Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  ‘Have you noticed any increase in threats against you recently?’

  ‘Why would there be any threats against me?’ Dick Stensson says. ‘I’m just an ordinary entrepreneur.’

  ‘We’ve received reports of an increase in violence between you and—’

  ‘Like I said. I’m just an ordinary honest businessman.’

  ‘Lay off that crap,’ Malin says. ‘All three of us know perfectly bloody well who you are and what you do. Two young girls are dead. We’re trying to find out what happened. If you’ve got even the tiniest idea that could help us, you’d better tell us, otherwise I’ll be on your arse like a soldering-iron until you’re in your grave.’

  Dick Stensson smiles.

  ‘So the little lady has a temper,’ he says in an amused voice, and Malin feels like flying across the desk and wrenching the biker bastard’s nose, but she holds back.

  ‘Easy now,’ Zeke says. ‘Nice and fucking easy. So you haven’t got anything to tell us?’ he asks in his steely voice, as if to demand respect from Stensson and calm Malin down.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can be sure we’re going to be taking a good look at your affairs pretty soon,’ Zeke says. ‘Don’t be in any doubt about that. Every single scrap of paper.’

  ‘Do the police have time for that?’

  Dick Stensson is smiling again.

  ‘And I don’t know anything about that Liberation Front.’

  ‘You’ve heard of it?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘It’s the lead story on Aftonbladet’s website.’

  ‘Did you see anything unusual in the square yesterday, anything at all?’ Malin asks.

  ‘I saw the girls. I saw them eating hotdogs and I thought they were pretty. I’m fond of children and I remember thinking that they were too beautiful to exist on our cruel planet. I remember thinking that, Malin.’

  Dick Stensson fixes his gaze on hers. The look in his eyes is hard and cold and factual, and she tries to see some sort of warmth there, but there’s nothing remotely like it.

  ‘You ought to concentrate on catching those activists. In the Liberation Front. After all, they’ve confessed.’

  ‘We’re working on it,’ Zeke says, and Malin can tell he’s annoyed with himself for responding to Stensson, that he’s somehow gone on the defensive, justifying himself, us, the police, to this bastard.

  ‘Thank you. That’s all,’ Malin says, getting up.

  We can hear engines, Malin.

  Inside the workshop.

  We hear them running, like nasty, hungry animals, hear them grunting out their song into the afternoon.

  There are lots of closed doors there. Do they have to be opened?

  Our names are on the Internet now. On the newspapers’ websites. Everyone knows who we were.

  The Vigerö girls.

  Mummy.

  She’s breathing. She’s fighting. We’re trying to persuade her to come to us, calling to her, but she’s resisting, wants to stay where she is, but she’ll probably come to us soon anyway.

  She’s got a temperature. She’s dreaming dark dreams full of our faces and men who aren’t human.

  Men who consist of just a few limited characteristics.

  We call for Daddy.

  We can see the man in the hood, the man with the rucksack on the bike.

  Who is he, Malin? Is he our fear? Is he our desire for more life? More and more and more.

  We weren’t ready, Malin. Aren’t ready. We want more life. Can you give it to us?

  We want you to help us, Malin, to become the girls we were, become the girls we were supposed to be.

  Now the other children are calling again, Malin. They’re calling for you.

  ‘Come, come,’ they call, and they call for their daddy, but he doesn’t know where they are, and their mummy can’t come because she’s dead like us.

  Actually, Malin, we don’t want to help them. Because why should they get to live when we can’t? But we’re supposed to help each other, be nice, everyone’s supposed to, so help them, Malin, save them.

  They’re waiting for you to come and save them. Do it, and you might be able to save yourself.

  If you listen carefully, you’ll be able to hear them too.

  Grown-ups are supposed to come when you call.

  But you can’t hear them.

  You can’t hear them.

  Zeke drops Malin off outside the sand-coloured apartment block on Ågatan.

  There are lights on up in the flat.

  Maybe Tove’s there? Hope so.

  Malin’s longing to curl up next to Tove on the sofa. For Tove to feel that she’s the sort of mum who cares. Who doesn’t put her job, or drink, first. Who doesn’t have to call from some bloody rehab centre and say she feels better.

  I’m longing for a friend as well, Malin thinks. A proper friend to have a serious talk with. To dare to be silly with. Maybe Helen Aneman, the radio presenter, could be that sort of friend? Possibly. Helen is smart and funny and sympathetic. But somehow they never manage to meet up. And Malin isn’t good at getting in touch out of the blue. Mostly she’s only heard Helen’s voice on the radio over the past year.

  In the car on the way back from Jägarvallen she and Zeke talked about Stensson.

  Let their thoughts roam free.

  Could someone have wanted to get at him, then set up the Liberation Front website to mislead the police and focus suspicion elsewhere?

  Maybe.

  There’s no limit to the lengths organised crime will go to. And those fucking crooks can live handsomely from their crimes, better than any ordinary wage-slave can dream of, living in the sort of luxury that would make an unemployed labourer pass out.

  Honesty doesn’t pay very well.

  Or did a few activists simply take the opportunity to promote their message when the chance of getting a bit of attention came along?

  As they were approaching the city centre, Malin called Sven Sjöman. Forensics hadn’t made any progress with

  their digital inquiries during the day. The IP address of the Liberation Front was hidden behind some advanced technical trickery. The question was whether they would ever be able to get at it, or even persuade the IP provider to surrender the information. They were also trying to find out where the email to the Correspondent had been sent from, and had sent a request to YouTube for information about the video, but any answer from there was likely to take a while.

  The source of the material used in the bomb would also be hard, if not impossible, to trace.

  During the afternoon, Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, and Waldemar Ekenberg had questioned more known activists, but that hadn’t given them anything. No one knew anything about the Economic Liberation Front. It had appeared like a cloud of smoke after the explosion, and maybe it would vanish just as quickly, without trace. No other media apart from the Correspondent had received the email, and they’d spoken to a professor in Stockholm who had never heard of any financially motivated activism from the left in Sweden, let alone the Economic Liberation Front itself. Certainly, the communists had once protested outside the Enskilda Bank, but that was back in the seventies. And the professor thought it unlikely that they were dealing with right-wing extremists. However, he did think it possible that a new type of revolutionary movement might have arisen because of the financial crisis and the growing inequality in society. It was just a question of when those who felt they had been sidelined would react, not if.

  Forensics were carrying on with their analysis of the surveillance video covering the cashpoint machine. The recordings inside the bank had provided little of interest, but they did show Stensson on his way towards Jeremy Lundin’s office with a briefcase in his hand.

  There had been no new activity reported from the bank branches identified on the website. All the country’s banks were still closed until further notice. The Security Police had remained silent, nothing about any Islamic extremists, and Karim had spent most of the day trying to hold the med
ia at arm’s length. One of them would be bound to find out about the connection to the biker gang and Stensson, and then the papers would go into overdrive. There would be someone working in the bank, possibly even Jeremy Lundin himself, who wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to get their hands on some of Aftonbladet’s reward for a tip-off. They had decided not to dig any deeper into Dick Stensson’s affairs for the time being, in all likelihood that was beyond the remit of this investigation, and they needed to maintain their focus, even if that was pretty much impossible in a situation that seemed to change by the minute.

  ‘We’ll carry on with this tomorrow, Malin,’ Zeke says now, just before she closes the car door.

  The sky has grown even darker.

  There’s rain in the air, maybe the spring is turning back into winter now. Maybe it’ll be like up in Norrland, Malin thinks. Where nature leapfrogs spring and goes straight to summer, letting everything skip childhood. Maybe to avoid the torments and vulnerability of youth?

  ‘Hope the rain holds off,’ Malin says.

  ‘Good work today, partner,’ Zeke says, and Malin nods, wants to be able to accept praise, let it sink in.

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  And she shuts the door.

  Looks up at the flat.

  My daughter.

  Are you there?

  She thinks about Tove.

  About the little six-year-old girl she once was.

  17

  The Ikea clock in the kitchen is ticking.

  It says quarter past eight, and Tove is calmly and methodically chopping a carrot, wants to cook even though Malin is too tired and thought they could splash out and get a takeaway from the Ming Palace.

  Tove is wearing a short cotton skirt. A pink blouse, far too thin, black leggings, and when Malin first saw her outfit she felt like saying something, pointing out that she was hardly dressed, but stopped herself, thinking that this is probably what a teenage girl is supposed to look like in spring this year.

  ‘Haven’t you got any food in the flat?’

  ‘I’ve got the ingredients for spaghetti bolognese, if you’d like that.’

  ‘We could make a big batch and freeze some,’ Tove said.

  ‘OK,’ and now the onion and garlic are sizzling in the large frying pan, and the water is bubbling in the saucepan.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call Grandad?’ Tove says. ‘He might be hungry.’

  ‘Don’t you think he’d be too tired?’

  ‘With his Spanish habits? He told me he and Grandma used to eat dinner at ten o’clock.’

  ‘Maybe he’d like to be left alone,’ Malin says.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Tove says. ‘I think you’re the one who’d like to be left alone.’

  Foiled, Malin thinks.

  The truth-sayer.

  The precocious girl.

  Where’s life going to take you, Tove?

  ‘I’ll call him,’ Malin says, and an hour later the three of them are sitting in Malin’s kitchen shovelling down spaghetti bolognese and cheap, freshly grated parmesan, not the expensive matured sort, and it feels good to be sitting there together, talking about nothing. When her dad asks about the case, and whether they’re getting anywhere with the bomb attack against the bank, she tells them about their various ideas, and explains that they can’t rule anything out at this stage of the investigation, or ignore any possibilities just because a new organisation has popped up in the media and claimed responsibility.

  ‘People are talking,’ her dad says, and Tove agrees.

  ‘Everyone’s frightened,’ she says. ‘Scared there’s going to be another blast. Like they said on YouTube. Everyone’s seen the film. Do you think there’s going to be another bomb?’

  Malin puts her cutlery down.

  Thinks how wonderful it would be to have a glass of bog-standard red wine with the pasta, but instead they’re drinking soda water, made in Malin’s recently bought Sodastream, and the bubbles in the water remind her of the enticing bubbles in an almost ice-cold lager, but in a good way, nothing unpleasant.

  ‘I don’t know if there’s going to be another explosion,’ Malin says. ‘But you can try to avoid it by not going near any banks.’

  ‘Not so easy in Linköping,’ her dad says. ‘There’s one on every square.’

  ‘And there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for the financial misery,’ Malin says. ‘DT Trucks! I thought that was the most stable company in the world!’

  More redundancies were announced today. Just when everyone had started to hope that things might be properly looking up, that it wasn’t just the stock exchange rising, but the real economy as well. Three hundred and twenty people were going to be laid off from DT Trucks in Mjölby, a place that’s already been hit hard.

  ‘You can’t take it for granted that anything’s going to last forever,’ her dad says laconically.

  ‘And another service in the cathedral today,’ Malin says. ‘They were expecting a lot of people again. And apparently there’s going to be a memorial service at lunchtime tomorrow in the square, and a minute’s silence covering the whole district at four o’clock in the afternoon.’

  ‘I think all the churches are open,’ her dad says. Tove, who has been silent up to then, opens her mouth.

  ‘Typical. As soon as something bad happens, they all run for the churches. God, how transparent.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it, Tove?’ Malin wonders.

  ‘Maybe. But surely not even God wants to provide comfort the whole time? She’d probably like a bit of attention when things are normal, don’t you think?’

  After dinner they sit on the sofa and watch an episode of an American series about a terrorist cell in the US. About how mild-mannered men turn out to be Muslim fanatics out for revenge for injustices against them and their families.

  ‘This can’t be the way it works in real life,’ Malin’s dad says, and Malin doesn’t know how to respond, and says: ‘They’re probably a bit more obscure in real life. I guess. What do you think, Tove?’

  Malin turns towards her daughter and sees that she’s fallen asleep, sitting there with her mouth open and her eyes closed, on her way into deep, peaceful teenage sleep.

  ‘I’ll carry her,’ her dad says, and Malin wants to protest, wants to carry her teenage daughter through to her childhood bed herself, but stops herself. Let Dad do it.

  ‘Great. She’s too heavy for me. Your back’ll be OK, won’t it?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with my back.’

  ‘I’ll go through to the bedroom first and pull the covers back.’

  Malin’s dad lays Tove down carefully on the bed. They leave her jeans and top on, and stand beside each other in the darkness, watching as Tove pulls the covers over her in her sleep, rolls onto her back and stretches her arms over her head.

  ‘When children sleep like that, it means they feel safe,’ her dad says.

  ‘She’s not a child any more.’

  ‘You never slept that way, Malin,’ he goes on. ‘You used to curl up into a little ball. I used to think it looked as if you thought the whole world was after you. Wanted to hurt you.’

  ‘Did you try to reassure me while I was asleep?’

  Her dad nods.

  ‘Every night. I used to go into your room every night, stroke your cheek, trying to persuade your dreams to stay gentle. But it didn’t help. You always curled up, as if you were trying to protect yourself.’

  ‘Against what, Dad? Come on, tell me now.’

  Dad walks out of the bedroom.

  ‘Children understand and feel much more than we think,’ he says out loud as Malin hears him running some water in the kitchen.

  They think I’m asleep, Tove thinks.

  It’s nice, lying here and listening to them talk, listening to Grandad talk about Mum when she was little. I’ve never heard them talk like that before, and Mum doesn’t even seem annoyed or irritated, I wonder what it is that she wants him to tell her?

  Now
Mum leaves the room as well.

  Leaving me alone in here.

  Tove stretches, and it strikes her that it never even crossed her mind to tell her mum about the letter, she’ll have to do that another day, there’s no immediate rush, and her mum would never be able to say no anyway.

  Or would she?

  She’ll be cross.

  Tove feels her stomach tighten, and realises that she has to tell her soon.

  Because Mum will ask when she got the letter, and if too many days have passed she’ll get suspicious, feel like she’s being criticised and sidelined, and then she’ll get angry, and then anything could happen.

  Absolutely anything.

  She mustn’t start drinking again. She mustn’t.

  So how to tell her?

  It’s already turned into a secret now. Something that needs to be revealed. And she forged their signatures on the application.

  Tove feels her thoughts wander off, and she daydreams her way into sleep, into high-ceilinged schoolrooms and benches full of people far more interesting than the bumpkins that make up most of her class at the Folkunga School.

  People with style.

  Like characters in a contemporary Jane Austen novel, Tove thinks, then the daydream vanishes into itself and soon she’s sleeping without any awareness that she actually exists.

  They’re sitting at the kitchen table.

  Sipping cups of herbal tea, and Malin can feel calmness spread through her body.

  Her dad opposite her.

  His familiar features look oddly different, his dark eyes full of feelings she can’t place.

  He wants to talk, I can see that, Malin thinks, then he says: ‘Malin, do you want to hear something awful? Can I tell you something terrible?’

  Malin feels a black, ice-cold fist hit her in the stomach, then the hand twists her gut and she feels frightened, doesn’t want to hear what’s about to come, is this the secret about to be revealed, is there even a secret? And she nods, can’t manage to make a sound, and her throat feels dry, and all she can hear is the ticking of the clock.

  ‘I don’t miss your mum,’ he says. ‘I feel relieved, and I’m ashamed of feeling that.’

  Malin feels the pressure in her guts ease.