Summertime Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

increasingly warm heads: ‘My name. Josefin Davidsson.’
    ‘What now?’ Zeke says as the ambulance disappears from sight.
    ‘Now we wait for Karin.’
    ‘Johannison?’
    Malin can hear the derision in Zeke’s voice. Thinks: Why do you dislike her so strongly, Zeke? Because she’s beautiful? Because she’s smart? Or because she’s rich, and rich is the same as better?
     
    ‘Bali. We’re going to be staying at the Bulgari resort in Uluwatu,’ Karin Johannison says as she scrapes flakes of blood from the railing. ‘I’m taking my holiday in August, so we’ll be there for a month, it’s at its best then.’
    ‘Janne and Tove are there at the moment.’
    ‘Oh, how lovely. Where are they?’
    ‘Some hotel on a beach called Kuta.’
    ‘That’s the best beach. Terribly touristy though.’
    Malin considers how suntanned Karin is even though she’s been working indoors at the National Forensics Laboratory all summer. She looks as indecently fresh and alert as she always does, her blue eyes radiating a positive shimmer, her skin glowing with care. Her dress, expensive pink fabric draped around her body, contributes to the impression of genuine class.
    Karin had already fine-combed the bushes and the grass beside the summerhouse. Picked up litter that she put into small marked bags.
    ‘I’ll try to get fingerprints. But there could be thousands here, or none at all. Wood’s difficult.’
    ‘I thought you could get prints from anything,’ Zeke says.
    Karin doesn’t answer.
    ‘It might be like you said, Malin. That he attacked her over there in the bushes, and then dragged her here and bundled her over the railings. We’ll have to see what the doctors say about her injuries.’
    ‘We don’t even know if she was raped. Or if the perpetrator was male.’
    Zeke’s voice is confrontational.
    ‘Time to go back to the station,’ Malin says, wondering what’s happened to Daniel Högfeldt. He or someone else from the
Correspondent
ought to have been here some time ago. But maybe their contacts in the force are on holiday. And maybe the call about the girl sounded too dull over the radio.
    But he’ll be here soon enough, Daniel. As surely as summer. The hottest story of the season has arrived, hotter even than the forest fires.
    Girl raped in Horticultural Society Park.
    Beyond the cordon a group of curious onlookers has gathered. People dressed for summer, all of them wondering the same thing as they are: What’s happened?
    Zeke leaves the car; one of the uniforms can drive it back to the station. Malin fetches her bicycle and looks towards the summerhouse one last time before she and Zeke leave the park.
    The sun has climbed higher in the sky and now patches of light are falling into the circular space, the sunbeams seem to wallow in what has happened, seemingly trying to focus on it with their ever-changing interplay.
    This is only the start, the sunbeams seem to be saying, this summer can still get even hotter, less forgiving. Just you wait, after us comes the darkness.
    ‘Are you coming, Fors?’
    Zeke’s voice urgent and calm at the same time.
    Finally a proper case to grapple with. And it’s summer. He doesn’t have any ice hockey to deal with.
    Malin knows that his son, Martin, the big star of the Linköping Hockey Club, the pride of the city, is having a break from training for three weeks. Zeke hates hockey, but is so loyal to his son that he goes to every match during the season. But at this time of year there isn’t even any ice inside the Cloetta Centre.
    The footpath out of the park runs between two blocks of flats, and is lined with flowerbeds, their plants wilting and losing their colour in the heat. Out on Djurgårdsgatan a number 202 bus goes past on its way to the University Hospital.
    It’s hardly six hundred metres to the police station, Malin thinks. Yet here, so close to the physical heart of the law, a girl has been attacked and raped.
    All security is just a chimera.
    Four girls