Midwinter Sacrifice (37 page)

Tove comes out of the kitchen.

‘Mum’s made spaghetti with home-made pesto. Do you like garlic?’

‘Last summer we rented a house in Provence. There was fresh garlic growing in the garden.’

‘We mostly go on day trips in the summer,’ Malin says, then quickly: ‘Shall we sit down straight away? Or would you rather have something to drink first? A Coke, perhaps?’

‘I’m quite hungry,’ Markus says. ‘I’d be happy to eat now.’

Malin watches him shovelling it in. He’s trying to resist, to behave the way his parents must have tried to tell him, but Malin can see how he keeps losing the battle with teenage hunger.

‘I think I might have overdone the parmesan . . .’

‘This is great,’ Markus says. ‘Really good.’

Tove clears her throat. ‘Mum. I’ve been thinking about what Grandad said. It sounds great. Really good. But couldn’t Markus come too? We’ve spoken to his parents and they can get him a ticket.’

Hang on now. What’s this?

Then she sees herself and Janne before her. She’s fourteen, him sixteen. They’re lying on a bed in an unidentified room, fingers on the buttons of each other’s clothes. How shall we ever manage to be apart from each other for more than a couple of hours? The same feeling in Tove’s eyes now.

Expectant, but with a first suspicion that time is finite.

‘Good idea,’ Malin says. ‘They’ve got two extra bedrooms.’

Then she smiles. A teenage couple in love. With her mum and dad. On Tenerife.

‘It’s fine with me,’ she says. ‘But we’ll have to ask Grandad.’

Then Markus says, ‘Mum and Dad would like you to come to dinner some time soon.’

Help.

No. No.

Doctors’ coats and a stuck-up woman around a table. Practised handshakes. Apologies.

‘How lovely,’ Malin says. ‘Tell your parents that I’d love to come.’

When Markus has gone Malin and Tove are sitting at the kitchen table. Their bodies become black silhouettes reflected in the window facing the church.

‘Isn’t he sweet?’

‘He’s very well behaved.’

‘But not too much.’

‘No, Tove, not too much. But enough for you to watch out for him. The well-behaved ones are always the worst when it comes down to it.’

‘What do you mean, Mum?’

‘Nothing, I’m just rambling, Tove. He’s fine.’

‘I’ll call Grandad tomorrow.’

An internal alarm clock rings and Malin is awake, wide awake, even though the clock on the bedside table says it’s 2.34 and her whole body is screaming for rest.

Malin twists and turns in bed, trying to get back to sleep, and she manages to shut out all thoughts of the investigation, of Tove, Janne and everyone else, but sleep still won’t come.

Have to sleep, have to sleep.

The mantra makes her more awake each time she thinks it, and in the end she gets up, goes out into the kitchen and drinks some milk directly from the carton, thinking how cross she used to get when Janne did that, how she thought it was disgusting and utterly uncivilised; and in another house, outside Linköping, Janne is lying awake and wondering if he’s ever going to stop dreaming and then, to get rid of his memories of the jungle and the mountain roads, he conjures up Malin’s and Tove’s faces in his mind’s eye and becomes calm and happy and sad, and thinks that only the people you really love can arouse such contradictory feelings inside you, and he pretends that his daughter is lying there, thinks about how she’s growing away from them, that he never wants to let her go; and in the flat in the city Malin is standing beside Tove’s bed and wondering if things could ever have been different or if everything was, is, already predetermined somehow.

She wants to stroke Tove’s hair.

But maybe that would wake her up? Don’t want to wake you, Tove, but I do want to hold you tight.

The early morning meeting was postponed yesterday, ‘No point if you aren’t here, Fors,’ as Sven Sjöman said over the phone.

The others’ breath is hanging heavy in the meeting room and they all seem more alert than her.

Maybe because they’ve had the results from the forensics lab?

The rubber bullets in Bengt Andersson’s flat were fired from the small-bore rifle found in Niklas Nyrén’s flat, and Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s fingerprints were found on the weapon.

‘So there we have it,’ Sven says. ‘We know who fired the shots through Bengt Andersson’s window. Now Malin and Zeke can put some real pressure on our little tough guys and see if they’re hiding anything else. Get hold of them as soon as you can. They ought to be at school at this time of day.’

Then Malin tells them what she’s found out about the Murvall line of inquiry.

She can sense Karim Akbar’s scepticism as she explains the connection between Cornerhouse-Kalle and the family. So what if he was Karl Murvall’s father, what does that matter? What does it give us that we don’t already have? That we don’t already know?

‘Murvall’s a dead-end. We’ve got new paths to explore. We need more to go on with the Æsir angle; there must be something on the hard drive. Johan, how are you getting on with that? I see, you’ve got past the password, and found a load of protected files.’

But Malin persists: ‘It makes Karl Murvall Bengt Andersson’s brother. Something that presumably even he doesn’t know.’

‘If the old boy in Stjärnorp is telling the truth,’ Karim says.

‘We can easily check. We’ve got Bengt’s DNA, and we can take a sample from Karl Murvall, and then we’ll know.’

‘Steady on,’ Karim says. ‘We can’t just run round taking a load of integrity-compromising samples just because of what one man says. Especially if its significance for the investigation is, to put it mildly, questionable.’

After they had eaten last night she had called Sven and told him what Weine Andersson had revealed.

Sven had listened intently, and she didn’t know if he was pleased or irritated that she was working on her own angle on a Sunday. But then he said, ‘Good, Fors, we aren’t done with that line of inquiry yet. And the Murvall brothers are still in custody, under arrest for the other offences.’

And perhaps that’s why he now says, ‘Malin, you and Zeke can go and talk to Karl Murvall again, see what else he knows. He has an alibi for the night of the murder, but try to find out if he knows anything about this. He may have been lying about how much he knew last time you spoke to him. Start with that, and then go and put some pressure on Kalmvik and Svensson.’

‘And the DNA test?’

‘One thing at a time, Malin. Pay him a call. See what you get. And the rest of you, look under every single stone, try to find angles and corners in this case that we haven’t considered so far. Time is passing and you all know that the more time passes, the less chance there is of us catching the perpetrator.’

Zeke comes up to her desk.

He’s angry, the pupils of his eyes are small and sharp.

Now he’s annoyed that I went off without him yesterday. Isn’t he ever going to get used to it?

‘You could have called me, Malin. Do you think Karl Murvall knows about this? About Cornerhouse-Kalle?’

‘I’ve been wondering about that. He might know, but not properly, if you get what I mean.’

‘You’re too deep for me, Fors. Okay, let’s get out to Collins and have a chat with him. It’s Tuesday, he ought to be there.’

57

Collins Mechanics AB, outside Vikingstad.

The tarmac car park stretches about a hundred metres from the edge of a dense forest to a security lodge and the heavy boom blocking the only opening in a ten-metre-high fence crowned with perfect coils of barbed wire.

The company supplies components to Saab General Motors. One of the few successful companies on the plain, three hundred people work on the automated construction of car parts. Just a few years ago there were seven hundred, but it is impossible to compete with China.

Ericsson, NAF, Saab, BT-Trucks, Printcom: they have all cut back or disappeared completely. Malin has noticed the changes that happen to areas when manufacturing industry is shut down: violent crime increases, as does domestic abuse. Despair is, contrary to what many politicians might say, a close neighbour of the fist.

But after a while everything reverts in a peculiar way to how it was before. Some people get new jobs. Others are put on training courses or forced or persuaded to take early retirement. They become either artificially necessary, or finished, and end up on a fault-line, on the edges of the society that the Murvall family wants no part in, at any cost. Other than on their own terms.

The realisation that one is used up, Malin thinks. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to be faced with that conclusion. Being unwanted, unneeded.

Beyond the impenetrable fence lie windowless, hangar-like white factory buildings.

It looks like a prison, Malin thinks.

The guard in the lodge is dressed in a blue Falck uniform, and his face lacks any distinct boundary between cheeks, chin and neck. In the middle of all that skin, creation deigned to introduce a couple of grey, watery eyes that stare sceptically at Malin as she holds up her police ID.

‘We’re looking for a Karl Murvall. I gather he’s IT manager here.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘It doesn’t matter what purpose,’ Zeke says.

‘You have to state—’

‘Police business,’ Malin says, and the watery-eyed man looks away, makes a call, nods a couple of times before hanging up.

‘You can go to main reception,’ he says.

Malin and Zeke walk along the road leading to the entrance. They walk past enclosed production halls, a walk of several hundred metres, and halfway along there are a couple of open doors; worn pulleys hang in their hundreds from beams in the roof, as if they have long been idle and are just waiting to be used. A revolving etched-glass door beneath a ceiling held up by metal beams leads into the reception area. Two women are seated behind a mahogany counter; neither of them appears to notice their arrival. On their left is a broad marble staircase. The room smells of lemon-scented disinfectant and polished leather.

They walk up to the counter. One receptionist looks up.

‘Karl Murvall is on his way down. You can wait on those chairs over by the window.’

Malin turns round. Three red Egg armchairs on a brown carpet.

‘Will he be long?’

‘Only a minute or so.’

Karl Murvall comes down the staircase twenty-five minutes later, dressed in a grey jacket, yellow shirt and a pair of too short dark blue jeans. Malin and Zeke get up when they catch sight of him and go to meet him.

Karl Murvall holds out his hand, his face expressionless. ‘Detective Inspectors. To what do I owe this honour?’

‘We need to talk in private,’ Malin says.

Karl gestures towards the armchairs. ‘Here, perhaps?’

‘Maybe a conference room,’ Malin says.

Karl Murvall turns round and starts to walk up the stairs, looking over his shoulder to make sure Malin and Zeke are following him.

He taps in a code on the lock of a glass door, and it slides open to reveal a long corridor.

Inside one of the rooms they pass can be heard the loud, whirring sound of fans behind a frosted-glass door. A dark shadow behind the door.

‘The server room. The heart of the whole operation.’

‘And you’re responsible for that?’

‘That’s my room,’ Karl Murvall says. ‘I’m in control in there.’

‘And that was where you were working the night Bengt Andersson was murdered?’

‘That’s right.’

Karl stops at another glass door, taps in another code. The door slides open, and round a ten-metre-long oak table are a dozen black Myran chairs, and in the middle of the table a dish of shiny red winter apples.

‘The committee room,’ Karl says. ‘This should do.’

‘Well?’

Karl Murvall is sitting opposite them, his back pressed against his chair.

Zeke squirms on his.

Malin leans forward. ‘Your father wasn’t a sailor.’

The expression on Karl Murvall’s face doesn’t change, not one single muscle tenses, no anxiety in his eyes.

‘Your father,’ Malin continues, ‘was a Ljungsbro legend by the name of Karl Andersson, also known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Did you know that?’

Karl Murvall leans back. Smiles at Malin, not scornfully, but an empty, lonely smile.

‘Nonsense,’ he says.

‘And if that’s true, then you and Bengt Andersson are, I mean, were, half-brothers.’

‘Me and him?’

Zeke nods. ‘You and him. Didn’t your mother ever tell you?’

Karl Murvall clenches his jaw. ‘Nonsense.’

‘You don’t know anything about this? That your mother had a relationship with Cornerhouse—’

‘I don’t care who was my father or not. I’ve left all that behind me. You have to accept that. You have to appreciate how hard I’ve had to fight to get where I am today.’

‘Can we take a DNA sample from you so that we can compare it with Bengt Andersson’s? Then we’d know for sure.’

Karl Murvall shakes his head. ‘It’s just not interesting.’

‘Really.’

‘Yes, because I know. You don’t need to do any tests. Mum told me. But because I’ve tried to leave my other half-brothers and their life behind me, I really don’t care about any of that.’

‘So you are Bengt Andersson’s half-brother?’ Zeke asks.

‘Not any more. Now he’s dead. Isn’t he? Was there anything else? I have another meeting I need to get to.’

On the way back to the car Malin looks over at the edge of the dark forest.

Karl Murvall didn’t want to talk about his stepfather, didn’t want to talk about what it was like growing up in Blåsvädret, didn’t want to say anything about his relationship with his brothers, his sister. ‘Not another word. You’ve got what you wanted. What do you know about what it’s like being me? If there’s nothing else you want to know, duty calls.’

‘But Maria?’

‘What about Maria?’

‘Was she as kind to you as she was to Ball-Bengt? Kinder than Elias, Adam and Jakob? We understand that she was kind to Bengt. Did she know that you were his half-brother?’

Silence.

Karl Murvall’s grey cheeks, little twitches at the corners of his mouth.