Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Mum’s note on the hall floor that morning.

  Have to get to work early. Something’s come up.

  Something always comes up, and will go on coming up. That’s just the way it is, isn’t it, Mum? But that doesn’t really matter now, I’m heading out into the world, I’m going to make it mine, I’m not going to stick around in this shitty dump, not like you.

  I think I can see what you’re doing more clearly than you can, Mum. You slave away at your work to get away from yourself. You fight, Mum, you really do, but you should probably stop for a bit, don’t you think?

  It’s a shame I have to leave soon, now that Grandad’s come home.

  I like being with him, he’s not as odd as other grown-ups, he seems to like spending time with me and hearing what I’ve got to say. But at the same time it’s obvious he’s scared of something when he’s with you, Mum, as if he’s hiding a secret, a truth, that could ruin everything.

  Her cheek gets cold against the glass.

  Tove sits up straight in her seat.

  The bus is approaching her stop.

  The clock on the screen of Malin’s computer says sixteen minutes past eight.

  The pictures and words on the screen are blurring together. She has to make a real effort to see, to read. Has to get some more sleep soon.

  The Correspondent’s website already has the news that Jonathan Ludvigsson has been arrested in connection with the investigation.

  They’ve found out about the caravan as well. The pictures of it look as if they were taken at dawn.

  Pictures of the man planting the bomb on the bicycle. Question of the day: ‘What punishment should he get?’

  ‘Shoot him,’ says a baker from Ljungsbro.

  ‘Lock him up and throw away the key,’ says a nursing assistant from Linghem.

  ‘We’ve got confirmation.’

  Sven Sjöman comes over to her and Zeke’s desk in the open-plan office. His eyes look steady, his voice tired but firm.

  ‘We’ve managed to get hold of Jonathan Ludvigsson’s friend in Stockholm. He confirms he was with Ludvigsson in his flat at the time of the explosion. Apparently there’s another person who can back that up. He says he doesn’t know anything about any Liberation Front. Stockholm are pulling him in for a more detailed interview.’

  ‘Doesn’t really surprise me,’ Malin says as she closes her browser.

  ‘And we’ve just had the results from Forensics’ expert in video analysis and body language,’ Sven goes on. ‘In his opinion, the man at the computer in the City Terminal can’t be the same man who left the bomb outside the bank.’

  Malin grits her teeth.

  In her mind’s eye she can see the different hooded men, their motivations, their intentions.

  ‘It could still be him, or them,’ Zeke says. ‘Jonathan Ludvigsson may be saying he set up the Liberation Front on his own, and he may have a reasonable explanation of how he got hold of the weapons. But we’ve still only got his word for it. Could he really have set up this whole charade himself?’

  Sven nods, then looks at Zeke and Malin, and Malin shakes her head.

  ‘Forensics are checking his computers, and the laptop. We’ll have to see what they come up with. Ludvigsson can show them around his encryptions. And we need to do another round of interviews with the men we picked up last night.’

  ‘We can hold them on suspected firearms offences,’ Malin says.

  ‘We can bring in other people with connections to Ludvigsson,’ Zeke says. ‘Put some pressure on them. If we can find any.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Sven says. ‘Could the whole Economic Liberation Front be an invention, like he says. Just to get a bit of attention?’

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ Malin says. ‘Has Karin had time to compare the explosives?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sven says. ‘What we found in the caravan isn’t the same sort that was used in the bomb in the square. And we’ve received information from Swedbank confirming that a large sum was withdrawn from the Vegan Power account at the time Ludvigsson claimed. The branch manager was extremely helpful.’

  What a surprise, Malin thinks.

  ‘Which leads us to the next subject,’ Zeke says. ‘Jonathan Ludvigsson said he bought the guns from the Dickheads, from Stensson. We ought to question Stensson about that. As soon as possible.’

  ‘We’ll get started on that,’ Sven says.

  ‘Let’s take it slowly,’ Malin says. ‘If Stensson’s heard we’ve arrested Jonathan Ludvigsson, then he knows we might be onto him, in which case anything could happen. Right now we’re not actually after him, but the people who really did this. The chances that he was behind the bombing are pretty slim. He’d hardly have tried to blow himself up. And arms dealing would be a separate investigation, wouldn’t it? Unless he just happens to have supplied the people responsible for the bomb. I think we should call Stensson, basically. Ask what he has to say about Ludvigsson’s claims.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Zeke says. ‘Maybe we’ll finally be able to get him for something after all.’

  ‘OK, that’s what we do. Get onto it after the morning meeting.’

  ‘Anything from the Security Police?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘Not, not a peep,’ Sven says. ‘But they’ll probably want to talk to Ludvigsson at some point today.’

  Sven leaves them.

  Malin leans back, then goes back into the Correspondent’s website. The homepage now has Jonathan Ludvigsson’s passport photograph alongside the pictures of the caravan.

  There’s a basic article about the arrest, and his attempt to get away, saying that’s he suspected of being the man who planted the bomb outside the bank, as well as the man on the video from Stockholm.

  We’re ahead of them, Malin thinks. Just for once, and if she goes over to the window she’d see the journalists who have gathered outside the station, standing there in the early spring light letting the sun’s rays hit their cheeks as they suck on cigarettes and drink coffee bought at the Statoil petrol station down by the roundabout.

  Nothing new with the Islamic extremists, she thinks. Can we write off that line of inquiry? No, not entirely, not yet.

  Then the phone on Malin’s desk rings.

  She picks up the receiver and answers.

  Ebba, the receptionist: ‘There’s a doctor who wants to talk to you. A Peter Hamse.’

  And when Malin hears his name it’s as if she loses control of her own body, and she suddenly has a quivering sensation all over, but focused mainly on her crotch, and she finds it hard to breathe. She hopes there’s no outward sign of what’s happening to her, that Zeke can’t tell that she’s been left feeling exposed and weak and red-cheeked at the mere mention of a name.

  Deep breath.

  Then out, slowly.

  And she says: ‘Put him through.’

  And then she hears his voice, slow but firm, as if he’s going to tell her a secret that he’s been keeping to himself.

  ‘Is this Malin Fors?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  I haven’t spared him a thought since the business with the caravan kicked off, Malin thinks. She’s had to concentrate on the tangible problems facing them.

  ‘Good to hear your voice,’ she says.

  And she says it without thinking and can hear how stupid and wrong it sounds, yet still somehow right, and she feels embarrassed but still feels that something important has been said. Then she looks at Zeke, sees him raise his eyebrows in surprise, then Peter Hamse says: ‘Good to hear your voice too, Malin, but that’s not why I’m calling. I’m phoning to let you know that Hanna Vigerö passed away during the night. I thought she was getting over the worst of it, but for some reason her injuries got the better of her. As far as we can tell, she simply stopped breathing.’

  Hanna Vigerö.

  The third victim of the bomb, the man with the bike, and Malin feels excited, randy, and angry, and sad all at the same time.

  Good to hear your voice too.
>
  Stopped breathing.

  ‘I seem to remember you saying she was going to make it.’

  ‘In difficult cases like this you can never know, but yes, I thought she was going to make it.’

  ‘What was the time of death?’

  ‘She passed away at a quarter past five.’

  Malin looks at the clock on the screen. Almost eight. Should they have called at once? Should he have called at once?

  No.

  She passed away as a result of her injuries.

  ‘You didn’t notice anything odd? There was nothing unusual about the way she died?’

  ‘No. The alarm on her monitor went off, and the night staff went to her room at once and found that she’d stopped breathing. They tried to resuscitate her, but in vain. Obviously there’ll be a post-mortem by the coroner.’

  Malin nods, and says: ‘Thanks. OK, now we know.’

  Then silence, and the phone feels damp in her hand, and she can hear him breathing, would like to feel his breath in her ear, this strange yet somehow familiar man. Can she say something now, does she dare? It feels as though he’s thinking something, hesitates, then he says: ‘It would be good to meet up sometime. I mean, if you’d like to, and get a chance? Off duty.’

  ‘We’ve got our hands full with the case,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  She shuts her eyes. Breathes.

  Then she clicks to end the call.

  Why?

  Why this wall around me? All I wanted was to shout out how much I wanted to see him.

  Then she looks at Zeke. He’s waiting intently to hear about the call.

  ‘That was Hanna Vigerö’s doctor,’ she says. ‘She passed away early this morning. Couldn’t survive with those injuries. There doesn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, just that her body couldn’t carry on, or didn’t want to.’

  28

  At nine o’clock the officers from the Crime Investigation Department gather in their usual meeting room.

  They’ve acquired a third victim overnight, and picked up a prime suspect who has confessed to crimes other than the one they’re investigating.

  Sven Sjöman.

  Karim Akbar.

  Waldemar Ekenberg.

  Johan Jakobsson.

  Börje Svärd.

  Zeke.

  And Malin.

  No one has said anything about counselling since the first meeting. It would be shameful to ask for that sort of thing right now. That’s their tacit understanding.

  The detectives are sitting around the table, twisting and turning the facts, evaluating the likely truth of people’s words and stories, feeling the truth evading them, trying to slip through their fingers and vanish into the dark hole that an unsolved case always becomes.

  In any place, at any time, outside any bank, another bomb could go off.

  People are frightened, and fear can’t be allowed to take hold in a civilised society.

  Fear needs to be vanquished.

  Otherwise society as we know it will collapse. That is the collective belief of the detectives, the nameless feeling that takes hold of them as they work through the lines of inquiry.

  Like scalding debris from a blazing star, that’s what lines of inquiry in this case are like, Malin thinks. In her mind’s eye she can see Peter Hamse, then Tove, and her dad and mum, and everything that seems to be going on now, as if all the elements of her life are coming together into a single event.

  Wasn’t something supposed to be happening today? What have I forgotten?

  The shouts and cries from the children in the nursery playground can’t be heard in the room, but in the detectives’ ears two floating little girls are whispering words about fear, and wondering where their mummy is, shouldn’t she be here now? Daddy, Daddy, where are you?

  But the detectives can’t hear the girls, they’re listening to Sven instead.

  There have been reports from Gothenburg about increased tension between the Hells Angels and the Bandidos – there’s supposed to have been a big fight in a club on the Avenue. So something’s going on with the biker gangs, Malin thinks. Could the bomb itself be part of an escalating bikers’ war? Could the three members of the Vigerö family be innocent victims of blunt, unfocused gang-related violence? What about all the activists down in the cells? What do they want?

  Dozens of possibilities.

  Malin can feel her brain getting tired. She thinks about the girls, about the eye above the cheek, thinks: I’m doing this for you. That’s why I’m sitting in this room in the middle of what feels like an ongoing explosion.

  Sven seems to see how tired she is, knows how cruel it was of him to call her in to question Ludvigsson.

  ‘Malin,’ he says. ‘After the meeting you’re to go and get some sleep in the staffroom. You look shattered.’

  ‘That’s an order,’ Karim agrees.

  She doesn’t actually want to sleep. But her body is screaming for rest, every muscle aches.

  But an order’s an order, isn’t it? And a weary brain can’t do any good.

  Malin is sitting at her desk. Rubs her eyes. Hears Zeke talking to Dick Stensson on the phone as she gets ready to head into the darkness of the staffroom. She closes her eyes. Listens to Zeke’s conversation, but can’t keep her focus. Instead she thinks about the city preening itself in the spring light out there, a light that’s far too sharp for her eyes.

  Events are coming one after the other, she thinks. No time to stop, think, reflect. And that makes us bad detectives.

  Like children playing football, twenty little bodies all chasing the ball.

  Memorial ceremonies. Church services. A minute’s silence.

  That’s all dying out now. People have to find their own solace, their own peace, faith.

  Malin can feel a dull pain at the base of her spine and feels like drifting off to sleep here at the desk, but she can’t let herself do that.

  She opens her eyes.

  ‘That was pointless. Stensson just laughed at us. Said Jonathan Ludvigsson’s talking crap and that he’s never met him. Stensson said we were welcome to check his phone calls and emails,’ Zeke says after he hangs up.

  Malin rubs her eyes again.

  ‘Maybe Ludvigsson’s making it all up. He seems prone to exaggerating his own importance. As far as we know, he could have bought the guns somewhere else entirely.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Zeke says. ‘We won’t make any more progress there.’

  ‘I’m going to get some rest,’ Malin says, getting up.

  Without looking up from his keyboard Zeke says:‘I’ll get our paperwork sorted. I’ll wake you if anything happens.’

  The windowless room is illuminated by a small, white tablelamp. Sven was resting in the room not long ago, Malin can still detect a faint scent of him, and it makes her feel calm.

  She switches on the ‘engaged’ sign.

  Lies down on the fairly comfortable sofa, leaving the light on and letting her thoughts roam free.

  Janne. I hardly ever think of him any more. He isn’t inside me the same way, but he’s there as someone to lean on.

  When I saw him in the square after the bomb I was impressed. We need people like that among us, solid trees of people who grow in the very worst of times, who step forward, and whose calmness and composure show the way forward.

  Is he likely to meet anyone new?

  How will I take that?

  Don’t even think about it, I’ll go mad, I know I will, I haven’t got that far yet, I’m not ready to accept something like that.

  Janne, as though made to take care of the wreckage after an explosion.

  But what if the whole world explodes?

  If a proper war breaks out? But war is conducted in miniature, every day, and she feels as if she’s missing out on something.

  My days pass, she thinks. And I breathe and I breathe and I breathe. But do I feel anything? Do I participate in anything?

  Peter Hamse.

  I could feel s
omething for him.

  I want him inside me, it’s as simple as that, isn’t it?

  Keep calm, Fors, the last thing anyone needs right now is for you to lose your focus.

  Tove. My love for her is a given. It is worth everything, and therefore nothing.

  How the hell can I even think that? What’s wrong with me?

  War. A heavy bomber in the sky, then people sitting in badly lit rooms in cramped flats where no one actually wants to live, making bombs that will tear small children to pieces.

  How did we get there?

  She shuts her eyes. Feels the thirst.

  But the desire for amber-coloured sweet tequila finds no foothold. There’s a different anxiety in her body instead. Wasn’t there something I was supposed to do today?

  Something was going to happen. Something important. But what? Can’t remember.

  She thinks about Zeke instead. The deep humanity in his voice, full of testosterone and power, but also balance. Somehow Zeke always manages to hold his life together no matter what happens.

  Infidelity.

  The son who has become a famous ice-hockey player and moved to Canada.

  A grandchild he never gets to see.

  A wife who is just that, a wife, one he’s had for a long time, and whom he plans to keep hold of out of habit.

  But Zeke stands there, stable and free in his life, apparently happy with his decisions, with no real doubts.

  Doesn’t he want more? Isn’t there anything that arouses greed in him? Yes. Sex with Karin. He wants more of that. But apart from that?

  There’s something I’m forgetting.

  What time is it?

  She looks at her mobile.

  Almost ten.

  She turns out the lamp. Leaves her mobile on. Feels the darkness embrace her like a pair of warm, longed-for arms.

  Two o’clock. Something was going to happen today at two o’clock, wasn’t it?

  But what?

  Åke Fors is pouring a cup of coffee in his flat on Barnhemsgatan. He’s just spoken to the estate agent in Tenerife, they’ve received an unexpectedly quick offer on the flat. Maybe not quite as much money as he’d been hoping for, but these days any offer is a good offer. We, or I, he corrects himself, have friends who haven’t received a single offer on their flats in several years, and who’ve been forced to stay on the island even though they wanted to move home to Sweden.