Midwinter Sacrifice (20 page)

What am I? Malin thinks.

A country girl?

Not out of love. Maybe out of obligation.

30

As the song on the radio ends, the phone on Malin’s desk rings.

‘That’s a bit quick,’ Zeke says.

‘Could be anything,’ Malin says. ‘Doesn’t have to be about the case.’

The phone seems to vibrate on its next ring, demanding to be taken seriously.

‘Malin Fors, Linköping Police.’

Silence on the line.

Breathing.

Malin makes a quick gesture to Zeke, holding up her hand.

Then a gruff voice that’s only recently broken: ‘I was the one with the computer game.’

Computer game? Malin ransacks her memory.

‘Playing Gnu Warriors.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You came to ask me about—’

‘Now I remember,’ Malin says, and sees Fredrik Unning sitting in the basement of the smart house, joystick in hand, sees the father looking at his son, aloof.

‘Yes, I asked you if there was anything else we ought to know.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I heard on the radio.’

The same fear in his voice now as there was in his eyes then. A quick, fleeting feeling, gone as soon as it appeared.

‘And you know something?’

‘Can you come out here, you and that other bloke?’

‘We’re heading out towards Ljungsbro later today. It may take a while, but we’ll be there.’

‘No one needs to know, do they? That you’re coming?’

‘No, we can keep this between us,’ Malin says, thinking, It depends on what you’ve got to say, of course. And it strikes her how easily she is prepared to lie outright to a young person, as long as it helps the investigation. And she knows she would hate to be treated like that. But still she says, ‘This is just between us.’

‘Okay.’

Then a click, and Zeke’s curious expression on the other side of the desk.

‘Who was that?’ he says.

‘Do you remember Fredrik Unning? The teenager playing computer games in that posh house?’

‘What, him?’

‘Yes, he’s got something to tell, but we’ll do the Murvalls first. Don’t you think?’

‘Murvalls,’ Zeke says, gesturing towards the door. ‘Now what could be troubling young Unning?’

‘When you cross this road property prices sink by thirty per cent,’ Zeke says, as they turn off at a deserted Preem garage on to the road leading to the collection of houses that goes by the horribly appropriate name of Blåsvädret, ‘windy weather’. The cold crackles through the melancholy outside the car. The chill seems to twist in the wind, picking up snow from the dead drifts, throwing it in transparent waves across the windscreen.

‘God, it’s windy,’ Malin says.

‘And the sky is white.’

‘Shut up, Zeke. Just shut up.’

‘I love it when you use platitudes, Malin, I just love it.’

An eerie place. That’s the immediate feeling.

Good to have Zeke alongside. Because if anything happens, he can switch in a fraction of a second. Like when that junkie whipped out a syringe and held it to her neck. She didn’t even have time to see what was happening, but Zeke lashed out and knocked the syringe from the junkie’s hand. Then she saw Zeke kick the man to the ground and carry on kicking him in the stomach.

She had to drag Zeke off to stop him.

‘Don’t worry, Fors, it’ll look like a couple of punches. But it’ll hurt more. He was trying to kill you, and we can’t have that, now, can we?’

Another, even more powerful, gust.

‘God, this is weird, there was hardly any wind on the main road. What is this?’

‘Blåsvädret is a Bermuda triangle,’ Zeke says. ‘Anything can happen here.’

One single street.

Blåsstigen, ‘windy way’.

Five red-painted wooden houses on one side, garages and workshops on the other, one breezeblock building with drawn blinds. Another larger whitewashed house further on at the end of the road, almost invisible through the swirling snow.

The houses in Blåsvädret that aren’t inhabited by the Murvall family are silent, their owners presumably at work. The clock on the dashboard says 11.30, almost lunchtime, and Malin feels her stomach rumble.

Food, please, not coffee.

The Murvall brothers live next to each other. The last two wooden houses and the breezeblock building are theirs, the white house their mother’s. The windows of the wooden houses are dark, and car wrecks are randomly strewn about the plots, half covered by snow and ice. But there are lights on behind the blinds of the brick building. A broken, bowed, black iron-railing rocks in the wind. The workshop opposite has heavy, rusty metal doors, and in front of it stands an old green Range Rover.

Zeke stops the car.

‘Adam’s house,’ Zeke says.

‘Okay, let’s see if he’s at home.’

They do up their jackets, get out. More wrecked cars. But not like Janne’s. These are wrecked beyond salvation; no loving hand will ever try to fix them up. In the drive is a green Skoda pick-up. Zeke peers at the back, running his glove through the snow, shakes his head.

The wind is howling beyond words, great angry gusts, with hidden little bursts of Arctic chill that easily and nonchalantly push through the fabric of their jackets, the wool of their jumpers.

Sand on the concrete steps. The bell doesn’t work and Zeke bangs on the door, but the house is silent.

Malin looks in through the green glass of the door. Vague shapes of a hallway, children’s clothes, toys, a gun cabinet, mess.

‘No one at home.’

‘Probably at work at this time of day,’ Malin says.

Zeke nods. ‘Maybe they’ve gone straight.’

‘It’s odd,’ Malin says, ‘do you see how the houses seem to belong together somehow?’

‘They’re one and the same,’ Zeke says. ‘Not physically, but if houses have souls, then these share one.’

‘Let’s go to the mother’s house.’

Even though the white wooden villa is just seventy-five metres down the road, it’s impossible to make out anything but the outline, and the white wood that occasionally shimmers through the surrounding whiteness.

They walk towards the house.

As they get close the gusts of snow and chilly haze disperse and they see that the whole garden is full of mature apple trees. Their branches sway darkly in the wind, and Malin breathes in through her nose, closing her eyes briefly and trying to pick up the smell of apple blossom and fruit that must be here in spring and autumn.

But this world is scentless.

She opens her eyes.

The building’s façade has settled and the crooked wood seems tired, yet somehow still defiant. Light is streaming through the windows.

‘Looks like Mum’s home,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes,’ Malin says, but before she can say more she is interrupted.

A man, tall and with at least a week’s worth of stubble around a well-defined mouth. He’s dressed in green overalls, and has opened the door of the white house. The man is standing on the porch and staring askance at them.

‘And who the fuck are you two? If you take another step on this property I’ll get my shotgun and blow your brains out.’

‘Welcome to Blåsvädret,’ Zeke says with an expectant smile.

‘We’re from the police.’

Malin holds up her ID as they approach the man on the porch.

‘Can we come in?’

And now she sees them.

All the people, the family watching them through the windows of the white house: tired women, children of various ages, a woman in a shawl with deep-set black eyes, a sharp nose and thin white hair draped over the shiny skin of her cheeks. Malin looks at the faces, the half bodies behind the windows, and thinks that it’s as if the bits of these people that she can’t see had grown together. That this family’s thighs, knees, shins and feet were bundled together, inseparable, different, yet somehow superior.

‘What do you want with us?’ The man on the porch throws the words at them.

‘And who do we have the honour of talking to?’

Zeke’s bluntness seems to have an effect.

‘Elias Murvall.’

‘Okay, Elias, let us in. Don’t leave us standing out here in the cold.’

‘We don’t let anyone in.’

From the house comes a sharp female voice, the mark of someone used to getting her own way.

‘Let the police in, now, boy.’

Elias Murvall steps aside, follows them into the hall, where they are hit by the smell of burned cabbage.

‘And you can take your shoes off.’ The woman’s voice again.

The hall is full of winter coats, garishly coloured children’s jackets, cheap padded jackets, an army raincoat. Ahead of her Malin can see a living room: period furniture on Wilton rugs, reproductions of Johan Krouthén’s sun-drenched Östgöta meadows. A misplaced computer screen of the latest, thinnest design.

Malin pulls off her Caterpillar boots, feeling exposed in her bare socks among these people.

The kitchen.

Around an enormous table laid for lunch in the middle of the room sits what must be the whole Murvall family, silent and expectant, more people than she saw in the windows, no longer grown together. Malin counts three women with small children, babies in their arms, children of various ages on other chairs; shouldn’t some of them be at school? Home schooling? Or are they still too young?

Two more men in the room, one with a neatly trimmed beard, the other clean-shaven. They’re dressed in the same sort of overalls as Elias who let them in, and they have the same powerful appearance. The clean-shaven one, who looks youngest, must be Adam. He is knocking a napkin on the table as if the tabletop were a door, his eyes such a dark blue that they are almost black like his mother’s. The middle brother, Jakob, thinning hair, sitting in front of the stove, his gut showing through his overalls, looks at them with hazy eyes, as if he’s encountered thousands of police officers who wanted something from him, all of whom he’s told to go to hell.

The mother is standing by the stove. The short, thin old woman is dressed in a red skirt and grey cardigan. She turns towards Malin.

‘On Wednesdays my family gets cabbage bake.’

‘Nice,’ Zeke says.

‘What do you know about that?’ the mother says. ‘Have you ever tasted my cabbage bake?’

At the same time she points with one hand at Elias, gesturing as if to say, Sit down at the table. Now!

Several of the children lose patience, jump down from their chairs and run out of the kitchen into the living room, then up the stairs.

‘Well?’ The old woman stares at Malin, then at Zeke.

Zeke doesn’t hesitate, in fact he even smiles slightly as he tosses the words into the room: ‘We’re here on account of the murder of a Bengt Andersson. He was one of the people questioned in connection with the rape of your daughter, Maria Murvall.’

And Malin, in spite of the incident the words refer to, feels a glow inside. This is what it should be like. Zeke is entirely unbowed, heads straight to the heart of the hornets’ nest. Commands respect. I forget sometimes, but I know why I admire him.

No one round the table moves.

Jakob Murvall leans languidly across the tabletop, takes a cigarette from a packet of Blend and lights it. A baby in one of the women’s laps whimpers.

‘We don’t know anything about that,’ the woman says. ‘Do we, lads?’

The brothers round the table shake their heads.

‘Nothing.’ Elias grins. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Your sister was raped. And someone who was questioned during the investigation has been found dead,’ Zeke says.

‘What were you all doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’ Malin asks.

‘We don’t have to tell you a fucking thing,’ Elias says, and Malin thinks that he says the words in an exaggeratedly tough voice, as if he doesn’t want to look weak in front of the others.

‘Well, yes you do, actually,’ Zeke says. ‘Your sister—’

Adam Murvall heaves himself up, throws out his arms and shouts across the table, ‘That bastard could very well have raped Maria. And now he’s dead, and that’s a fucking good thing.’

The colour of his eyes shifts from blue to black as he spits out the words.

‘Maybe she can get some peace now.’

‘Boy, sit down.’ The mother’s voice from the stove.

Now several of the babies are crying, and the women try to comfort them, and Elias Murvall pulls his brother down on to his chair.

‘That’s better,’ their mother says when silence has fallen once again. ‘I think the bake is ready now. And the potatoes.’

‘The old Æsir beliefs,’ Malin says. ‘Do you follow them?’

Scattered laughter from the adults round the table.

‘We’re proper men,’ Jakob Murvall says. ‘Not Vikings.’

‘Do you have guns in the house?’ Malin asks.

‘We’ve all got hunting rifles,’ Elias Murvall says.

‘How did you get licences for them, with your records?’

‘What, the sins of our youth? That’s a long time ago.’

‘Have you got a small-bore rifle?’

‘What guns we’ve got is none of your business.’

‘So you didn’t use a short-bore rifle to fire through the window of Bengt Andersson’s flat?’ Malin asks.

‘Has someone fired through his window?’ Elias Murvall says. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be too bothered about that now, will he?’

‘We’d like to see your gun cabinet,’ Zeke says. ‘You do keep your guns in one, I presume? And we’ve got a lot of questions. We’d like to talk to you one by one. Either here and now, or down at the station. Your decision.’

The women are all looking at me, Malin thinks. Their eyes are trying to work out what I want, as if I might try to take something away from them that deep down they don’t really want anyway, but which they would defend to the death.

‘You can call my boys in for questioning. And if you want to see the gun cabinet you’ll have to come back with a warrant,’ the old woman says. ‘But right now, the Murvall boys are going to eat, so you can leave now.’

‘We’ll be wanting to talk to you as well, Mrs Murvall,’ Zeke says.

Rakel Murvall lifts her nose towards the ceiling. ‘Elias, show the police officers out.’

Malin and Zeke are standing in the cold outside the house, looking back at the façade, and the shapes behind the ever more fogged windows. Malin thinks how nice it is to have her shoes back on again.