Savage Spring (38 page)

Then Malin’s mobile buzzes.

A text.

From Ottilia Stenlund.

‘Check the City Mission, at Slussen.’

‘What was that?’

‘Josefina Marlöw. Ottilia Stenlund thinks she might be at Slussen.’

Malin.

You’re getting close to Josefina now.

Does she know what’s happened to us?

Is she sad, grieving?

Is she as scared as we are?

Come to us, Mummy and Daddy, you’re our real parents, aren’t you?

Father, Mother, come here, to our domain.

They’re crying now, Malin, the other children, the nasty thing is getting closer to them again. Full of fury. And the lizards that want to eat them up.

You’ve got to hurry, Malin. Hurry up and save them.

Before it’s all too late.

42

Zeke and Malin manage to find a parking space close to the Katarina Lift.

It’s already half past three, and Malin looks across to the round building sitting on top of the Slussen traffic interchange like a truncated, abandoned stump. Beyond it, the City Museum tries in vain to make itself visible in the urban confusion, pale posters for exhibitions about the city of the future hanging limply from its walls.

Who cares about the future? the people passing by seem to be thinking.

She turns to look back towards the commercial centre of the city.

The cars crowding along Skeppsbron seemed to want to spin out onto the quayside walk, where old, rusty ferries and a grey navy vessel are lying at anchor.

Across the water come shrieks and shouts from the Gröna Lund funfair, and the Djurgården ferries steam sedately back and forth. The air is thick with traffic fumes and pollen, and the heavy smell of diesel reminds Malin of the homebrew she drank as a teenager, and she remembers the wonderful sense of intoxication rather than the nightmarish hours spent vomiting over the rim of the toilet.

Red buses are driving on the carriageway beneath them, and a blue and grey train pulls out, heading for the suburbs, past the quayside where a Viking Line ferry is waiting to be filled with pensioners and booze-cruisers.

They head down towards the quayside and stop at a security booth at the entrance to a garage, and Malin leans forward and asks the skinny young guard: ‘The City Mission’s supposed to be somewhere around here, do you know where it is?’

And the guard stares at her, grins, then says in a hostile voice: ‘This isn’t an information desk. Get lost.’

And Zeke instinctively takes a step back, then two steps forward, and Malin realises what the guard thinks they are. Do they really look like a couple of homeless people? But even if they were, this bastard shouldn’t be talking to them like that. Play the game, Fors, do it right.

‘I was just asking a simple question. You’ve got no right to . . .’

And she can tell that Zeke has realised what she’s doing, and is holding off behind her.

‘Get lost. Or I’ll call for reinforcements and arrest you,’ the guard says. ‘You shouldn’t be hanging around here.’

‘I—’

‘And then I’ll call the cops, so just take yourselves off somewhere else now.’

‘You stupid little shit,’ Malin says, pressing her index finger against the window of the booth. ‘You sit there in your third-rate fucking uniform, like a little rat in a cage, and you have the nerve to think you can . . .’

The guard moves his hand to the phone beside him, and Malin yells: ‘Now it’s your turn to listen to me very fucking carefully!’

And Zeke steps up alongside her, presses his police ID against the glass, and Malin sees the guard’s stubbly little chin drop as his mouth opens and closes like a fish, and he looks scared, his eyes flitting to the water behind them.

‘Is that any way to treat people?’ Malin says. ‘You’re supposed to show them a bit of respect. You get that? No matter who they are.’

‘Where. Is. The. City. Mission?’

Zeke’s voice is as hard and hoarse and blunt as only his voice can be.

Bastard guard.

A minute later they’re standing outside the unassuming, shabby doorway of the City Mission at the start of Stadsgården. There’s a terrible racket from some air-conditioning pipes and fans mounted high on the concrete roof above them, and the stench of petrol fumes and rubbish is overwhelming.

A group of drunks is hanging around some steps, looking at Malin and Zeke, and one of them calls out through a toothless grin: ‘So the city’s finest have found their way here, then?’

A slender-limbed, middle-aged woman called Madelene Adeltjärn, dressed in a white blouse and blue jeans, is leading them through the shelter. The yellow linoleum floor shimmers under the dull fluorescent lighting as the empty dormitories are cleaned by cleaners, all of them black.

In the refectory, a man is picking at the last of the day’s lunch.

‘We’re closed between lunchtime and eight o’clock in the evening,’ Madelene Adeltjärn explains as she shows them into her cramped office, with a barred window looking out into a narrow internal shaft.

‘Our clients are allowed in for dinner, then they get a bed for the night if they’re sober, in order of arrival, until we run out. We’re full every night.’

Madelene Adeltjärn sits down behind a tiny desk, and it’s as if she can sense Malin wondering what a woman like her is doing here, in this setting, in this office.

There are no other chairs in the room, so she and Zeke remain standing.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Madelene Adeltjärn says. ‘I come from what you’d probably call a good family. We’ve got money. But there’s nothing more empty than money. I’m a trained social worker, and I feel I can make a difference here, working with people who haven’t had such an easy life as me. That’s it, really. Money can ease your hunger, but it can’t help your soul.’

Malin can feel her jaw dropping.

‘I didn’t mean . . .’

Zeke is grinning beside her, and says: ‘Yes you did.’

‘I’m no saint,’ Madelene Adeltjärn says with a smile. ‘I have very expensive habits.’

Then Zeke focuses, keen to make progress.

‘What do you know about a Josefina Marlöw? Does she usually come here?’

‘I’m not bound by any confidentiality legislation. But I’m very careful with our clients’ privacy.’

‘Please,’ Malin says. ‘We mean her no harm, we don’t want to arrest her, we just want to ask her a few questions.’

Madelene Adeltjärn doesn’t ask what it’s about, and just nods.

‘I know who Josefina is, where she’s from. I can see myself in her, even if she’s taken the act of running away to a far more extreme conclusion.’

‘How do you mean?’ Malin says.

‘I mean there’s a difference between working with the homeless in order to make amends, and actually becoming homeless.’

‘Does she usually come here?’ Zeke asks.

‘Occasionally,’ Adeltjärn says. ‘A few nights a week for food, but she never sleeps here.’

‘Where does she sleep?’

‘I don’t know. In the underground, maybe.’

‘You said you knew her background. What can you tell us?’ Malin says.

‘Like I said, I’m very careful . . .’

‘We’re talking about murder here,’ Malin says. ‘That much I can tell you,’ and she sees Madelene Adeltjärn’s pupils contract as a shiver of fear runs through her.

‘She’s Josef Kurtzon’s daughter. She’s a heroin addict. I’ve seen her around ever since I first started here, and I have to say I’m surprised she’s still alive. She’s extremely run-down, quite possibly seriously ill.’

‘And she’s turned her back on her family?’ Malin asks.

‘I presume so.’

‘Why?’ Zeke asks.

‘I don’t know. I’ve got no idea, but environments in which life merely revolves around money can be fatal for the soul. Sometimes you just can’t take any more, the greed and the lust for power growing bigger than love, and you try to find somewhere to escape to. And if you get your hands on heroin at that point, maybe that looks like a good way to escape.’

‘Do you think she might be here this evening?’ Malin asks.

Madelene Adeltjärn shakes her head.

‘That’s impossible to say.’

‘Do you think any of the people outside might know where she is?’

‘You can ask, but I doubt they’ll be particularly willing to talk to you.’

Sure enough, none of the men or women outside the City Mission wants to talk to them, or even answer a single question about Josefina Marlöw, so they go back inside. Madelene Adeltjärn invites them to wait on the shabby sofas in the lobby, and she brings them each a cup of coffee before disappearing further inside the building again.

Posters on the walls.

About Aids and the risk of infection, about the symptoms of TB and the importance of seeking medical help to prevent the disease spreading.

Malin pulls out her mobile and calls Sven Sjöman, who tells her about the day’s work, and how they still haven’t come up with anything new with any of their lines of inquiry. They’ve checked Jonathan Ludvigsson’s emails and phone log, but there was nothing to link him to the bombing.

They’ve had a visit from an expert in kinesiology from the university. He compared Ludvigsson’s walk with the recording of the cashpoint, and declared almost instantly that he definitely wasn’t the man with the bike outside the bank.

So in principle he’s been eliminated from the investigation.

‘Although we’re likely to charge him about the weapons and making unlawful threats, and maybe fraudulent conduct as well,’ Sven says.

They’ve also been in touch with the unit covering gang-related violence at National Crime. Although there were indications of an increase in tensions between the main biker gangs, there was nothing to suggest that the bomb was intended for Dick Stensson. So they’ve written off that line of inquiry for now.

And the Security Police hadn’t been in touch.

‘So we’re pretty much stuck,’ Sven says. ‘We’re carrying on, of course. Johan hasn’t come up with an address for any of the Kurtzon family yet, but we’re working on it. They’re not registered as residing here, but they’ve got property here somewhere, that much is almost certain. We’ve tried Kurtzon’s company, but they don’t know where Josef is, or they’re refusing to say. What about you, how are you getting on?’

‘We’re sitting in the City Mission beneath Slussen. Waiting for Josefina Marlöw to show up.’

‘OK. We haven’t managed to find out anything else about the Vigerö family. We’ve taken a look at the car crash in which Pontus Vigerö died, but there’s not much there. The car was scrapped a while back now, and the emergency services report is pretty thin, as is our own police report. Looks like he got a puncture and went off the road. There was no reason to suspect any sort of crime, and maybe there still isn’t.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Malin says.

‘No, me neither.’

Sven’s words confuse Malin.

Silence on the line.

‘Are you staying the night in Stockholm?’ he asks eventually, and through a small window looking out across the harbour Malin can see it’s getting darker as a soft but somehow threatening twilight begins to settle over the city.

It strikes her that they haven’t given any thought to where they might spend the night, but they’ll certainly be staying, they’re nowhere near finished with this line of inquiry, and she thinks of the bank card in her wallet, and how there isn’t much left in her account, but enough to pay for a decent hotel room. She won’t have to sleep in the street, or in some toilet, or in some smelly bed in a refuge.

‘We’re staying. We’ll find somewhere.’

‘Good,’ Sven says. ‘Everything OK otherwise?’

OK? Far from OK. Confusing, mainly, but maybe things are on their way to becoming OK.

‘It’s OK,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll be in touch if anything happens.’

Beside her on the sofa Zeke has his eyes closed.

Malin can hear him snoring, and feels how much she’d like to drift off to sleep. She shuts her eyes, and in the theatre of her closed eyelids the boy, the man, the skinny body in the anonymous sickroom, comes to her and he’s alone and she wants to go up to him and stroke his cheek but she doesn’t dare, doesn’t want to take the only thing he’s got away from him, his loneliness.

Buzz.

She’s woken from sleep by her mobile buzzing again.

A text from Johan.

She clicks to open it.

Josef Kurtzon, 42 Strandvägen.

How did Johan manage to get hold of that in the end? Never mind. Maybe he found a domestic residence attached to one of the businesses?

The clock on her phone tells her it’s almost eight o’clock. The City Mission opens in twelve minutes, and there’s a long queue outside the window. Stockholm’s most rootless inhabitants have come to fill their stomachs and maybe sleep in a warm bed with clean sheets.

A few women.

Is one of them Josefina Marlöw?

Zeke opens his eyes, stretches, and says his back aches.

Madelene Adeltjärn comes into the room.

Looks out through the window.

‘You’re in luck,’ she says. ‘I can see Josefina at the back of the queue. Don’t go out, wait until she comes in. Otherwise there’s a high risk she’ll turn on her heels the moment she catches sight of you.’

Malin looks at Josefina Marlöw.

At her big, dark eyes. So like the girls’, but entirely lacking their innocence.

43

Börje Svärd and Waldemar Ekenberg are sitting together in Börje’s kitchen, the seats of the black Myran chairs chafing against their buttocks. They’re each sipping a glass of tepid whisky, their stomachs full of the sausage stroganoff and rice that Börje has just cooked for them.

After spending the whole day tugging at various lines of inquiry, following up on fruitless tip-offs from the public, they had both felt they’d had enough.

They had sat at their desks in the open-plan office, tired and smelling of sweat, looking at each other, thinking that Malin had better make some sort of progress in Stockholm, because how else were they going to get anywhere with this case?

And Börje had realised that he didn’t want to eat alone, and that he could really do with a drink, but definitely not on his own.