Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Have I been suppressing something? she wonders again. And if so, what? But she has no time to linger on that thought before she is roused from her reverie by Sven’s voice, summarising what they know about the girls, and their mother, whose operation the previous day was a success, though she still isn’t out of danger.

  ‘We can’t talk to her yet, according to the doctor I spoke to,’ Sven says. ‘Tomorrow at the earliest. Possibly even later than that.’

  ‘You saw the video,’ Malin says. ‘The bomb could have been aimed at them. It was detonated, if they used remote control, when the girls had returned to the cashpoint.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Waldemar says. ‘That’s too much of a long shot.’

  ‘Malin, Waldemar’s right,’ Sven says. ‘We can assume that the family were innocent victims.’

  ‘Should we put a guard on Hanna Vigerö in the University Hospital?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  Malin nods.

  Thinks that the girls were probably just that: innocent victims. They were certainly innocent, no matter what the circumstances.

  Then Waldemar says: ‘Those bastards could have spared the kids. If they wanted to. That’s obvious enough. But they wanted to prove they meant business.’

  14

  Time spares nothing and no one.

  The clock on the dashboard says it’s eleven o’clock, and the radio news comes on as Zeke and Malin turn into Rydsvägen and glide slowly past the northern end of the old cemetery. The trees inside the cemetery wall seem eager to catch Malin’s attention. Their crowns are covered with little pink flowers that sway in the wind, and it seems to Malin that the flowers want to stay, hold on to the branches at all costs, even though it’s a hopeless battle.

  You can’t fight against what you are.

  Just ask someone who knows.

  One thing that’s changed since she stopped drinking is that her intuition, what some people might call her visions, has become stronger. Especially in her dreams. As if the absence of alcohol makes her consciousness clearer, more receptive to things that are hard to explain.

  It doesn’t scare her.

  But she knows it scares a lot of people.

  Instead she tries to open herself up to her perceptions, accept the gift of being able to see more, intuit more than other people do.

  But what does it mean?

  There’s no point trying to make any sense of it.

  She sees it like this: a wind blows through a leafy treetop. You hear a voice whispering. Or else you don’t hear it. Nothing more to it than that, really.

  Anxious shadows on the grey, moss-covered stones of the cemetery wall.

  The flowers, vibrant with both life and death, an ending but also a beginning. Pink is the colour of everything newborn, isn’t it?

  The memorial grove.

  Malin can’t see it through the flowering trees. Is that were Mum’s going to be laid to rest?

  ‘How’s your dad doing?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘He seems to be dealing with it OK.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘How are you dealing with it?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘You know I do that automatically.’

  ‘What for?’

  Zeke laughs.

  ‘Because you’ve got previous as a major fuck-up. That’s why.’

  Malin grins back. They drive on in without talking.

  She concentrates on the news.

  The bombing is the lead story.

  The newsreader says nothing they don’t already know, then he goes on to talk about deserted banks, and that there are reports from various parts of the country that people daren’t even walk past banks.

  Nordea’s head of PR says they’re raising the level of security in all their premises, and that, like all the other banks, they’re keeping their branches closed until further notice, but that it looked as if it would be entirely safe to carry out your business with the banks within a day or two.

  ‘Naturally, we’re taking this extremely seriously.’

  ‘Like fuck,’ Zeke snarls, and outside the car it’s the sort of spring day you dream about, when the mercury climbs unexpectedly high and there are just a few confused clouds in an ice-blue sky.

  ‘Nice that those bastard banks are going to be closed for a while,’ Zeke goes on. ‘Like a physical sign of the shame they ought to feel after all the trouble they’ve caused in the past few years.’

  ‘I’d be happy to see them stay open if it meant we could have avoided this,’ Malin says.

  ‘Obviously, Malin, that wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘I know.’

  They drive past Gamla Linköping.

  People are wearing less with each passing day. As if they dare to trust the spring and the warmth, in spite of what’s happened.

  Some of the blocks of flats they pass could do with painting, but the council has had to postpone the work, they don’t have the money now that the number of unemployed in the city is going up. There’s also been talk of shutting the Tinnerbäck pool one day a week, and withdrawing funding for the city’s playgrounds.

  Fucking banks.

  Don’t those bastard bank directors and venture capitalists realise that their greed is directly connected to the country’s children being worse off? That they run the risk of hurting themselves on broken climbing frames?

  Responsibility, Malin thinks, has little meaning these days, except for the responsibility for your own bank account.

  The radio is droning on about some Komodo dragons being born in Kolmården Zoo, the first time that’s ever happened in captivity.

  What do baby lizards eat? Malin wonders. Then she sees a mental image of ten baby lizards ripping a mouse apart.

  Who’s ripping Linköping apart?

  Sofia Karlsson?

  The activist.

  Who spent two months in Skänninge Prison for the attack on Kindstrand’s now defunct mink farm in Kisa. She only got two months because it was impossible to prove that it was her, or the group she belonged to, that set fire to the farm. She was found guilty of making threats against the owner.

  Animal rights activist.

  Proud of ruining decent businesses, proud of her claim that animals were as equal in value as people.

  Malin closes her eyes.

  Hears the car engine do its job. Thinks: Just let me manage to do mine.

  The stairwell of the yellow-brick, two-storey block of student flats smells of a mixture of pizza and piss.

  It’s a hundred metres from here to the university, and the students are among the more fortunate residents of Ryd.

  The people living in the ordinary council blocks are generally regarded as the dregs of the city: unemployed labourers, immigrants, single mothers with young kids, alcoholics, people with mental illnesses.

  No one chooses to live in Ryd of their own accord, except for the students who have managed to get hold of a student flat.

  And that’s what Sofia Karlsson has done.

  According to Johan Jakobsson she’s studying biology, which makes Malin think of worms eating their way through a wooden coffin as she stands in the stairwell and rings the doorbell beside the graffiti-covered door of the flat.

  Zeke standing beside her.

  Leaning forward slightly.

  Ready.

  Ready to draw his pistol if anything happens. Ready for the violence, the force needed if they think they’re getting close to something.

  The door opens and a thin, petite young woman in her mid-twenties pokes her head out and looks at them.

  Sparkling nose-rings, several in each nostril, and her hair, twisted into tight dreadlocks, shines greasily in the light falling through the windows of the stairwell.

  Cops.

  That’s what she seems to be thinking. Then she makes an attempt to close the door, but Zeke puts his foot in the way.

  ‘Not a chance.’

  And Sofia
Karlsson gives up, opens the door, lets them in, and the single room of the flat is tidier than Malin was expecting. Neat and organised, with small china animals on a crocheted cloth on top of a metre-high bookcase. There’s a computer on a table, and a sofa bed covered by a rasta-coloured blanket. A faint smell of hash.

  The only indication of Sofia Karlsson’s activism is a poster for Animal Guardians.

  A polecat eating a woman in a fur.

  Blood pouring from wounds in the woman’s legs.

  Sofia Karlsson says nothing, just sits down on the bed and looks at them.

  Malin and Zeke stand in front of her and show their badges.

  ‘Can we assume you know what’s happened?’ Malin says.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘The bomb in the main square. The Economic Liberation Front. Do you know anything about them?’

  ‘No. Why would I know anything about them? Apart from what I’ve heard on the radio this morning and seen on the Net.’

  ‘Have you looked at their website?’ Zeke asks.

  Sofia Karlsson nods.

  ‘Do you know anything about them?’ Malin asks again. ‘Their pattern of behaviour, action followed by a media campaign, is very similar to what you did with the mink farm.’

  ‘So you think I’m involved in some fucking explosion?’

  Zeke takes a step forward and leans down towards Sofia Karlsson: ‘Two children are dead,’ he whispers. ‘If you know anything, you’d better tell us.’

  Zeke backs away, then sweeps his hand over the bookcase, knocking off the small glass animals, which shatter on the yellow linoleum floor.

  At first Malin wants to stop him, then changes her mind. At a time like this they need Waldemar Ekenberg’s type of anger.

  Sofia Karlsson stands up and yells: ‘You’re mad, you fucking pigs. Completely mad.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Malin says, and Sofia Karlsson sinks onto the bed again, shaking her head.

  ‘I had a lecture when the bomb went off yesterday. You can easily check that.’

  ‘What, you think we suspect you?’ Zeke says, in a exaggeratedly friendly tone of voice.

  ‘Why else would you be here?’

  ‘We’re fishing,’ Malin says. ‘Trying to find a bomber, a child-killer. Do you happen to know anyone like that?’

  ‘You can leave now if you’re only here to bully me.’

  ‘What do you think about what they’ve done?’ Zeke says. ‘About what this Liberation Front claim to have done?’

  Malin looks at the computer.

  Can we seize it?

  No. We’ve got nothing on Sofia Karlsson. Just a link in a line of inquiry, if it can even be called a link.

  Sofia Karlsson looks up at them from her bed.

  Runs her hands over the bedspread.

  A pained, anxious expression in her eyes is replaced by a cool, delighted, almost manic look.

  ‘I think it’s great,’ she says. ‘The banks needed to be taught a lesson. Greed has to be wiped out. And that might mean sacrifices have to be made.’

  Malin stifles an urge to punch her in the face, to beat some sense into the girl in front of her.

  ‘ButI don’t know anything about it,’ Sofia Karlsson goes on. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Do you smoke dope?’ Zeke asks. ‘It smells like it.’

  Sofia Karlsson doesn’t answer. Just stares past Malin and Zeke.

  As they leave the house in Ryd a black Volvo pulls up outside the door and two men in jeans and almost identical blue jackets get out.

  They must be the Stigman and Brantevik that Sven mentioned.

  Malin and Zeke nod to them.

  ‘All yours,’ Zeke says as they meet on the pavement. ‘All yours,’ and the two Security Police officers can’t help smiling, as if this is all a game to them.

  Security Police pigs, Malin thinks. You think you’re pretty special. But tell me, what good have you done at all in the past twenty years?

  She opens the car door with a jerk.

  Once they’re out on the main road, four motorbikes drive past them.

  Hang on.

  Hang on a moment.

  The man in the video, by the cashpoint, the one coming out of the bank.

  ‘Get back to the station. I want to watch the video of the cashpoint again.’

  ‘There. There!’ Malin says, pausing the recording.

  The meeting room is stiflingly warm from the spring sunshine, her stomach feels swollen with the flatbread wrap she ate at Snodda’s kiosk on the way back to the station.

  Zeke is sitting beside her, and they both lean closer to the screen, and Malin points at the fuzzy outline of the bare-armed man leaving the bank just before the explosion.

  ‘Do you see him? Do you see who that looks like?’

  ‘No. I can just see a general outline.’

  ‘Can we zoom in with this?’

  ‘Malin, this is a twenty-year-old VHS, so I’m pretty sure we can’t.’

  Malin adjusts one of the video’s controls and the film from the surveillance camera moves on, one frame at a time.

  ‘There.’

  She pauses the picture. The man’s face is suddenly clear.

  ‘I bet you that’s Dick Stensson,’ Malin says.

  Zeke screws up his eyes.

  ‘Bloody hell, you might be right.’

  Dick Stensson.

  Leader of the local biker gang, the Dickheads, loosely associated with the Hells Angels. They’ve never been able to get him for anything on the long list of his suspected crimes: extortion, drugs, fraud, weapons offences, assault, murder . . .

  ‘If it is him,’ Malin says, ‘what was he doing in the bank just a couple of minutes before the explosion?’

  ‘You mean he could have been the target?’ Zeke says.

  ‘Los Rebels in Rimforsa are flexing their muscles, we know that. And they’re associated with the Bandidos.’

  ‘No one in the bank mentioned Stensson when they were questioned after the bomb.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just another ordinary customer to them,’ Malin says. ‘He’s not well-known to the general public. Is he?’

  ‘No,’ Zeke says. ‘And the people in the bank could have been more shaken-up than they seemed.’

  ‘It still seems odd that he was in the bank just before the explosion,’ Malin says.

  A hint.

  A spark.

  And the investigation is wrenched in another different direction. The moments of clarity and focus she felt after their last team meeting have dissolved into a new chaos, like the minutes following an explosion, when debris and dust sinks to the ground like sooty stars.

  Or am I at the centre of an explosion? Malin wonders.

  And I just don’t realise it?

  ‘It’s still a bit odd,’ Malin goes on.

  ‘Stensson’s got as much right as anyone else to have a bank account,’ Zeke says. ‘Maybe we should take a trip out to Jägarvallen, the Dickheads’ hangout, and ask Stensson what he was doing at the bank?’ he adds.

  ‘I think we should ask the branch manager first,’ Malin says.

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Zeke says. ‘We let Waldemar and Börje talk to the bank manager. See if they can get him to tell them if Stensson was at the bank yesterday.’

  Malin nods.

  Waldemar Ekenberg isn’t worried about ramming his pistol deep into someone’s throat if he wants to make them talk.

  The SEB branch manager might not have any idea of who Dick Stensson really is.

  But letting Waldemar loose on him won’t do any harm. Why should we show any compassion to a banker? There mustn’t be any more explosions. And they don’t deserve gentle treatment, those idiots in the banks.

  ‘What about us? What are we going to do?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘Let’s see what Forensics have come up with. You’ll get to see Karin, Zeke.’

  ‘Be careful, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘Just watch it.’

  Malin sees his eyes flash in the light
of the frozen television screen.

  You’re still fucking her, Malin thinks.

  God, I wish I had someone to make love to.

  15

  What must it look like when Zeke has sex with Karin Johannison?

  They’ve been having a secret affair for almost two years now.

  But they hide it well, Malin thinks.

  Karin Johannison is sitting behind her desk in the National Forensic Laboratory. She is slowly stirring a cup of hot tea. Her straight blonde hair is hanging down over her aristocratic cheekbones.

  She’s wearing a thin white blouse that emphasises her breasts, and the walls of her windowless office are covered with shelves holding bundles of papers, files, and books in a fairly bohemian muddle. On the floor is a pink and red oriental carpet, and that overblown leather-clad office chair that she must have paid for herself. Malin recognises the design but can’t place it, and it annoys her, and then she gets annoyed at the fact that she gets annoyed by such insignificant things.

  They’re each sitting on a leather stool opposite Karin.

  How is she looking at Zeke?

  I want you. Now.

  That’s how she’s looking at him.

  And in her mind’s eye Malin once more sees the pair of them tightly intertwined on a bed in one of Linköping’s cheaper hotels, perhaps the Stångå down by the railway station.

  ‘We know what sort of bomb it was now,’ Karin says. ‘What explosives were used, and how it was detonated.’

  ‘Shoot,’ Zeke says, and Karin smiles.

  ‘The bomb was detonated remotely. We found the remains of a detonator cap that’s usually used for remote explosives, as well as parts of a transmitter. You can pretty much stand as far away from that sort of detonator as you like. We’re talking about an IED here, an improvised explosive device. A bomb that someone put together themselves from various parts and substances. The basis for the bomb was acetone peroxide, or TATP as its known in the trade. The army keeps stocks of acetone peroxide, and it’s also commonly used on construction sites in Sweden. It’s probably the most widespread type of explosive.’

  ‘So where exactly would someone get hold of some of this TATP?’ Malin asks, leaning forward to show her interest, feeling the buttons of her dress strain, and wondering if she shows any skin when she does that. She thinks: He could have spared the girls, if he or they could see the bank from wherever they detonated the bomb. Does that mean anything? Apart from the fact that they wanted to show they meant business?