Savage Spring by Mons Kallentoft Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Everyone needs to be questioned.
    Who knows which of them might know something? Who knows what direction this investigation is going to take?
    Johan seemed shocked at first. Especially when he heard about the dead children, children the same age as his own. Börje has been strangely calm from the start. Waldemar is as unshakeable as ever. A cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and with the friendly look in his eyes that he pulls out when he needs to. Malin knows his wife lost her job a few months ago, when the redundancies hit Rex Components. But her being unemployed doesn’t seem to have had any noticeable effect on Waldemar.
    Zeke is professional yet still upset, as if he wants retribution for what has happened in the square, and hasn’t established any distance whatsoever from it, still gripped by the force field of the explosion. It makes him seem grand and diminished at the same time.
    They ask thousands of questions.
    But almost always get the same answer.
    ‘Did you see anyone suspicious?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What were the minutes leading up to the explosion like?’
    ‘I was drinking coffee, everything was normal.’
    ‘I don’t know anything.’
    ‘I didn’t see anything.’
    ‘I was curious so I came down.’
    The fear in people’s eyes, in their bodies, is shared. What’s happened? Denial and realisation all mixed up in a way that takes in the form of a fear that still isn’t quite strong enough to keep the curious away from the devastation. Like after 9/11, when hordes of curious onlookers streamed to the site where the towers had stood and thousands had died, and you could see on television that the curiosity in their eyes was greater than the fear.
    Malin questions one person after the other.
    A student with a plaster over a cut on her forehead, maybe just four years older than Tove, and she says: ‘I was having a Coke at Mörners, wanted to get a bit of sun before I went off to the library to study. It seemed to me that the explosion came from up by the bank. At least that’s what it felt like. What do you think happened? Who could have done something like this?’
    ‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin replies, and she can see that the girl in front of her doesn’t have any great faith in the abilities of the police.
    Then, after an hour or so, everyone in the square has been questioned. Along with the staff in the bank, including the branch manager. Several of the bank’s employees have left the scene and gone home to their families.
    A large number of uniformed police have helped take statements in the square. Hesitant, almost scared, they’ve gone out among the citizens of Linköping who have turned up, with their notebooks in their hands, and have received the same answers as Malin and her colleagues from the Criminal Investigation Department.
    No one saw anything. No one knows anything.
    Aronsson has made sure that any of the injured who have already been taken to hospital will be questioned, as