Zeke on his meeting with Hans Ekstrom.

Grief.

A dead child.

So many years later, perhaps it doesn’t matter much who was driving and whether or not they were drunk.

A child, a cherished child, is dead. Or, possibly even worse, a living death.

Guilt.

Fundamentally meaningless. But can the anger ever end? Forty stab wounds, years of fury unleashed.

Sven quickly explaining the prosecutor’s decision to release Fredrik Fagelsjo. Then: ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on him’, empty words, and he knows it. They don’t have the resources to keep an eye on him.

‘Contacts,’ Waldemar snarls. ‘Who knows what that bastard Ehrenstierna’s got on the prosecutor?’

And Malin thinks about her own work.

The inquiries.

Maria Murvall.

The violence and the hunt for the truth that she imagined might be able to comfort those left on earth when their relative was drifting about in some sort of bright, radiant sky.

‘Did you check your contacts in the underworld?’ Sven asks Waldemar.

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Waldemar says, and the others laugh cautiously. ‘I checked. But it doesn’t look like Petersson had any connections there.’

And she hears Sven saying that they’ll have to keep digging through Petersson’s life, try to follow the threads of the inquiry as doggedly as possible. Following the lines they already have.

‘We,’ she hears Sven say, ‘are at a stage in the investigation where everything just seems to be spiralling downwards. We might make a breakthrough, or we might get hopelessly stuck. Only hard work can help us now.’

Listen to the voices, Malin whispers quietly to herself.

‘I’m going to Vadstena to talk to Jasmin’s mother.’

‘Soderkoping,’ Sven says. ‘You can go tomorrow, you and Zeke.’

‘I’d like a word with you, Malin.’

Sven’s voice had sounded formal, authoritative, outside the meeting room, and now she’s going up the stairs beside him to his office, and he closes the door behind them and tells her to sit down.

Carved wooden bowls on a white pedestal. Malin knows Sven has made them himself.

She’s sitting in front of him, with him behind his desk with his familiar furrowed face, although Malin can’t quite come to terms with the new wrinkles that have appeared since he lost weight.

There’s a stranger in front of me, and he’s talking to me, he’s worried about me. Don’t worry, Sven, I’m doing enough of that myself, can’t you just leave me alone?

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘I’m fine. Tenerife was great.’

‘So it was good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get a bit of sun?’

Malin nods.

‘And you got to see your parents?’

‘I met them. That was nice.’

‘I’ve been — and I still am — worried about you, Malin. You know that.’

Malin sighs.

‘I’m OK. Everything’s just a bit much at the moment. I’ve split up with Janne, and things haven’t settled yet.’

Sven looks at her.

‘And the drinking? You’re drinking too much, that much is obvious just from looking at you. You-’

‘It’s under control.’

‘That’s not what I’m hearing and seeing.’

‘Has someone talked to you? Gone behind my back? Who?’

‘No one’s said a word. I’ve got eyes of my own.’

‘Zeke? Janne? He’s perfectly capable of-’

‘Be quiet, Malin. Pull yourself together.’

After Sven’s stern words they sit in silence facing each other across the room, and Malin knows Sven wants to say something else, but what could he say? It’s not as if I’ve turned up drunk at the station.

Or have I?

‘Has Zeke said anything?’

‘No. I’ve got eyes of my own.’

‘So what now?’

‘You carry on working. But think very carefully before you drive. Let Zeke do the driving. And try to pull yourself together. You’ve got to.’

‘Can I go now?’ Malin asks.

‘If you like,’ Sven says. ‘If you like.’

‘Mum?’

‘Tove? I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

‘I was at school.’

Shall I say I was outside? Will that make her happy? Or sad because I didn’t go in?

‘Are you coming tonight? Did you get my message?’

‘I’m going to the cinema.’

‘Don’t you want to hear how it went at Grandma and Grandad’s?’

‘How did it go?’

‘Tove, please.’

‘OK.’

‘Will you come round after the cinema? You’ve got to. I want to see you. Can’t you tell?’

‘It’ll be late after the cinema. It’s probably best that I get the bus back to Dad’s.’

‘I can make us some sandwiches.’

‘I’ve got all my things out there. I mean, I do kind of live there.’

‘It’s up to you.’

‘Maybe tomorrow evening, Mum.’

‘You know you can live at mine as well. That used to work.’

Tove is silent at the other end of the line.

‘Do I have to beg, Tove? Can’t you come round?’

‘Do you promise not to drink if I come?’

‘What?’ Malin says. ‘I only have the occasional drink. You know that.’

‘You’re incredible, Mum, you know that? Completely messed up.’

And Tove clicks to end the call, and the words linger like nails on her eardrum. Malin wants to get rid of them, shake them out of her ears and hear other, warmer words instead, words that conjure up a different reality, one where she doesn’t lie to her daughter as a way of lying to herself.

Then she sees the monster looming over Tove, ready to kill her, and the monster turns its masked face towards Malin and smiles, whispering: ‘I’m giving you what you want, Malin.’ And at that moment she knows that she drinks largely because she was given a valid excuse when Tove came close to losing her life, that she had the opportunity for an existence that justified her giving in to her greatest passion: intoxication, the soft-edged world without secrets, the world where fear isn’t a feeling but a black cat that you can stroke and whose claws never rip any searing holes in your skin.

Look at me. Poor me. She wants to smash herself into pieces, but most of all she wants to down a glass of tequila.

Where am I?

I’m standing at the entrance of the police station and I’m wondering where to go, Malin thinks as she looks out into the darkness, watching the raindrops turn into grey splinters in the orange glow of the street lamps, as the old barracks change colour in the autumn darkness, turning mute grey instead of matt beige. It’s just gone seven o’clock. The paperwork surrounding her trip to Tenerife kept her working late.

Malin doesn’t move.

Makes a call on her mobile.

He answers on the third ring.

‘Daniel Hogfeldt here.’

‘Malin.’

‘So I can see from the screen. It’s been a while.’

‘You know how it is.’

‘And now you want to meet up?’

‘Yes.’

The doors glide open and three uniformed officers walk past her with quick nods.

‘I don’t take much persuading. Can you come round in half an hour?’

‘Yes.’

She can already feel him inside her as she ends the call.

And exactly thirty-five minutes later Malin is kneeling on all fours on his bed in his sparsely furnished flat on Linnegatan and holding onto the thin metal bedstead as he pumps hard and deep into her and she screams out loud and he is hot and hard and unknown and familiar all at the same time.

He’s like a whip inside me, she thinks.

His hands are sharp barbed wire on my back. She wants to shout: Faster, deeper, you bastard, further in, harder, and it’s as if he can hear her thoughts because he thrusts harder into her each time his body moves and he digs his nails into her neck and she can feel his sweat dripping like cold rain down through her skin and into her flesh and bones and soul.

Don’t resist.

Explode instead.

Let consciousness disappear in pain and beauty, let the little snakes with their many and varied faces retreat to their darkness.