Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Everyone needs to be questioned.

  Who knows which of them might know something? Who knows what direction this investigation is going to take?

  Johan seemed shocked at first. Especially when he heard about the dead children, children the same age as his own. Börje has been strangely calm from the start. Waldemar is as unshakeable as ever. A cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and with the friendly look in his eyes that he pulls out when he needs to. Malin knows his wife lost her job a few months ago, when the redundancies hit Rex Components. But her being unemployed doesn’t seem to have had any noticeable effect on Waldemar.

  Zeke is professional yet still upset, as if he wants retribution for what has happened in the square, and hasn’t established any distance whatsoever from it, still gripped by the force field of the explosion. It makes him seem grand and diminished at the same time.

  They ask thousands of questions.

  But almost always get the same answer.

  ‘Did you see anyone suspicious?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What were the minutes leading up to the explosion like?’

  ‘I was drinking coffee, everything was normal.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘I was curious so I came down.’

  The fear in people’s eyes, in their bodies, is shared. What’s happened? Denial and realisation all mixed up in a way that takes in the form of a fear that still isn’t quite strong enough to keep the curious away from the devastation. Like after 9/11, when hordes of curious onlookers streamed to the site where the towers had stood and thousands had died, and you could see on television that the curiosity in their eyes was greater than the fear.

  Malin questions one person after the other.

  A student with a plaster over a cut on her forehead, maybe just four years older than Tove, and she says: ‘I was having a Coke at Mörners, wanted to get a bit of sun before I went off to the library to study. It seemed to me that the explosion came from up by the bank. At least that’s what it felt like. What do you think happened? Who could have done something like this?’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin replies, and she can see that the girl in front of her doesn’t have any great faith in the abilities of the police.

  Then, after an hour or so, everyone in the square has been questioned. Along with the staff in the bank, including the branch manager. Several of the bank’s employees have left the scene and gone home to their families.

  A large number of uniformed police have helped take statements in the square. Hesitant, almost scared, they’ve gone out among the citizens of Linköping who have turned up, with their notebooks in their hands, and have received the same answers as Malin and her colleagues from the Criminal Investigation Department.

  No one saw anything. No one knows anything.

  Aronsson has made sure that any of the injured who have already been taken to hospital will be questioned, as well as anyone whose names they have been given as having been present in the square, but who had already left without being interviewed.

  Malin moves through the debris, feeling the glass crunch beneath her feet, and sees Karin Johannison fine-combing the area around the bank, looking for anything that might mean something.

  Loads of police officers here.

  When something like this happens you don’t notice the cutbacks that have been made in recent years as a result of the financial crisis. Budgets will have to be grappled with later. But they could do with many more police officers in the city. Mainly, perhaps, in the domestic crime unit. Plus they have a pathetically low prosecution rate for things like suspected paedophile crime. Only one report in every ten ever leads to criminal charges.

  Hopeless. Surely we have to be able to protect children? Malin thinks. What’s a society worth if it can’t even protect its children?

  The children. The child’s cheek.

  Who were you? Malin thinks, as she walks over towards Sven.

  The panic and fear are gone from his eyes now.

  All that is left is the calm determination of experience.

  ‘Let’s get back to the station,’ he says. ‘Put our heads together. Try to get some sort of overview of what’s happened.’

  At first Malin drove past her mum and dad’s flat on Barnhemsgatan without stopping, thinking that she ought to get to the police station in the old barracks of the Garnisonen district as quickly as possible. But then she turned back towards the flat.

  Have to go home, home to Tove and Dad, to the drinks after the funeral, and do my bit.

  She parked down by the old bus station, where one of the city’s increasing number of homeless was rooting through a rubbish bin, and a gang of teenage girls in short skirts and thin blouses was walking past with an older lad in a padded jacket.

  Even here the smell was in the air, the faint smell of burning from the explosion, but also the smell of dogshit from down in the Horticultural Society Park, all the shit left by dogs whose owners hadn’t bothered to pick it up in the cold of winter, the smell of which was now spreading in the spring air.

  There was still grit on the roads. It was treacherously slippery, a reminder that the cold still wasn’t that far away. In the car park, she had felt like running away in vain from the changing season, and now she is standing in her mum and dad’s living room, by the window, where their long since dried-out plants once stood. Malin looks around, listening to the sound of her dad and Tove in the kitchen.

  All the guests have gone.

  She missed coffee, but the buttery, sickly smell of biscuits and sandwiches is still hanging in the air, making her feel hungry.

  In the kitchen her dad is standing at the sink, giving the old porcelain a rudimentary scrub with the washing-up brush, as Tove dries it.

  ‘There’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry.’

  He smiles at Malin, looks almost relieved. Do you feel free now, Dad, is that what it is?

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she replies.

  ‘You should be,’ Tove says. ‘Eat something,’ and Malin opens the fridge and picks a few prawns from a sandwich.

  There’s a bottle of mandarin liqueur in the fridge in front of her.

  The urge wrenches at her stomach, heart, soul, and Malin says: ‘You used to love these pre-packed prawns when you were little, Tove.’

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ Tove says. ‘Surely I had better taste than that? I wouldn’t have eaten pre-packed prawns, would I?’

  Then Dad laughs, but abruptly cuts his laughter off.

  ‘The will’s going to be read on Thursday,’ he says. ‘With Strandkvist, the solicitor. Two o’clock in his office, number 12, St Larsgatan. It has to be done.’

  Of course it has to be done, Malin thinks. And against her will she thinks of what Mum has left behind, knows that Dad will get everything as things stand, but still feels greed grabbing at her, and thinks how nice it would be to get a share of the millions of kronor that her parents’ flat in Tenerife must be worth.

  I want it.

  Give it to me.

  It’s mine.

  Human greed is the best friend of evil. I don’t give a damn about the inheritance.

  ‘Reading the will is going to be fine,’ Malin says once she’s thrust such thoughts aside. ‘It’s just a formality.’

  Dad nods, then goes on: ‘It’s not that, it’s just that . . .’

  ‘I realise it’s difficult,’ Malin says. ‘But we’ll be there together. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Do I have to go as well?’ Tove asks.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Dad says. ‘We’re done here, aren’t we?’

  Tove nods, and leaves the tea towel on the worktop.

  ‘I have to get back to the station. This is going to take a lot of work.’

  None of them has mentioned the explosion up to now.

  As if what happened just five hundred metres away belongs to another wo
rld.

  ‘We understand,’ Tove says. ‘We saw the local news on television. Is it true what they said about the children?’

  Tove is not scared.

  Not keen to hear gory details.

  Just curious. All too aware of the crap the world can throw at anyone, far too good at dealing with crap for someone so young.

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘What do you know so far, then? There must be something you can say?’

  And Malin realises that they don’t know anything, except that they mustn’t let themselves panic, that the shock felt by the city and its inhabitants at what has happened can’t be allowed to spread to the police. We have to keep our heads clear, she thinks. We have to, even if it’s difficult. Who knows what Karim might get into his head?

  Malin leaves them in the kitchen, framed by the bright green kitchen cupboards that must have been the height of fashion twenty years ago.

  You two seem to enjoy each other’s company, she thinks as she hurries down the stairs.

  Åke Fors watches his daughter from the living-room window.

  Sees how the spring seems to embrace her, how the yellow crocuses by the roadside seem to reach out to her, wanting her with them as protection against an uncertain future.

  He runs his finger across one of the plant pots and realises that he won’t manage to say anything to her, it will all have to play out in their meeting with the solicitor. That everything must run its course and that everything will get sorted out, because surely it must now, mustn’t it?

  He sees Malin walk past Janne’s Jaguar in a light that transforms her hair into a halo.

  He sees her radiant figure, and he thinks: You have no idea of the bomb that’s about to go off in your life. No idea, and I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.

  The whiteboard in the meeting room is already full of ideas when Malin walks into the room at a quarter past three, the last of all the officers in the case unit of the Crime Investigation Department.

  She’s still wearing her black dress.

  Aware that it isn’t at all suitable here. And it’s covered in dust as well.

  Her colleagues are back from the square.

  They’re all there.

  Their clothes are all flecked here and there like Malin’s dress, reminders of the noise and dirt and chaos down in the square.

  But there’s a remarkable calm in the room, in spite of everything.

  A calm that is probably hiding its own chaos, a deep unease. What’s happened? What sort of evil has emerged from its lair under the snow? Was a completely different world hiding under the snow, a world that has mutated in the cold? And is what we have taken to be the beauty of spring actually some new sort of evil, hidden behind layer upon layer of exquisite colours and smells?

  Malin sits down opposite Zeke.

  She wants to be able to look out at the playground of the nursery school outside the windows. The children are out there, playing in the sandpit, pushing toy cars, playing with skipping ropes, clambering up the new climbing frame that was installed just a month or so ago, the solid pastel colours of which remind Malin of what it was like to have a really bad hangover.

  All the police officers are sitting in silence, waiting for Sven Sjöman – who has been appointed head of the preliminary investigation – to start the first meeting in the investigation into the presumed bombing outside the SEB bank in Linköping’s main square on 10 May, an explosion in which two little girls, as yet unidentified, lost their lives, and five other people were seriously injured.

  Sven stops writing on the board and turns around, and for a moment the officers hope for a miracle, that Sven has somehow solved the case at once, so that they can declare the emergency over and tell the city’s citizens the truth.

  But this spring is no age of miracles in Linköping.

  ‘Well, the first thing I should say,’ Sven Sjöman begins, ‘is that the Security Police are on their way. We could well be dealing with a subversive act against national security. Obviously, we still have primary responsibility in formal terms, and we’ll be expected to help the Security Police with their parallel investigation, but I doubt we can expect any help from them in return.’

  ‘They’re quick off the fucking mark,’ Waldemar Ekenberg snarls.

  ‘Take it easy, Waldemar,’ Karim Akbar says. ‘I’ve just spoken to Karin Johannison. She’s done a quick analysis of the crater by the cashpoint machine: we are dealing with a bomb attack. So we need all the help we can get. It looks as if the bomb was placed outside the cash machine rather than inside it, and most of the force was directed away from it. From what we can tell so far, the charge was pretty large, equivalent to a kiloton or so. Previous attacks against cash machines used much smaller amounts, only about five per cent of that. So I think we can safely rule out any possibility that this was a straightforward attempted robbery.’

  Sven points at the board.

  All the officers seem to agree with him: this is no ordinary crime.

  ‘I’ve written up some possible lines of inquiry for us to think about,’ Sven goes on. ‘About people who could be behind something like this.’

  Something like this, Malin thinks.

  The cheek. The eye staring at her.

  Two young children are dead.

  And Sven calls it ‘something’, but that’s just his way of creating the necessary distance from the crime in order for the investigation to run as efficiently as possible.

  ‘What do we know about the victims?’ Malin says.

  Her colleagues look at her, the looks in their eyes revealing that they have only just remembered what she was doing earlier that day, what is going on in her life at the moment.

  Concern.

  Sympathy.

  She hates sympathy. But there’s doubt as well: Is she going to buckle under the strain? Start drinking again?

  ‘No need to worry about me,’ Malin says, in an effort to pre-empt the thought. ‘Besides, I’m needed here now, aren’t I?’

  Johan Jakobsson nods. Karim does too, before saying: ‘We’re grateful to you for putting the victims first.’

  ‘So what do we know about them?’

  ‘Nothing so far,’ Sven says. ‘One theory is that they were the children of the woman who’s in the University Hospital at the moment with severe injuries. It looks as if she and the children were closest to the bomb when it went off. Karin has already been able to confirm that we’re talking about two young children. But they haven’t yet been identified.’

  Malin nods.

  ‘Could the children have been the target?’ she asks.

  ‘In all likelihood they were innocent victims,’ Sven says, ‘who just happened to be there by some cruel twist of fate.’

  Cruel twist of fate?

  Malin can feel that she has taken the children’s side.

  If they care, wherever they are now.

  We’re here, Malin.

  Close to you.

  But simultaneously everywhere.

  We can’t be bothered to listen to everything you say in your meeting room, talking about various factions in society.

  You go on and on like that, like adults, you want to understand everything.

  About the right-wing extremists who are growing in strength in the city. Could they be behind the explosion? But they love the banks, don’t they? Capitalism? Anyway, behind their noisy, sick ideas they’re pretty harmless, they’ve never caused much trouble in Linköping apart from a few demonstrations that have got out of hand.

  The man called Karim is talking.

  Do we have to listen to him? We want to drift off, to Mummy, and stroke her on the cheek.

  But we stay, listen.

  He raises the idea of terrorists.

  The rest of you don’t want to think this thought, but he raises it, and maybe he knows something that you don’t.

  He asks the question straight out: could Islamic extremists have been responsible? Could there have been a te
rrorist cell hidden away in Linköping? Could they have set off dark undercurrents among the city’s Muslim population, making some of its young unemployed members focus their energy in the wrong direction?

  But Sven protests, saying that none of the city’s Muslims has ever reported that sort of extremism. That there are no greater social problems among that group than in any other group with high unemployment.

  Karim persists: someone will have to talk to the local imam sooner or later. And perhaps the Security Police know something that you don’t know. Even if it’s a long shot, and even if it might look racist, we need to talk to him. Look at what happened in Örebro. That Guantanamo inmate used to go to the mosque there, then he went off to Pakistan and was accused of being a terrorist. But what did the imam in Örebro know? And what’s to say that there isn’t an active terrorist cell here in Linköping?

  And we can hear what Karim’s thinking, he’s thinking: even though there are Swedish troops in Afghanistan, people still don’t seem to realise that there’s a war on. The Islamic extremists want to kill us. They want to kill our families, our wives, women, and children. It’s us or them. It’s as simple as that.

  And he’s thinking about his father, Malin. Who was forced to flee nationalist Muslims in Turkey, and then committed suicide in Sundsvall. Alone, unwanted, and desperately homesick.

  You think so much. Trying to make evil simple, comprehensible.

  We don’t think that much. We feel. But is that any better?

  You talk so much.

  No, we can’t be bothered to listen to you talking about how our bodies shattered, Malin, how we were blown up, how our blood stained the beautiful spring square and the plants outside the chemist’s and made everything red and horrid. No, we’d rather watch the children playing in the nursery playground, pretend that we can still sing, go down the slide, run and jump, maybe just have some fruit as a snack.