Summertime Death (18 page)

He barks and barks and barks.

His paws digging, digging, digging.

I can hear noises, barking.

Slowly, slowly they drag me out of my dream, up, up. I want to wake up now, I want to wake up.

But I’m not going to wake up. Am I?

Am I going to wake up, Dad?

I’m stuck in something much worse, much stranger than sleep. But how did I get here?

Someone has to tell me, tell everyone, tell Mum and Dad. They must be worried; I don’t usually sleep this late. And what are those other noises? It sounds like digging, and someone, a woman’s soothing voice saying: ‘OK, Jack, OK. Come here now,’ and the barking turns into whimpering, and someone says: ‘OK, stay there, then, stay there.’

Slavenca is taking a break from the relentless selling of ice cream, ignoring the next customer, leaving the surprised woman to stand there glaring into the kiosk, at the fridge full of drinks.

Don’t be in such a rush, she thinks. If it gets even hotter you’ll buy more ice cream and drinks.

She’s put her prices up and people complain about her charging twenty kronor for a Coke, seventeen for an ice lolly.

OK, so don’t buy them, then.

Bring your own drinks with you.

But if the ice cream company gets to hear about her raised prices she won’t be allowed to sell their products any more. So what, there are other suppliers. Anyway, I ought to be in the forest with the other volunteers, tackling the flames.

And that dog over there.

He shouldn’t be barking like that, shouldn’t be there.

He’s frantic, as if there’s a bitch on heat buried by that tree.

Mad dogs. Mad men. Desire can lead to anything.

And that ugly girl who was first in the queue, she’s looking down into the hole the dog’s digging.

What on earth does she think she’s going to see?

The wet and the dark are getting thinner, and that dog barking is getting louder, the voices have died out behind the barking and am I waking up now? The light up there, and the digging, and then my view is clear, but fuzzy, grainy, as if there were soil or sand in my open eye.

Am I free now?

Can I go home?

And I see a black dog, its nose and teeth, and he’s barking excitedly and I want to get up, but my body doesn’t exist.

And the dog disappears and instead there’s a girl, the same age as me, no, younger, and her face changes, distorts, and I see her mouth form a scream and I want to tell her to stop screaming, it’s only me, waking up at long last.

My body does exist, but do I?

Slavenca rushes out of the kiosk and down towards the girl and the dog, people are rushing over, all the bathers, and the scream is contagious, yes, even the water and the trees and the cows up in the meadow seem to be screaming.

‘Out of the way,’ Slavenca says, then she’s standing on the edge of the hole, looking down.

A girl’s open eye beneath thin plastic, blue, curious.

The life gone from those eyes long before.

You poor thing, she thinks.

She’s seen a lot of eyes like that, Slavenca, and all those mute memories come back to her now, lifeless memories of a life that never happened.

On the way towards the final room

You were left to rest and wait close to purifying water.

Murdered, but perhaps not yet dead.

I know that rebirth is possible, that innocence can come back. It didn’t work with you, my earthbound angel, but it will work with someone else, because how else are the spiders’ legs to disappear, how else can I put a stop to the rabbits’ claws tearing away deep within me?

Our love couldn’t evaporate, no matter how much pain the hot summers brought with them, no matter how much the tentacles crept over our legs.

This city has masses of trees, parks and forests. I am there among the black, silvery trees. You are also there somewhere. I just haven’t found you yet.

I want to get there now, feel your breath on my cheek. I want to have you here with me.

So don’t be scared.

No one will ever be able to hurt you again.

The blue and white tape of the cordon. The steaming water of the lake in the early afternoon light, like the bare skin of the people standing in the shadows of the trees on the slope, on the other side of the tape, watching the police officers with curious, hungry eyes.

The uniforms are fine-combing the ground down towards the shore where Malin, Zeke and Sven Sjöman, together with Karin Johannison, the duty Forensics officer, are carefully freeing the body from the soil and transparent plastic. It’s unnaturally white, scrubbed, its cleansed wounds like the craters of dark, red-blue volcanoes in a dead human landscape, the greyish skin recently touched by hungry worms for the first time.

‘Careful, careful.’ Karin’s words, and they are careful, slow, keen to preserve any evidence that might be left in the location where the body was found.

Mingling with the bathers are the journalists, from local radio, television, from the papers, from the
Correspondent
. Daniel Högfeldt isn’t there, but Malin recognises the young female temp who interviewed her for a piece of coursework she was doing about crime-reporting at the journalism college back in the spring.

Where’s Daniel?

He doesn’t usually miss something like this.

But presumably even he gets Sundays off. And if that’s true, good luck to him.

The muffled sound of digital cameras.

Eyes eager to get closer, to document events so that they can be sold on.

Malin takes a deep breath.

Is it possible to get used to this heat?

No.

But it’s better than freezing cold.

Can nature self-combust as a result of events caused by human beings? Attack us in protest at all the stupid things we do to one another? In her mind’s eye Malin can see the trees on the meadow, the oaks and limes, tear their roots from the earth and furiously beat everyone to the ground with their sharp branches. Burying us with our wicked deeds.

The sweat is dripping from Zeke’s brow and Sven is panting, his heart-attack gut juddering up and down above his belt as he squats on the ground with a blank expression on his face.

‘It has to be Theresa Eckeved,’ he says. ‘It looks like she’s been wrapped in ordinary transparent bin bags.’

‘No chance of tracing them,’ Malin says.

The girl’s face scrubbed clean under the plastic, her body naked, as white as her face, almost entirely uncovered now, also scrubbed clean. There’s a deep open wound in the back of her head, and wounds as big as saucers on her arms, stomach, thighs, all cleaned and somehow trimmed at the edges, like neatly tended flowerbeds, blue-black, nurtured.

‘It’s her,’ Malin says, noting the stench of decay, no smell of bleach here. ‘I recognise her from the photographs. It’s her, no doubt about it.’

‘No doubt at all,’ Zeke agrees.

And Sven mutters: ‘Just because it’s hot as hell, surely the whole world doesn’t have to go to hell.’

Malin looks at the body.

‘It’s like someone’s cleaned her really, really carefully,’ Malin says.

‘Like someone wanted to make her, the wounds, as clean and neat as possible. Like with Josefin, only even more so.’

White skin, black wounds.

‘Yes,’ Zeke says. ‘Almost like a ritual.’

‘She doesn’t smell of bleach.’

‘No, she smells of decay,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks: You’re no older than Tove, what if it was you, Tove? What would I have done then? And then she sees herself sitting on the edge of her bed with her service pistol in her hand, raising it slowly to her mouth, ready to let a bullet explode her consciousness for ever.

Fear. You were scared, weren’t you?

You must have been scared.

How did you get there in the ground?

‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin says, and Zeke and Karin and Sven all look at her.

‘Just thinking out loud,’ Malin says. ‘How long has she been here?’

‘Considering how damp the skin is from the plastic it was wrapped in, and how the body has started to bloat in spite of the earth on top of it, I’d guess three days, maybe four. It’s impossible to say for sure.’

‘Three days?’ Zeke says. ‘She could have disappeared up to six days ago.’

‘I can’t say right now if she was moved here after she died,’ Karin says. ‘I’ll try to figure that out.’

‘So she could have been held captive somewhere for a couple of days,’ Sven says. ‘And then moved here.’

‘Someone might have seen something,’ Zeke says.

‘You think so?’ Malin says. ‘This is a pretty remote spot if you’re not here to go swimming.’

‘People, Malin. They’re always on the move, you know that as well as I do.’

Malin sees herself in the Horticultural Society Park the other night.

Did you see me then? You who did this?

You who are doing this, you’re trying to put something right, that has to be it. It must have been dark when you dragged the body down here, the trees bearing witness as you buried her in the ground. And why so close to the water where most people are? Maybe you wanted us to find her. What is it that you want from us?

‘How did she die?’ Malin asks, as an unexpectedly cold wind blows past her legs and out across the lake.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Karin replies. ‘The head injury was probably the cause of death, but as you can see there are clear strangulation marks around her neck.’

‘Sexual violence?’

‘No clear signs of penetration. But I’ll have to examine her more closely.’

Karin.

Smart, not to say driven, but her view of the dead is like an engineer looking at a machine.

‘It’ll be hard to find any forensic evidence,’ Karin says. ‘There must have been hundreds of people who came here to swim over the past few days. Any footprints or other evidence has probably disappeared by now.’

‘Unfortunately that’s all too likely,’ Sven says. ‘But the scene can probably tell us a fair bit about the perpetrator, if we just give it some thought.’

The perpetrator?

Malin thinks. You’re so sure about things, Sven. Just as sure as I am that that gut of yours is going to be the death of you if you don’t do something about it soon.

‘What do we think about a connection with Josefin?’ Malin asks.

‘They’re probably linked,’ Sven says. ‘Both girls scrubbed clean the same way. But we can’t be absolutely certain. Karin, you’ll have to check for traces of paint.’

I can see you and hear you, all you strangers, and I understand that you’re talking about me, but I don’t want to listen to your wretched words.

Wounds on my body.

Sexual violence.

Perpetrator.

Penetration?

No.

Captive, captive, dead.

Dead.

A blow to the head.

And who’s dead? Not me, I’m fourteen years old, do you hear? You don’t use words like dead about someone who’s just fourteen years old. I’ve got many years of life ahead of me, at least seventy, and I want those years.

I want them back.

Give them to me, Dad.

I refuse. Refuse.

I feel no pain and if I did have those wounds that you’re talking about then surely I’d be screaming?

But my voice.

It can’t be heard, but is audible nonetheless, and the words are different, it’s as if I’ve grown up in this dream and woken up with a new register.

Register?

I’d never use that word.

Let me be! Don’t touch me!

Let me sleep, dream myself away, let me be. What are you doing with me?

All the awful things I’ve been dreaming.

Go away, now.

Let me carry on sleeping.

I can see a face.

A woman’s face, it’s a thin, pleasant face framed with blonde hair that blends into the pale green of the trees, the blue of the sky.

She’s looking at me.

I want to get up, but it’s like I don’t exist. Don’t I exist? But if I didn’t exist, then you wouldn’t be talking about me, would you?

Malin crouching down over the girl.

One eye open, the other closed, almost pleading for sleep. The body still, almost pressed into the ground. Bruising around the neck.

The scrubbed body.

The neat, trimmed wounds.

Just like Josefin Davidsson in the Horticultural Society Park.

Sven may still have a few doubts, but it must be the same person, the same people, behind this. From now on these cases are one and the same.

Soil under the girl’s nails, the only trace of dirt.

You wanted to get away from here.

Didn’t you?

The girl in the pictures in the house in Sturefors.

Now here. A scared father trying to keep calm. An anxious mother giving them the photographs. And then what?

I promise you one thing, Theresa: I won’t give up until we’ve got him.

Or her.

Or him.

Or . . .

The mantra within Malin like a prayer, and she looks away from the girl’s single open eye and up at Sven. He’s making a plan, drawing up an internal checklist of how to move forward with this, everything that needs to be done and mustn’t be forgotten. Calling in off-duty officers, going door-to-door around every house within a two-kilometre radius, questioning all the people on the beach, today, yesterday and the day before, appearing in the media and pleading with anyone who might have seen something, the removal of the body, the wait for Karin’s report, informing the parents . . . telling them this unbearable news.

Malin knows whose job that will be. Sometimes they have someone with them when they break news like that, a priest or a counsellor, but often they do it themselves. And who knows how long it might take to rustle up a priest in the dog days of summer?