Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  ‘And for the girls’ sake,’ Zeke says. ‘The ones you killed. They were only six years old. How does it feel to have killed two little girls?’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson goes on staring down at the table.

  Doesn’t even shake his head.

  Sighs and takes a deep breath before he looks up at Johan and Zeke with empty eyes, as if he’s just found a different part of himself, a neutral part.

  He looks over at the mirror. Smiles at the people he must know are behind it.

  ‘You’re a child murderer,’ Johan says. ‘The worst sort of murderer. In two hundred years your name will live on as a child murderer.’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson blinks.

  Runs his forefinger and thumb over his mouth.

  Zip.

  ‘We’re about to talk to your comrades,’ Zeke says. ‘One of them’s bound to talk. They looked like they were about to crap themselves.’

  ‘Like frightened little rabbits,’ Johan says, and looks at Ludvigsson.

  A bomber? Malin thinks.

  Maybe. The Olympic bomber in Stockholm was precisely the same sort of wayward political fanatic who’d gone off the rails. But he actually succeeded. The Olympic Games didn’t come to Sweden in the end, which was probably just as well.

  She looks at Ludvigsson through the glass, as he swings between fear and arrogance.

  ‘Tell us about the Economic Liberation Front,’ Johan says. ‘There’ll be a lot of people who agree with you in principle. Everyone hates the banks, that much is obvious. And there’ll be plenty of people who think the banks deserve everything they’ve got coming.’

  Ludvigsson smiles at him, a conspiratorial smile.

  ‘So if you talk, if you confess, your ideas will get massive exposure in the media. You might even end up as a martyr, but that will only happen if you talk to us.’

  ‘So, your dad,’ Zeke says. ‘He got laid off?’

  ‘Yes. And now he’ll probably never get another job. And all because the banks lent so much fucking money to a bastard venture capitalist. It’s people like that Falkengren who are ruining my dad’s life, and there are plenty of people like my dad in this country. But the banks and their stooges are grabbing whatever they can get, Falkengren earned twenty million last year, while Dad got laid off because the bank had over-extended the finance of the company he worked for. It’s sick. Completely sick. It has to be stopped.’

  With that last word Ludvigsson raises his eyebrows, then he shuts his eyes and looks as if he’s pretending to be asleep.

  ‘OK, time to start talking, you child-murdering little shit. Got that?’

  Zeke stands up.

  Takes two steps forward, grabs a handful of dreadlocks, and drags Jonathan Ludvigsson from his chair. Malin sees it happen, feels violence taking hold of her: Get him! Get the child-killer! The same uncontrollable urge she had out in the field. Karim and Sven are calm beside her, focused.

  ‘You’re going to talk, you bastard. Tell us all about the Liberation Front, what you were doing in Stockholm, how you and your friends rigged the bomb.’

  ‘You sent the email and someone else detonated the bomb,’ Johan shouts, and his fury sounds hollow, as if he doesn’t have the right sort of anger in him. ‘Who was he, the man with the bike?’

  ‘What is this?’ Jonathan Ludvigsson yells, standing on tiptoe in the face of Zeke’s assault, grimacing with pain. ‘Fucking Guantanamo?’

  But Johan doesn’t answer. Ignores the question. No more Mr Nice Guy, he seems to be thinking. He carries on: ‘Who was the man on the bike, the one who left the bomb outside the bank?’ and Zeke lifts his arm, and Jonathan Ludvigsson’s feet leave the floor.

  ‘CIA, fucking hell, you’re CIA, I don’t know anything about any man with any fucking bike.’

  Zeke lets Ludvigsson fall back onto his chair.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Johan says. There’s real harshness in his voice now, as if it were his children who’d been killed by the bomb.

  So he does have it in him after all.

  Violence against children always reveals a person’s true character.

  It’s unforgivable, Malin thinks. It should be unforgivable.

  ‘And you expect us to believe that?’ he roars.

  Jonathan Ludvigsson flinches.

  ‘Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, would I?’

  Then he repeats the gesture with his finger and thumb over his mouth, and Zeke moves forward again, and Ludvigsson ducks, then Karim makes a move beside Malin and opens the door to the interview room. His dark face in profile is even darker in the dim light as he says authoritatively: ‘That’s enough. Enough now. You two go home and get some sleep. You too, Malin.’

  Karin Johannison has dusted the caravan for fingerprints, has searched through all the cupboards for evidence. She’s been over every inch with a fine-tooth comb, looking for traces of the explosives, the TATP, and anything else needed to make a bomb.

  Hours have passed.

  And now she’s standing alone in the confined space.

  Brushes her blonde hair from her face, feeling tired, but she still wishes Zeke were there with her.

  What had started as a bit of innocent extramarital sex has become something more for her, but not for him, and that wasn’t what she’d been planning, and she realises now that she had expected it to be the other way around, that she could toy with him, making the rather uncouth, rough policeman dance to her tune.

  He helps himself to me.

  Whenever he wants.

  Not the other way around. And I no longer have any sex life with Kalle, I can’t bear him any more, and he doesn’t seem to mind. Do we even have fun together these days?

  Am I in love with Zeke? I can’t bear to think about it. Instead, she swears out loud to drown out her own thoughts, and thinks about the three computers they’ve seized, and the one laptop, and the way the caravan was like a little IT lab. She stops, breathing in the stale smell, the smell of cheap camping holidays and poverty and cigarette butts and empty bottles and dirty pots caked with dried-on lentils, and she swears again: ‘Fuck,’ then thinks: We’re missing something, and she falls to her knees and starts searching along the edge of the caravan’s cork floor, pulling at the lintels of the benches, but they’re stuck tight, don’t seem to have been touched since the caravan was built. She carries on towards the toilet and kitchen, crawling on all fours, until she works her way around to where she started.

  She gets up again.

  The top cupboards are fixed to the roof.

  But doesn’t the roof seem lower than it should be?

  Karin stands on one of the caravan’s built-in benches, opens the top cupboard again, pulls out the stuff she’s just put back in, then shoves the fingers of one hand up at the top of the cupboard and pushes.

  The ceiling of the cupboard suddenly comes loose, seeming to fall from the roof of the caravan as if under some great weight, and she feels cold metal against her hand.

  Rummages about.

  Pulls out her finds.

  An UZI. A SIG Sauer. Three hand grenades, and she delves into the space between the caravan’s outer shell and internal roof, and suddenly feels something doughy between her fingers.

  Should I be more careful?

  What if he’s armed it?

  And she can’t help herself, and pulls the package out, and sees what looks like three large parcels of explosives, white crystals under pale plastic, enough to blow an entire block of Linköping into the air.

  Careful now, Karin.

  ‘I need help here!’ she shouts from the caravan to the uniforms she hopes are waiting outside. ‘NOW!’ and she hears an angry bleeping sound, a sound that echoes through her flesh and blood and into whatever unknown substance lies beyond her marrow.

  ‘We don’t know anything.’

  The sessions with the three other activists haven’t produced anything.

  ‘So he had the website open when we got there, but pretty much everyone in Swed
en is looking at that right now, aren’t they?’

  Waldemar Ekenberg had resorted to violence.

  He split Konrad Ekdahl’s lip, but they still didn’t manage to get anything out of them.

  Sven Sjöman is sitting slumped in the leather chair in his office.

  It’s half past two in the morning, but it hasn’t started to get light yet, and he wonders how Karin’s getting on out at the caravan.

  Has she found anything?

  The other detectives in the team are at home now, in their beds, and he’s thinking of snatching a few hours’ sleep here at the station, in the staffroom, the sofa in there will have to do.

  He kept switching between the interviews.

  The three bewildered young men appeared to be telling the truth. They claimed they had gone to the caravan to have a few drinks, that they didn’t have a clue that Jonathan Ludvigsson was involved in or was behind anything called the Economic Liberation Front. Sofia Karlsson, who had sobered up completely by now, also seemed to be telling the truth, and she didn’t know anything either.

  Frustrating.

  But Jonathan Ludvigsson could have had plenty more comrades.

  Or just been working with one other person.

  He thinks of his wife at home in bed in their villa. What wouldn’t he give to be able to feel the warmth of her body right now?

  Sven shuts his eyes.

  Maybe he could sleep here, in his armchair?

  No. It would cripple his back.

  He gets up.

  And then the phone rings. He thinks: It’s bound to be Karin, now that she’s finished out at the caravan.

  25

  What happens at night when everything’s dark?

  We see you sleep, Malin.

  You came home, looked at Tove in her bed for a while, then you fell asleep, didn’t even bother to take off your clothes.

  But we understand that you’re tired. Because what happened to us is a drain on your mind, your heart, your soul.

  Who could it have been who harmed us?

  Jonathan? Al Kabari’s fellow believers? Those men who like motorbikes? Someone else? And what’s happened out at the caravan?

  Who would detonate a bomb in Linköping on a sunny spring day?

  What is the point of being mean? Are they planning to harm the captive boy and girl? The children you must hurry to save.

  And everything else, Malin.

  Your body is screaming for something strong to drink.

  Your mum. Your dad and Tove. With their secrets. We like secrets, but not that secret. That’s horrid.

  Lizards’ teeth, Malin.

  The hungry beasts are waking from hibernation tonight.

  Who’s that heading towards the hospital? Towards Mummy who’s struggling without knowing what she’s struggling against in her bed in the lonely hospital room.

  Something dark is moving towards her.

  Wake up, Mummy, wake up.

  No, don’t wake up.

  Come to us instead. Don’t wake up, never wake up again.

  Malin is sleeping with her arms stretched out above her head, but it isn’t the secure sleep of a child.

  Her dream is a dream of faces.

  Her mum is standing in a darkened corner and shouting in annoyance, but no comprehensible words are coming out of her mouth, just a sludgy mess of sound that cuts through Malin’s body. The Vigerö girls are playing in another corner of the room with two other children. They’re pushing little Lego cars back and forth in a pattern that seems to lead back into history, back to the very first time a human being ever wanted anything.

  Dad is standing with his hand stretched out, he wants to give her a doll, a little boy doll that seems to be reaching its plastic hands out to her, a gesture that says: Help me, Malin, help me – and Tove is staring at her from somewhere in the middle of the room, her eyes filled by an endless unfamiliar landscape where pink clouds are falling apart far off above a burning horizon.

  Faces come and go. Sven Sjöman’s, Zeke’s, Karin Johannison’s, Mohamed Al Kabari’s, Jonathan Ludvigsson’s, Dick Stensson’s. They’re all laughing at her, yelling: ‘How can you be so fucking stupid?’

  Then the dream contracts to a dense black point of matter where everyone’s bad deeds and contradictory desires seem to accumulate, and then her eardrums burst and the skin melts away from her bones, and bleeding arms, fingers, eyes, and brains spread through the air like burning rain. A bear eats a bearcub in a cave on an isolated, forgotten, lost island, eating its own young.

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.

  The chorus is overwhelming in the black banks of dust that make up the last eddies of her dream.

  Allahu Akbar.

  The words become a whistling sound, and the girls drift inside Malin’s eyelids. They’re scared and calm at the same time, and in her dream she knows everything that has happened and is still to happen.

  Then everything becomes peaceful and quiet.

  Like after a sudden explosion.

  She is having trouble breathing, taking deep breaths, but the air doesn’t seem to want to fill her lungs, she is bursting from a lack of oxygen, but finally she manages to roll over. She was lying face down on the pillow.

  Then she takes a deep breath and disappears into black, death-like, empty sleep.

  Jonathan Ludvigsson is lying on the bunk in his cell.

  Can’t sleep.

  A guard looks in through the hatch in the door, probably checking I haven’t committed suicide, he thinks.

  Presumably the cops have found everything out in the caravan by now.

  So what happens next?

  I don’t care.

  Just stay quiet. Like before. The others can’t say anything about stuff they don’t know.

  Some things are bigger than me, and can there be anything more unreal than an explosion? It happens, but it doesn’t happen. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you don’t make your voice heard, you don’t exist.

  There’s a battle underway on this planet right now. Between us and nature, between us and our own nature, and in that battle all means are justified.

  But maybe I, we, went too far this time.

  The custody cell is cold, and the orange blanket doesn’t make much difference, his joints are aching, and the hatch in the door opens again and he sees a black eye.

  Bang.

  The eye’s gone, but it’s still there in the door, and it’s a different eye now, it looks like a girl’s eye, and it seems to want to strangle him with its rage. He sits up on the edge of the bunk and wants to get rid of the eye, and why can’t I breathe?

  I’ve got to get out, got to get rid of the eye.

  Jonathan Ludvigsson leaps up from the bunk and over to the door, and starts yelling: ‘Let me out, let me out!’

  He bangs on the hatch, at the girl’s eye that seems to be radiating rays that can stop his heart.

  ‘Easy, easy.’

  The guard’s voice from the other side of the door, then it opens.

  Light from the corridor.

  ‘What is it?’

  The guard’s eyes.

  ‘I want to talk,’ Jonathan Ludvigsson says.

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘What I’ve done.’

  Karin Johannison is delving through the weapons and grenades in the caravan, carefully, so that nothing happens.

  She scared herself badly before, when the alarm clock that was hidden under some cushions on a chair at the front of the caravan went off and started to bleep. She thought the caravan and weapons store were booby-trapped, and that she was about to be blasted into atoms, like those girls very nearly were.

  But it was only a bloody alarm clock.

  And during those short seconds while the clock was ringing she saw her life flash past.

  Kalle, Mum, Dad, all the lovers she’s had. Zeke. How she wanted to hold onto him in those moments, take him with her to wherever she thought she was going
.

  Then everything had gone silent. Peaceful and lonely, and she realised what was missing in her life.

  She knew already, she knew she should have felt the longing, but it had never happened. And unborn children had drifted before her eyes, and she had felt a longing she had never felt before, never knew she had within her, a longing that was bigger than the longing itself, a greed for more life just as life was about to end.

  As if everything became clear only when she herself was about to be struck by a terrible calamity.

  And life changes. Gently and imperceptibly, then suddenly and clearly.

  But it wasn’t a bomb.

  It was an alarm clock.

  Sven Sjöman is sleeping, curled up on the sofa in the darkness of the staffroom. He got Karin’s call about the weapons and explosives and the other things they found out in the caravan. But couldn’t even summon up the energy to think of questioning Ludvigsson again. It’s time for Sven to sleep, so that he can wake up and see everything with fresh eyes, get a fresh grip on one of the messiest, most slippery investigations he’s ever been involved in. It makes him feel he’s at the centre of a torrent of events that are governed by their own internal mechanisms, and over which he, they, have absolutely no influence.

  There’s a knocking sound in his dream.

  ‘Sven. Sven.’

  But he doesn’t want to wake up.

  An old body, a tired but sharp mind, both wanting sleep, file the day’s thoughts into shiny neat boxes that can be arranged in clearer, more comprehensible ways.

  But someone doesn’t want that.

  Someone is shaking him.

  ‘Sven. Sven, you have to wake up.’

  He sits himself up.

  Rubs his eyes. Looks at who it is who’s standing beside him: Constable Antonstjärna, an intelligent young man, only twenty-five or so, far too young to be a police officer.

  ‘He wants to talk,’ Antonstjärna says.

  ‘Who wants to talk?’

  ‘Ludvigsson wants to talk about what’s happened, what he’s done.’

  Sven gets up and stretches his back.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty-five past four. It’ll soon be light.’

  We have power, we can convey messages, can’t we?