Savage Spring (54 page)

Children’s films, as far as Malin can make out.

A Swarovski crystal bear, posters for some hard rock group from the eighties on the wall, and for the Finnish group Lordi.

Through the open window, summer is streaming in.

Outside, the sun is pouring its light onto a garden where microscopic apples are starting to form on the branches of the trees.

Norrgården Care Home.

An old works-manager’s house, beautifully situated on the edge of the village of Sjöplogen in the heart of the Hälsingland forest.

They have been shown to the room by Britta Ekholm. She was pleased to see them, said: ‘He’s having his nap at the moment. But I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you when he wakes up.’

There was so much Malin wanted to ask.

What should I be expecting?

How is he?

But she didn’t ask anything.

Instead, she and Tove went into the room, and when she hesitated Tove took her hand, pulling her mum in with her.

In one corner of the room, beside the window open to the summer, is a hospital bed. And in that bed a thin man is sleeping. Beside the bed is a wheelchair.

They approach the prone body.

He’s resting quietly, and Malin can see her little brother’s face from the side. His chin isn’t very pronounced, and his nose sort of juts out between his cheeks, and Malin wonders what she’s feeling, then she puts her hand against her brother’s cheek and slowly strokes the warm skin, and his warmth becomes her own, and she knows that she has arrived somewhere, at a place she’s been longing for.

You’ve got my cheekbones, she thinks, my fine hair, my prominent nose. Tove’s delicate forehead. You are me, she thinks, stroking his cheek again.

She met up with Peter Hamse when she got home from Stockholm.

They went for a meal at the Aphrodite restaurant, talked remarkably openly, and then he went back to her flat with her, and it was all that she had been longing for.

He seemed utterly present in the moment as she gave herself to him, and afterwards she asked him to stay. And he had done so, and they spent all night talking, and in the morning he stayed until Tove got back from Janne’s, so he could meet her as soon as possible.

He spends almost every night in her flat now.

She’s seen both Janne and Daniel Högfeldt with their new girlfriends. And she accepts their choices, their love, wishes them well.

Tove’s school holiday has begun. In August she’ll be moving to Lundsberg.

Malin often asks herself how on earth she is going to cope. But it will work. It has to work. I can always curl up in Peter’s arms when anxiety starts to eat away at me from the inside.

Zeke’s gunshot wound turned out to be superficial. And the injury has healed, and he is still seeing Karin Johannison, Malin is sure of that.

But Karin is longing to have children. Malin can see it in her, and Zeke is the wrong man for that. He’ll never leave his wife, and Kalle, her husband, wants to cling to his ‘freedom’.

Zeke hasn’t said outright that he pushed Leopold Kurtzon over the edge of the terrace of the house out in the Norrhammar archipelago. But Malin knows he did, and is full of silent admiration for him. Child-killers have no place among us. Just as little as predatory paedophiles.

Johannison Ludvigsson was given a three-month sentence for possession of illegal firearms. His invented Economic Liberation Front never made it to court: his confused behaviour was written off as a work of artistic creativity by the prosecutor, the career-minded woman to whom Karim Akbar, increasingly cocky and self-satisfied, has now got engaged. An investigation into Dick Stensson’s affairs was started, but soon dropped.

‘He’s sound asleep,’ Tove says, and Malin replies: ‘He sleeps like a child,’ and she enjoys the feeling this moment is giving her, doesn’t want to let her mum in here, never wants to let her in anywhere again, she’s been eradicated now, hasn’t she?

Her dad’s back in Tenerife.

He gave up in the end when she didn’t answer any of his calls.

And then, one day, he was gone. He’d put a letter through her door, saying he thought he might stay on the island for a while, that he had taken his flat there off the market, and had arranged for a friend to take care of the flat on Barnhemsgatan for him. He was planning to scatter her mum’s ashes on one of the island’s golf courses: ‘That was where she was happiest.’

Happiest.

Tove strokes the cheek of the sleeping man who looks like a boy, and in that moment Malin feels a wave of pressure ebbing away.

‘I’m here now,’ Malin whispers. ‘We’re here.’

‘I’m here now,’ and a warm breeze comes in through the window, and she can feel tears on her cheeks.

I’m here now.

Sorry it took me so long.

Sorry, that’s all I can say.

About the Author

Mons Kallentoft grew up in the provincial town of Linköping, Sweden, where the Malin Fors series is set. The series is a massive European bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages. Before becoming a novelist, Mons worked in journalism; he is also a renowned food critic. His debut novel,
Pesetas
, was awarded the Swedish equivalent of the COSTA First Novel Award.

Mons has been married to Karolina for over twenty years, and they live in Stockholm with their daughter and son.

Visit Mons’ website at
www.monskallentoft.se
and his Facebook page at
www.facebook.com/MonsKallentoft
and follow him on Twitter @Kallentoft