Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  She looks around the room.

  A man comes in there, she thinks, or a woman, and carefully pulls the pillow out from under Hanna Vigerö’s head, gently putting his or her hand behind her neck and letting her head fall softly to the mattress, before pressing the pillow down over her nose and mouth.

  Hanna Vigerö can’t put up any resistance, and maybe she doesn’t want to either, maybe she wants to be with her girls, and in her mind’s eye Malin can see the man – or is it a woman? – pressing the pillow over Hanna Vigerö’s face, and how she gives in, her tensed fingers relaxing, then the straight line on the monitor showing her heartbeat.

  Who were you?

  What were you doing here? Was there more than one of you?

  Did you enjoy the violence? Or did you really not want to do it, but were forced to? If so, by whom? Did you think a coroner or forensics expert wouldn’t notice that she’d been suffocated?

  Does any of this have any meaning at all? And then: Are you a ghost?

  How else could you get in here at night without being seen or heard? Do you work here at the hospital?

  Malin stares into space and tries to open herself up to any remnants of motives or feelings lingering in the air.

  You know exactly what you’re doing, she thinks.

  But you didn’t really want to do it? Is that it? Malin shuts her eyes, and inside her she sees the man in the hood turn to face the woman on the bed. He’s asking for forgiveness, because you are a man, aren’t you? And you’re asking for forgiveness.

  I can’t see your face, Malin thinks. But who are you? You can’t be Jonathan Ludvigsson, because we had him in the cells when you were here.

  So who are you? And why, tell me why you were here?

  Malin tries to make sense of the thoughts and feelings darting around the dark room. What evil is there in this hospital room?

  Evil can come to you in any form.

  It often takes you by surprise, but not always. You can devote your whole life to protecting your children, then you open the door to a man who ought to come with love, and when you turn your back he attacks your children, raping them without you even noticing.

  Can you protect yourself from evil like that? Is your inattention an evil in and of itself?

  The plank with the rusty spike in it under the snow. You notice it when the snow melts, but it’s only a plank, you think, and then the spike goes through your shoe and into your foot.

  The infection spreads through your body, your blood heading back towards your heart.

  What do you do?

  Can you protect yourself against the evil hidden beneath layer upon layer of goodness in those closest to you of all?

  In the poisonous plants in the garden?

  So what do you do?

  Faith. Turn to faith.

  Pure evil.

  It does exist, Malin can sense it, and we have to keep it shut away. Not accept it, nor deny its existence. Instead we have to try to eradicate it.

  A child wants goodness, but can be harmed. Because a child has no knowledge of the world.

  You wished your girls well, Hanna, didn’t you? You wished nothing but good for them. And what sort of evil, in whatever form, was it that found its way to you here and suffocated you?

  Malin takes a deep breath.

  She stands still in the drowsy morning, in the gloomy hospital room.

  Then she feels a cold draught in the room, followed by a short burst of warm air against her neck, dancing against her throat before it moves up towards her ear and turns into a whisper.

  There’s someone here.

  Someone’s here with me.

  I’ll listen, she thinks. I’m not frightened. It’s nothing odd.

  Talk, and I’ll listen, I promise.

  36

  We’re here, Malin.

  We’re here to remind you about the captive children.

  You have to hear them.

  They need you, and in order to know who they are, you need to find out who we are, that’s the only way.

  We see you standing in the hospital room.

  We’re pressing up against you, our little fingers tickling your neck like peacock feathers, and you know we’re here in the room where Mummy died, don’t you?

  That’s why you came here, even though you ought to be sleeping.

  It’s dark here, but the day is waking up and in the earth there are millions of shoots moving, not sure if they dare to peep out.

  The darkness of this room is nothing to the darkness you need to step down into, Malin. There’s a darkness waiting for you that might never end. But don’t be scared, because then you might not dare to go down into it, and then the darkness will only get bigger.

  You’re breathing.

  Your eyelids are closed, and the room smells of disinfectant and death.

  Can you hear us, Malin?

  Can you hear us?

  Malin opens her eyes.

  The voices, the ones she’d been hoping to hear, aren’t there, weren’t there, yet there’s still something encouraging her to press on, making her screw up her eyes until her darkness becomes a flaming, steaming, pulsating hell, and making her realise that wherever the solution to the Linköping bombing is to be found, it will be in just such a hell.

  A crow flies past outside the window. The bird has a worm in its beak, and in the darkness the worm becomes a little snake slithering across the cloudless dawn sky.

  ‘You have to help them,’ a faint voice says behind her back, making her jump, and she turns around, expecting to see one of the night-shift nurses who’d entered the room without her noticing. But there’s no one there, just the dusty stillness of the hospital room, and the smell of a life that has reached its end.

  ‘You have to help them,’ the voice says again, and Malin feels her fear fade, and says: ‘Is that you, Hanna? Are you here?’

  She waits for an answer.

  ‘Is it your girls I have to help? I’m trying to get justice for them.’

  The room is silent and still, and Malin wants to hear the friendly, calm voice again, and then it returns: ‘I can’t see my girls here.’

  ‘They aren’t with you?’

  The voice doesn’t answer.

  Malin senses it slipping away. Vanishing through the window, and she turns around and looks out at the sky. Wants answers to her many questions.

  ‘Come back, Hanna,’ Malin says. ‘Come back, and tell me what I have to do to help them.’

  ‘She’s not coming back. She’s dead.’

  The female voice comes from behind her, from the door. Malin turns around once more, sees a sturdy body clad in white coming into the room, a coarse-featured face beneath cropped hair.

  ‘Are you talking to the dead, Inspector?’

  No trace of irony. No fear, no surprise, just mild bemusement.

  ‘I don’t know what got into me,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe I should call in at the psychiatric department?’

  ‘Best to stay well away from there,’ the nurse says, holding out her hand.‘Siv Stark, I work the night shift.’

  ‘Were you on duty the night Hanna died?’

  Siv Stark shakes her head.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘We’ll need to question everyone who works here.’

  ‘Something’s obviously happened, I can tell that much from the fact that forensics officers were here cordoning off the room and conducting some sort of search. What is it? Was there something funny about the way Hanna Vigerö died?’

  ‘I can’t say anything else at the moment, but if you could let the others know that they’ll have to be questioned, I’d be grateful.’

  Peter Hamse.

  She simultaneously wants and doesn’t want to talk to him.

  Siv Stark nods, then smiles, and in the dawn light her mouth looks twice as big, yet without being frightening or grotesque.

  ‘Was she here?’ Siv Stark asks. ‘Or her girls, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t kn
ow. Maybe. I’m trying to listen to them. Believe in them.’

  Siv Stark searches through one of the pockets of her white coat. Then she takes out a small tub of chewing tobacco and inserts a dose under her top lip, and the smell of the tobacco makes Malin feel sick, and she wants to get out, back home to her flat, to Tove, to the soft, clean smell of her daughter, a smell that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

  The two women leave the room together.

  They can’t hear the desperate cries behind them.

  Two girls crying for their mother.

  A mother crying for her girls.

  It’s a quarter to six when Malin curls up in bed beside Tove.

  She doesn’t wake up, just makes room instinctively before cuddling up to Malin in her sleep and wrapping her arms around her. Malin starts to sweat, and thinks that she’ll never get to sleep like this, yet this is still where she wants to be, just like this, finding some way of expressing all the love in the world, pressing against Tove until there’s nothing between them. Soon she’ll be gone, and that scares me, makes me scared of being lonely, and I want to keep her here.

  Everyone lets me down.

  Tove, who wants to go to Lundsberg.

  Dad.

  Janne, Daniel. Everyone abandons me, and Malin feels like crying, sinking into self-pity, but she knows that won’t do, it just leads straight to hell, and instead she tries to enjoy Tove’s warmth, and slowly her brain stops spinning at top speed, the images overlap each other more slowly, with less logic, and she is carried out into a flower meadow where she can breathe, and she’s a little girl hurtling over the meadow, not looking at her feet, a little girl whose goal is the horizon.

  Then a dog barks.

  And the girl stops and looks at the ground and she screams, jumps, and tries to run away, but she’s stuck in mud where little blood-stained baby lizards are trying to dig their teeth into her ankles, and spiders with long hairy legs crawl up into the girl’s hair, trying to get into her eyes, mouth, and ears. The creatures want to make her mute, blind, and deaf, want to free her from all desires, from all greed, and Malin wants to escape from her dream, but forces herself to stay, and then the meadow is replaced by a hospital room, and she sees her brother lying there in bed under white sheets, asleep. He’s grown up, and yet he’s a little baby dressed in a pale blue rompersuit that she recognises from so many dreams dreamt.

  His face is thin, and his chin is slight, and his body small and slender, and his sleep seems dreamless and free from worry. In her dream Malin thinks: I’m not the one who’s been abandoned, you are, and if human life is a contest to see who has been most abandoned, maybe you’d win?

  I’ve let you down. Haven’t I? But why am I so scared of going to visit you? After all, I want to give you my love. Am I scared of the way you are, and what that’s going to make me feel?

  She feels like going up to her brother.

  To stroke his cheek, but before she has the chance to move, the backdrop of the dream changes, into a stinking pit running with damp, surrounded by water on all sides, where two tiny creatures are whimpering in a corner, and she wants to get them out of there, but she can’t, because they have no faces, no names, she doesn’t know who they are.

  You have to save us.

  You have to.

  And she stays in the room, freezing the image of the dirty, frightened children, letting Tove’s body merge with the children’s, the stuff that dreams are made of, the sense of proximity that only leaves Malin Fors when she wakes up.

  Åke Fors has got up early.

  He’s sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee in one hand and the Correspondent in front of him.

  But he doesn’t feel like reading the news, can’t even be bothered to find out the latest about the bomb, because he’s got enough to deal with from his own latest explosion.

  From where he’s sitting he can almost feel the grass in the park outside bubbling with life. He can feel the vibrations of the worms, of everything eager to grow, yet somehow hesitating.

  Åke Fors hasn’t got the energy to get up and look out at the park, and see the beautiful, almost perfect spring day that’s coming into being.

  Malin.

  He takes a sip of coffee.

  How will you ever forgive me? Do you even want to?

  But we have to get closer to each other. We can’t just give up.

  I’m going to stay here. Not leave. Stay, with my regret and guilt.

  If you’d drunk yourself to death, it would have been my fault.

  Margaretha.

  How the hell did you get me to do what you wanted? That was how it was. It was. Wasn’t it?

  Birdsong. A bumblebee buzzing.

  I suppose it was easiest that way. However it came about.

  37

  Tove and Malin have opened the window facing St Lars Church, letting the warmth of the sun caress their faces.

  Tove is drinking coffee.

  They’re both eating sandwiches, and Malin has just told her what happened at her dad’s, at Grandad’s, last night, and Tove repeats: ‘You have to forgive him. Try. One way or another, there are just the three of us now, aren’t there?’

  Malin doesn’t answer.

  She just looks down at the recently smartened up St Lars Park, where a group of youngsters is busy setting up some market stalls.

  ‘What do you think they’re selling?’ Malin asks.

  ‘Secrets often end up like that,’ Tove says. ‘They get bigger and bigger the longer you hold onto them, and in the end you just can’t talk about them.’

  ‘We’ll see. So, am I supposed to contact Lundsberg?’

  ‘Ideally. But I could do it myself. Are you going to talk to Dad about it?’

  Janne.

  The blonde woman by his side last night.

  ‘No need. I’ll email the headmaster. It’s a good thing, isn’t it? Tell your dad it’s OK with me. Pretty much every company director in the country went there, didn’t they?’

  ‘Almost,’ Tove says.

  ‘So you can end up as a director and look after me when I get old.’

  ‘I’m not going to end up as some wretched director,’ Tove says, and Malin looks at her, knows she’s going to make a success of things among the posh kids, feels the word ‘wretched’ rolling around her head, she’d have gone for ‘fucking’ herself, but wretched is perfectly good for a smart girl in a situation like this.

  Malin takes a deep breath.

  The rays of the spring sun are warm, almost enough to burn, at least that’s what it feels like, inside the open window of the flat.

  Where are my sunglasses? Haven’t bothered to dig them out yet, but it’s almost time.

  The clock on the church tower says half past eight, and even though Malin only got a few hours’ sleep last night, she no longer feels tired, just ready and full of anticipation for the day’s work.

  She’ll have to shelve all the other crap.

  Lock it away in some distant little room in her consciousness. Take it out again when the time comes.

  Börje Svärd is walking quickly through Tornhagen. Wants to get to the station in time for the morning meeting. He walks past the unassuming little houses and the yellow-brick blocks of flats.

  His second walk of the day.

  He was out with the dogs at six o’clock.

  But he needs to keep moving, not to suppress Anna’s memory, or any thoughts about the case they’re working on, but because he wants to hold onto her memory.

  He breathes in the spring air.

  Remember Anna as a young woman, before her MS slowly sucked the life from her. But the illness never managed to steal her happiness. Just as little as the bomb in the square would manage to steal the city’s happiness now.

  The past few days’ hard work on the case have taken their toll on both body and soul.

  He heard on the radio that all the country’s banks would be opening once again, but with rigorous security measu
res in place, and extra guards.

  Börje reaches the Valla road, waits at the pedestrian crossing, and looks at the old buildings of Gamla Linköping.

  Then he hears a car horn and turns to see Waldemar’s green car pulling up at the crossing, and his weather-beaten face sticking out of the open window.

  ‘Do you want a lift, partner?’

  Partner?

  Well, that’s probably what they are.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Let’s stop for coffee at the 7-Eleven,’ Waldemar says once they’re on their way. ‘I need some decent coffee.’

  ‘Why not?’ Börje says. ‘I don’t know why, but I get the feeling this case is moving into a different phase now. Don’t you think?’

  Waldemar nods and lights a cigarette without asking if Börje minds.

  Unusually few people in the police station.

  Just a few uniforms meandering about trying to look busy.

  But then Sven has probably arranged the interviews up at the hospital by now.

  Where are Börje Svärd and Waldemar Ekenberg? She wants to ask them to go and talk to the staff at the children’s pre-school again, the North Wind school in Ekholmen, and then someone at the day centre in Vidingsjö where Hanna Vigerö worked.

  Malin’s sitting at her computer, and thinks that that’s where she wants to start.

  Wants to get an idea of who Hanna Vigerö was, who the girls were. Properly. Strangely enough, no one has done that up to now. But everything has happened so quickly.

  Zeke.

  Where is he?

  She ought to have called him, but she hopes Sven has explained the angle that he and Malin will be working on from now on.

  Zeke will follow her lead. She knows that. And she knows she’s going to need the energy and drive that he can contribute. Never backing down, getting on with the job.

  He’ll have the energy to switch to looking into the Vigerö family. To try to see every aspect of the investigation into the bombing in the main square in a new light.

  He has to have the energy.

  Six-year-old girls shouldn’t get blown up.

  Their mum shouldn’t be asphyxiated during the night in hospital.

  We should never accept that.

  ‘Malin.’

  She hears Zeke’s voice behind her.