Mons Kallentoft - Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

‘But-’

‘This is how it has to be, Martinsson. I don’t doubt that you and Fors are very capable, but right now we need to focus our resources.’

Sven’s stomach seems to have grown even larger, the furrows on his brow even deeper.

‘Do you want me to contact the National Criminal Investigation Institute? We don’t yet know formally that he was even murdered.’

Karim is heading towards the door.

‘No National Crime. We’re going to sort this out ourselves. You’re to report to me every three hours, or whenever there are any new developments.’

The noise of the door slamming behind him echoes round the room.

‘You heard what he said. You can divide the work up between you and report back to me.’

The children playing on the other side of the nursery windows are gone. A yellow, Calder-inspired mobile is swaying gently beneath the checked curtains.

Blue, fat-mottled skin.

Beaten and alone in the ice-cold wind.

Who were you? Malin wonders.

Come back and tell me who you were.

Now they have erected a tent beneath me, its green colour turned grey by the evening. I know they are warm in there, but none of that warmth reaches me.

Can I even feel warmth any more? Could I ever? I lived in the land beyond, free in one way from your world, but what a freedom it turned out to be.

But I no longer have any need of your warmth, not as you understand it; there is warmth around me. I am not alone, or rather I am exactly that, alone, I am loneliness, I am the core of loneliness. Perhaps I was the core of loneliness when I was alive? The most basic substance of loneliness, the mystery whose solution we are approaching, the chemical reaction, the seemingly simple yet all-encompassing process in our brains that gives rise to perceptions which in turn give us consciousness, the precondition for the reality we believe to be our own. The lamps burn late in researchers’ laboratories. Once we have cracked that code, we will have cracked them all. Then we can rest. Laugh or scream. Stop. But until then?

Wandering, working, searching for the answers to all manner of questions.

It’s hardly surprising, the way you carry on.

The snow melts, trickling away, but you won’t find anything, so get rid of the tent, bring in a crane and get me down. I’m a strange fruit, I’m not supposed to hang here; it spoils the balance, and it’s starting to make the branch creak. Even the tree is protesting, can’t you hear it?

Well, exactly, you’re all deaf. Just think, how quickly we actually forget. Think what the meanderings of our thoughts can do to us, where they can lead us.

‘Mum, have you seen my eye-shadow?’

Tove’s voice from the bathroom sounds desperate, annoyed and resigned all at the same time, yet simultaneously full of a resolved, focused and almost frightening determination.

Eye-shadow? That hasn’t happened for a while. Malin can’t remember the last time Tove wore any make-up, and wonders what’s going on this evening.

‘Do you want eye-shadow?’ Malin calls from her place on the sofa. The news has just started, with the man in the tree as the third item, after a statement from the Prime Minister and some meteorological expert who says that the current spell of cold weather is conclusive proof of climate change, that we’re heading for a new ice age which is going to cover the whole of Sweden under metres of granite-hard crystals.

‘Why else would I be asking?’

‘Are you seeing a boy?’

There is silence from the bathroom, then a single ‘Damn’ when the make-up bag balanced on the bathroom cabinet evidently tumbles to the floor. Then: ‘It’s here. I found it, Mum.’

‘Good.’

A male reporter from the Östgöta newspaper is standing at the darkened crime-scene, floodlights illuminating the tree in the background, and you can just make out the body in the tree, but only if you know it’s there.

‘I’m standing in a frozen field several miles outside Linköping. The police have…’

Throughout the region people are watching the same pictures as me, Malin thinks. And they’re wondering the same thing: Who was he? How did he get there? Who did it?

In the eyes of the television viewers, I am the provider of television truth, I make sure that evil people are locked up behind bars. I am the person who is expected to transform anxiety to security, but things are never so simple in reality, outside the screen. Out here everything is a test card, rich in nuances where it is impossible to take in everything, where meaning is everywhere and nowhere, with a clock ticking away and everyone waiting for something new, something clearer, better, to take over.

‘Mum, can I borrow your perfume?’

Perfume?

She’s got a date, Malin thinks. Which would be a first. Then: Who? Where? When? A thousand questions, thoughts, anxieties in myriad forms run through her in a fraction of a second.

‘Who are you seeing?’

‘No one. Can I borrow your perfume?’

‘Of course.’

‘… the body is still hanging here.’

The camera moves to one side, and in the abrupt darkness above the tent the body sways back and forth and Malin wants to change the channel, but at the same time she wants to watch. Cut to that afternoon’s press conference. Karim Akbar in a well-pressed suit in the large meeting room in Police Headquarters, his black hair slicked back, his face serious, but his eyes can’t conceal how much he loves the spotlight, how it seems to validate him.

‘We don’t yet know for certain that he was murdered.’

Microphones from TV4 in the foreground. A question from the mass of journalists; she recognises Daniel Högfeldt’s voice.

‘Why have you left the body hanging there?’

Daniel. What are you up to now?

Karim answers confidently. ‘For technical reasons concerned with the investigation. As yet we don’t know anything. We’re keeping an entirely open mind.’

‘Mum, have you seen my red polo-neck?’ Tove’s voice from her own room now.

‘Have you looked in the drawer?’

A few short seconds, then a triumphant voice. ‘Found it!’

Good, Malin thinks, then ponders what keeping an open mind means and is likely to mean: going round to every farm and cottage within a three-kilometre radius from the tree, knocking on the doors of farmers, commuters and workshy folk on sick leave.

‘Really? No, I haven’t noticed anything.’

‘I’m always asleep at that time of day.’

‘In this sort of cold I stay indoors.’

‘I keep myself to myself, it’s better that way.’

The same response for Johan and Börje as for her and Zeke: no one knows anything, no one has seen anything. It’s as if the hundred-and-fifty-kilo body flew up into the noose in the tree, parking itself on the end of the rope in anticipation of attention.

Back to the studio.

‘Naturally we’ll be following developments in Linköping.’ Pause. ‘In London…’

Then Tove is standing in the door to the living room.

‘I read about that on the net,’ she says. ‘Are you in charge of it?’

But Malin can’t answer her daughter’s question. Instead she just gawps when she sees her, the child who was lying in bed this morning; the little girl who went into the bathroom just quarter of an hour ago is transformed. She is wearing make-up and has tied up her hair, and something has happened, a hint of a woman has superimposed itself over her daughter’s appearance.

‘Mum? Mum, hello?’

‘You look lovely.’

‘Thanks, I’m going to the cinema.’

‘I’m working on the case.’

‘It’s a good thing I’m going to Dad’s tomorrow, so you can work late.’