Savage Spring (29 page)

They’re grinning at me. Aren’t they? Unless I’m imagining it?

‘It’s been a hell of a day,’ Malin says.

‘But now you’re back,’ Sven says, and goes on, ‘we’ve had to release them all apart from Ludvigsson. The prosecutor couldn’t see any reason to hold them. We have no evidence whatsoever that any of them was in any way involved in either the bombing or any of Ludvigsson’s other activities.’

‘I daresay the prosecutor’s right,’ Malin says. ‘But I’m far from convinced that they’re entirely innocent.’

Outside the entrance the flashbulbs are clattering around the young men, as the reporters shout their questions all at the same time.

‘And we’ve got a preliminary report from the experts about their examination of Ludvigsson’s computer. There’s nothing to suggest he had any contact with anyone else, not about the Economic Liberation Front, and not about the bombing.

‘They’ve also found the coding for the website, and the original video file that was posted on YouTube. It certainly does look like Ludvigsson created the Liberation Front on his own, as a way of drawing attention to an issue he thought was ideologically important.’

‘Idiot.’

‘But nowhere close to as much of an idiot as plenty of other people,’ Sven says. ‘These days people seem prepared to do pretty much anything for what they believe in.’

‘Does this mean that we don’t think there’s any threat to the country’s banks?’

‘The level of threat is certainly considerably less acute, don’t you think? They could probably open up again, if only as a way of easing people’s anxieties,’ Sven says.

Detonating a bomb, Malin thinks.

In a little square in a nondescript city.

Blowing the life out of two little girls.

What sort of conviction could drive someone to that?

Nothing’s shown up from Linköping’s assortment of religious minorities. No sign that militant Islamists were involved.

‘What about the connection between Dick Stensson and Jonathan Ludvigsson, this supposed weapons deal, has that produced anything?’ Malin asks.

‘Not a thing. We haven’t found anything that can be linked to our case.’

‘Can we seize the Dickheads’ computers?’

‘Not as things stand. We haven’t got a shred of evidence that there was anything untoward going on.’

‘Here’s what I think,’ Malin says. ‘Dick Stensson and the Dickheads and Los Rebels may not be the nicest people on the planet, and they wouldn’t hesitate to kill their rivals, but are they really child-killers? Terrorists who don’t have any qualms about planting a bomb in the middle of a perfectly ordinary city, among perfectly ordinary people? I’d be extremely surprised.’

‘In principle we can probably drop that line of inquiry for the time being,’ Sven says. ‘I agree with you.’

‘What about thefts of explosives from military stores? Wholesalers? Construction companies?’ Malin asks.

‘So far we haven’t found anything there. And there haven’t been any suspicious purchases from any of the firms that supply TATP.’

Ebba nods in greeting at Malin from behind the reception desk.

Malin nods back.

‘So we’re back where we started, aren’t we?’ Malin says. ‘We don’t know who the man with the bike outside the bank on the video is. We haven’t got a fucking clue, if we’re being honest about it.’

Outside the station the chaos has died down.

The sun has moved lower, and the journalists and the released young activists seem to dissolve in the shadows. Malin looks at them through the window. Thinks that any one of them could be the man in the video, then realises that none of them is, but that they’re still all actors in the tragic drama currently playing out, a drama that needs to reach a conclusion if any real calm, any passable illusion of security, is to return to the city, to the citizens who have chosen to make it their home.

But that won’t bring me any calm.

Not a chance, Malin thinks as she forces it all away, and Sven goes on: ‘You’re right, Malin. We’re treading water. But deep down in my detective’s soul I have a feeling that something’s going to happen, something’s going to crop up that throws a new light on everything.’

‘You think so?’

‘It’s time to listen to the voices,’ Sven says. ‘The investigation’s voices. Hear what they’re telling us.’

Sven’s mantra, through all the cases they’ve worked on.

The investigation’s voices.

Listen to them.

She has made the mantra her own, but now, in the drab lobby of the police station, the words sound hollow and meaningless. Of course she can hear the voices, she knows they’re there, they’re everywhere, and only those inaudible words can help them solve the mystery.

But how are you supposed to find the energy to care about the solution to the mystery when your very self is exploding, turning into the charred pieces of a jigsaw for no reason? How to find the energy for anything when you’re being torn apart like this?

But maybe it has to be this way. First something inside you has to die, so that something new can take its place.

‘I’ve got no idea where this is going to take us,’ Malin says. ‘What about the Security Police, have we heard anything from them?’

‘Not a damn thing. I’m pretending they don’t exist.’

‘I still can’t understand why they went straight to the media with the video from the City Terminal.’

‘They wanted to show who’s in charge,’ Sven says. Then he asks: ‘How did the reading of the will go?’

‘Don’t ask, Sven, just don’t ask,’ and then she leaves him, heading towards her desk in the office without really knowing what she’s going to do there.

Zeke went home just after nine o’clock in the evening, once the day’s paperwork had been dealt with.

Waldemar Ekenberg, Johan Jakobsson, and Börje Svärd have gone as well, and Malin has spent a while sitting at her computer, surfing manically around the news websites, reading about their case, about the day’s ideas, about any imaginable and unimaginable line of inquiry. On one of the main newspapers’ websites she found an absurd conspiracy theory, suggesting that the bombing had been carried out by an al-Qaeda commando who had been sent here from Afghanistan. Some mad professor at a Scottish university supported the theory, but it was just wild speculation, the story didn’t seem to have any foundation in reality at all.

No.

In all likelihood, Islamic militants had absolutely nothing to do with their bomb. The likeliest explanation was that a different sort of primitive evil had blossomed this spring, and that the reason for the girls’ death was to be found in something that was more clearly visible in our own society.

She shuts her browser.

The screensaver with the picture of Tove in a bathing costume on a beach at sunset clicks in.

I have to tell her, Malin thinks as she looks at the picture of Tove, I have to tell her, I have to take her with me to the care home in Hälsingland, I can’t let her down again and keep her new uncle away from her. And then she sees the room with the boy again, her image of her brother, but behind it hovers the black hole of her hatred for her dad.

And possibly also for her mum.

How the hell could you, either of you, both of you? and she swallows hard and the sense of unreality takes over again, and that feeling becomes her best friend and she looks at Tove, this perfect incarnation of love and goodness, and she thinks that they will never abandon each other, that they will follow each other through life until she dies of old age in a comfortable armchair on a balcony with a view of the sea.

Outside the window, night is starting to mark its progress, and she wants to go home, go to bed and try to sleep, but how the hell is sleep going to come now?

You can’t sleep in the middle of an explosion. You can’t even shut your eyes when the world is tearing you apart.

But you can drink.

And the Hamlet is open.

She gets up, goes out to the car park and sits in the car. Turns the key and the engine throbs happily, and then she hears someone knock on her windscreen and she feels like ignoring it, because there can’t actually be anyone out there, can there?

An eye.

A torn cheek. A solitary little girl’s eye staring at her, begging her for something important. Is that eye my only salvation?

Hungry.

And she thinks of the hotdog-seller in the square. What had he said when her colleagues spoke to him? That Hanna and the twins were often there?

The knocking continues, breaking her train of thought, and the feeling of hunger.

Malin turns her head.

Sees Karin Johannison on the other side of the glass. A serious look on her beautiful face.

What the hell has happened now? Has Zeke dumped her? Or vice versa?

‘Open up, Malin. Open up.’

And a minute later Karin is sitting in the passenger seat beside Malin, and Malin can smell the sweet, fruity scent of her perfume, and thinks that the scent smells as expensive as Karin’s white and black dress looks. She imagines Zeke pulling that dress up, and the image doesn’t fill her with distaste, but with a peculiar feeling of desire.

Karin looks at her.

An efficient look, somehow focused on the future, and Malin realises that her apparition here is to do with work.

‘I wanted to tell you first,’ Karin says.

‘Tell me what?’

‘We’ve just finished the post-mortem on Hanna Vigerö.’

‘And?’

‘The oxygen levels in her blood don’t make sense, Malin. And some of the blood vessels in her nose were broken. A lot of them. And the capillaries in her lungs are unnaturally distended.’

‘What do you mean?’

Malin looks at Karin. Senses that she is finding out something that she actually already knows, and she sees a small spider crawl across the windscreen, and it looks as if it’s climbing across the sky, as if it were capable of finding a foothold where no other living creature could.

And she looks back at Karin. Sees the loneliness in her eyes, the confusion that has woken up there. The longing.

The family, Malin thinks. Someone was after the family. That’s where we need to look.

‘Hanna Vigerö was murdered,’ Karin goes on. ‘Suffocated. Most likely by someone holding a pillow over her face.’

PART 3

The Children

In the chamber of darkness

The sound of the lizards’ teeth is horrible. Say they can’t come and eat us. Say it now.

Take them away, take them away, and take away the men’s fingers, scratching at the door.

Daddy, where have you got to? Can’t Mummy come back from heaven and save us?

Come, just come.

My voice, ours, belong to other girls.

Little brother’s scared, Daddy. More scared than ever. We want you to be here and we hug each other and there’s a really, really big lizard creeping through the forest outside our room, there really is, and I dream about its sharp yellow teeth, dream about it grabbing us by our legs and biting until our feet aren’t there any more, and then, once it’s destroyed us, it creeps away through the forest, in amongst the leaves.

The men.

They’re there, outside. They do something, and the ticking stops, then the ticking starts again.

Are they going to kill us now, Daddy? They’re so angry.

Little brother’s calmer now, quiet, like he’s too tired to do anything.

In the end, he did jump into the pool. From the edge, when no one was looking, and his armbands helped him float. His whole head went under the water, but he wasn’t scared, because he’d decided he was going to dare.

He did it! I cried.

He dared!

He has to dare again now.

I hug him, and he smells better than all the horrid things.

It smells so bad here, and we’re the ones who smell, Daddy, you have to come now, or send someone to get us, because otherwise we’ll end up dead and we’ll go to heaven and God and Jesus.

It’s getting worse, Daddy. We’ve done wees and poos, and no one’s cleaned it up.

I see their feet under the crack of the door.

The light goes dark when they come closer.

They shout at each other.

They sound scared.

As if a cruel beast has caught them in the forest and is going to eat them, just like that, Daddy.

We cry. I cry and he cries but I don’t shout any more because no matter how much I shout the scared bit of my stomach won’t go away.

I’m so scared, Daddy, and so is he, and that will only get better if you come and get us. They hit us when we tried to run away, when they opened the door. So now we stay in the corner, Daddy, a long way from them, and maybe they’ll forget about us, so we can sneak out, run into the forest and disappear.

But the lizards are out there. When the men showed them to us, when we got here after the plane, I realised that you weren’t waiting for us, like they told us.

Spiders.

And snakes in their lairs.

They’re going to want to bite us, snap at us with their warm teeth, make us poisonous so that no one will want to hug us again, so we’ll never again feel warm skin against our own.

Tap your finger against a vein and it will come to life.

Become powerful and blue, and there are still plenty of places to aim at on the map of my elbows and lower arms.

It’s nice underground.

Here I’m left alone, at least most of the time, here I can let the syringe dip into a volcano and then have its contents trickle like magma into my body, making me forget everything that’s happened, and think that I have a future.

The pain when the needle breaks my skin is wonderful, because it means that the great pain is almost over. I lie down on the damp stone, hear the underground trains rattling along the tracks above my head, and then I sink into a warm bed, feel warm water surround me, nothing but love caressing me until once again I feel all the love vanish and become impossible.

The years have passed.

I have disappeared from my family, changed my name, run away from everyone who hates me and wishes me harm. I live underground, stealing whatever I can get. I live alone, but sometimes they come, the men, and I don’t know what they do with me, and then it happens, even though it’s not supposed to, it shouldn’t happen to a body as ravaged as mine.