Savage Spring (51 page)

It’s quiet in there now. They’re not even whimpering. They can’t have any screaming left in their lungs. Just mute fear.

The brothers release the safety catches of their guns.

And open the final door.

The one that leads into the chamber of darkness.

The door that leads to the children.

57

Sunday, 16, Monday, 17 May

There’s a faint, almost rumbling sound from the car’s engine.

They’re already past Norrtälje, and are driving straight through the deep forests that skirt the coast, and the trees become ghosts in the night, seem to be smirking at Malin even though she can’t see the faces of the trunks.

Zeke behind the wheel.

Focused. Conny Nygren has gone home, she didn’t want him to come with them, and he protested at first, but eventually gave in. It’s unlikely that the brothers and children are even at the property north of Norrtälje. The most likely reason the property isn’t listed in the property register is simple administrative error.

I want to do this myself, Malin thinks. I have to. And if the brothers are there with the children, it would be better to creep up on them under cover of night. Wouldn’t it?

Zeke appears to think the same.

Malin shuts her eyes.

The explosion in the square has thrown me into the air, she thinks. The pressure wave is carrying me deep into the darkness of Sweden: at first everything expanded in volume, spreading out, and now it’s contracting again.

What are we going to find? Are the brothers even there, and do the children exist at all?

But she knew that Jokso Mirovic was telling the truth about his children.

The desperation in his eyes couldn’t be fake. The recording was genuine.

‘Daddy . . . Daddy . . .’

But Elena and Marko could be absolutely anywhere in the world. Maybe Thailand? Still out there somewhere? Or dead, dead for several days now.

In this short space of time they haven’t been able to find even the smallest electronic trace of the brothers. No email traffic, no mobile calls, no credit cards in their names had been used.

Nothing.

Try to sleep, Malin. Get an hour’s rest before you get there. Make sure you’re alert then.

Zeke’s hands firmly on the wheel.

Silence in the car. They should get there just after midnight.

Sleep soon comes to her, and the reclining seat brings the strangest dreams, streams woven by the chill of the spring night.

The faces of the Vigerö girls.

White, pure, guiltless, and they talk to her from the darkness of the dream.

Is it too late, Malin, is it too late? We know, but we daren’t say.

‘It isn’t too late,’ Malin says, but her voice isn’t her own, it’s Tove’s.

‘It isn’t too late,’ and the girls laugh and then they vanish and are replaced by two silhouettes in a dark room, stretching their arms out towards her.

‘Where are you, where are you?’ and she can see Josefina Marlöw in her underground room, and in the dream she’s stretching her arms out towards her father, and towards her mother, and they respond, but their embrace is made of red-hot metal in the shape of rose thorns.

Are there actually any children?

Do Elena and Marko exist?

And Hanna Vigerö is there, a man beside her who must be her husband, and she says:
They exist, Malin, they exist, but where are they, we haven’t found the girls, and we desperately want to.

Isn’t that what death is supposed to be, a place where only love exists?

Then her sleep turns black, and she shouts into her own dream, has to find out before it’s too late: ‘What about my brother? Is he OK?’

And the girls, and the pale, faceless children whisper:
He’s OK, but he’s alone, and he’s waiting for you to go to him.

Börje Svärd is pacing up and down in his kitchen.

Johan Jakobsson called him half an hour or so ago to tell him that Malin and Zeke were on their way to an island in the archipelago where there was a small chance that the brothers were hiding, and that they might be holding Jokso Mirovic’s children there.

The whole of the investigating team has been informed about events in Stockholm, and he has a feeling the case is moving towards its conclusion.

And it turned out to be nothing to do with Islamic extremists, political activists or biker gangs.

His first reaction when he heard about Malin and Zeke’s nocturnal excursion was that it was madness to head out there alone, without back-up, but then it occurred to him that it was very unlikely the children and the brothers were actually there, and if they were there, maybe a small-scale operation made more sense, just two officers who could get on with the job calmly and quietly.

And he knows Malin. Knows her well enough to know that she would want to do something like this herself, she’s almost obsessively independent, and Sven Sjöman has a tendency to let her have her own way on occasions like this. Sven evidently thought it was OK for them to head out there tonight.

But still.

He can’t help feeling worried. Whatever he may think, there’s a chance that Malin is getting close, and that might mean it gets dangerous.

The house feels empty without Anna.

But her spirit hovers over the decor, a hundred times more tasteful than anything he could have come up with.

Then his phone rings.

Waldemar Ekenberg’s name on the screen.

Waldemar Ekenberg is standing in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette under the extractor fan above the cooker, trying to let what Börje Svärd is saying calm him down, but it’s not working.

‘Shouldn’t Stockholm be sending back-up?’

‘You know what Malin’s like.’

‘Shall we get in the car and go after them?’

‘It’s too late for that, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s probably a dead end.’

‘The Kurtzons are rich fuckers,’ Waldemar says, taking a last drag on the cigarette. ‘If they get a whiff of money, or even worse, get it into their heads that they’re going to lose their money, then anything could happen, you know that as well as I do.’

‘They can handle it,’ Börje says, sounding as if he’s trying to convince himself. ‘Zeke’s a tough bastard.’

‘Let’s just hope they kill them if they manage to find them,’ Waldemar says, hoping that Börje is going to contradict him.

‘Yes, there won’t be any witnesses, after all,’ he says instead.

‘You’re pretty hard,’ Waldemar says.

‘And unlike you, I’m properly hard,’ Börje replies. ‘And that means I can afford to be soft sometimes.’

‘So you’re a philosopher too?’

‘Have a whisky.’

Waldemar grins.

‘Listen, my head’s still thumping from last time.’

Malin wakes up to hear her mobile ringing.

She might have been asleep for an hour or so in the reclined car seat, and before she answers, it occurs to her that they must be close now.

Tove’s voice.

‘Mum, where are you? I’ve been trying to call.’

Malin tells her what she’s doing, that the investigation has led her north, out to the archipelago. But that she should be home tomorrow.

‘I miss you,’ Tove says. ‘And when you get home we’re going to Hälsingland. To see my uncle, your little brother.’

‘Yes, we are,’ Malin says.

‘You’ve got to let me go with you.’

And Malin detects a lack of trust in Tove’s voice, and it strikes her that she’s heading out into the night, possibly putting herself in mortal danger, without sparing a thought for her daughter, and that she’d be motherless if anything happened. But Tove isn’t a child any more, she’s probably more grown up and sensible than I am.

‘Of course you’re coming with me,’ Malin says. ‘I’d never go and see him without you.’

Tove hangs up.

And Malin feels her anxieties about going to Hälsingland to see her brother fading away. Thanks to hearing Tove’s voice just now.

Tove sounded as if she doesn’t really care about where I am and what I’m doing. But of course she has her own life to live. Presumably she hasn’t got the energy to feign a load of feelings just to show how worried she is about her mum. She didn’t even seem to consider the possibility that I might be heading off on a dangerous job.

Another car comes towards them.

The driver leaves his lights on full beam, and Malin sees Zeke squint, but keeps her own eyes wide open.

Light.

Stronger light.

And then the solid dark of blindness.

And Malin feels it, knows they’re on the right track, they’re going to rescue the children.

They’re going to rescue Elena and Marko.

It can’t be too late.

Terror, have you made it your servant?

Josef Kurtzon stares out into the darkness of his cataracts. Knows that everything has reached its endgame, knows that life is a game that you must never stop playing.

Weakness, what can we do with that? With uncertainty?

I toy with it, he thinks, as a jolt of pain hits his airways and his body is racked with coughs that almost burst the lining of his lungs.

I’ve never stopped playing. The pleasure has always been on my side, just like it is now, on this night when everything is moving towards its dark conclusion.

The stuffed lizard hisses by his side. He pats it in his imagination, stroking its cold skin, and looks out into the darkness.

His blindness is a white blindness.

He isn’t afraid of the dark. He’s sought it his whole life, made it his own.

Josefina.

Leopold.

Henry.

The twin girls, Tuva and Mira.

The other children.

Tell me, has there ever been a more grandiose game?

He closes his blind eyes. Tries to imagine what is about to happen. Takes pleasure in what has been his life’s work.

58

It hadn’t worked.

They had turned on the lights in the room where they were holding the children, saw the fuzzy drawings they’d made on the walls, saw them open their eyes in utter terror, heard them scream, saw them hold their arms up, then hug each other, and the brothers had aimed their guns at them, but they hadn’t been able to shoot.

Henry and Leopold Kurtzon had yelled at each other. Their voices merging, impossible to tell apart.

‘Do it!’

‘Shoot!’

‘This is your job!’

‘Kill them, shoot for fuck’s sake!’ But neither of them had been able to pull the trigger.

Hiring someone to kill someone, to kill children, was an entirely different matter from killing someone yourself. Things that happened at a distance were strangely fictional. The reality was something else.

The children on their own inside the room. Silent. Somehow blind.

And Leopold and Henry had looked at the little bodies in the darkness, and then the brothers had started shouting again: ‘You’ve got to shoot. We can’t leave it like this.’

But then Henry had changed his tune, and said: ‘We have to let them live.’

‘We have to kill them,’ Leopold had screamed.

‘I can’t do it. You do it.’

‘If we don’t kill them, we’ll never be free of them.’

‘Look how scared and lonely they are!’

‘Then I’ll kill you.’

‘You can’t. You know you can’t. We’ll leave them here. We can’t abandon each other.’

And Leopold had looked at his brother, realised he was right, and then he had nodded, yes, we’ll leave the children here, who could have expected anything different, I’m backing down, the way I always have, I’m nothing.

The brothers had slammed the door shut, leaving the children alone in the room, then rushed up to the terrace, throwing their guns on the stone floor, and looked out at the dark garden, the black, almost still sea, and down at the outhouses containing the beasts. They could hear a strange banging on the door of one of the buildings, and desperation had started to creep up on them, and for a few moments they were transformed into nothing but survival instinct.

What do we do now, should we leave, should we leave them here, but where are we going, should we shoot ourselves, let the children live, or should we shoot them first, and then ourselves?

Questions that go around in circles.

Everything they thought they knew just a few moments ago, down in the basement, returns in the form of new questions, impossible to unravel.

No matter what they did, however much they might try to eradicate their own capacity for empathy, a tiny fragment remained, infuriating them.

That’s not who we are.

We are mathematics.

Rationality.

And the bomb ticking outside the room. The one they had had made for them in Bangkok, before the kidnapping in Phuket, powerful enough to blow the whole house into tiny fragments. The pilot of the charterplane had no idea that it was in their bags. Kidnapped children are one thing. But a bomb?

They had landed at Gävle Airport, and then brought the children here. Back then the brothers had been exhilarated: We can do this, it’s going to work.

They had more or less ignored the bomb for the past twenty-four hours, as if they couldn’t quite bring themselves to think about it. Somehow letting the threat of their own and the children’s impending death hang in the air.

Should they set the bomb off? Only another hour or so to go before the timer needs to be reset again.

‘We’re leaving now,’ Leopold had yelled.

‘Shouldn’t we let the kids go anyway?’ Henry had said.

‘We have to kill them.’

‘That’s what Father would do, isn’t it?’

And they had gone back down to the basement again, opened all the doors, pulled the children out, and dragged them up to the living room.

First they had checked the timer on the bomb, and put it back a bit, to give themselves some more time. Now that the sea was so calm, they would surely be able to make their way across the Baltic to Estonia.

The children had been silent.

Not even the three-year-old had made a sound, and maybe they were beyond fear, beyond life even before they died.

They stank when the brothers brought them out. Their bodies were covered in ingrained brown dirt, and they looked more like animals than small people.