Savage Spring (20 page)

Hanna Vigerö stares, blinks, stares again, and there’s no calm, just fear, almost panic in her eyes, and no matter what Malin asks, her answer is the same.

‘The money, the money, the girls’ money.’

‘Were you going to withdraw money from the cashpoint?’

They’ve got the details from the bank.

The family didn’t have much money, but the girls each had a savings account with a few thousand kronor.

‘Were you going to withdraw the girls’ money?’

‘The money, the girls’ money,’ she whispers again.

Zeke looks at Malin.

Shakes his head, gives her a look that says: we ought to stop now, she’s rambling, she’s stuck in the worst moment of the horror and we shouldn’t keep her there, let’s stop this now, and Malin falls silent, strokes her cheek, sees Hanna Vigerö close her eyes and start to breathe calmly as the words stop flowing from her mouth.

The girls, Malin thinks, then she strokes Hanna Vigerö’s cheek several more times before she stands up.

They leave the hospital room. Out in the corridor Malin takes some deep breaths. Out here the air is different, clearer.

There was a smell of death in there, she thinks.

‘Did you feel it?’ she asks Zeke.

He nods.

Zeke has gone to the toilet, and she is standing on her own with Peter Hamse by the lifts that lead down to the main entrance of the main hospital building.

He’s absurdly handsome, Malin thinks as she hears herself tell him about their conversation with Hanna Vigerö, how she seemed scared and confused, and that she didn’t say anything very significant, just seemed to get caught in the unbearable memory of a terrible moment.

Peter Hamse looks at her with genuine warmth when she says the words ‘terrible moment’, then he says: ‘There’s no need for her to be anxious. I’ll see that she gets a decent shot of tranquillisers. There’s no need for her to be in any pain either.’

‘Will she make it?’ Malin asks.

‘I think so.’

‘But she’ll have lasting injuries?’

Peter Hamse nods.

‘In all likelihood, yes.’

Then they stand there in silence looking at each other, and Malin moves unconsciously closer to him, and he takes a step forward, and Malin notices that she’s swaying, drawn to that dimple in his chin, and then they smile at each other and Peter Hamse throws his arms out and says something about bad timing, and then Malin says: ‘It must be spring.’

‘It must. And the sap is rising,’ Zeke’s voice says, and a minute later they’re standing in the lift, Zeke grinning beside her, and Peter Hamse’s words are ringing inside Malin: ‘I’ll get in touch if anything happens.’

Something has happened, Malin thinks, then feels ashamed of what she can sense going on within her body.

Ashamed because of the girls, and Hanna Vigerö, and Dad and Mum and Tove and Janne, and even Daniel Högfeldt.

‘Go for it, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s perfectly OK. You might as well let your own sap rise.’

And she tries to laugh at Zeke’s joke, but it doesn’t work, she feels like running down to the Hamlet instead, settling down on a bar stool, and drinking all these damn emotions away, obliterating herself until there are only tiny pieces left.

21

Evening has taken over Linköping, and the dusk is coloured mauve outside the living-room window, and Malin is sitting on the sofa beside Tove, waiting for the soap opera they’re watching to end and the news to start. She’s drinking a glass of cranberry juice.

Malin was sitting at her desk in the police station when the minute’s silence for the Vigerö girls took place at four o’clock, and a remarkable thing happened. Suddenly all activity stopped, people stopped moving, sound somehow ceased to exist, and with it the world as she knows it.

The silence and respect almost tangible in the station.

But the girls weren’t there.

Malin could sense that they were somewhere else.

Then the minute came to an end, and the usual hubbub of the station started up once more.

Malin stretches her legs.

Maybe, just maybe, the main television news will have something about the case that we don’t know, she thinks.

Tove has been quiet and withdrawn all evening, but she wants to stay the night in the flat on Ågatan, she’s got a big maths test tomorrow and wants to relax as long as possible before setting off for school.

Or is she just keeping an eye on me?

I think she trusts me more and more, but maybe that’s just what I’m hoping, could that be it?

An explosion.

She thinks about the doctor she met today.

Peter Hamse.

She’s never felt instinctively drawn to anyone like that, and she’s sure he felt it as well. She can hardly breathe when she thinks about his face, his body under that white coat, and she wants to give in to those feelings, sneak out to the bathroom and free herself from the almost medieval lust that seems to have taken over her body, piece by piece.

An explosion.

That’s what it feels like, as if she’s at the centre of an explosion in which everything is being thrown at her all at once, where everything happens in a short, condensed moment, where matter becomes compressed and concentrated and nothing has time to stick, nothing has time to take hold, nothing has time to mean anything, and she is forced to go along with the emotion of each moment.

Mum’s dead.

My mother died three weeks ago, and tomorrow the will is going to be read. Dad will be there, he’s in charge of everything now, must have realised that I have to focus on work, even if he hasn’t said anything. Unless there’s some other reason?

Something’s approaching in the explosion and I ought to be grieving, I ought to feel much, much more, but I can only see Dad, walking to and fro in the apartment on Barnhemsgatan and finally feeling liberated, apparently enjoying his newfound freedom.

Mum.

Your face like an empty mask, your life seen through a sort of forced perspective, like a stage set, a lie, lies within lies within lies, and in the end they become true, and then one sunny day you go and have a heart attack on a golf course.

It’s odd, but I don’t feel any grief, I don’t feel anything, just relief and possibly fear that the core of a secret is about to burst, like some bastard red rosebud, and that I’m about to find out why I am the way that I am. But not even that feeling sticks, no, instead it’s as if the explosion takes over, tossing me this way and that, and everything just happens and happens and happens. I can see it, but I can’t get a grip on it, still less control it or do anything about anything.

An explosion of faces. That’s what the investigation is like. Words and contexts that don’t fit together, or at least they don’t to me.

Mohamed Al Kabari on his rugs in his mosque.

Racism. But is it so odd that we should look there?

Or could the girls have been the target? But what evidence is there for that?

Dick Stensson. Repulsively attractive. His arrogant smile, his money. His stinking money.

And then the man in the hoodie in the video. The man who actually planted the bomb outside the bank. The man the whole city seems to hate.

Is he the Economic Liberation Front? Does Sofia Karlsson have anything to do with it? Are there others, and who’s the person in the video from the City Terminal in Stockholm? The one those bastards in the Security Police are refusing to hand over.

Malin closes her eyes.

She lets her brain explode into thoughts, and when Tove asks her what she’s thinking, she replies: ‘I’m thinking about absolutely nothing, I’m just trying to clear out my brain. There’s so much madness going on right now, Tove, I don’t feel I can keep up with it.’

Peter Hamse.

Same age as me. No ring on his finger. I have to contact him.

And then she sees the girls again. The fragment of a face, the eye.

Their mum, Hanna’s staring eyes in the hospital.

Children shouldn’t die.

Children shouldn’t be murdered, blown into tiny pieces. Mum’s death is OK, she was almost seventy, after all.

What’s Dad doing now? What’s Janne doing? Daniel Högfeldt? I ought to talk to Tove, find out what’s happening in her teenage life, what her dreams are, but I’m scared she’ll tell me something new, something else I don’t want to hear, and I know that only the bottle, tequila, and beer, can save me if everything gets too much, and they’ll destroy me if I can’t handle everything.

It’s two days since I stood in front of Mum’s coffin.

What did I say to her?

What did I whisper?

What did I want to say?

Peter Hamse.

His face, his body, the way he looked at me, his explosion into awareness.

Take me in your arms. Save me from my longing.

‘I’m just going to the loo,’ Malin says, getting up.

Peter Hamse has finished his shift at the hospital, he’s just looked up Malin’s number on the Internet and now he’s sitting in front of his computer in the bedroom of his flat on Konsistoriegatan wondering whether or not he should call her, if he’d look too keen if he called straight away, yet at the same time he knows that he might not ring at all if he doesn’t do it at once.

God, she was so attractive!

Sexy, taut, and athletic, with intelligent eyes and a blonde bob, exactly the sort he usually goes for.

But she had something more.

Something else.

A sort of messiness and vulnerability combined with a primitive strength that made her unbelievably fucking sexy.

He types her name into Google.

Malin Fors.

More than five thousand hits, and he reads the online articles about various murder cases she’s been involved in, and he thinks that she’s seen pretty much everything, coped with pretty much everything, she must be pretty damn tough.

Almost scary.

Maybe best to retreat.

But she’s definitely not gay. There was a ridiculous tension between them. Like teenage infatuation on hormone overdrive.

He gets up.

Thinks: I’ll call her.

Tomorrow. Maybe. Or we’ll just bump into each other again, in connection with Hanna Vigerö. Best to approach this with caution.

‘You look more relaxed now, Mum,’ Tove says when she comes out of the bathroom, and Malin thinks: Is it that obvious? What do I say to that? She feels her cheeks go red, and hopes Tove doesn’t notice.

‘I’m just tired, Tove, it probably shows.’

‘No, it’s something else,’ Tove says, and Malin thinks that she can read me like an open book, but she probably doesn’t have a clue about what I was doing in the bathroom, because it isn’t in a child’s nature to see its parents as sexual beings.

What do I know about Tove’s sex life? Nothing, she never talks about what she does with her boyfriends, the ones she’s seeing. But she can’t still be a virgin. Can she?

The soap opera finally comes to an end.

The news starts, and Tove gets up, saying: ‘I can’t bear to watch this, I’m going to have a last look at my maths,’ and Malin nods, concentrating on the television.

One of the usual newsreaders appears on the screen, a young woman. Says: ‘Just half an hour ago our reporters were shown a video by the Security Police. It shows a man who is presumed to have a connection to the bombing in Linköping in which two young girls lost their lives. The video you’re about to see shows the man sending an email from the Sidewalk Café in the City Terminal in Stockholm at five-thirty on Tuesday morning. Anyone who has any information about this man is asked to contact the Security Police as soon as possible on 010 568 70 00.’

The video starts to play.

A man in a black hooded jacket is typing at a computer in one of the waiting rooms. His hood is down. He is sitting alone at a row of five computers and his face is visible.

Black-and-white images.

But clearer than anything else in the investigation so far.

Bastard Security Police.

Happy to give the recording to the television news.

But not us.

What’s the explanation for that?

It’s always impossible to explain their actions. Secrecy for secrecy’s sake. An explosion of fucking secrets.

The recording plays again.

The same man as outside the bank?

Maybe, unless this one is slightly smaller, thinner? How old? Twenty-six, maybe, twenty-seven, sitting there writing his email to the
Correspondent
.

The pictures aren’t very clear.

The features of his face seem elusive, almost a mask. Am I looking at the murderer, the bomber, the child killer, and what’s he doing in Stockholm? His features look typically Swedish, sharp and smooth, innocent, and she catches her breath, if anyone in the country recognises this young man then they’ll have a name by tomorrow morning at the latest, or rather, the Security Police will have a name. But in all likelihood someone will probably call them as well.

Do I recognise him?

No, never seen him before.

Then the man stands up and disappears from the screen, leaving just the row of computers in the deserted waiting room.

Then the newsreader’s face again, repeating what she said before the video was played, as the phone number appears at the bottom of the screen. She adds that the video is available on their website, and that it will be played again before the end of the bulletin.

Malin gets up.

The video is playing in her mind, and she thinks that this is the breakthrough in the case, it’s about to crack.

Then the phone rings.

Sven Sjöman.

His voice sounds thick, tired, irritated, hopeful, all at the same time.

‘What do you think?’

‘Looks like the Security Police want to play this their way.’

‘But things are going to start happening now,’ Sven says. ‘Why the hell couldn’t they let us have the video?’

‘Prestige,’ Malin says. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Two six-year-old girls have been killed. In principle every single bank in the country has been threatened with bombing. Plenty of people are too terrified to go out. And they’re thinking about prestige.’

‘That’s how it is,’ Malin says.

‘Hang on, I’ve got another call, hold on.’