‘What was he like as a child?’ Malin asks.

‘Impossible to handle. Did crazy things, got into fights, but he was good at school. We lived in a rented flat in Berga, but he went to the Anestad School with all the doctors’ kids. And he was better than them.’

‘What was he like towards you? And you to him?’

The words literally pour from Ake Petersson.

‘I worked a lot when he was a kid. A hell of a lot. That was when things were going well in the aviation industry.’

The old man twists in the bed, reaching for a glass from the bedside table and drinking the transparent liquid through a straw.

‘Do you know if he had any enemies?’

Zeke’s voice is soft, hopeful.

‘I knew no more about his life than I read in the papers.’

‘Do you know why he bought Skogsa? Why he wanted to move back here?’

‘No. I called him, but he hung up every time he heard it was me.’

‘Anything that might have happened when you were still in touch?’

The old man seems to consider this, his pupils contracting, then he says: ‘No. Of course he was an unusual person, the sort people used to notice, but nothing special ever happened. I really didn’t know much about his life even back then. When he was at high school. Before he moved to Lund. He never used to tell me anything.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ Malin asks. ‘Try to remember.’

The old man closes his eyes and sits in silence.

‘Could he have been homosexual?’

Ake Petersson remains calm when he replies: ‘I can’t imagine that he was. I seem to remember him liking girls. When he was at high school there were several girls who used to phone the flat in the evenings.’

‘What was Jerry like in high school, generally?’

‘I don’t know. He’d pretty much turned his back on us by then.’

‘So Jerry moved to Lund?’

‘Yes. But by then he’d broken off all contact.’

‘What about before that?’

But Ake Petersson doesn’t answer her question, and says instead: ‘I did my grieving for Jerry a long time ago. I knew he’d never come back to me, so I got all the sadness out of the way in advance, and now he’s gone all I’ve got is confirmation of what I already felt. Strange, isn’t it? My son is dead, murdered, and all I can do is revisit feelings I’ve already had.’

Malin can feel that her marinated brain isn’t keeping her thoughts in order, and they wander off to Tenerife, to Mum and Dad on the balcony in the sun, the balcony she’s only seen in pictures.

And pictures, black and white, emerge from her memory, she’s very young and wandering around the room asking for her mum, but Mum isn’t there, and she doesn’t come home either, and she asks Dad where Mum’s gone, but Dad doesn’t answer, or does he?

Strange, Malin thinks. I always remember Mum as being there, yet somehow not. Maybe she wasn’t even there?

Tove.

I’m not there. And she feels acutely sick, but manages to control the gag reflex.

Then she forces herself back to the present, and stares at the wall of the room. A shelf full of books. Literary fiction, by famous difficult authors: the sort Tove devours and that she can’t stand.

‘I started reading late in life,’ Ake Petersson says. ‘When I needed something to believe in.’

Dad!

Dad, Dad, Dad!

What would I need you for? To raise my hand against?

You know why Mum took the cortisone, the pain in her body ended up as pain in her soul.

You dragged yourself up from that green sofa for your own sake, not mine, and what did you get up for? Sitting and programming the simplest sort of code, the only thing your pickled brain could handle.

I see you there in bed, your cramping stroke-paralysed half-body is like a physical embodiment of the muteness that always characterised your side of the family, those taciturn, useless men.

You tried to contact me, Dad. But I wouldn’t take your calls. What would we have said to each other?

Would we have spent Christmases in Berga eating cheap sausages? Meatballs, Jansson’s Temptation, pickled herring ad nauseam?

You stopped trying to contact me.

Certain doors have to be closed for others to open. That’s just the way it is. But at the same time: is there anything more exciting than a locked door?

I had been hoping you’d get in touch when I moved back to the city. When I bought the castle. I could have had you driven out there, I could have shown you my home.

Someone else could have come too.

There’s something tragic about you now, as you tell the nurse to angle the blinds so you can look out at the rain. You speak to her nicely, with a meekness you’ve learned to express perfectly.

You look out into the room.

One eye blind after the stroke.

You blink.

As if you can see something you could never see before.

Is it me you can see, Dad?

The phone in her hand shaking. The living room of the flat dark, as if darkness could subdue her nerves.

I’m scared, nervous about calling my own daughter. I’ve spent two days being scared to talk to her. Is that really true?

The third ring cuts off. Crackling. Fragments of a voice.

‘Tove? Is that you?’

‘Mum!’

‘I can hardly hear you, the line’s really bad for some reason.’

‘I can hear you.’

‘Hang on, I’ll go over to the living-room window, you know reception’s a bit better there.’

‘OK, Mum, go to the window.’

‘There, can you hear me any better now?’

‘I can hear you better now.’

‘Are you coming over this evening?’

‘It’s already evening, Mum. I’m out at Dad’s.’

‘So you’re not coming?’

‘It’s a bit late.’

‘Maybe tomorrow, then.’

‘I’ve arranged to meet Filippa tomorrow. We’re going to the cinema. Maybe I could stay over afterwards?’

‘I think I’ll be at home. But you’ve probably read in the paper about the man who was found out at Skogsa. So I might have to work. But you’d be OK here on your own, wouldn’t you? I might have to come out to the house and pick up a few clothes and things.’

‘Let’s talk tomorrow, Mum.’

Then Tove hangs up, and Malin looks out of the living-room window, at the rain that seems to be trying to whip God out of the church over there.

Tove.

It’s as if there’s a great chasm between what I ought to do and what I’m actually doing. She wants to call Tove again, just to hear her voice, try to explain why she is the way she is, does what she does, but she doesn’t even know why herself.

And Tove wanted to end the call quickly, she didn’t pick up Malin’s remark about maybe picking some clothes up tomorrow.

Why?

Does Tove think I’m going to go back?

Could that be it?

Maybe she’s had enough of me? Is she holding back to protect herself?

In the gushing water in the gutter outside, bloated bodies float past. Shiny, covered in silvery drops, with teeth that glow white in the darkness.

Where do all these rats come from? Malin thinks. From the underground caves where we try to conceal all our human shortcomings?

Then she thinks about her conversation with Tove, how people can avoid talking about the things that matter to each other, even though the world they share is collapsing. How a mother and daughter can do this. How she herself has never even spoken to her own mother like that.

The rest of the day had been fairly hopeless for her and Zeke. There had been another press conference, in which Karim hadn’t given the vultures anything at all.

But Lovisa Segerberg, Johan Jakobsson and Waldemar Ekenberg had had a good day in their stinking strategy room.

In a way that struck Malin as miraculous, Lovisa had managed to dig out information that proved that the Fagelsjo family had indeed fallen upon hard times, and that was why they had had to sell Skogsa to Jerry Petersson.