Summertime Death (43 page)

‘Someone has a hell of a lot to hide,’ she says, and Zeke smiles, his whole face radiating confidence.

They drive out to the pool at Glyttinge in silence.

Slavenca’s kiosk appears to be empty, and from the front it looks as though it’s closed for good. In the car park the smell of smoke is very noticeable, the wind is coming from the north-west, blowing the charred smell towards them, particle by particle.

The owner of the Glyttinge pool.

Hakan Droumani.

A man in his fifties of Mediterranean appearance, his accent hard to pin down. He’s very cheerful, business booming in a summer like this, offering Malin and Zeke coffee in the pool’s little café, in the same building as the changing rooms with a view of the main pool.

Quick questions, answers.

‘Yes, her name’s Elisabeth. Surname? No idea. If I know anything about her? No. Her company is Water Technology, Linköping, Ltd . . . cash, always cash, that’s fine by me, of course, no account number on the invoices, but business accounts cost money so I suppose she’s trying to cut costs . . .’

By the pool stands a woman in a burka, ready to jump in.

Hakan Droumani laughs.

‘That’s the only full clothing I allow.’

‘You’ve never had any reason to call her? Like back in June, for instance, when there was a problem with the water?’

‘She called me. Health and Safety leaked it to the
Correspondent
before they said anything to me. But otherwise I’ve never had any reason to call her.’

Malin makes another call to directory inquiries, to the woman in the tax office: ‘doesn’t exist . . . sorry . . .’

‘Where do we go from here?’

Malin puts her mobile in her pocket and looks questioningly at Zeke. All around them in the car park outside the Glyttinge pool people are walking slowly past, on their way to or from cool relief.

‘We can try Vera Folkman’s flat again.’

Zeke’s voice full of certainty. He’s turned Malin’s theory about how things are connected into a truth, even though they don’t know that yet.

‘OK,’ Malin says. ‘If Vera Folkman is this Elisabeth.’

‘It could be a matter of urgency,’ Zeke says.

And they look at each other, two detectives made scruffy by the summer, feeling how violence is approaching, how they’re being drawn towards its core, the eye of the hurricane, the ultimate eruption of the volcano.

She feels her stomach tighten.

That isn’t fear.

But she doesn’t manage to convince herself.

Zeke puts a hand on her shoulder.

‘Relax, Malin,’ he says. But not even Zeke’s voice can reach deep enough inside her to suppress her anxiety.

Now you’re going into the library.

Thousands of books in there, sentences, words, characters, each one more meaningless than the last, each story more mendacious than the last.

But you love books, don’t you?

Their spines, the escape they offer.

You can’t escape.

I’ll be waiting here for you.

Are you going to go through the park?

Or along the road?

My cleansing angel.

My summertime angel.

I shall bring life to you, that’s what I’ll do.

Tove loves the library.

The nice new one that was built after the old one burned down one cold January night.

She loves all the space above the books, and how the greenery outside takes over the room through the huge windows facing Slottsparken, and the smell of old books, a bit musty but still full of excitement and dreams, suggesting that the planet and all the life on it can be made clear; the smell of mystery, enticing but also, in some indefinable sense, dangerous.

She’s sitting in one of the black Egg chairs that are lined up facing the park, immersed in
The Great Gatsby
again, in the parties and Jay and Daisy’s passion, so different from her and Markus’s infatuation that never turned into love. Unless it’s going to?

Am I going to regret it?

And try to recreate a feeling that might never really have existed?

She must have read the book five times now. Precocious was how her Swedish teacher described her essay in school.

Sure.

She can sit here for hours, vanishing among the words, watching the day turn to afternoon, then early evening. Nice weather outside, but then it always is.

Outside in the park some dark-skinned men in green overalls are raking up leaves, they’ve given up early this year, the leaves.

Turning the pages.

Do a bit of reading before I go home and get something to eat.

Zeke’s finger on the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. The heat in the stairwell is oppressive, the glass in the windows seems to bow and it feels as if hungry flames are rising from the floor and trying to burn the skin of Malin’s legs.

No answer, and they stand silently in front of the door for a while. A smell of decay.

‘Shall we break in?’

Malin says the words more as a challenge than a question, doesn’t want to leave any room for doubt.

‘We can’t, Malin. You know that.’

‘So what are we going to do, then? How the hell are we going to find her? She’s like mist, smoke, a shadow. Whatever you like.’

‘Calm down, Malin. Just calm down.’

‘Sorry. It’s this heat, it’s driving me mad.’

‘Let’s go back to the station. See what we can come up with. We need a meeting.’

‘OK. Let’s do that.’

Before she gets in the Volvo Malin calls Tove, wants to find out what she’s doing, check that she’s OK.

A birch tree provides a bit of shade and in the car Zeke reaches for the cold-air vent by the rear-view mirror.

Tove answers after just one ring.

‘Mum, I’m in the library reading. You’re lucky I forgot to switch my phone off. You’re not supposed to have them on in here, but I don’t think I’ve disturbed anyone.’

‘Aren’t you with Markus?’

‘I broke up with Markus today.’

You didn’t tell me, Malin thinks, even if I saw it coming, why didn’t you tell me, Tove? And she wants to reprimand her daughter, ask: why didn’t you tell me you were going to break up? But when could she have told me?

There’s never any time.

Hence Tove’s silence, her secrecy.

And because of something else. Another explanation that makes Malin’s gut ache, an explanation that she shies away from.

Malin had been expecting them to break up, but so suddenly?

But perhaps things like that always happen suddenly? Like a revelation?

‘Mum, are you there? I said I broke up with Markus today.’

‘Was he upset?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it rough?’

‘I don’t know, Mum, I felt relieved afterwards.’

‘Tove, let’s talk more this evening. I’ll see you at home.’

There are so many books, Tove thinks as she walks through the bookcases in her hunt for something to take out. And so little time to read them.

She pulls out a book from the shelf, it’s called
Prep
, American, about a school for rich kids.

Tove has read about it in a magazine.

It’s supposed to be good, and five minutes later she leaves the library with the book in her hand.

Food?

I’m not hungry, and Mum won’t be home and it’s no fun eating alone.

The men in overalls with rakes have left the park, and the shadows under the trees over by the car park towards the castle looks inviting.

I’ll lie there and do some reading, Tove thinks. What else am I going to do?

You’re coming closer to me now.

Am I really going to be so fortunate that you’re going to lie down in the grass under the oak tree, in the shade, so close to me?

You’re steering your bicycle towards me.

I can go up to you if you’re lying there, just five metres away, and I can take you with me. No one need notice anything.

Tove leans her bike against the tree, looks over at the car park but doesn’t notice the van, half hidden as it is behind some low bushes. She’s longing to get into the book, among the words and letters, into the fiction.

She takes her towel out of her bag, lays it out on the grass and lies down on her side, opens the book and starts reading.

The sounds of the city in the background. The siren of an ambulance, cars, and the hum of a choir of hundreds of ventilation units. The indistinct sound of voices.

A sliding door opening.

Soon the sounds of the city are stifled by the rhythm of the words in her head.

I’m heading towards you now.

No one can see anything, it’s early afternoon but we’re alone here, and I’m going to take you.

No one by the castle, or the county administration office, or in the park.

Or on the path to the library, or inside the big glass windows, and I am approaching your rebirth. I shall take you with me to him for the final act.

They’ll say that I’m mad.

And maybe I am not really myself.

But I shall do this now.

Fill you with nothing.

The tarmac of the car park becomes grass under my feet, I’m close to you now, we’re sharing the shade. The ether in my hand, a soaked rag, and my white clothes are spotless and you don’t hear me and I’m kneeling on your orange towel, putting the rag over your nose.

What’s this?

A sharp, bitter smell and something damp burning against her nose and Tove twists around, but her body doesn’t want to, why doesn’t her body want to, and in the corner of her eye she can see a white figure, feeling the weight of someone’s arm and the edges of the world start to dissolve and I’m sleepy, so sleepy, but I can’t fall asleep here, not here, not now, and I can feel something dragging me over the grass, then something harder, tarmac? And then my sight disappears and the world becomes a dream before everything goes black and cold, dreamless and empty.

Before the world becomes mute, wordless, and therefore ceases to exist.

The heavens quake.

And as if in an enchanting dream, full of whiteness, she reaches out one hand against a transparent white film, and feels the film tremble before she pulls her hand back, resting, dreaming herself still in the world, nightmaring herself alive again.

Fire is everywhere.

It’s jumping from treetop to treetop, thundering as it tears everything in its path into burning fragments.

This summer is hot.

But the hell in the forest is even hotter. Slowly the fire has spread down towards Lake Hultsjön, and Janne and his colleagues have their backs to the lake, their hoses snaking through the vegetation, zigzagging through the still living soil down to the warm water of the lake, where generators are driving great pumps.

He slept on the floor of the fire engine last night, in the empty space where the hoses are usually kept, the night singing all around him, crackling and rumbling and stinking of smoke, of cremated animals and insects, of soil turned to ash.

The flames an unquiet wall some hundred metres away from them. Approaching faster and faster. Human beings against fire, fire against human beings.

He’s wet with sweat, feels like tearing off his clothes and fleeing the heat into the water of the lake.

The fire is the beast.

They stand firm, sticking their gushing knives right into its throat.

Afternoon meeting.

Karim Akbar clears his throat and looks around the meeting room with empty eyes, perhaps trying to find a dancing mote of dust in the air to focus on.

Malin has just outlined her suspicions about Vera Folkman, about the pools, about the false information about her company, a company that may not even exist. She’s explained that they haven’t been able to find her, that she’s ‘like the smoke from the forest fires, you can’t see it, but you know it’s there’.

‘We’ve got her flat under surveillance,’ Sven Sjöman says from his chair beside Zeke. The blinds are open, the playground behind them deserted, the nursery still closed for the summer. ‘Does anyone have any other ideas of how to get hold of her?’

‘We don’t even know if this Elisabeth is actually Vera Folkman,’ Karim says.

‘We’ll have to assume that she is,’ Malin says.

‘We’re keeping an eye out for white vans,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s what she drives. But there are loads of them in the city.’

‘And we’re checking to see if there are any registered companies with similar names,’ Malin says.

‘Any other ideas?’ Sven says once more. ‘We haven’t got enough to go into her flat, you know that, Malin. Even if the smell might suggest that she’s maltreating animals in there.’

Malin thinks: it’s starting to fit, Sven, the voices of this case are telling us that, aren’t they? And then the other maxim:
It’s desire that kills
.

Waldemar Ekenberg and Per Sundsten are silent.

Silent as only police officers who’ve caught a scent of the truth in a meeting room can be.

‘We spoke to the last sex offender on the list this morning. Nothing,’ Per says.

‘As much of a dead-end as Suliman Hajif and Louise Svensson. And Slavenca Visnic, she’s been busy with her kiosks, although apparently they lost her this morning.’

‘And she drives a white van,’ Per says. ‘So in theory Slavenca Visnic could be this Elisabeth.’

‘We saw the interior of her van in the forest,’ Malin says. ‘She didn’t have anything in there that could be connected to pool maintenance. No chemicals, nothing. And the manager at Glyttinge would have recognised her from the kiosk outside.’

‘Check again, just to make sure,’ Sven says. ‘You take that, Sundsten.’

Then Waldemar’s voice, full of scepticism: ‘Could a woman really have done this? Dildo or not? Doesn’t this go against a woman’s nature?’

‘Prejudice,’ Malin says. ‘There’s no shortage of female thugs and sex offenders in the past, and most of them were the victims of abuse themselves, just like Vera Folkman.’

‘And Slavenca Visnic,’ Per says.

‘I think we should put the squeeze on Suliman Hajif again,’ Waldemar says, but no one has the energy even to comment on his suggestion, and Malin shuts out the others’ voices, thinking about what it must be like to be Vera Folkman, thinking about synchronicity, how the pools and all the other connections in the case could be coincidence. And maybe Vera Folkman isn’t even this Elisabeth?