To Zeke: ‘And what took you so bloody long?’
‘I ran out of petrol. As luck would have it I was only a couple of hundred metres from the Statoil garage. I haven’t run out of petrol for years. It’s this damn heat.’
‘The heat?’
‘It stops your brain working.’
‘True enough. I hope we don’t miss too much in this investigation.’
Malin told him what she knew, what she had seen in the summerhouse, then they went down there again together and now Zeke is standing beside her in the unwalled room, his thin face full of doubt.
‘We don’t know for sure if she’s been raped?’
‘No, but everything points towards that, don’t you think?’
‘Yes . . .’
‘And that it could have happened in those bushes.’
Zeke nods.
‘Or else someone hurt her somewhere else and left her here. God, it’s hot in here. Weird.’
‘I’d like you to talk to her,’ Malin says. ‘See if you can get her to say anything. I’ve got a feeling that we’re only going to be able to get her to talk here, nowhere else.’
The back of the ambulance is open.
A figure wrapped in an orange blanket sitting on a stretcher, the young paramedic close, so close, as if she will never leave her. The girl has the blanket over her head, her head still bowed. The inside of the ambulance smells of hospital and disinfectant, tubes from oxygen cylinders run along the walls, and short cords with yellow corks hang down from the roof. A cardiac support machine is fixed to the internal wall.
Have you saved many lives? Malin wonders.
You can’t save the girl in here now.
Can anyone?
Zeke climbs in first. Malin just behind him, gesturing to Ellinor Getlund to get up. They sit down on either side of the girl.
Zeke turns to face her, and asks: ‘If you feel like lifting your head and looking at me, that’s fine. If you don’t, never mind.’
The girl sits motionless.
‘What happened here last night?’
‘Can you tell us?’
Silence that lasts several minutes.
‘Did somebody attack you here last night?’
Zeke runs a hand over his glistening scalp.
‘If you don’t want to say anything, you don’t have to. But it would be good if we knew your name.’
‘My name is Josefin Davidsson,’ the girl says.
Then she falls silent again.
The ambulance heads off towards the fountain, the brake lights hesitant as the vehicle turns towards the gate onto Linnégatan.
Josefin Davidsson said nothing more. Just her name.
What happened?
What were you doing in the park?
Your clothes. Where are they?
Has someone washed you?
Who are your parents?
Where do you live?
Who was the person who made the phone call? Who saw you first? Unless . . .
Their voices ever more desperate. Full of questions in the face of her silence. The words tumble around inside their increasingly warm heads: ‘My name. Josefin Davidsson.’
‘What now?’ Zeke says as the ambulance disappears from sight.
‘Now we wait for Karin.’
‘Johannison?’
Malin can hear the derision in Zeke’s voice. Thinks: Why do you dislike her so strongly, Zeke? Because she’s beautiful? Because she’s smart? Or because she’s rich, and rich is the same as better?
‘Bali. We’re going to be staying at the Bulgari resort in Uluwatu,’ Karin Johannison says as she scrapes flakes of blood from the railing. ‘I’m taking my holiday in August, so we’ll be there for a month, it’s at its best then.’
‘Janne and Tove are there at the moment.’
‘Oh, how lovely. Where are they?’
‘Some hotel on a beach called Kuta.’
‘That’s the best beach. Terribly touristy though.’
Malin considers how suntanned Karin is even though she’s been working indoors at the National Forensics Laboratory all summer. She looks as indecently fresh and alert as she always does, her blue eyes radiating a positive shimmer, her skin glowing with care. Her dress, expensive pink fabric draped around her body, contributes to the impression of genuine class.
Karin had already fine-combed the bushes and the grass beside the summerhouse. Picked up litter that she put into small marked bags.
‘I’ll try to get fingerprints. But there could be thousands here, or none at all. Wood’s difficult.’
‘I thought you could get prints from anything,’ Zeke says.
Karin doesn’t answer.
‘It might be like you said, Malin. That he attacked her over there in the bushes, and then dragged her here and bundled her over the railings. We’ll have to see what the doctors say about her injuries.’
‘We don’t even know if she was raped. Or if the perpetrator was male.’
Zeke’s voice is confrontational.
‘Time to go back to the station,’ Malin says, wondering what’s happened to Daniel Högfeldt. He or someone else from the Correspondent ought to have been here some time ago. But maybe their contacts in the force are on holiday. And maybe the call about the girl sounded too dull over the radio.
But he’ll be here soon enough, Daniel. As surely as summer. The hottest story of the season has arrived, hotter even than the forest fires.
Girl raped in Horticultural Society Park.
Beyond the cordon a group of curious onlookers has gathered. People dressed for summer, all of them wondering the same thing as they are: What’s happened?
Zeke leaves the car; one of the uniforms can drive it back to the station. Malin fetches her bicycle and looks towards the summerhouse one last time before she and Zeke leave the park.
The sun has climbed higher in the sky and now patches of light are falling into the circular space, the sunbeams seem to wallow in what has happened, seemingly trying to focus on it with their ever-changing interplay.
This is only the start, the sunbeams seem to be saying, this summer can still get even hotter, less forgiving. Just you wait, after us comes the darkness.
‘Are you coming, Fors?’
Zeke’s voice urgent and calm at the same time.
Finally a proper case to grapple with. And it’s summer. He doesn’t have any ice hockey to deal with.
Malin knows that his son, Martin, the big star of the Linköping Hockey Club, the pride of the city, is having a break from training for three weeks. Zeke hates hockey, but is so loyal to his son that he goes to every match during the season. But at this time of year there isn’t even any ice inside the Cloetta Centre.
The footpath out of the park runs between two blocks of flats, and is lined with flowerbeds, their plants wilting and losing their colour in the heat. Out on Djurgårdsgatan a number 202 bus goes past on its way to the University Hospital.
It’s hardly six hundred metres to the police station, Malin thinks. Yet here, so close to the physical heart of the law, a girl has been attacked and raped.
All security is just a chimera.
Four girls in their early teens fly past them on their bikes. Bathing gear on their parcel-racks.
On their way to cool down. To the pool out at Glyttinge, maybe? Or Tinnis?
Chatter and commotion. Summer holidays and something lurking behind a tree in the dark.
5
We’re going swimming, swimming, swimming, you say, have you seen my armbands, Mum, have you seen my rubber ring, where’s the rubber ring? I don’t want to sink, Mum.
I hear you.
You’re above my darkness but I don’t know if you hear me, hear me calling: Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, where are you, you have to come and you have to come and get me and who are all these people shouting about swimming, about rubber rings, about ice cream?