Read Savage Spring for Free Online Page A

nice. Get rid of the dog, Malin, get rid of the dog.
    Now you’re walking across the square, you couldn’t bear to look at the cheek and eye. The glass is crunching under your smart black shoes and you’re wondering how many people have been killed. Two children? Two girls, more?
    We know all that now, Malin, the way you think, even though we’re just six years old. We suddenly know everything, and we know the words, and with that knowledge and awareness comes the realisation that we don’t know anything, and it’s that realisation that scares us, that makes us so frightened that you can hear our fear streaking through the air like the sound of a dog-whistle: there, yet simultaneously not there.
    Sven Sjöman and Zeke are standing beside a black car outside Mörners Inn. You’re approaching them, Malin.
    You’re scared as well, now, aren’t you? Scared of where this explosion might take you. Scared of the desire, the longing for clarity that our violent and abrupt deaths can set in motion within you.
    Because that can make everything you know about evil dance inside you.
    We’re six years old, Malin.
    Just six.
    Then we were wiped out. And you know that we can wipe you out.
    That’s why you love us, isn’t it? Because we can give you peace. The same peace you can give us.
    Sven Sjöman is leaning against the car, and the black paint makes his profile and the deep furrows in his brow look even more prominent, lending his face a hard, unshakeable determination.
    In spite of the outward appearance of calm, they’re all feeling wound up.
    Zeke has just acknowledged her arrival. Nodding to Malin in a way that she knows means, ‘Hi, partner, let’s get to work’, and she had looked at him, thinking: What would I do without you, Zeke? Could I handle this job if anything happened to you?
    Zeke seems to be absorbing the smells of the square, letting his hard green eyes work their way over the scene.
    ‘Two dead. At least,’ Malin says. ‘Two young children.’
    Zeke shakes his head, closes his eyes.
    ‘One woman with serious injuries,’ Sven says.
    ‘And how many others wounded?’ Malin asks.
    ‘Maybe thirty,’ Sven says. ‘Not too serious. Cuts, mainly, most of them look worse than they really are.’
    ‘That’s bad enough,’ Zeke says. ‘Two kids, I mean. How old?’
    ‘Don’t know yet,’ Malin says. ‘But I saw enough over there to know that we’re talking about at least two children. Karin and her team are just arriving, they’ll have to look into it.’
    From the corner of her eye Malin can see the smart figure of forensics expert Karin Johannison heading towards the yellow plastic sheet covering the ground where the child’s cheek is lying.
    ‘Is there any risk of a second explosion?’ Malin goes on. ‘That’s often what happens with terrorist attacks, first one explosion, then another when everyone is running away in panic in one particular direction.’
    ‘That’s what happened in Kuta, on Bali,’ Zeke says.
    ‘We’ll have to move the onlookers back,’ Sven says. ‘Increase the perimeter and get the dogs to check the area, and get the injured away from here. And we need to talk to anyone who might have seen anything.’
    ‘I don’t think there can be a second bomb,’ Malin says. ‘It would have gone off by now if there was.’
    ‘Do we even know that it was a bomb?’ Zeke asks. ‘Could it have been anything else?’
    ‘So what the fuck could it have been?’ Sven asks, and it occurs to Malin that she hasn’t heard him swear for at least ten years before today, if she has ever actually heard him, and she can see panic hovering in his eyes. After almost thirty-five years in the force you should have seen and heard pretty much everything, but now this: a powerful explosion, a bomb in broad daylight, in the biggest square in the city. Where to begin, where to stop? How to protect the city’s inhabitants? How to protect yourself and your colleagues while you’re all doing