Mons Kallentoft: Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

This whole thing is like a farce, Malin thought when she glanced through the paper fifteen minutes ago, far too tired to read it properly.

Janne is standing in the hall next to Tove. He looks tired, the skin stretched tight across his sharp cheekbones, and his tall, muscular body seems to be hanging from a swaying gallows. Has he lost weight? And aren’t those a few mute grey hairs at his temples, scattered among the otherwise so glossy amber locks?

Tove off school, a study day, early Friday pick-up instead of late. Changes of shift. A jigsaw puzzle.

She sent Janne a letter in Bosnia when she had packed her and Tove’s belongings and moved into a small flat in the city, a stop on the road to Stockholm.

‘You can have the house. It suits you much better than me, you’ve got room for your cars. I’ve never liked the countryside that much, really. Hope you’re well, and not having to witness anything awful. Or put up with anything awful. We can work out everything else later.’

His answer came on a postcard.

‘Thanks. I’ll get a mortgage when I get home and buy you out. Do as you like.’

Do as you like?

I would have liked to have things the way they were before. Back at the start. Before it all became routine.

Because there are events and days that can drive people apart, breaking points. We were young, so young. Time, what did we know of that then, other than that it was ours?

Malin thinks about his dreams, the ones he always wants to talk about when they meet, but which she can never quite bear to listen to and he can never quite articulate even when she is trying to listen.

Instead Janne’s voice: ‘You’re looking tired, Malin. Don’t you think, Tove?’

Tove nods.

‘Working too much,’ Malin says.

‘The bloke in the tree?’

‘Mmm.’

‘You’ll have your work cut out this weekend, then.’

‘Did you come in the Saab?’

‘No, I used the Volvo. It’s got winter tyres. I haven’t bothered to change the others.’

Men are car fanatics. Most of them. And Janne in particular. He has four cars in the garage next to the house. Four cars in varying stages of decay, or restoration, as he would put it. She could never stand the cars, not even at the start; she couldn’t bear what they represented. What? A lack of willpower? Or imagination? Listlessness? Crass systematic thinking. Love demands something else.

‘What have you got planned?’

‘Don’t know,’ Janne says. ‘There’s not too much you can do in this sort of cold. What do you think, Tove? Shall we rent some films and get a load of sweets and lock ourselves in? Or do you want to read?’

‘Films sound good. But I’ve got some books as well.’

‘Try to get a bit of fresh air anyway,’ Malin says.

‘Mum. That’s not up to you.’

‘We can go to the firestation,’ Janne says. ‘Play a bit of fireman’s indoor hockey. Tove, what do you think, that would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

Tove looks up at the ceiling, then adds, as if not quite daring to trust her father’s sarcasm, ‘Not in a million years.’

‘Oh well. Films it is, then.’

Malin looks tiredly at Janne, and his grey-green eyes meet hers, he doesn’t look away, he never has. When he disappears he takes his perfect physique and his soul and goes to places where someone might need the help he thinks he can’t survive without giving.

Help.

The name he has given to flight.

When the flat, the house, everything got too cramped. And then over and over again.

She gave Janne a hug when he arrived today, held him tight and he responded, he always does and she wanted to keep hold of him, pull him to her for a long time, ask him to sit out the cold snap with them here, ask him to stay.

But instead she came to her senses, found a way of breaking free of him, as if he were the one who had initiated the embrace. A way of getting her muscles to ask quietly, ‘What are you doing? We’re not married any more and you know as well as I do that it’s impossible.’

‘And what about you, have you been sleeping okay?’

Janne nodded, but Malin could see that the nod concealed a lie.

‘I just sweat so much.’

‘Even though it’s so cold?’

‘Even though.’

‘Have you got everything, Tove?’

‘Yep, everything.’

‘Make sure you get some fresh air.’

‘Mum.’

Then they’re gone. Janne will bring her back tomorrow, Saturday evening, so we can have Sunday together.

What am I going to do now?

Wait for the phone to ring? Read the paper?

Think?

No. Thinking has a way of leading you into a very tangled forest.

‘He died of his head injuries. The perpetrator used a blunt object, repeatedly, almost as if in a frenzy, to beat in the cranium and the face until it became the shapeless mass of flesh it is now. He was alive when he received the blows, but in all likelihood lost consciousness fairly quickly. The perpetrator or perpetrators also appear to have used a knife.’

Karin Johannison is standing beside the blue body, which is lying on the cold steel of the pathology laboratory. Arms and legs and head stick out from the trunk like lumpy, irregular stumps. The torso is cut open, with the skin and fat folded into four flaps, revealing a jumble of guts. The skull has been sawn open, dutifully, at the back of the head.

It looks methodical and haphazard at the same time, Malin thinks. As if someone had been planning it for a long time, and then lost their composure.

‘I had to let him thaw out before I could start,’ as Karin had put it over the phone. ‘But once I got started it was pretty straightforward.’

Zeke is standing quietly beside Malin, apparently unconcerned; he’s seen death many times before and realises that it’s impossible to grasp.

Karin works with death, but she doesn’t understand it. Perhaps none of us does, Malin thinks. But most of us appreciate what death can encompass. Karin, Malin thinks, doesn’t understand a lot of what everything in this basement room is actually about; here she is useful, functional, as precise as the instruments she uses in her work. As precise as the room itself.

The most practical face of death.

White walls, small windows at ceiling height, stainless-steel cabinets and shelves along the wall holding textbooks and bandages, compresses, surgical gloves and so on. The linoleum floor is a bluish colour, easy to clean, hardwearing, cheap. Malin never gets used to this room, to its role and function, but she is nevertheless drawn to it.

‘He didn’t die from the rope,’ Karin says. ‘He was dead by the time he was hauled up into the tree. If he’d died of strangulation the blood wouldn’t have run to his head the way it did. With a hanging the blood vessels are shut off directly, to put it in layman’s terms, but here the physical blows made the heart pump faster, which accounts for the abnormal amount of blood.’

‘How long has he been dead?’ Malin asks.

‘You mean now?’

‘No, before he was strung up in the tree.’

‘I’d say at least five hours, maybe a bit longer. Considering there was no great quantity of blood in his legs even though he was found hanging.’

‘What about the blows to the body?’ Zeke says.

‘What about them?’

‘What have you got to say about them?’

‘Doubtless very painful, if he was conscious at the time, but they weren’t fatal. There are marks on the legs that show he was dragged, that someone hauled the body over damp ground. The wounds have dirt in them, and fragments of fabric. Someone undressed him after the beating, and then moved the body. At least that’s what I believe happened. He was finished off with a knife.’