Savage Spring (6 page)

He looks tired, Malin thinks, properly old, for the first time.

‘We’ll stay here for a while, get as many statements as we can,’ Sven goes on. ‘Then I’ll put Aronsson onto making sure that everyone who was actually in, or in the vicinity of the square, gets questioned. As I said, there was no attempted robbery before the blast. The bank’s employees are gathered in a conference room. They were fairly calm when I was there a short while ago, no one seemed to be injured, so the force of the explosion must have been focused outwards. I had a quick word with the manager. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual, just said there was a massive explosion, out of nowhere.’

Malin can hear a ringing sound in her ears.

A thin, high note, and she wonders what it could be.

‘Can you hear that?’ Malin asks. ‘Could that be another bomb?’

The words fly from her mouth and the others stare at her anxiously.

They listen.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ Zeke says.

Sven shakes his head.

Then the noise vanishes again, seemingly sucked up into the empty rooms of the Central Hotel.

The pigeons are back.

They’re tugging at the yellow plastic sheets covering the parts of the girls’ bodies, and the sun has found its way between two buildings and is making the shards of glass sparkle, and Malin thinks: What is it that’s been let loose here, blossoming so darkly?

Some evil, full of potent force, deeply rooted in life?

Then there is another sound.

A high note, like a monotonous whistle, from a black bag that the explosion seems to have thrown against the veranda of the hotel, where several onlookers are still staring out at the square.

Fear in Zeke and Sven’s eyes.

‘Fuck,’ Zeke yells. ‘Fuck!’

Then he rushes off towards the bag, and Malin can see Janne heading towards it from the other side of the square.

6

Zeke picks up the black bag.

Malin shouts: ‘NO! NO!’

His first thought was to throw himself on top of it, let his own body absorb the force of the coming explosion.

It’s against all the rules, but who cares about rules when something’s about to explode?

A bag that’s been left behind should be shot at and destroyed in circumstances like these.

But Zeke picks it up anyway.

Has to throw it as far away from anyone as he can.

But the noise stops abruptly.

And he lowers the bag again and passes it to Janne, who opens the zip.

Rifles through it.

And Zeke can see the sweat on his brow, as he becomes aware of Malin approaching them.

Clothes.

Books.

An iPod.

And a mobile. Janne looks at the screen, then holds it up towards them, one missed call.

‘Fucking weird ringtone,’ he says, one corner of his mouth twitching in a crooked smile. Then he drops the bag, and a few seconds later a middle-aged man appears from inside the hotel and says, ‘That’s my bag. I was sitting outside Mörners. It must have been blown here by the explosion.’

Johan Jakobsson and Waldemar Ekenberg have arrived in the square, and together with Malin, Zeke, Börje Svärd, and Sven Sjöman they set about methodically taking statements from anyone with minor injuries who’s still at the scene, those who are considered well enough to go home after being questioned without there being any risk of them falling into a state of shock. Then they interview all the onlookers who have come to the square, drawn by the commotion and devastation, by the rumours spreading through the city like the shockwaves from the explosion.

Everyone needs to be questioned.

Who knows which of them might know something? Who knows what direction this investigation is going to take?

Johan seemed shocked at first. Especially when he heard about the dead children, children the same age as his own. Börje has been strangely calm from the start. Waldemar is as unshakeable as ever. A cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and with the friendly look in his eyes that he pulls out when he needs to. Malin knows his wife lost her job a few months ago, when the redundancies hit Rex Components. But her being unemployed doesn’t seem to have had any noticeable effect on Waldemar.

Zeke is professional yet still upset, as if he wants retribution for what has happened in the square, and hasn’t established any distance whatsoever from it, still gripped by the force field of the explosion. It makes him seem grand and diminished at the same time.

They ask thousands of questions.

But almost always get the same answer.

‘Did you see anyone suspicious?’

‘No.’

‘What were the minutes leading up to the explosion like?’

‘I was drinking coffee, everything was normal.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘I was curious so I came down.’

The fear in people’s eyes, in their bodies, is shared. What’s happened? Denial and realisation all mixed up in a way that takes in the form of a fear that still isn’t quite strong enough to keep the curious away from the devastation. Like after 9/11, when hordes of curious onlookers streamed to the site where the towers had stood and thousands had died, and you could see on television that the curiosity in their eyes was greater than the fear.

Malin questions one person after the other.

A student with a plaster over a cut on her forehead, maybe just four years older than Tove, and she says: ‘I was having a Coke at Mörners, wanted to get a bit of sun before I went off to the library to study. It seemed to me that the explosion came from up by the bank. At least that’s what it felt like. What do you think happened? Who could have done something like this?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin replies, and she can see that the girl in front of her doesn’t have any great faith in the abilities of the police.

Then, after an hour or so, everyone in the square has been questioned. Along with the staff in the bank, including the branch manager. Several of the bank’s employees have left the scene and gone home to their families.

A large number of uniformed police have helped take statements in the square. Hesitant, almost scared, they’ve gone out among the citizens of Linköping who have turned up, with their notebooks in their hands, and have received the same answers as Malin and her colleagues from the Criminal Investigation Department.

No one saw anything. No one knows anything.

Aronsson has made sure that any of the injured who have already been taken to hospital will be questioned, as well as anyone whose names they have been given as having been present in the square, but who had already left without being interviewed.

Malin moves through the debris, feeling the glass crunch beneath her feet, and sees Karin Johannison fine-combing the area around the bank, looking for anything that might mean something.

Loads of police officers here.

When something like this happens you don’t notice the cutbacks that have been made in recent years as a result of the financial crisis. Budgets will have to be grappled with later. But they could do with many more police officers in the city. Mainly, perhaps, in the domestic crime unit. Plus they have a pathetically low prosecution rate for things like suspected paedophile crime. Only one report in every ten ever leads to criminal charges.

Hopeless. Surely we have to be able to protect children? Malin thinks. What’s a society worth if it can’t even protect its children?

The children. The child’s cheek.

Who were you? Malin thinks, as she walks over towards Sven.

The panic and fear are gone from his eyes now.

All that is left is the calm determination of experience.

‘Let’s get back to the station,’ he says. ‘Put our heads together. Try to get some sort of overview of what’s happened.’

At first Malin drove past her mum and dad’s flat on Barnhemsgatan without stopping, thinking that she ought to get to the police station in the old barracks of the Garnisonen district as quickly as possible. But then she turned back towards the flat.

Have to go home, home to Tove and Dad, to the drinks after the funeral, and do my bit.

She parked down by the old bus station, where one of the city’s increasing number of homeless was rooting through a rubbish bin, and a gang of teenage girls in short skirts and thin blouses was walking past with an older lad in a padded jacket.

Even here the smell was in the air, the faint smell of burning from the explosion, but also the smell of dogshit from down in the Horticultural Society Park, all the shit left by dogs whose owners hadn’t bothered to pick it up in the cold of winter, the smell of which was now spreading in the spring air.

There was still grit on the roads. It was treacherously slippery, a reminder that the cold still wasn’t that far away. In the car park, she had felt like running away in vain from the changing season, and now she is standing in her mum and dad’s living room, by the window, where their long since dried-out plants once stood. Malin looks around, listening to the sound of her dad and Tove in the kitchen.

All the guests have gone.

She missed coffee, but the buttery, sickly smell of biscuits and sandwiches is still hanging in the air, making her feel hungry.

In the kitchen her dad is standing at the sink, giving the old porcelain a rudimentary scrub with the washing-up brush, as Tove dries it.

‘There’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry.’

He smiles at Malin, looks almost relieved. Do you feel free now, Dad, is that what it is?

‘I’m not hungry,’ she replies.

‘You should be,’ Tove says. ‘Eat something,’ and Malin opens the fridge and picks a few prawns from a sandwich.

There’s a bottle of mandarin liqueur in the fridge in front of her.

The urge wrenches at her stomach, heart, soul, and Malin says: ‘You used to love these pre-packed prawns when you were little, Tove.’

‘I can’t believe that,’ Tove says. ‘Surely I had better taste than that? I wouldn’t have eaten pre-packed prawns, would I?’

Then Dad laughs, but abruptly cuts his laughter off.

‘The will’s going to be read on Thursday,’ he says. ‘With Strandkvist, the solicitor. Two o’clock in his office, number 12, St Larsgatan. It has to be done.’

Of course it has to be done, Malin thinks. And against her will she thinks of what Mum has left behind, knows that Dad will get everything as things stand, but still feels greed grabbing at her, and thinks how nice it would be to get a share of the millions of kronor that her parents’ flat in Tenerife must be worth.

I want it.

Give it to me.

It’s mine.

Human greed is the best friend of evil. I don’t give a damn about the inheritance.

‘Reading the will is going to be fine,’ Malin says once she’s thrust such thoughts aside. ‘It’s just a formality.’

Dad nods, then goes on: ‘It’s not that, it’s just that . . .’

‘I realise it’s difficult,’ Malin says. ‘But we’ll be there together. It’ll be fine.’

‘Do I have to go as well?’ Tove asks.

‘You don’t have to,’ Dad says. ‘We’re done here, aren’t we?’

Tove nods, and leaves the tea towel on the worktop.

‘I have to get back to the station. This is going to take a lot of work.’

None of them has mentioned the explosion up to now.

As if what happened just five hundred metres away belongs to another world.

‘We understand,’ Tove says. ‘We saw the local news on television. Is it true what they said about the children?’

Tove is not scared.

Not keen to hear gory details.

Just curious. All too aware of the crap the world can throw at anyone, far too good at dealing with crap for someone so young.

‘I can’t say.’

‘What do you know so far, then? There must be something you can say?’

And Malin realises that they don’t know anything, except that they mustn’t let themselves panic, that the shock felt by the city and its inhabitants at what has happened can’t be allowed to spread to the police. We have to keep our heads clear, she thinks. We have to, even if it’s difficult. Who knows what Karim might get into his head?

Malin leaves them in the kitchen, framed by the bright green kitchen cupboards that must have been the height of fashion twenty years ago.

You two seem to enjoy each other’s company, she thinks as she hurries down the stairs.

Åke Fors watches his daughter from the living-room window.

Sees how the spring seems to embrace her, how the yellow crocuses by the roadside seem to reach out to her, wanting her with them as protection against an uncertain future.

He runs his finger across one of the plant pots and realises that he won’t manage to say anything to her, it will all have to play out in their meeting with the solicitor. That everything must run its course and that everything will get sorted out, because surely it must now, mustn’t it?

He sees Malin walk past Janne’s Jaguar in a light that transforms her hair into a halo.

He sees her radiant figure, and he thinks: You have no idea of the bomb that’s about to go off in your life. No idea, and I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.

The whiteboard in the meeting room is already full of ideas when Malin walks into the room at a quarter past three, the last of all the officers in the case unit of the Crime Investigation Department.

She’s still wearing her black dress.

Aware that it isn’t at all suitable here. And it’s covered in dust as well.

Her colleagues are back from the square.

They’re all there.

Their clothes are all flecked here and there like Malin’s dress, reminders of the noise and dirt and chaos down in the square.

But there’s a remarkable calm in the room, in spite of everything.

A calm that is probably hiding its own chaos, a deep unease. What’s happened? What sort of evil has emerged from its lair under the snow? Was a completely different world hiding under the snow, a world that has mutated in the cold? And is what we have taken to be the beauty of spring actually some new sort of evil, hidden behind layer upon layer of exquisite colours and smells?