Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Then he called Malin, noting that it was already eleven o’clock.

  ‘That’s the best I can give you,’ Johan Jakobsson says. ‘A property that doesn’t exist except in a photograph, and the photographer’s statement that it might belong to the brothers. They could be holding the children there.’

  Zeke and Conny Nygren are sitting silently beside Malin.

  Johan has just given her directions of how to find the island, and Malin has a feeling that this could be right, the brothers could have brought the children to Sweden, they could be holding them in a house that doesn’t exist, yet still exists.

  The lizard in Josef Kurtzon’s room.

  The import licence.

  More lizards.

  The peculiar logic of evil.

  Are there lizards on the island now?

  ‘We’ll set off at once,’ Malin says. ‘It really is our only hope, it’s all we’ve got, isn’t it?’

  Johan mutters in agreement at the other end of the line.

  ‘Good work,’ Malin says. ‘Damn good work.’

  ‘I’m going to head home to the kids now,’ Johan says, and hangs up.

  56

  Leopold Kurtzon’s mood sinks slightly as he sees his own face reflected in the screen of the laptop; his thin, pointed nose seems to dissolve in the reflection, as though his time is running out. The computer is sitting on a desk in a room on the second floor of the house.

  Jokso Mirovic has been caught. So the police probably know everything by now.

  Jokso Mirovic.

  There’s an archive picture of him halfway down the main page of the Dagens Nyheter website, under the heading: Hitman caught at Arlanda. Suspected of Involvement in the Linköping Bombing.

  Leopold reads on.

  ‘Unconfirmed sources suggest that Jokso Mirovic carried out the job on the orders of two brothers in financial circles . . .’

  Even though he suspected that the police were onto them now, it’s still a shock to read it on the DN website. It feels like being hit twice, once in the gut, and once in the heart, and now he knows for sure that everything has gone to hell, that Jokso Mirovic has told his story to the police, and now it’s only a matter of time before they find their way here, isn’t it?

  Before they catch us. And we’ll get life imprisonment. Thirty years. I’ll be an old man by the time we get out.

  But then his mood rises again, he pulls a face, as energy and determination reassume their places inside him.

  Because how could they find us here?

  No one knows we’ve got this place.

  By putting money in the right pockets, absolutely anything can be erased. A patch of land, a house? No problem. Father sorted that out, wanted to have a place that existed yet didn’t, and he let us take it over, ordered us to get hold of monitor lizards from Asia, to keep the beautiful, prehistoric creatures on the island. Try to breed them. ‘Maybe you can succeed at that, even though you’ve failed at everything else.’

  Leopold goes out onto one of the house’s terraces.

  Looks down towards the outhouses where they keep the animals.

  He hates going down there, even when the creatures are full and sluggish and resting in their cages under the light of the heat-lamps. When they’re hungry they gnaw like mad on the bars of their cages, trying to get out.

  They bought them in Thailand and Indonesia, set up a company purely for the purpose, and got hold of an import licence. Then they shut down the company, claimed that the creatures had been put down, and no one seemed to care.

  They take turns feeding them. That was a while ago now, because neither of them wants to go down to the lizards in the outhouses, neither of them wants to see the snapping, greedy jaws.

  And the man who helps them with the creatures when they’re away, often for long periods, he stays quiet, is so well paid that he never says anything to anyone, and he seems scared of the brothers. They’ve told him not to come back again until they call him.

  Then Leopold suffers a moment of doubt again.

  Who knows how the police work, who knows what they might dig out, and how, when they really have to and want to?

  We’re responsible for four murders.

  We’re pariahs.

  The money won’t come to us. We can never show ourselves in public again.

  And the police must know about the children, and kidnapped children are top priority.

  Like murder.

  They’re not going to drop the case.

  Everything’s fucked. What are we going to do now? What the hell are we going to do now?

  Leopold doesn’t want to think about it, but knows he has to.

  Think logically now, Leopold.

  Rationally.

  He feels the chill from the sea and the surrounding forest, but it doesn’t take hold; as usual it’s warmer here than in most other places, a peculiar microclimate.

  He looks down towards the buildings where they keep the lizards again, and suddenly the thought of them makes him feel safer, knowing that Father is aware that they’ve got the creatures here, and that they’ve actually succeeded in breeding them, even if all the female lizard’s young had died after just a week or so.

  Then Leopold suddenly hears the lizards hissing and banging against their bars.

  And he is filled with terror.

  Are they about to gnaw their way out? Creep about in the forest, find their way up to the terraces of the houses and attack them?

  But they can’t get out.

  Can they?

  Leopold tries to forget about the lizards and looks at his brother Henry lying on the sofa, listlessly drinking a glass of Coca-Cola, and Leopold calls him over.

  Reluctantly his brother gets up.

  They go off to the kitchen, and as they stand beside the Gaggenau units Leopold tells Henry what he’s seen on the Net, then says: ‘We have to kill them now, then we get away from here.’

  At first Henry feels scared by how cool his brother seems, then he realises he’s right, his conclusion is the logical one. Kill the children, bury them, or give them to the lizards, let the carrion-eating creatures do the work, two small children could disappear without a trace here. Or just blow them up. Simple, so simple.

  They were frightened when he last went down to them.

  Screaming.

  As if to drown out their fear.

  To get the better of it.

  Both he and Leopold have already felt anger building up inside themselves. Who do these kids think they are? The sort of people who can get the Kurtzon brothers to back down and go soft? Huh? Whatever gave them that idea? Do they really doubt that we’re tough, efficient?

  We have to get rid of them.

  But still Henry says: ‘Do we have to kill them?’

  Leopold’s face contorts into a grimace, his eyes take on that focused look they always get when he’s convinced of something, as he often is, much more often than Henry, who is occasionally doubt personified.

  ‘Have you got a better suggestion?’ Leopold asks. ‘OK, we might need them as hostages, but they’re still more of a hindrance alive.’

  ‘But do the kids have to die? Isn’t everything pretty much lost anyway?’

  ‘We play this out to the end,’ Leopold says. ‘Do you want to spend thirty years in prison?’

  ‘No. No. It was a stupid plan from the start,’ Henry says, and sees his brother’s eyes boil with fury and frustration.

  ‘We knew exactly what we were doing when we kidnapped them on Phuket and chartered the plane to bring them up here. Didn’t we?’ he screams. ‘It wasn’t a stupid plan. Should we just have given up? You knew what you were doing when you sedated them before the flight and paid off the pilot.’

  Henry stays quiet.

  Then he says: ‘And now we’re going to end up with nothing.’

  ‘But we can show Father how strong we are,’ Leopold says.

  And in what ought to be a moment of panic, a sense of calm settles, ra
ther like the stories he’s heard about the sinking of the Titanic, when the passengers calmly awaited their fate and let the ship sink without panic breaking out.

  Or the Estonia.

  Similar stories when that sank.

  ‘We could let them live,’ Henry says. ‘Just let them go. Leave the house, let someone find them. They’re three and six years old, we can’t kill them.’

  ‘We have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To show how strong we are. How powerful. Show the whole world.’

  And Henry looks at his brother, at the unshakeable clarity in his eyes, and his reasoning does seem to hold a certain cruel justice.

  No one ever gets out of their own cramped, dark room.

  No one who has been there will ever raise their eyes to the sky again.

  Instead there is the desire, the greed for something else.

  ‘So where are we going to go afterwards?’ Henry asks.

  ‘We clear out. Let the timer count down. Wipe out everything that could prove we were ever here.’

  ‘Where do we clear out to?’

  ‘We’ll take the motorboat to Estonia. Straight across the Baltic, the boat can go much further than that on a full tank. Then we sort out a flight to South America. Or Asia. The world’s a big place. We’ve got enough money here to last a long time.’

  ‘OK. We’ll do as you say.’

  ‘Good. But first we have to kill the kids,’ Leopold whispers.

  ‘Can’t we just leave them to die in the explosion?’

  ‘Now, we have to do it, you have to do it, so we know they’re dead. Those kids down in the cellar have to die, and we have to do it.’

  Henry finally nods.

  He raises and lowers his head over and over again, and they go up to the next floor, to the unused fourth bedroom, open the wardrobe and take out the pistols and sub-machine guns.

  They stand there with the guns in their hands in the dim light of the bedroom.

  They look at each other.

  Have only each other.

  Are each other.

  Hug each other, and feel their blood flow become one and the same, and doubt and determination, love and hate, good and evil, greed and generosity all melt together into a single quality that has no name, running through them, quick and clear.

  And then the brothers pull free of each other’s arms, go down to the bottom floor of the house, the one that’s half-hidden below ground, dug into the rock of the steep slope the house is built on.

  They open the door that leads to the room where they’ve got the children locked up.

  They hear the ticking.

  Have to sort that out.

  They made a fuss to start with. In spite of the crayons they were given.

  But we put a stop to that, Leopold thinks. Almost, at least. We knew how to do that. They got to experience our fury.

  It’s quiet in there now. They’re not even whimpering. They can’t have any screaming left in their lungs. Just mute fear.

  The brothers release the safety catches of their guns.

  And open the final door.

  The one that leads into the chamber of darkness.

  The door that leads to the children.

  57

  Sunday, 16, Monday, 17 May

  There’s a faint, almost rumbling sound from the car’s engine.

  They’re already past Norrtälje, and are driving straight through the deep forests that skirt the coast, and the trees become ghosts in the night, seem to be smirking at Malin even though she can’t see the faces of the trunks.

  Zeke behind the wheel.

  Focused. Conny Nygren has gone home, she didn’t want him to come with them, and he protested at first, but eventually gave in. It’s unlikely that the brothers and children are even at the property north of Norrtälje. The most likely reason the property isn’t listed in the property register is simple administrative error.

  I want to do this myself, Malin thinks. I have to. And if the brothers are there with the children, it would be better to creep up on them under cover of night. Wouldn’t it?

  Zeke appears to think the same.

  Malin shuts her eyes.

  The explosion in the square has thrown me into the air, she thinks. The pressure wave is carrying me deep into the darkness of Sweden: at first everything expanded in volume, spreading out, and now it’s contracting again.

  What are we going to find? Are the brothers even there, and do the children exist at all?

  But she knew that Jokso Mirovic was telling the truth about his children.

  The desperation in his eyes couldn’t be fake. The recording was genuine.

  ‘Daddy . . . Daddy . . .’

  But Elena and Marko could be absolutely anywhere in the world. Maybe Thailand? Still out there somewhere? Or dead, dead for several days now.

  In this short space of time they haven’t been able to find even the smallest electronic trace of the brothers. No email traffic, no mobile calls, no credit cards in their names had been used.

  Nothing.

  Try to sleep, Malin. Get an hour’s rest before you get there. Make sure you’re alert then.

  Zeke’s hands firmly on the wheel.

  Silence in the car. They should get there just after midnight.

  Sleep soon comes to her, and the reclining seat brings the strangest dreams, streams woven by the chill of the spring night.

  The faces of the Vigerö girls.

  White, pure, guiltless, and they talk to her from the darkness of the dream.

  Is it too late, Malin, is it too late? We know, but we daren’t say.

  ‘It isn’t too late,’ Malin says, but her voice isn’t her own, it’s Tove’s.

  ‘It isn’t too late,’ and the girls laugh and then they vanish and are replaced by two silhouettes in a dark room, stretching their arms out towards her.

  ‘Where are you, where are you?’ and she can see Josefina Marlöw in her underground room, and in the dream she’s stretching her arms out towards her father, and towards her mother, and they respond, but their embrace is made of red-hot metal in the shape of rose thorns.

  Are there actually any children?

  Do Elena and Marko exist?

  And Hanna Vigerö is there, a man beside her who must be her husband, and she says: They exist, Malin, they exist, but where are they, we haven’t found the girls, and we desperately want to.

  Isn’t that what death is supposed to be, a place where only love exists?

  Then her sleep turns black, and she shouts into her own dream, has to find out before it’s too late: ‘What about my brother? Is he OK?’

  And the girls, and the pale, faceless children whisper: He’s OK, but he’s alone, and he’s waiting for you to go to him.

  Börje Svärd is pacing up and down in his kitchen.

  Johan Jakobsson called him half an hour or so ago to tell him that Malin and Zeke were on their way to an island in the archipelago where there was a small chance that the brothers were hiding, and that they might be holding Jokso Mirovic’s children there.

  The whole of the investigating team has been informed about events in Stockholm, and he has a feeling the case is moving towards its conclusion.

  And it turned out to be nothing to do with Islamic extremists, political activists or biker gangs.

  His first reaction when he heard about Malin and Zeke’s nocturnal excursion was that it was madness to head out there alone, without back-up, but then it occurred to him that it was very unlikely the children and the brothers were actually there, and if they were there, maybe a small-scale operation made more sense, just two officers who could get on with the job calmly and quietly.

  And he knows Malin. Knows her well enough to know that she would want to do something like this herself, she’s almost obsessively independent, and Sven Sjöman has a tendency to let her have her own way on occasions like this. Sven evidently thought it was OK for them to head out there tonight.

  But still
.

  He can’t help feeling worried. Whatever he may think, there’s a chance that Malin is getting close, and that might mean it gets dangerous.

  The house feels empty without Anna.

  But her spirit hovers over the decor, a hundred times more tasteful than anything he could have come up with.

  Then his phone rings.

  Waldemar Ekenberg’s name on the screen.

  Waldemar Ekenberg is standing in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette under the extractor fan above the cooker, trying to let what Börje Svärd is saying calm him down, but it’s not working.

  ‘Shouldn’t Stockholm be sending back-up?’

  ‘You know what Malin’s like.’

  ‘Shall we get in the car and go after them?’

  ‘It’s too late for that, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s probably a dead end.’

  ‘The Kurtzons are rich fuckers,’ Waldemar says, taking a last drag on the cigarette. ‘If they get a whiff of money, or even worse, get it into their heads that they’re going to lose their money, then anything could happen, you know that as well as I do.’

  ‘They can handle it,’ Börje says, sounding as if he’s trying to convince himself. ‘Zeke’s a tough bastard.’

  ‘Let’s just hope they kill them if they manage to find them,’ Waldemar says, hoping that Börje is going to contradict him.

  ‘Yes, there won’t be any witnesses, after all,’ he says instead.

  ‘You’re pretty hard,’ Waldemar says.

  ‘And unlike you, I’m properly hard,’ Börje replies. ‘And that means I can afford to be soft sometimes.’

  ‘So you’re a philosopher too?’

  ‘Have a whisky.’

  Waldemar grins.

  ‘Listen, my head’s still thumping from last time.’

  Malin wakes up to hear her mobile ringing.

  She might have been asleep for an hour or so in the reclined car seat, and before she answers, it occurs to her that they must be close now.

  Tove’s voice.

  ‘Mum, where are you? I’ve been trying to call.’

  Malin tells her what she’s doing, that the investigation has led her north, out to the archipelago. But that she should be home tomorrow.

  ‘I miss you,’ Tove says. ‘And when you get home we’re going to Hälsingland. To see my uncle, your little brother.’