Savage Spring (11 page)

Her dad looks at her in surprise.

‘Here? Who’d be here on an ordinary weeknight except you?’

‘I suppose so,’ Tove says, and now it’s her turn to sense a lie in the air, and she takes the letter and starts to go upstairs to her room.

‘I’m tired,’ she says. ‘I’m going to go to bed.’

Her dad looks at her. Nods, before asking: ‘How’s your mum?’ and his voice has a dutiful tone that instinctively annoys Tove.

‘Fine,’ she says curtly.

‘And Grandad?’

‘He’s fine as well.’

The letter in one hand.

She feels her hands shaking as she tries to open the envelope without damaging the contents.

The school’s logo on the outside.

The dream.

Something better that the damn Folkunga School. Far away from all her problems.

From Mum.

God, she feels ashamed of thinking like that.

She drops the envelope. Picks it up again and manages to open it neatly.

A single sheet of paper.

Extra thick. That can only mean one thing, can’t it? She takes the letter over to the bed, turns the lamp on, and unfolds it. Then she reads, and smiles, and feels like jumping up and leaping in the air and shouting, but then she feels her stomach clench, Mum, Mum, how am I going to tell Mum about this?

Malin has undressed and got into bed, under the cheap duvet cover.

She feels the soft, familiar, lonely mattress under her body.

Tries to summon an image of her mum from inside, but it doesn’t work, her mum’s face won’t assume real features, only an outline.

Why can’t I see you, Mum? Why don’t I feel any grief? Have I suppressed it?

I don’t think I have. You abandoned me once, didn’t you, and the sorrow I ought to be feeling now hit me then, is that it? Maybe that’s the sorrow I’ve felt throughout my life?

Is there ever a valid reason for letting your child down? Abandoning it? Abusing the only unquestionable loving relationship? Turning against it with cruelty? Exploiting it?

No.

If you do that, you deserve to die. That makes you guilty of betrayal.

The secret is Dad’s now, but I know that something’s going to snap.

Malin rolls onto her side.

Tries to get to sleep, worries that sleep might be a long time coming, but it comes to her at once.

In her dreams she sees Maria Murvall.

She sees a little boy lying in a bed in another hospital room, and the boy has no face, but he has a gaping black mouth, and out of the mouth come words in a language Malin can’t understand, and she doesn’t even know if it’s a human language.

Then the girls from the square are with her in the dream.

They’re drifting, white and beautiful, above their mother’s sickbed.

A life-support machine bleeping in the dream.

Bleeping that there’s still life, there’s still hope. The girls drift onwards, upwards, out across the forest, and on towards a quiet, dark stretch of coast.

Then the girls scream. They turn their faces to Malin and scream straight out in terror. Other children’s voices join in, and soon Malin’s sleep is one single scream.

‘Let us out,’ the scream goes.

‘Let us out. Let us out!’

11

Sven Sjöman couldn’t sleep, the bedroom was too warm, so he got up and made his way down through the dark house, over the creaking stained floorboards, down to the kitchen, where he made himself a cheese sandwich with his wife’s homemade bread.

Then he did what he’s done thousands of times before.

He went down to the cellar of the villa, to his carpentry room, whose walls had been insulated with old eggboxes. He ate the sandwich standing at the lathe, unable to bring himself to start the machine, let alone pick up any of the pieces of wood he was currently working on.

Now he’s sitting down on the stool looking at his lathe, his tools, and feeling the loneliness of this room, and thinking about all the bowls he’s made, sold to new owners in the handicrafts shop in Trädgårdsgatan.

A bomb has exploded in his city.

Who would ever have dreamed that something like that could happen, but now it has. Two girls are dead, and while everyone else is rushing about, while the general public is suffering from collective panic, he stands there like an ancient pine tree, unbreakable by any storm.

Malin.

He’s not sure what’s going on with her yet. She seems to be able to keep the drink at bay, and she seems to be getting on well with Tove again. But Janne?

I don’t regret forcing her into rehab, but somehow I get the feeling that she’ll never completely trust me again, as if she used to take it for granted that I’d listen to whatever she wanted, no matter what happened.

She was guilty of drink-driving.

She was drunk on duty.

It could have turned out really badly, and someone else could have got hurt. And I couldn’t let either of those things happen.

And now her mother. I remember when my mother died. It was as if all my security was pulled away, as if I finally grew up, liberated by the reality of her death from the fear that she might disappear.

I grieved, but I also grew as well. She had lived her life, she was old, and I can still feel her love to this day. But if she had lived her life without showing me love, maybe I’d feel differently. Maybe I’d feel that there was a hole in me that could never be filled now.

She’s balancing on a very fine line, Malin. Anything could tip her into the darkness. But Malin’s a human being, and that’s what we all have to deal with, being human.

Vulnerable little people.

I’d kill anyone who attacked them.

Kill them.

Johan Jakobsson watches his children sleep in their beds in the room they share on the ground floor of their terraced house. Lets his feelings run free, refusing to let guilt tarnish them.

His children are almost the same age as the girls who died in the square. The whole thing seems unreal. Yet still horribly real.

And Malin.

She buried her mother that morning. The explosion seemed in some paradoxical way to hold her together. As if it made her more focused, made things clearer, helping her cope with the very fact of being human.

He closes the door to the children’s room.

Stops in the darkness of the hall.

Whoever it was who carried out the bombing, we’re going to catch him, or her, or them.

There’s a dividing line there, he thinks. Anyone who is guilty of violence against children, the abuse of children, breaks our shared human contract, and that contract can never be restored. Those people have forfeited their right to be part of society.

Why does anyone join the police? Why did I join the police?

God knows, I’m not a macho-man like Waldemar. Or Börje, come to that.

But I like the intricacy of the work. Mapping out people and events. Digging into people’s pasts. Seeing the patterns that have led them to a particular point in their lives.

And the clarity. In cases like this. Because behind the smokescreen, the conflict is straightforward. Me against the people who harm children. Black and white. It’s as easy as that.

Börje Svärd is asleep.

Waldemar Ekenberg is asleep.

They’re asleep in their respective unassuming Östergötland villas, united by their untroubled breathing.

Börje’s Alsatians are lying on his bed. They’re allowed on there now, it makes the nights feel less lonely, and he’s noticed that it makes them feel more secure.

That he himself feels more secure because of the dogs’ watchful, protective presence.

As if they are capable of holding evil at bay.

Börje had been in the cathedral, at the service, together with another two and a half thousand of the city’s inhabitants. He was standing right at the back of the church, looking out over the rows of people in the pews, seeing the soft yet powerful light shining on the crucifix on the altar, and the lamps on the walls made the stone sing, demanding something from the congregation, demanding that their fear and anxiety be brought under control, and that was also the bishop’s message: ‘In times like this we must stick together. Not point the finger, but show tolerance and not let fear rule our lives and our choices. By having faith in the good within us, we can defeat evil.’

And Börje had been scornful. How had faith helped Anna? Had it overcome her evil, evil illness?

No, hardly.

But until close to the end she’d had a good life. Difficult and painful, but every day he had seen the unshakeable power within her, the desire to live, and possibly also faith in human goodness.

He had thought about Malin in the cathedral.

The way she actually seemed to be carrying the same torment as Anna. How she tried to reach out for goodness even though a powerful dark force was constantly threatening to take over. But, he thought, it’s probably only when life becomes so black and white that existence becomes truly clear to us, when we might feel able to understand that its inherent contradictions are the whole point.

But here, in this cathedral, he had thought, we try to convince ourselves, jointly, that those contradictions don’t exist, no matter what the bishop says. In times of need we seek solace, otherwise we don’t give a damn.

He had left the cathedral before the end of the service.

He had felt the oxygen in the air running out, as the flames of the candles reached out to him. He had walked home through the mild spring evening. Longing to be at home with his dogs’ simple, easily comprehensible love.

Waldemar Ekenberg has his arm around his wife. She’s awake, and is looking at him, admiring his solidity, his ability never to give in. She doesn’t mind about his tendency towards racism and over-simplification. He probably has good reasons. He looks after her, always has done. They can manage on his wage alone, if they have to. She never liked the job at Rex Components, sitting in front of a screen and typing in data all day long. But at the same time, it was nice to feel needed. But Waldemar seems happy about her not working, because then everything at home works perfectly, and he gets properly cooked meals on the table every evening.

Waldemar cares about the people closest to him.

His colleagues.

Börje, Johan, Sven. And Malin. He said he was worried about her at the dinner table this evening. Worried she was going to start drinking again now that her mother was gone. But she seems to have a grip on things, doesn’t she, he says, as if I’d know. I do know one thing, though: however much you might want to help someone, he or she will eventually have to overcome their demons themselves.

And who knows what nightmares are really haunting that Malin?

Zeke is sitting in front of his computer in the kitchen of his villa. He’s just woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

He’s opened a picture of his grandson in Canada. His name’s Per, but he’s called Pelle, and Zeke has seen far too little of him.

Inside the bedroom his wife is snoring, and the soft, rumbling sound of her breathing makes Zeke feel calm, at the same time as making him feel wide awake.

Bloody awful, those girls in the square.

What would he do if anything like that happened to Pelle?

He’d smoke the bastards who did it out of their holes.

But he knows that unfocused aggression is pointless in a situation like this. Now was the time for them to be methodical, not let themselves be blinded by hate or anger.

He looks at the picture of his grandson.

Taking some of his very first steps in his son Martin’s lush garden.

Bloody awful.

He knows he can let rip if need be.

Go to hell, Zeke thinks, and in his mind’s eye he sees a monster in human disguise.

12

Tuesday, 11 May

What does a journalist want?

To capture the truth. To let it loose.

Become a parasite on it, profit from it. Give their own view, share it with those who choose to listen. If they actually want anything, journalists.

It’s only a quarter to seven when Malin parks outside the police station, but in spite of the early hour there’s a minor horde of journalists outside the entrance.

There are vehicles from Swedish Television and TV4. With a case like this, in such an extreme situation as this one, it’s even more important than usual to hold the media at a distance, not let the vultures set anything in motion that might affect the general public and foster fear in society.

But perhaps Linköping’s inhabitants ought to be afraid now? Who knows when the next bomb might go off? Or what has already been set in motion?

Malin breathes in the morning air. Detects the smell of newly woken chlorophyll, life waiting to be lived, the way the whole of nature seems to want to make love to itself in a boisterous orgy.

Is Daniel Högfeldt there? In the horde?

She can’t see him, and as she approaches the entrance the journalists shout at her: ‘Malin? Have you got anything for us? What are your main lines of inquiry? Activists, Islamic extremists . . . Has anyone claimed responsibility?’

She shakes her head, puts one hand in front of her face, and wishes she had put her sunglasses on, but is still glad she’s wearing her nice blue dress if she has to have her picture taken. The holster containing her SIG Sauer is concealed beneath a white cotton jacket. White plimsolls, French sailor style. She felt properly chic when she looked at herself in the mirror in her bedroom, and that cheered her up, the way her appearance has recovered and improved since she stopped drinking.

Properly attractive.

Vivacious skin that sits tightly on her high cheekbones, glossy hair. Alert blue eyes.

Not bad at all.

So why am I still so alone? she had wondered.

‘No comment,’ she says as the crowd parts, possibly out of respect for her, a number of them have covered other cases she’s been involved in, and they know what sort of person she is.

Then the automatic doors open and she goes in, hears the sucking sound as they close behind her, then her mobile rings. She looks in her bag, gets hold of it, sees Daniel’s number and doesn’t feel like taking the call, but does so anyway.