About the Author

Mons Kallentoft grew up in the provincial town of Linköping, Sweden, where the Malin Fors series is set. The series is a massive European bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages. Before becoming a novelist, Mons worked in journalism; he is also a renowned food critic. His debut novel, Pesetas, was awarded the Swedish equivalent of the Costa Book Award.

Mons has been married to Karolina for over twenty years, and they live in Stockholm with their daughter and son.

Also by Mons Kallentoft
and published by Hodder & Stoughton

Midwinter Sacrifice

Summertime Death

Autumn Killing

Savage Spring

The Fifth Season

Water Angels

Souls of Air

Visit Mons’ website at www.monskallentoft.se and his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/MonsKallentoft and follow him on Twitter @Kallentoft

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www.hodder.co.uk

Originally published in Swedish in 2014 as Jordstorm by Bokförlaget Forum

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Hard Boiled company 2014

English translation Copyright © Neil Smith 2018

The right of Mons Kallentoft to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 77644 7

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

Prologue

[In silence]

The worms are slithering around me. I try to move my arms, but the wood stops them. It is wood, isn’t it?

I don’t remember how I ended up here.

My head has stopped aching. But it was aching when I woke up. And the skin around my nose and mouth stung.

I can breathe, and I can scream. The air could run out at any moment.

I’ve been here for many hours now, but how long? A day? Twenty-four hours? Probably no longer. A second feels like an hour, which feels like a day.

I’m trying not to be frightened, because this must be a dream.

There’s a smell of earth, of damp earth drying.

I’m lying stretched out, no other position is possible.

The planks get in my way if I try to raise my head. Splinters catch in my forehead when I move it from side to side. I’m not naked, though. Trousers, a top, cloth against my skin.

Unless it is actually my skin, and I just think it’s cloth?

My body stings, and there’s blood running down my cheeks, making my hair sticky under my head. I’ve got cuts on my body. Did somebody hurt me?

I fall asleep and wake up. Make an effort not to panic.

The first time I woke up I did that. I strained, kicked, and screamed, and scraped with my fingernails until my fingertips were raw. I screamed until I couldn’t breathe. But my screams bounced back into me, and when I stretched my legs I felt my feet hit a barrier.

There are barriers on all sides. And I hit them and push at them, but don’t get anywhere. I know that now.

I’m tired, I want to sleep.

Maybe I’m already dead?

I’ve got something to drink, there’s a cold plastic tube above my mouth. If I suck it I get water, and I drink, which must mean I’m not dead, because the dead don’t drink. Do they?

Sometimes I imagine I can hear footsteps from above, and think I can hear voices.

But now everything is black and silent, like deaf and blind people’s lives must be. As if someone had hollowed out my eye sockets and inner ears and filled them with earth.

I have to get out of here.

Someone has to find me.

Because the water will run out. The air.

Hunger is making me nauseous. Dissolving my thoughts before they take shape.

Ticking. What’s that ticking sound I can hear? I’m not wearing a watch.

I move, push once again, and scream, but get nowhere, and I yell: ‘Rescue me! Rescue me!’

Who the hell put me here? How did I get here?

Blood from my forehead mixes with my tears.

Someone has to help me.

I close my eyes, and in my thoughts I am carried up, up across the fields, away towards a city in darkness.

PART 1

A love of longing

1

Sunday, 14 May, Monday, 15 May

Malin Fors is sitting at the kitchen table in her flat on Ågatan, looking out at the tower of St Lars Church. The black spire, topped with a cross, is lit up against the encroaching night. The ground around the church has been dug up, and it looks as if the entire building is slowly sinking into its own grave. The rain earlier in the spring crept into the foundations, and now the water needs to be drained.

Not many people about. Linköping has been as quiet as usual for a Sunday evening.

The digital clock above the new Ikea table says 23.14. The red numbers glow in the darkness as she feels the evening’s events linger inside her.

She was working the evening shift. Just after seven o’clock they received a report about a domestic in a flat in Skäggetorp. When they got there they found a woman in her fifties, so drunk she could barely stand, brandishing a knife. Her husband was lying in the floor in a pool of blood. The woman was so out of it that she didn’t know what she’d done.

Yet another drunk shipped off to hospital with severe injuries, and another one to Hinseberg Prison.

Alcohol, wreaking havoc again.

And Malin can’t help thinking it could have been her in that flat, if she hadn’t joined the police, and if it hadn’t been for the people who had tried to guide her in the right direction over the years.

She runs her hands over her face, feels her taut skin, then lets her fingertips play across the deepening wrinkles around her eyes.

She sees those wrinkles in the mirror every morning. She likes them, knows there’s no point fighting the lines that time wants to engrave on your face.

No grey hair yet, and she can still keep her body in shape.

She exercises, exercises, exercises. Runs, swims, lifts weights, and she fucks. More than she’s done for years.

She thinks about what she and Daniel do in bed.

They don’t make love, they fuck. The former would be far too dangerous.

Daniel.

The man who’s moved in and out of her life.

She’d like to be gentler with him, take things nice and slowly, but what they do in bed, on the kitchen table, in the car, and plenty of other places, isn’t making love.

The pattern of their behaviour is purely physical. At first Daniel wanted to be more tender, but that didn’t work. It was as if they were holding back, retreating before the attack had even started.

So they set all gentleness aside.

And now we’re like animals, Malin thinks, even though what we do has absolutely nothing to do with reproduction. He knows she can’t have any more children, and it doesn’t seem to bother him. Doesn’t seem to want any of his own, even if she has trouble believing that.

She sees Daniel’s face before her, his brown eyes, sharp nose, and the laughter lines that have become more prominent.

As if he were happy.

As if we were happy.

Are we happy?

I’m fine with the way things are, she thinks, with the two of us keeping our separate flats. But Daniel lives here almost all the time. He works a lot, like tonight, working the night shift on the paper. He works hard in the newsroom at the Östgöta Correspondent, they’ve got far too few staff after years of financial crisis, and they’re buying in more and more material from freelancers.

And he doesn’t drink much either. Even if he’s in no way teetotal. It’s as if he understands when she’s in a vulnerable state, when she’s thirsty as hell and can’t bear to see anyone else drink, and then he abstains.

She wants a drink now.

There’s a bottle in a cubbyhole under the rubbish bin.

Drink.

And she longs for him, more than she really dares to, longs for Tove, who’s so far away, and that longing saves her, because there’s something solid in the emotion.

Malin sits down on the sofa in the living room, reaches for the remote on the table, and turns the television on. Zaps through the channels.

Celebrities. A load of rubbish.

She thinks about the Eurovision Song Contest. The final took place the previous weekend. Every single newspaper had led with Eurovision news.

And she hated it.

People on television talked about pop songs as though they were the most important thing in the world, and she felt ashamed when she heard them. Is this what we choose to do with our wealth and freedom of speech?

She and Daniel sat on the sofa watching the spectacle.

‘General education,’ he said. ‘Current affairs. This is Sweden now, whether you like it or not.’

‘The world’s totally fucked, and all we’re doing is singing?’

‘Chill out, Malin.’

She felt like smashing him in the head with the bowl of crisps, then realised that he was right.

Why get worked up?

There was no point fighting against it.

Like her wrinkles.

She switches the television off.

Thinks: You make me chill out, Daniel. You calm me down, make me less restless, but you also make me feel more alone.

She wishes he were there with her. Would like to feel his arm around her shoulders, his hand on her cheek. And then they’d fuck. Maybe tenderness and sexuality should be kept separate. Maybe that’s how you make a relationship work.

He usually leaves little messages for her. Hidden in places where she’s bound to find them sooner or later. Most recently a note under the coffee maker. ‘I love you,’ it said.

And reading it made her happy, she believed it, and felt like calling him, but held back. Whispered in his ear that evening: ‘I found the note this morning.’

Nothing more.

She stifles a yawn and switches the television on again.

The late news.

A report of heavy fighting in Damascus, where a young Swede from Karlstad has died a martyr’s death. Some young men from Linköping have also been killed there, lured by manipulative radicals and their own ennui. The news presenter goes on to talk about a bomb in Egypt, the liberals being tortured in Libya, and the international success of a new Swedish computer war game.

Renewed fighting has broken out in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and she feels her stomach tighten.

Tove.

In western Congo. Doing voluntary work in a home for children whose parents have died or disappeared.

Hell on earth.

As you wrote in one of your emails.

But also paradise.

Everything all at once, you wrote, Tove. The jungle, beauty, love. Sickness, violence, hatred.

Tove had already spent several months in Rwanda, following in her dad Janne’s footsteps, but had found Rwanda too ‘organised’, and moved to Congo with the same relief agency.

Malin had protested, but knew there was no point, Tove did as she liked anyway. And Janne had backed her up, telling Malin on the phone: ‘She’ll realise what it means to be human once she sees what she’s going to see there.’

‘She doesn’t need that level of insight.’

Felt like saying: Look at how it changed you, Janne.

How had his time in Bosnia and Rwanda changed her ex-husband? He became more guarded. Resigned. As if he’d lost faith in what might be possible in this world.

Women assaulted.

Children eaten alive by ravenous dogs.

Children dying from curable infections.

Rendered mute by terror and loneliness.

And those are the things he wants Tove to experience.

There are thousands of kilometres between the east and west of Congo. Impenetrable jungle.

It’s a country where women are raped as a tool of war. And why should Tove be spared simply because she distributes a bit of medicine and food?

She wishes Tove were here with her. Would like to hear her talk, breathe, see her walk through the living room on her way to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

She wants to be disturbed by Tove’s noise.

Yet Tove is nothing but silence now.

Sometimes she thinks that Tove might never come home again. That she’ll stay in Africa for good.

Malin is lying in bed. The white cotton sheets are cool against her skin.

Pleasantly cool. But the pillow could be thicker, and when Daniel is here she often lies with her head on his chest.

She’s pulled the blind down, shutting out the light of the stars in the cloud-studded sky. She wants to sleep. But longing is keeping her awake.

She considers trying to read, maybe switching the radio on, but she never does that when she’s trying to sleep, and why would it work this time? She looks up at the ceiling, a dark ochre colour in the gloom.

Tove. Janne. Daniel.

All the people who come and go and sometimes linger in my life.

I don’t want to feel anything, she thinks.

Something is moving in Linköping tonight, and she knows that it’s going to have some sort of effect on her.

She lets herself become her longing. Pure longing, a feeling that makes her more tired than tired, and just after half past midnight, Malin Fors falls asleep.

She dreams about children left speechless with terror, human bodies coming together like animals, hands gently caressing cheeks.

Then her dreams end and she sleeps in total darkness.

2

The street lamps glow above the young man as he makes his way along Repslagaregatan, not far from the Correspondent’s offices, and only a few blocks from Malin Fors’s flat. The street is deserted, one of the few real backstreets in the centre of Linköping. The buildings are a mixture of two and three storeys tall. A brown-fronted office building, a sand-coloured block of flats, with a porcelain cat gazing out from one window.

Peder Åkerlund is tired. He’s dragging his feet. He’s drunk too much beer, but his head is still full of thoughts, ideas, and opinions.

You have to be smart. Say what people want to hear, but do the opposite.

They have to go.

They’re not like us.

They’re ruining Sweden.

Give Mother Svea back to us and send the rabble back to where they belong: Somalia, Iraq, Turkey, Bangladesh, Syria. Who cares where: they need to go, one way or the other. No means prohibited, any alliance permitted.

That’s what people are thinking. Far more of them than you’d imagine, Peder Åkerlund thinks, as he walks home. But you’re not allowed to say that.

Sometimes you have to side with the devil, he thinks.

He imagines he can hear footsteps behind him. Stops, turns around, but there’s no one there.

He walks on. The effect of the beer is getting worse, and he’s weaving badly now. Ahead of him one of the street lamps is broken, and where there ought to be a cone of light he can see a square black shape, a van, by the looks of it.

He carries on walking.

He’s never been scared of the dark, that sort of thing’s for poofs.

Get rid of them as well.

The Pride Festival makes him feel sick.

Something about the street, the van, the broken lamp, unsettles Peder Åkerlund, and he crosses the road, doesn’t want to go too close to the vehicle. Can’t put his finger on why.

A few streets away he can hear two people talking too loudly, obviously drunk. On their way home, like him.

He’s opposite the van now. It looks like it’s been painted by hand, with matt black paint. He speeds up, and is already past it when he hears one of the side doors open, then a voice: ‘You’ve got to help me.’

A terrible sound from his lungs.

‘I can’t breathe.’

It sounds like the man in the van is being asphyxiated by some invisible force, and Peder Åkerlund wants to carry on walking. But he also wants to help.

‘My asthma inhaler. It’s in that bag, over in the corner. Can you get it for me? I can’t reach it myself.’

Not an immigrant. Unless he’s learned to speak perfect Swedish.

This is someone in trouble. And you have to help your fellow man.

If not, you’re no better than an animal, a poof. A Muslim.

He steps over the body lying on the ridged metal floor of the van, can just make out the bag in the corner, and he digs around inside it, finds a plastic object. He can feel that it’s an inhaler, but it’s too dark for him to see what state the van is in.

Dirty or clean?

It smells of iron.

Blood?

No.

Yes. And urine. Excrement.

And Peder Åkerlund thinks that he shouldn’t be here, he should have carried on walking when he heard the weak voice, but it touched something deep inside him, and he had to help.

Be a hero, maybe.

Like those nutters in Syria. The guys from Ryd who blew themselves to pieces, voluntarily. At least we’re rid of them here now.

Be like them. Only in reverse. Save this man and end up in the paper for a reason everyone can agree is good. Mum and Dad as well.

Peder Åkerlund turns around. Bends over the gasping man, holds out the inhaler.

‘Here you are.’

The man holds out his hand.

Grasps the inhaler and puts it to his mouth.

Takes a deep breath.

Then another.

And then Peder Åkerlund sees the man quickly and with unexpected agility and force turn the inhaler towards his own face and let it off like it is a fire extinguisher. He hears a different hissing sound, and his eyes flare with pain. His mouth fills with fuggy air, and against his will he breathes it in, feels himself being shoved backwards hard, and he hits the back door of the van with full force.

The metal doesn’t give way.

His eyes are stinging now. Burning, as if he were going to be blind for ever.

His lungs are smarting, and he tries to stand up, knows he has to stand up, but he can’t, the man is on top of him, pressing him down, and Peder Åkerlund screams silently because his eyes are burning, and then he feels something cold and chemical against his nose and mouth and tries to flail with his arms.

But his arms won’t move.

His thoughts fade.

He hears laughter and shouting.

Sees his mother’s face in front of him.

Then a sharp pain in one temple. And his eyes stop burning. Everything seems to stop.

How much time has passed?

Peder Åkerlund is lying on the cold metal floor, he realises where he is, feels the van moving.

Bouncing. Are they heading into the forest, or down some rough gravel track somewhere else?

He can feel tape around his wrists. Over his mouth.

His eyes are stinging rather than burning, and in spite of the darkness he knows he isn’t blind.

He’s lying on his stomach and his chin is bouncing on the floor, his nose too, and it starts to bleed, the metallic smell is his own blood now.

He can’t move his legs. They must be taped as well. He tries to free himself, but it’s impossible.

His trousers are wet and sticky. Those smells are also his now. His whole body has contracted with fear, first cramping, then into a jellyfish softness.

His head is thudding.

Have the coloureds got him? Those Muslim cunts? The gay pride wankers?

Fuck them.

His thoughts scare him. What if they can hear me thinking, if they hit me and ram my nose into the floor and break it? And he feels like screaming.

But he can’t scream.

The tightest piece of tape is the one covering his mouth.