Savage Spring (46 page)

It might mean when you know you wouldn’t hold back from killing your own flesh and blood if that was what mathematics, rationality, demand. If that was what it took for you to save yourself.

You can’t run away from rationality like Josefina.

Or hold back and try to be nice, like Henry. Trying to pretend there’s another, gentler option.

There’s no such option.

All the beatings, all my failures and shortcomings have convinced me of that.

And what would be the point of trying to find a more lenient path?

You have to live in the present, in this suffering. Otherwise you’ll never be anything, and being anything at all has to be better than being nothing.

Archaeologists have found caves with paintings by those who came before us.

A different species’ pictures of their lives.

Dark, lonely places with pictures showing how they beat each other to death with sticks.

And beyond those places, those pictures, there are even darker places.

Where they eat their own children, in pictures made from paint mixed with blood.

And it was the strongest members of that species who slowly, slowly developed into human beings.

51

Images.

From a surveillance camera outside the bus terminal next to Linköping railway station.

Sven Sjöman is leaning forward in his office chair, almost pressing his nose against the screen, trying to get as close as possible to what he’s watching.

It took a long time to get hold of the images because the hard-drive they were on had crashed, and the junior officers in charge of getting hold of surveillance recordings hadn’t made it a priority, seeing as none of the other security cameras in the city had captured anything of interest on the day of the explosion.

But one of the technicians working for the regional transport company, Östgötatrafiken, had made it his mission to fix the hard-drive. He’d worked overtime for days, and all weekend, laboriously restoring the binary code.

Then he had looked at the restored recording.

And saw the bomber with his bicycle. He had personally brought the recording to Sven just half an hour ago, in a state of some excitement, aware that his hard work had paid off, and Sven had thanked him, said he’d be rewarded somehow, and now Sven sits back, double-clicks with his mouse, and watches the recording again.

The same man as outside the bank. The man with the bike.

No question.

He’s just sent the clip to Malin, and has summoned the others. The door opens and in come Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, and Waldemar Ekenberg.

‘Come over here,’ Sven says. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

And the three of them go and stand behind him, in silence, not even Waldemar comes out with any sort of crass comment, they all seem to have noticed how serious Sven is.

He clicks to start the clip.

They see the man on the screen, at some distance from the camera, removing the bike from a cycle carrier on the back of a black Volvo, then gently taking the rucksack from the backseat and carefully fixing it to the parcel rack of the bike.

Then he leads the bicycle past the camera at close range, and you can see his face. He has thin cheeks, a long nose, and cropped black hair, and a thin scar above his right eyebrow.

Sven thinks the man looks Slavic, and you can make out his eyes on the black-and-white pictures, the look in them determined, but neither enthusiastic nor scared.

Your whole being gives a professional impression, Sven thinks. You’re acting as if this is just one in a succession of jobs. Is this your job, blowing up little girls? Murdering people in hospitals at night? In which case, who are you? Or am I wrong, are you just concentrating on the task ahead of you?

‘A fucking professional,’ Waldemar says.

‘Definitely,’ Börje agrees, and Sven thinks the two of them sound tired, almost hungover.

‘Doesn’t he look familiar somehow?’ Johan asks.

You might be right, Johan, Sven thinks. I recognise him as well.

He freezes the clip.

‘So, who is he?’

‘No idea,’ Börje says.

‘Hang on,’ Johan says.

‘Fuck me, I think I do recognise him,’ Waldemar says.

The phone on Sven’s desk rings. A mobile. Must be Malin. Sven wonders how she’s really doing, but brushes the thought aside. No time to think about that now.

‘We’ve seen the clip,’ Malin says as she moves into the shade of the budding lime trees at Odenplan, past the little fountains next to the market stalls. ‘Bloody hell, do the Security Police know about this?’

‘No. The technician from Östgötatrafiken came straight here and handed over the recording in person.’

‘Zeke and I both think we recognise him,’ Malin says. ‘But we can’t place him. He moves like a professional, it’s more obvious here than up at the bank, where he was presumably making an effort to look as natural as possible. But it looks like he knows what he’s doing, doesn’t it?’

‘Definitely professional,’ Sven says. ‘A hired thug, military maybe, possibly even police. The way he moves is extremely focused.’

A group of children goes past. A school class? No. Not on a Sunday. The children are shouting.

No, they’re not shouting, they’re singing a song that echoes right across Odenplan before it gets drowned out by the noise of the traffic.

‘What are you thinking of doing with this?’ she asks.

‘We’re about to have a meeting. Then we’ll circulate these images to our colleagues throughout the country, get a warrant out for him, and if that doesn’t come up with anything, we’ll release the pictures to the media. Obviously we’d prefer to avoid that, because then he’d know that we’re on to him and maybe go to ground, or flee the country. If he’s even still here, of course.’

‘It looks like he’s working alone.’

‘Yes, it looks that way.’

‘Then he must be a professional.’

‘That seems pretty likely.’

‘In which case he could have been hired by someone.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Sven asks, and Malin tells him what they’ve found out in Stockholm, about the Kurtzon family, the brothers, the complex game surrounding the inheritance and control of a family fortune probably worth over a hundred billion kronor.

‘That could fit,’ Sven says. ‘But there could be an entirely different explanation.’

‘We’ll carry on digging,’ Malin says.

‘You do that,’ Sven says. ‘I’ll update the others on how you’re getting on.’

‘Any other news?’

‘No.’

Malin looks out across Odenplan again.

For a few short seconds it’s completely free of cars and buses; the pedestrians and cyclists are in sole charge, and she feels a sudden desire to live in Stockholm again, to be part of a larger, less inbred city, where she would have a greater number of more interesting cases, and where she could live anonymously but still feel at home.

In Linköping everything is too small.

Everyone knows all about everyone else. Or at least that’s the way it sometimes feels. Even if no one really knows anything about anyone. She often feels that she’s been recognised, that people are staring at her. There she goes, Detective Inspector Malin Fors, the one we’ve seen in the
Correspondent
and on telly.

Here, celebrities get to go about their business unhindered. People who’ve really achieved something are left in peace, here their faces are just part of the everyday scene.

But actually moving? Would that work?

‘I think I recognise him,’ Sven says, and Malin is dragged back to the present. ‘So do Johan and Waldemar. So who the hell is he?’

Malin can hear the others in the background.

‘It’ll come out in time,’ she says.

‘Do you think it could be one of the Kurtzon brothers?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘It’s neither of the brothers, judging from the pictures Johan found. But if they’re behind this, they may have hired someone. Or else we’re on the wrong track. We’ll have to see what these pictures lead to.’

‘If what you’re saying is right,’ Sven says, ‘do you think this Josefina Marlöw is in danger? Do you think we should try to dig her out from the underground again and put her under protection?’

‘I think they need her alive for a bit longer,’ Malin says. ‘She’s OK.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘There’s no real danger until Josef Kurtzon dies,’ Malin says.

So that’s what he looks like.

The man who hurt us so badly.

And we know where you are, you, our biological mother.

You’re in your own dark room down in the underground. With your lovely drawings on the wall.

The syringe slips from your hand.

Your world is a white blanket now, everything is goodness and warmth.

You’re turning your black room into a white one, Mummy, and we’re with you, and we can feel that the mummy and daddy you gave us instead of yourself are here as well, but we can’t see or hear them.

We can’t.

But we’d really like to, because even if your room is white and soft and warm for you, it’s really horrible for us. It’s so nasty that it’s making us cry.

We’re running away now.

We’re running away from the underground to the paved square where Malin Fors is sitting on a bench. She’s looking at pictures of our uncles. Trying to make sense of what she sees.

A few alcoholics are drinking an early lunch on a nearby bench.

Malin and Zeke are still in Odenplan, now on a bench in the shade, the spring sunshine got too hot.

They let the images of the brothers scroll across the screen of the mobile phone. They look very similar, but there are differences. Leopold’s face is sharper, with dark, thick eyebrows that lend almost unreal force to his long, pointed nose. Henry’s face is slightly rounder, more friendly, but his blue eyes have a hunted expression, and the look in them seems completely vacant, doesn’t contain any sort of desire.

Neither of the brothers resembles the bomber, they look far more Scandinavian. They’ve both got thinning hair, which makes them look older than their forty-two and forty-three years.

Leopold’s eyes.

The expression in them both vague and focused at the same time. Cold, as if he were caught in a state of permanent calculation and consideration.

‘They look ordinary,’ Zeke says. ‘If they did hire an assassin, how the hell would anyone from their background go about it?’

‘You’re being a bit naïve, Zeke,’ Malin says. ‘If you’ve got money you can do anything.’

Zeke rubs his nose with one hand.

‘Show me the clip of the bomber again.’

Malin plays the recording, angling the mobile to stop the sunlight from making the man invisible.

The man moves towards the camera.

They see his face.

‘Stop, right there,’ Zeke whispers. ‘Can you zoom in?’

‘Yes,’ Malin says, and zooms in on the man, and they see the scar running above one eyebrow, like a line drawn with eyeliner.

Zeke’s eyes are burning with concentration, he’s breathing heavily. Don’t blow up now, Malin thinks.

‘Fuck it,’ Zeke says. ‘I know who that is. I recognise him.’

52

‘That’s Jokso Mirovic,’ Zeke says.

Opposite the bench he and Malin are sitting on, the doors of Gustaf Vasa Church open up.

An elderly black man in a priest’s collar steps out onto the stone steps, followed by a thickset woman, also wearing a collar.

The priests embrace, say goodbye, and the black priest disappears back inside the church again.

‘Mirovic was a heavy in the Yugoslavian mafia at the end of the nineties. I remember him from a case I worked on with Crime in Gothenburg. He was famous for being very intelligent, an academic. He’s supposed to have got that scar fighting in Sarajevo.’

Sarajevo.

Bosnia.

That was where Janne fled when he couldn’t face playing happy families any more, after Tove had arrived, unplanned, and he hadn’t been anywhere near ready for that sort of responsibility. Other things had been going on in their relationship then, things that belong to nightmares. How could we possibly have managed to live together then, when we haven’t even managed it as adults with more experience?

We were never going to manage it.

A bus blows its horn.

A mother with a pushchair, crossing the road on red.

‘I remember he was granted asylum around the time of the Balkan conflict, then he got Swedish citizenship. I think he vanished off the criminal map sometime just after the millennium,’ Zeke says. ‘But I’m sure it’s him. He looks older, but it’s definitely him. A hard bastard. He’s supposed to have been behind the unsolved murder of that businessman in Malmö ten years ago. The one where the victim was stabbed in the stomach a hundred times with a blunt knife. And they reckon he killed a paedophile by cutting his balls off and stuffing them down his throat so he suffocated.’

‘Sounds lovely,’ Malin says.

‘Paedophiles. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for them.’

‘Humanity has no place for people like that,’ Malin says, then feels alarmed by her own honesty.

She pulls out her mobile and calls Sven Sjöman, who tells her he’ll put out a national alert and inform the others.

‘Keep digging,’ Sven says. ‘We can’t let child-killers go free in our society.’

Harry Karlsson looks at the queue at Entrance B of Terminal 5 at ArlandaAirport. Newly built and very nice it may be – the ceiling must be twenty metres high – but there are far too few security desks, and there’s always a queue at busy times.

Like now.

It’s just after one o’clock.

The queue snakes all the way back to the SAS check-in desk, and people are getting impatient and annoyed, and there’s a stink of perfume from the new duty-free shop.

He’s worked for the airport authority for over thirty years. Now he’s supervisor for the main security checks, and it’s a hell of a job trying to organise the second-rate people he has to work with.

The guards from the companies under contract are supposed to be friendly but tough. Make people feel happy about travelling, while still making them feel safe. Not a job for thickos, basically.