Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  She blinks.

  Now only her dad is there, once her eyes have adjusted to the light. Only Dad, and the smell of distilled fear.

  3

  Malin and Mum, over the years

  When did I lose you, Mum?

  That time you disappeared? Because you did go away when I was little, didn’t you, and where were you then?

  On planet Look-after-number-one. And I would go to you, and I was allowed to sit on your lap, but never for more than five minutes, then you would have to do something else, I was too heavy, too hot, too in the way. How can a mother think that her own daughter is in the way?

  So I turned away.

  I would run to Dad. He was the one who came to my athletics competitions, who gave me lifts to football matches, who made sure I got my hair cut. That was all true, wasn’t it?

  You turned me towards Dad, didn’t you? You did, didn’t you?

  I remember sitting in my room out in Sturefors, waiting for you to come to me, Mum. Waiting for you to say something nice, rub my back with your hand.

  But you never came.

  Instead I would lie in bed and stare up at the white ceiling, unable to sleep.

  One night when there was a storm I went to your bed and crept in beside you. I was five years old.

  You turned on the lamp on the bedside table.

  Dad was sleeping next to you.

  You looked at me.

  Lie down next to me, you said. Are you scared of the thunder?

  Then you turned out the light and I could feel your warm body against mine under your nightgown, the way it carried me off to sleep as if your whole being were a vessel of bubbling warmth.

  When I woke up the next morning you were already gone. I found you in the kitchen.

  Sleepy, with bags under your eyes.

  ‘I haven’t slept a wink,’ you said. ‘And it’s all your fault, Malin.’

  I never felt the warmth of your body under your nightgown again.

  You hardly ever got angry, Mum.

  It was as if you didn’t really exist, even though you were there in those rooms out in the villa. You decided how I should dress, or wanted to decide, at any rate, trying to make me more girly, because that’s what girls were supposed to be like. I hated the skirts you tried to make me wear. The dresses.

  And I tried to rein myself in. You tried to get me to feel small in the world, to know my place.

  You’re not that intelligent, Malin.

  Make sure you find someone with money.

  Maybe you should be a nursery teacher. That might suit you. But try your best.

  Make sure you find someone with a good name.

  Becoming part of my own failure, my inability to accept what I had, what I had created for myself.

  You hated reality, Mum.

  Did you hate me? Because I was a reminder of your own reality?

  The words, said in your grudging voice when I came home with my school report.

  Have you been flirting with the teachers?

  And when Tove arrived. You cursed me for my clumsiness, how could I get pregnant, just like that? So young? You said that I, we, weren’t welcome, that you’d die of embarrassment in front of all your acquaintances because I couldn’t keep my legs together.

  Tove.

  You never looked at her. You never held her in your arms. You’d made up your mind that she was a disgrace, simply because she didn’t suit your plans, or fit in with the image of the perfect life that you were trying to create.

  But no one cared about that picture, Mum.

  I cared about you.

  I wanted your love. But because I didn’t get it when I was little, maybe I didn’t really want it once I was grown up, and you didn’t want to give it to me either.

  Was there ever any love?

  What were you scared of, Mum? God knows, I could have done with your support when I was studying at Police Academy and was on my own with Tove.

  Dad used to come to Stockholm sometimes.

  But you refused.

  Women shouldn’t be police officers.

  The distance grew over the years. The lack of love became greater than the love, eradicating it, and in the end I had to ignore you, Mum.

  I miss the mum I never had, but I can’t mourn the mother I did have.

  Does that make me a bad person?

  4

  An acrid, burned smell in the air, presumably from the construction blast earlier, cutting through the air and seeming to trouble the spring sun.

  Malin moves closer to her dad on the paved path outside the chapel, feels like putting her arm around him, can see he’d rather be somewhere else.

  The wind is rustling the top of an oak tree whose green buds are still holding back on the showier part of their annual repertoire. I was right, Malin thinks, the branches that looked most dead are vibrant with life, the trees are bursting into leaf all over Linköping.

  The priest smiles, takes Dad’s hand, mutters something Malin can’t hear. Then Malin takes Dad by the hand, and she soon feels Tove’s soft, slender fingers take a firm grip of her other one. Janne has gone on ahead and is standing beside his latest car, an old silver Jaguar that he has restored himself, and it looks as if he’d like to light up a cigarette, even though Malin knows he’s never smoked.

  Her dad pulls free. Takes a few steps to the side, then the other mourners file past and shake his outstretched hand.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come back to Barnhemsgatan for coffee with us.’

  ‘You will come, won’t you?’

  The mourners at Malin’s mother’s funeral aren’t yet marked by old age, but they’re starting to get older, and are probably just glad it isn’t one of them in the coffin.

  As a swallow chases a gust of wind across the copper roof of the chapel, she allows herself to imagine them as her colleagues in the Crime Investigation Department of Linköping Police. A thickset woman with red hair becomes Sven Sjöman, her sixty-two-year-old boss, who over the past year has put on all the weight he had previously lost, and now puffs and pants at the slightest exertion, a sound that makes Malin think he could go the same way as her mother at any moment.

  An elderly man with thinning hair turns into Johan Jakobsson, the tired but thoroughly decent young father who seems happy with suburban life. A suntanned gentleman becomes Börje Svärd, now without his drooping moustache since his wife, Anna, died of MS a year or so ago. Börje hasn’t met anyone else yet, instead choosing to devote himself to his dogs, the firing range, and work.

  The lunatic, Waldemar Ekenberg, the violent, heavy-handed police officer from the neighbouring district of Mjölby, is here represented by a little woman desiccated by decades of smoking, with a scratchy, firm voice.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I’m afraid I can’t come back for coffee. She was a lovely person.’

  Her closest colleague, Zeke, becomes an amiable old man with a sharp nose, and twinkling eyes, not entirely unlike the real Zeke, with his shaved head, steely gaze, and a penchant for sleeping with the beautiful forensics expert Karin Johannison, even though they’re both married to other people.

  And with that the parade of mourners is finished.

  They head off towards their cars in the car park. None of them was like Karim Akbar, the Kurd in his early forties who is head of the Linköping Police. Karim has picked himself up again after his divorce, and has finished his book about integration issues, and has appeared in the papers and on television with his impeccable suits and well-groomed hair. He has met a new woman, a prosecutor whom Malin can hardly bear to look at. She’s a weak prosecutor, a true careerist who won’t even let them question suspected paedophiles.

  Silly games, Malin thinks. Mum’s dead. This is my own mother’s funeral, and all I’m doing is playing silly games in my head.

  Tove has gone over to Janne by the Jaguar.

  They put up with each other, she and Janne, for Tove’s sake.


  Malin says nothing about anything whenever she meets Janne. It’s best that way, best to hold the anger and bitterness and loneliness at bay by not putting it into words.

  They talk about Tove. About things she needs, who’s going to pay for what, how and where their daughter should spend her free time, her school holidays.

  Is he seeing anyone else?

  Malin hasn’t noticed anything, hasn’t seen anything, hasn’t heard anything. She’s usually good at picking up the signs, and Tove hasn’t mentioned anything about there being a new woman out in the house in the forest on the way to Malmslätt.

  Malin takes her dad under the arm and leads him off towards the car park, and asks: ‘Are many of them coming back for coffee?’

  ‘All apart from Dagny Björkqvist. She’s got to go to another funeral out in Skärblacka.’

  Skärblacka.

  The site of the biggest waste incinerator on the Östgöta plain. Sometimes the smell from Skärblacka hangs over Linköping like a stinking cloud.

  No Skärblacka cloud today, thank goodness.

  Only the strange, faint smell of something burned, as if from an explosion or – and Malin doesn’t even want to think the thought – burned flesh, fear.

  Could that smell be coming from her mum?

  They cremate bodies here, in a facility connected to the chapel by a tunnel: could they have been so quick that Mum is already burning, that her body is already surrounded by destructive flames, that it’s the smell of Mum’s burning flesh spreading invisibly through the air?

  No.

  They couldn’t move that quickly from the end of the funeral to cremation.

  The coffin is still there in the chapel, and Malin feels a sudden urge to run back in, open the coffin, put her warm hand on her mum’s cheek and say goodbye, goodbye Mum, I forgive you, for whatever it was that meant things ended up the way they did.

  But she doesn’t move from her dad’s side in the car park.

  She watches the cars drive off, one by one, and pushes all thoughts of the coffin aside. Instead she switches on the large-screen mobile phone that she pestered Karim Akbar for, the only technological investment in the force that year, and fingers the keyboard nervously, and the moment the phone finds a signal it starts to ring.

  Sven Sjöman’s name on the screen.

  Sven.

  Now?

  He knows I’m at the funeral, so something terrible must have happened, and Malin can feel the familiar tingling, the excitement she always feels when she senses, and almost starts to hope, that a new, big, important investigation is about to start. Then comes the shame, a double dose this time, that she should think of her work as a release, and in such a way.

  Who’s in trouble this time?

  Some drunks who’ve managed to kill each other?

  A violent robbery?

  Children?

  The girls, the angels just now.

  Dear God, please not children. There’s no defence against that sort of crime, evil aimed at children.

  ‘Malin here.’

  ‘Malin?’

  Sven sounds upset, almost bewildered. Then he pulls himself together.

  ‘I know this is a bad time to call, but something terrible has happened. Someone’s set off a bomb in the main square. A big one. A lot of people seriously injured. Maybe even fatalities. It’s total fucking chaos . . .’

  She hears Sven’s words, but what the hell is he saying, what’s he actually saying, and she understands without understanding and her lips move: ‘I’m on my way.’

  Her dad looks at her, hears her words and knows she’s on her way to something else, and he looks scared but nods calmly to her as he stands beside his old black Volvo, as if to say: ‘I’ll be all right’. But the look in his eyes contains something else as well, something intense, a different sort of relief that Malin can’t quite grasp but knows is important.

  ‘Drive straight to the square.’

  ‘I’ll be there in five minutes. Maybe ten.’

  She clicks to end the call, adjusts her long black dress and rushes over to Janne and Tove.

  Janne looks worried, his brow furrowed as he watches her running towards him, hampered by the long dress.

  Must have seen her talking on her mobile, can see that her work persona has taken over.

  If anyone from the emergency services is needed in the square right now, it’s Janne.

  Whatever must it look like there?

  Like a war zone. Dismembered limbs and blood and screaming. Janne knows how to deal with that. Rwanda, Kigali, Bosnia, Sudan. There’s no recent trouble spot where his need to demonstrate compassion hasn’t found an outlet.

  ‘We’ve got to go. The pair of us,’ she says, tugging at his arm, and then she explains what’s happened, and Tove says, her eyes clear in her open teenage face: ‘Go, both of you, I’ll look after Grandpa and the coffee, just go, that’s more important.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Malin says, and turns away from Tove, and it feels as if she’s done it a thousand times before, a thousand times too often.

  Her dad has come over to them.

  ‘Dad, that was work, something terrible’s happened, I have to go.’

  ‘Go,’ he says without hesitation. ‘We’re not going to have much fun back at the flat anyway, I can promise you that.’

  He doesn’t ask what’s happened, doesn’t even seem curious.

  A minute later Malin’s sitting in the new white Golf she uses for work, with Janne beside her.

  Dad and Tove can take the Jaguar.

  The rays of spring sunshine have somehow made the car as hot as a desert bunker. In the rear-view mirror Malin can see her dad and Tove standing in the car park in front of the chapel. They’re hugging each other, but Malin can’t see if they’re crying. She doesn’t think they are, she’d prefer to believe that they were taking strength from each other in order to deal with the rest of the day, and all the future that lies beyond it.

  Janne takes a deep breath and clears his throat before he says: ‘I’ve seen what explosions can do to the human body, Malin. Be prepared for the worst.’

  5

  Two grey-white pigeons are pecking at something that Malin thinks looks like a piece of meat, it must be human flesh, mustn’t it? Flesh from a body that’s been blown apart, as if razor-sharp lizard’s teeth have torn it to pieces.

  The paving stones of the main square are littered with dust and debris. A dirty paper sign bearing the handwritten word ‘Sale’ in orange ink blows past her along with hundreds of pink tulip petals.

  Is that really flesh in front of her?

  Malin moves towards whatever it is on the ground some ten metres in front of the chemist’s. She raises her arms to scare the pigeons away, they shouldn’t be pecking at that.

  At what it looks like.

  No, it mustn’t be that.

  No, no, no.

  Her black dress is lifted up by a gust of wind as she slowly walks towards what she doesn’t want to see.

  She and Janne had parked outside the Hamlet bar, and from the main street, there had been no sign of any destruction, nor any sign of any people. Instead there was just an all-consuming silence when they opened the car doors and set off at a run towards the square and the devastation they were expecting.

  Maybe the phone call from Sven was just a bad dream? Maybe there hadn’t been any explosion? Maybe it wasn’t a bomb but a gas leak, but surely it had been years since they stopped using gas in Linköping?

  Then they got closer to the square.

  They slowed down, as if they wanted to calm their hearts, steel themselves, prepare themselves, adopt their professional roles.

  The ground in front of the shoe shop and the newsagent’s was covered with broken glass from the shattered windows. The smell of scorched flesh and hair was noticeable, but she couldn’t hear any screaming.

  They turned the corner at the end of the shopping centre and saw the square.

  The scene of devastation alm
ost made Malin collapse. She had to stop and catch her breath as Janne rushed on towards the ambulances and fire engines that had driven into the square down by Mörners Inn and the Central Hotel.

  Firemen and paramedics were swarming around people lying on the ground with shimmering metallic blankets over their bodies and clumsily bandaged bleeding heads. Several of the injured were talking on mobiles.

  Presumably to their families, and Malin herself felt a strange desire to call Tove even though they had only just seen each other.

  There was glass and debris and dust everywhere. The little flowerstall had been blown over, tulips everywhere. A lost white greyhound was rushing to and fro with bleeding paws, and grey and white pigeons were circling the scene, flying low, back and forth, seeming to look at their reflections in the mass of broken glass. All of the hotel’s fifty or so windows facing the square had been blown out, the glass scattered in a million fragments down below. On the ground floor, the hotel’s restaurant and bar lay deserted and open to the elements, as if God had come down to earth and declared that the Day of Judgement had arrived.

  Malin narrowed her eyes.

  Noticed the smell of burned flesh and fabric once more.

  Saw uniformed police officers setting up a cordon.

  She tried to acclimatise herself to the scene, understand what she was looking at, tried to get her eyes to accept the knife-sharp spring light that was making all the as yet winter-pale people in the square look almost dead, lifeless, with a skintone that made the blood on the paving stones look even redder.

  The hotdog-seller.

  The parasol above his stall was a stripped metal skeleton.

  The tubs of sausages had been tipped onto the pavement, and the canvas awnings over the terrace cafés had been blown off, as if a giant maw had leaned down from the sky and sucked up all the air, only to spit broken glass over all the locals who had been enjoying the spring sunshine in the city’s largest square on this particular day.

  Two marked police cars were parked over by the old courthouse. There was a smoking black hole where the SEB cashpoint had been. But there were no scraps of money on the square, every last note must have been consumed in what seemed to have been the core of the explosion.