They breathe out, catch their breath. The door has no security peephole, and Sven and Zeke draw their pistols and stand behind Malin. She rings the bell, and the sound it makes becomes a slowly burning fuse, and she hears steps approach the door, slow, tired, alone.
The door opens.
The rings in her nose.
The dreadlocks.
Tiredness in her eyes, fog, and Malin can smell hash, strong and unmistakeable.
‘You?’ Sofia Karlsson says. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I think you know.’
‘What?’
She looks genuinely surprised, Malin thinks, then she pushes Sofia Karlsson aside and steps into the hash-haze of the flat.
She doesn’t even seem bothered that we’re here, even though she must have smoked a whole damn cake of hash in here.
Sven and Zeke glide past Sofia Karlsson, pistols drawn, she doesn’t even seem to notice them, then she hears them call: ‘Clear.’
‘Clear.’
‘The whole flat’s clear.’
‘Take it easy, hey? Just take it easy,’ Sofia Karlsson says.
Sofia Karlsson is sitting on her bed, on the rasta-coloured throw, trying to keep her eyes open, evidently making an effort to absorb what they’re telling her about Jonathan Ludvigsson, her lodger. She clearly hasn’t seen the item on the news.
They tell her everything, and she frowns exaggeratedly, but she’s so high that she’s hardly in a fit state to lie, Malin thinks.
‘Is Jonathan supposed to have something to do with the bomb? Mind you, I can just about believe that, but I don’t know anything about it, no word of a lie. But good for Jonathan. Cool.’
Cool?
Are you mad?
Two six-year-old girls died.
Malin clenches her fists, sees Zeke do the same, but Sven raises his hand in warning to calm them down, then gestures towards himself as if to say: ‘I’ll deal with this.’
‘We don’t think you had anything to do with this,’ Sven says. ‘But you’ll have to come down to the station with us and sleep off the drugs, and we’ll have to take your computer.’
‘He hasn’t touched my computer.’
‘Does he still live here?’
‘What?’
‘Does he live here?’
‘He’s just registered here. His post gets delivered here.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘You mean was I fucking him?’
Sofia Karlsson looks up at the ceiling and puts her hand over her crotch.
‘I’d never do anything like that with him. I only like black men.’
Push her now, Sven, keep going, Malin thinks.
‘So he’s never actually lived here?’
‘No. I’m pretty sure he lives in a caravan out on the plain, somewhere outside Vadstena. I’ve never been there, but he lives there with a few other people.’
‘Outside Vadstena?’
‘No, Klockrike, I mean. Near the old Pentecostal church. I’ve been there.’
‘So you have been there?’
Sofia Karlsson puts her hands over her mouth, then makes a gesture to indicate smoking a joint.
‘I see,’ Sven says. ‘Do you know if they have any weapons out there?’
The bluntness of his question makes Sofia Karlsson jerk, open her eyes wide, and for a second her eyes clear and Malin thinks she’s about to protest, switch back to her activist persona, but then the hash-haze descends again and she becomes amenable, telling them what they need to know.
‘Of course they’ve got weapons. Pistols. A few hand grenades. And that fucking AK4 that Jonathan bought.’
‘As many as that?’ Sven says, without sounding particularly surprised or upset.
Sofia Karlsson nods, then her eyelids sink and she says: ‘You’re going to have to go now, I need to sleep.’
Then Malin goes over and gives Sofia Karlsson two hard slaps on the cheek.
‘Like fuck you do. You’re going to show us the way to Klockrike.’
23
‘Down there. Behind that big house. The one that looks like it’s got black eyes.’
Sofia Karlsson points from where she is sitting between Malin and Zeke in the back of the police car.
She’s less high now, the veils have lifted from her brain, and now just the tiredness and thirst are left, and she hasn’t had the energy to cause them any trouble, and has led them in the right direction. And Malin feels like asking why, why betray your friends, but something must have happened between them, Jonathan Ludvigsson can’t be an easy man to deal with.
‘Have they got explosives?’
Sven’s final question in the flat, and Sofia Karlsson replied that she didn’t know, then she had asked Malin for another joint, without seeming the least bit concerned about being slapped.
The big, dark building – presumably the church meeting house – lies there dimly lit up in the moonlight on a sidestreet in Klockrike, a small village cast out in the middle of the Östgöta plain, painfully exposed to wind and cold and summer heat.
Beyond the back of beyond. Maybe three hundred inhabitants, who probably like their simple life in the countryside. But the church looks abandoned, now that idiotic television programmes, online games, and surfing for porn have taken over people’s souls.
Inside the houses, most of them in darkness, people probably still play Bingolotto whenever they get the chance.
The meeting house that the caravans are supposed to lie behind sits in splendid isolation on a small hill on the edge of a forest, and seems to keep watch over the little community, saying to the inhabitants: We’re watching you.
‘How many of them might there be?’ Malin had asked when they were halfway to Ljungsbro on the motorway.
‘Maybe just him. Four at most,’ Sofia Karlsson had replied.
Karim Akbar, who had come with them, grunted from the passenger seat beside Sven, then said: ‘We’ll let the uniforms take care of this.’
Malin had wanted to protest, then she thought about Tove at home in bed. She stayed quiet. Instead Zeke spoke up.
‘Malin and I are going in. That’s obvious. We’ve got vests on.’
‘Out of the question,’ Karim said, in a voice that didn’t allow for any discussion, and the subject had been dropped in the darkness of the car as its headlights eagerly swallowed up metre after metre of the road that was going to lead them to the people who might be responsible for one of the worst crimes in the city’s history.
Sven isn’t using the radio. Doesn’t want to risk being overheard. He uses his mobile, with the speaker on, as he gives orders to the officers from the police van that followed them there. An officer by the name of Sundblom, who has a Finnish–Swedish accent and is new to Linköping, is in charge of the group of ten uniformed officers in full gear, reporting over his headset as they approach the meeting house.
‘No sign of any caravans yet.’
Malin can just make out the police officers up by the building. They’re maybe five metres apart as they move at a crouch around the end of the building, dividing into pairs, then they get swallowed up by the darkness.
‘We have visual on the caravans. There are lights on.’
‘Execute,’ Sven says, and there is a muffled crash, probably a door flying open, Malin thinks, then shouting but no shots, then more shouting, voices yelling: ‘Calm down, get on the floor, lie still, we’ve got you now you bastards,’ and now Malin can see a dark figure rushing past the end of the building, and just has time to think, That can’t be a police officer, before she sees the figure disappear down towards the street and off across a dark field that seems to roll like a calm sea under the light of the moon.
‘Shit,’ she says, then she’s out of the car.
She runs down the street, out into the field, rushing after the figure, which is moving like a shadow up ahead of her.
Whoever it is, they’re trying to escape capture.
Her heart is pounding in
her chest.
Don’t draw your pistol. Get closer, then pounce, let all those hours in the gym in the basement of the station over this past sober year do their work, the countless kilometres on the treadmill, all the physical pain she has imposed upon herself to help her forget the urge to drink, to conquer the body’s greedy explosions. Her heart is pounding but her body can cope, she can feel it, and the figure ahead of her has slowed down, maybe running out of energy, is it Jonathan Ludvigsson?
Impossible to tell in the darkness.
And the passport photograph they got hold of was ten years old.
Can he hear me?
He’s walking now.
Another hundred steps or so and I’ve got him.
And she runs towards her prey, runs towards the moon, and two wingless girls with white faces and white hair drift in the light, encouraging her onwards.
Run, Malin, run.
Whatever that is ahead of you in the field in the darkness, it’s something you need to chase, isn’t it?
Bring it down.
Is it an animal?
It’s exciting, Malin, watching you chase him, but it isn’t the nastiest thing that might happen tonight.
The captive children are sleeping. They belong with us. The nasty lizards are gnawing at the cages, they can hear the lizards and the men in their dreams.
Do you feel the wind, Malin?
The cold wind sweeping over the city and across the plain?
Deep inside that wind death is whispering, Malin. And maybe, just maybe, death is whispering for you.
We don’t know.
What are you saying?
What do you want with me? I haven’t got time for you now, and Malin can feel the lactic acid surging through the muscles of her legs, finding its way up through her stomach to her lungs, before it takes hold of her heart like a dark, glowing pair of glass-blower’s tongs.
But I can’t give up now.
Then the black figure ahead of her in the field stops.
Turns around.
Seems to be searching through a pocket. Is he pulling out a gun?
And if he pulls out a gun he might be faster than me. Am I going to die now? Is that what’s about to happen?
And she digs deep for the last of her energy, zigzagging the last twenty metres towards the person in front of her.
There’s a flash.
From the barrel of a gun before the sound of the shot that kills me.
But no sound? Has he got a silencer?
She throws herself forward. Feels a warm blow to her cheek.
Zeke walks up to the caravan, a KABE, it must be twelve metres long.
Dim light from the caravan’s windows.
Outside the caravan, among a great mass of clutter, there are three large oil drums, and he sees six beefy police officers leaning over what look like three young men dressed in those shabby, dirty clothes that itinerants, or the unemployed, or homeless New Age travellers usually slum about in.
‘Which one’s Ludvigsson?’ he asks.
‘None of them,’ Sundblom says from the door of the caravan. ‘Apparently he was outside having a piss.’
‘In that case he’s the one Malin set off after,’ Zeke says. ‘He took off across the field.’
‘Did she get him?’
‘Don’t know. I rushed over here. Karim and Sven ran after her, we left Sofia Karlsson handcuffed in the back of the car.’
Sundblom nods.
‘These are Konrad Ekdahl, Jan Thörnkvist and Stefan Törnvall, I’ve managed to get that much out of them.’
‘What have you got in there?’
‘I’ve found computers so far, but there’s a hell of a lot of cubbyholes in a caravan this size. They seem to be pretty well connected, though.’
Cables are draped through the trees around the caravan, leading to an aerial on the roof.
‘Anything about the Liberation Front in there?’
‘The website was open on one of the computers. I haven’t touched anything else.’
‘Good,’ Zeke says. ‘Johannison’s already on her way.’
Karin.
Trying to give the impression of distance, saying Johannison. Never using her first name.
Ridiculous.
We’re having sex with each other. That’s all. It’s not a question of love.
He can see Karin’s absurdly aristocratic face in his mind’s eye, how it can switch in an instant and become bestial when she picks up his scent.
‘Forensics can carry out the search,’ Zeke says.
From the three captured men on the ground come groans and whimpering, met by ‘Shut up, you fuckers,’ and all sound seems to disappear into the darkness, muffled by the weak light of the moon.
‘Where’s Malin?’
Why’s it taking so long? Zeke wonders.
It wasn’t a gun.
He had stopped to light a cigarette and wait for whatever fate had in store for him, had heard her behind him and realised he wasn’t going to get away, that the game was up.
She had knocked him to the ground.
Burned herself slightly on the cheek with the end of the cigarette.
She pressed his face down, hard, down into the sucking mud of the field, not bothered whether he could breathe.
‘Are you Jonathan Ludvigsson? Did you kill two little girls? Well, did you? If you did, you don’t have to worry, I’ll make sure you breathe your last in this fucking field.’
She paused for breath. Went on pushing his face into the damp ground as she tugged at his long, matted dreadlocks.
‘Can you breathe? Well? Can you? Those girls aren’t breathing any more, you know that, don’t you?’
Then she felt a blow to her side and she lost her grip of his head and fell, taking a bit of dreadlock with her, and the man on the ground tried to get some air, but didn’t make a sound.
‘For God’s sake, Malin! Are you trying to kill him?’
Sven doesn’t sound upset, it’s merely a statement of fact.
And now Malin is on her knees beside the man.
Panting, looking up at Karim’s agitated face, sees Sven put handcuffs on the man and pull him up.
‘I was just holding him until you arrived.’
‘Like fuck you were.’
The man.
He can’t be more than twenty-five years old.
Bearded.
Pure Swedish features, angry blue eyes, long, filthy dreadlocks.
She recognises him from the video.
‘That’s Jonathan Ludvigsson,’ as she gets to her feet and starts heading back across the field, towards their cars and the caravan.
24
Thursday, 13 May
Jonathan Ludvigsson is sitting in interview room number one, on the other side of the big black table, in the light of a halogen lamp.
Malin is watching him through the glass of the observation room, through what looks like a mirror inside the interview room. Karim Akbar and Sven Sjöman are standing beside her. Sven was very clear: ‘You’re not taking the interview. You thought he tried to kill you out in the field and that’s not a good starting point. Zeke can take it, with Johan Jakobsson, he’s just got in and is fresh and alert.’ She had protested, but to no avail.
Now, through the glass, Malin can see the defiance in Jonathan Ludvigsson’s eyes: ‘I’m not going to say a fucking thing.’ And he’s declined the offer of a lawyer, saying: ‘They’re part of this rotten financial system, the whole lot of them. Every last one of them, and I don’t want anything to do with any of them.’
The clock on the wall says twenty-five to one.
Ludvigsson is staring down at the tabletop, and Malin can only see his dreadlocks.
They didn’t find any of the weapons Sofia Karlsson mentioned in the caravan. No pistols, no hand grenades, nothing. No explosives, but Karin Johannison is there now, searching the caravan and the vicinity with a toothcomb in the hunt for evidence. And there don’t seem to have been any leaks;
there haven’t been any journalists in Klockrike yet.
Malin’s body is screaming for sleep, her eyes are itching, and her muscles ache in a plaintive grumble, and she presumes Zeke inside the room must be just as tired, and the same goes for Jonathan Ludvigsson. She looks at his hair, the way his dreadlocks resemble dirty earthworms in the glow of the lamp.
Johan looks alert. Maybe the children fell asleep early and he along with them, so that he’s already had a few hours’ kip?
The tape recorder in the room starts to turn. The other three they picked up in Klockrike are sitting in the cells. Börje Svärd and Waldemar Ekenberg have just got in and are about to interview them, while they’re still confused and sleepy.
‘So,’ Zeke says, and his voice sounds gentle through the loudspeaker in the ceiling, just above where Malin is standing. ‘What were you really doing in Stockholm the morning of the day before yesterday?’
‘I wasn’t in Stockholm,’ Jonathan Ludvigsson says without looking up. ‘And I’m not going to say anything else.’
‘Look at us when you’re talking,’ Johan says. ‘Got that? We know you were in Stockholm, and we know you sent the email about the Economic Liberation Front to the Correspondent. We know you’re behind the website, and it’s only a matter of time before we know you carried out the bombing in the main square in which two little girls died.’
Jonathan Ludvigsson carries on staring down at the table.
Silence in the room.
‘You’re in the shit. Do you realise that?’ Zeke says, and all the gentleness in his voice has vanished, and he looks over at the mirror, as if to say to Malin: OK, this fucker’s going to talk. ‘You might as well start by telling us about the Economic Liberation Front. Who are you exactly?’
Malin drums her fingers on the ledge under the window of the observation room, looks at Zeke, at his skull-like face in the dim light, senses Karim and Sven’s presence, their heavy, tense, expectant breathing.
A pistol. That turned out to be a cigarette. Her rage from the field gone now, but she is aware that it could flare up at any moment. There is a slight bruise on Ludvigsson’s cheek after their tussle.
‘It would be best to tell us,’ Johan says softly. ‘For your own sake.’
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