Savage Spring (41 page)

‘Dad,’ Tove says after a while, ‘Mum said she saw you with someone else in the city. One evening. Outside Teddy’s sandwich bar.’

Janne turns away from the film and looks at Tove, and the look in his eyes is tired, as if he’d rather not have this conversation now.

‘She said that? Someone else? It sounds as if your mother’s having trouble understanding that it’s over between us.’

‘She didn’t put it quite like that, I can’t remember.’

‘Well, it’s true though. There is a girl I’ve been seeing,’ he says. ‘She works at the hospital, she’s a nurse in the X-ray department. You’ll like her.’

‘So you mean I’ll have to meet her?’

‘If you want, but it’ll probably be hard to avoid, because I really do like her.’

‘And you think I’ll like her?’

‘Definitely.’

On television a bearded man puts a noose around a woman’s neck in a narrow alley. They watch the end of the scene before her dad asks: ‘You’re not upset that I’m seeing someone?’

‘No. Not if it’s what you want. I think it’s a good thing. Then I know that you won’t be alone.’

Her dad puts his arm around her and pulls her towards him.

‘What have I done to deserve such a kind, considerate daughter?’

‘I did think I might be jealous if either of you met someone, but it actually feels good. For your sake. I wish Mum could meet someone as well.’

‘You know I’ll always put you first.’

And Tove frowns, lets out a little laugh, then says: ‘Sure, Dad. Same as ever,’ and Janne knows he hasn’t got a good response to Tove’s quip.

They’ve never truly put her first, and she knows it, and is having to live with it like an adult, and it’s all wrong, so wrong.

‘How old is she?’ Tove asks.

‘She’s twenty-four.’

‘But Dad, I’m almost twenty-four.’

Janne sits there without saying anything, feeling Tove’s eyes on him.

‘You know enough about love to know that you don’t get to decide everything yourself,’ he finally says.

The woman on the screen slips out of the noose onto the rain-drenched tarmac of the dark alley, and the man runs off towards the nearest subway station.

‘What is it that you like about her?’

‘Please, Tove, I’m trying to watch the film, I’m a grown-up, and grown-ups want someone to live with, to be with.’

‘I realise that, but why her in particular?’

Her dad’s reply comes in a flash.

Blows like a harsh wind through a wide-open teenage soul.

‘Because she’s the complete opposite of your mum.’

Malin.

Will you ever be able to forgive me.

Ever?

Åke Fors can’t sleep, and the bedroom of the flat in Barnhemsgatan feels cramped and hot, the bed hard and lonely, and he thinks that he doesn’t deserve forgiveness, and then he thinks what he has thought so many times before: Do I have a responsibility for the boy? Did I ever, right from the start?

No.

No, no, he wasn’t mine, and I didn’t want anything to do with him, but of course Malin had a right to know. And Margaretha had a choice, didn’t she?

The flat in Tenerife.

Maybe it would be best just to leave, start something new, God knows, there are plenty of widows who would be only too happy to open their arms to him.

But this is where life is now.

Here and now, with Malin and Tove. This battle can’t be avoided.

But there’s something wrong.

And you know it, he thinks.

But time still passes, year after year after year, without you ever gathering your strength and doing anything about the mistake.

What does that say about us as people?

I ended up feeling scared of myself. Of what I’d become, of my own weakness. Are you scared of the same thing, Malin, and is it inside that fear that we’re going to have to meet?

I was there when you tried to make sense of the world when you were small. I lifted you out of your despair, your shame when you’d done something stupid, comforted you when you were sad.

Together, Malin, we can put an end to each other’s fear.

Like father and daughter should.

What could possibly have happened within the Kurtzon family? Malin wonders.

She and Zeke are in the car, on the way back to the Hotel Tegnérlunden.

Zeke behind the wheel, as usual, even though she could perfectly well drive now that she’s always sober.

‘So he disinherited his sons,’ Zeke says. ‘And told them. And probably also told them that Josefina Marlöw would end up in control of some sort of trust.’

Malin can feel how tired she is, she’s having trouble thinking clearly.

‘The brothers are the key to this,’ she says. ‘I can feel it. Why was Ottilia Stenlund so scared? I think she’s scared of the family, of the brothers. Their father seems harmless enough in his current state, he could have been like that for years, he might have been blind for a long time. But, on the other hand, who knows how far his power stretches?’

‘We don’t even know who the brothers are,’ Zeke says. ‘Johan didn’t mention them when he told us about Kurtzon, did he? And we’ve even less idea of where they might be.’

‘And we don’t even know if the Vigerö girls’ background has anything to do with the bombing, or Hanna Vigerö’s murder. Josef Kurtzon really didn’t seem to know about them.’

‘There has to be a connection,’ Zeke says. ‘We just need to work out what it is.’

As they drive past the NK department store, Malin thinks about how many of Stockholm’s very richest inhabitants lend legitimacy to their ruthless capitalism by getting involved in the running of the City Mission and other charities.

But Kurtzon doesn’t appear to give a damn about legitimacy, and for that reason money had always loved him.

She goes on to think about evil.

How she is sometimes inclined to think that it doesn’t exist, because she can’t feel its presence. Like when winter makes its last offensive against the spring, and one day the temperature plummets below zero and there’s more snow and your whole body screams: ‘Spring is an illusion. It doesn’t exist!’

But at the same time Malin is sure: evil does exist, it’s alive and flourishing wherever there are people, often where you’d least expect it, behind a thicket of goodness in a human soul.

‘I’d like to talk to Josefina Marlöw again. Try to find out if she actually knows about her father’s plans for his estate.’

‘And the trust,’ Zeke says. ‘What’s to say that the brothers wouldn’t gain control of it and the money if Josefina Marlöw no longer existed? Do you think the old man considered that? That he might have put Josefina in danger?’

‘He strikes me as the kind of man who thinks of everything,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe he’s trying to manipulate yet another game from his deathbed?’

‘What if the brothers knew about the daughters their sister gave up for adoption, and wanted to get rid of them to stop them popping up to claim any of the money?’

‘No, we can’t make that fit,’ Malin says. ‘We don’t have enough to go on.’

And she thinks about the infamous Stenbeck family. How badly the siblings treated Jan Stenbeck’s unknown son when he popped up out of nowhere after the financier died. They acted as if he didn’t exist, even though he was their half-brother. But maybe that was only the distorted picture portrayed by the media?

Then Malin sees the man with the bike in the video in her mind’s eye.

One of the Kurtzon brothers?

‘Drive to the refuge,’ she says. ‘I’d like to try to talk to Josefina Marlöw this evening. Something tells me it’s urgent.’

‘But she never sleeps there?’

‘Maybe there’ll be someone there who can tell us where she is. Have you got any better ideas?’

Then she says: ‘I’ll give Johan Jakobsson a call. Ask him to see what he can find out about the brothers.’

‘He’ll be asleep by now. Or at least the kids will be, he’s bound to be at home by now. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’

‘No,’ Malin says.

46

The day’s spring warmth has been replaced by a damp night chill, and there’s no longer any shouting or yelling from Gröna Lund.

It’s almost eleven o’clock.

Johan Jakobsson was still up. He said he’d have a look on his computer at home and see what he could find about the brothers.

The noise of Stockholm’s nocturnal traffic mixes with the rumble from the air-conditioners, and beside the entrance to the City Mission at Slussen sits a group of run-down men, passing bottles between them.

Malin and Zeke go up to them.

Malin recognises several of them, they were milling about outside the City Mission earlier, waiting to get in, but maybe they were too drunk, too high, or simply too unruly to get a bed.

Calm now.

No threat. Just cold and tired, and Malin asks, without looking at any of them in particular: ‘Do you know where we could find Josefina?’

‘What do you want with that whore?’ one of the men snarls, but there’s nothing threatening or critical in his voice, it’s just a statement of fact.

‘We’re from—’

Zeke is interrupted.

‘We know you’re cops,’ another of the men says.

‘We just want to talk to her,’ Malin says. ‘Nothing else.’

The men stay silent, looking at Malin and Zeke, waiting for the inevitable.

Malin takes out her wallet. Holds up a five-hundred-kronor note.

‘What do you take us for?’ a third man says, and the others laugh.

Malin pulls out another five-hundred-kronor note.

One of the men takes the money.

‘Try looking in Hornstull underground station. She usually hangs around there. One of the guards will be able to show you down into the tunnels.’

At first the guard was reluctant, but they managed to persuade him, and he said he knew where the junkies usually hung about, and that he and the other security guards usually left them alone, that they’d removed anything flammable from where they congregated, so that there was no risk of them causing a fire.

‘Well,’ the guard said. ‘They’ve got nowhere else to go, and it gets bloody cold up here in the winter.’

And now Malin is following the back of the guard’s grey uniform as they head down the escalator towards the platforms.

The underground station has its own microclimate.

A train thunders into the station.

People get on and off, and by the time the train pulls out again they’ve reached the end of the platform, and the guard leads them into the tunnel, where he opens a rusty iron gate and heads down a rickety galvanised metal staircase. They walk slowly and carefully along a narrow ledge into the darkness.

‘OK, take it nice and slowly,’ he says. ‘If you stumble and fall, there are ten thousand volts running through those rails. Just so you know.’

The lights from another train approaching blind Malin, and her ears feel as if they’re going to burst from the noise.

The guard stops.

‘Stand still. Press yourselves up against the wall and it’ll be fine,’ he shouts, and as the train sweeps past, the lights disappear, and Malin can see into the carriages, people on their way home from work or an evening out.

Men on their own.

Groups of teenage girls, no older than Tove. Couples in love. Pensioners.

They all look tired. Eager to get home to bed.

Tough lads from the suburbs, wearing nothing but vests in spite of the cold. Gang tattoos. The sort of thing they never really see back home in Linköping. The level of crime there is tamer, even if it can sometimes get pretty violent between the various gangs of youths. Mostly they have to deal with solitary nutters.

There’s a strong gust of wind and Malin thinks she’s going to be swept away and fall onto the rails, dying from the shock from the conductor rail, burning and boiling from the inside as a punishment for all her sins, for her inability to deal with the things that really matter.

But she doesn’t fall.

And soon the train is gone, and the guard carries on until he reaches a steel door that he opens with some effort, and inside the door is a ladder that leads down to yet another tunnel, and the guard switches on a torch.

They head down a flight of steps, then there’s a long passageway lit up by intermittent lamps hanging from dusty electric cables.

‘Who was it you were trying to get hold of?’

‘Josefina Marlöw.’

The guard nods to them, and in the weak light of the torch his face becomes a skull with black holes for eyes, yet he still radiates friendliness, and Malin gets the impression that he’s quite protective of his underground dwellers.

They carry on, turning off into an even narrower passageway, then the guard nudges a door open, and a strong smell of faeces and urine and dirt hits them. Malin fights an urge to throw up, and the guard lights the way into the cramped space.

Josefina Marlöw is lying on a filthy scrap of cardboard. The damp, dirty brown walls are covered in small, elegant chalk drawings of people.

She’s asleep, snoring in that vacant, assured way that only a seriously high addict can, soft and self-contained, with a desire never to wake up again.

‘I’ll leave you on your own,’ the guard says. ‘You can find your own way out?’

Mummy.

What are you doing here, underground? In this room where nothing living should have to be. But you’ve chosen it yourself, haven’t you? As protection against the cruelty. You wanted to withdraw, and you withdrew further and further, and you abandoned us because you knew there was no way back any more.

And now you’re lying here.

In a sleep that’s dreamless and vacant, yet still soft.

Hold on, Mummy.

You are dreaming, aren’t you?

You’re dreaming that you’re dead, drifting here beside us and looking down on a different, much better world.

There’s something you need to know.

We forgive you.

We want you to come to us. Together we shall exist as love.

Malin and Zeke wait. They’ve agreed not to wake Josefina Marlöw, and wait until she wakes up of her own accord.

Their nostrils get used to the stench.