Mons Kallentoft: Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

‘I can’t stand that man,’ Zeke says as the Correspondent ’s car disappears off in the cold. ‘He’s like a cocaine-fuelled leech with ADHD.’

‘And that’s why he’s so good at his job,’ Malin says.

Zeke’s American-inspired metaphors turn up when you least expect them, and Malin has often wondered where they come from. As far as she knows, Zeke has never shown any fondness for American popular culture, and he probably hardly knows who Philip Marlowe is.

‘If he’s so fucking clever, what’s he doing on a local paper?’

‘Maybe he’s happy here?’

‘Yeah, right.’

Then Malin looks over at the body. ‘What do you think it’s like, hanging up there?’

The words hung in the cold air.

‘It’s just meat now,’ Zeke says. ‘Meat can’t feel anything. Whoever that person was, whatever sort of human being he was, he isn’t here any longer.’

‘Even so, he still has things to tell us,’ Malin says.

Karin Johannison, analyst, pathologist and researcher at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, with a part-time post as a crime-scene investigator with the Linköping Police, is flapping her arms around her heavily padded body, elegant even though conducting an inelegant gesture. Small fragments of feathers fly up in the air like misshapen snowflakes and Malin imagines that the jacket must have been incredibly expensive considering how well-padded its red fabric is.

Even in her fur hat and with cheeks red from the February chill, Karin is the spitting image of a slightly aged Riviera princess, like a middle-aged Françoise Sagan, without a cloud in her sky, far too attractive for the job she does. The suntan from her holiday in Thailand at Christmas is still lingering on her skin and sometimes, Malin thinks, I wish I could have been like Karin, married to money and the easy life.

They approach the body cautiously, stepping in footprints already there.

Karin is behaving like an engineer, pushing aside any thoughts of the naked human being in the tree in front of them, refusing to see the fat, the skin, what had once been the face, suppressing any empathy with the thoughts that might have passed through the swollen body’s brain, and which are now slowly settling over the city, the plain and the forests like an ominous murmur; a whimper that could perhaps only be silenced in one way, through an answer to the question: Who did it?

‘What do you see, Karin?’

I know, Malin thinks. You see an object, a screw or a nut, a narrative machine that needs to be analysed, that will be allowed to tell its innate story.

‘He can hardly have got up there by himself,’ Karin says, standing almost immediately below the body. She has just photographed the footprints around it, laying a ruler beside them, because even if they are in all likelihood merely their own and Peter Liedbergh’s they need to be checked.

Malin doesn’t answer. Instead she asks, ‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’

‘Impossible to know just by looking at him. I’m going to have to work without any preconceptions on this one. We’ll get answers to those questions in the post-mortem.’

The answer she was expecting. Malin thinks instead of Karin’s suntan, her plump jacket and how the wind is cutting straight through her own Stadium coat.

‘We need to take a look at the ground before we get him down,’ Karin says. ‘We’ll have to bring in the heater the army have got up in Kvarn, and erect a tent so we can get rid of all this snow.’

‘But won’t you just end up with a quagmire?’ Malin asks.

‘Only if we carry on too long,’ Karin replies. ‘They can probably have the heater here in a few hours. If they’re not on duty somewhere else, that is.’

‘He shouldn’t be left hanging there much longer,’ Malin says.

‘It’s minus thirty out here,’ Karin says. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to the body in this sort of cold.’

Zeke has kept the engine running and there is probably a forty-degree difference in temperature between the inside of the car and the air outside. Warm breath is turning to ice crystals on the side windows.

Malin gets into the passenger seat.

‘Quick, shut the door,’ Zeke snaps. ‘So, has Mrs Johannison taken charge of the situation?’

‘Kvarn. She’s getting the heater from there.’

Another two patrol cars have arrived, and through the tracery of the crystals Malin sees Karin direct the uniformed officers out in the field.

‘We might as well go now,’ Zeke says.

Malin nods.

As they drive back past Sjövik’s fruit farm Malin turns on the radio, tuning it to P4. An old friend of hers, Helen Aneman, presents a programme on that channel every day between seven and ten o’clock.

Her friend’s soft voice comes on as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ fades out.

‘During that last track I took a look at the Correspondent ’s site. This is no normal day in Linköping, dear listeners. And I don’t mean the cold. The police have found something in an oak tree in the middle of the plain, towards Vreta Kloster.’

‘That was quick,’ Zeke said over the noise of the radio.

‘He’s no slacker, Daniel,’ Malin says.

‘Daniel?’

‘If you feel like starting the day with something stomach-churning,’ the velvet voice on the radio says, ‘have a look at the pictures on the Correspondent ’s website. A very unusual bird in a tree.’

Daniel Högfeldt leans back against his office chair and the responsive backrest dips towards the floor.

He rocks back and forth like he used to in Grandfather’s rocking-chair in the cottage out in Vikbolandet, the one that burned down soon after Grandma finally passed away at Vrinnevis Hospital in Norrköping. First Daniel looks out through the window at Hamngatan, then across the open-plan newsroom at his colleagues crouched over their computers, most of them completely indifferent to their work, happy with what they’ve got, and tired, so tired. If there’s one poison worse than all the others for journalists, Daniel thinks, it’s tiredness. It messes people up, ruins them.

I’m not tired. Not in the slightest.

He mentioned Malin in his article about the man in the tree: Malin Fors of Linköping Police did not want to give any…

Back and forth.

Just like most crime investigations he had covered.

The clatter of keyboards, the sound of people calling across the newsroom, and the smell of bitter coffee.

Several of his colleagues are so cynical it is affecting their productivity. But not him. It is a matter of maintaining respect for the people whose stories and mishaps are his daily bread.

A naked man in a tree. Hanged.

A blessing for anyone with newspaper pages to fill and sell.

But also something else.

The city will wake up. No question at all.

I’m good at what I do, because I know how to play the ‘journalistic game’, but also because I know how to keep my distance and how to play people.

Cynical?

Hamngatan was swept in winter outside.

Crumpled sheets in Malin Fors’s apartment. Only two blocks away.

Sven Sjöman’s wrinkled brow, his bulging gut, the denim shirt carelessly tucked into his brown wool trousers. His face as lifeless and grey as the jacket he is wearing, his thin hair the same colour as the whiteboard he is standing in front of. Sven prefers to keep meetings small, then to inform anyone else involved as and when. In his opinion, large meetings like they have in other police districts are never as productive.

He starts the way he usually does with a meeting of this sort, when they are about to start work on a big new case. The question who? needs to be answered, and it is his responsibility to set the question in motion, to give it a direction that will hopefully lead to the answer: him , her , them .