She was used to the cries of the birds and the noise of the waves, but the rustling of the big windbreak made of thin blue plastic annoyed Madeleine. It made it hard to sleep.
She was lying on her stomach and the sun was baking her body. She had folded the big beach towel so it covered her head, but had left a little gap so she could see what was going on if she had her head facing the side.
Nine Lego figures.
And Karl and Annette’s little girl, playing happily by the water’s edge.
Everyone was naked except for the pig farmer, because he said he had eczema and couldn’t stand the sun. He was down by the water, keeping an eye on the girl. His dog was there too, a big Rottweiler that she had never learned to trust.
She sucked her tooth. It never seemed to want to stop bleeding, but it wouldn’t come out.
Closest to her, as usual, sat her foster-father. Every now and then he ran his hand down her back or rubbed some sunscreen on her. He had asked her twice to turn over and lie on her back, but she pretended to be asleep and unable to hear him.
She turned her head under the beach towel and looked in the other direction. There the beach was completely empty, nothing but sand all the way to the bridge and the red-and-white lighthouse in the distance. But there were more seagulls in that direction, possibly because some visitor hadn’t tidied up properly when they left.
‘Turn onto your back now.’ His voice was mild. ‘You might burn.’
She obeyed without a word, and shut her eyes as she heard him shake the bottle of sunscreen. His hands were warm, and she didn’t know what she ought to feel. It was nice and nasty at the same time, just like her tooth. It itched in a tingly sort of way, and when she ran her tongue around its root its wobbliness made her shudder, in the same way that she shuddered at the touch of his hands.
She knew that her body was more developed than many girls the same age. She was much taller than they were, and had even started to get breasts. At least she thought she had, because they felt swollen and itched as if they were growing. And that was why her tooth itched, because it would soon fall out. There was a new tooth that was going to grow from beneath the old one, an adult tooth.
He stopped touching her, sooner than she was expecting.
A subdued female voice asked him to lie down, and she heard her elbows press into the sand.
She cautiously turned her head. Through the gap in the towel she saw it was the fat woman, Fredrika, and she sat down beside him with a smile.
She thought about the Lego figures. Tiny plastic people that you could do whatever you liked with, and they carried on smiling even when you melted them in the oven.
She couldn’t stop watching as the woman leaned over towards his waist and opened her mouth.
Through the gap in the towel her head was soon moving slowly up and down. She had just been for a swim, and her hair was stuck to her cheeks and it all looked very wet. Red and wet.
She thought about when they were up at Skagen and her foster-father hit her for the first time. It had been on a beach with a lot of people, and they were all wearing swimming costumes. She had gone over to a man sitting alone on his blanket, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking. She had pulled down her swimming costume in front of him because she had thought the man wanted to see her naked.
He had just looked at her with a wry smile as he blew out the smoke, but they had been furious and Daddy P-O had dragged her away by the hair. ‘Not here,’ they had said.
Now everyone was just curious, and the shadows of their bodies were starting to block the light.
Her tooth itched, and she could feel how cold the air was when the sun disappeared.
They looked on and she looked on. There was nothing to be ashamed of.
One of the new, fair-haired women took out a camera. It was the type that froze the pictures and spat them out at once. A polar camera, that was it. They made the molecules stand still.
The windbreak rustled, and she shut her eyes again when the camera clicked.
Then suddenly her tooth came loose.
The hole in her gum ached and felt cold, and she rolled the tooth around her mouth as she watched.
It itched, and tasted of blood.
S?dermalm
THE BEGINNING OF the end is a burning blue car at the highest point of Tantoberget.
A burning hill in the middle of S?dermalm isn’t the sort of thing that Jeanette ever expected to be the missing piece that would help her see the whole picture. As she and Jens Hurtig pass Hornstull at high speed and catch sight of Tantoberget, it looks like a volcano.
Before the patch of land between became a park, Tantoberget was pretty much a dump, a cemetery for human refuse, and now, once more, it has become a site for scrap and waste.
The fire at the highest point of the park is visible from most of Stockholm, and the flames leaping up from the burning car have set fire to an autumn-dry birch. It’s sparking and crackling, and the fire is threatening to spread to the little allotment cottages a dozen metres away.
Hannah ?stlund and her classmate from Sigtuna College for the Humanities, Jessica Friberg, are wanted by the police on suspicion of two murders. The car that is being devoured by the flames up on the mountain is registered to Hannah ?stlund, and that’s why Jeanette has been called in.
As she opens her car door to get out, she can smell the hot, poisonous, black smoke.
It stinks of oil and rubber and melting plastic.
In the front seats of the car, through the fatally hot flames, she can see the silhouettes of two lifeless bodies.
Barn?ngen – S?dermalm
THE EVENING SKY is bathed in the yellow glow of light pollution from the centre of Stockholm, and only the Pole Star is visible to the naked eye. The artificial lights in the form of street lamps, neon tubes and light bulbs make the open site below the Skanstull Bridge gloomier than if the city had been blacked out and the starry sky the only source of light.
The few nocturnal pedestrians crossing the older Skans Bridge alongside and glancing up towards Norra Hammarbyhamnen see nothing but light and shadows, in an alternately dazzling and blinding display of light pollution.
They don’t see the crouched figure walking along the old, abandoned railway track; they don’t see that the figure is carrying a black plastic bag and turns off the track to stand on the quayside, where it’s swallowed up by the shadows of the bridge.
And no one sees the bag being swallowed by the black water.
The figure opens a car door and gets into the driver’s seat, puts the light on and pulls a bundle of papers from the glove compartment. After a couple of minutes the light goes out and the car starts.
The woman in the car recognises the sky’s sick yellow light from other places.