Savage Spring Read Online Free PDF

saying, what’s he actually saying, and she understands without understanding and her lips move: ‘I’m on my way.’
    Her dad looks at her, hears her words and knows she’s on her way to something else, and he looks scared but nods calmly to her as he stands beside his old black Volvo, as if to say: ‘I’ll be all right’. But the look in his eyes contains something else as well, something intense, a different sort of relief that Malin can’t quite grasp but knows is important.
    ‘Drive straight to the square.’
    ‘I’ll be there in five minutes. Maybe ten.’
    She clicks to end the call, adjusts her long black dress and rushes over to Janne and Tove.
    Janne looks worried, his brow furrowed as he watches her running towards him, hampered by the long dress.
    Must have seen her talking on her mobile, can see that her work persona has taken over.
    If anyone from the emergency services is needed in the square right now, it’s Janne.
    Whatever must it look like there?
    Like a war zone. Dismembered limbs and blood and screaming. Janne knows how to deal with that. Rwanda, Kigali, Bosnia, Sudan. There’s no recent trouble spot where his need to demonstrate compassion hasn’t found an outlet.
    ‘We’ve got to go. The pair of us,’ she says, tugging at his arm, and then she explains what’s happened, and Tove says, her eyes clear in her open teenage face: ‘Go, both of you, I’ll look after Grandpa and the coffee, just go, that’s more important.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Malin says, and turns away from Tove, and it feels as if she’s done it a thousand times before, a thousand times too often.
    Her dad has come over to them.
    ‘Dad, that was work, something terrible’s happened, I have to go.’
    ‘Go,’ he says without hesitation. ‘We’re not going to have much fun back at the flat anyway, I can promise you that.’
    He doesn’t ask what’s happened, doesn’t even seem curious.
    A minute later Malin’s sitting in the new white Golf she uses for work, with Janne beside her.
    Dad and Tove can take the Jaguar.
    The rays of spring sunshine have somehow made the car as hot as a desert bunker. In the rear-view mirror Malin can see her dad and Tove standing in the car park in front of the chapel. They’re hugging each other, but Malin can’t see if they’re crying. She doesn’t think they are, she’d prefer to believe that they were taking strength from each other in order to deal with the rest of the day, and all the future that lies beyond it.
    Janne takes a deep breath and clears his throat before he says: ‘I’ve seen what explosions can do to the human body, Malin. Be prepared for the worst.’

5
    Two grey-white pigeons are pecking at something that Malin thinks looks like a piece of meat, it must be human flesh, mustn’t it? Flesh from a body that’s been blown apart, as if razor-sharp lizard’s teeth have torn it to pieces.
    The paving stones of the main square are littered with dust and debris. A dirty paper sign bearing the handwritten word ‘Sale’ in orange ink blows past her along with hundreds of pink tulip petals.
    Is that really flesh in front of her?
    Malin moves towards whatever it is on the ground some ten metres in front of the chemist’s. She raises her arms to scare the pigeons away, they shouldn’t be pecking at that.
    At what it looks like.
    No, it mustn’t be that.
    No, no, no.
    Her black dress is lifted up by a gust of wind as she slowly walks towards what she doesn’t want to see.
    She and Janne had parked outside the Hamlet bar, and from the main street, there had been no sign of any destruction, nor any sign of any people. Instead there was just an all-consuming silence when they opened the car doors and set off at a run towards the square and the devastation they were expecting.
    Maybe the phone call from Sven was just a bad dream? Maybe there hadn’t been any explosion? Maybe it wasn’t a bomb but a gas leak, but surely it had been years since they stopped using gas