Savage Spring (32 page)

‘I mean Grandad.’

Tove gives her a hug, and whispers in her ear: ‘I’ll be fine on my own. Be gentle with him.’

And fifteen minutes later, tired and cold after a chilly walk, at a quarter past three in the morning, Malin is standing outside the building on Barnhemsgatan, and she hesitates, doesn’t want to tap in the code, but her fingers move by themselves, as if the whole of her being knows that it has to hear her father tell the story of her little brother, Stefan.

The stairwell smells of mould and disinfectant, and Malin walks slowly up the stairs, feeling annoyed at having to be here, at this moment.

Thinks: I’m going to put you on the spot. I’m going to make you tell the truth, Dad.

Her dad is sitting in the large armchair in the living room of the flat, or the sitting room, as her mum used to call it. The green fabric of the armchair envelops his increasingly slender frame, and her dad’s thin face, which usually radiates self-confidence and forcefulness, is now radiating a peculiar mixture of weariness and fear, a new sort of hesitancy that Malin is inclined to put down to loneliness.

She rang the doorbell.

He opened the door after the tenth angry ring, not annoyed at being woken – he actually seemed pleased to see her. As for her, she really didn’t feel anything when she saw him.

They sat down opposite each other in the living room. Malin in the red chair where she’s sitting now, feeling the rough fibres of the cheap oriental carpet under her feet. She’s looking at her father, who knows what is expected of him, and he starts to talk, beginning with an apology, or at least an attempt to explain himself.

‘I should have told you a long, long time ago. You had a right to know. But you know how it is, the way things can turn out.’

The way things can turn out? Malin thinks, and feels like interrupting, him but stops herself and lets him go on.

‘The years pass and in the end the secret somehow grows bigger than it really is, we never spoke about it between ourselves, and we’d never agreed how we were going to tell you when you got older. Even when your mum died, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to you, even though I knew perfectly well that the truth was bound to catch up with us now. I was simply very weak, and I’d like to think I did it for your mum’s sake, she wouldn’t have been able to handle what had turned into the biggest lie of her life.’

You’re not even referring to him by his name, Malin thinks. You’re talking about him as a secret. A thing.

Her dad leans forward.

And Malin feels her anger take hold of her, and she feels like shouting at him again, but manages to suppress the outburst by digging the fingers of one hand deep into the stuffing of the armrest.

For Mum’s sake? Or your own?

Don’t you see, haven’t you seen, the way I’ve been feeling? The way I’ve spent the whole of my fucking life feeling? And you’ve been aware that I needed to know, that I’ve been searching for something I felt was missing. My mother’s love, or the brother I never even knew I had.

Malin sits in silence.

Her dad’s voice is like an empty sarcophagus, an echo from someone who accepts their mistakes and shortcomings, and carries on living with them, without placing any specific demands on themselves as far as improvements and the truth are concerned.

A note of resignation.

A note that has more to do with death than life.

How the hell could you let me down like that? Let him down?

‘You mum had an affair with an unmarried office supplies salesman. She met him at Saab, and then one night she was out at a dance with one of her girlfriends. One night at the Freemasons’ Hotel where he was staying. You were three, almost four years old at the time, and she got pregnant, and the man was killed in a car crash a few months into the pregnancy. There was never any talk of a divorce. It was all going to be managed. And I forgave her, and then she moved out during the pregnancy, when it started to show . . .’

I know all that, Malin feels like screaming.

Tell me something I don’t know!

How could you just hide my own brother away from me? Why couldn’t you adopt him, seeing as his father was dead?

She listens to her dad. The words come flying at her like shards of glass, razor-sharp, red-hot.

‘Adoption wasn’t an option, no one wanted him, he wasn’t mine, and he was handicapped, I couldn’t have stood it, it was better to pretend he didn’t exist, never say anything . . .

‘Then, after so many years, it was as if that had become the truth,’ her dad says, and goes on, ‘that the secret didn’t exist. That it was just us, you and me and Mum, and she got obsessed with social status, her own life, her choices, with the fact that everything had to be so damn perfect and lovely when it was really just ordinary and built on shaky foundations. And I went along with it.’

Her dad falls silent, and Malin looks out of the window, at the slowly breaking dawn, thinking that her dad sounds strangely calculating, almost deceitful.

‘Say something, Malin.’

‘How could you just leave him there, alone, even if he wasn’t yours, didn’t you feel any responsibility?’

Her dad looks at her, tries to catch her eye, and Malin realises he wants her to say she understands, but she doesn’t.

‘Didn’t you think I had any right at all to know about my own brother? You know how much I missed having a brother or sister, how the hell could you deny me that right?’

‘He’s severely handicapped, Malin.’

She gets to her feet and shouts: ‘Like that’s got anything to do with anything! For fuck’s sake, couldn’t you have said you were his father? Or didn’t Mum want that? Or were you the one who forced her to abandon him? Gave her an ultimatum and tried to make her look like the cold, heartless villain, when you’re actually no better yourself? You didn’t want him either, did you? Maybe Mum did want him, and you just said no? It wasn’t that fucking easy in those days to just leave your husband, was it?’

Her dad sinks lower into his armchair, holds out his hands, then quickly withdraws them, and it looks as though he’s thinking, then he says, without a trace of denial in his voice:‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Don’t say anything,’ Malin yells. ‘You’ve been silent for thirty years, so you might as well keep quiet for a bit longer.’

‘I understand why you’re angry. But times have changed, as you pointed out.’

She looks at him.

Times have changed? she thinks. You forced Mum to give him up, didn’t you? And maybe she didn’t want to? And that’s why she ended up so cold?

A thin layer of snow melting. Still hiding the truth. Then the next layer melts, and a completely different reality is revealed. Then what? Layer upon layer of ice, of denial and life.

Malin sinks onto the sofa.

Catches her breath.

‘I’m not angry, Dad. Well, yes, I am. But most of all I’m just fucking sad. I’m sad for my own sake. For his, my brother’s sake. I’m sad for Tove’s sake. For Janne’s sake, and yours too, and Mum’s, because this has affected us so much more than you can possibly imagine. You and Mum, together and individually, have trampled all over my life, and that makes me sad.’

Her father stands up, and the insecurity and fear have been replaced by a grown man’s look, and she’s seen it before, that look, in criminals confessing their crimes and prepared to take the consequences, but who still think, deep down in the bottom of their souls, that it was right to commit them.

He turns towards her.

‘What am I supposed to do, Malin? What do you want? What’s done is done, and it can’t be undone. Obviously, I hope you can forgive me.’

You’re crazy, Malin thinks. Completely fucking mad, and she stands up again and leaves her father alone in his living room without another word. She leaves him alone in the flat, surrounded by silence, by the memories of choices made, hours and days lived in the milky, thin air of the lie, and she realises that his loneliness is aggressive, malignant, like cancer, and that she can leave him trapped in it without a second thought.

‘I want to see Tove,’ he calls after her. ‘Let me see Tove.’

She doesn’t want to see you, Malin thinks.

Lundsberg School like a fortress inside her.

Tove doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s on her way away from us.

And me, I know where I’m on my way to.

The first morning light breaks on the empty, scrubbed hospital room. Blue-and-white crime-scene tape is already stretched across the doorframe, and Sven must have called Karin Johannison after their meeting, and got one of her colleagues to go through the room. But they can’t have found anything, today hospital rooms are disinfected the moment the dead and cured alike have made way for another patient.

The nurses on night duty were reluctant to let her into the room, even though she showed her ID.

She couldn’t help herself, and asked after Peter Hamse, even though she knew he was hardly likely to be there at half past four in the morning, and the nurses seemed to have a fair idea of why she was really asking.

She looks around the room.

A man comes in there, she thinks, or a woman, and carefully pulls the pillow out from under Hanna Vigerö’s head, gently putting his or her hand behind her neck and letting her head fall softly to the mattress, before pressing the pillow down over her nose and mouth.

Hanna Vigerö can’t put up any resistance, and maybe she doesn’t want to either, maybe she wants to be with her girls, and in her mind’s eye Malin can see the man – or is it a woman? – pressing the pillow over Hanna Vigerö’s face, and how she gives in, her tensed fingers relaxing, then the straight line on the monitor showing her heartbeat.

Who were you?

What were you doing here? Was there more than one of you?

Did you enjoy the violence? Or did you really not want to do it, but were forced to? If so, by whom? Did you think a coroner or forensics expert wouldn’t notice that she’d been suffocated?

Does any of this have any meaning at all? And then: Are you a ghost?

How else could you get in here at night without being seen or heard? Do you work here at the hospital?

Malin stares into space and tries to open herself up to any remnants of motives or feelings lingering in the air.

You know exactly what you’re doing, she thinks.

But you didn’t really want to do it? Is that it? Malin shuts her eyes, and inside her she sees the man in the hood turn to face the woman on the bed. He’s asking for forgiveness, because you are a man, aren’t you? And you’re asking for forgiveness.

I can’t see your face, Malin thinks. But who are you? You can’t be Jonathan Ludvigsson, because we had him in the cells when you were here.

So who are you? And why, tell me why you were here?

Malin tries to make sense of the thoughts and feelings darting around the dark room. What evil is there in this hospital room?

Evil can come to you in any form.

It often takes you by surprise, but not always. You can devote your whole life to protecting your children, then you open the door to a man who ought to come with love, and when you turn your back he attacks your children, raping them without you even noticing.

Can you protect yourself from evil like that? Is your inattention an evil in and of itself?

The plank with the rusty spike in it under the snow. You notice it when the snow melts, but it’s only a plank, you think, and then the spike goes through your shoe and into your foot.

The infection spreads through your body, your blood heading back towards your heart.

What do you do?

Can you protect yourself against the evil hidden beneath layer upon layer of goodness in those closest to you of all?

In the poisonous plants in the garden?

So what do you do?

Faith. Turn to faith.

Pure evil.

It does exist, Malin can sense it, and we have to keep it shut away. Not accept it, nor deny its existence. Instead we have to try to eradicate it.

A child wants goodness, but can be harmed. Because a child has no knowledge of the world.

You wished your girls well, Hanna, didn’t you? You wished nothing but good for them. And what sort of evil, in whatever form, was it that found its way to you here and suffocated you?

Malin takes a deep breath.

She stands still in the drowsy morning, in the gloomy hospital room.

Then she feels a cold draught in the room, followed by a short burst of warm air against her neck, dancing against her throat before it moves up towards her ear and turns into a whisper.

There’s someone here.

Someone’s here with me.

I’ll listen, she thinks. I’m not frightened. It’s nothing odd.

Talk, and I’ll listen, I promise.

36

We’re here, Malin.

We’re here to remind you about the captive children.

You have to hear them.

They need you, and in order to know who they are, you need to find out who we are, that’s the only way.

We see you standing in the hospital room.

We’re pressing up against you, our little fingers tickling your neck like peacock feathers, and you know we’re here in the room where Mummy died, don’t you?

That’s why you came here, even though you ought to be sleeping.

It’s dark here, but the day is waking up and in the earth there are millions of shoots moving, not sure if they dare to peep out.

The darkness of this room is nothing to the darkness you need to step down into, Malin. There’s a darkness waiting for you that might never end. But don’t be scared, because then you might not dare to go down into it, and then the darkness will only get bigger.

You’re breathing.

Your eyelids are closed, and the room smells of disinfectant and death.

Can you hear us, Malin?

Can you hear us?

Malin opens her eyes.

The voices, the ones she’d been hoping to hear, aren’t there, weren’t there, yet there’s still something encouraging her to press on, making her screw up her eyes until her darkness becomes a flaming, steaming, pulsating hell, and making her realise that wherever the solution to the Linköping bombing is to be found, it will be in just such a hell.