Savage Spring Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Kurd in his early forties who is head of the Linköping Police. Karim has picked himself up again after his divorce, and has finished his book about integration issues, and has appeared in the papers and on television with his impeccable suits and well-groomed hair. He has met a new woman, a prosecutor whom Malin can hardly bear to look at. She’s a weak prosecutor, a true careerist who won’t even let them question suspected paedophiles.
    Silly games, Malin thinks. Mum’s dead. This is my own mother’s funeral, and all I’m doing is playing silly games in my head.
    Tove has gone over to Janne by the Jaguar.
    They put up with each other, she and Janne, for Tove’s sake.
    Malin says nothing about anything whenever she meets Janne. It’s best that way, best to hold the anger and bitterness and loneliness at bay by not putting it into words.
    They talk about Tove. About things she needs, who’s going to pay for what, how and where their daughter should spend her free time, her school holidays.
    Is he seeing anyone else?
    Malin hasn’t noticed anything, hasn’t seen anything, hasn’t heard anything. She’s usually good at picking up the signs, and Tove hasn’t mentioned anything about there being a new woman out in the house in the forest on the way to Malmslätt.
    Malin takes her dad under the arm and leads him off towards the car park, and asks: ‘Are many of them coming back for coffee?’
    ‘All apart from Dagny Björkqvist. She’s got to go to another funeral out in Skärblacka.’
    Skärblacka.
    The site of the biggest waste incinerator on the Östgöta plain. Sometimes the smell from Skärblacka hangs over Linköping like a stinking cloud.
    No Skärblacka cloud today, thank goodness.
    Only the strange, faint smell of something burned, as if from an explosion or – and Malin doesn’t even want to think the thought – burned flesh, fear.
    Could that smell be coming from her mum?
    They cremate bodies here, in a facility connected to the chapel by a tunnel: could they have been so quick that Mum is already burning, that her body is already surrounded by destructive flames, that it’s the smell of Mum’s burning flesh spreading invisibly through the air?
    No.
    They couldn’t move that quickly from the end of the funeral to cremation.
    The coffin is still there in the chapel, and Malin feels a sudden urge to run back in, open the coffin, put her warm hand on her mum’s cheek and say goodbye, goodbye Mum, I forgive you, for whatever it was that meant things ended up the way they did.
    But she doesn’t move from her dad’s side in the car park.
    She watches the cars drive off, one by one, and pushes all thoughts of the coffin aside. Instead she switches on the large-screen mobile phone that she pestered Karim Akbar for, the only technological investment in the force that year, and fingers the keyboard nervously, and the moment the phone finds a signal it starts to ring.
    Sven Sjöman’s name on the screen.
    Sven.
    Now?
    He knows I’m at the funeral, so something terrible must have happened, and Malin can feel the familiar tingling, the excitement she always feels when she senses, and almost starts to hope, that a new, big, important investigation is about to start. Then comes the shame, a double dose this time, that she should think of her work as a release, and in such a way.
    Who’s in trouble this time?
    Some drunks who’ve managed to kill each other?
    A violent robbery?
    Children?
    The girls, the angels just now.
    Dear God, please not children. There’s no defence against that sort of crime, evil aimed at children.
    ‘Malin here.’
    ‘Malin?’
    Sven sounds upset, almost bewildered. Then he pulls himself together.
    ‘I know this is a bad time to call, but something terrible has happened. Someone’s set off a bomb in the main square. A big one. A lot of people seriously injured. Maybe even fatalities. It’s total fucking chaos . . .’
    She hears Sven’s words, but what the hell is he