Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Al Kabari shakes his head.

  ‘Why would you need to ask that question?’

  Then he pauses before going on: ‘I can tell you that my community is calm. I promise you that there’s no fanaticism of that sort. There are no madmen here, no desperate kids, no crazy Taliban hiding in some tiny flat. I can pretty much guarantee that. All we have here is a group of people trying to make a decent life for themselves.’

  Malin can hear the honesty in the imam’s voice. His sorrow at the state of things.

  ‘We’re going to have a meeting here this evening. A lot of people in the community are worried about what’s happened. I know you have to catch the person who killed those girls,’ he says. ‘I don’t know anything that can help you. But I hope that the perpetrator gets his just punishment.’

  Malin hears her mobile ring as they are walking back to the car between the white blocks of flats in Ekholmen, thinks that it must be her dad or Tove. What are they doing now? I should be there with them.

  She fishes her phone out and sees Sven’s name on the screen.

  She stops, clicks to take the call, and beside her Zeke’s skull-like features emerge from the fading light.

  ‘Sven here. How did you get on at the mosque? Did you get hold of him?’

  ‘We’ve just come out. In all honesty, I really don’t believe this has any connection to Linköping’s Muslim community.’

  ‘He didn’t know anything?’

  ‘No, and I think he was telling the truth.’

  ‘You were careful about what you said, weren’t you? Was he angry that you went to see him?’

  ‘He wasn’t angry, Sven, he was very understanding. Is there any news?’

  ‘The uniforms have talked to everyone who was in the square now, the wounded in hospital, and the ones who were OK and didn’t hang around. But no one saw anything unusual. Not a thing. Then there’s the guy from the hotdogstand. We must have missed him in all the confusion. He said he recognised Hanna Vigerö, she used to come to the square some mornings with the children.’

  ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘She works in a home for adults with learning difficulties. They have a rota that means they’re sometimes off in the mornings, so there’s nothing odd about that. And she’s been off sick for a while, so she’s had plenty of opportunities to be there.’

  ‘What about Waldemar and Börje? They were going to the bank?’

  ‘Yes, they’ve asked for the recordings from the bank’s security cameras, we’ll be getting them from Stockholm tomorrow, everything is stored centrally there. They got hold of the last of the staff as well. No one seems to have noticed anything odd, or seen anyone acting suspiciously. And I got hold of the SEB’s head of security in Stockholm. According to him there haven’t been any threats at all against the bank. Obviously he questioned the idea that the bomb was directed at them specifically, and seemed to be suggesting that it was just coincidence that the explosion happened there. But they’ve closed all their branches for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘Did they speak to the branch manager again?’

  ‘Yes. He said he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary either. He made a point of it.’

  ‘What about Johan?’

  ‘He’s busy trying to get an overview of left- and right-wing extremists in the city at the moment, trying to piece together everything we know, identify a few key individuals for us to talk to, but it’s not easy, they’ve been pretty quiet for the past few years.’

  ‘Some new idiots might have moved here,’ Malin says. ‘From Umeå, Lund, or Uppsala.’

  She hears Sven pondering this on the other end of the line.

  ‘And we’ve found out a bit more about Hanna Vigerö,’ he goes on. ‘There’s a good reason for why she’s been on sick leave. Her husband, a Pontus Vigerö, the girls’ father, died in a car accident six weeks ago. Ice. Evidently he was on his way to work and went off the road, straight into an old oak tree. You remember, that cold snap at the end of March, when the roads were like glass and we got all that late snow. He worked for Tidlund Lifts out in Kisa.’

  ‘Anything odd about the accident?’

  ‘No, the investigation concluded that it was just an ordinary accident as a result of ice.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ Malin says. ‘First her husband, and now the children. That’s terrible.’

  ‘To put it mildly,’ Sven says.

  ‘Any other family?’

  ‘None that we’ve been able to trace. No grandparents on either side, they died years ago.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘No. They seem to have been pretty self-contained.’

  Beside Malin, Zeke is tapping his foot restlessly on the grass, staring up at the small balconies where the white moons of satellite dishes point out at the world.

  ‘How about the girls? Have they been formally identified yet?’

  ‘No. Karin and her team in the National Forensics Laboratory are working as hard as they can on the DNA analysis, comparing them against samples from Hanna Vigerö. Karin hasn’t got anything else for us yet either.’

  There’s a moment’s silence on the phone and Malin breathes in the smells of the area. Fried meat and toasted cumin, perhaps a hint of cinnamon, and Malin feels hungry again and wishes people had the decency to cook with their windows and balcony doors closed. Then she detects the verdant, slightly bitter smell of spring grass, and it reminds her of when she used to race across the lawn in their garden out in Sturefors as a child, and how the smell carried with it a promise of movement, physical activity, and how she always loved that feeling, the feeling of unlimited freedom.

  ‘Are you still out in Ekholmen?’ Sven goes on.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You might as well take a look at the Vigerö family flat while you’re there.’

  ‘So this is where they live, then?’

  ‘I said so at the meeting.’

  ‘I missed that. Zeke too.’

  ‘There’s a lot going on. It’s hard to take it all in,’ Sven says.

  My brain’s not working at its best, Malin thinks, there’s too much happening, too quickly, it’s as if my whole world is one big explosion.

  ‘What do you want us to do in the flat? Is it OK to break in just like that? I mean, they are the victims.’

  ‘Break in,’ Sven says. ‘It’s important. Get a sense of who they are, or were. You know, Malin. Listen to the voices of the investigation.’

  The voices, Malin thinks. I’ll listen to them.

  But will there be any to hear in the flat?

  ‘Number 32A, Ekholmsvägen. Head over there now. See what you can find.’

  Malin hears a buzzing sound.

  ‘I’d better go,’ Sven says. ‘Someone’s waiting to come into the office.’

  8

  Sven Sjöman leans back in his office chair and the men opposite him sip coffee from grubby 7-Eleven mugs.

  They’ve introduced themselves, but only by their surnames.

  Brantevik, a man in his fifties, wearing a worn brown corduroy suit and blessed with a rugged red face that’s been wrecked by smoking.

  Stigman. A man of Malin’s age with short blond hair and a sharply chiselled chin and similarly sharp eyes. Elegantly but casually dressed in a pale-blue jacket and black jeans.

  The Security Police.

  It’s not even six o’clock and they’re here already.

  ‘Have you got anywhere?’ Brantevik asks in a hoarse voice.

  Sven briefs them on their lines of inquiry, carefully and thoroughly.

  The two Security Police officers nod. No follow-up questions.

  ‘How about you?’ Sven asks, looking out of the window, towards the orange panelled façade of the University Hospital and the hundreds of cars in the car park.

  ‘What can you give us? For instance, is there any sort of international connection that we ought to know about? Anything to do with religion? Politics?’

  Stigman takes a dee
p breath and starts talking in a tone that lets on that he really likes the sound of his own voice.

  ‘At the current time any information of that sort is confidential, but between us I can say that we have no such indications. We didn’t receive any prior warning.’

  Sven nods.

  ‘We’re booked into the Central Hotel.’

  ‘Are they open?’

  ‘Yes, the rooms at the back of the building.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Apparently they’ll be serving breakfast in one of the conference rooms, and the reception area made it through the explosion without too much damage.’

  ‘And there are just the two of you?’

  ‘For the time being,’ Brantevik says. ‘There’ll be more coming tomorrow. I’m in charge of our investigation. Keep us informed about your work.’

  ‘And you’ll doubtless be keeping us informed about yours?’

  The men on the other side of Sven’s desk smile.

  Stigman seems to want to say: ‘Sure, Charlie, sure,’ but stays silent.

  When the Security Police officers have left the room, Sven leans over the desk and looks down towards the hospital again.

  Hanna Vigerö.

  She’s in there somewhere, fighting for her life.

  Another ten or so of those injured are being kept in for treatment, some of them probably for several weeks. Those with minor injuries can go home, and those in shock have had treatment, but the shock permeating the city will last a long time, perhaps it will never fade completely.

  What on earth have they been hit by?

  He thinks about his detectives.

  Reflects that Waldemar Ekenberg’s relentless determination will definitely be needed now. That Johan Jakobsson’s talent for digging things out with his computer – God knows how he does it – will come in handy. Similarly Börje Svärd’s maturity, and Zeke’s steely core. But most of all they’re probably going to need Malin’s intuition. Who knows, it might lead them in the right direction.

  And Karim Akbar.

  He seems to have reached a watershed moment in his life, and instead of becoming more tolerant he’s choosing to see things in black and white, us against them, and who can really blame him when something like this happens?

  Malin.

  He knows he ought to talk to her, but there’s no time for that. He knows she’s likely to throw herself at the case, and that perhaps she ought to be doing the exact opposite right now, look after her nearest and dearest, not least Tove. But the general public, Linköping’s taxpayers, need her now.

  I need her now, Sven thinks.

  So I’m going to let her follow her instincts.

  The stairwell on Ekholmsvägen smells of sweat and smoke and wet animal fur. It’s strangely damp here, a sense of something steaming, as if they had been instantaneously transported to a thick jungle. A faulty fluorescent light is flickering in the ceiling, making the yellow-painted concrete walls look pale, and the speckled grey stone floor look as if it’s covered with crawling worms.

  Malin rings on the door that says Vigerö.

  ‘Out of politeness,’ she says.

  She and Zeke wait.

  Malin rings again.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ she says.

  ‘Not sure about that.’

  ‘It’s OK in a situation like this,’ and she pulls out her keyring, finds the lock-pick, and a minute later the door of the flat is open.

  What does normal look like?

  Floral wallpaper in the hall. A coat-rack from Ikea, and below it a shoe-rack, neat rows of children’s and adults’ shoes.

  A clean kitchen with yellow units. Two stools at a round kitchen table, two ladder-back chairs that look new. A living room with a green-checked corner sofa, a flatscreen television. On the walls, black-and-white photographs of coastal scenes, probably from Ikea as well.

  They go into a bedroom. The blinds are closed and faint light seeps through the gaps. White duvets on two beds.

  Malin reaches for the light switch. Turns it on.

  The room is bathed in a gentle light and Malin sees framed photographs above the beds, images from the girls’ lives, playing in a sandpit when they’re little more than a year old, riding a pony, playing on a beach, getting bigger, the last day at nursery, going down a blue slide in a playground, standing outside Gröna Lund funfair in Stockholm.

  Colourful plastic toys in a wooden box. Games in neat piles. Two identical dolls.

  Close-ups of the two girls.

  The prettiest kids you could imagine.

  Beautiful big eyes.

  One picture in which their mother is stroking their cheeks.

  Malin can hear Zeke breathing heavily behind her. His grandchild is two and a half years old now. A little boy. He’s only seen him twice, Malin knows that, it’s difficult arranging regular contact when your son is a star ice-hockey player in the NHL.

  ‘Fuck,’ Zeke says. ‘Fuck.’

  Malin sits down on one of the beds. Lays her hands on the neat white duvet.

  Sisters. They probably stuck together. Best friends. Us against the world. The way sisters sometimes are. The way brothers are.

  Then the lamp in the ceiling flickers, and there’s a clicking sound, and the room goes dark again, and Malin thinks she can hear the whistling sound again, the one she heard in the square.

  She sees the eye from the square in the room’s darkness, and the cheek, the torn-off scrap from a human face, a child’s face. She can see it clearly in her mind’s eye, and she knows now that the eye, the cheek, belonged to one of the girls, which one doesn’t matter, it might as well be the cheek of both twin girls.

  Let them be at peace, Malin prays, and the sound vanishes, and she fumbles through the darkness of the room, the world black in front of her blinded eyes.

  Malin, Malin.

  We see you and Zeke making your way through our rooms, hear you swear when you see our lovely beds.

  Aren’t they lovely?

  You don’t find anything odd, you don’t find anything. Just perfectly ordinary things, ordinary records and images from a life where everything was ordinary. Wasn’t it?

  A twin existence. Twice as much love, twice as much good.

  Mummy’s asleep now.

  Do you think she’ll live here again?

  We won’t.

  Because now feelings are our home.

  All feelings. Everything a person can feel, even the things far, far beyond what can be expressed in words.

  It’s dark and cold here. Like a long spring night, and we want Mummy and Daddy to come and give us a hug.

  But where’s Daddy, Malin?

  Where is he?

  Where are they?

  Now you’re closing the door of what used to be our home.

  You look around the stairwell, Malin, wondering what those shapes are that you can make out in the darkness.

  You hear the whistling again. Is it the birds singing?

  It’s only us, Malin, our drifting bodies trying to find peace by making the most of physical space.

  But it doesn’t work, Malin, we can’t find any peace.

  9

  Karim Akbar is sitting in his office, feeling as if he’s chained to the chair. The leather behind him is warm against his back, and he is longing for his new girlfriend’s body, longing for all that she is.

  He wants to hear her voice, and the intelligence contained within it. He wants to feel her breath as she whispers in his ear, feel how she desires everything about him, the same way that nature desires life itself in the spring.

  His former wife, who took off for Malmö with a counsellor and their son Bayran, she can go to hell.

  The arrogance that comes with being the object of someone’s infatuation.

  I can indulge myself a bit, Karim thinks.

  Vivianne’s a prosecutor, transferred from Norrköping a year ago. Five years younger than me. She offers a bit of resistance, and she’s smart, and it’s as if she
awakens the beast in me with her ambition, she’s made me really keen to make a career for myself again. And she herself is probably going to end up as Attorney General.

  The Justice Minister has just called.

  She wanted to find out what the situation was, hear about the investigation, and Karim wasn’t surprised to hear from her – their bomb is leading all the news broadcasts.

  He has the television on.

  The main evening news. And now he can see pictures of Linköping, of himself, and outside the window the police station car park is empty, and the street lamps are casting a peculiar yellow glow over the spring evening, and he knows it’s chilly out there.

  Then the Justice Minister’s face appears on the screen. Wrinkled from smoking, soothing.

  ‘At this moment in time there’s nothing to indicate any connection to international terrorism . . . I have full confidence in the local police . . .’

  Karim turns off the television.

  He looks over towards the offices on the top floor of the district court building.

  There’s a light on in one of the rooms. Her office. He can see her silhouette, sitting in front of the computer on her desk.

  Then his mobile buzzes.

  He reads the message.

  ‘I can see you. I’m touching myself as I watch your shadow. Come over.’

  Malin is walking home from the station, feeling the perfumed smell of all the flowers in the Horticultural Society Park, sensing how the pistils of the flowers seem to be sending coded signals to her body: break free, do something stupid, give in to your weaknesses, who cares what happens?

  But she has to stay focused.

  She knows that.

  It’s past ten o’clock in the evening, and it feels as if one of the longest days of her life is drawing to an end. It’s gloomy now, the cones of light beneath the street lamps free of insects, yet still somehow vibrating with life.

  The cordon around the main square has been lifted now.

  People have started lighting memorial candles on the ground in front of the hole in the wall where the cashpoint machine had been. Maybe a hundred candles there already, flowers, little notes written to the children who the media have said were killed, but who still haven’t been officially identified.