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.