Midwinter Sacrifice (32 page)

‘So you want to send the fragments of clothing to England?’

‘Yes. Can you see that they get to Karin Johannison at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science?’

‘It really ought to go through official channels.’

‘Tell that to Maria Murvall.’

‘We’ve got the samples in the archive. Karin will get them today.’

‘Thanks, Sven.’

Just as Malin hangs up Karin passes her in her car. Malin stops her.

Karin winds down the window.

‘You’ll be getting some material today, from Nordström in Motala. Get it to Birmingham as soon as you can. It’s urgent.’

‘What is it?’

‘Maria Murvall’s clothes. Or the remains of them.’

Margaretha Svensson is tired when she opens the door of her flat. There is a smell of coffee from the kitchen and she doesn’t seem surprised to see Malin and Zeke again, just gestures to them to come in and sit down at the kitchen table.

Is Niklas Nyrén here? Malin thinks, but if he was he would probably be sitting at the table or in the living room already. He would have been visible by now.

‘Would you like coffee?’

Malin and Zeke stop in the hall once they’ve shut the door behind them.

‘No thanks,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got a couple of quick questions.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Do you know what your son was doing yesterday evening and last night?’

‘Yes, he was at home. He and I had dinner with Niklas, then we all watched television together.’

‘And he didn’t go out at all?’

‘No, I know that for certain. He’s asleep upstairs at the moment. You can wake him and ask him.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Zeke says. ‘Is Niklas here now?’

‘He’s gone home. Went late last night.’

‘I’ve asked him to call me, I left messages.’

‘He told me. But he’s been so busy with work.’

A murder investigation, Malin thinks. A fucking murder investigation and people can’t even be bothered to call back. And they complain that the police are slow? Sometimes Malin wishes that people understood that the police are only the last link in a network covering the whole of society, where everyone, each and every one of us, has to do their bit to hold things together.

But everyone relies on everyone else doing their bit. And do nothing themselves.

SEP, as it’s called in
Life, the Universe and Everything
: Somebody Else’s Problem.

‘What do you think?’ Zeke asks as they head back to the car.

‘She’s telling the truth. He was at home last night. And Jimmy Kalmvik would hardly have done it on his own. Next stop the farmer.’

The group of buildings on a field a few kilometres outside Klockrike is covered in snow and cold, and the surrounding clusters of birches and a lovely dry-stone wall provide only slight protection for the garden in front of the newly built farmhouse.

The house is constructed of sandstone, with green shutters over the windows. In front of the porch, painted Mediterranean blue, stands a Range Rover.

It ought to smell of lavender, thyme and rosemary, but instead it smells of ice. At the end of the avenue leading to the house is a gate where someone has put up a sign saying: ‘Finca de Hambergo’.

The green-painted door of the house opens and a man in his forties with bleached hair puts his head out.

‘Thanks for coming so quickly. Come in.’

The ground floor of the house is a single open room, hall, kitchen and living room in one. When Malin sees the stone walls, the patterned tiles, the open kitchen cupboards, terracotta floor and earth colours, she feels transported to Tuscany or Majorca. Or Provence, maybe?

She’s only been to Majorca, and the buildings didn’t look like this. The flats where she and Tove were staying looked more like an overblown version of the council blocks in Skäggetorp. But nonetheless, she knows from interior design magazines that this is what the dream of the south looks like for a lot of people.

Dennis Hamberg notices them staring.

‘We wanted it to look like a mixture of an Andalusian
finca
and an Umbrian villa. We moved here from Stockholm to start an organic farm. We really wanted to move further away, but the kids needed a Swedish school, so they’re at secondary school in Ljungsbro. And my wife got a good job as head of PR for Nygårds Anna in Linköping. I went through a hell of a lot in the nineties and just wanted some peace and security.’

‘Where are your family now?’

‘In town, shopping.’

And you’ve got the urge to talk to someone, way out here on a desolate winter plain, Malin thinks.

‘And the break-in to the barn?’

‘Of course. Follow me.’

Dennis Hamberg pulls on a black Canadian Goose parka and leads them across the yard to a red-painted barn, and points to the marks left by a crowbar in the door frame.

‘This is where they got in.’

‘More than one?’

‘Yes, there are loads of footprints inside.’

‘Okay, we’ll have to try not to stand on them,’ Zeke says.

Prints from trainers and heavy boots. Military? Malin wonders.

In the barn there are several cages of rabbits. There’s a single lamb in a pen, and in a square of concrete a black sow lies suckling something like ten piglets.

‘Iberico. Pata Negra from Salamanca. I’m going to make ham.’

‘This was where they took a pig?’

‘Yes, they took one of the young ones. A lamb too.’

‘And you didn’t hear anything?’

‘Not a sound.’

Malin and Zeke look round, then go back out into the yard, followed by Dennis Hamberg.

‘Do you think there’s any chance I’ll get the animals back?’ he says.

‘No,’ Zeke says. ‘They were found hanged in a tree outside Ljung this morning.’

The muscles in Dennis Hamberg’s face seem to wither away instantly, his whole body shudders, then he pulls himself together and tries to get a grip on something that seems completely incomprehensible.

‘What did you say?’

Zeke repeats what he said.

‘But things like that don’t happen here.’

‘It looks like they do,’ Malin says.

‘We’ll be sending out a forensics team to conduct a search.’

Dennis Hamberg looks across the fields, pulling his hood over his head.

‘Before we moved here,’ he says, ‘I never knew how windy it could get. Sure, it’s windy in Egypt, on the Canary Islands, in Tarifa, but not like this.’

‘Do you have a dog?’ Malin asks.

‘No, but we’re going to get cats before summer.’ And then Dennis Hamberg thinks for a moment before asking, ‘The animals, will I have to identify them?’

Malin looks away, over the fields, and can hear from Zeke’s voice that he’s suppressing a laugh.

‘Don’t worry, Dennis,’ he says. ‘We can assume the animals are yours. But if you’d like to identify them, I’m sure that can be arranged.’

49

Börje Svärd clenches his fists in his pockets, feeling something approaching, something intangible. It’s there in the air he breathes, and he recognises it. It’s a feeling that something’s about to happen, that an event has meaning for him in a way that goes far beyond his understanding.

The condensation on the windscreen increases with every breath.

The owner of the Dobermann, according to the tax register, is called Sivert Norling, and he lives at 39 Olstorpsvägen in Ljungsbro, on the side of the river where the roads lead up towards the forests near Hultsjön. It only took a few minutes to find out the owner’s name, thanks to some helpful people in Stockholm.

Start with this.

The whole of his police instinct feels it. Closest, most possible. Skoglöf and Valkyria Karlsson will have to wait.

And now he and Johan Jakobsson are there. He wants to see what the bastard looks like, if it was the owner who did it. Either way, you have to keep a closer eye on your dog than to let a group of nutters get hold of it.

The whitewashed wooden house is squeezed in between other similar seventies constructions. The apple and pear trees are fully grown and in the summer the hedges are presumably tall enough to stop prying eyes.

‘No point waiting,’ Börje says. ‘You never know. We might be getting close.’

‘So how are we going to do it?’ Johan wonders.

‘We ring the bell.’

‘Okay. That would be a start.’

They get out of the car, open the gate in the fence and go up the steps. Ring the bell.

They ring three, four times before they hear sluggish steps inside the house.

A lad in his late teens opens. He’s wearing black leather trousers, has long black hair hanging over pierced nipples. His skin is as white as the snow in the garden and the cold doesn’t seem to bother him.

‘Yeah?’ he says, and looks blearily at Börje and Johan.

‘Yeah?’ Börje says. ‘Are you Sivert Norling?’ he asks, holding up his police ID.

‘No, that’s the old man.’

‘And you are?’

‘Andreas.’

‘Can we come in? It’s cold out here.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Your dog. A Dobermann. Is it missing?’

‘I haven’t got a dog.’

‘According to the tax office you do.’

‘It’s the old man’s dog.’

Johan looks at the boy’s hands. Small dots of red.

‘I think you’d better come with us,’ he says.

‘Can I put a top on?’

‘Yes—’

Without warning the boy takes a step back and slams the door with full force.

‘Shit,’ Börje shouts, rattling the door. ‘You check the back and I’ll take the front.’

They draw their weapons, split up, sticking close to the wall, their jackets catching on uneven planks.

Johan crouches, creeps under the windows along the terrace; the stained green planks creak beneath his feet. He reaches his arm up and tests the handle of the terrace door.

Locked.

Five minutes pass, then ten. Silence from inside the house, no one seems to be moving in there.

Börje sticks his head up, tries to see through the window into what must be a room. Darkness within.

Then Börje hears a noise from the door beside the garage, and it flies open and the boy races out with something black in his hand. Shall I take him? Börje has time to think, but he doesn’t shoot him, instead starts chasing the boy as he sprints off down the road between the houses.

Börje chases the boy towards the centre of town and the Motala River, then into a street off to the left. There are children playing in a garden. His heart is racing fit to burst but with every step he gets a bit closer.

The boy is growing in his vision in front of him. The gardens seem to get bigger then smaller in turn to each side of him. His shoes drum on the gritted streets, left, right, left. The boy must know these streets like the back of his hand.

Tired now.

They’re both running slower.

Then the boy stops.

Turns round.

Aims the black thing at Börje, who throws himself to the ground, towards a heap of snow.

What the fuck is he doing, the idiot, does he know what he’s forcing me to do?

The heaped snow is sharp and cold.

Before him Börje Svärd sees his wife, motionless in bed, his dogs, excitable as he approaches their run; he sees the house and the children far away in distant countries.

He sees a boy before him, holding a gun aimed at him.

Torturing dogs. A child. The Dobermann’s taped-up mouth.

Fingers closed around a trigger. The boy’s, his own.

Aim for the leg. The shin. Then he’ll go down, and there’s no vein to tear open so he won’t bleed to death.

Börje fires and the sound is short and powerful and before him on the road the boy collapses, as if someone had pulled his legs out from under him.

Johan heard the noise from the front of the house and rushed round.

Where did they go?

Two directions.

Johan runs upwards and then left. Are they round that corner?

Heavy breathing.

Cold in his lungs, then he hears the shot.

Shit.

And he runs towards the direction of the sound.

And he sees Börje creeping towards a body lying in the middle of the gritted street. Blood is running from a leg, a hand clawing at the snow, reaching for the wound. The boy’s black hair like an array of shadow on the white snow.

Börje gets up, kicks something black away from the body.

Then the body starts to make a noise; a scream of pain, despair and fear, maybe also confusion, cuts through the walls of the residential area.

Johan runs up to Börje.

‘He stopped and took aim at me,’ Börje pants through the screaming. Then he points at the weapon in the snow. ‘A fucking plastic replica. The sort of thing you can buy from a thousand websites. But how the hell was I supposed to see that?’

Börje crouches down next to the boy, says, ‘Take it easy now. It’ll get sorted.’

But the boy carries on screaming, holding his leg.

‘We have to get an ambulance out here,’ Johan says.

Malin looks out over the empty playground.

Thinks: What’s going on round here? Why is all this happening now? She doesn’t know why, but maybe it’s because a breaking point has been reached, and something is collapsing right now, in a torrent of violence and confusion.

Young people.

Drifts of confused young people.

And it doesn’t seem to fit.

‘They’ve operated on him. We’ll talk to him later.’ Sven Sjöman’s weary voice. ‘His dad confirms that it was their dog, that he bought it for the boy.’

‘What else did the father have to say?’ Zeke asks.

‘That the boy wasn’t at home last night, that he’s spent the last few years living in a world of computer games, Internet, death metal and, as his father put it, “a general interest in the occult”.’

‘Poor sod,’ Zeke says, and Malin can see that he seems to be reflecting. Maybe he’s getting a bit of sensible perspective and thinking that his anxieties before Martin’s matches are ridiculous, that he knows his worries are silly and that he really ought to get over them, once and for all. There are ten thousand dads in Linköping who’d love to have a son like Martin. And when’s the next home match?