Savage Spring (49 page)

‘But where are they right now?’ Malin says.

‘They must live somewhere,’ Zeke says.

‘Mirovic was on his way to Thailand. Do you think he knows anything he’s not telling us?’ Conny Nygren asks.

‘He’s got no reason to lie. We’re his only hope.’

‘Is there any point issuing an international alert?’ Conny Nygren wonders.

‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘It’s a long shot, but it might help.’

‘Do you think Josef Kurtzon and Josefina Marlöw are in danger?’ Conny Nygren says after a pause.

‘I don’t think so, the brothers have nothing to gain from harming them now,’ Malin says. ‘And now that we’ve got Mirovic behind bars, they probably haven’t got anyone they could send.’

‘So what do you think we should do?’ Zeke asks, and Conny Nygren looks at Malin as well, as if they’re both waiting for her next brilliant idea.

‘Can we get a search warrant for the brothers’ apartments on Strandvägen? We’ve got enough to justify that now, haven’t we?’

‘I’ve got good contacts in the prosecutors’ office,’ Conny Nygren says. ‘I’ll get the warrants,’ and he digs his mobile out of his trouser pocket and calls straight away, and Malin thinks that she likes him, he doesn’t drag his feet, and Conny Nygren is off the phone a minute later.

‘All sorted.’

‘Great,’ Malin says, and Zeke mutters:‘Damn good job.’

Malin stands up.

‘Time to pick up the pace,’ she says, her body racing with adrenalin, and she looks at the clock on the wall. Quarter past eight now, and outside darkness has nearly taken over.

‘Have you got your pistols with you?’ Conny Nygren asks.

Malin and Zeke open their jackets, showing the weapons in their shoulder holsters.

‘You might need them. I’ll get you some bulletproof vests.’

Conny Nygren smiles again, a crooked smile that reminds Malin of Waldemar Ekenberg’s.

Do you have a penchant for violence as well? Malin wonders, but at the same moment she realises that she’d be only too happy to blow the brothers into tiny pieces.

Malin leans her head against the side window, closes her eyes and thinks about her brother, wants to see him, and he’s already real inside her, in her heart, as yet another reason to go on fighting.

It doesn’t matter if he can never know who I am.

Or recognise me.

Conny Nygren at the wheel.

He says: ‘Malin, you know I remember you from when you were at the academy? But I don’t think you remember me, do you?’

Malin is wrenched back to the present, and opens her eyes just as they’re driving past the aquarium façade of Kulturhuset.

‘Sorry,’ Malin says. ‘So when did we meet?’

‘I was in charge of the shooting exercises in an authentic environment. You got to play at being tough cops, making your way into buildings and rooms where there might be armed suspects and hostages.’

‘I don’t remember you being there for that. But I remember the exercises.’

Maybe that training’s about to come in useful? Malin thinks. It has done before.

Conny Nygren’s voice again, a note of amusement in it: ‘I remember you, it was like you were possessed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a student with such drive and determination, so much aggression, yet still under control.’

‘Now you’re definitely joking, it’s not nice to try and ingratiate yourself!’

‘You can laugh, but it’s true!’

A minute later Conny Nygren pulls up outside the building on Strandvägen that houses the brothers’ apartments, gets out and waves to the officers in the surveillance vehicles.

The officers wave back. Seem to be wishing them luck.

Malin picks the three locks.

The stairwell smells of mothballs and rat poison as they stand in the darkness outside Henry Kurtzon’s door.

The standard lock takes her three seconds, the two 7-level tumbler locks take a quarter of an hour each. There’s no sound from inside the flat, and there were no lights on in the windows.

No alarm connected.

In all likelihood, no one here.

But they can’t be sure, and Zeke and Conny Nygren are standing beside the door with their pistols drawn, and Malin tries to shield herself as best she can, but can’t manage to keep her body entirely out of any eventual line of fire.

Are the children in there?

Is that whimpering I can hear? Elena and Marko? No, it’s just the background noise of Stockholm, isn’t it?

Then the third lock clicks and she pushes the door open and Zeke and Conny Nygren rush into the darkness, weapons drawn.

Empty rooms, an empty kitchen with glistening green units, empty cupboards, empty shelves, no lamps to switch on, nobody here, unless there is someone here? Children?

Malin searches deeper inside the flat, heading for the rooms that look out onto the inner courtyard. First an empty bedroom, then a bathroom, then another door on the other side of the bathroom.

Darkness behind it.

She hears a scratching sound. I’m coming, she thinks, as she turns the key that’s sitting in the lock.

Someone’s coming.

Daddy, is that you coming? You have to come soon, and now the men are coming and I take hold of little brother and pull him with me into the corner because then they might not find us.

Stop it.

I don’t want to.

No.

It’s horrid.

What are they going to do now?

I’m hungry, and little brother’s crying, and you have to come, Daddy.

Is that you coming?

The door’s opening now, it mustn’t be the men. They mustn’t be angry. They just mustn’t. Are we going to be lizard food now?

Now we’re screaming.

We’re screaming so we don’t realise just how scared we are.

55

Empty.

An empty cupboard.

Shit.

And the scratching?

A grey-black mouse runs between Malin’s feet and out into the flat, and Malin watches it run off, then goes to find Zeke and Conny Nygren standing by a window, looking out at Nybroviken, their weapons pointed at the parquet floor, hanging heavy in their hands.

There’s a thick layer of dust on the white marble windowsill.

Malin runs her finger through the dust and comes to think about her mum and dad’s flat on Barnhemsgatan in the years she spent looking after it for them while they were in Tenerife and never came home.

She’d had grand ambitions to start with, to keep the plants alive, hold the dust and cobwebs at bay, but gradually, as she realised that Mum and Dad were going to stay away, she gave up caring.

She let the plants die.

The dust settled in a thick layer, and when Mum died, just before Dad came home, she had cleaned the flat with a frenzy that surprised even her. It had been like a session in the gym, and the sweat had poured off her and she couldn’t think about anything but the dust, about making sure the flat was spotless for Dad’s sake.

But it wasn’t for Dad’s sake that I started cleaning.

It was for yours, Mum.

But you never came home. And I can promise that I’m never going to clean anything ever again for your sake, you’re not going to follow me through life making remarks the way you used to when you followed me around the house out in Sturefors whenever I wanted to try vacuuming when I was little.

I was five years old, Mum.

And all you did was complain about the Hoover hitting the furniture, scratching the paint, as if that little house was some fucking huge palace.

And all the while you knew about your betrayal of me, of my little brother. You withdrew, but you never realised that you were withdrawn, did you? Do you have any idea what effect that had on me, do you have any idea how hard I’ve had to fight to maintain a presence in Tove’s life? Do you have any idea? That I haven’t managed to be there for her, and how that fills me with sadness and an unbearable sense of shame?

The way I’ve struggled to give Tove the mother I never had, and whom I spent my whole life longing for. And in spite of all that, I actually failed.

I don’t feel any vacuum now that you’re gone, Mum. No grief. I see your face in the darkness and feel relief that you’re gone. And now I know that I might finally be able to live my own life, a life without secrets and desires that need to be suppressed without me having the faintest idea why.

You died, and I found myself, Mum.

I shall take nourishment from my unlove for you.

Does that make me a bad person?

Then Malin hears Zeke and Conny Nygren talking, but can’t be bothered trying to make out the words, feels tired, is tired of this, but wants to push on, has to.

‘Come on, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘This one’s empty. Let’s try next door, Leopold Kurtzon’s flat.’

When she opens the third lock on the door of Leopold Kurtzon’s flat an angry ringing sound starts up.

Loudly, stabbing at her consciousness.

An alarm?

Or is the door booby-trapped? Is it about to explode?

And she sees Conny Nygren run into the darkness of the flat.

He opens a cupboard door in the hallway and finds what he’s looking for.

The ringing stops.

‘Alarmed,’ Conny Nygren says. ‘The security companies usually put the control panel inside the nearest cupboard.’

Malin carries on into the flat.

She holds her pistol out in front of her, and the adrenalin is rushing through her veins again, her recent tiredness has vanished, along with all her thoughts, and they spread out, shouting: Clear, clear, clear.

This flat is furnished.

In a pompous, nineteenth-century British style, and the walls of the rooms are lined with bookcases full of leather-bound volumes.

The same dust.

The same mustiness, yet there’s still a feeling that someone has been living here.

They gather in the kitchen, and Conny Nygren says: ‘We need to see if there’s anything that can give us any idea of where they might be.’

They switch on all the lights.

One of Anders Zorn’s paintings of girls in traditional dress.

A Carl Larsson.

Art for people who want to show how important they are.

Who want to show that they themselves represent the nation’s cultural inheritance, and Malin finds it all rather tasteless, and thinks the entire flats reeks of insecurity.

They move from room to room. Opening drawers. Rifling through receipts and documents, pulling sheets and towels out of the wardrobes.

We have to find something, Malin thinks as she enters what looks like some sort of office.

A desk, but no computer. The walls empty, except for two large portraits in oil. One is of a young Josef Kurtzon.

Next to him a woman with thin lips and piercing blue eyes beneath perfectly bobbed hair. A blue Chanel dress.

The woman is standing in front of a leaded window. Water in the background.

It must be Selda Kurtzon.

Wife. Mother.

Malin looks at the portrait. So these were the people you couldn’t deal with, Josefina. What did they do to you, what did their way of seeing the world do to you?

And Malin thinks about her own addiction, her longing for alcohol, and about her mum, and she thinks about
her flat, and it dawns on her that she was relieved when her parents moved such an inconvenient distance away, that her drinking is a sign of exactly the same desire to run away that has characterised Josefina’s life.

The difference is just a matter of degree.

And events and genes, coincidence and chance and fate, giving things a direction, and then there’s a momentum that no one is able to stop, or wants to stop, or has the energy to stop.

Tove.

I haven’t ruined you, have I? and she looks away from the portraits, sees a folder on the desktop, opens it, but the folder is empty.

She yanks the desk drawers open.

Empty.

Nothing.

The last drawer.

A single photograph.

An aerial photograph of what looks like an island out in the archipelago. A large house, painted white, that looks as if it’s been built into the rock. The house looks new, and there’s a bridge leading to the mainland. Several rectangular white outbuildings down by the water. The picture was taken in the autumn, the woodlands on the island and those around it are glowing like fire, as if flames wanted to devour the buildings in the picture.

Why is this photograph here? Does the island belong to the brothers? Is that where they are?

Malin holds her breath.

Turns the photograph over.

Blank. Nothing. It could be anywhere.

She calls Zeke and Conny Nygren in.

Shows them the picture.

‘What do you make of this?’

‘Could that be one of their houses?’

Conny Nygren is animated, alert even though it’s starting to get late.

‘Impossible to say,’ Zeke says.

‘Could that be where they’re holding the children?’ Malin asks.

‘It’s a picture of a house, an island a hell of a lot further north than Thailand,’ Zeke says. ‘And the Mirovic kids are supposed to have been kidnapped from Phuket. Why would they be in Sweden, on an island, if this photograph is actually anywhere in Sweden?’

‘They could have brought the children to Sweden,’ Conny Nygren says. ‘Either on a regular flight, or by chartering a plane.’

‘The problem is that we have no idea where this photo was taken. Even if a long shot like this turned out to be true,’ Zeke says. ‘We haven’t found any property registered under the brothers’ names in any database.’

Just as Zeke finishes this last sentence, Malin’s mobile rings.

Johan Jakobsson’s name on the screen.

Couldn’t bear to go home.

Couldn’t bear to see his own children when others are in such obvious danger, and maybe, just maybe he can do something about it. So Johan Jakobsson has been sitting at his computer in the police station, tired from a day of paperwork and meaningless interviews with left- and right-wing activists whose names had been mentioned in anonymous tip-offs.

He’s searched through the property register again, crosschecking transactions against each other, typing in the names of all the companies the Kurtzon brothers have been involved in, any name he could think of that resembled the names of those companies.