Savage Spring (36 page)

People scattered around the sofas and chairs.

Leafing through copies of the
Metro
, celebrity magazines, or the interior design magazines that one of the staff must have tactlessly brought in from home.

Some of the clientele look familiar. Alcoholics the same age as Malin, but who look a hundred years older and stink of piss and alcohol and dirt, and who are here to pick up the weekly contribution to their drink budget. A skinny woman who looks like she’s in her forties, but is probably no more than twenty. Malin can recognise a drug addict from a hundred metres, the desperate pleading look in their eyes, yet still utterly focused. But there are also perfectly ordinary people in the waiting room, a smart mother with two young children, a man of about thirty in a blue suit and tie, a pensioner with a neatly pressed blue and white striped shirt.

Hardship is striking blind now, Malin thinks. Anyone can lose their job. No one’s safe, and if you can’t make your mortgage payment within twenty days the bank will seize your flat.

You could be out on the street in a month. Yet it’s still hard to feel sorry for people who own flats in this part of the city. Highly paid toffs with luxury cars and runaway expenses. Now some of them are finding out what hardship feels like, and then a man emerges from Ottilia’s office and interrupts Malin’s train of thought, scruffy and dirty the way only the homeless can be, and suddenly a woman in her mid-fifties is standing in front of them, wearing a long, blue-flowered dress.

Her face is round, and a pair of deep blue, intelligent eyes peer out from beneath her blonde fringe.

‘I can see you now,’ she says, looking at Malin and Zeke. ‘Come through, but I’m afraid I don’t have long.’

Malin looks at the standard-issue clock on the wall of Ottilia Stenlund’s office.

Similar to the ones Malin remembers from the rehab centre last autumn.

Twenty past nine.

They’re sitting opposite Ottilia Stenlund, who is looking down at them from her elevated position behind a desk piled high with files and documents.

In front of her on the desk, face down, is a black folder.

She’s got one hand on the folder, as if to protect it, before she lets go of it.

‘I thought you might come,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘What’s happened is absolutely appalling,’ and Malin feels her anger of the previous day flaring up again, and for a few short seconds she thinks that Ottilia Stenlund isn’t going to say anything useful. But Malin manages to control herself, and her fears prove unfounded.

‘It was an extremely unusual case,’ Ottilia Stenlund goes on. ‘Difficult. Unpleasant, very unpleasant. I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

Both Malin and Zeke can sense the fear creeping into the room, crawling across the floor like some ravenous, infected lizard, bringing with it an unshakeable stench of rotting flesh.

The woman on the other side of the desk looks at them.

‘I don’t see I have any other choice but to tell you,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you who the girls’ biological mother is.’

40

Mummy.

You’re not our mummy.

Not our real one.

We were confused at first, but maybe we had a vague idea already.

And now that this lady is telling you, Malin, we’re wondering why you, Hanna, if you weren’t our mummy, why you looked after us? Why did you want to look after us?

Because you loved us, that’s why, isn’t it? Because you needed something to love, and that’s the way it should be.

Mummy!

We’re calling to you, want to ask why you never mentioned anything to us, even though we realise you must have thought we were too little, that you wanted to protect us from ourselves, from what we are, from what we were.

Was that it, Mummy? Were you scared?

And Daddy wasn’t our daddy either, and he isn’t here either. We’re alone, so alone, and we see Malin sitting in an office in a big city that we don’t recognise, and next to her sits the bald man, and in front of them sits a woman, and we can see her mouth moving, but we can’t hear what she’s saying, and we know it’s important. We know she’s telling our story.

How we ended up with you, Mummy, you who aren’t our mummy, and with you, Daddy, you who aren’t our daddy.

But for us you have always been our mummy and daddy, and you always will be, the feeling of a love that can stretch across whole universes, combining the sound of all roaring water, of all thunder clouds blowing back and forth above human beings, whispering to them: Love one another, love one another. And even if you can’t manage that, don’t abandon each other.

Because we were abandoned, but we were also loved.

So who was it who abandoned us?

Who wasn’t able to love us?

A mouth moving way down there. Is it saying a name?

Malin.

Can you get hold of a name? Can you get a description of abandoned love?

Can you tell us about Mummy and Daddy, the real ones, the ones who put us in a little reed boat and set us adrift into this wicked world?

Malin could see Ottilia Stenlund’s mouth move.

Heard what it said. Felt that they were no longer alone in the room.

You’re here, aren’t you? she thinks. Can you hear what she’s saying, what she’s just said?

Ottilia Stenlund has told them, but she didn’t look directly at Malin or Zeke as she did so, as if she were committing some sort of moral crime.

It struck Malin that the woman before her was actually breaching confidentiality laws when she told them what they needed to know, but to hell with that.

The woman who gave birth to the Vigerö twins was a Josefina Marlöw, and at the time she was thirty-three years old, a heavy heroin user, homeless, and was probably raped by another addict while she was high. At any rate, she didn’t know who the father was, and couldn’t actually remember having intercourse at all.

So she said.

Josefina Marlöw was the daughter of the financier Josef Kurtzon, one of the richest men in Sweden, and the owner of a wide-reaching financial empire. The name Kurtzon seemed familiar to Malin, but she couldn’t summon up an immediate picture of the man. It had been Ottilia Stenlund’s duty as a social worker to ensure that the children were taken care of after they were born: the idea that they would be looked after by Josefina Marlöw, single, and a heavy heroin user, had been out of the question. Ottilia Stenlund confirmed what Malin had heard, that the natural solution in cases like that was to place the children with members of their immediate family, or find a foster home for them. Usually Social Services did everything they could to avoid going straight for adoption, there were hardly any Swedish infants adopted at birth any more.

But Josefina Marlöw had insisted on it, her family must never know that she had been pregnant, let alone that the children existed, or where they had gone. She had turned her back on her family and changed her name, and Ottilia Stenlund didn’t want to, or perhaps couldn’t, go into the reasons why.

Thoughts were bouncing around inside Malin’s head.

So, even if the girls had been adopted, they were members of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families?

What did that mean?

Could someone have wanted to get at them somehow because of money? And what could have turned this Josefina Marlöw into a drug user, so heavily addicted that it made her abandon her children?

Ottilia Stenlund went on.

‘Josefina kept herself clean while she was pregnant, but no longer than that. She was adamant that the children should be adopted by a decent Swedish couple with no connection at all to her family, and that they mustn’t be rich. Josefina was careful to stress that the adoptive parents should be ordinary people, as she put it. We did as she asked. There were no legal problems about not telling anyone else. The pregnancy and children were legally considered to be Josefina’s private business.’

‘What about her family, weren’t they keeping an eye on her?’ Zeke asked, and Ottilia Stenlund just shook her head and said: ‘That family scares me. I’ve no idea if they knew about what was going on. Maybe Josefina just disappeared off their radar.’

‘Why didn’t she want anything to do with her family?’

‘She didn’t want to talk about it. But I got the impression that a lot of terrible things had happened in her childhood.’

‘Her name wasn’t mentioned on the adoption papers.’

‘No,’ Ottilia Stenlund replied. ‘Information sometimes gets lost . . . Not even our system is perfect.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Josefina is one of Stockholm’s underground angels.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Malin asked.

‘She told me she lived underground. In tunnels and sewers, in the passageways of underground stations, and all she could think about was heroin. Don’t ask me where she was getting the money, but she had no bank account, we knew that much. I assume she was prostituting herself, maybe stealing as well. Well, the way a lot of them do.’

‘But if her family was so rich, why work as a prostitute?’

‘She didn’t want anything to do with their money.’

Malin nodded, then fell silent, and in that silence she now sees Ottilia Stenlund stand up and walk about the room, thinking before she says: ‘I presume you’ll want to talk to Josefina. I honestly don’t have any idea of where she might be. She disappeared straight after the girls were born. She was exhausted when she left the hospital, and I haven’t had any contact with her since then. That was six years ago . . .’

‘How did you come to be involved in the first place?’

‘I was her social worker when she returned to the city after she was sectioned for rehab up in Norrland. Long before she got pregnant.’

When Malin hears the word ‘sectioned’ the memories come flooding back to her, the disgust and seediness and shame, and the offensive intimacy she experienced when Sven Sjöman sent her to the rehab centre out in the forest.

But still.

Since then she’s managed to stay in control of the urge to drink – but that wasn’t thanks to any sort of fucking group therapy. That was down to me.

‘So you’ve got no idea where we might find her?’ Zeke asks.

Ottilia Stenlund shakes her head, but in her eyes Malin sees something that suggests that Ottilia Stenlund knows more than she’s prepared to say about Josefina Marlöw’s whereabouts.

She’s just about to put pressure on Ottilia Stenlund when the woman raises her hand to Malin and says: ‘I’ve already told you far more than I should. I’ve gone far enough. You’ll have to ask your colleagues in the Stockholm force. If Josefina is still alive, they might know where she could be.’

Malin makes do with this.

Zeke shakes his head slightly, as if to say that this will do, that she’s already given them more than they could have hoped, and then Malin asks: ‘What about Kurtzon? What do you know about her father? The family?’

‘If you google them you’ll find loads of information. He’s a bit like a latterday Wallenberg, only more secretive. You know, working invisibly behind the scenes.’

‘I’ve heard of the name,’ Zeke says. ‘They have those investment funds, don’t they?’

‘Those, and much more,’ Ottilia Stenlund says, going over to the door.

‘If you’ll excuse me, detectives. I’ve got a client waiting. I don’t want to have to put in too much overtime on a Saturday.’

Do you know, Malin, do you know?

We floated down and were hanging in the air right in front of the woman’s face, and we tried to read her lips when she spoke to you and do you know, do you know, Malin, we could understand, and we kept seeing the name Josefina. Josefina, is that the name of our real mummy, the woman who carried us and gave birth to us?

So who is she? Where is she? Shall we look for her together, Malin? We want to see her, want to read her lips to see what she says about us.

Does she think about us?

Do we exist for her?

But we do, we must. Maybe she’s drifting here with us as well, even though we can’t see her.

What about our real daddy? Who was he?

Maybe she didn’t know anything about him, our real mummy.

Things are coming together, Malin.

Can you feel it?

Spring is showing its anxious face now, and those are our faces you can see, contorted by grimaces, Malin, that’s us you can hear calling: Mummy, Daddy, come to us, we daren’t be on our own any more, we don’t want to be frightened any more.

The other children, the ones who are locked up, they’re shouting, just like we are. And we’re wondering: Did we have to die so that they can live? Isn’t that rather unfair? Isn’t everything supposed to be fair?

How are we supposed to understand any of this?

As they’re standing in the lift on the way down from their encounter with Ottilia Stenlund, Malin switches on her mobile.

Two missed calls. Two new messages.

Dad.

Don’t call me.

Tove.

SHIT, shit, shit.

I forgot to call Tove and tell her I was coming to Stockholm.

Her stomach clenches.

Her heart turns black, the blood inside it congeals. How could I?

She brings up Tove’s number, but there’s no answer.

Instead Tove’s beautiful, slightly hoarse voice, saying: ‘I can’t talk right now. Leave a message after the bleep and I’ll get you back.’

Malin smiles, then she starts laughing, she’d forgotten what Tove’s sense of humour was like, and she thinks she could stay in that lift for weeks, just listening to the message over and over again.

‘What’s going on, Malin?’ Zeke asks.

She holds her hand over the phone.

‘Nothing. I think I might be going a bit mad.’

She takes her hand away.

‘Tove. I’m in Stockholm for work. I’ll call you later.’

‘You’ve been mad for a while now,’ Zeke says, and they leave the lift and walk out of the building.