Summertime Death (3 page)

Malin looks in front of her, as St Larsgatan forms a straight line out of the centre of the city, only turning when it reaches the edge of the smartest district, Ramshäll.

Hasse and Biggan live there, Markus’s parents. Close to the hospital, both of them doctors.

The light turns green and Malin pedals onwards.

The beer and tequila from last night have left no trace in her body. Nor has Daniel Högfeldt. He crept out while she was asleep, and if she knows him at all he’ll be in the newsroom now, cursing the lack of news, waiting for something to happen.

Malin cycles past the medical school, hidden behind leafy maples, and a hundred metres off to the right, at the end of Linnégatan, she can make out the Horticultural Society Park. Beyond the school the buildings thin out, making way for a car park, beyond which lies the Hotel Ekoxen, generally regarded as the best in the city. But Malin turns the other way, down towards the entrance of the Tinnerbäck Swimming Pool. Tinnis, as the pool is known locally, opens at seven, and in the car park by the entrance there are just two cars. An elderly red Volvo estate and an anonymous white van, possibly a Ford.

She jumps off her bike, parks it in the stand beside the doors, and takes her bag from the rack on the back.

There’s no one at the desk by the turnstile.

Instead there’s a note on the smeared glass: ‘The pool opens at 7.00 a.m. Free entry before 8.00 a.m.’

Malin goes through the turnstile. The sun is just creeping above the stands of the Folkungavallen Stadium further down the road, hitting her in the face, and in just a few seconds the relative cool of morning is forced out by an angry heat.

Before her Malin sees the twenty-five-metre pool, the abandoned indoor pool, the bathing area in the lake and the grass slopes surrounding it. Water everywhere. She longs for the water.

The changing room smells variously of mould and disinfectant.

She pulls her red bathing suit over her thighs, feeling how taut they are, and thinking that her exercise regime is holding the years at bay, and that there can’t be many thirty-four-year-olds in better shape. Then she gets up, pulling the bathing suit over her breasts, and the touch makes her nipples stiffen under the synthetic fabric.

She shakes her arms. Pulls the goggles out of her bag. Too warm in the gym at the station these days. Better to swim.

She takes her wallet, pistol and mobile and goes out of the changing room towards the outdoor pool. She walks past the showers. She doesn’t want to shower even though she knows those are the rules, prefers the first water to touch her skin to be the water she’s going to be swimming in.

No holiday until the middle of August.

Her colleagues are taking their well-earned breaks now, in July, most of them, apart from Zeke and the duty officer and Detective Inspector Sven Sjöman.

Johan Jakobsson is with his wife and children at her family’s summer place by some lake outside Nässjö. Johan had a pained look on his face when he outlined his plans for the summer to Malin in the police-station kitchen.

‘Mother- and father-in-law have built another two little cottages, one for us and one for Petra, Jessica’s sister. With their own kitchen and bathroom, the whole works. Everything so that we don’t have a legitimate excuse not to go.’

‘Johan. You’re thirty-five. You should be able to do what you want.’

‘But Jessica loves it there. Wants the kids to have their own childhood memories of the place.’

‘Lots of arguments?’

‘Arguments? Like you wouldn’t believe. My mother-in-law is the most passive-aggressive person you can imagine. The victim mentality comes completely naturally to her.’

Johan had taken a gulp of his hot coffee, far too large a gulp, and was forced to spit it out in the sink when he burned his mouth.

‘Fuck, that was hot.’

Just like the summer.

Malin steps out onto the narrow concrete path that leads down to the banked seats that in turn form a staircase down towards the pool, feeling her bathing suit cut in between her buttocks.

Börje Svärd.

His wife, Anna, who has MS, is in a respite ward at the University Hospital. Three weeks away from the villa she had furnished with her assured taste, three weeks in a hospital room, entirely dependent on strangers. But dependency is nothing new for her, completely paralysed for years.

Börje himself on a much longed-for hunting trip in Tanzania, Malin knew he’d been saving up for it for several years.

She also knew that he had left his dogs at a kennels up on Jägarvallen, and it was the dogs he had chosen to talk about when he gave her a lift home one Friday evening towards the end of June.

‘Malin,’ he had said, his waxed moustache twitching. ‘I feel so damn guilty about leaving the dogs.’

‘Börje. They’ll be fine. The kennels in Jägarvallen has a good reputation.’

‘Yes, but . . . You can’t just leave animals like that. I mean, they’re like members of the family.’

In the weeks before he left, Börje’s body seemed to shrink under the weight of guilt, as if it were already regretting going.

‘Anna will be fine as well, Börje,’ Malin had said as they pulled up outside the door on Ågatan. ‘She’ll be well looked after at the University Hospital.’

‘But they don’t even understand what she says.’

She’d had the words ‘try not to worry about it’ on the tip of her tongue, but left them unsaid. Instead she had silently put her hand on Börje’s arm, and at the usual morning meeting the next day Sven had said:

‘Go, Börje. It’ll do you good.’

Börje, who would usually have been annoyed by a remark like that, had leaned back in his chair and thrown out his arms.

‘Is it so obvious that I’d rather not go?’

‘No,’ Sven had said. ‘It’s obvious that you should go. Go to Tanzania and shoot an antelope. That’s an order.’

Malin is down at the pool now, her nostrils full of the smell of chlorine. She walks along the long side towards the end where the starting blocks look like grey sugar lumps above the flaking black lane-markers. Beyond the pool stands a line of tall elms, their leaves yellowing, and she’s still alone at the pool, presumably none of the other people left in the city has the energy to get up so early?

Karim Akbar.

Police Chief.

Not as controversial in his choice of holiday as his choice of career. He, his wife and their eight-year-old son have rented a cottage outside Västervik. Three weeks’ holiday for Karim. But not really a holiday. He’s told Malin that he’s going to write a book about integration based on his own experiences, while his wife and son take day-trips and go swimming.

Malin already knows what the book will be about: the little Kurdish boy in the far too cramped flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall. The father who committed suicide in his despair at being excluded from society. The son who takes revenge by studying law and becoming the youngest police chief in the country, the only one from an immigrant background. Articles in the press, appearances on television discussion programmes.

Malin climbs up onto the starting block. She likes swimming in the middle of the pool, where she isn’t troubled by the swell at the edges. She crouches down and carefully puts her towel and mobile down on the asphalt, hiding her pistol inside the towel and pulling on her goggles before getting ready to dive in.

Degerstad would be back from his course up in Stockholm in early September. Andersson is still off sick.

Malin stretches her ankles, feeling her body get ready to split the surface of the water, as her unconscious checks off every muscle, organ, cell and drop of blood from a list that is as long as it is quickly ticked off.

Muscles tensing. And off.

She doesn’t hear the mobile phone ringing, angrily announcing that something has happened, that Linköping has been woken from its hot summer lethargy.

One arm forward, the other back. Breathing every fifth stroke, swimming eighty lengths of the twenty-five metre pool, that’s the plan.

She vaults at the end of the first length, enjoying the response of her body, the fact that the hours in the gym at the station are showing results, the feeling that she is in control of her body, and not the other way around.

Of course it’s an illusion.

Because what is a human being if not a body?

Her body like a bullet in the water, the bathing suit like a red flash of blood. The surrounding buildings and trees as vague images when she breathes, otherwise not there at all.

She approaches the end, the first circuit of forty almost over, and she tenses her body for another turn when she hears a voice, a calm deep voice that sounds insistent.

‘Excuse me, sorry . . .’

She wants to swim, doesn’t want to stop and talk to anyone, answer any questions, wants to use her body and escape from all thought, from all . . . yes, what, exactly?

‘Your mobile . . .’

Could have been Tove. Janne.

She slows down instead of turning, her hands on the metal steps of the ladder.

A distant voice between her quick breaths, a face dark against the sun.

‘I’m sorry, but your mobile was ringing when I walked past.’

‘Thanks,’ Malin says as she tries to catch her breath.

‘Don’t mention it,’ the voice says, and the large, dark figure disappears, seeming to shrivel up in the sunlight blazing behind it. Malin heaves herself out of the pool, sitting on the edge with her feet still in the water. She reaches for her mobile over on the towel.

It’s waterproof, a fairly basic model.

Zeke’s number on the display.

A new message received.

Doesn’t feel like listening to it.

Zeke answers on the third ring.

‘Malin, is that you?’

‘Who else?’

‘The Horticultural Society Park,’ Zeke says. ‘Get there as fast as you can. You’re fairly close, aren’t you?’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Don’t know exactly. We got a call here at the station. See you at the playground up by Djurgårdsgatan as soon as you can get there.’

The words take the chill of the water from her body. Sun and heat, the tone in Zeke’s voice.

The cracks in the ground are opening up, Malin thinks. The time of glowing worms has arrived.

Malin hurries to the changing room with her towel around her neck, the wet footprints left by her feet on the concrete of the steps drying before she gets there.

She tears off the bathing suit, giving up any idea of showering off the chlorine from the pool. She puts on some deodorant but doesn’t bother to comb her hair. She pulls on her skirt, her white blouse, the holster and jacket and the white sneaker-style shoes.

Through the turnstile.

Onto the bicycle.

Breathing.

Now.

Now something is happening.

What’s waiting for me in the Horticultural Society Park?

Something has happened, that much is clear. Zeke’s words before he hung up, quickly telling her about the call received at the station fifteen minutes earlier, put through to his desk from reception, how the gender-neutral voice at the other end of the line had been indistinct, upset: ‘There’s a naked woman in the Horticultural Society Park, she’s sitting in the summerhouse by the playground. Something terrible must have happened.’

A naked woman.

In the largest park in the city.

The person who called hadn’t said anything about how old the woman was, nor whether she was alive or dead, nothing about anything really. A patrol had probably got there by now.

Maybe a false alarm?

But Malin could tell from Zeke’s voice that he was sure something serious was going on, that evil was on the move again, the indefinable dark undercurrent that flows beneath all human activity.

Who made the call?

Unclear. A panting voice.

No caller number had been indicated on Zeke’s phone, or out in reception.

Malin heads for the gate to the park beside the Hotel Ekoxen, cycling past the entrance to the hotel bar. They mostly have bus-loads of German tourists at this time of year, and as Malin rides past the dining room she can see the elderly Germans swarming around the breakfast buffet.

Over by the park’s open-air stage the large lawn is surrounded by fully grown oaks, and the park is a regular venue for sixth formers’ drunken parties in the spring. Malin imagines she can still pick up the smell of alcohol, vomit and used condoms. Down to the right is the summerhouse, which was built on the site of the park restaurant that burned down long ago.

The white paint of the patrol car is like a shimmering mirage further up the park.

Cycle faster.

She can feel the violence now. Has been in its vicinity often enough to recognise the traces left by its scent.

The patrol car is parked by the little summerhouse at the foot of a small hillock. Beside the car is an ambulance. In the background Malin can make out white blocks of flats with walkway balconies, and through the trees she can just make out a yellow stuccoed building from the turn of the century.

She folds out the bike’s footrest.

Takes in the scene. Makes it her own.

Close to her, behind a green-stained wooden fence, there are swings made of car tyres. There is a patch of sand with a climbing frame and three small spring-loaded rocking horses that look like cows. A sandpit.

Two uniformed police wearing outsized pilot glasses, beefy Johansson and rotund Rydström, wandering back and forth on the grass beyond the sandpit. They haven’t seen her yet, as she’s hidden by the patrol car as she approaches.

Comatose.

They should have heard her. Or noticed the paramedics waving in greeting from the bench where they are sitting on either side of an orange, blanket-wrapped bundle. A thickset older man, she knows his name is Jimmy Niklasson, and a young girl, blonde, around twenty or so.

She must be new.

Malin knows they’ve been having trouble finding women. A lot fall by the wayside on the physical tests.

Niklasson looks at Malin, worried.

The orange figure, the person between them on the bench.