Savage Spring (22 page)

The captive children are sleeping. They belong with us. The nasty lizards are gnawing at the cages, they can hear the lizards and the men in their dreams.

Do you feel the wind, Malin?

The cold wind sweeping over the city and across the plain?

Deep inside that wind death is whispering, Malin. And maybe, just maybe, death is whispering for you.

We don’t know.

What are you saying?

What do you want with me? I haven’t got time for you now, and Malin can feel the lactic acid surging through the muscles of her legs, finding its way up through her stomach to her lungs, before it takes hold of her heart like a dark, glowing pair of glass-blower’s tongs.

But I can’t give up now.

Then the black figure ahead of her in the field stops.

Turns around.

Seems to be searching through a pocket. Is he pulling out a gun?

And if he pulls out a gun he might be faster than me. Am I going to die now? Is that what’s about to happen?

And she digs deep for the last of her energy, zigzagging the last twenty metres towards the person in front of her.

There’s a flash.

From the barrel of a gun before the sound of the shot that kills me.

But no sound? Has he got a silencer?

She throws herself forward. Feels a warm blow to her cheek.

Zeke walks up to the caravan, a KABE, it must be twelve metres long.

Dim light from the caravan’s windows.

Outside the caravan, among a great mass of clutter, there are three large oil drums, and he sees six beefy police officers leaning over what look like three young men dressed in those shabby, dirty clothes that itinerants, or the unemployed, or homeless New Age travellers usually slum about in.

‘Which one’s Ludvigsson?’ he asks.

‘None of them,’ Sundblom says from the door of the caravan. ‘Apparently he was outside having a piss.’

‘In that case he’s the one Malin set off after,’ Zeke says. ‘He took off across the field.’

‘Did she get him?’

‘Don’t know. I rushed over here. Karim and Sven ran after her, we left Sofia Karlsson handcuffed in the back of the car.’

Sundblom nods.

‘These are Konrad Ekdahl, Jan Thörnkvist and Stefan Törnvall, I’ve managed to get that much out of them.’

‘What have you got in there?’

‘I’ve found computers so far, but there’s a hell of a lot of cubbyholes in a caravan this size. They seem to be pretty well connected, though.’

Cables are draped through the trees around the caravan, leading to an aerial on the roof.

‘Anything about the Liberation Front in there?’

‘The website was open on one of the computers. I haven’t touched anything else.’

‘Good,’ Zeke says. ‘Johannison’s already on her way.’

Karin.

Trying to give the impression of distance, saying Johannison. Never using her first name.

Ridiculous.

We’re having sex with each other. That’s all. It’s not a question of love.

He can see Karin’s absurdly aristocratic face in his mind’s eye, how it can switch in an instant and become bestial when she picks up his scent.

‘Forensics can carry out the search,’ Zeke says.

From the three captured men on the ground come groans and whimpering, met by ‘Shut up, you fuckers,’ and all sound seems to disappear into the darkness, muffled by the weak light of the moon.

‘Where’s Malin?’

Why’s it taking so long? Zeke wonders.

It wasn’t a gun.

He had stopped to light a cigarette and wait for whatever fate had in store for him, had heard her behind him and realised he wasn’t going to get away, that the game was up.

She had knocked him to the ground.

Burned herself slightly on the cheek with the end of the cigarette.

She pressed his face down, hard, down into the sucking mud of the field, not bothered whether he could breathe.

‘Are you Jonathan Ludvigsson? Did you kill two little girls? Well, did you? If you did, you don’t have to worry, I’ll make sure you breathe your last in this fucking field.’

She paused for breath. Went on pushing his face into the damp ground as she tugged at his long, matted dreadlocks.

‘Can you breathe? Well? Can you? Those girls aren’t breathing any more, you know that, don’t you?’

Then she felt a blow to her side and she lost her grip of his head and fell, taking a bit of dreadlock with her, and the man on the ground tried to get some air, but didn’t make a sound.

‘For God’s sake, Malin! Are you trying to kill him?’

Sven doesn’t sound upset, it’s merely a statement of fact.

And now Malin is on her knees beside the man.

Panting, looking up at Karim’s agitated face, sees Sven put handcuffs on the man and pull him up.

‘I was just holding him until you arrived.’

‘Like fuck you were.’

The man.

He can’t be more than twenty-five years old.

Bearded.

Pure Swedish features, angry blue eyes, long, filthy dreadlocks.

She recognises him from the video.

‘That’s Jonathan Ludvigsson,’ as she gets to her feet and starts heading back across the field, towards their cars and the caravan.

24

Thursday, 13 May

Jonathan Ludvigsson is sitting in interview room number one, on the other side of the big black table, in the light of a halogen lamp.

Malin is watching him through the glass of the observation room, through what looks like a mirror inside the interview room. Karim Akbar and Sven Sjöman are standing beside her. Sven was very clear: ‘You’re not taking the interview. You thought he tried to kill you out in the field and that’s not a good starting point. Zeke can take it, with Johan Jakobsson, he’s just got in and is fresh and alert.’ She had protested, but to no avail.

Now, through the glass, Malin can see the defiance in Jonathan Ludvigsson’s eyes: ‘I’m not going to say a fucking thing.’ And he’s declined the offer of a lawyer, saying: ‘They’re part of this rotten financial system, the whole lot of them. Every last one of them, and I don’t want anything to do with any of them.’

The clock on the wall says twenty-five to one.

Ludvigsson is staring down at the tabletop, and Malin can only see his dreadlocks.

They didn’t find any of the weapons Sofia Karlsson mentioned in the caravan. No pistols, no hand grenades, nothing. No explosives, but Karin Johannison is there now, searching the caravan and the vicinity with a toothcomb in the hunt for evidence. And there don’t seem to have been any leaks; there haven’t been any journalists in Klockrike yet.

Malin’s body is screaming for sleep, her eyes are itching, and her muscles ache in a plaintive grumble, and she presumes Zeke inside the room must be just as tired, and the same goes for Jonathan Ludvigsson. She looks at his hair, the way his dreadlocks resemble dirty earthworms in the glow of the lamp.

Johan looks alert. Maybe the children fell asleep early and he along with them, so that he’s already had a few hours’ kip?

The tape recorder in the room starts to turn. The other three they picked up in Klockrike are sitting in the cells. Börje Svärd and Waldemar Ekenberg have just got in and are about to interview them, while they’re still confused and sleepy.

‘So,’ Zeke says, and his voice sounds gentle through the loudspeaker in the ceiling, just above where Malin is standing. ‘What were you really doing in Stockholm the morning of the day before yesterday?’

‘I wasn’t in Stockholm,’ Jonathan Ludvigsson says without looking up. ‘And I’m not going to say anything else.’

‘Look at us when you’re talking,’ Johan says. ‘Got that? We know you were in Stockholm, and we know you sent the email about the Economic Liberation Front to the
Correspondent
. We know you’re behind the website, and it’s only a matter of time before we know you carried out the bombing in the main square in which two little girls died.’

Jonathan Ludvigsson carries on staring down at the table.

Silence in the room.

‘You’re in the shit. Do you realise that?’ Zeke says, and all the gentleness in his voice has vanished, and he looks over at the mirror, as if to say to Malin: OK, this fucker’s going to talk. ‘You might as well start by telling us about the Economic Liberation Front. Who are you exactly?’

Malin drums her fingers on the ledge under the window of the observation room, looks at Zeke, at his skull-like face in the dim light, senses Karim and Sven’s presence, their heavy, tense, expectant breathing.

A pistol. That turned out to be a cigarette. Her rage from the field gone now, but she is aware that it could flare up at any moment. There is a slight bruise on Ludvigsson’s cheek after their tussle.

‘It would be best to tell us,’ Johan says softly. ‘For your own sake.’

‘And for the girls’ sake,’ Zeke says. ‘The ones you killed. They were only six years old. How does it feel to have killed two little girls?’

Jonathan Ludvigsson goes on staring down at the table.

Doesn’t even shake his head.

Sighs and takes a deep breath before he looks up at Johan and Zeke with empty eyes, as if he’s just found a different part of himself, a neutral part.

He looks over at the mirror. Smiles at the people he must know are behind it.

‘You’re a child murderer,’ Johan says. ‘The worst sort of murderer. In two hundred years your name will live on as a child murderer.’

Jonathan Ludvigsson blinks.

Runs his forefinger and thumb over his mouth.

Zip.

‘We’re about to talk to your comrades,’ Zeke says. ‘One of them’s bound to talk. They looked like they were about to crap themselves.’

‘Like frightened little rabbits,’ Johan says, and looks at Ludvigsson.

A bomber? Malin thinks.

Maybe. The Olympic bomber in Stockholm was precisely the same sort of wayward political fanatic who’d gone off the rails. But he actually succeeded. The Olympic Games didn’t come to Sweden in the end, which was probably just as well.

She looks at Ludvigsson through the glass, as he swings between fear and arrogance.

‘Tell us about the Economic Liberation Front,’ Johan says. ‘There’ll be a lot of people who agree with you in principle. Everyone hates the banks, that much is obvious. And there’ll be plenty of people who think the banks deserve everything they’ve got coming.’

Ludvigsson smiles at him, a conspiratorial smile.

‘So if you talk, if you confess, your ideas will get massive exposure in the media. You might even end up as a martyr, but that will only happen if you talk to us.’

‘So, your dad,’ Zeke says. ‘He got laid off?’

‘Yes. And now he’ll probably never get another job. And all because the banks lent so much fucking money to a bastard venture capitalist. It’s people like that Falkengren who are ruining my dad’s life, and there are plenty of people like my dad in this country. But the banks and their stooges are grabbing whatever they can get, Falkengren earned twenty million last year, while Dad got laid off because the bank had over-extended the finance of the company he worked for. It’s sick. Completely sick. It has to be stopped.’

With that last word Ludvigsson raises his eyebrows, then he shuts his eyes and looks as if he’s pretending to be asleep.

‘OK, time to start talking, you child-murdering little shit. Got that?’

Zeke stands up.

Takes two steps forward, grabs a handful of dreadlocks, and drags Jonathan Ludvigsson from his chair. Malin sees it happen, feels violence taking hold of her: Get him! Get the child-killer! The same uncontrollable urge she had out in the field. Karim and Sven are calm beside her, focused.

‘You’re going to talk, you bastard. Tell us all about the Liberation Front, what you were doing in Stockholm, how you and your friends rigged the bomb.’

‘You sent the email and someone else detonated the bomb,’ Johan shouts, and his fury sounds hollow, as if he doesn’t have the right sort of anger in him. ‘Who was he, the man with the bike?’

‘What is this?’ Jonathan Ludvigsson yells, standing on tiptoe in the face of Zeke’s assault, grimacing with pain. ‘Fucking Guantanamo?’

But Johan doesn’t answer. Ignores the question. No more Mr Nice Guy, he seems to be thinking. He carries on: ‘Who was the man on the bike, the one who left the bomb outside the bank?’ and Zeke lifts his arm, and Jonathan Ludvigsson’s feet leave the floor.

‘CIA, fucking hell, you’re CIA, I don’t know anything about any man with any fucking bike.’

Zeke lets Ludvigsson fall back onto his chair.

‘You don’t know?’ Johan says. There’s real harshness in his voice now, as if it were his children who’d been killed by the bomb.

So he does have it in him after all.

Violence against children always reveals a person’s true character.

It’s unforgivable, Malin thinks. It should be unforgivable.

‘And you expect us to believe that?’ he roars.

Jonathan Ludvigsson flinches.

‘Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, would I?’

Then he repeats the gesture with his finger and thumb over his mouth, and Zeke moves forward again, and Ludvigsson ducks, then Karim makes a move beside Malin and opens the door to the interview room. His dark face in profile is even darker in the dim light as he says authoritatively: ‘That’s enough. Enough now. You two go home and get some sleep. You too, Malin.’

Karin Johannison has dusted the caravan for fingerprints, has searched through all the cupboards for evidence. She’s been over every inch with a fine-tooth comb, looking for traces of the explosives, the TATP, and anything else needed to make a bomb.

Hours have passed.

And now she’s standing alone in the confined space.

Brushes her blonde hair from her face, feeling tired, but she still wishes Zeke were there with her.

What had started as a bit of innocent extramarital sex has become something more for her, but not for him, and that wasn’t what she’d been planning, and she realises now that she had expected it to be the other way around, that she could toy with him, making the rather uncouth, rough policeman dance to her tune.