Midwinter Blood by Mons Kallentoft

Author:Mons Kallentoft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

40

A voice at the other end of the line, the crackling makes the Norwegian unclear, dreamlike, as Zeke reverses out of the Kalmviks’ drive.

“Yes, hello? You wanted Göran Kalmvik? He hasn’t been here for just over a week now. His shift ended last Thursday, and he’s not expected back for two weeks. I can’t hear you very well, not … Where he might be? At home. … Oh, I see. … In that case I’ve no idea. … Yes, he works two weeks and is off for three.”

“Holy hell,” Malin says when she has hung up. “Kalmvik’s dad isn’t on the rig. Hasn’t been there for over a week.”

“Henrietta didn’t seem to have any idea about that,” Zeke says. “What do you think it means?”

“It could mean anything. That he was at home last week when Bengt Andersson was murdered and that he could have helped the boys if they managed to go a bit too far with one of their pranks against him. Or he’s been deceiving his wife and has a mistress or something even juicier somewhere else. Or maybe he’s just having some time off on his own.”

“Is it Saturday he’s due home?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be hard to get hold of him before that. Do you think Henrietta’s lying? That she’s only pretending not to know anything? Trying to protect him and their son?”

“It didn’t look like it,” Malin says. “I’d say not.”

“Okay, let’s drop Kalmvik for now, Fors. Let’s brave the cold and darkness and go and take a look at the Murvalls’ cabin in the forest. It would be just as well to get a bit further with all this.”

Just as well, Malin thinks, closing her eyes and relaxing and letting the images in her head come and go as they like.

Tove on the sofa at home in the apartment.

Daniel Högfeldt, bare-chested.

Janne’s picture beside the bed.

And then the image that forces all the others aside, that expands and burns into her consciousness, an image impossible to shift: Maria Murvall on her bed in her room in the hospital, Maria Murvall among dark tree trunks one raw, damp night.

* * *

The car headlights illuminate the forest road, the trees like frozen figures from a horror film around them, deserted summer cottages turned to black outlines, stiff dreams of good days by the water; frozen now like a light gray smudge in the pale moonlight filtering through the gaps in the veils of cloud.

The directions Elias Murvall gave them earlier in his mother’s house: “Hultsjön, then after Ljungsbro head toward Olstorp, past the golf course and on to Tjällmo Road. After about six miles you’ll get to the lake; the road to the other cottages is kept cleared, but from there you’ll have to walk. The path is marked out. But you won’t find anything there.”

Before that Jakob Murvall, suddenly talkative, as if his mother had pressed the play button. He went on about their organized hunting expeditions, about the sale of meat, about deer traps, about how Russian millionaires were crazy about deer traps.

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