Savage Spring by Mons Kallentoft Read Free Book Online Page B

well as anyone whose names they have been given as having been present in the square, but who had already left without being interviewed.
    Malin moves through the debris, feeling the glass crunch beneath her feet, and sees Karin Johannison fine-combing the area around the bank, looking for anything that might mean something.
    Loads of police officers here.
    When something like this happens you don’t notice the cutbacks that have been made in recent years as a result of the financial crisis. Budgets will have to be grappled with later. But they could do with many more police officers in the city. Mainly, perhaps, in the domestic crime unit. Plus they have a pathetically low prosecution rate for things like suspected paedophile crime. Only one report in every ten ever leads to criminal charges.
    Hopeless. Surely we have to be able to protect children? Malin thinks. What’s a society worth if it can’t even protect its children?
    The children. The child’s cheek.
    Who were you? Malin thinks, as she walks over towards Sven.
    The panic and fear are gone from his eyes now.
    All that is left is the calm determination of experience.
    ‘Let’s get back to the station,’ he says. ‘Put our heads together. Try to get some sort of overview of what’s happened.’
    At first Malin drove past her mum and dad’s flat on Barnhemsgatan without stopping, thinking that she ought to get to the police station in the old barracks of the Garnisonen district as quickly as possible. But then she turned back towards the flat.
    Have to go home, home to Tove and Dad, to the drinks after the funeral, and do my bit.
    She parked down by the old bus station, where one of the city’s increasing number of homeless was rooting through a rubbish bin, and a gang of teenage girls in short skirts and thin blouses was walking past with an older lad in a padded jacket.
    Even here the smell was in the air, the faint smell of burning from the explosion, but also the smell of dogshit from down in the Horticultural Society Park, all the shit left by dogs whose owners hadn’t bothered to pick it up in the cold of winter, the smell of which was now spreading in the spring air.
    There was still grit on the roads. It was treacherously slippery, a reminder that the cold still wasn’t that far away. In the car park, she had felt like running away in vain from the changing season, and now she is standing in her mum and dad’s living room, by the window, where their long since dried-out plants once stood. Malin looks around, listening to the sound of her dad and Tove in the kitchen.
    All the guests have gone.
    She missed coffee, but the buttery, sickly smell of biscuits and sandwiches is still hanging in the air, making her feel hungry.
    In the kitchen her dad is standing at the sink, giving the old porcelain a rudimentary scrub with the washing-up brush, as Tove dries it.
    ‘There’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry.’
    He smiles at Malin, looks almost relieved. Do you feel free now, Dad, is that what it is?
    ‘I’m not hungry,’ she replies.
    ‘You should be,’ Tove says. ‘Eat something,’ and Malin opens the fridge and picks a few prawns from a sandwich.
    There’s a bottle of mandarin liqueur in the fridge in front of her.
    The urge wrenches at her stomach, heart, soul, and Malin says: ‘You used to love these pre-packed prawns when you were little, Tove.’
    ‘I can’t believe that,’ Tove says. ‘Surely I had better taste than that? I wouldn’t have eaten pre-packed prawns, would I?’
    Then Dad laughs, but abruptly cuts his laughter off.
    ‘The will’s going to be read on Thursday,’ he says. ‘With Strandkvist, the solicitor. Two o’clock in his office, number 12, St Larsgatan. It has to be done.’
    Of course it has to be done, Malin thinks. And against her will she thinks of what Mum has left behind, knows that Dad will get everything as things stand, but still feels greed grabbing at her, and thinks how nice it would be to get