So this is today’s confession.
‘I don’t miss her either,’ she says. ‘And I don’t feel guilty about it.’
‘Don’t you, Malin? I can’t really believe that. I feel horribly guilty, but at the same time I still feel the way I feel.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dad,’ she says. ‘That doesn’t make anything better.’
‘I’m not going back to live in Tenerife again. I’m going to stay here.’
‘I thought you loved the heat?’
‘I do. But she was the one who wanted to move there. Not me.’
‘Are you going to sell the flat?’
‘She could be difficult, actually pretty awful, we both know that.’
Malin smiles.
Understatement of the year.
‘I just feel lonely sometimes. That’s all.’
‘You lived together for a long time. Maybe you’re just suppressing your grief? That happens to a lot of people.’
‘I think I’ve been grieving for a long time. For all the things that never happened,’ her dad says, then they sit in silence opposite each other, drinking the soothing tea.
‘Feelings are never wrong,’ Malin says.
Her dad looks at her for a while, then says:‘No, maybe not. What about lies, then? Aren’t lies wrong?’
‘Which lies do you mean, Dad? There are different sorts of lies, aren’t there?’
Her dad rubs his eyes.
Malin wants to ask him about her mum’s ashes. He must have got the urn by now. Where’s he going to scatter the ashes? But she can’t summon up the energy to ask.
‘I’m looking forward to getting to know Tove properly,’ her dad says. ‘I don’t think it’s too late.’
‘It isn’t,’ Malin says. ‘It’s what she’s been wanting. But those lies, Dad, which ones are they?’
‘I’m going now,’ her dad says, and he gets up, and she feels that this is the thousandth time he’s running from something which is unavoidable, and she feels like shaking him, forcing him to tell her, the same way they sometimes have to force the truth out of a suspect.
But she doesn’t move.
Hears him disappear out into the Linköping night.
What are my lovers doing?
Malin is lying naked in her bed, with her hand between her legs, but she feels tired and brittle.
Have I even got any lovers?
It’s been months since I had Daniel Högfeldt. And it’s all over with Janne, for good, and that was more than eighteen months ago, and I haven’t had anyone else since them.
She pulls her hand up, puts both hands on the covers and listens to the darkness.
Are you there, girls? she wonders. Are you the girl I once was? Am I the two of you?
She gets out of bed.
Goes over to the window and pulls the blind up and sees that the clouds have gone and that the night outside is clear and full of stars, with a pale light that seems to caress the whole planet and wish its inhabitants well.
She shuts her eyes.
Opens them again, and then she sees two girls drifting like wingless white angels outside her window.
She sees them talking, whispering, arguing, chasing each other in their own domain without noticing her.
She smiles and laughs at them, knows who they are, but doesn’t want to disturb them.
Is everyone there? Are you there, Mum, and do you want to show yourself to me? Do you want to say sorry?
Then the girls stop and turn towards Malin, and suddenly the calm is gone from their faces, their flesh somehow torn into bleeding wounds, their eyes covered in layer upon layer of soot.
Their arms are stumps.
Their legs wriggle, torn off, and the girls scream, but no sound comes out of their mouths.
They’re screaming.
I don’t want to hear your screams, Malin thinks, and shuts her eyes again, hoping the girls will be gone when she opens them again.
Eyelids open.
And there is nothing but a lonely, star-covered sky.
Malin can hear the sound of her own breathing.
A solitary person’s solitary breathing, and it’s nothing, yet simultaneously everything.
18
Wednesday, 12 May
Malin picks the newspaper up from the hall floor, the whole of the front page is devoted to their case, to the bomb that has shaken the city to its foundations.
There’s a picture of the lizard that’s been born at Kolmården in the top corner.
Malin puts the paper on the kitchen table, reading it as she puts coffee on and feels her brain waking up as she goes about her various chores.
Every last little fucker wants to have their say.
The district governor; an overweight former agriculture minister; an old right-wing hag – they all say that people have to feel safe, and want to see more police on the streets. Karim Akbar says: ‘No comment.’ Mohamed Al Kabari talks about racism, and says it’s tragic that just because a bomb has gone off, everyone is pointing at the city’s Muslim community. But Kabari is also sympathetic: considering all the things that have been done in the name of his religion, it’s understandable, but very sad. There’s a statement from the Security Police, a Superintendent Frick, about the fact that they’re conducting a parallel investigation alongside the Linköping Police, and that the collaboration is working well, in an almost exemplary fashion. The only one who hasn’t spoken up is Dick Stensson, but Daniel Högfeldt has already found out about his visit to the bank, and is openly speculating about whether the bomb was aimed at Stensson.
Nor is there any new statement from the Economic Liberation Front, just their announcement, or manifesto. Screenshots in the paper, and the fact that no one has managed to find out anything about the organisation, that it was previously unknown, and that the police are treating the Liberation Front as their main line of inquiry, but that they can’t assume that they were the people behind the blast. Karim Akbar: ‘Previous international experience has shown that people and organisations often come forward to claim responsibility for similar acts, even though they had nothing to do with them.’
Pictures of the girls.
Tuva and Mira.
Vigerö.
Tuva and Mira Vigerö, six years old.
Their identity officially confirmed.
No other family found, apart from their mother. And she’s still unconscious in hospital.
Then the surveillance tape. The man with the hood like a shadow in the pictures, it’s impossible to see who he is.
Evidently the film has been shown on all the television news broadcasts. Maybe they’ve received some tip-offs about who their bomber might be?
The Correspondent has screenshots of the man in the paper. They’ve interviewed several Linköping residents, letting them have their say about the man in the video, and even if their hatred has been toned down for the newspaper, it’s unmistakeable.
‘No punishment would be enough for someone like that.’
‘Shoot him.’
‘Maybe he’s the devil himself?’
It’s as if the citizens needed something on which to focus their anger, their hate, their fear, and now they’ve got it with the man in the video. He has become the evil demon to be hunted down and banished.
But he’s still a person, Malin thinks. What he’s done is terrible, and we’re going to catch him.
The Correspondent knows as much as we do, Malin thinks, taking a bite of a sandwich. We haven’t got a damn thing, really, apart from a load of suspicions and guesses. But plenty of successful police investigations have started out that way, with quiet voices whispering into tired police officers’ ears.
Then Malin is jolted out of her thoughts by Tove, standing in the doorway in her dressing gown. She rubs her eyes, says: ‘Good morning’, and it occurs to Malin that Tove must have got up and taken her clothes off during the night.
‘Up early,’ Malin says.
‘Is there a
ny coffee?’ Tove asks.
‘Coffee? Since when do you drink coffee?’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Mum.’
‘Since when?’
Tove shakes her head, goes over to the coffee machine and pours herself a cup of the black, oily liquid.
Malin looks out of the window.
The sky is shimmering blue in a cold light with a hard core of warmth, and the trees outside the window, all their buds, seem ready to explode, burst into life, and Malin looks at Tove. Her breasts are obvious, almost impertinent, beneath the worn yellow towelling of the dressing gown.
Nothing came of the threatened cold rain from the night before. Nothing can hold back the power of spring.
At nine o’clock precisely the meeting of the investigating team begins.
Tired, hollow-eyed detectives sitting quietly around a table, playing at being detectives, playing the game, dancing the dance as they wearily run through the state of the investigation that the world demands should make progress, give the people the truth, deliver justice for the victims of violence.
Nothing has come of the video being screened on television yesterday. Nor did anyone seem to know who the man in the Economic Liberation Front’s clip on YouTube was.
They work through all the other lines of inquiry.
And then silence.
An awareness of how little their ideas have actually led to, the feeling that they’re already starting to get bogged down, even though it’s only two days since the bomb went off.
And Malin looks at Zeke, who’s sitting with his back to the children playing outside the nursery. The bags under his eyes are sagging and she can’t help wondering if he went to see Karin Johannison last night after dropping her off. If he fucked her on a stainless steel bench down in the National Forensics Laboratory, beside a ventilator cabinet smelling of chemicals, and an oscillator for shaking test tubes.
Zeke’s wife Gunilla has no idea he’s having an affair. No one knows apart from me. But I’d never judge you, Zeke. You do what you have to do. We always do what we have to do. Don’t we?
Waldemar Ekenberg breaks the silence: ‘Are we going to take them alive?’ he asks the room in general, and Johan Jakobsson and Börje Svärd say at the same time: ‘For fuck’s sake, Waldemar.’
‘We’ve got some more information about the Vigerö family,’ Sven Sjöman says, ignoring Waldemar’s comment. ‘Their finances look perfectly ordinary. Before his death the father was a mechanic at the lift factory in Kisa. It looks like Hanna Vigerö worked with people with learning difficulties, but only part-time since the children were born.
‘Then there’s her husband’s car crash. Nothing odd about that either.’
‘What’s the latest on her condition?’ Börje asks.
‘More stable, apparently,’ Sven says. ‘But we still can’t talk to her.’
Maybe you’ll make it after all, Malin thinks. Maybe there’s a slim chance, but how on earth could you move on from this?
Your husband’s dead.
And now both your children.
Could I go on living if anything happened to Tove?
I almost drank myself to death the time I came close to losing her, and I almost drank my relationship with her into the ground as well.
Almost managed to do what the killer didn’t.
What have I not put Tove through, really?
Malin feels the urge to go down to the gym in the basement, wants to feel a far-too heavy dumbbell drive the desire for alcohol out of her body, make it disappear for good.
And as soon as she thinks about alcohol, the urge is there again, and she digs the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, pressing until she feels a reassuring pain.
It works.
As usual.
‘There was nothing unusual in their home. Nothing to suggest anyone had made any threats against them,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe we should check with the people she worked with? See if they know anything else about the family?’
‘We can’t waste resources on that,’ Karim Akbar says. ‘These are just ordinary people. Who happened to get in the way of a terrorist attack. Now we move up a gear in the hunt for the Liberation Front. Who are they? We need to look under every stone, interview anyone we can find with any activist connection, left- or right-wing, and keep on at Forensics, they must be able to come up with something.’
I’ll look into Hanna Vigerö’s background myself, Malin thinks, but knows it will have to wait, now she has to show her loyalty to the investigation as a whole, any division at this point could mean they lose what little momentum they have.
‘That will have to be our main priority for the time being,’ Sven says. ‘Johan, Waldemar and Börje, you carry on with that. We’ll put in a request for Stensson’s records from the bank and get the Financial Division to take a look. There might be something there.’
Malin nods without quite knowing why. She shuts her eyes, hoping her brain can make sense of all this, but she can’t find any structure in it, maybe they’re looking in the right direction, but she’s far from certain.
Then Sven’s phone rings and she hears him muttering, saying yes, no, yes, yes, then he hangs up.
‘That was Andersson from Forensics. They’ve worked out where the email to the Correspondent was sent from. It was a computer in the Sidewalk Café in the City Terminal, up at the Central Station in Stockholm.’
‘I know where that is,’ Malin says. ‘There’s bound to be a security camera there. We might be in luck.’
‘We need to get hold of any recordings from there at once,’ Sven says. ‘It ought to be easy enough to find out who owns the building, and who provides the security.’
‘Nothing definite about the email server?’ Johan asks.
‘Nothing,’ Sven says. ‘They haven’t managed to get past the anonymous sender of the initial mail from the Liberation Front.’
‘OK. Does everyone know what they’re doing now?’ Karim asks in conclusion.
The officers around the table nod.
It seems to Malin that their various lines of inquiry are circling the case like the various parts of an atom circling its core. Particles like lost moons.
Islamic extremists, biker gangs, and the hottest lead, in all probability the key to the mystery: the Economic Liberation Front. The video on YouTube, like something from Islamic extremists, and the man in the security footage of the cashpoint.
The same man? No. That much was clear, but who knows how many people there might be in the Liberation Front?
‘Just give me a vegan so I can ram a bit of meat up their arse,’ Waldemar suddenly says, and the others fall silent and stare at him.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I just feel we have to make some real progress now. This is pointing in so many directions, it’s like the spines on a hedgehog.’
‘Malin, Zeke,’ Sven says, ‘come back to my office with me and we’ll put our heads together and try to work out who sent that email to the Correspondent. OK?’
‘OK,’ Malin says. ‘Let’s go.’
19
Sven Sjöman is sitting behind his desk, his cracked, ivory-coloured phone held to one ear, and the whole of his office seems to glow with concentration. Malin and Zeke are leaning forward in their chairs.
After three short calls Sven has got through to the right person, the man at Securitas who’s in charge of the surveillance cameras in the City Terminal in Stockholm.
Malin has just been watching Sven work, and once again she is surprised by his authority and experience, the way all his tiredness seems to vanish when he can focus on something that means something to him.
‘Hello, yes, my name is Sven Sjöman, from the Linköping Police, head of the preliminary investigation into the bombing in the main square. Yes, well, of course you know about that . . .’
Sven falls silent.
Malin can see him clench his jaw as he listens to what the person at the other end of the line says.
&nb
sp; Then silence.
‘So you’re saying that the Security Police contacted you yesterday to ask for the recordings from the time in question? And you let them have them?’
Another silence, then Sven’s voice, commanding and pleading at the same time.
‘What about copies? I presume you store everything digitally, so surely you could send us a copy? By email?’
Then Sven’s face contorts into a grimace.
‘So you mean you only had one copy? An old VHS tape, and you gave that to the Security Police?’
Sven looks at them and raises his eyebrows, and Malin realises that this is going to be a problem, there isn’t a hope in hell that the Security Police will give them a copy of the tape, not now they’re a couple of moves ahead.
‘Well, we’ll have to take it up with the Security Police. Thanks anyway, thanks for your help.’
Sven hangs up.
Slumps down in his chair.
‘The Security Police got there first,’ he says. ‘You can guess the rest.’
‘We need that damn video,’ Zeke says, and Malin grins.
‘So what do we do?’ Malin asks.
‘You two go and see the Security Police at the Central Hotel. See if they’re prepared to give us what we want. Put whatever pressure you can on them.’
The main square is a hive of activity in the spring sunshine. Millions of floating grains of pollen reflect the sun’s rays and cast microscopic shadows on the freshly washed pavements.
Carpenters are fixing new canopies over the terrace in front of Mörners Inn, stretching new canvas over the Central Hotel’s repaired loungers. Glaziers are fitting new windows in the hotel’s veranda, workmen are installing a new cashpoint machine outside the closed SEB bank, as even more glaziers replace the large sheets of plywood temporarily nailed up over the windows with sparkling new glass. Down by the newsagent, some council workers are tipping the last of the debris and dust from the explosion into big yellow skips.
But the burned-out candles are still there. And the flowers. Even if most of them are wilting, and no new ones have been laid.
Considerably fewer people in the churches yesterday evening.
A bomb, Malin thinks.
Savage Spring Page 14