Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Could it have been an attempt to blow open the cashpoint machine that had gone wrong?

  No.

  There hadn’t been a single attempt to blow open a cashpoint anywhere in the country for years. Anyone who wanted to steal from a cashpoint did it through skimming or getting hold of codes and cards.

  And the bomb was far too powerful, Malin thought. Maybe a robbery that went wrong?

  Incredibly, the surveillance camera above the cashpoint looked as if it was still intact. The windows had been blown out, and some of the bank’s metal windowframes must have melted in the explosion.

  Overturned bicycles. Shredded tyres.

  Sven? Zeke? Börje? Johan? Waldemar?

  Malin rubbed her eyes, unable to see any of her colleagues, but aware that they had to be somewhere in all this quiet chaos.

  There was nothing but emptiness and silence from inside the bank, and a crowd of curious onlookers at the corner, by the café and the Passagen art gallery. There was another cashpoint machine in the neighbouring building, Handelsbanken, and that seemed to be intact.

  Why? Because they couldn’t be blamed for the financial crisis, unlike the SEB? Because they’d behaved better? Malin couldn’t help thinking of the managing director of SEB, Annika Falkengren, who had earned twenty million kronor the year the crisis hit, and intended to increase her regular salary still more. The way her leadership had contributed to driving people into misery while she grabbed what she could without any inhibitions at all.

  A heavily made-up vampire slurping champagne in a castle out in the smart Stockholm suburb of Djursholm.

  Someone might well have wanted to blow her sky-high. Or everything she stood for.

  Numerous times in recent years Malin has felt utterly nauseous at the greed of bank directors. And she isn’t alone in that. The directors ought to be begging in the streets, the way other people have been forced to now.

  So should those onlookers be there? So close to the bank?

  What if this is a terrorist attack? What if there’s another blast?

  A pram on its side.

  What would it take to knock me off balance? Malin thinks as she sees the pigeons pecking at that scrap of meat whose origins she absolutely does not want to think about.

  Some firemen she doesn’t recognise are lying yellow plastic sheets over other pieces of meat, other fragments of people. A foot. A small foot, an eye, a face, what the hell has actually happened here, what the hell is this? Pieces of two faces. No.

  The greyhound barks.

  It shakes its bloody, glass-splintered paws, spraying blood over the broken glass and pavement, then Malin sees the solid figure of Börje Svärd catch hold of the dog’s lead, kneel down and pull it towards him, calming it with measured strokes.

  Nauseous.

  Thirsty.

  When does the Hamlet open? A beer and a tequila would slip down very nicely right now, and those pigeons really shouldn’t be pecking at that, they’re back again.

  A stretcher with a drip attached is being lifted into an ambulance by the hotel entrance, a doctor that Malin recognises at its side. His blue tunic is covered in blood.

  The pigeons.

  She moves towards them again.

  Keep your head cool now, Malin, stay focused, pull yourself together, and she sees Janne, he’s wearing a yellow Gore-Tex jacket over his new suit, and he is calmly and methodically taking care of two wounded students that no one has had time to look at before now. He is bandaging the small cuts on their arms, talking to them, Malin can see his mouth moving, and even though she can’t hear what he’s saying she knows he’s professional to the core, a solid, warm tree of a man who can prevent shock from taking hold. Once again she feels like running away to the Hamlet.

  But that won’t do.

  The pigeons.

  They’re pecking at the flesh, the skin, the hair, the child’s hair. Malin is running now. Her arms outstretched to mimic a bird of prey.

  Unseemly.

  She rushes at them and the pigeons take off into the sky, joining the low-flying swallows.

  She stops beside what the birds were pecking at.

  Sinks to her knees.

  Adjusts the black cloth of her dress.

  Feels her stomach clench, but manages to hold back the urge to vomit.

  A scorched cheek. A child’s beautiful cheek, torn from the head and cheekbone with perfect destructive force.

  Then the eye, still in place, just where it should be, just above the cheek, as though it can still see.

  A small, brown eye, open and staring at Malin, wanting to tell her something, ask her for something.

  She looks away.

  Calls to the firemen with the yellow plastic sheeting.

  ‘Over here. Come and cover this up.’

  Is that me you’re looking at, Malin Fors, or is it my twin sister?

  I don’t know, I can’t bear to look, to see the remains of what used to be me, us, my sister and me.

  We were six years old, Malin.

  Six.

  How short a life is that?

  We want more.

  Maybe you could give us more life, Malin. And Daddy, where’s he? Why isn’t he here, he ought to be here and we want him to be here, because Mummy’s over there in the ambulance, not far from us, isn’t she?

  It’s lonely and dark here, and the bleeding white dog dancing isn’t nice. Get rid of the dog, Malin, get rid of the dog.

  Now you’re walking across the square, you couldn’t bear to look at the cheek and eye. The glass is crunching under your smart black shoes and you’re wondering how many people have been killed. Two children? Two girls, more?

  We know all that now, Malin, the way you think, even though we’re just six years old. We suddenly know everything, and we know the words, and with that knowledge and awareness comes the realisation that we don’t know anything, and it’s that realisation that scares us, that makes us so frightened that you can hear our fear streaking through the air like the sound of a dog-whistle: there, yet simultaneously not there.

  Sven Sjöman and Zeke are standing beside a black car outside Mörners Inn. You’re approaching them, Malin.

  You’re scared as well, now, aren’t you? Scared of where this explosion might take you. Scared of the desire, the longing for clarity that our violent and abrupt deaths can set in motion within you.

  Because that can make everything you know about evil dance inside you.

  We’re six years old, Malin.

  Just six.

  Then we were wiped out. And you know that we can wipe you out.

  That’s why you love us, isn’t it? Because we can give you peace. The same peace you can give us.

  Sven Sjöman is leaning against the car, and the black paint makes his profile and the deep furrows in his brow look even more prominent, lending his face a hard, unshakeable determination.

  In spite of the outward appearance of calm, they’re all feeling wound up.

  Zeke has just acknowledged her arrival. Nodding to Malin in a way that she knows means, ‘Hi, partner, let’s get to work’, and she had looked at him, thinking: What would I do without you, Zeke? Could I handle this job if anything happened to you?

  Zeke seems to be absorbing the smells of the square, letting his hard green eyes work their way over the scene.

  ‘Two dead. At least,’ Malin says. ‘Two young children.’

  Zeke shakes his head, closes his eyes.

  ‘One woman with serious injuries,’ Sven says.

  ‘And how many others wounded?’ Malin asks.

  ‘Maybe thirty,’ Sven says. ‘Not too serious. Cuts, mainly, most of them look worse than they really are.’

  ‘That’s bad enough,’ Zeke says. ‘Two kids, I mean. How old?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ Malin says. ‘But I saw enough over there to know that we’re talking about at least two children. Karin and her team are just arriving, they’ll have to look into it.’

  From the c
orner of her eye Malin can see the smart figure of forensics expert Karin Johannison heading towards the yellow plastic sheet covering the ground where the child’s cheek is lying.

  ‘Is there any risk of a second explosion?’ Malin goes on. ‘That’s often what happens with terrorist attacks, first one explosion, then another when everyone is running away in panic in one particular direction.’

  ‘That’s what happened in Kuta, on Bali,’ Zeke says.

  ‘We’ll have to move the onlookers back,’ Sven says. ‘Increase the perimeter and get the dogs to check the area, and get the injured away from here. And we need to talk to anyone who might have seen anything.’

  ‘I don’t think there can be a second bomb,’ Malin says. ‘It would have gone off by now if there was.’

  ‘Do we even know that it was a bomb?’ Zeke asks. ‘Could it have been anything else?’

  ‘So what the fuck could it have been?’ Sven asks, and it occurs to Malin that she hasn’t heard him swear for at least ten years before today, if she has ever actually heard him, and she can see panic hovering in his eyes. After almost thirty-five years in the force you should have seen and heard pretty much everything, but now this: a powerful explosion, a bomb in broad daylight, in the biggest square in the city. Where to begin, where to stop? How to protect the city’s inhabitants? How to protect yourself and your colleagues while you’re all doing the work that has to be done? Could this be bigger than they can handle?

  ‘A gas leak,’ Zeke says calmly.

  ‘Gas hasn’t been used in Linköping for the past ten years.’

  ‘Could it have been aimed at the cashpoint?’ Zeke asks. ‘An attempted robbery that went wrong?’

  ‘The explosion was way too damn powerful to blow open a cashpoint machine,’ Sven says. ‘But of course there are plenty of idiots out there. I was in the bank just now, and there was no attempted raid before the explosion. But they were pretty shaken up, we’ll have to organise proper interviews with the staff as soon as we can.’

  ‘This is something different,’ Malin says. ‘All three of us know that.’

  ‘Any threatening calls?’

  ‘Not to us,’ Sven says.

  A black Mercedes has made its way through the cordon, let through by the uniforms, and stops down by the cinema on Ågatan.

  Karim Akbar, head of the Linköping Police, steps out, dressed in a pinstriped black suit and a neatly ironed pink shirt.

  Malin looks out across the square again and notices something she hadn’t seen before: Daniel Högfeldt from the Östgöta Correspondent, and some other journalists milling about among the people with minor injuries who haven’t been removed from the cordoned-off area yet.

  Can’t someone get rid of them?

  She can hear the journalists’ questions as background noise, the clicking of the photographers’ cameras, she can see the little red lights flashing on top of the television cameras, then Karim’s voice.

  ‘This is going to be the biggest thing we’ve ever had to deal with. The media invasion has already started,’ and she feels like punching him on the nose, screaming at him: ‘Children have died today, blown into tiny pieces, and you’re thinking about the media!’

  ‘Karim,’ Sven says calmly, ‘in all likelihood, a bomb has gone off in the square today. In all likelihood, two young children are dead, and a woman is seriously injured. A lot of other people have been wounded. So that’s probably our biggest problem, isn’t it? Not the media?’

  Karim frowns.

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Is there any risk of further explosions? This could be a terrorist attack on an international scale.’

  ‘There’s always that risk in situations like this,’ Malin says.

  ‘Get those people away from the square,’ Karim goes on. ‘Now.’

  And with those words he leaves them, setting off towards a group of uniformed officers standing beside a police van that has just arrived.

  ‘Listen up,’ he yells to them.

  ‘What do we think this is all about, then?’ Sven says in a low voice as he pulls his stomach in. ‘Malin, what do you think?’

  Malin shakes her head.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Zeke?’

  ‘This wasn’t any ordinary robbery. And it wasn’t a prank. That much is obvious. If the plan was to blow the cashpoint open, they’d have done it at night, not now, when there are so many people around. No, this is something else.’

  They stand in silence.

  Then Zeke says: ‘I don’t even want to think that thought. But could Karim be on the right lines when he talks about a terrorist attack with an international aspect? Could it be Islamic terrorists? But what the fuck would they be doing in Linköping of all places?’

  They stand there in silence for a bit longer.

  Yes, Malin thinks. Why would terrorists detonate a bomb in Linköping of all places? But, at the same time, why not? A flat in Skäggetorp, or Ryd, or Berga, could just as easily house a terrorist cell as a flat in Rosengård in Malmö, or Madrid, or the southern suburbs of Paris.

  The uniformed officers that Karim has just been yelling at are now driving the journalists, photographers, and curious onlookers from the square, away from the devastation, and Malin sees the city’s young police chief take charge of a situation that isn’t in any instruction manual.

  Could he, with his background as a Christian Kurd, imagine that there is some sort of Islamic connection? Apparently. What are most Kurds? Shiite Muslims, aren’t they? Or are they Sunni Muslims?

  The paramedics and firemen remove the remaining injured people as Börje Svärd leads the greyhound off towards Hospitalstorget.

  Soon every approach to the square is cordoned off with blue and white tape.

  ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Sven says once more.

  The three detectives can feel inertia spreading through their bodies like a paralysing poison, but none of them is capable of breaking free of it, as if all three of them had expected any manner of things from this day apart from this. As if the forces that had been let loose in the city felt alien to them in an almost supernatural way, as if the responsibility that the day had placed on their shoulders was unbearable even before they had realised it was there.

  Then they look at each other. As if all three of them are wondering: Where the hell do we start?

  ‘How was the funeral?’ Sven asks eventually.

  ‘Yes, how did it go, Malin?’ Zeke asks.

  Malin stares at the pair of them, looking from one colleague to the other, refusing to answer such a ridiculous question: how the hell can they imagine she has time to think of the funeral now?

  ‘We’ll have to call everyone in straight away,’ Sven says. ‘Anyone who’s not on duty: Johan, Waldemar, absolutely everyone. We’ll start over there. OK?’

  Sven gestures towards the square, and the gaping windows of the hotel.

  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.