This world is overflowing with unwanted children, Malin thinks.
A planned adoption that never happened.
Who wants damaged goods if there’s a choice? Sooner brown or yellow or red than someone with a damaged brain, a wrecked soul.
Malin looks out across the park towards the castle, sees the cherry and apple trees and magnolias competing to be the most beautiful, Miss Linköping Tree 2010.
It’s a quarter to twelve, and Zeke is strolling slowly beside her, and behind the wall of white flowers they can just make out the castle, and the section of the park that’s closed to the general public, and on the other side of them is the library, its huge glass windows glinting knife-sharp in the sun. In the passageways between the shelves, people are looking for books to read, and students are huddled over their computers at the desks.
The library.
Tove’s favourite place. Malin and Zeke walk in silence towards the car, parked over by the cathedral.
Every corner of this city is so familiar to me, Malin thinks. Every stone of the cathedral’s walls is in my memory, every tree, every nuance of the pink façade of the old gymnasium is part of me, every inequality between people, every injustice, every sorrow, joy, desire, and avaricious thought.
There was a name in the black file in the district court archive.
Not the name of the woman who gave the children up for adoption, nor the name of the father, but the name of a social worker who was involved in some way.
Swedish parents have no right to anonymity when they give children up for adoption. But in the case of the Vigerö twins, the biological parents were not identified.
Why not?
A bureaucratic mistake? Or something else?
The social worker was an Ottilia Stenlund, and six years ago she was working for Social Services in Norrmalm, office number four, at 13 Teknologgatan in Stockholm.
‘We’ll have to try calling Ottilia Stenlund,’ Zeke says as they go around the big oak tree outside the old gymnasium.
The castle.
A grey box some hundred metres away. The residence of the district governor. Smart people get invited to official dinners there. And ice-hockey players from the Linköping team.
The cathedral.
Like a gigantic sarcophagus, it seems to demand the attention of Linköping’s inhabitants, yet they still don’t seem to care much about what happens in God’s house. The mosque out in Ekholmen is bound to be better attended. Apart from when there’s a bombing, or at Christmas, at midnight mass, when a thousand candles make the stone interior glow. Then the citizens of Linköping turn out to a man, and the churchwardens have to turn people away at the doors, and the collection boxes overflow with guilty consciences.
Bloody hell, Malin thinks.
In Springsteen’s words: ‘Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.’
She pulls out her mobile.
‘I’ll see if I can get her number through directory enquiries.’
‘Shouldn’t we call her at work?’
‘That would take longer. Directory enquiries is quicker, and more straightforward. Let’s give it a try.’
They reach the car. The white paint on the roof is covered with bird shit that wasn’t there when they parked, and Malin sees Zeke look up at the sky, at the pale green oak tree that must have been full of defecating crows or ravens or some other urban refugees, and Zeke swears, but not very convincingly.
‘Yes, we have an Ottilia Stenlund. Number 39, Skoghöjdsvägen in Abrahamsberg. Would you like me to connect you, and send you a text message with the details?’
The phone rings three times, then Malin hears a tired, hoarse female voice at the other end.
‘Ottilia.’
Something in Ottilia Stenlund’s voice makes Malin think she was expecting a phone call.
From us?
‘My name’s Malin Fors, I’m a detective inspector with the Linköping Police.’
She explains the reason for her call.
Apologises for calling her at home, but given the circumstances it couldn’t be helped.
‘I still work at the same office,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘But today’s my day off.’
Friday off. Malin remembers reading an article in Expressen saying that Social Services had started to open on Saturdays to meet the extra demand from people affected by the financial crisis.
‘So do you have to work on Saturdays? I read about that.’
Show interest, build up trust, you never lose the habit, Malin thinks.
‘Sometimes I have to work Saturdays, yes.’
Ottilia Stenlund breathes, long, thoughtful breaths, and Malin asks: ‘I presume you’ve been following the case. And that you remember the girls.’
‘I have to keep everything confidential,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘I’d be breaching our code of conduct if I said anything,’ and Malin feels a flash of anger as she snaps down the line: ‘They were blown to pieces. Can you imagine that? Those lovely little babies you helped to get adopted grew into two beautiful little girls, and now there’s nothing left of them but charred flesh, blood, and guts. So don’t try it on with all that fucking—’
And Zeke has rushed around the car and is now yanking the mobile from her hand, and Malin feels everything going black before her eyes, and is having trouble breathing, and she reaches out for the roof of the car and can feel still-warm bird shit between her fingers as she hears Zeke say: ‘I must apologise . . . my colleague is under a lot of pressure, we’re in a tight spot at the moment, is there any way you could make an exception, getting a court order to get around the confidentiality legislation takes time, and time is something we don’t have.’
The world grows clearer again.
Zeke, sounding resigned.
‘So you can’t make an exception? OK, thanks anyway.’
He clicks to end the call.
‘She was scared,’ Zeke says. ‘Couldn’t you hear it in her voice? She was absolutely terrified.’
It’s half past four by the time Zeke drops Malin off outside her flat.
The pair of them, Börje Svärd, Waldemar Ekenberg, and Johan Jakobsson have spent all Friday afternoon talking to people connected to the Vigerö family. Nothing terribly significant has emerged. The adoption seems to have been unknown to all of them, and the family appeared to have been impossibly happy.
And the Security Police have made their presence felt again.
On the same path as them? Not impossible. Sven Sjöman had taken care to keep them updated, as he had been instructed, and who knew what they might do with the information.
Ottilia Stenlund is my, our, best way forward, Malin tells herself.
The Pull & Bear has opened, and she stops outside the entrance to the pub, waiting for the urge to have a drink to wash over her, but as she stands there in front of the red and yellow paintwork she feels nothing. Just wants to get up to the flat, and a couple of minutes later she’s sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring at the wall.
Tove is out at Janne’s.
The bastard.
And then things start to move inside her body and she leaps up from the sofa. She needs to shake off this damn restlessness, can’t bear the thought of just looking at the shabby walls of the flat any longer, listening to the ticking of the Ikea clock, and she pulls her running clothes out of the wardrobe, digs out her worn-out Nikes, and in just a few minutes she’s running past the few people strolling along the path beside the river.
From the corner of her eye she can see the tall, newly built apartment blocks, which rumour has it are seventy-five per cent occupied by doctors. She runs past the new bowling alley, trying not to look at the other side of the river where the fire station, Janne’s workplace, sits red and blunt, like a reminder of the unending meagreness of life.
How fast can I run?
How far?
Smart 1950s villas line the slope down to the river. She’s been inside several of them in connection with other cases.
Her heart beating like a hammer inside her now.
Her field of vision reduced to a narrow oblong.
Move, get out of the way. And she feels her body working, obeying her, and the adrenalin pumps and she swings up over Braskens Bridge and runs on past Saab.
This was where Mum worked, she thinks. This was where she met the man who gave her her second child, my brother. This was where our lives, Mum’s and Dad’s and mine, turned into one big lie. Unless that had already happened before then?
I refuse, Malin thinks. It’s not going to happen to me.
She’s stopped outside the factory gates. Stands there panting, leaning over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath, then she runs back towards the city centre again, thinking: I refuse, refuse, refuse, and the word becomes a mantra inside her, carrying her forward, and she thinks, I’m thirty-six years old, I can’t allow myself to be defined by the mistakes made by another woman and her husband, and by their inability to confront themselves. I’ve got the opportunity now to do precisely that, to look myself in the mirror and finally do something with my life.
I have to visit my little brother. For my own sake, for Tove’s, for his. Have to conquer my fear. Because I am afraid of what might be waiting for me, aren’t I?
Tove. She wants to go straight away.
Malin fights to suppress the dark feeling that grows in her stomach whenever she thinks of Tove, and she’s aware that she’s making the same mistake that she’s always made.
But still.
Still.
First I have to finish this job. Put pressure on Ottilia Stenlund. Make her talk.
And Malin thinks of Peter Hamse. She hasn’t spoken to him today. Even if I have a perfectly valid reason to.
Daniel and Janne. Bastards. And she forces herself onward, her surroundings become colours, sounds, pain, breathing, until finally she slumps in front of the door to her block as the bells of St Lars Church strike half past six. She feels her stomach clench and quickly leans to one side, spewing up all the bile from her stomach, and it feels incredibly good and her whole being is nothing but sweat and a chilly dampness.
She sticks her fingers down her throat.
Throws up the last contents of her stomach.
Sees her dad’s face in front of her.
Dad, she thinks. How am I ever going to forgive you?