Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Peter Hamse looks at her with genuine warmth when she says the words ‘terrible moment’, then he says: ‘There’s no need for her to be anxious. I’ll see that she gets a decent shot of tranquillisers. There’s no need for her to be in any pain either.’

  ‘Will she make it?’ Malin asks.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But she’ll have lasting injuries?’

  Peter Hamse nods.

  ‘In all likelihood, yes.’

  Then they stand there in silence looking at each other, and Malin moves unconsciously closer to him, and he takes a step forward, and Malin notices that she’s swaying, drawn to that dimple in his chin, and then they smile at each other and Peter Hamse throws his arms out and says something about bad timing, and then Malin says: ‘It must be spring.’

  ‘It must. And the sap is rising,’ Zeke’s voice says, and a minute later they’re standing in the lift, Zeke grinning beside her, and Peter Hamse’s words are ringing inside Malin: ‘I’ll get in touch if anything happens.’

  Something has happened, Malin thinks, then feels ashamed of what she can sense going on within her body.

  Ashamed because of the girls, and Hanna Vigerö, and Dad and Mum and Tove and Janne, and even Daniel Högfeldt.

  ‘Go for it, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s perfectly OK. You might as well let your own sap rise.’

  And she tries to laugh at Zeke’s joke, but it doesn’t work, she feels like running down to the Hamlet instead, settling down on a bar stool, and drinking all these damn emotions away, obliterating herself until there are only tiny pieces left.

  21

  Evening has taken over Linköping, and the dusk is coloured mauve outside the living-room window, and Malin is sitting on the sofa beside Tove, waiting for the soap opera they’re watching to end and the news to start. She’s drinking a glass of cranberry juice.

  Malin was sitting at her desk in the police station when the minute’s silence for the Vigerö girls took place at four o’clock, and a remarkable thing happened. Suddenly all activity stopped, people stopped moving, sound somehow ceased to exist, and with it the world as she knows it.

  The silence and respect almost tangible in the station.

  But the girls weren’t there.

  Malin could sense that they were somewhere else.

  Then the minute came to an end, and the usual hubbub of the station started up once more.

  Malin stretches her legs.

  Maybe, just maybe, the main television news will have something about the case that we don’t know, she thinks.

  Tove has been quiet and withdrawn all evening, but she wants to stay the night in the flat on Ågatan, she’s got a big maths test tomorrow and wants to relax as long as possible before setting off for school.

  Or is she just keeping an eye on me?

  I think she trusts me more and more, but maybe that’s just what I’m hoping, could that be it?

  An explosion.

  She thinks about the doctor she met today.

  Peter Hamse.

  She’s never felt instinctively drawn to anyone like that, and she’s sure he felt it as well. She can hardly breathe when she thinks about his face, his body under that white coat, and she wants to give in to those feelings, sneak out to the bathroom and free herself from the almost medieval lust that seems to have taken over her body, piece by piece.

  An explosion.

  That’s what it feels like, as if she’s at the centre of an explosion in which everything is being thrown at her all at once, where everything happens in a short, condensed moment, where matter becomes compressed and concentrated and nothing has time to stick, nothing has time to take hold, nothing has time to mean anything, and she is forced to go along with the emotion of each moment.

  Mum’s dead.

  My mother died three weeks ago, and tomorrow the will is going to be read. Dad will be there, he’s in charge of everything now, must have realised that I have to focus on work, even if he hasn’t said anything. Unless there’s some other reason?

  Something’s approaching in the explosion and I ought to be grieving, I ought to feel much, much more, but I can only see Dad, walking to and fro in the apartment on Barnhemsgatan and finally feeling liberated, apparently enjoying his newfound freedom.

  Mum.

  Your face like an empty mask, your life seen through a sort of forced perspective, like a stage set, a lie, lies within lies within lies, and in the end they become true, and then one sunny day you go and have a heart attack on a golf course.

  It’s odd, but I don’t feel any grief, I don’t feel anything, just relief and possibly fear that the core of a secret is about to burst, like some bastard red rosebud, and that I’m about to find out why I am the way that I am. But not even that feeling sticks, no, instead it’s as if the explosion takes over, tossing me this way and that, and everything just happens and happens and happens. I can see it, but I can’t get a grip on it, still less control it or do anything about anything.

  An explosion of faces. That’s what the investigation is like. Words and contexts that don’t fit together, or at least they don’t to me.

  Mohamed Al Kabari on his rugs in his mosque.

  Racism. But is it so odd that we should look there?

  Or could the girls have been the target? But what evidence is there for that?

  Dick Stensson. Repulsively attractive. His arrogant smile, his money. His stinking money.

  And then the man in the hoodie in the video. The man who actually planted the bomb outside the bank. The man the whole city seems to hate.

  Is he the Economic Liberation Front? Does Sofia Karlsson have anything to do with it? Are there others, and who’s the person in the video from the City Terminal in Stockholm? The one those bastards in the Security Police are refusing to hand over.

  Malin closes her eyes.

  She lets her brain explode into thoughts, and when Tove asks her what she’s thinking, she replies: ‘I’m thinking about absolutely nothing, I’m just trying to clear out my brain. There’s so much madness going on right now, Tove, I don’t feel I can keep up with it.’

  Peter Hamse.

  Same age as me. No ring on his finger. I have to contact him.

  And then she sees the girls again. The fragment of a face, the eye.

  Their mum, Hanna’s staring eyes in the hospital.

  Children shouldn’t die.

  Children shouldn’t be murdered, blown into tiny pieces. Mum’s death is OK, she was almost seventy, after all.

  What’s Dad doing now? What’s Janne doing? Daniel Högfeldt? I ought to talk to Tove, find out what’s happening in her teenage life, what her dreams are, but I’m scared she’ll tell me something new, something else I don’t want to hear, and I know that only the bottle, tequila, and beer, can save me if everything gets too much, and they’ll destroy me if I can’t handle everything.

  It’s two days since I stood in front of Mum’s coffin.

  What did I say to her?

  What did I whisper?

  What did I want to say?

  Peter Hamse.

  His face, his body, the way he looked at me, his explosion into awareness.

  Take me in your arms. Save me from my longing.

  ‘I’m just going to the loo,’ Malin says, getting up.

  Peter Hamse has finished his shift at the hospital, he’s just looked up Malin’s number on the Internet and now he’s sitting in front of his computer in the bedroom of his flat on Konsistoriegatan wondering whether or not he should call her, if he’d look too keen if he called straight away, yet at the same time he knows that he might not ring at all if he doesn’t do it at once.

  God, she was so attractive!

  Sexy, taut, and athletic, with intelligent eyes and a blonde bob, exactly the sort he usually goes for.

  But she had something more.

  Something else.

  A sort of messiness and vulnerability combined with a primitive strength that made her unbeliev
ably fucking sexy.

  He types her name into Google.

  Malin Fors.

  More than five thousand hits, and he reads the online articles about various murder cases she’s been involved in, and he thinks that she’s seen pretty much everything, coped with pretty much everything, she must be pretty damn tough.

  Almost scary.

  Maybe best to retreat.

  But she’s definitely not gay. There was a ridiculous tension between them. Like teenage infatuation on hormone overdrive.

  He gets up.

  Thinks: I’ll call her.

  Tomorrow. Maybe. Or we’ll just bump into each other again, in connection with Hanna Vigerö. Best to approach this with caution.

  ‘You look more relaxed now, Mum,’ Tove says when she comes out of the bathroom, and Malin thinks: Is it that obvious? What do I say to that? She feels her cheeks go red, and hopes Tove doesn’t notice.

  ‘I’m just tired, Tove, it probably shows.’

  ‘No, it’s something else,’ Tove says, and Malin thinks that she can read me like an open book, but she probably doesn’t have a clue about what I was doing in the bathroom, because it isn’t in a child’s nature to see its parents as sexual beings.

  What do I know about Tove’s sex life? Nothing, she never talks about what she does with her boyfriends, the ones she’s seeing. But she can’t still be a virgin. Can she?

  The soap opera finally comes to an end.

  The news starts, and Tove gets up, saying: ‘I can’t bear to watch this, I’m going to have a last look at my maths,’ and Malin nods, concentrating on the television.

  One of the usual newsreaders appears on the screen, a young woman. Says: ‘Just half an hour ago our reporters were shown a video by the Security Police. It shows a man who is presumed to have a connection to the bombing in Linköping in which two young girls lost their lives. The video you’re about to see shows the man sending an email from the Sidewalk Café in the City Terminal in Stockholm at five-thirty on Tuesday morning. Anyone who has any information about this man is asked to contact the Security Police as soon as possible on 010 568 70 00.’

  The video starts to play.

  A man in a black hooded jacket is typing at a computer in one of the waiting rooms. His hood is down. He is sitting alone at a row of five computers and his face is visible.

  Black-and-white images.

  But clearer than anything else in the investigation so far.

  Bastard Security Police.

  Happy to give the recording to the television news.

  But not us.

  What’s the explanation for that?

  It’s always impossible to explain their actions. Secrecy for secrecy’s sake. An explosion of fucking secrets.

  The recording plays again.

  The same man as outside the bank?

  Maybe, unless this one is slightly smaller, thinner? How old? Twenty-six, maybe, twenty-seven, sitting there writing his email to the Correspondent.

  The pictures aren’t very clear.

  The features of his face seem elusive, almost a mask. Am I looking at the murderer, the bomber, the child killer, and what’s he doing in Stockholm? His features look typically Swedish, sharp and smooth, innocent, and she catches her breath, if anyone in the country recognises this young man then they’ll have a name by tomorrow morning at the latest, or rather, the Security Police will have a name. But in all likelihood someone will probably call them as well.

  Do I recognise him?

  No, never seen him before.

  Then the man stands up and disappears from the screen, leaving just the row of computers in the deserted waiting room.

  Then the newsreader’s face again, repeating what she said before the video was played, as the phone number appears at the bottom of the screen. She adds that the video is available on their website, and that it will be played again before the end of the bulletin.

  Malin gets up.

  The video is playing in her mind, and she thinks that this is the breakthrough in the case, it’s about to crack.

  Then the phone rings.

  Sven Sjöman.

  His voice sounds thick, tired, irritated, hopeful, all at the same time.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Looks like the Security Police want to play this their way.’

  ‘But things are going to start happening now,’ Sven says. ‘Why the hell couldn’t they let us have the video?’

  ‘Prestige,’ Malin says. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Two six-year-old girls have been killed. In principle every single bank in the country has been threatened with bombing. Plenty of people are too terrified to go out. And they’re thinking about prestige.’

  ‘That’s how it is,’ Malin says.

  ‘Hang on, I’ve got another call, hold on.’

  A minute later Sven’s voice comes back on the line.

  ‘The man’s been identified.’

  Sven says a name.

  ‘He’s registered in Linköping,’ he goes on. ‘See you at the station as soon as you can get there. I’ll call Zeke in as well.’

  22

  No journalists outside the police station.

  Just an empty car park where the cones of light from the street lamps are trying to shut out an unwelcome darkness.

  The time is twenty-five to ten.

  Almost pitchblack now.

  Malin had rushed in to see Tove, sat down on the edge of her bed and spoken to the back of her head as she sat at her desk.

  ‘Something’s happened. I’ve got to go into work.’

  Without turning around or looking up from her maths books Tove had replied: ‘Go ahead. I’ve got plenty to do here. You know I can look after myself.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Go.’

  Malin had almost felt that Tove wanted to get rid of her, but realised that that was a way of rationalising what she felt about leaving her daughter alone yet again, and yet again putting work first. And Malin had felt ashamed as she left the flat, but now she’s here anyway with Zeke and Sven Sjöman in the lobby of the police station, listening as Sven says: ‘It was his mum who called. From Gränna. She’s sure it was her son she saw in those pictures.’

  ‘Why did she call us?’ Zeke asks, and he looks tired, as if he’d already gone to bed when Sven called him in.

  ‘She didn’t seem to have thought about it, or else she just didn’t manage to write down the Security Police number.’

  ‘And who is he?’

  Malin hears how impatient she sounds, how the words are launched clumsily into the air.

  ‘If this is right, his name’s Jonathan Ludvigsson. According to his mum, they haven’t had any contact for the past five, six years, because she thought his opinions were getting too extreme, about everything from food to the economy and the environment. But particularly about the social effects of the economy. His dad was evidently laid off from a factory that ran into problems when a firm of venture capitalists loaded it with too much debt.’

  ‘A vegan,’ Zeke says, unable to conceal his distaste, ‘frustrated about the economy.’

  Sven nods.

  ‘So where is he now? Did she know?’

  ‘She thinks he lives up in Umeå.’

  The wrinkles around Sven’s eyes seem to deepen, and he lets out a deep breath, making his big stomach even bigger, and Malin knows there’s something he’s not saying.

  This Ludvigsson was supposed to be registered in Linköping, after all.

  ‘Out with it,’ she says.

  ‘We’ve done a quick check,’ Sven says. ‘And you know what, he lived in Umeå until six months ago, then he moved down here to Linköping.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What else?’ Zeke says.

  ‘He’s registered at the flat of a certain Sofia Karlsson. And of course we all know who she is.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says.

  ‘No shit,’ Zeke exclaims.

  ‘Let’s get
over there before the Security Police march in.’

  ‘If they aren’t already there,’ Sven says.

  ‘Are we going in mob-handed?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘We’ll take back-up,’ Sven says. ‘But we’ll go in nice and calmly, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. If we go in too heavy, anything could happen,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Boom,’ Malin says quietly to herself.

  The stairwell in Ryd stinks of piss.

  Worse this time than before.

  And there’s a smell of spilled wine.

  Malin feels the urge, tries to suppress it, but it chimes within her like a never-ending note.

  Sven Sjöman, Zeke, and Malin are wearing bulletproof vests. Malin’s holster is tight under her white jacket, she’s left her jacket undone and is ready to draw her pistol in a second if she has to.

  Two police vans are parked just out of sight of the flat, ten uniformed officers in protective gear positioned around the building and nearby, in this late spring evening that doesn’t seem able to decide whether to be warm or cold.

  Malin is breathing heavily, and she can hear Zeke’s light footsteps behind her on the stairs, then Sven’s strained panting, and she prays that his heart can cope with this, that he doesn’t collapse onto the cold concrete.

  No Security Police.

  Maybe no one called them.

  Maybe they’re all snoring peacefully in their comfortable rooms in the Central Hotel.

  Bastards.

  Is he, Jonathan Ludvigsson, in there, behind the door that looms in front of Malin for the second time in two days? She managed to maintain her façade last time, Sofia Karlsson, but Malin can more or less remember what she said: ‘The banks need to burn. And then there’ll be casualties.’

  Are these youngsters – because that’s how she wants to see them – really cold-hearted terrorists, a sort of new Swedish Baader–Meinhof gang? And if they are, how could Jonathan Ludvigsson be so careless that he didn’t think about the security camera up in the City Terminal? But maybe he didn’t think his email could be traced?

  The Economic Liberation Front.

  Is the flat booby-trapped? Should they be more careful? Call for reinforcements? There were lights in the flat, the flicker of a television, and maybe, if Jonathan Ludvigsson saw himself on the news, they’re in there panicking.