Read Savage Spring for Free Online Page B

the work that has to be done? Could this be bigger than they can handle?
    ‘A gas leak,’ Zeke says calmly.
    ‘Gas hasn’t been used in Linköping for the past ten years.’
    ‘Could it have been aimed at the cashpoint?’ Zeke asks. ‘An attempted robbery that went wrong?’
    ‘The explosion was way too damn powerful to blow open a cashpoint machine,’ Sven says. ‘But of course there are plenty of idiots out there. I was in the bank just now, and there was no attempted raid before the explosion. But they were pretty shaken up, we’ll have to organise proper interviews with the staff as soon as we can.’
    ‘This is something different,’ Malin says. ‘All three of us know that.’
    ‘Any threatening calls?’
    ‘Not to us,’ Sven says.
    A black Mercedes has made its way through the cordon, let through by the uniforms, and stops down by the cinema on Ågatan.
    Karim Akbar, head of the Linköping Police, steps out, dressed in a pinstriped black suit and a neatly ironed pink shirt.
    Malin looks out across the square again and notices something she hadn’t seen before: Daniel Högfeldt from the Östgöta Correspondent , and some other journalists milling about among the people with minor injuries who haven’t been removed from the cordoned-off area yet.
    Can’t someone get rid of them?
    She can hear the journalists’ questions as background noise, the clicking of the photographers’ cameras, she can see the little red lights flashing on top of the television cameras, then Karim’s voice.
    ‘This is going to be the biggest thing we’ve ever had to deal with. The media invasion has already started,’ and she feels like punching him on the nose, screaming at him: ‘Children have died today, blown into tiny pieces, and you’re thinking about the media!’
    ‘Karim,’ Sven says calmly, ‘in all likelihood, a bomb has gone off in the square today. In all likelihood, two young children are dead, and a woman is seriously injured. A lot of other people have been wounded. So that’s probably our biggest problem, isn’t it? Not the media?’
    Karim frowns.
    ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Is there any risk of further explosions? This could be a terrorist attack on an international scale.’
    ‘There’s always that risk in situations like this,’ Malin says.
    ‘Get those people away from the square,’ Karim goes on. ‘Now.’
    And with those words he leaves them, setting off towards a group of uniformed officers standing beside a police van that has just arrived.
    ‘Listen up,’ he yells to them.
    ‘What do we think this is all about, then?’ Sven says in a low voice as he pulls his stomach in. ‘Malin, what do you think?’
    Malin shakes her head.
    ‘No idea.’
    ‘Zeke?’
    ‘This wasn’t any ordinary robbery. And it wasn’t a prank. That much is obvious. If the plan was to blow the cashpoint open, they’d have done it at night, not now, when there are so many people around. No, this is something else.’
    They stand in silence.
    Then Zeke says: ‘I don’t even want to think that thought. But could Karim be on the right lines when he talks about a terrorist attack with an international aspect? Could it be Islamic terrorists? But what the fuck would they be doing in Linköping of all places?’
    They stand there in silence for a bit longer.
    Yes, Malin thinks. Why would terrorists detonate a bomb in Linköping of all places? But, at the same time, why not? A flat in Skäggetorp, or Ryd, or Berga, could just as easily house a terrorist cell as a flat in Rosengård in Malmö, or Madrid, or the southern suburbs of Paris.
    The uniformed officers that Karim has just been yelling at are now driving the journalists, photographers, and curious onlookers from the square, away from the devastation, and Malin sees the city’s young police chief take charge of a situation that isn’t in any instruction manual.
    Could he, with his background as a Christian Kurd, imagine that there is some sort of