Savage Spring (33 page)

A crow flies past outside the window. The bird has a worm in its beak, and in the darkness the worm becomes a little snake slithering across the cloudless dawn sky.

‘You have to help them,’ a faint voice says behind her back, making her jump, and she turns around, expecting to see one of the night-shift nurses who’d entered the room without her noticing. But there’s no one there, just the dusty stillness of the hospital room, and the smell of a life that has reached its end.

‘You have to help them,’ the voice says again, and Malin feels her fear fade, and says: ‘Is that you, Hanna? Are you here?’

She waits for an answer.

‘Is it your girls I have to help? I’m trying to get justice for them.’

The room is silent and still, and Malin wants to hear the friendly, calm voice again, and then it returns: ‘I can’t see my girls here.’

‘They aren’t with you?’

The voice doesn’t answer.

Malin senses it slipping away. Vanishing through the window, and she turns around and looks out at the sky. Wants answers to her many questions.

‘Come back, Hanna,’ Malin says. ‘Come back, and tell me what I have to do to help them.’

‘She’s not coming back. She’s dead.’

The female voice comes from behind her, from the door. Malin turns around once more, sees a sturdy body clad in white coming into the room, a coarse-featured face beneath cropped hair.

‘Are you talking to the dead, Inspector?’

No trace of irony. No fear, no surprise, just mild bemusement.

‘I don’t know what got into me,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe I should call in at the psychiatric department?’

‘Best to stay well away from there,’ the nurse says, holding out her hand.‘Siv Stark, I work the night shift.’

‘Were you on duty the night Hanna died?’

Siv Stark shakes her head.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘We’ll need to question everyone who works here.’

‘Something’s obviously happened, I can tell that much from the fact that forensics officers were here cordoning off the room and conducting some sort of search. What is it? Was there something funny about the way Hanna Vigerö died?’

‘I can’t say anything else at the moment, but if you could let the others know that they’ll have to be questioned, I’d be grateful.’

Peter Hamse.

She simultaneously wants and doesn’t want to talk to him.

Siv Stark nods, then smiles, and in the dawn light her mouth looks twice as big, yet without being frightening or grotesque.

‘Was she here?’ Siv Stark asks. ‘Or her girls, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. I’m trying to listen to them. Believe in them.’

Siv Stark searches through one of the pockets of her white coat. Then she takes out a small tub of chewing tobacco and inserts a dose under her top lip, and the smell of the tobacco makes Malin feel sick, and she wants to get out, back home to her flat, to Tove, to the soft, clean smell of her daughter, a smell that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

The two women leave the room together.

They can’t hear the desperate cries behind them.

Two girls crying for their mother.

A mother crying for her girls.

It’s a quarter to six when Malin curls up in bed beside Tove.

She doesn’t wake up, just makes room instinctively before cuddling up to Malin in her sleep and wrapping her arms around her. Malin starts to sweat, and thinks that she’ll never get to sleep like this, yet this is still where she wants to be, just like this, finding some way of expressing all the love in the world, pressing against Tove until there’s nothing between them. Soon she’ll be gone, and that scares me, makes me scared of being lonely, and I want to keep her here.

Everyone lets me down.

Tove, who wants to go to Lundsberg.

Dad.

Janne, Daniel. Everyone abandons me, and Malin feels like crying, sinking into self-pity, but she knows that won’t do, it just leads straight to hell, and instead she tries to enjoy Tove’s warmth, and slowly her brain stops spinning at top speed, the images overlap each other more slowly, with less logic, and she is carried out into a flower meadow where she can breathe, and she’s a little girl hurtling over the meadow, not looking at her feet, a little girl whose goal is the horizon.

Then a dog barks.

And the girl stops and looks at the ground and she screams, jumps, and tries to run away, but she’s stuck in mud where little blood-stained baby lizards are trying to dig their teeth into her ankles, and spiders with long hairy legs crawl up into the girl’s hair, trying to get into her eyes, mouth, and ears. The creatures want to make her mute, blind, and deaf, want to free her from all desires, from all greed, and Malin wants to escape from her dream, but forces herself to stay, and then the meadow is replaced by a hospital room, and she sees her brother lying there in bed under white sheets, asleep. He’s grown up, and yet he’s a little baby dressed in a pale blue rompersuit that she recognises from so many dreams dreamt.

His face is thin, and his chin is slight, and his body small and slender, and his sleep seems dreamless and free from worry. In her dream Malin thinks: I’m not the one who’s been abandoned, you are, and if human life is a contest to see who has been most abandoned, maybe you’d win?

I’ve let you down. Haven’t I? But why am I so scared of going to visit you? After all, I want to give you my love. Am I scared of the way you are, and what that’s going to make me feel?

She feels like going up to her brother.

To stroke his cheek, but before she has the chance to move, the backdrop of the dream changes, into a stinking pit running with damp, surrounded by water on all sides, where two tiny creatures are whimpering in a corner, and she wants to get them out of there, but she can’t, because they have no faces, no names, she doesn’t know who they are.

You have to save us.

You have to.

And she stays in the room, freezing the image of the dirty, frightened children, letting Tove’s body merge with the children’s, the stuff that dreams are made of, the sense of proximity that only leaves Malin Fors when she wakes up.

Åke Fors has got up early.

He’s sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee in one hand and the
Correspondent
in front of him.

But he doesn’t feel like reading the news, can’t even be bothered to find out the latest about the bomb, because he’s got enough to deal with from his own latest explosion.

From where he’s sitting he can almost feel the grass in the park outside bubbling with life. He can feel the vibrations of the worms, of everything eager to grow, yet somehow hesitating.

Åke Fors hasn’t got the energy to get up and look out at the park, and see the beautiful, almost perfect spring day that’s coming into being.

Malin.

He takes a sip of coffee.

How will you ever forgive me? Do you even want to?

But we have to get closer to each other. We can’t just give up.

I’m going to stay here. Not leave. Stay, with my regret and guilt.

If you’d drunk yourself to death, it would have been my fault.

Margaretha.

How the hell did you get me to do what you wanted? That was how it was. It was. Wasn’t it?

Birdsong. A bumblebee buzzing.

I suppose it was easiest that way. However it came about.

37

Tove and Malin have opened the window facing St Lars Church, letting the warmth of the sun caress their faces.

Tove is drinking coffee.

They’re both eating sandwiches, and Malin has just told her what happened at her dad’s, at Grandad’s, last night, and Tove repeats: ‘You have to forgive him. Try. One way or another, there are just the three of us now, aren’t there?’

Malin doesn’t answer.

She just looks down at the recently smartened up St Lars Park, where a group of youngsters is busy setting up some market stalls.

‘What do you think they’re selling?’ Malin asks.

‘Secrets often end up like that,’ Tove says. ‘They get bigger and bigger the longer you hold onto them, and in the end you just can’t talk about them.’

‘We’ll see. So, am I supposed to contact Lundsberg?’

‘Ideally. But I could do it myself. Are you going to talk to Dad about it?’

Janne.

The blonde woman by his side last night.

‘No need. I’ll email the headmaster. It’s a good thing, isn’t it? Tell your dad it’s OK with me. Pretty much every company director in the country went there, didn’t they?’

‘Almost,’ Tove says.

‘So you can end up as a director and look after me when I get old.’

‘I’m not going to end up as some wretched director,’ Tove says, and Malin looks at her, knows she’s going to make a success of things among the posh kids, feels the word ‘wretched’ rolling around her head, she’d have gone for ‘fucking’ herself, but wretched is perfectly good for a smart girl in a situation like this.

Malin takes a deep breath.

The rays of the spring sun are warm, almost enough to burn, at least that’s what it feels like, inside the open window of the flat.

Where are my sunglasses? Haven’t bothered to dig them out yet, but it’s almost time.

The clock on the church tower says half past eight, and even though Malin only got a few hours’ sleep last night, she no longer feels tired, just ready and full of anticipation for the day’s work.

She’ll have to shelve all the other crap.

Lock it away in some distant little room in her consciousness. Take it out again when the time comes.

Börje Svärd is walking quickly through Tornhagen. Wants to get to the station in time for the morning meeting. He walks past the unassuming little houses and the yellow-brick blocks of flats.

His second walk of the day.

He was out with the dogs at six o’clock.

But he needs to keep moving, not to suppress Anna’s memory, or any thoughts about the case they’re working on, but because he wants to hold onto her memory.

He breathes in the spring air.

Remember Anna as a young woman, before her MS slowly sucked the life from her. But the illness never managed to steal her happiness. Just as little as the bomb in the square would manage to steal the city’s happiness now.

The past few days’ hard work on the case have taken their toll on both body and soul.

He heard on the radio that all the country’s banks would be opening once again, but with rigorous security measures in place, and extra guards.

Börje reaches the Valla road, waits at the pedestrian crossing, and looks at the old buildings of Gamla Linköping.

Then he hears a car horn and turns to see Waldemar’s green car pulling up at the crossing, and his weather-beaten face sticking out of the open window.

‘Do you want a lift, partner?’

Partner?

Well, that’s probably what they are.

‘Sure.’

‘Let’s stop for coffee at the 7-Eleven,’ Waldemar says once they’re on their way. ‘I need some decent coffee.’

‘Why not?’ Börje says. ‘I don’t know why, but I get the feeling this case is moving into a different phase now. Don’t you think?’

Waldemar nods and lights a cigarette without asking if Börje minds.

Unusually few people in the police station.

Just a few uniforms meandering about trying to look busy.

But then Sven has probably arranged the interviews up at the hospital by now.

Where are Börje Svärd and Waldemar Ekenberg? She wants to ask them to go and talk to the staff at the children’s pre-school again, the North Wind school in Ekholmen, and then someone at the day centre in Vidingsjö where Hanna Vigerö worked.

Malin’s sitting at her computer, and thinks that that’s where she wants to start.

Wants to get an idea of who Hanna Vigerö was, who the girls were. Properly. Strangely enough, no one has done that up to now. But everything has happened so quickly.

Zeke.

Where is he?

She ought to have called him, but she hopes Sven has explained the angle that he and Malin will be working on from now on.

Zeke will follow her lead. She knows that. And she knows she’s going to need the energy and drive that he can contribute. Never backing down, getting on with the job.

He’ll have the energy to switch to looking into the Vigerö family. To try to see every aspect of the investigation into the bombing in the main square in a new light.

He has to have the energy.

Six-year-old girls shouldn’t get blown up.

Their mum shouldn’t be asphyxiated during the night in hospital.

We should never accept that.

‘Malin.’

She hears Zeke’s voice behind her.

It makes her feel safe, finally anchoring her in the present. I’ve been falling through the air since the bomb went off, she thinks.

‘Let’s get to work,’ Zeke says. ‘Sven’s told me about Hanna Vigerö, and what he wants the two of us to do.’

Malin nods.

‘I thought we could start with population records.’

Zeke pulls his chair around the desk they share and sits down next to Malin as she starts typing on the computer, logging in with her police authorisation, and soon Hanna Vigerö’s details are up on the screen in front of them.

Born in Linköping in 1969, parents Johan and Karin Karlsson.

Married Pontus Vigerö in 1994.

And twin girls.

Born 2004, January.

Nothing odd, nothing remarkable.

‘The girls,’ Zeke says. ‘Check the girls, go into their records.’

‘Haven’t we already checked their birth certificates?’

‘Not as far as I know. They were identified by their dental records. And we haven’t had any reason to look into their files more closely.’

A black pupil, an angelic child’s eye above a torn cheek.

I still don’t know which of you the eye belonged to, which one of you was staring at me, Malin thinks, but does it really matter?

You were twins, so perhaps you thought of yourselves as one and the same person, the way twins often do?

They bring up Tuva Vigerö’s record on screen.

‘Hang on,’ Zeke says. ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

And Malin holds her breath.

Then reads: ‘Born Stockholm, Karolinska Hospital, 2004. Adopted at birth by Pontus and Hanna Vigerö.’