Mons Kallentoft: Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

The first book in the Detective Inspector Malin Fors series, 2011

Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, 2011

Originally published in Swedish in 2007 as Midvinterblod by Natur och Kultur

I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book:

Bengt Nordin and Maria Enberg for their encouragement and unstinting commitment. Nina Wadensjö and Petra König for their open-mindedness and enthusiasm. Rolf Svensson for his ability to control reams of paper, among other things. My mother, Anna-Maria, and father, Björn, for detailed information about Linköping and the surrounding area.

I would also like to thank Bengt Elmström, without whose common sense and warm-heartedness there would probably never have been any books at all.

I owe my greatest debt of thanks to my wife Karolina, who has been absolutely invaluable to so many aspects of Midwinter Sacrifice . What would have become of Malin Fors, her family and colleagues without Karolina?

My main focus has always been on what is best for the story. For this reason I have taken certain liberties, albeit small ones, with police procedure, the city of Linköping, the geography of the surrounding area, and the people who live there.

Mons Kallentoft

21 March 2007

Östergötland, Tuesday, 31 January

In the darkness

Don’t hit me. Do you hear me? Leave me alone.

No, no, let me in. Apples, the scent of apples. I can almost taste them.

Don’t leave me standing here, in the cold and wet. The wind feels like nails that tear at my hands, my face, until there is no frosted skin, no flesh, no fat left on my bones, my skull.

Haven’t you noticed I’m gone? You couldn’t care less, really, could you?

The worms crawl on the earthen floor. I hear them. The mice too, how they make love, going mad in the heat, tearing each other to pieces. We ought to be dead now, they whisper, but you have lit your stove and are keeping us alive, we are your only company in the cold. But what company? Was I ever alive, or did I die long ago, in a room so cramped that there was never any space for love?

I pull a damp blanket over my body, see the flames burn through the opening of the stove, feel the smoke spread through my black hovel and seep out to the sleeping pines, the fir-trees, the rocks, the ice on the lake.

Where is the heat? Only in the boiling water.

If I fall asleep, will I wake up?

Don’t hit me. Don’t leave me in the snow. Outside. There I’ll turn blue, then white, like everything else.

Here I can be alone.

I am sleeping now, and in my dreams the words return: fucking runt, bastard brat, you’re not real, you don’t exist.

But what did I ever do to you? Just tell me: what have I done? What happened?

And where did the scent of apples first come from? The apples are round, but they explode, disappear in my hands, and there are biscuit crumbs on the floor beneath me.

I don’t know who she is, but a naked woman is drifting above my body. She says, I’m going to look after you, you exist for me, we are human beings, we belong together. Then she is dragged away and the ceiling of my hovel is ripped open by a black wind. Out there I hear something slithering towards her legs. She screams and there is silence. Then she’s back, but she is someone else now, the faceless person I have missed all my life. Who is she really?

I can wipe out the longing. I can give up breathing.

But if longing and breathing disappear, you are left with belonging. Aren’t you?

I have woken up. I am many years older, but my hovel, the cold, the winter night and the forest are the same. I have to do something. But I’ve done it already; something has happened.

Where does the blood on my hands come from? And the noises.

The worms and mice are inaudible over all the commotion.

I hear your voice. I hear you banging on the nailed-together planks that make up the door of my hovel. You’re here, you’ve finally come.

But is it really you? Or is it the dead?

Whoever is out there, tell me that you mean me no harm. Tell me that you have come in love.

Promise me that.

Promise me that much.

Promise.

Thursday, 2 February

Love and death are neighbours.

Their faces are one and the same. A person need not stop breathing in order to die, and need not breathe in order to be alive.

There are never any guarantees where death or love are concerned.

Two people meet.

Love.

They make love.

And they love and they love and then, after a while, the love runs out, just as abruptly as it first appeared, its capricious source blocked by circumstances, internal or external.

Or else love continues until the end of time. Or else it is impossible from the start, yet still unavoidable.

And is this sort of love, this last sort, is it really nothing but a nuisance?

That’s just what it is, thinks Malin Fors as she stands in her dressing gown by the kitchen sink, fresh from the shower, spreading butter on a slice of wholemeal bread with one hand, and lifting a cup of strong coffee to her lips with the other.

Six fifteen, according to the Ikea clock on the whitewashed wall. Outside the window, in the glow of the streetlamps, the air seems to have solidified into ice. The cold embraces the grey stone walls of St Lars Church, and the white branches of the maples seem to have given up long ago: not another night of temperatures below minus twenty; better to kill us outright and let us fall dead to the ground.

Who could love this sort of cold?

A day like this, Malin thinks, is not meant for the living.

Linköping is paralysed, the city’s streets draped limply upon the crust of the earth, the condensation on the windows making the houses blind.

People didn’t even make the effort to get to the Cloetta Centre last night for the ice hockey, just a couple of thousand instead of the usual full house.

I wonder how Martin’s getting on? Malin thinks, her colleague Zeke’s son, a local lad, a forward with a chance of a place in the national team and a career as a professional. She can’t actually summon up much interest in ice hockey, but if you live in this town it’s pretty much impossible to avoid hearing about events on the ice.

Hardly anyone about.

The travel agent’s on the corner of St Larsgatan and Hamngatan mocks with its posters for one exotic destination after the other; the sun, beaches, the unnaturally blue skies belong to another planet, a habitable one. A lone mother is wrestling with a twin buggy outside the Östgöta Bank, the children nestled in black bags, almost invisible, sleepy, obstinate, yet still so unimaginably vulnerable. Their mother slips on patches of ice hidden under a powder of snow, she lurches but drives herself on as though there were no other option.

‘Winters here are the devil’s work.’

Malin can hear her father’s words within her, his justification a few years ago for the purchase of a three-room bungalow in a retirement village on Tenerife: the Playa de la Arena, just north of Playa de las Américas.

What are you doing right now? Malin thinks.

The coffee warms from within.

You’re probably still asleep, and when you wake up it’ll be warm and sunny. But here, the frost reigns unchallenged.

Should I wake Tove? Thirteen-year-olds can sleep for ages, right round the clock if they’re given the chance, and in a winter like this it would be lovely to hibernate for a few months, not having to go out, and waking up fully restored when the temperature creeps above zero.