Savage Spring (12 page)

‘It’s me, Malin.’

And she can hear from the efficient tone of his voice that this is strictly a work call.

He doesn’t want to meet up for a fuck.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I wanted to call you first considering the current situation. I’ve received an email in the newsroom from a group calling themselves the Economic Liberation Front. They say they’re at war with all banks, which they call outposts of greed, and they’re claiming responsibility for yesterday’s explosion. And they say they’re going to strike again.’

Malin stops in front of the reception desk, and Ebba, the receptionist, who’s just arrived, nods in her direction.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard. The Economic Liberation Front. Ever heard of them?’

‘No. Never.’

Malin starts walking towards her desk in the open-plan office, the first detective on the team to arrive, but there’s a countless number of uniforms and civilian staff wandering to and fro with cups of coffee and bundles of documents in their hands.

‘I’ve never heard of the Economic Liberation Front,’ she says.

‘But they seem to be genuine,’ Daniel says. ‘They sent a link to a website, and it’s not a pretty sight.’

In front of her computer now.

‘The address, Daniel. The address.’

‘As it sounds. Dot S E.’

‘Hold on, I’m opening it now. And the email address?’

‘The mail came from an anonymous server.’

Her fingers race over the keyboard.

Wrong.

Damn. Then she gets the right address in the browser.

Heavy blue text on a pale green background. A graphic consisting of the burning logos of SEB, Nordea, Handelsbanken, and Swedbank.

She reads:

The country’s banks and the indescribable greed expressed by them and their owners, management and staff, are threatening the whole climate of society. Their behaviour is creating a predatory cage for our children to live in.

The Economic Liberation Front is therefore declaring war on Sweden’s banks. They and their greed will be wiped out.

Pictures from the main square following the explosion.

Malin scrolls down.

Pictures of bank branches in other cities. The caption beneath every picture is the same.

The next target?

The next target?

Then, at the bottom of the page, another short text:

Civilian casualties cannot be ruled out in our struggle to save public decency, selfless compassion for others and love between people.

‘Have you looked?’

Daniel’s voice is full of fear and distaste, but also expectation, as if he’s waiting for a pat on the back.

‘Yes.’

No other pages, nothing more about the organisation than what it says on the home page.

‘Bloody dodgy,’ Malin says. ‘Have you put this up on your own site?’

‘No. I came to you first.’

‘Can you hold back for a bit? Until we can check this out. Bloody hell.’

‘I can’t wait, Malin, you know that.’

‘You could start a panic, Daniel.’

‘People have the right to know, Malin. And what’s to say they haven’t sent this to loads of people in the media? If you check, you’ll probably find the link on other sites. Hasn’t anyone else contacted you? You didn’t get the email?’

Did we get the email? I don’t know. Has anyone else received it? Or just Daniel? If so, why just him?

She shuts her eyes. Sees the photographs of the girls on the bedroom wall in her mind’s eye, and she knows that Daniel’s right.

People have to know.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Do what you have to do. You haven’t got any idea why you specifically were sent this email?’

‘No. But I’m the lead reporter in the city’s pre-eminent news organisation, so it’s hardly that surprising, is it? If they’ve got local connections.’

‘But shouldn’t they have gone to the national media?’

‘Maybe they have, who knows? It’ll only take two seconds, then it’ll be everywhere else anyway. Maybe they wanted to maintain the local angle. How the hell should I know? They must have known it would spread, whatever they chose to do.’

‘OK. Thanks again. We’ll be in touch. Not least Forensics, when they get to tracing the email. Can you forward it to me?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good.’

Then silence on the line.

‘How are things otherwise?’ Daniel asks after something like ten seconds, which feel like a year. ‘I heard about your mum . . .’

‘Sorry. I haven’t got time to talk about that now. I need to get going with this.’

She hangs up.

Civilian casualties cannot be ruled out . . .

The photographs of the scene seem to have been lifted from various newspapers. Sharp and edited, the way that professional news photographers’ pictures always are.

The yellow plastic sheeting clearly visible in the pictures of the square yesterday.

Doesn’t want to think about what’s under it.

. . . war on Sweden’s banks. They and their greed will be wiped out.

Can this be true? Malin wonders. Is the demon of money behind this? The bizarre greed of the banks and financiers, biting itself in the tail?

Half an hour later the entire investigative team is standing in Sven Sjöman’s office.

Waldemar Ekenberg, Börje Svärd, Johan Jakobsson, Zeke, Malin, and Karim Akbar. They’re staring at the computer, trying to grasp something that they imagine is there.

‘That’s it, then,’ Waldemar says. ‘We just have to get hold of the nutters behind the Economic Liberation Front, then case solved.’

‘Doesn’t that site look a bit thin?’ Johan says. ‘And I haven’t come across any Liberation Front in my search of extremists in the city up to now. The ones around here seem mainly interested in animal rights.’

‘New groups do pop up,’ Börje says. ‘Who knows what a financial crisis and insane levels of injustice can drive people to, how desperate they might get?’

‘We’ll get the technical guys to try to trace the email and the server the site’s hosted on,’ Sven says. ‘We haven’t heard anything from any of the other media, and the
Correspondent
put the details up on its site five minutes ago, so the chances are that the email was only sent to Daniel Högfeldt.’

‘Which suggests a local connection,’ Börje says.

‘Well, it might do,’ Malin says, ‘but at the same time they might be using the
Correspondent
to get us to think that they have a local connection.’

‘If they’re any good at technology,’ Johan says, ‘they could already be a hundred steps ahead of us. It might be impossible to track them down this way.’

‘How many of them can there be?’ Zeke wonders.

‘It’s impossible to say,’ Sven replies, updating the site on his computer.

The page has changed.

At the top there is now a videoclip linked to YouTube.

Sven clicks to start the film.

A man wearing a grey hooded jacket and black jeans, with a black mask over his face, is standing in what looks like a warehouse with a sheet of paper in his hand. The hand holding it appears to belong to a white-skinned person.

‘This looks like an Al-Qaeda video,’ Karim says. ‘One of the ones where they cut the head off some westerner they’ve captured.’

‘Shit,’ Zeke says, and Waldemar exclaims: ‘We’re going to get that bastard.’

Malin thinks it takes an age before the man starts reading from the sheet of paper into the camera.

A sharp but slightly hoarse voice. No accent, and evidently distorted to make it hard to recognise.

‘People of Sweden,’ the man says. ‘Stay away from the banks. You never know when the next greeting from the Economic Liberation Front will come. The banks and finance companies and venture capitalists must be punished, wiped out. Quake, oh ye capitalists, and let a new age be born, with new ethics and compassion between people, free from avarice.’

Then the clip ends.

The detectives stand in silence around Sven’s computer.

Malin thinks that something like this was bound to come sooner or later, however this all fits together.

She looks out of the window.

Towards the hospital. Where nurses and carers slave for long hours for a fraction of what the fat-cats in Stockholm earn, and have always earned, for pressing buttons, for lunatic business deals that have driven the country into the financial abyss. The hospital where patients are given substandard food. Where the unemployed and lonely and anyone surplus to requirements nowadays fill the psychiatric wards with their despair and angst.

Greedy vampires.

Obviously someone was bound to react in the end.

A cloud drifts in front of the sun and darkens both the day and the room.

‘Bloody hell,’ Waldemar says. ‘I’d happily take him out with a shot to the back of the neck. Looks like he’s a Swede.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Sven says. ‘None of that talk. Pull yourself together, Ekenberg. But you’re right, he seems to be Swedish. We need to keep our heads clear and take this one step at a time, and work through the investigation methodically. OK, this might be the right line, but as far as we know it could also be a red herring, a few idiots playing a prank and trying to exploit the situation.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Waldemar says. ‘Does he look like he’s joking? I say, let’s burn the nutters out of their holes.’

‘We need to get someone from the technical division to analyse the video. See what we can get from that,’ Sven says, then there’s a knock at the door, and a moment later a freckled female constable pops her head in.

‘A courier’s just delivered the surveillance recordings
from the camera outside the entrance to the bank. The others will be here as soon as they’ve identified them,’ she says, holding out what looks like an ancient videocassette in her hand. ‘The bank’s head of security has written some notes. He says we ought to look at the video as soon as possible.’

13

Are we about to see the face of the murderer?

Malin feels adrenalin clutch at her heart, making it race.

The entire investigative team has moved into their usual meeting room, where someone has wheeled in a television and video player.

The nursery playground is empty and the beautiful spring weather makes the swings and climbing frames look as if they’re crying out for children.

Still no results from Forensics, even though Malin knows that Karin Johannison and her team have worked through the night. What was it that exploded? What sort of substances was the bomb made of? How was it detonated? Remote control? A timer? And exactly how powerful was it?

None of us has had time to reflect properly, Malin suddenly realises.

The bomb exploded yesterday.

Then we ran off in every direction we could think of, and now the Economic Liberation Front, and this video that we’re about to watch.

Things have been happening, one after the other, and she gets the feeling that they’re all in a kind of vacuum. It’s as if none of the officers in the investigating team has yet realised that a bomb actually went off in the largest square in the city.

We’re rushing in all directions, never stopping for breath, Malin thinks. We’re haring after ideas the moment they pop into our overcrowded heads. No time to stop, no time to think. A growing but unspoken sense of panic, wrapped up inside the question that we can probably all hear being whispered within us: is this more than we can cope with?

Can Linköping deal with this? Fifteen thousand people visited the city’s churches yesterday. Trying to find comfort where they imagined it might be found. And there are more candles in the main square, more flowers the whole time, people have evidently started ordering flowers to be delivered to the square from Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, and God knows how many other towns.

This can’t be happening. Hasn’t happened.

But it has happened. And then what do you do? When you can no longer deny it, and are left alone with your fear? Then you send a flower, seek comfort in our collective fate. And maybe it’s even some sort of a relief that there’s actually a real, tangible crisis, not just the slow, abstract assault of the financial mess?

What about me? Malin thinks.

I buried Mum yesterday.

Where do I want to go? What do I want?

If I slow down, I might be forced to answer that question.

Better to watch the video.

Then Karim Akbar presses play, and the police officers lean back in their uncomfortable chairs and watch the recording, shot with an extremely wide angle. At the edge of the screen a man in a black hooded jacket leaves a bicycle beside the cashpoint and then walks away slowly, heading off towards Hospitalstorget.

Soundless black-and-white pictures.

Silent police officers.

The posters in the bank’s windows are clearly visible in the video. Kurtzon Funds.

Kurtzon.

Malin recognises the name, but can’t put it into any real context. Some sort of new investment company? But that isn’t interesting, watch the video instead.

A black rucksack is fastened to the bicycle’s parcel rack.

The bastard, Malin thinks. But who is he? The same person in the video on YouTube?

Then, as if in a circle in the middle of the screen, they see the two girls wearing pink jackets and jeans running towards the cashpoint, as a blurry man with bare arms leaves the bank.

Impossible to see who the man is.

An ordinary customer.

But doesn’t she recognise him?

No. I’m just imagining things, and none of the others reacts.

But dear God. I recognise the girls.

They walk close to the cashpoint, then disappear again.

Then, maybe five minutes later and after two more customers, they’re back again, the children, and you can just make out their mother behind them.

Their hair dark grey on the black-and-white video, and, in spite of the poor quality of the recording, it’s possible to see that their eyes are shining, that they’re enjoying their morning in the square, conquering the world with each moment.