Mons Kallentoft: Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

She tries again and again.

But the car refuses.

Malin gets out. Thinks: I have to take the bus, which way does it go?

Damn, it’s cold, fucking bloody car-fucker, then her mobile rings.

A clawed hand on the angry plastic gadget. She can’t be bothered to see who it is.

‘Hello, Malin Fors.’

‘It’s Zeke.’

‘My fucking car won’t start.’

‘Calm down, Malin. Calm down. Just listen. Something big’s happened. I’ll tell you when I see you. Be with you in ten minutes.’

Zeke’s words hang in the air. From his tone of voice Malin can hear that something serious has indeed happened, that the coldest winter in living memory just got a few degrees less forgiving, that the cold has just shown its true face.

German choral music blasts through the car as Zacharius ‘Zeke’ Martinsson keeps a firm grip on the wheel and drives past the detached houses on the outskirts of Hjulsterbro. Through the side window he glimpses the red and green gables of the rows of generously proportioned houses. The painted wood is covered with frost and the trees that have grown tall in the thirty years since the houses were built look emaciated and malnourished in the cold. But, even so, the whole area looks unusually cosy and well-cared-for; it looks prosperous.

The doctors’ ghetto, Zeke thinks. That’s how the area is known in town. And it is undeniably popular among the doctors at the hospital. Opposite, on the other side of the main Sturefors road, on the far side of a car park, are the squat white blocks of flats in Ekholmen, home to thousands of immigrants and Swedes at the bottom of the pecking order.

Malin sounded tired, but not newly woken. Perhaps she slept badly. Maybe I should ask if anything particular has happened? No, best let it be. She only gets cross if you ask how she is. Zeke tries to keep his mind off what they are on their way to. Doesn’t even want to know what it’s going to look like. They’ll see soon enough, but the boys in the patrol car sounded seriously shaken, and no wonder, if it was as bad as they said. He’s got good at this over the years, delaying, postponing the crap even if it sometimes hits him hard.

Johannelund.

The boys’ league football pitches down by the Stångån River are covered with snow. Martin used to play there for the Saab team before he decided to concentrate full-time on ice hockey. I’ve never been much of a football dad, Zeke thinks, and now, now things are starting to go really well for the boy, I hardly have the energy to get to his matches. Last night was terrible. Even though they beat Färjestad 4-3. No matter how I try, I just can’t love that game, its overblown toughness.

Love, Zeke thinks, is either there or it isn’t. Like my love of choral music.

They practise two evenings a week, Da Capo, the choir he’s been a member of since he dared himself to go almost ten years ago. Concerts maybe once a month, a trip to some festival once a year.

Zeke likes the undemanding nature of his relationships within the choir; no one cares what anyone else does the rest of the time, they meet, they talk and then they sing. Sometimes, when he’s standing with the others, surrounded by song in a bright church hall, he imagines that it might really be possible to belong to something, to be part of something bigger than his own insignificant self. As if there were a simplicity and self-evident joy to the singing that couldn’t possibly contain anything evil.

Because it’s a question of holding evil at bay, as best you can.

On their way towards evil now. That much is clear.

The Folkungavallen Stadium. The next rung in the ball-game ladder. The football stadium was run down, ripe for redevelopment. The Linköping women’s team is one of the best in the country, a group of women bought for the purpose, including a lot of national players, but who have never succeeded in winning over the town’s inhabitants. Then the swimming pool. The new buildings beside the multistorey. He turns into Hamngatan, past the big shops, Hemköp and åhléns, and then he can see Malin standing there shivering outside her door. Why isn’t she waiting inside?

She is huddled but still seems somehow indefatigable as she stands with her arms round her body, her whole being sort of anchored to the ground in spite of the cold, in the certainty that this is the start of another day where she can devote herself to what she’s best suited to.

And she really is suited to it, to police work. If I’d done anything wrong, I wouldn’t want her after me, Zeke thinks, and he whispers to himself, ‘Right, Malin, fuck it, what’s today got in store for us then?’

The choral music turned down to a minimum. One hundred whispering voices in the car.

What can a human voice tell us? Malin thinks.

Zeke’s voice has a hoarseness like no other Malin has ever heard, a tempered, demanding tone that vanishes when he sings, but which became even more pronounced when he just told her what had happened:

‘Apparently it’s a bloody awful sight,’ he says, the hoarseness making his words sharper, ‘according to the boys in the car when they called in. But when is it ever anything else?’

Zeke is sitting beside her, behind the wheel of his Volvo, his eyes fixed on the slippery road ahead.

Eyes.

We depend on them. Ninety per cent of the impressions that make up our image of the world around us come from our eyes. What we can’t see almost doesn’t exist. Anything can be hidden away in a cupboard and it’s gone. Problem solved, just like that.

‘Never,’ Malin says.

Zeke nods his clean-shaven head. Perched on an unusually long neck, his skull doesn’t seem to belong to his short, sinewy body. His skin is stretched over his cheekbones.

Malin can’t see his eyes from where she’s sitting. But she trusts her memory of them.

She knows those eyes. Knows that they sit deep in his cranium, and are usually calm. In their dull grey-green colour there is always a polished, almost bottomless light that is harsh and gentle at the same time.

At forty-five, he’s got a lot of the calmness that experience brings, although the years have somehow made him more restless, implacable, or, as he said to her after a few too many beers and shorts at the Christmas party: ‘It’s us against them, Malin. Sometimes, no matter how sad it sounds, we have to use their methods. That’s the only language a certain type of man understands.’ He said it without bitterness or satisfaction, it was simply a statement.

Zeke’s restlessness isn’t visible, but she can feel it. What on earth must he go through at Martin’s games?

‘… a bloody awful sight.’

It had taken eleven minutes from when Zeke had phoned for him to pick her up outside her flat. His blunt assertion made her shiver even more, at the same time making her feel strangely elated, against her will.

Linköping through the windscreen.

The avaricious city, in spite of its size, the veneer over its history strangely thin.

What had once been a factory city and a marketplace for farmers soon became a university city, the factories largely shut down, the residents cajoled into education, into colleges, into the university, and soon the most self-aware city in the country was rising from the plains, with the most remarkable inhabitants in the country.

Linköping.

The city as though born in the 1940s, the city as an insecure academic with a past that must be swept under the carpet at all costs. With people who want to be better than they are, and put on dresses and suits to go and drink coffee in the city centre on Saturdays.

Linköping.

An excellent city to get ill in.

Or, even better, to get burned in.

The University Hospital is home to the pre-eminent burns unit in the country. Malin was there once, in connection with a case, dressed in white from head to toe. The conscious patients were screaming or moaning, the tranquillised dreaming of not having to wake up.