Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  It makes her feel safe, finally anchoring her in the present. I’ve been falling through the air since the bomb went off, she thinks.

  ‘Let’s get to work,’ Zeke says. ‘Sven’s told me about Hanna Vigerö, and what he wants the two of us to do.’

  Malin nods.

  ‘I thought we could start with population records.’

  Zeke pulls his chair around the desk they share and sits down next to Malin as she starts typing on the computer, logging in with her police authorisation, and soon Hanna Vigerö’s details are up on the screen in front of them.

  Born in Linköping in 1969, parents Johan and Karin Karlsson.

  Married Pontus Vigerö in 1994.

  And twin girls.

  Born 2004, January.

  Nothing odd, nothing remarkable.

  ‘The girls,’ Zeke says. ‘Check the girls, go into their records.’

  ‘Haven’t we already checked their birth certificates?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. They were identified by their dental records. And we haven’t had any reason to look into their files more closely.’

  A black pupil, an angelic child’s eye above a torn cheek.

  I still don’t know which of you the eye belonged to, which one of you was staring at me, Malin thinks, but does it really matter?

  You were twins, so perhaps you thought of yourselves as one and the same person, the way twins often do?

  They bring up Tuva Vigerö’s record on screen.

  ‘Hang on,’ Zeke says. ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

  And Malin holds her breath.

  Then reads: ‘Born Stockholm, Karolinska Hospital, 2004. Adopted at birth by Pontus and Hanna Vigerö.’

  ‘Is it possible to find out who their real parents were?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malin says, clicking around the screen, but the information isn’t there. Malin knows it must exist somewhere, just not available to them through the online population records.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says.

  ‘Adoptions between Swedish parents are pretty unusual,’ Zeke says.

  ‘But they do still happen,’ Malin says. ‘But you have to be pretty damn lucky to be one of them, from what I’ve heard. There are only something like ten to twenty adoptions like that each year. I read about it somewhere, Social Services prefer foster placements.’

  And Malin thinks about her little brother. No one wanted him. No one wanted damaged goods. Not even his mother.

  They scroll down.

  Bring up Tuva’s twin sister Mira’s records.

  The same adoption details, of course.

  They click through the rows of neutral words, the formal phrases that Malin knows hide a truth that hides further truths.

  There’s no further information about the adoption online.

  Malin lets go of the mouse.

  Turns to Zeke.

  ‘Do you know where we can get hold of more information? Which organisations would have the records?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Malin calls Johan on his internal number, even though he’s only at his desk at the far end of the open-plan office.

  ‘District courts have to approve adoptions, in purely legal terms. I suppose there’d be something in their records,’ he says. ‘But you’ll need to go to the actual archive itself, that sort of information isn’t stored digitally yet. Because of data protection legislation.’

  ‘Thanks, Johan.’

  Then Malin sees Börje and Waldemar arrive at the station, deep in a new, jovial sort of conversation, and they look like old friends who have only just met after years apart.

  She calls them over.

  Tells them what she wants them to do, and fills them in on the latest developments.

  And, against expectations, neither of them frowns or gets annoyed, they seem to accept her authority, saying: ‘We’re on it,’ before heading back out the way they just arrived.

  ‘I’ll tell Sven that we can skip the morning meeting,’ she calls after them.

  The face in the mirror of the cramped, airless toilet seems to evade Malin, even though she knows she’s looking at her own reflection.

  But who is it really?

  Do I actually have any idea?

  And she wonders if her brother looks like her.

  What do you look like? she whispers to herself, and she thinks about the girls, pretty, beautiful, their eyes so full of life in the pictures in the flat out in Ekholmen. Not so very different in appearance to Hanna Vigerö.

  Adopted.

  There was someone who didn’t want you, but who wouldn’t want a couple of girls like you?

  Who abandoned you?

  And no one, no one wanted you, my brother.

  I would have wanted you, but I didn’t even know you existed.

  Malin splashes water over her face.

  Shakes her head.

  Are there any sensible officials working in the district court archive? If the children were adopted in Linköping, then surely the documents ought to be there?

  Well, we’ll just have to try to find one if we’re going to make any progress. And we’ll have to see what Börje and Waldemar come up with.

  The wheelchairs seem to be streaming out of the community ambulances, their paint gleaming in the spring light. A strongly perfumed scent is spreading from the beds of tulips framing the single-storey brick building housing the Vidingsjö day centre.

  Vegetables, Waldemar Ekenberg thinks, as he sees Börje Svärd’s face contort, and realises that he must see Anna in the adults with learning difficulties and cerebral palsy who are being wheeled in for therapy and storage.

  Waldemar himself has always been terrified of ending up like that, or that the child he and his wife never had would turn out that way. Maybe his fear of that explained why they never had any children?

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  Börje nods.

  They press the button and the glass doors leading into the day centre slide open, and they go in. In a harshly lit corridor they stop a young blonde girl wearing a pink painter’s smock.

  They say their names, show their ID, and explain why they’re there.

  ‘I’m Petronella Nilsson, I’m an occupational therapist here. You’re welcome to talk to me if you like, my art class doesn’t start until eleven o’clock.’

  They follow the girl into an art room with jars of brushes lined up on shelves along the walls, and a feeble light filters through the large windows facing a plant-filled internal courtyard.

  Stained tables, no chairs.

  They each sit down on a stool, and Waldemar notices the girl’s freckles, and thinks how well they suit her snub-nosed, twenty-five-year-old face.

  ‘It’s all so awful. I can’t understand it. We’ve all had the chance to get some counselling, but we still can’t believe it. First Hanna’s daughters, and now her. I don’t even want to think about it.’

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual about Hanna before the bombing? Did she say anything strange?’ Börje asks.

  ‘No, nothing. We’ve talked about that. But there was nothing. Why? Do you think the bomb was aimed at her?’

  She doesn’t know that Hanna was murdered, Waldemar thinks. It’s not come out in the media yet. And he isn’t about to tell her.

  ‘We’re keeping all lines of inquiry open,’ he says. ‘What was she like as a person?’

  ‘She was on compassionate leave after her husband’s accident, of course. But things were getting better for her. She was actually the loveliest, happiest girl in the world. Our clients loved her, and she was so fond of them. And she adored her girls.’

  ‘Did she talk much about her children?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘Anything special?’

  Petronella Nilsson thinks for a moment.

  ‘No, just the usual, how they were getting on, that sort of thing. Things they’d said and done.’

  ‘Did you know they were adopted?’

/>   Petronella Nilsson looks surprised. Shakes her head.

  ‘I’d never have guessed.’

  ‘So you didn’t know about that?’ Waldemar asks.

  ‘No. Hanna never even hinted at it.’

  ‘Did she have any particularly close friends here?’ Börje goes on.

  ‘She was friends with everyone,’ Petronella Nilsson says. ‘Everyone and no one. She didn’t see any of us outside of work. She pretty much stuck with her family. They seemed to be a very close-knit unit.’

  Before they leave the Vidingsjö day centre they talk to another two members of staff who say the same sort of thing as Petronella Nilsson. Then they set off to drive the few kilometres to the North Wind pre-school.

  Kids shouting and playing.

  More brushes. More paint. Toys, and a headache-inducing volume of noise.

  An older woman called Karin Kvarnsten, the manager of the North Wind, is standing in front of Börje Svärd and Waldemar Ekenberg in the middle of the chaos, grey-haired, with friendly eyes and round cheeks.

  ‘So it’s your turn now, is it? The Security Police were here yesterday. Aren’t you working together?’

  Börje and Waldemar look at each other, and they seem to be thinking the same thing: ‘Are we following the same line of inquiry?’ But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, maybe the Security Police are doing the same as them, leaving no stone unturned.

  ‘They like to do things their own way,’ Börje says, and Waldemar pulls an annoyed face.

  They go off to the nursery’s kitchen, which smells strongly of curry, and a bearded man the same age as them is slicing a huge smoked sausage at the same time as somehow managing to pour couscous into a pan of boiling water.

  The man introduces himself as Sten Håkansson.

  ‘Tell us about the girls,’ Waldemar says.

  ‘The nicest kids in the world, best friends, very advanced for their age,’ Karin Kvarnsten says. ‘They didn’t get the chance to come back after their dad’s accident, so I don’t know how that would have affected them. And now we’ll never know.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Börje says.

  ‘It’s so terrible,’ Sten Håkansson says. ‘It’s impossible to take it all in, somehow, and we’re all worried about what’s going on in Linköping.’

  ‘Did you know that the girls were adopted?’ Waldemar says. ‘Did the Security Police mention that?’

  ‘Adopted? What are you saying?’ Karin Kvarnsten exclaims. ‘We had no idea, we’d never have guessed.’

  Sten Håkansson stops stirring the couscous.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘The Security Police didn’t say a word about that. They just wanted to know if we’d noticed anything unusual about the family, which of course we hadn’t.’

  ‘Except that they seemed somehow happier than everyone else,’ Karin Kvarnsten says.

  Once they finish questioning the two nursery workers, Börje and Waldemar stop next to each other out in the car park.

  Waldemar lights a cigarette.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ he says. ‘No matter what happens, as long as it doesn’t affect you directly, life goes on, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does,’ Börje says. ‘It really does. Let’s see if Malin and Zeke have come up with anything.’

  Ronny Karlsson doesn’t stop muttering as he leads Malin and Zeke through the cramped, dusty rooms of the district court archive, housed four floors below the red-brick building containing the county administrative headquarters, next to the library in Slottsparken.

  They managed to find the details of the person in charge of the archive online, then called the reluctant bureaucrat, who had protested but eventually agreed to help them. He must have understood how serious it was.

  ‘Can’t it . . .?’

  He abandoned his question halfway through over the phone.

  No, it can’t wait, there’s no time to go through the normal channels with a load of form-filling.

  ‘OK, come over in an hour and a half.’

  And now he’s walking ahead of them, in jeans and a red flannel shirt, and the archive smells musty and forgotten, and on tall metal shelving, painted bright blue, stand rows of files and boxes, identified by marker pen, beside piles of folders evidently arranged into some sort of system with elastic bands and Post-it notes.

  ‘Most of the archive is available to the public,’ Ronny Karlsson mutters, taking a long stride over a box in the middle of the passageway. ‘But no one ever bothers with any of it. What you’re after should be here.’

  ‘We’re bothered,’ Malin says, and Ronny Karlsson stops beside a shelf full of black files.

  ‘It ought to be here.’

  And he reaches up on tiptoe with a frown as he reads the headings on the spines of the files, before pulling one of them out.

  Ronny Karlsson leafs through it.

  Reads, then holds the open file out towards Malin.

  ‘Here,’ he says. ‘This is all I’ve got about the Vigerö girls.’

  38

  This world is overflowing with unwanted children, Malin thinks.

  A planned adoption that never happened.

  Who wants damaged goods if there’s a choice? Sooner brown or yellow or red than someone with a damaged brain, a wrecked soul.

  Malin looks out across the park towards the castle, sees the cherry and apple trees and magnolias competing to be the most beautiful, Miss Linköping Tree 2010.

  It’s a quarter to twelve, and Zeke is strolling slowly beside her, and behind the wall of white flowers they can just make out the castle, and the section of the park that’s closed to the general public, and on the other side of them is the library, its huge glass windows glinting knife-sharp in the sun. In the passageways between the shelves, people are looking for books to read, and students are huddled over their computers at the desks.

  The library.

  Tove’s favourite place. Malin and Zeke walk in silence towards the car, parked over by the cathedral.

  Every corner of this city is so familiar to me, Malin thinks. Every stone of the cathedral’s walls is in my memory, every tree, every nuance of the pink façade of the old gymnasium is part of me, every inequality between people, every injustice, every sorrow, joy, desire, and avaricious thought.

  There was a name in the black file in the district court archive.

  Not the name of the woman who gave the children up for adoption, nor the name of the father, but the name of a social worker who was involved in some way.

  Swedish parents have no right to anonymity when they give children up for adoption. But in the case of the Vigerö twins, the biological parents were not identified.

  Why not?

  A bureaucratic mistake? Or something else?

  The social worker was an Ottilia Stenlund, and six years ago she was working for Social Services in Norrmalm, office number four, at 13 Teknologgatan in Stockholm.

  ‘We’ll have to try calling Ottilia Stenlund,’ Zeke says as they go around the big oak tree outside the old gymnasium.

  The castle.

  A grey box some hundred metres away. The residence of the district governor. Smart people get invited to official dinners there. And ice-hockey players from the Linköping team.

  The cathedral.

  Like a gigantic sarcophagus, it seems to demand the attention of Linköping’s inhabitants, yet they still don’t seem to care much about what happens in God’s house. The mosque out in Ekholmen is bound to be better attended. Apart from when there’s a bombing, or at Christmas, at midnight mass, when a thousand candles make the stone interior glow. Then the citizens of Linköping turn out to a man, and the churchwardens have to turn people away at the doors, and the collection boxes overflow with guilty consciences.

  Bloody hell, Malin thinks.

  In Springsteen’s words: ‘Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.’

  She pulls out her mobile.

  ‘I’ll see i
f I can get her number through directory enquiries.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we call her at work?’

  ‘That would take longer. Directory enquiries is quicker, and more straightforward. Let’s give it a try.’

  They reach the car. The white paint on the roof is covered with bird shit that wasn’t there when they parked, and Malin sees Zeke look up at the sky, at the pale green oak tree that must have been full of defecating crows or ravens or some other urban refugees, and Zeke swears, but not very convincingly.

  ‘Yes, we have an Ottilia Stenlund. Number 39, Skoghöjdsvägen in Abrahamsberg. Would you like me to connect you, and send you a text message with the details?’

  The phone rings three times, then Malin hears a tired, hoarse female voice at the other end.

  ‘Ottilia.’

  Something in Ottilia Stenlund’s voice makes Malin think she was expecting a phone call.

  From us?

  ‘My name’s Malin Fors, I’m a detective inspector with the Linköping Police.’

  She explains the reason for her call.

  Apologises for calling her at home, but given the circumstances it couldn’t be helped.

  ‘I still work at the same office,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘But today’s my day off.’

  Friday off. Malin remembers reading an article in Expressen saying that Social Services had started to open on Saturdays to meet the extra demand from people affected by the financial crisis.

  ‘So do you have to work on Saturdays? I read about that.’

  Show interest, build up trust, you never lose the habit, Malin thinks.

  ‘Sometimes I have to work Saturdays, yes.’

  Ottilia Stenlund breathes, long, thoughtful breaths, and Malin asks: ‘I presume you’ve been following the case. And that you remember the girls.’

  ‘I have to keep everything confidential,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘I’d be breaching our code of conduct if I said anything,’ and Malin feels a flash of anger as she snaps down the line: ‘They were blown to pieces. Can you imagine that? Those lovely little babies you helped to get adopted grew into two beautiful little girls, and now there’s nothing left of them but charred flesh, blood, and guts. So don’t try it on with all that fucking—’

  And Zeke has rushed around the car and is now yanking the mobile from her hand, and Malin feels everything going black before her eyes, and is having trouble breathing, and she reaches out for the roof of the car and can feel still-warm bird shit between her fingers as she hears Zeke say: ‘I must apologise . . . my colleague is under a lot of pressure, we’re in a tight spot at the moment, is there any way you could make an exception, getting a court order to get around the confidentiality legislation takes time, and time is something we don’t have.’