum, you got my message.’

‘I got it. It’s okay. How are you getting out there?’

‘I’ll go down to the station. His shift ends at six, so we can head out then.’

‘Okay, I’m probably going to be working late anyway.’

Sjöman’s words at the meeting: ‘I’ve already called them in for questioning. If the whole Murvall family doesn’t turn up here tomorrow, we can go and get them. But we haven’t got enough for a search warrant as far as the guns are concerned.’

When she ends the call to Tove, Malin calls Janne. Gets the answering service.

‘Is it right that Tove’s staying the night at yours? Just checking.’

Then she sits down behind her desk. Waits. Sees Börje Svärd hesitantly twisting the ends of his moustache on the far side of the room.

32

The façade of the main building of Ljungsbro school is matt grey, the low, dark-red-tiled roofs are covered by a thin layer of snow; small swirls of frozen moments, circular patterns etched on to several of the larger surfaces.

They park by the craft rooms, aquariums for handicrafts in a row of single-storey buildings along the road leading into town.

Malin looks into the rooms, empty, with dormant saws, lathes, firing and welding equipment. They walk past what must be a technology room; pulleys and chains hanging from the ceiling, one by one, as if ready for use. When she looks in the other direction she can just make out Vretaliden care home, and in her mind’s eye she sees Gottfrid Karlsson sitting in his bed, under an orange health service blanket, quietly driving her on: ‘What happened to Bengt Andersson? Who killed him?’

Malin and Zeke walk to the main building, past what must be the school dining room. Inside the frosted windows the staff are scrubbing pans and work surfaces. Zeke pulls open the door of the main entrance, eager to escape the cold, and in the large, airy space some fifty pupils are all talking at once, their breath fogging the windows on to the school grounds.

No one pays any attention to Malin and Zeke, their attention utterly absorbed by the conversations that belong to teenage life.

Tove’s world.

This is what it looks like.

Malin notices a thin boy with long black hair and an anxious look, talking to a pretty blonde girl.

On the far side of the room a sign above a glass door announces: Head’s Office.

‘Vamos,’ Zeke says as he catches sight of the sign.

Britta Svedlund, head of Ljungsbro school, has them shown in at once, perhaps the first time the police have been to the school in her time here.

But probably not.

The school is known to be problematic, and every year several of its pupils are sent to reform school, somewhere far out in the countryside, for further education in low-level criminality.

Britta Svedlund crosses her legs, her skirt riding up her thighs, revealing an unusual amount of black nylon, and Malin notes that Zeke has trouble controlling his eyes. He surely can’t imagine that the woman in front of them is beautiful, cigarette-wrinkled, worn and grey-haired as she is.

The male curse, Malin thinks, trying to get comfortable on her chair.

The walls of the office are lined with bookcases and reproductions of Bruno Liljefors paintings. The desk is dominated by an antiquated computer.

After listening to Malin and Zeke’s explanation of why they are there, Britta Svedlund says, ‘They’re leaving this spring, Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson, Jimmy and Jocke; they’ve only got a couple of months left and it’ll be a relief to be rid of them. Every year we have a few rotten eggs, and we get to send a few of them away. Joakim and Jimmy are craftier than that. But we do what we can with them.’

Malin and Zeke must have succeeded in looking curious, because Britta Svedlund goes on: ‘They never do anything illegal, or if they have, they’ve never been caught. They come from stable backgrounds, which is more than you can say about a lot of pupils at this school. No, what they do is bully people, students and staff alike. And they’re competitive. I swear that every lamp that gets broken in this school has been kicked in by them.’

‘We’ll need their parents’ phone numbers,’ Zeke says. ‘Home addresses.’

Britta Svedlund taps on her keyboard, then writes down their names, addresses and numbers on a piece of paper.

‘Here you are,’ she says, handing the note to Malin.

‘Thanks.’

‘And Bengt Andersson?’ Zeke asks. ‘Do you know about anything they may have done to him?’

Britta Svedlund is suddenly defensive. ‘How did you hear about this? I don’t doubt that it’s correct. But how do you know?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t tell you that,’ Malin replies.

‘To be honest, I don’t care what they get up to outside these walls. If I cared about what the students get up to in their own time, I’d go mad.’

‘So you don’t know,’ Zeke says.

‘Precisely. But what I do know is that they don’t play truant more than the exact amount that means they still get their grades, which are actually surprisingly good.’

‘Are they at school at the moment?’

Britta Svedlund taps at her keyboard.

‘You’re in luck. They’ve just started their woodwork class. They don’t usually miss that one.’

Inside the woodwork room there is a smell of fresh sawdust and scorched wood, with a background note of varnish and solvent.

When they walk into the room the teacher, a man in his sixties with a grey cardigan and matching grey beard, leaves one pupil at a lathe and comes over to meet them.

He holds out a hand covered in shavings and sawdust, then pulls it back with a smile, and Malin notices his warm blue eyes, which have evidently not lost their sparkle with age. Instead he raises his hand in a welcoming wave.

‘Well,’ he says, and Malin picks up a strong smell of coffee and nicotine on his breath, classic teacher’s breath. ‘We’ll have to greet each other like Indians. Mats Bergman, woodwork teacher. And behind me we have class 9B. I take it you’re from the police? Britta called and said you were on your way.’

‘That’s right,’ Malin says.

‘So you know who we’re looking for. Are they here?’ Zeke says.

Mats Bergman nods. ‘They’re right at the back, in the paint room. They’re working on a design for the petrol tank on a moped.’

Behind the teacher Malin can see the paint room. Squeezed into a corner, grey-green tins of paint on shelves behind shabby glass walls, two boys inside. They’re sitting down, so Malin can only see their blond hair.

‘Are they likely to be a problem?’ she wonders.

‘Not in here,’ Mats Bergman says, smiling again. ‘I know they can be rowdy outside, but they behave themselves in here.’

Malin pulls open the door to the glass-box paint room. The boys look up from their stools, their eyes dull at first, then watchful, tense and anxious, and she looks down at them with all the authority she can muster. A red skull painted on a black petrol tank.

Bullies?

Yes.

Shooters?

Possibly.

Murderers?

Who knows? She’ll have to leave that question open.

Then the boys get up; they’re both well-built, a head taller than her, both dressed in saggy hip-hop-style jeans and hooded jackets with designer logos.

Spotty teenage faces, they’re oddly similar in their puppyish look, bony cheeks, noses a bit too big, suggesting nascent lust and an excess of testosterone.

‘Who are you?’ one of them asks as he gets up.

‘Sit down,’ Zeke snarls behind her. ‘NOW!’

As if hit by a collapsing ceiling he is pressed back down on to the paint-spattered stool again. Zeke shuts the door and they leave a dramatic pause before Malin says, ‘I’m Malin Fors, from the police, and this is my colleague Zacharias.’

Malin pulls her ID from the back pocket of her jeans.

She holds it out to the boys, who are now looking even more anxious, as if they’re worried that a whole ocean of misdemeanours has caught up with them.

‘Bengt Andersson: we know you tormented him, bullied him and made fun of him. We want to know all about that, and what you were doing on the night between last Wednesday and Thursday.’

Terror in the boys’ eyes.

‘So who’s who? Jimmy?’

The one dressed in a blue hoodie nods.

‘Okay,’ Malin says. ‘Start talking.’

The other boy, Joakim Svensson, starts to make excuses. ‘What the fuck, we were just having a laugh. Cos he was so fat. Nothing wrong with that.’

Jimmy Kalmvik goes on: ‘He was, like, completely fucked up, chasing after balls every match. And he stank. Of piss.’

‘And that made it okay for you to torment him?’ Malin can’t hide the anger in her voice.

‘Sure.’ Jimmy Kalmvik grins.

‘We’ve got witnesses who say you vandalised Bengt Andersson’s home, and that you attacked him with stones and water-bombs. And now he’s been found murdered. I can take you in to the station here and now if you don’t talk,’ Malin says.

She falls silent and lets Zeke continue: ‘This is murder. Can you get that into your thick skulls?’

‘Okay, okay.’

Jimmy Kalmvik throws out his arms and looks at Joakim Svensson, who nods.

‘Attacked him? We threw stones at him, and we cut off the power to his flat, and sure, we put shit through his letterbox, but now he’s dead anyway so what does it matter?’

‘It might matter a very great deal,’ Zeke says in a calm voice. ‘What’s to say you didn’t go too far one day? That you got too close. That there was a fight. And you just happened to kill him? Try to see it from our side, boys. So what were you doing on Wednesday night?’

‘How would we have got him out there?’ Joakim Svensson says, then goes on: ‘We were at Jimmy’s, watching a DVD.’

‘Yeah, my mum was at her bloke’s. Dad’s dead so she’s got a new one. He’s all right.’

‘Can anyone confirm that?’ Malin asks.

‘Yes, we can,’ Joakim Svensson says.

‘No one else?’

‘Do you need anyone else?’

Teenage boys, Malin thinks. They switch between arrogance and fear in a matter of seconds. A dangerous mixture of overblown self-assurance and doubt. But still: Tove’s Markus seemed very different. What would Tove make of these two? They’re not exactly heroes in the Jane Austen mould.

‘You silly little sod,’ Malin says. ‘Murder. Got it? Not torturing cats. Of course we need it confirmed, you can be fucking sure of that. What did you watch?’

‘
Lords of Dogtown
,’ the two boys answer at once. ‘Fucking good film,’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘It’s about blokes who are as sound as we are.’

Joakim Svensson grins.

‘And we’ve never tortured any cats, if that’s what you think.’

Malin looks over her shoulder.

Outside the lathes and sanders and saws are in action as if nothing has happened. Someone is hammering frenetically at a box-like construction as she turns to face the boys again.

‘Have you ever fired a gun at Bengt Andersson’s flat?’

‘Us? A gun? Where would we have got that from?’

Innocent as lambs.

‘Are you interested in the Æsir belief-system?’ Zeke asks.

And they both look nonplussed. Stupid, or guilty, impossible to tell which.

‘Interested in what?’

‘The Æsir belief-system.’

‘What the fuck’s that?’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘Believing in
asses
? Yeah, I believe in them.’

Full-blown chauvinist pigs, when they’re scarcely out of short trousers. Noisy, rowdy. But dangerous?

‘Torturing cats? So he blabbed, Unning,’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘The little shit. He’s so fucking useless.’

Zeke leans over to him, his eyes looking like a snake’s. Malin knows what that looks like. She hears his voice, its gruffness as cold as the night approaching outside the windows.

‘If you touch Fredrik Unning I will personally see to it that you have to eat your own entrails. Shit and all. Just so you know.’

33

‘Yes, she can stay over.’

Janne’s text arrives at 20.15. Malin is tired, on her way home in the car from the gym at work, obliged to clear her head after a day full of too much human crap.

They went back to the station after talking to Ljungsbro’s bullies, and in the passenger seat beside Zeke she summarised the situation to herself.

Bengt Andersson is teased and bullied and possibly more than that by testosterone-charged little bastards. We’ll have to talk to their parents tomorrow. See where it comes from. Nothing to get them on so far. The offences against Bengt Andersson that they admitted to stopped being chargeable with his death, and may have been youthful mischief as much as anything else.

The shots through the living-room window.

Æsir nutters out on the plain. The murder apparently carried out as a heathen ritual.

And then the Murvall family casting its large shadow across the whole investigation. Weapons in a gun cabinet.

Maria Murvall silent and mute, raped. By whom? Bengt?

Malin wanted to answer no to that question. But knew that she couldn’t yet close any doors in any direction, to any room. Instead she had to try to get an overview of something impossible to get an overview of. Listen to the voices of the investigation.

What else was still to emerge from the darkness of the plain, the forests?

‘Yes . . .’

She sees the first word of the text.

Her concentration leaves the road for a few moments.

Yes.

We made that promise to each other once, Janne, but we didn’t manage to find a way through what lay before us. How over-confident can you get?

Malin parks and hurries up to the flat. She fries a couple of eggs, sinks into the sofa and turns on the television. She gets stuck on a programme about some excitable Americans competing to build the most perfect motorbike.