Savage Spring (26 page)

Sven seems to see how tired she is, knows how cruel it was of him to call her in to question Ludvigsson.

‘Malin,’ he says. ‘After the meeting you’re to go and get some sleep in the staffroom. You look shattered.’

‘That’s an order,’ Karim agrees.

She doesn’t actually want to sleep. But her body is screaming for rest, every muscle aches.

But an order’s an order, isn’t it? And a weary brain can’t do any good.

Malin is sitting at her desk. Rubs her eyes. Hears Zeke talking to Dick Stensson on the phone as she gets ready to head into the darkness of the staffroom. She closes her eyes. Listens to Zeke’s conversation, but can’t keep her focus. Instead she thinks about the city preening itself in the spring light out there, a light that’s far too sharp for her eyes.

Events are coming one after the other, she thinks. No time to stop, think, reflect. And that makes us bad detectives.

Like children playing football, twenty little bodies all chasing the ball.

Memorial ceremonies. Church services. A minute’s silence.

That’s all dying out now. People have to find their own solace, their own peace, faith.

Malin can feel a dull pain at the base of her spine and feels like drifting off to sleep here at the desk, but she can’t let herself do that.

She opens her eyes.

‘That was pointless. Stensson just laughed at us. Said Jonathan Ludvigsson’s talking crap and that he’s never met him. Stensson said we were welcome to check his phone calls and emails,’ Zeke says after he hangs up.

Malin rubs her eyes again.

‘Maybe Ludvigsson’s making it all up. He seems prone to exaggerating his own importance. As far as we know, he could have bought the guns somewhere else entirely.’

‘Maybe,’ Zeke says. ‘We won’t make any more progress there.’

‘I’m going to get some rest,’ Malin says, getting up.

Without looking up from his keyboard Zeke says:‘I’ll get our paperwork sorted. I’ll wake you if anything happens.’

The windowless room is illuminated by a small, white tablelamp. Sven was resting in the room not long ago, Malin can still detect a faint scent of him, and it makes her feel calm.

She switches on the ‘engaged’ sign.

Lies down on the fairly comfortable sofa, leaving the light on and letting her thoughts roam free.

Janne. I hardly ever think of him any more. He isn’t inside me the same way, but he’s there as someone to lean on.

When I saw him in the square after the bomb I was impressed. We need people like that among us, solid trees of people who grow in the very worst of times, who step forward, and whose calmness and composure show the way forward.

Is he likely to meet anyone new?

How will I take that?

Don’t even think about it, I’ll go mad, I know I will, I haven’t got that far yet, I’m not ready to accept something like that.

Janne, as though made to take care of the wreckage after an explosion.

But what if the whole world explodes?

If a proper war breaks out? But war is conducted in miniature, every day, and she feels as if she’s missing out on something.

My days pass, she thinks. And I breathe and I breathe and I breathe. But do I feel anything? Do I participate in anything?

Peter Hamse.

I could feel something for him.

I want him inside me, it’s as simple as that, isn’t it?

Keep calm, Fors, the last thing anyone needs right now is for you to lose your focus.

Tove. My love for her is a given. It is worth everything, and therefore nothing.

How the hell can I even think that? What’s wrong with me?

War. A heavy bomber in the sky, then people sitting in badly lit rooms in cramped flats where no one actually wants to live, making bombs that will tear small children to pieces.

How did we get there?

She shuts her eyes. Feels the thirst.

But the desire for amber-coloured sweet tequila finds no foothold. There’s a different anxiety in her body instead. Wasn’t there something I was supposed to do today?

Something was going to happen. Something important. But what? Can’t remember.

She thinks about Zeke instead. The deep humanity in his voice, full of testosterone and power, but also balance. Somehow Zeke always manages to hold his life together no matter what happens.

Infidelity.

The son who has become a famous ice-hockey player and moved to Canada.

A grandchild he never gets to see.

A wife who is just that, a wife, one he’s had for a long time, and whom he plans to keep hold of out of habit.

But Zeke stands there, stable and free in his life, apparently happy with his decisions, with no real doubts.

Doesn’t he want more? Isn’t there anything that arouses greed in him? Yes. Sex with Karin. He wants more of that. But apart from that?

There’s something I’m forgetting.

What time is it?

She looks at her mobile.

Almost ten.

She turns out the lamp. Leaves her mobile on. Feels the darkness embrace her like a pair of warm, longed-for arms.

Two o’clock. Something was going to happen today at two o’clock, wasn’t it?

But what?

Åke Fors is pouring a cup of coffee in his flat on Barnhemsgatan. He’s just spoken to the estate agent in Tenerife, they’ve received an unexpectedly quick offer on the flat. Maybe not quite as much money as he’d been hoping for, but these days any offer is a good offer. We, or I, he corrects himself, have friends who haven’t received a single offer on their flats in several years, and who’ve been forced to stay on the island even though they wanted to move home to Sweden.

Dare I do it? he thinks.

Sell up.

Who knows what’s going to happen once the will is read out today. Is Malin going to go mad, is she going to push me away, is she going to forbid me to see Tove? He knows she’s been longing to know the truth, that she’s felt that there’s been a secret in her life, and she’s asked him, several times, straight out, to tell her what it is.

But that wasn’t my responsibility, Åke Fors thinks, sipping the hot coffee as the wind moves the treetops outside the window and the yellow-green buds seem to wave at him, telling him that today is the start of something new.

I’ve missed Malin. Tove. But I don’t miss you, Margaretha, he thinks.

For all these years you got me to do what you wanted.

I went along with you, denying Malin the chance to be whole, and she’s going to hate me for it, isn’t she?

Am I going to be forced to run away to a lonely life in the sun on Tenerife? Do I even have the right to demand to be part of their lives?

I wonder if she’s remembered the meeting with the solicitor today, I ought to call her, and Åke Fors goes out to the phone on the wall in the hallway, dials his daughter’s number and waits.

One ring.

And even though Malin never lived there when she was little, he can see her as a six-year-old running across the floor, the beautiful little girl with her hair flying around her head, and she’s crying and bubbling and howling with laughter as she runs through the rooms.

Then she stops in the hall. Right in front of him. Looks at him, wants to ask him something, but can’t seem to find the words, and then she runs off again, and he sees her looking for something in the living room, intently, lifting the rug, the cushions on the sofa, saying: ‘Where is she? Where is he? Where is he?’

And Åke Fors wants to run over to his six-year-old daughter and help her, and now she’s saying: ‘Where’s Mummy? Where’s Mummy?’

And he wants to answer, but he knows that none of what he can see really exists except as electrical impulses, created by memories and dreams inside the meandering pathways of his own brain.

The phone rings several more times.

No answer.

Åke Fors hangs up.

Hopes that everything isn’t already too late.

She hadn’t had time to fall asleep. And she sees her dad’s name on the screen but doesn’t feel like answering.

But it makes her remember the meeting with the solicitor.

The will.

Today.

She’d completely suppressed it, but she has time to get a bit of sleep and still get there in time.

Try to sleep now, Malin. You need to rest. Even if you don’t want to.

Concentrating on the present moment, that’s the only way to survive.

Malin.

You’re asleep in your staffroom now, with your phone switched on, but no one seems to want to disturb you. You’re lying there, Malin, and you’re missing your mummy, even if you don’t realise it, even if you don’t feel it.

Our mummy isn’t here. Even though she ought to be, and you, you still don’t know what happened to her, and maybe you’re never going to find out.

Maybe the old man who’s just been cutting into her broken, dead body in a room in the hospital won’t find anything odd about the way she died.

Be careful with it all, Malin.

Tove likes you, your daddy likes you.

Don’t be scared of what’s about to happen, try, try not to get angry, not to judge people for not being able to control, or understand, their feelings.

Deep down, you know better than that, Malin.

As for us, we’re afraid, because it’s lonely here, and dark and cold and it’s like we’re in one of those nightmares you used to have when you were little. You used to dream you were all alone in the world, that there was no love for you.

When your mummy left you she was sad.

Because she was leaving you.

Just like our mummy left us.

We know that now.

And she ought to be here. With us, but she isn’t here and nor is Daddy, and we want to be together again. Sleep next to each other in a big bed with white sheets, snuggling under white sheets that can shut out anything nasty, anything cruel.

The other children’s mummy keeps to herself, maybe she’s trying to be there for them, like we are for you, Malin? And if she is, then she’ll hear them breathing now, see them banging on the door, scared of the anger, scared of getting out, scared they’re never going to get out.

The boy is crying. The girl hugs him, says: ‘Don’t be sad, don’t be sad.’

The monotonous whistling.

It’s started again.

Stop that fucking noise. I want to sleep. I want to stay in my lonely darkness.

Sleep comes to an abrupt end and she opens her eyes, feeling with her hand over the sofa for her mobile.

There it is.

And by mistake she dismisses the call, but hardly has time to switch on the tablelamp before it starts ringing again.

She doesn’t recognise the number.

What the hell is the time? How long have I been asleep? Fuck.

She sits up, answers.

‘Malin Fors.’

‘Ah, hello. My name is Johan Strandkvist, I’m a solicitor. We’re waiting for you here at my office. It’s ten past two, and we had a meeting that was supposed to start at two, so I just wanted to see if you . . .’

‘I’m on my way,’ Malin says, and ends the call.

Got to get the meeting out of the way. It can’t take more than half an hour.

Then it will all be done, she thinks.

I don’t have the time, or the energy, for any more worries.

29

She’s driving too fast.

Not long awake, yet her head feels strangely clear.

Malin accelerates.

Djurgårdsgatan is shut for roadworks.

The car sweeps past the edge of the old cemetery, where small leaves are starting to blur with the buds on the trees, and on one grave a solitary woman is laying a large bouquet of what look like red and white roses.

She thinks about the case.

She’s sure Jonathan Ludvigsson is telling the truth. He is, and will remain, an activist who went too far, but he’s no murderer. The Economic Liberation Front is an invention. He’s the sort who would travel the length and breadth of Europe to protest outside meetings, and demand the nationalisation of the banks, and the firing-squad for their greedy directors.

But the guns? The explosives in the caravan?

Romantic revolutionary dreams.

Like the Italian anarchists in the USA in the early years of the last century.

But she’s convinced Jonathan Ludvigsson hasn’t used any weapons. That they caught him in time. So who’s the man with the bicycle? Where does he come from? What are his motives?

Malin stops at a red light beside the old fire station. A car pulls up alongside her.

A young family, dad driving, mum and two children in the backseat.

Green.

Malin puts her foot down again, then she hears an earth-shattering bang and feels like crouching down behind the steering wheel, feels her stomach clench, and she thinks that it’s happened again, but she can’t see any smoke, can’t hear any real silence.

How far away?

Where has something just been blown up? Who? Are there going to be body parts raining from the sky?

She stops again. The car with the family has braked beside her, the children are screaming in the backseat, and the woman is comforting them.

Then the father points ahead and starts to laugh, pointing and laughing and pointing.

At the bus stop fifty metres away, beside the shiny multi-storey car park, stands a bus, its bulk leaning to one side like a badly listing ship.

The bus driver is inspecting one of the front tyres, the one with no air in it, the one that just a few seconds before must have exploded.

Malin pulls open the door of Johan Strandkvist the solicitor’s office after knocking, but without waiting for a ‘come in’.

Sleepy, out of kilter again now.

The solicitor, about forty years old, greasy curls reaching his collar, dressed in a blue blazer and a bright red shirt. His drink-swollen face is lined with deep wrinkles, and Malin thinks he must have done some serious drinking the night before, this is just a routine meeting for him, a meeting he needs to get over and done with, and that’s how I see it as well, don’t I? This needs to be done so we can all move on. In purely legal terms there’s nothing to discuss, Dad’s going to get everything, and then I’ll inherit everything from him when the time comes.