Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  In Linköping everything is too small.

  Everyone knows all about everyone else. Or at least that’s the way it sometimes feels. Even if no one really knows anything about anyone. She often feels that she’s been recognised, that people are staring at her. There she goes, Detective Inspector Malin Fors, the one we’ve seen in the Correspondent and on telly.

  Here, celebrities get to go about their business unhindered. People who’ve really achieved something are left in peace, here their faces are just part of the everyday scene.

  But actually moving? Would that work?

  ‘I think I recognise him,’ Sven says, and Malin is dragged back to the present. ‘So do Johan and Waldemar. So who the hell is he?’

  Malin can hear the others in the background.

  ‘It’ll come out in time,’ she says.

  ‘Do you think it could be one of the Kurtzon brothers?’

  ‘No,’ Malin says. ‘It’s neither of the brothers, judging from the pictures Johan found. But if they’re behind this, they may have hired someone. Or else we’re on the wrong track. We’ll have to see what these pictures lead to.’

  ‘If what you’re saying is right,’ Sven says, ‘do you think this Josefina Marlöw is in danger? Do you think we should try to dig her out from the underground again and put her under protection?’

  ‘I think they need her alive for a bit longer,’ Malin says. ‘She’s OK.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘There’s no real danger until Josef Kurtzon dies,’ Malin says.

  So that’s what he looks like.

  The man who hurt us so badly.

  And we know where you are, you, our biological mother.

  You’re in your own dark room down in the underground. With your lovely drawings on the wall.

  The syringe slips from your hand.

  Your world is a white blanket now, everything is goodness and warmth.

  You’re turning your black room into a white one, Mummy, and we’re with you, and we can feel that the mummy and daddy you gave us instead of yourself are here as well, but we can’t see or hear them.

  We can’t.

  But we’d really like to, because even if your room is white and soft and warm for you, it’s really horrible for us. It’s so nasty that it’s making us cry.

  We’re running away now.

  We’re running away from the underground to the paved square where Malin Fors is sitting on a bench. She’s looking at pictures of our uncles. Trying to make sense of what she sees.

  A few alcoholics are drinking an early lunch on a nearby bench.

  Malin and Zeke are still in Odenplan, now on a bench in the shade, the spring sunshine got too hot.

  They let the images of the brothers scroll across the screen of the mobile phone. They look very similar, but there are differences. Leopold’s face is sharper, with dark, thick eyebrows that lend almost unreal force to his long, pointed nose. Henry’s face is slightly rounder, more friendly, but his blue eyes have a hunted expression, and the look in them seems completely vacant, doesn’t contain any sort of desire.

  Neither of the brothers resembles the bomber, they look far more Scandinavian. They’ve both got thinning hair, which makes them look older than their forty-two and forty-three years.

  Leopold’s eyes.

  The expression in them both vague and focused at the same time. Cold, as if he were caught in a state of permanent calculation and consideration.

  ‘They look ordinary,’ Zeke says. ‘If they did hire an assassin, how the hell would anyone from their background go about it?’

  ‘You’re being a bit naïve, Zeke,’ Malin says. ‘If you’ve got money you can do anything.’

  Zeke rubs his nose with one hand.

  ‘Show me the clip of the bomber again.’

  Malin plays the recording, angling the mobile to stop the sunlight from making the man invisible.

  The man moves towards the camera.

  They see his face.

  ‘Stop, right there,’ Zeke whispers. ‘Can you zoom in?’

  ‘Yes,’ Malin says, and zooms in on the man, and they see the scar running above one eyebrow, like a line drawn with eyeliner.

  Zeke’s eyes are burning with concentration, he’s breathing heavily. Don’t blow up now, Malin thinks.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Zeke says. ‘I know who that is. I recognise him.’

  52

  ‘That’s Jokso Mirovic,’ Zeke says.

  Opposite the bench he and Malin are sitting on, the doors of Gustaf Vasa Church open up.

  An elderly black man in a priest’s collar steps out onto the stone steps, followed by a thickset woman, also wearing a collar.

  The priests embrace, say goodbye, and the black priest disappears back inside the church again.

  ‘Mirovic was a heavy in the Yugoslavian mafia at the end of the nineties. I remember him from a case I worked on with Crime in Gothenburg. He was famous for being very intelligent, an academic. He’s supposed to have got that scar fighting in Sarajevo.’

  Sarajevo.

  Bosnia.

  That was where Janne fled when he couldn’t face playing happy families any more, after Tove had arrived, unplanned, and he hadn’t been anywhere near ready for that sort of responsibility. Other things had been going on in their relationship then, things that belong to nightmares. How could we possibly have managed to live together then, when we haven’t even managed it as adults with more experience?

  We were never going to manage it.

  A bus blows its horn.

  A mother with a pushchair, crossing the road on red.

  ‘I remember he was granted asylum around the time of the Balkan conflict, then he got Swedish citizenship. I think he vanished off the criminal map sometime just after the millennium,’ Zeke says. ‘But I’m sure it’s him. He looks older, but it’s definitely him. A hard bastard. He’s supposed to have been behind the unsolved murder of that businessman in Malmö ten years ago. The one where the victim was stabbed in the stomach a hundred times with a blunt knife. And they reckon he killed a paedophile by cutting his balls off and stuffing them down his throat so he suffocated.’

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ Malin says.

  ‘Paedophiles. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for them.’

  ‘Humanity has no place for people like that,’ Malin says, then feels alarmed by her own honesty.

  She pulls out her mobile and calls Sven Sjöman, who tells her he’ll put out a national alert and inform the others.

  ‘Keep digging,’ Sven says. ‘We can’t let child-killers go free in our society.’

  Harry Karlsson looks at the queue at Entrance B of Terminal 5 at ArlandaAirport. Newly built and very nice it may be – the ceiling must be twenty metres high – but there are far too few security desks, and there’s always a queue at busy times.

  Like now.

  It’s just after one o’clock.

  The queue snakes all the way back to the SAS check-in desk, and people are getting impatient and annoyed, and there’s a stink of perfume from the new duty-free shop.

  He’s worked for the airport authority for over thirty years. Now he’s supervisor for the main security checks, and it’s a hell of a job trying to organise the second-rate people he has to work with.

  The guards from the companies under contract are supposed to be friendly but tough. Make people feel happy about travelling, while still making them feel safe. Not a job for thickos, basically.

  Harry Karlsson looks at the people he’s got working for him. Young security guards, he knows many of them want to join the police, just like the two heavies in attendance today. Apparently there’s some sort of national alert out for the man who set off that bomb in Linköping.

  Two cops seconded to the airport. Just in case.

  But what are the odds of the bomber showing up here?

  Low, but not impossible.

  They haven’t been shown any pictures of the man, but evidently the police have been to
ld what he looks like.

  Why don’t they want to show us his picture? Or even give us the name of the man they’re looking for? Because they don’t think either we or the security contractors are reliable, that’s the reason, in which case they have to appreciate that we can’t do as good a job as we could.

  They want to keep the information confidential.

  Bleep.

  Check that a pensioner isn’t carrying weapons on-board inside his shoes. Sometimes the harshness of the new security directives is absurd.

  Then Harry Karlsson sees a change in the eyes of one of the policemen, and they both stiffen, and one of them gestures discreetly at Harry Karlsson, who goes over to them. The policeman says: ‘That could be the man we’re looking for. The one who’s just putting his toiletries in a plastic bag.’

  Harry Karlsson looks over at the table with the bags.

  A man maybe ten years younger than him, around forty-five.

  Harry Karlsson is looking at him from the side, but he can still make out a scar above one eye. In spite of the scar, the man doesn’t look particularly tough or hard, but Harry Karlsson still feels the adrenalin coursing through his body, the way it does whenever a known criminal wanted by the police shows up at the security control, even though he must have been through dozens of similar arrests by now.

  ‘We’ll pick him up once he’s gone through the gate,’ the policeman whispers. ‘My colleague’s already called for back-up.’

  Harry Karlsson looks at the other policeman.

  He must have whispered into his headset without him noticing.

  ‘Don’t do anything, just keep the security guards calm, OK?’

  Harry Karlsson nods, knows that at this moment police officers will be covering every exit from the airport, every escape route, ready to draw their weapons and fire.

  The man, the suspect, has reached the metal detector now, he’s taken off his jacket, put his bag on the belt to go through the X-ray machine, then he walks through without any fuss.

  Nice and calm now.

  Calm, calm.

  And then the policemen move towards the man.

  It looks as if they’re about to draw their pistols.

  Harry Karlsson catches their movement in the corner of his eye, and now watches as the man suddenly explodes, one leg flying out in a martial arts move, knocking the two policemen backwards, and the people in the queue scream. Harry Karlsson’s guards throw themselves to the floor to take cover, or simply out of panic, but there haven’t actually been any shots, have there? And Harry Karlsson leaps towards the man, but he skips aside, and Harry Karlsson feels his two top front teeth push into his jaw and break as he lands on the floor, chin first.

  Shit, he thinks.

  Shit.

  This is going to cost a fortune in dental fees.

  When Jokso Mirovic saw the policemen move towards him he realised instinctively that they had been waiting for him, that they wanted to get hold of him. He’d had a feeling that something was wrong the moment he checked into his flight to Phuket, but dismissed it as his own paranoia, he was used to situations like this, but the feeling only grew stronger as he was standing in the queue and caught sight of the police officers. He knew from experience that there weren’t usually any police at the security check.

  But he had still dismissed it as paranoia, even though he knew he shouldn’t, knew you should always trust your instincts, but not this time: he simply had to get on this flight at any cost, there were no other options open to him. He had to look for the children now, and that trail began in Thailand, where they were kidnapped, the children’s passports had been left in the house, so maybe they were still in the country. But how the hell did the police know what he’d done, they couldn’t possibly have tracked him down, could they?

  The metal detector.

  And the old, overweight bloke in plain clothes who seemed to be the supervisor had looked nervous.

  Sweating, and then everything happened very quickly, as usual, the policemen tried to draw their pistols when they got close to him, and he raised one leg high and then kicked out with his trainer, and twisted with his right foot, and the policemen, clumsy idiots with bulletproof vests under their shirts, collapsed unconscious to the floor as Jokso Mirovic watched.

  Their pistols were still in their holsters.

  What next?

  Run.

  If it wasn’t already too late. The place would be crawling with cops any moment, and now he’s running through the main hall that forms the heart of Terminal 5, rushing past tourists on package tours on their way to the sun, businessmen on their way to what they presumably believe are important meetings.

  Which exit?

  Keep running straight ahead, then into SkyCity and into the hotel there, then the exit to the garage where you can steal a car.

  He turns his head.

  Three cops, maybe fifty metres behind him, and there are two rushing towards him up ahead, they must have come from Entrance C.

  I can’t get caught now, I mustn’t, otherwise this whole idiotic business has been in vain.

  No guns drawn.

  But he’s still back in the trenches.

  Pursued by machine-gun fire and hand grenades and the cries of the Croats, and it’s as if everything is transformed in a split second to a single explosive present, a present that demands just one thing: freedom.

  He goes into a slide when he’s five metres from the cops, gliding on his smooth cotton trousers, knocking them to the ground, and it works.

  They fall.

  Groan.

  And he quickly gets to his feet and rushes on, but the little manoeuvre means that the other policemen are twenty metres closer now, then he’s out into the glazed open space of SkyCity, and the light is harsh, and there aren’t many people about now, just after lunchtime.

  He swerves off to one side.

  Takes the escalator up to the Radisson Hotel and races for the lift.

  Inside.

  Presses the button to close the doors.

  And he leaves the cops behind him, they’re ten metres away as the lift doors close on him, and when they open again one floor below he runs down one, two more escalators, then catches his breath, sees his two children in front of him, Daddy’s on his way, Daddy’s coming, and he sees the Vigerö girls playing in the square, the other children, and he feels like screaming, howling, but he knows he can’t give in now, no matter what he feels, and then he stops.

  Fuck.

  Shit.

  There must be at least five police officers barricaded behind the sofas in the lower lobby of the hotel.

  Guns aimed at him.

  He’s unarmed, ditched his pistol out in the car park earlier.

  Shit.

  ‘Hands up!’

  ‘Down on the floor!’

  Various options run through Jokso Mirovic’s head.

  Carry on going forward, get shot, die, or get away and do what he has to do.

  I’d never get past them.

  It would be like running straight across no-man’s land towards an occupied enemy line.

  And the police would shoot.

  They know what I’ve done.

  I’ll have to hope that someone else can do what I ought to.

  But is there any police officer who could pull it off?

  He remembers his friends in the war, the ones who died, the ones who had shown a courage he would never have thought them capable of.

  Then he raises his hands in the air.

  Shouts: ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’

  53

  The underground is lit by cold, white strip lights.

  A constant attack on the eyes.

  The interview room is on the third basement floor of Police Headquarters, beside the lush green of Kronoberg Park in the centre of Stockholm. Even when she was at Police Academy, Malin thought the building was ugly: brutal 1970s architecture with tiny windows set tightly together in a façade of orange panelling. />
  They did their swimming tests in the Kronoberg pool. Struggling with heavy, waterlogged practice dummies, length after length, and there were several of them who couldn’t do it and had to leave the course after almost a year of study.

  Harsh.

  But not as harsh at this interview room, which is unbelievably shabby, the paint peeling from the yellow walls, the black plastic flooring has deep gouges in it, and from the ceiling hang fluorescent lights that give off an offensive glare, not the trust-inspiring, warm, soft light from the halogen lamps they have in the interview rooms of the station in Linköping, the sort of light that’s so good for interviews.

  The wall mirror.

  A few colleagues from Stockholm behind it.

  Sven Sjöman called when they were on their way back to the hotel to change clothes. Malin and Zeke had both bought new underwear and white T-shirts from Åhléns, and Malin is now wearing them under her increasingly filthy dress. Sven told her that Jokso Mirovic had been arrested at Arlanda and was on his way to Police Headquarters in Stockholm.

  They’d gone straight there, and to begin with the duty officer had been dubious about letting them conduct the first interview with Jokso Mirovic.

  Surely the Security Police ought to do that? Or at least Stockholm themselves, seeing as he’d been arrested in their district, but Malin had given him an outline of their work so far, emphasising how keen they were to solve this case as soon as possible, to make sure the public weren’t put in any unnecessary danger, so the best solution would be if she and Zeke spoke to Jokso Mirovic straight away.

  Now. Not later.

  And the duty officer had backed down. But only after consulting the head of the Crime Unit over the phone.

  And now Jokso Mirovic is sitting opposite them in the interview room, and the scar above his left eye is glowing pink. He seems to be waiting for Malin or Zeke to say something while he looks at his reflection, inspecting his thin face, as if someone else were sitting in this room, caught by their own actions, and not him.

  Malin reaches for the tape recorder on the table.