Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  The world grows clearer again.

  Zeke, sounding resigned.

  ‘So you can’t make an exception? OK, thanks anyway.’

  He clicks to end the call.

  ‘She was scared,’ Zeke says. ‘Couldn’t you hear it in her voice? She was absolutely terrified.’

  It’s half past four by the time Zeke drops Malin off outside her flat.

  The pair of them, Börje Svärd, Waldemar Ekenberg, and Johan Jakobsson have spent all Friday afternoon talking to people connected to the Vigerö family. Nothing terribly significant has emerged. The adoption seems to have been unknown to all of them, and the family appeared to have been impossibly happy.

  And the Security Police have made their presence felt again.

  On the same path as them? Not impossible. Sven Sjöman had taken care to keep them updated, as he had been instructed, and who knew what they might do with the information.

  Ottilia Stenlund is my, our, best way forward, Malin tells herself.

  The Pull & Bear has opened, and she stops outside the entrance to the pub, waiting for the urge to have a drink to wash over her, but as she stands there in front of the red and yellow paintwork she feels nothing. Just wants to get up to the flat, and a couple of minutes later she’s sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring at the wall.

  Tove is out at Janne’s.

  The bastard.

  And then things start to move inside her body and she leaps up from the sofa. She needs to shake off this damn restlessness, can’t bear the thought of just looking at the shabby walls of the flat any longer, listening to the ticking of the Ikea clock, and she pulls her running clothes out of the wardrobe, digs out her worn-out Nikes, and in just a few minutes she’s running past the few people strolling along the path beside the river.

  From the corner of her eye she can see the tall, newly built apartment blocks, which rumour has it are seventy-five per cent occupied by doctors. She runs past the new bowling alley, trying not to look at the other side of the river where the fire station, Janne’s workplace, sits red and blunt, like a reminder of the unending meagreness of life.

  How fast can I run?

  How far?

  Smart 1950s villas line the slope down to the river. She’s been inside several of them in connection with other cases.

  Her heart beating like a hammer inside her now.

  Her field of vision reduced to a narrow oblong.

  Move, get out of the way. And she feels her body working, obeying her, and the adrenalin pumps and she swings up over Braskens Bridge and runs on past Saab.

  This was where Mum worked, she thinks. This was where she met the man who gave her her second child, my brother. This was where our lives, Mum’s and Dad’s and mine, turned into one big lie. Unless that had already happened before then?

  I refuse, Malin thinks. It’s not going to happen to me.

  She’s stopped outside the factory gates. Stands there panting, leaning over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath, then she runs back towards the city centre again, thinking: I refuse, refuse, refuse, and the word becomes a mantra inside her, carrying her forward, and she thinks, I’m thirty-six years old, I can’t allow myself to be defined by the mistakes made by another woman and her husband, and by their inability to confront themselves. I’ve got the opportunity now to do precisely that, to look myself in the mirror and finally do something with my life.

  I have to visit my little brother. For my own sake, for Tove’s, for his. Have to conquer my fear. Because I am afraid of what might be waiting for me, aren’t I?

  Tove. She wants to go straight away.

  Malin fights to suppress the dark feeling that grows in her stomach whenever she thinks of Tove, and she’s aware that she’s making the same mistake that she’s always made.

  But still.

  Still.

  First I have to finish this job. Put pressure on Ottilia Stenlund. Make her talk.

  And Malin thinks of Peter Hamse. She hasn’t spoken to him today. Even if I have a perfectly valid reason to.

  Daniel and Janne. Bastards. And she forces herself onward, her surroundings become colours, sounds, pain, breathing, until finally she slumps in front of the door to her block as the bells of St Lars Church strike half past six. She feels her stomach clench and quickly leans to one side, spewing up all the bile from her stomach, and it feels incredibly good and her whole being is nothing but sweat and a chilly dampness.

  She sticks her fingers down her throat.

  Throws up the last contents of her stomach.

  Sees her dad’s face in front of her.

  Dad, she thinks. How am I ever going to forgive you?

  39

  Saturday, 15 May

  The car is pressing its way along the E4, heading north across the flat landscape of Östergötland.

  It’s only half past six in the morning, and Malin is glad that Zeke’s driving, no coffee in the world could fight off the tiredness she feels, even though she got a full night’s sleep.

  She had to nag Sven Sjöman into letting them drive to Stockholm and put an extra strain on their already hard-pressed budget, to talk to Ottilia Stenlund in person rather than let their colleagues in Stockholm take care of it.

  But she’s sure that only she could do it properly, she and Zeke, and she really does want to follow up this line of inquiry, and Sven hadn’t been able to resist the strength of her conviction.

  Tired, so tired.

  She hasn’t caught up yet, the nights and days when everything seemed to be happening at once are still in her system, and she could do with sleeping for a week. But not now, there’s no time at the moment, and she listens to the sound of the engine as she watches some white cows grazing in a meadow full of yellow flowers in front of a red-painted farmhouse on the edge of a dense forest of fir trees.

  What’s hidden among those trees? she thinks.

  In those dark, in-between spaces?

  What are we heading into, Zeke and I? Are we going to find anything new, or is the trail that leads to social worker Ottilia Stenlund a dead end? Are the lines of inquiry that Waldemar Ekenberg, Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, and the others are following the right way forward?

  Maybe the truth is to be found, if not in the Economic Liberation Front, then in some other militant organisation, Islamic extremists, biker gangs?

  The pistol in the holster under her jacket presses against her body.

  On the phone last night, when Malin insisted that they try to get Ottilia Stenlund to talk about the adoption themselves, Sven told them to get to Stockholm as early as they could. He had told her that they still had no idea who the man with the bomb on the bike was, and that the interviews up at the University Hospital hadn’t come up with anything. Nor had the forensic examination, so the field was wide open for Malin and Zeke.

  ‘Do what you can,’ Sven had said. ‘Just keep going. We can deal with the financial consequences of the trip later.’

  And Malin had felt that what he was really saying was: ‘Keep going, into the darkness.’

  And she looks out at the grey tarmac of the E4, reads a sign saying ‘Norrköping 14’ and thinks: I really am pushing into an unknown darkness now, I can feel it, but it doesn’t frighten me, what I’m scared of is somewhere else. And Zeke reaches for the CD player and switches on the minor-key German choral music he’s so fond of, but which has the ability to give Malin a serious headache when played at the wrong moment.

  It’s just right for this moment, though.

  And she leans her head against the side window, shuts her eyes, and falls asleep.

  When she wakes up again the car is rolling through the southern suburbs of Stockholm.

  The brutal high-rises of Botkyrka seem to be bogged down against a receding horizon.

  The hidden splendour of Mälarhöjden, the relative comfort of Midsommarkransen, where the functionalist blocks seem to defy the roar of the motorway and want to give their inhabitants a good hug.<
br />
  Stockholm.

  I moved here once, Malin thinks. With Tove, who was so young at the time, and it was almost impossible to reconcile life as a mother of a young child with studying at Police Academy. It worked, but only just.

  Stockholm was like a piece of scenery for me, Malin thinks as they roll across the Skanstull Bridge and through the tunnel under the shimmering, ostentatious façade of the recently built hotel. I never found my way into the city, I never gained access, and why should I have? A single mother studying to join the police. Could there be anyone of lower status in a city completely obsessed with money and fashion, with everything just a bit beyond the ordinary?

  I told myself that I wanted to stay, Malin thinks. But I convinced myself that it was impossible in practical terms, that I wanted to move back to Janne and maybe try again, but it was really something different. A strong sense of inadequacy, of not being good enough, and that’s how you felt all your life, isn’t it, Mum? The feeling that the world is so big, and you so little, and that others are important, while you’re of no value.

  When they emerge into the light again she can see the back of the parliament building, Riksdagshuset, and the water of Riddarfjärden, and she thinks: How could I ever have imagined that I could fit in here? How many people have succeeded with the journey I failed to make? Moving from a provincial city and making the capital their own? Succeeding, making something of themselves, astonishing the world, if only a very small part of it?

  The München Brewery building rises from the water like a medieval citadel on Söder Mälarstrand behind them, the cliffs seem to be there to protect the bourgeois inhabitants from attack, and the tower of the City Hall on the opposite shore seems to warn: Feel free to come, but don’t think you’re anything special. The handsome functionalist blocks along Norr Mälarstrand are bigger than Malin remembers, and she wonders what it’s like living there, waking up every morning to see the water and the

  Western Bridge. She remembers the flat she and Tove sublet out in Traneberg, a single room with an alcove for a bed, on the ground floor above all the bins, with a view of a car park.

  But Tove was happy there.

  With her pre-school.

  With her babysitters.

  Maybe because back then they both had a sense that they were actually going somewhere, and maybe that’s why Tove has the nerve to take the next step now? Is that why the thought of her leaving makes me angry and panicky?

  Janne. Daniel Högfeldt. They’re on their way towards something new as well. But what about me, where am I going? And then she sees the boy in an anonymous hospital room. The way he’s tried to suppress his mother’s face, erasing it, and even though she knows that the boy is a man now, he’ll always be a boy to her.

  Sveavägen.

  They emerge from the City Tunnel and get caught in the chaotic traffic beneath the blue façade of the Concert Hall. Malin watches young girls cross the road by the Adidas shop on the corner of Kungsgatan, and their footsteps are firm, determined. I never had that sort of step when I was your age, when I lived here.

  They turn off into Rådmansgatan and drive up to the spring greenery of Tegnérlunden, and the romantic statue of Strindberg which seems to liken the old nutter to a lion, and then they turn into a side street whose name Malin doesn’t know.

  ‘Teknologgatan. It should be here somewhere,’ Zeke says, pulling up.

  ‘Norrmalm Social Services, office number four. Let’s hope Ottilia Stenlund will see us, if she’s actually working Saturday this week. Otherwise we’ll have to head over to her home address.’

  Hardship doesn’t take weekends off during the spring of 2010.

  The office is open, just as Ottilia Stenlund had said it would be.

  And she’s there.

  Malin and Zeke are asked to wait in a windowless room, its walls painted an aggressive shade of yellow that makes Malin think of Hare Krishna.

  Ottilia Stenlund is willing to see them, but she has two meetings with clients to get through first.

  People scattered around the sofas and chairs.

  Leafing through copies of the Metro, celebrity magazines, or the interior design magazines that one of the staff must have tactlessly brought in from home.

  Some of the clientele look familiar. Alcoholics the same age as Malin, but who look a hundred years older and stink of piss and alcohol and dirt, and who are here to pick up the weekly contribution to their drink budget. A skinny woman who looks like she’s in her forties, but is probably no more than twenty. Malin can recognise a drug addict from a hundred metres, the desperate pleading look in their eyes, yet still utterly focused. But there are also perfectly ordinary people in the waiting room, a smart mother with two young children, a man of about thirty in a blue suit and tie, a pensioner with a neatly pressed blue and white striped shirt.

  Hardship is striking blind now, Malin thinks. Anyone can lose their job. No one’s safe, and if you can’t make your mortgage payment within twenty days the bank will seize your flat.

  You could be out on the street in a month. Yet it’s still hard to feel sorry for people who own flats in this part of the city. Highly paid toffs with luxury cars and runaway expenses. Now some of them are finding out what hardship feels like, and then a man emerges from Ottilia’s office and interrupts Malin’s train of thought, scruffy and dirty the way only the homeless can be, and suddenly a woman in her mid-fifties is standing in front of them, wearing a long, blue-flowered dress.

  Her face is round, and a pair of deep blue, intelligent eyes peer out from beneath her blonde fringe.

  ‘I can see you now,’ she says, looking at Malin and Zeke. ‘Come through, but I’m afraid I don’t have long.’

  Malin looks at the standard-issue clock on the wall of Ottilia Stenlund’s office.

  Similar to the ones Malin remembers from the rehab centre last autumn.

  Twenty past nine.

  They’re sitting opposite Ottilia Stenlund, who is looking down at them from her elevated position behind a desk piled high with files and documents.

  In front of her on the desk, face down, is a black folder.

  She’s got one hand on the folder, as if to protect it, before she lets go of it.

  ‘I thought you might come,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘What’s happened is absolutely appalling,’ and Malin feels her anger of the previous day flaring up again, and for a few short seconds she thinks that Ottilia Stenlund isn’t going to say anything useful. But Malin manages to control herself, and her fears prove unfounded.

  ‘It was an extremely unusual case,’ Ottilia Stenlund goes on. ‘Difficult. Unpleasant, very unpleasant. I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

  Both Malin and Zeke can sense the fear creeping into the room, crawling across the floor like some ravenous, infected lizard, bringing with it an unshakeable stench of rotting flesh.

  The woman on the other side of the desk looks at them.

  ‘I don’t see I have any other choice but to tell you,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you who the girls’ biological mother is.’

  40

  Mummy.

  You’re not our mummy.

  Not our real one.

  We were confused at first, but maybe we had a vague idea already.

  And now that this lady is telling you, Malin, we’re wondering why you, Hanna, if you weren’t our mummy, why you looked after us? Why did you want to look after us?

  Because you loved us, that’s why, isn’t it? Because you needed something to love, and that’s the way it should be.

  Mummy!

  We’re calling to you, want to ask why you never mentioned anything to us, even though we realise you must have thought we were too little, that you wanted to protect us from ourselves, from what we are, from what we were.

  Was that it, Mummy? Were you scared?

  And Daddy wasn’t our daddy either, and he isn’t here either. We’re alone, so alone, and we see Malin sitting in an office in a big city that we don’t
recognise, and next to her sits the bald man, and in front of them sits a woman, and we can see her mouth moving, but we can’t hear what she’s saying, and we know it’s important. We know she’s telling our story.

  How we ended up with you, Mummy, you who aren’t our mummy, and with you, Daddy, you who aren’t our daddy.

  But for us you have always been our mummy and daddy, and you always will be, the feeling of a love that can stretch across whole universes, combining the sound of all roaring water, of all thunder clouds blowing back and forth above human beings, whispering to them: Love one another, love one another. And even if you can’t manage that, don’t abandon each other.

  Because we were abandoned, but we were also loved.

  So who was it who abandoned us?

  Who wasn’t able to love us?

  A mouth moving way down there. Is it saying a name?

  Malin.

  Can you get hold of a name? Can you get a description of abandoned love?

  Can you tell us about Mummy and Daddy, the real ones, the ones who put us in a little reed boat and set us adrift into this wicked world?

  Malin could see Ottilia Stenlund’s mouth move.

  Heard what it said. Felt that they were no longer alone in the room.

  You’re here, aren’t you? she thinks. Can you hear what she’s saying, what she’s just said?

  Ottilia Stenlund has told them, but she didn’t look directly at Malin or Zeke as she did so, as if she were committing some sort of moral crime.

  It struck Malin that the woman before her was actually breaching confidentiality laws when she told them what they needed to know, but to hell with that.

  The woman who gave birth to the Vigerö twins was a Josefina Marlöw, and at the time she was thirty-three years old, a heavy heroin user, homeless, and was probably raped by another addict while she was high. At any rate, she didn’t know who the father was, and couldn’t actually remember having intercourse at all.