Read Online Savage Spring by Mons Kallentoft - Free Book Online Page B

decide when it goes out.
    The flashbulbs love me, Karim Akbar thinks, they love me and they make the adrenalin pump, coursing through my veins and making me feel full of life.
    There must be a hundred journalists in this large, panelled courtroom they’ve had to use for the press conference.
    Karim is standing behind a long, pale wooden table. He raises his arms, tries to get the crowd to be quiet and stop the chorus of questions. Because it needs to be managed, directed, this crowd.
    He holds his hands out, tries to calm them down, get them to sit, and it works.
    He thinks that if he felt insecure and weak when his wife left him, then his new love has made him stronger than ever, now he knows he can deal with anything.
    What does a short period of loneliness matter? There’s always a new love for someone like me. I can afford to be a bit arrogant, can’t I?
    Soon the crowd is sitting down and listening to him, the flashes die out and he tells them what they know, about the bomb, that the victims can’t be named until their family has been informed, but nothing more. Nothing about lines of inquiry, suspects, and when he stops the storm of questions breaks out again.
    ‘Do you think it’s terrorists?’
    ‘Are the Security Police involved?’
    ‘Could the attack have been aimed at the bank?’
    ‘Is there a risk of further attacks?’
    ‘Has anyone claimed responsibility?’
    He skirts around all the questions, says that they’re keeping an open mind at the moment, that no one has claimed responsibility.
    ‘What about the victims, who were they? Is the woman going to survive?’
    ‘Out of consideration to their family . . .’
    Ten, twenty more questions, then he stands up and says: ‘That’s all for the moment,’ and he leaves the room in triumph.
    Daniel Högfeldt turns off his tape recorder and looks at the reinforced white door through which Karim Akbar has just vanished. The other journalists around him look unhappy, wondering how the hell they’re going to make any sense of all this. He can see the doubt in their eyes: Has this really happened? Has a bomb really gone off in a godforsaken provincial backwater in Sweden? And there’s anxiety as well: If this can happen, then anything is possible. No one is safe, ever, anywhere.
    The police are closing ranks. The way they always do before they’ve made any progress.
    Karim Akbar looks like a bloody politician, Daniel thinks. With a newfound self-confidence, the sort you hardly ever see, as if he’s suddenly found something inside himself that’s prepared him for a serious challenge.
    Malin.
    Bound to be at the centre of the investigation. Its informal leader.
    A long, long time since they last saw each other. He’s only met her once since she came out of rehab, but she had been irritable and hadn’t seemed altogether there when they had slept together in his flat.
    Once upon a time he had actually thought he was in love with her.
    That was before he met the woman he’s seeing at the moment. Malin would probably go mad if she knew about that.
    But I don’t give a damn what you think, Malin. You had your chance.
    But he can’t help wondering how she is. If anything has happened in her life. He has no idea, hasn’t heard anything. But isn’t that what’s supposed to happen with failed love affairs?
    And Karim Akbar.
    What a stuck-up prick he’s become. For a while I thought he’d actually changed. But no one ever changes.
    ‘Are women allowed in here?’
    It’s just after five o’clock.
    Malin and Zeke are standing in the declining afternoon light outside the factory building in Ekholmen that houses the mosque serving Linköping’s Muslim population. The building is at the foot of a wooded slope, as though pressed up against silence and a meaningless darkness. Whitewashed brick walls, peeling paint, small windows under a roof of brown-stained metal sheets with rusty iron fixtures, and a metal door with even more rust on it. An altogether