Midwinter Sacrifice (7 page)

Has the rain-sheet broken?

It’s so fucking wet. How do the millipedes cope with all these drops?

Fuck, it stings, fucking savages, fucking things up for themselves.

Don’t raise that machete against me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me, no no no and the scream is in the room outside the dream now, outside sleep, in the wakefulness of his room, in his loneliness and the dream-soaked sheets.

He sits up in bed.

The screams echo round the walls.

His hand on the fabric.

Soaking wet. No matter how cold it gets out there, it still seems to be warm enough in here for him to break into a full sweat.

Something crawls over his leg.

The last remnant of the dream, Jan-Erik Fors thinks, before he gets up to fetch a new sheet from the linen cupboard in the hall. The cupboard is an heirloom. He and Malin bought the house, in its isolated forest setting a couple of kilometres north of Linköping, not far from Malmslätt, just after Tove was born.

The floorboards creak as he moves, alone, from the bedroom and out into the rest of the house.

The dogs are barking round Börje Svärd’s legs.

For the Alsatians there is no such thing as morning cold, not even at five o’clock in the morning; they’re just happy to see him, excited about being able to run around in the garden, chasing the sticks he throws in different directions for them.

Entirely unconcerned.

Unaware of naked beaten dead men in trees. Every conversation with people in the area yesterday was fruitless. Silence and blindness. As if people were ungrateful at having senses that functioned.

Valla.

The district of detached houses built in the forties and fifties, wooden boxes with assorted extensions illustrating the way life just kept getting better and better and better; when this city still worked for ordinary people, before a factory worker was forced to get a university education to look after a robot.

But some things work.

Inside the house they’re busy with her right now, the carers. They come once late at night to turn her, then they’re there, in Börje and Anna’s house, their home, all day and long into the evening, simultaneously more and less natural than the furniture, the wallpaper and the carpets.

MS. Multiple sclerosis. A few years after they got married Anna started to slur her speech. It progressed quickly after that. And now? The disease-modifying treatments came too late for her. Not a single muscle obeys her now, and Börje is the only person who can understand what she’s trying to say.

Darling Anna.

This business of the dogs is crazy, really. But there has to be some sort of breathing hole, something that is his own, uncomplicated, full of happiness. Pure. The neighbours have complained about the kennels, the barking.

Let them complain.

And the children? Mikael moved to Australia about ten years ago. Karin moved to Germany. To escape? Almost certainly. Who could bear to see their mother like that? How do I bear it?

But you do bear it.

Love.

They may well have said that she can have a place in a home whenever you want it.

When
I
want it?

Dogs, pistols. Concentrating on the target. The firing range acts as purification.

But Anna, for me you are still you. And as long as you are still that for me, maybe you can bear to be the same for yourself.

‘And then we open the garage.’

The spoon of cereal can’t seem to find its way into the one-year-old’s mouth, and for a moment Johan Jakobsson is brusque, holding the boy’s head still with his hand and slipping the spoon into the reluctant mouth, and the boy swallows.

There.

Their terraced house is in Linghem. That was what they could afford, and as far as Linköping’s dormitory villages are concerned, Linghem isn’t the worst. Homogenous, rural, middle-class. Nothing remarkable, but nothing visibly dreadful either.

‘Toot toot, here comes the lorry.’

From the bathroom he can hear his wife brushing their three-year-old daughter’s teeth, hear her screaming and fighting, and how his wife’s voice betrays the fact that she is on the brink of losing patience.

She asked him yesterday if he was working on the man in the tree and what was he supposed to answer? Lie and say no to keep her calm or tell it how it was: Yes, I’m working on that case.

‘He looks so lonely up there in the tree,’ his wife had said. ‘Lonely,’ and he hadn’t been able to think of anything to say to that. Because you don’t get much more alone than that.

‘Brrm, brrm, here comes a Passat.’

After that she got annoyed because he didn’t want to talk about it. The children were tired, out of control, until they collapsed for the night.

The children: they make him feel wiped out, their all-consuming will makes him exhausted, so tired. At the same time, they make him feel alive and adult. Life itself seems to go on somehow alongside the family. As if the crimes they investigate have nothing to do with the children. But they do. The children are part of the social body in which the crimes have taken place.

‘Open wide . . .’

Breakfast television on in the background. The first news bulletin of the day. They mention the case briefly.

I’m going to miss these moments, Sven Sjöman thinks, taking a break from sanding down in the woodwork room in the cellar of their house in Hackefors. I’m going to miss the smell of wood in the mornings when I retire. Of course, I can carry on having that smell afterwards, but it won’t be the same when I don’t have police work ahead of me. I know that. I find meaning in shoring up the others. It’s good to have young officers like Johan and Malin who aren’t yet fully formed. I can feel I’m having some influence on them. Malin, in particular, seems to be able to take in what I say and make something of it.

He usually sneaks down to the workshop in the mornings before Elisabeth has woken up. Sand down the leg of a chair, apply some varnish. Something small and simple to get the day going before the first coffee.

Wood is simple and obvious. With his skills, he can make it do whatever he wants, in contrast to the rest of reality.

The man in the tree. The scarred corpse falling on top of one of his officers. It’s as if everything is constantly getting worse. As if the boundary of violence is advancing relentlessly and as if people in their despair and fear and anger are capable of doing anything to each other. As if more and more people feel that they’re somehow out of reach; beyond their own and that of everyone else as well.

It’s easy to get bitter, Sven thinks. If you decide to mourn the fact that all decency and honour seem to have vanished into the darkness of history.

But you can’t mourn something like that. It’s better to be happy about each new day, about the fact that consideration and solidarity still seem able to hold the worst cynicism at bay.

Masks.

All these masks I have to put on.

Karim Akbar is standing in front of the mirror in his bathroom, freshly shaven. His wife has set off for school with their eight-year-old son, just as she usually does.

I can be many people, Karim thinks, depending what the situation demands.

He pulls a face. He conjures forth anger, he smiles, looks surprised, attentive, reserved, inquisitive, watchful.

Which of all of these am I really?

How easy it is to lose your own view of yourself when you sometimes think you can be anyone at all.

I can be the tough police officer, the successful immigrant, the media manipulator, the gentle father, I can be the man who wants to cuddle up with my wife, feel the warmth of her body beneath the sheets.

Feel love.

Instead of cold.

I can be the man who pretends that the fat body in the tree never existed, but my task right now is a different one: the man who gives him justice. If only in death.

‘What have you got planned?’

Malin’s question to Janne and Tove echoes in her head.

It’s just after eight. The day is fully awake now.

So far they haven’t called from the station, but Malin is expecting the call any minute. The debacle yesterday evening at the crime-scene, when the body fell out of the tree, is on the front page of the
Correspondent
.

This whole thing is like a farce, Malin thought when she glanced through the paper fifteen minutes ago, far too tired to read it properly.

Janne is standing in the hall next to Tove. He looks tired, the skin stretched tight across his sharp cheekbones, and his tall, muscular body seems to be hanging from a swaying gallows. Has he lost weight? And aren’t those a few mute grey hairs at his temples, scattered among the otherwise so glossy amber locks?

Tove off school, a study day, early Friday pick-up instead of late. Changes of shift. A jigsaw puzzle.

She sent Janne a letter in Bosnia when she had packed her and Tove’s belongings and moved into a small flat in the city, a stop on the road to Stockholm.

‘You can have the house. It suits you much better than me, you’ve got room for your cars. I’ve never liked the countryside that much, really. Hope you’re well, and not having to witness anything awful. Or put up with anything awful. We can work out everything else later.’

His answer came on a postcard.

‘Thanks. I’ll get a mortgage when I get home and buy you out. Do as you like.’

Do as you like?

I would have liked to have things the way they were before. Back at the start. Before it all became routine.

Because there are events and days that can drive people apart, breaking points. We were young, so young. Time, what did we know of that then, other than that it was ours?

Malin thinks about his dreams, the ones he always wants to talk about when they meet, but which she can never quite bear to listen to and he can never quite articulate even when she is trying to listen.

Instead Janne’s voice: ‘You’re looking tired, Malin. Don’t you think, Tove?’

Tove nods.

‘Working too much,’ Malin says.

‘The bloke in the tree?’

‘Mmm.’

‘You’ll have your work cut out this weekend, then.’

‘Did you come in the Saab?’

‘No, I used the Volvo. It’s got winter tyres. I haven’t bothered to change the others.’

Men are car fanatics. Most of them. And Janne in particular. He has four cars in the garage next to the house. Four cars in varying stages of decay, or restoration, as he would put it. She could never stand the cars, not even at the start; she couldn’t bear what they represented. What? A lack of willpower? Or imagination? Listlessness? Crass systematic thinking. Love demands something else.

‘What have you got planned?’

‘Don’t know,’ Janne says. ‘There’s not too much you can do in this sort of cold. What do you think, Tove? Shall we rent some films and get a load of sweets and lock ourselves in? Or do you want to read?’

‘Films sound good. But I’ve got some books as well.’

‘Try to get a bit of fresh air anyway,’ Malin says.

‘Mum. That’s not up to you.’

‘We can go to the firestation,’ Janne says. ‘Play a bit of fireman’s indoor hockey. Tove, what do you think, that would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

Tove looks up at the ceiling, then adds, as if not quite daring to trust her father’s sarcasm, ‘Not in a million years.’

‘Oh well. Films it is, then.’

Malin looks tiredly at Janne, and his grey-green eyes meet hers, he doesn’t look away, he never has. When he disappears he takes his perfect physique and his soul and goes to places where someone might need the help he thinks he can’t survive without giving.

Help.

The name he has given to flight.

When the flat, the house, everything got too cramped. And then over and over again.

She gave Janne a hug when he arrived today, held him tight and he responded, he always does and she wanted to keep hold of him, pull him to her for a long time, ask him to sit out the cold snap with them here, ask him to stay.

But instead she came to her senses, found a way of breaking free of him, as if he were the one who had initiated the embrace. A way of getting her muscles to ask quietly, ‘What are you doing? We’re not married any more and you know as well as I do that it’s impossible.’

‘And what about you, have you been sleeping okay?’

Janne nodded, but Malin could see that the nod concealed a lie.

‘I just sweat so much.’

‘Even though it’s so cold?’

‘Even though.’

‘Have you got everything, Tove?’

‘Yep, everything.’

‘Make sure you get some fresh air.’

‘Mum.’

Then they’re gone. Janne will bring her back tomorrow, Saturday evening, so we can have Sunday together.

What am I going to do now?

Wait for the phone to ring? Read the paper?

Think?

No. Thinking has a way of leading you into a very tangled forest.

8

‘He died of his head injuries. The perpetrator used a blunt object, repeatedly, almost as if in a frenzy, to beat in the cranium and the face until it became the shapeless mass of flesh it is now. He was alive when he received the blows, but in all likelihood lost consciousness fairly quickly. The perpetrator or perpetrators also appear to have used a knife.’

Karin Johannison is standing beside the blue body, which is lying on the cold steel of the pathology laboratory. Arms and legs and head stick out from the trunk like lumpy, irregular stumps. The torso is cut open, with the skin and fat folded into four flaps, revealing a jumble of guts. The skull has been sawn open, dutifully, at the back of the head.

It looks methodical and haphazard at the same time, Malin thinks. As if someone had been planning it for a long time, and then lost their composure.

‘I had to let him thaw out before I could start,’ as Karin had put it over the phone. ‘But once I got started it was pretty straightforward.’

Zeke is standing quietly beside Malin, apparently unconcerned; he’s seen death many times before and realises that it’s impossible to grasp.

Karin works with death, but she doesn’t understand it. Perhaps none of us does, Malin thinks. But most of us appreciate what death can encompass. Karin, Malin thinks, doesn’t understand a lot of what everything in this basement room is actually about; here she is useful, functional, as precise as the instruments she uses in her work. As precise as the room itself.