But why am I thinking of Tove Jansson and the Moomins, the lyrical and melancholy landscape of coastal Finland, and the sensitive beings that inhabit it? Their feelings are hurt, over and over; the insensitive ones trample all over them. The most terrible and frightening character is the lonely Groke, or Mårran, who has no feelings at all, and brings ice and darkness wherever she goes. Moominpappa longs for the sea and grand adventures; he tinkers with his memoirs; Moominmamma, who embodies some of the detached and semi-mythical maternal quality of Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, makes pancakes for all the little creatures, but is, as I remember her, also somehow existentially alone, without the comforting life lies of the other beings. She sees more clearly than they do.
The Moomin home is a little tower, round like a hobbit dwelling: the Moomins, like hobbits, prize comfort and cosiness over elegance.
It itches at my mind, this idea of a home which does not conceal terrible secrets.
Hans hid Eva’s body, and repressed the fact of her death. Funerals are universal; the beliefs and practices are many and varied, but all humans, and probably some prehumans, have disposed of their dead through the ages. When we don’t take leave with proper rituals, the dead can come back to haunt or harm us, or they may not find their way to the afterworld. The dead are laid to rest in graves or in monuments; they are launched on boats or buried at sea; they are incinerated or burnt in ritual fire; they are placed on hillsides for the vultures to pick clean or preserved for posterity. When we fail to perform those communal rituals, whatever they are, we break the laws of culture as well as the law of the land. We remove ourselves from the community; we are in self-imposed exile.
—
We are no longer superstitious, Freud wrote in “The Uncanny,” and yet we are not quite securely secular, either: the old beliefs live on in us; we wait and watch for evidence. When Eva cursed me, I half believed that she could genuinely harm me. And part of her may have believed it, too. She wasn’t a violent person, but the drugs propelled her into another reality. Freud saw the delusion of omnipotence in black magic as a primitive phase into which modern people can relapse under duress. The old world is still in us; the narcissism of magic contains the delusion of omnipotence.
Eva said she made a wax doll of me. The doll fell and broke its neck. I must be careful. “My witchcraft is going well,” she wrote. “See how your neck feels today.”
And instead of being careful I galloped up a hill—my own stab at the wild—and my horse fell. I woke up on the ground, severely concussed.
In the dreamy state that followed, meaning, time, and memories warped; I was thrown into acute depression, then euphoria—the garden was dusted with gold; I rested in a warm breeze, dandelion seeds floating. It was intensely peaceful.
The children had been with us for two years. I hadn’t seen Hans for a year, and Eva for many months. It was a time of acute anxiety—so much so that the concussion felt like a reprieve. The days were so sunny; they went on forever.
It lasted a week or two. Then real life slowly seeped in through the thinning walls.
*
I tried to teach myself to pray in those years. Having been brought up an atheist I didn’t know how—can you think the words, or do you have to say them out loud? Do the words have to form into thoughts in your mind, or can you just be still, nebulous intentions gathering?
Most of my acquired Judaism had melted away, except that I always prayed outside, on my long walks, up to the crest of the fields, then back again. “Green Sussex fading into blue,” Tennyson wrote. I looked at the green fields fading into blue; I looked at the trees and the sky and the clouds, and the Jewish tradition which sees God in nature—in a breath of wind over the grass, in a beam of sunlight or a sudden stillness—comforted me. But no words formed, just inchoate supplications.
Please
let this be over
let it end well.
15
Towards the end of the summer of 2012—August 29, to be exact—an article appeared in The Guardian.
Eva Rausing, who was found dead in July at the London home she shared with her husband, an heir to the Tetra Pak fortune, had passed on information about the unsolved 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Swedish prosecutors have revealed.
Scotland Yard confirmed on Tuesday night that it had given information to authorities in Sweden, where investigators are now reported as wanting to question Hans Kristian Rausing as a possible witness about the information his wife claimed to have obtained.
—
The story about Eva and Olof Palme had broken in Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish daily newspaper, the day before. Eva, it turned out, had been corresponding with Swedish writer Gunnar Wall, the author of several speculative books about the Palme murder. He contacted the police and the newspaper after Eva died.
—
Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot in the back and killed in Stockholm on the evening of February 28, 1986. He was walking home from the cinema with his wife, Lisbet—they had dismissed their bodyguards. The police still don’t know who killed him, or why. It may have been unpremeditated manslaughter. It may have been a case of mistaken identity. It may have been a Swedish far-right conspiracy, or a political assassination by foreign agents.
The police originally believed, apparently on flimsy grounds, that Palme had been assassinated by Kurdish terrorists, but there were many other potential political culprits, including, perhaps most credibly, South Africa. Olof Palme was one of the most vocal international critics of apartheid and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the ANC—the African National Congress liberation movement—via secret channels, at least one of which had been infiltrated by the infamous South African agent Craig Williamson.
Lisbet Palme, however, eventually identified the gunman as Christer Pettersson, a drug addict with a previous conviction of manslaughter. He seemed to have had no particular motive—one theory was that Palme resembled Pettersson’s drug dealer, to whom he owed money. There is a certain cultural logic in the notion that the political leader who had worked so hard to advance equality in Sweden may have been randomly shot on the street, mistaken for someone else. But however improbable it sounds, Pettersson could have had a gun in his possession—the weapon was never found—and he could have pressed the trigger. Lisbet Palme was certain that she recognised him, even though some years had passed by the time he was arrested.
Pettersson was found guilty, but the appeal court later ruled that Lisbet Palme’s identification of him was not credible due to police errors—Pettersson had been lined up with a row of plainclothes policemen who were still wearing their regulation black shoes, and Mrs. Palme noticed, and commented on it. Pettersson was released. He was rumoured to have privately confessed to the murder, but later was said to have retracted his confession. He died after a fall in 2004.
Olof Palme died more than thirty years ago. The police bungled the case since the beginning and have not done much better since. In Britain, there would long since have been a public enquiry about the investigation. In Sweden, by contrast, a tailor-made act of Parliament in 2010 abolished the statute of limitations for the most serious crimes. Since the police don’t comment on ongoing investigations, there is a lack of information about the Palme case, leading to speculation and conspiracy theories.
*
We are in Sussex; the children are playing outside on the lawn. They are laughing, hitting tennis balls high in the air. A ball veers towards the window, and they see me, mock guilt on their faces, mock stricture on mine. “I’m here!” I shout. They laugh. I’m reading old emails, remembering, remembering.
—
The first email Eva sent to me on the subject of Olof Palme arrived at 2:15 a.m. on December 31, 2010. It was New Year’s Eve, exactly ten years into the relapse. The subject line read “very imporrtant [sic] from Eva and Hans K.” The email was long and very angry. She claimed that Hans “had reason to believe” that my father was behind the murder
of the prime minister of Sweden. I could stop her going to the police by sending her a coded sign, some flowers, and then we could meet to discuss the return of the children. It was up to me, she said. I had to decide whether I wanted to “protect” my father or not.
I did not respond.
—
She wrote again on January 18, claiming to know that $30 million had been spent to “take” the children and expressing concern that I had been captured by an imposter. She talked about sending me signs from God, and about her despair. And then, as if in a strange mimicry of the tone in the letters she received from us and from friends, she claimed to miss me, sending very much love to you always, adding I can’t wait to have you back. She signed the email “Eva XXX.”
Below those happy and careless Xs, however, she asked me not to let anyone murder her. She was afraid, she wrote, that my father would attempt to “silence” her. G-d would send me a sign, she said, to encourage me to help her to restore her life and her children.
She wrote again a week later, a heartbreaking and incoherent message. G-d was going to save her, or there was no G-d. She was going to die. But all will be well, she repeated over and over.
—
Eva urgently needed treatment, but she refused all help. The one remaining avenue was to try to have her committed to a mental hospital, but since we were not her nearest relatives we had no power to do so, and our lawyer told us that we would have very little hope of success if we tried.
I think about my old father surreptitiously feeding his dog tidbits under the dining table, reading and rereading The Hobbit in Russian to keep up the language. Eva assumed that he was the force behind the court case to gain custody of the children, but he was thinking of other things.
—
Perhaps it was precisely that slightly indifferent kindness that fuelled her rage.
—
Eva’s first email to Gunnar Wall was sent months later, on June 5, 2011. The subject line read “I know who murdered prime minister Olof Palme.” The Swedish newspapers published it after she died, concealing my father’s name with an x. In the email, Eva claimed that my father was behind the murder of Olof Palme. My brother was supposed to have “discovered” this by chance, and to have been badly affected by it. She wrote that my father thought that Palme threatened his company, which he didn’t want to lose. She wrote that she would say more if Wall wrote back.
—
Eva might not have known or remembered that by 1986—the year of Palme’s murder—the headquarters of Tetra Pak had already left Sweden. The reason for the move was the radical political plan to change the ownership of Swedish industry via union-controlled foundations. These trusts would hold shares that industries of a certain size would be compelled to issue on an annual basis, financed by up to 20 percent of revenue, until the union foundations would own 52 percent of the companies, giving them ownership control.
The plan was launched in 1975 by the economist Rudolf Meidner and others, at the request of the unions. Meidner wrote this for the union journal Fackföreningsrörelsen:
We want to rob the power from the owners of capital, which they wield precisely in their capacity as owners. All experience shows that influence and control are not enough. Ownership plays a decisive role. I wish to refer to Marx and to Wigforss: we cannot profoundly change society without changing the structure of ownership. [my translation]
Nordic noir, the crime genre where the villains are always outsiders, often capitalists, is a cultural residue of this political radicalisation. They are the outliers, rejected by the social norms of togetherness.
The Social Democrats lost the 1976 and the 1979 elections to a centre-right coalition. The party continued working on Meidner’s plan, however: a joint union and Social Democrat working group issued a report in 1978, and the debate carried on. It looked as if the Social Democrats would implement the Meidner foundations if they won the 1982 election, even though Olof Palme himself was apparently sceptical.
The party did win the election, and the foundations were eventually introduced, albeit in a modified—and ultimately temporary—form. Many families, however, had pre-empted the takeover, and left Sweden before then, bringing their companies with them. My parents left in 1982. Eva’s idea, therefore, that Olof Palme had constituted a threat against the company may have been true in the 1970s, but by 1986 it certainly wasn’t true anymore. And every newspaper editor in Sweden knew that.
*
I read what I can of the emails from Eva to Gunnar Wall that have been published in various Swedish newspapers. Some were held back, and the rest were redacted. His own part of the conversation has not been published, and he refused my request to see the whole correspondence. In her emails, Eva repeatedly claims that she knows the location of the murder weapon, but never reveals where it was. She contradicts the information that the murder weapon was a calibre .357 Magnum and claims instead that it was .22-calibre revolver. She wrongly insists that Palme had been shot in the neck, and not, as was the case, between the shoulder blades.
Eva told Gunnar Wall about her drug problems, too. She later realised, he said, “that this was not helping her cause.” She also regretted, according to Wall, revealing that she had seen the “truth” about the Palme murder in a vision. “Palme is not the first vision but the others have been proven to be 100% accurate,” she wrote on June 20, 2011.
Dagens Nyheter asked Gunnar Wall about the discrepancies in Eva’s story. “It was obvious to me that Eva Rausing speculated on flimsy grounds about the type of weapon used and how the murder happened,” he responded. “But I have met many clever people who have guessed rather widely in exactly that way—most people have no detailed knowledge about the murder. And they can still have important things to say about what they actually do happen to know.”
—
Eva’s accusation of murder made all the papers. Sweden was gripped by Nordic noir, and this story had all the ingredients of a crime thriller: an international industrialist, drugs, a woman found dead, and, at the centre, the unsolved murder of the ideological anti-capitalist, the prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme. And whatever newspaper editors privately thought about my father, whose affairs were in good order, who had no motive, and against whom there was no evidence, the allegation sold papers.
Once the media wheels were turning, Swedish deputy prosecutor general Kerstin Skarp, who was in charge of the investigation, was asked to comment. “We have had information from the British authorities, and she [Eva] has contacted the [Palme police] group before, but otherwise I don’t want to say anything about how we work,” she said.
Is the information valuable, she was asked.
“We are not making that judgement public,” she responded.
—
Varg Gyllander, press secretary to the police, told the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet:
“We are aware of this information and there has been a meeting between the Palme group and the prosecutor. But the conclusions of the meeting are secret.”
—
For several years the police Palme group has consisted of just a few people. They sift through and catalogue the leads coming in. They may do more, of course—it’s hard to know. There is always a steady trickle of Palme speculation in the Swedish press, and the police response is always the same: they do not comment on ongoing investigations. There is little or no transparency, and the serious tone of the no-comment policy has the curious effect of lending credibility to any claim, however outlandish it may be.
Conspiracy theories thrive where there is no clear information, and the police policy of no comment, perhaps inadvertently, has a creeping fictionalising effect.
—
In London, The Times published Eva’s allegation on the front page and a two-page spread inside the paper. I called the then editor when I saw it and asked him whether, when he saw the emails from Eva, he really thought of her as a credible witness. Well, he said. It was obvious that she was somewhat—I c
an’t remember the term he used. “Disturbed,” perhaps. Let’s say disturbed. But, he continued, I thought it was possible that she was disturbed and had gotten hold of something important.
That was the gist of it, anyway.
—
Too many women in history have been accused of being deranged when they tried to tell the truth, or at least their version of the truth. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Eva should have been in hospital care at the time when she was writing her incoherent and paranoid emails.
“They killed the prime minister of Sweden and they will not hesitate to get rid of me,” Eva wrote to our lawyer in late spring 2011. “STOP the spread of this evil. They will rule over the lives of others more and more with thier [sic] money and will kill those who stand in their way. It becomes easy for them.”
She added that everything she wrote or said was being monitored; that she was drugged by her security staff, and that she was sending supernatural signs to make our lawyer believe her.
She was not well. But since she was an addict, inhabiting that dangerous territory between mental illness and free will, between compulsion and volition, she could not be forced into care. She couldn’t be coaxed into hospital, and she was not likely to be sent to prison for drug possession. Because she was from a well-known family, the emails to Gunnar Wall became a news commodity. He had the emails for more than a year before he released them: they only became valuable after she died.
—
In September 2012 the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday published another story about Eva: EMOTIONAL LETTERS REVEAL BIZARRE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TRAGIC HEIRESS EVA RAUSING AND JAILED KILLER…AND HOW SHE TOLD HIM “I FEAR FOR MY LIFE.”
The prisoner in question was convicted of conspiracy involving drugs and murder. From prison, he wrote to several high-profile drug addicts, including Eva. Her letters, the article stated, made “the remarkable allegations that a well-known businessman had paid for the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, and that she feared somebody would murder her.” The authorities in Sweden were said to be “taking seriously Eva’s allegations regarding the killing of Olof Palme, and now want to question an unidentified man in Britain who she claimed was the source of her information.”
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