Savage Spring Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Linköping?
    Then they got closer to the square.
    They slowed down, as if they wanted to calm their hearts, steel themselves, prepare themselves, adopt their professional roles.
    The ground in front of the shoe shop and the newsagent’s was covered with broken glass from the shattered windows. The smell of scorched flesh and hair was noticeable, but she couldn’t hear any screaming.
    They turned the corner at the end of the shopping centre and saw the square.
    The scene of devastation almost made Malin collapse. She had to stop and catch her breath as Janne rushed on towards the ambulances and fire engines that had driven into the square down by Mörners Inn and the Central Hotel.
    Firemen and paramedics were swarming around people lying on the ground with shimmering metallic blankets over their bodies and clumsily bandaged bleeding heads. Several of the injured were talking on mobiles.
    Presumably to their families, and Malin herself felt a strange desire to call Tove even though they had only just seen each other.
    There was glass and debris and dust everywhere. The little flowerstall had been blown over, tulips everywhere. A lost white greyhound was rushing to and fro with bleeding paws, and grey and white pigeons were circling the scene, flying low, back and forth, seeming to look at their reflections in the mass of broken glass. All of the hotel’s fifty or so windows facing the square had been blown out, the glass scattered in a million fragments down below. On the ground floor, the hotel’s restaurant and bar lay deserted and open to the elements, as if God had come down to earth and declared that the Day of Judgement had arrived.
    Malin narrowed her eyes.
    Noticed the smell of burned flesh and fabric once more.
    Saw uniformed police officers setting up a cordon.
    She tried to acclimatise herself to the scene, understand what she was looking at, tried to get her eyes to accept the knife-sharp spring light that was making all the as yet winter-pale people in the square look almost dead, lifeless, with a skintone that made the blood on the paving stones look even redder.
    The hotdog-seller.
    The parasol above his stall was a stripped metal skeleton.
    The tubs of sausages had been tipped onto the pavement, and the canvas awnings over the terrace cafés had been blown off, as if a giant maw had leaned down from the sky and sucked up all the air, only to spit broken glass over all the locals who had been enjoying the spring sunshine in the city’s largest square on this particular day.
    Two marked police cars were parked over by the old courthouse. There was a smoking black hole where the SEB cashpoint had been. But there were no scraps of money on the square, every last note must have been consumed in what seemed to have been the core of the explosion.
    Could it have been an attempt to blow open the cashpoint machine that had gone wrong?
    No.
    There hadn’t been a single attempt to blow open a cashpoint anywhere in the country for years. Anyone who wanted to steal from a cashpoint did it through skimming or getting hold of codes and cards.
    And the bomb was far too powerful, Malin thought. Maybe a robbery that went wrong?
    Incredibly, the surveillance camera above the cashpoint looked as if it was still intact. The windows had been blown out, and some of the bank’s metal windowframes must have melted in the explosion.
    Overturned bicycles. Shredded tyres.
    Sven? Zeke? Börje? Johan? Waldemar?
    Malin rubbed her eyes, unable to see any of her colleagues, but aware that they had to be somewhere in all this quiet chaos.
    There was nothing but emptiness and silence from inside the bank, and a crowd of curious onlookers at the corner, by the café and the Passagen art gallery. There was another cashpoint machine in the neighbouring building, Handelsbanken, and that seemed to be intact.
    Why? Because they couldn’t be blamed for the financial crisis, unlike the SEB? Because they’d behaved better? Malin couldn’t