Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  We aren’t as small and helpless as you all think, we can help you, Malin, we really can.

  But you have to believe that we exist, because if you don’t we’ll vanish and won’t exist at all.

  We’re with Mummy now.

  Sitting on her bed and whispering nice things in her ear, and now someone is approaching her along the corridor; slowly, slowly, the person is getting closer, the person who has made their way unnoticed through the hospital’s subterranean passageways and up the stairs to the ninth floor, and who is now approaching her room like the invisible man.

  We want to help him, because we want you here with us, Mummy.

  We don’t want to exist without you, and we know you’re in pain, so much pain, and you’ll always be in pain. Yet that doctor still seems to think that you’re a bit better, and maybe we could help you now, Mummy, but we’re not going to.

  The door of your dark room slips open.

  A person in a black hood steps in.

  And we disappear from here, whispering in your ear, Mummy: See you soon.

  Hanna Vigerö can feel the air running out. It’s disappearing slowly, yet still suddenly, the feeling is like cotton wool, and she tries to breathe but it doesn’t work.

  I was aware that you were here just now, girls.

  I know what you want.

  And I want the same thing.

  That’s why I’m not even trying to struggle, not the tiniest little bit, even if I were physically capable of it.

  But I’m not struggling mentally either. I want this to happen, and I can even control my most basic instinct.

  No.

  I can’t.

  I want to breathe, breathe, but I can’t.

  Is someone whispering an apology? Forgive me?

  I want the person pressing the pillow over my face to succeed in asphyxiating me. But still I try to breathe.

  The person pressing is pushing down hard now.

  The air is gone, everything goes black, and white, and black, and I leave the hibernation of the hospital room, see my room disappear into a black dot, only to explode into white light, burning hot magnesium and white phosphor, and then I am somewhere else.

  I can feel that you’re here, girls.

  Mummy’s here now.

  I call your names.

  Mira! Tuva!

  Over and over again, I call your names.

  You’re here, but you can’t hear or see me.

  But you’re here.

  I know that.

  And I promise I’m never going to stop looking for you.

  PART 2

  Out of the black, into the white

  In the chamber of darkness

  Daddy!

  Help!

  Little brother’s really scared, Daddy, and so am I, more scared than when Mummy went up to heaven.

  Come on, Daddy! Now!

  The men are nasty. Angry. And dark, it’s too dark here, and I try to hug little brother, but I’m too little and it’s horrid here, and he doesn’t like how horrid it is, and I don’t either. I’m scared, Daddy, and I try to think about birthdays instead, about Christmas and other nice things, about my friends, even though they aren’t here.

  We want you to rescue us now, why don’t you come, why did you let us go on the aeroplane with the men?

  I’m scared of the lizards.

  They showed them to us. Said they’d eat us up if we weren’t good.

  They were chewing at the bars with their teeth. Banging their bodies against them.

  They wanted to eat us, I could see that. And they had narrow, glowing, mean eyes.

  You should be here, Daddy. We’re not supposed to be alone.

  And little brother, I hug him, and he plays, and I play with him. We draw with the crayons in the darkness, even though we can’t see what we’re drawing.

  We’re hungry, Daddy. We don’t want to be dead. We don’t want to be locked up any more.

  We want to get back to the other side of the bridge.

  Mummy’s in heaven. She must be. You said so, Daddy, but we don’t want to be with her yet. We want you to come, and get rid of the nasty men and then give us a big, long hug, and then we want to play, and go swimming, and play, and forget about all the horrid things.

  But everything’s horrid here. It smells of death here.

  I want to get away from here, Daddy. Right away.

  Only you can take us away.

  Unless someone else could?

  I’m screaming again now, I can’t do anything else, and he screams too, and then we scream together, Daddy, listen to us yell.

  Are you there, girls?

  Every day I wonder what’s happened to you, lying here in my dark, stinking room and wondering if I did the right thing.

  Now I know what’s happened to you. You were blown up into little pieces.

  I’ll never be able to forgive myself.

  But I was forced to keep you away from the monsters at all costs, I was forced to save you, that’s the foremost duty of every parent, to protect their children. And I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough, and all I want now is to be allowed to come to you. But why should you welcome me, I who have let you down most of all?

  The flame of the wax candle lights up my damp walls, the dirt runs slowly down to the black floor, making it cold and sticky, impossible to lean on.

  I can hear the trains above and below me, feel how they make the rock shake.

  I want you here, but the thought of you, and of what I am and what I’ve done, always gets too much for me.

  I prepare the syringe.

  Then I find a little vein between two of my fingers, I feel the prick, wait a few seconds, blow out the light, and soon my darkness becomes a different darkness, a white, smooth darkness, the darkness of lies, I know, but sooner that than the darkness of reality, of the truth.

  26

  Sven Sjöman called.

  He sounded as though he’d just woken up, and it was still night, or possibly early morning.

  His words: ‘We’ve found guns and explosives in the caravan. Ludvigsson wants to talk. I want you to take the interview now, it was you who caught him, and you’d be best at reading his voice, getting him to tell us everything, the whole truth.’

  ‘I need to sleep, Sven. OK? I thought I was about to get shot out there. And I used excessive force, so why would he confess to me? Can’t someone else take it?’

  Sven falls silent, evidently thinking.

  ‘I need you here, Malin. He might be scared of you, and fear can be good in this sort of situation. You’ve had time to calm down. You can do this, Malin. You can sleep later. During the day. In the staffroom. I’ve just had a nap in there. It works.’

  Maybe this isn’t the time to sleep after all, Malin thought. Maybe another bomb’s ticking somewhere else, and she got in the shower, letting the cold water shake some life into her body, got dressed, wrote a note for Tove, then headed straight to the station.

  And now, at a quarter past six, Malin is sitting in interview room one opposite a wide-awake Jonathan Ludvigsson, with a cup of pitch-black coffee in her hand, and she’s just switched on the tape recorder and is trying to sort out her thoughts so she can best get to what she wants, what they want.

  She looks at Jonathan Ludvigsson.

  Innocent blue eyes. Not the eyes of someone who would resort to violence. In that case, why the weapons? Why the Economic Liberation Front? It could have been you caught by the surveillance camera with your bike in front of the bank, but I don’t think that’s very likely.

  Forensics are busy analysing both videos, comparing your walk with that of the man at the bank, they’re getting an expert in movement to examine them.

  And the explosives that were found in the caravan.

  Forensics are trying to work out if they were the same sort as the explosives used in the main square.

  Malin’s thoughts are interrupted by Jonathan Ludvigsson’s voice: ‘Are you tired? You look tired,
but I wanted to talk now, straight away, something really weird happened down in that cell.’

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’

  Malin leans across the table. Looks him in the eyes.

  ‘I promise you can talk in confidence to me. I’ll be reasonable with you.’

  Ludvigsson blinks slowly, then takes a deep breath.

  ‘The others haven’t said anything, have they?’

  ‘Not beyond the fact that didn’t have a clue that you’re the person behind the Economic Liberation Front.’

  ‘That’s true. They didn’t know anything. The whole thing was my idea.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call a bomb in the main square that kills two little girls a thing. Take it from the start, the whole story, nice and slow. Who put the bomb together? Did you do it yourself?’

  Malin hears her voice.

  She sounds soft, but manages to summon up a vague sense of threat, and knows she wants to flatter him, wants him to feel important, clever, and get him to reveal the truth that way. Because even if he says he wants to talk, there’s no guarantee that he’s thinking of letting the truth pass his lips.

  ‘You certainly managed to get a lot of attention for what you did. I heard the New York Times had a piece on it.’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson nods.

  ‘That was the point,’ he says. ‘Attention. I wanted to take the opportunity to focus people’s attention on the banks’ exploitation of ordinary people, like my dad, and the way they’re ruining the whole of society with their arrogance and greed and lack of any sense of history, I wanted to use the bombing to do that, and find a quick way to spread the anti-capitalist message. So I came up with the Liberation Front as a way of spreading the word.’

  Her brain.

  Still tired. But if I understand him right, Malin thinks, he’s saying he didn’t have anything to do with the bomb. Maybe this whole Liberation Front is just a clumsy way of trying to make up for what happened to his dad.

  ‘So you’re saying you came up with the Economic Liberation Front after the explosion, to spread your anti-capitalist message and somehow do right by your father?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Jonathan Ludvigsson says, twisting two of his dreadlocks in one hand. ‘I put the website together in a few hours on my laptop when I was up in Stockholm seeing a friend, I downloaded the pictures of the banks, filmed the video myself against a white wall in his flat, then put it on YouTube.’

  ‘I’m having trouble believing this,’ Malin says. ‘You’re just trying to find a way of wriggling out of it, aren’t you? You killed two little children, and now you’re trying to wriggle out of it.’

  ‘I can show you how I put the code together for the website, and the firewalls around my IP address and server. You haven’t managed to get around it or crack it yet, have you? I can show you how I did it, and where the page is hosted. That ought to be enough to convince you.’

  ‘Convince us of what? That you’re not behind the bomb?’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson looks at Malin, and seems to realise just how unrealistic what he’s just said is.

  ‘I know all about decrypting,’ he says. ‘I studied it at university in Umeå, among other things.’

  ‘We found explosives in your caravan. Was it the same substance you used in the bomb in the main square?’

  ‘I’m not responsible for the bomb in the main square. I didn’t kill any young girls.’

  Desperate now.

  A hint.

  ‘Two little girls,’ Malin says. ‘And you’ve got a history of militant activism. If I’m going to believe you, you need to give me better evidence to prove that you’re not responsible for the bomb. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘My friend, in Stockholm. I was with him, in his flat in Hornstull when the bomb went off, so it couldn’t have been me. Could it?’

  But you could have been working with other people and still be behind the bomb, Malin thinks. You could have constructed it and planned it, but been in Stockholm when it went off.

  ‘What’s your friend’s name?’ Malin asks. ‘Where does he live? What’s his phone number?’

  ‘His name’s Johan Sjö. He lives on Hornstulls strand.’

  And Ludvigsson gives a telephone number.

  Malin knows they will have heard the number on the other side of the mirror. That Sven will instigate a check immediately.

  ‘I sent the email the next morning,’ Jonathan Ludvigsson goes on. ‘From the bus terminal in Stockholm, before I caught the coach down to Linköping.’

  ‘So you weren’t bothered by the security cameras there? How am I supposed to believe that, when you seem to have thought of everything else?’

  ‘I’m good at encryption and online anonymity. I’ve even helped PirateBay. But not surveillance. I made a mistake with the camera. But I want to stress that I came up with the Economic Liberation Front entirely on my own, none of the others out in the caravan had anything to do with it, nor did Sofia Karlsson. And I didn’t have anything to do with any bombs. I swear on my life.’

  ‘What about the explosives, the weapons we found in the caravan?’ Malin persists. ‘Did you make them up as well? Those will get you several years in prison on their own.’

  ‘This is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I didn’t kill those girls. I’m not responsible for any bombs.’

  You don’t want to talk about the explosives.

  Why? Malin wonders, before going on: ‘Even if you were in Stockholm at your friend’s, the Economic Liberation Front could still be behind the bombing. There could be a lot of you. We’ve no way of knowing one way or the other.’

  ‘You won’t find anyone else, because there isn’t anyone else. I’ll help with all the technical stuff. Show you everything, then you’ll believe me.’

  ‘You didn’t want to talk yesterday. Why now?’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson stares at Malin.

  Fear and anxiety in his eyes. He takes a deep breath before replying.

  ‘I saw one of the girls’ eyes. I know it sounds completely mad. But it was there, sort of on the hatch in the cell, and it was staring at me like it wanted to kill me, and I realised it had all gone too far.’

  You’re fucking right there, Malin thinks, looking at Jonathan Ludvigsson and trying to work out if he’s lying or telling the truth, and she believes him, his wide blue eyes are honest, and he seems to be smart enough and naïve enough to be both sophisticated and pretty crazy at the same time.

  And scared of the eye.

  ‘What about the guns? The explosives? How do you explain them?’

  Malin stands up.

  ‘This is the third time I’ve asked about them, so you’d better tell me now.’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson looks at her with a different sort of fear in his eyes.

  ‘I got the chance to buy them,’ he says. ‘So I did. I thought they might come in useful.’

  ‘Useful?’

  ‘There’s a war going on,’ Jonathan Ludvigsson says. ‘Between the forces of good and evil. I hate greed and capitalism and meat-eaters. I’m on the side of good, and at some point the guns and explosives might have come in handy, if things got desperate, but they haven’t, not this time anyway.’

  ‘For the last time: where did you get hold of the weapons?’

  Jonathan Ludvigsson hesitates, then shuts his eyes.

  ‘I bought them from the Dickheads. I got in touch with their leader, Dick Stensson, and asked if he could arrange something. He threatened to beat me up, then one of his colleagues called a month later.’

  Stensson.

  This case is going in circles, Malin thinks, the different lines of inquiry are biting each other’s tails. So what does this mean? Does this all fit together? She closes her eyes, and hears Jonathan Ludvigsson say: ‘Check with Stensson. I’m probably signing my death warrant here, but check with him.’

  ‘What about the money? Stuff like that costs a fair amount.’

&
nbsp; Malin looks at Jonathan Ludvigsson again.

  ‘Vegan Power, the animal rights group that I run, sometimes gets large donations. From anonymous individuals. I got the money from there. It all happened at the beginning of March. You can check the withdrawals from our bank account at Swedbank.’

  Malin gets up.

  ‘We’ve got a few things to follow up,’ she says. ‘You can be damn sure I’m going to want to talk to you again.’

  27

  Where do all the secrets come from?

  Tove leans her head against the window of the bus, watching the pavement of Vasagatan bow under the morning light. The trunks of the birch trees are almost grey after the winter, and the buds on the branches seem to belong to another world.

  There was a terrible smell at the bus stop. From a litter bin. Something must have rotted inside it, and she had to hold her nose, then she slipped on the last of the winter grit as she was about to get on the bus.

  But she didn’t fall.

  She never falls.

  She wonders why she can’t tell her mum about the letter she received? Even though what it said made me so happy?

  I was relieved she was so tired yesterday, and that she’d gone back to work again by the time I woke up.

  I know why I daren’t say anything.

  I’m scared she’ll cross the line again, start drinking, start behaving like a different person, not the one I know she can be, the one she wants to be.

  I’m not really sure I can leave her, but I have to. I have to, and I want to go for my own sake. I can’t be her mother, her guardian. I’ve carried that responsibility for far too long. I’m not going to do it any more. It’s completely wrong.

  Tove looks out of the bus window again.

  The Abisko roundabout.

  There’s a tattoo parlour by the square. It’s supposed to be the best in Linköping, and she’d like to get a tattoo on her shoulder. A dragon with wolf’s jaws. To represent her, the way she’s managed to move on after what happened that summer when she was kidnapped by a killer and almost murdered.

  That was when Mum lost control. That was when she flung open the door to the darkness, to a room so full of horrors and loneliness that in the end it would only have had room for death itself.