‘And who was that man?’
The same silence. The same fixed gaze.
‘I can’t give you any names,’ Hedin said eventually. ‘But I’ve got them in my papers.’
‘This is a murder investigation.’
‘A Supreme Court ruling takes priority. Much higher priority.’
‘So you’re on their side?’
‘They’ll have to stay here in my papers,’ said Hedin, patting a blue file tied with string she’d just placed on the bed. ‘Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom.’
Sara waited until Hedin had locked the door to give her deniability, and then she opened the file.
Excerpts from records in German.
On the page titled ‘IM Geiger’ there was an annotation in pencil: ‘Broman’. Against ‘IM Kellner’ it said ‘Schulze’; against ‘IM Koch’ it said ‘Stiller’. Against ‘IM Ober’ it said ‘Ringleader’ and ‘Name’ with a big question mark after it. Sara took out her mobile and photographed the pages.
She leafed onwards. Thanks to her schoolgirl German, she was able to find a couple of files about young East Germans who’d ended up in prison after Geiger had reported their plans to leave the country, although the punishment was doled out for some made-up crime. Next to one name there were details of a male ‘friend’ in Sweden – one Günther Fricke. Sara also photographed those pages, as well as some she didn’t have time to interpret, and then she quickly put the folder back when she heard water rushing through the pipes.
While Hedin washed her hands, a memory cropped up in Sara’s head of how she and the Broman sisters had played capitalists and workers when they were little. She hadn’t thought about it for years. And previously she’d interpreted it as a tragicomic reflection of the fact that they’d grown up in a thoroughly politicised society, where children’s television could be about capitalism’s hunger for profits or the Vietnam War. Now, however, it felt as if there might be another explanation for why they’d played that particular game in well-heeled Bromma.
Sara always got to be the evil capitalist who was lectured by the sisters, who were on the side of the workers. She remembered that Stellan had got very angry when he’d found them playing that game. Sara had thought it was because they were in Bromma, where all forms of Red influence were to be prevented – but perhaps Stellan had been worried about being uncovered as an East German agent?
‘Was there anything else you wanted to ask me about?’ said Hedin once she was back. ‘I need to get back to work.’
‘How sure are you that Stellan was Geiger?’
‘I can actually show you that,’ said Hedin, taking out a red file tied with string. She leafed through the papers and pulled out a dozen sheets of A4 attached in the corner – copies of files from a German archive. The Stasi archive, judging by the heading.
Sara glanced through the text and tried to understand as much as possible. German was tricky enough anyway, but bureaucratic German – communist bureaucratic German to boot – was even worse.
But she understood some of the information. The house in Bromma, contacts with the Swedish elite, intense socialising. There was no doubt that Uncle Stellan had been Geiger – however that was possible. But the name wasn’t written down, so she had to assume that none of the newspapers had dared to run with the story.
Sara held up the bundle of papers.
‘I need to take copies of this,’ she said.
‘Take them. I’ve got others.’
Sara got up.
‘There’s just one more thing,’ she said. ‘If Stellan Broman’s death had anything to do with the Cold War, with this spy ring, or with someone he hurt – what might have happened to Agneta?’
‘Which Agneta?’
‘His wife.’
‘Don’t know. Is she dead? Or missing?’
‘Missing. And this is top secret. It can’t get out to anyone.’
‘Who would I tell? When did she disappear?’
‘In connection with the murder. Could someone taking revenge have kidnapped her? Might it be connected to the spy ring? Why would someone attack his wife?’
‘Sometimes spouses knew what the spies were doing, sometimes not. But I’ve not seen anything about his wife in the archives.’
Agneta’s disappearance was still a mystery.
10
The Kalashnikov was still there in its waterproof bag under a heap of old rag rugs. She took it apart, oiled all the components and then put it back together again. She could have done it blindfolded. She had actually done it blindfolded – but that had been forty years ago.
She needed to test fire it, and she wondered how far away the nearest house was. At a guess, it was a couple of kilometres, and even if someone happened to be passing right now, there was no one who would investigate the sound of shots this far out on Ekerö, given how much game was shot unlawfully with the silent blessing of the residents.
She made the weapon ready and fired three shots in rapid succession, although without the automatic element since she didn’t want to attract any curious witnesses.
The old Kalashnikov worked just as it should. There was a reason this was the world’s most widespread automatic weapon.
The barn was now fragrant with gunpowder, and the smell took her back in time. Once again she felt the heat, the sand in her eyes and the strong winds – at once warming and frightening. She heard the commands being shouted in foreign languages – languages of which she remembered only fragments today.
As a matter of reflex, she secured the weapon again, put it down on the floor butt-first and stood to attention – in three rapid steps.
It had stuck.
The question was whether everything had stuck, or only enough to encourage her to set off on her mission in the belief that she was equipped for it – only to discover en route that she was nowhere near good enough. That she had forgotten. That she couldn’t do it.
That she was too old.
Doubtful of her own abilities, but at least satisfied with the test firing, she put the rifle back in the bag and stashed it in the boot of the car along with the box of ammunition. She got out the mobile phone she’d bought ten years ago – an insurance policy that had made her feel faintly ridiculous – even then the old world had seemed increasingly distant, almost unreal. Today, she was glad she’d made the purchase. Her own mobile was out of the question, and now she didn’t have to cycle to some nearby farm to make a call. An old woman knocking on the door in the middle of nowhere would have drawn attention, even if she could have come up with some story about being out in the woods and losing her mobile. But she would probably have struggled to talk uninterrupted, and she definitely didn’t want anyone listening in on her next call.
A ten-year-old Ericsson without any smart features was exactly what she needed. Long battery life, plenty of calling time. Charging it a couple of times a month had become a ritual, an invocation of times gone by – although it was unclear which ones. But in any case, it was a brief opportunity to look back at her life and her mission. To remember who she’d been.
Now that her mission had suddenly become reality, all the years of waiting were suddenly over and the other life had been forgotten. It was like returning through Professor Kirke’s wardrobe, or waking up from a dream in which you’d lived a whole life and realising that just a few minutes had elapsed.
Apart from her body.
Her damn body. Deserter. Traitor.
As a young woman, it had been impossible to imagine how decrepitude would feel. As an old woman, it was almost impossible to think about anything else. The muffin top tummy, the flaws and droopy breasts. Her body, which had been her most effective weapon, was now a burden. Like going to a ball in knight’s armour.
In terms of her mission, she had always found the objectification of women useful – and had been able to use her attractiveness to get men where she wanted them. It was a sort of sexual aikido – using the attacker’s force against himself. She’d seen her body
as a tool – at the cost of always maintaining a distance from it, not experiencing it as her own. But she couldn’t help but miss that desirable body a little now – when she could have used it the way she wanted to.
Four rings, then he answered.
‘Yes?’
‘Geiger is dead.’
A brief pause, too brief for most people to notice it, but it told her everything she needed to know. Just half a second before the other speaker replied had given away their hand. Not one second or two seconds – just half of one.
‘Never heard of him. You must have the wrong number.’
And with that answer, he sealed his own fate. He was still ready, true to his old loyalties. The ring was still very much active, just as Agneta had feared. Now she had no choice.
‘Listen up,’ she hastened to say before he had time to hang up. ‘You need to cooperate if you want to live. We’re in the same situation. Geiger is dead. I know who did it and they’ll carry on. Stay inside, don’t open the door, don’t answer the phone. I’ll be with you in eight hours. I’ll text from this number when I’m outside the door.’
Then she hung up.
She was certain it would work. You couldn’t give them the feeling that they had any other options – she’d learned that much. And since she’d practised the tactic so many times, she knew that it almost always worked. The few times it didn’t, you had to improvise on the spot. Now she knew that he, at least, was still loyal, which meant she had to act.
She had eight hours, then she absolutely had to be at his door. She ate the last of the biscuits, urinated in a corner of the barn and covered it in old straw. Fortunately, she always had tissues in her pocket. Given she was stuck here until the car was charged, she preferred not to show herself outside the barn unnecessarily.
The test firing of the gun had been a risk of its own. There were more people out and about in the woods around here than you would think, and she knew how often it was passing members of the public who, by chance, put police on the trail. But she’d chosen to take that risk.
There were around seven hours until the battery would be charged, if the instruction manual was right. She might as well gather strength. She contemplated the straw and the car, and eventually opted for the car. She folded down the back seat and lay down in the boot with her coat blanketed across her and the AK-47 her bedfellow. Her legs still hurt. She would need to take painkillers before she left, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to walk.
But that was then. This was now.
Fatigue washed over her, soft and comforting, like waves on a white beach in the West Indies. If she’d been born a few decades later, she might have found it highly stressful, being pulled back into a life she’d finished with – a life suited to a forty-years-younger version of herself. In addition, she’d shot dead her husband of almost half a century, undeniably an act of some importance. But that wasn’t how she thought.
She had a mission. Her whole life had been one long preparation for this day.
And now the day had come.
Two minutes later, she was sound asleep, snoring.
11
Sara sat in her car for a long time, thinking about what Hedin had told her. It was a lot to take in – not just what had happened to Stellan and Agneta, but also the fact that Stellan had supposedly been a spy for the DDR.
After so many years together, Martin was still the one Sara called when she needed perspective and some contact with reality. Her husband was in a meeting about an impending concert tour, but he left the room to answer his phone, as if he’d sensed something unusual had happened.
Martin came from the same neighbourhood as Sara and the Bromans, and like every other Swede of the same age, he’d grown up watching Stellan’s shows. He tried to grasp what Sara told him.
‘How are you?’ was his well-meaning question, but Sara struggled to answer. ‘Where are you? Do you want me to come to you?’
‘No, it’s fine. But I might react when it all hits me properly.’
‘Are you sure? I’ll come to you now if you like.’
‘No, you look after your artists. I just wanted to talk a little. Process it.’
‘But it’s not your case, is it? You’re not a police officer now – just a friend. Well, just and just . . . You know what I mean.’
‘That’s exactly why I might know something that could help them. Anna and I have always helped each other out.’
And they had. Ever since the police academy, they’d been in a pact to help each other. And Anna probably knew exactly how important this was to Sara – that was why she’d been so open towards her.
‘See you later, at home. Love you.’
‘Love you.’
Sara realised that she really wanted to end the call so that she could think more about Uncle Stellan’s death. She didn’t want to admit to Martin how obsessed she could get with a case, even when – as now – it wasn’t her own. Sometimes it just felt like things depended on her if they were going to get solved. She found it hard to relax and trust others. And she didn’t think Anna had any objection to a little extra help.
*
Anna was done at the Bromans’ house and was heading back to the station in Solna, so when Sara called her they agreed to meet at Brommaplan.
Once there, they couldn’t decide between McDonald’s and a coffee from Pressbyrån. They opted for the latter. Then they settled down on a park bench in the sunshine and watched the stream of passengers heading in and out of the underground station.
‘We found something in the upstairs bathroom,’ said Anna. ‘Some kind of hidden compartment, which had recently been covered up. The adhesive was still wet.’
‘What was in it?’
‘Nothing. But it could have been where they kept their valuables. That would suggest a break-in. A home robbery.’
‘Why would the burglar cover the hole back up again?’ said Sara.
‘Maybe as a diversion – to create confusion. Perhaps it was something very particular, like jewellery or watches that could be traced, and they wanted to buy some time before we put an alert out.’
Her mobile beeped four times almost simultaneously, and then twice more. Newsflashes from Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Omni and Dagens Eko.
‘Uncle Stellan dead. Thought to have been murdered.’
‘Unclear if Stellan murdered.’
‘Uncle Stellan found murdered in his home.’
‘Uncle Stellan dead. Found by daughter.’
Well, it was only ever going to be a matter of time.
Anna’s mobile rang. The ringtone was a song by some stupid talent show winner that her friend apologised for every time it rang, but never changed.
‘Expressen,’ she said, hanging up. ‘And I am going to change it.’
‘And there was nothing in the hidey-hole to suggest what had been in there?’ said Sara.
‘Something wrapped in a waxcloth, according to Forensics.’
A secret hiding place correlated well with Hedin’s theories about espionage, Sara thought to herself. The question was simply what had been kept in there. Microfilm? Weapons? Radio equipment?
And why had the murderer taken it? And then covered the hole back up?
To buy time, obviously. So far she agreed with Anna. The murderer had perhaps not expected the espionage trail to become known quite so soon.
Was that why Stellan had died? Because the murderer needed to get at what was in the secret compartment?
What could be that valuable?
Money?
‘Instead of putting cash under the mattress, perhaps he’d hidden it behind a bathroom tile,’ said Anna, as if she’d been reading Sara’s thoughts. ‘He must have made a fair whack in his time. He might have gone a bit gaga in his old age and stopped trusting banks. We’re checking similar cases now. Armed robberies in domestic homes, with or without deadly violence. And we’ve raised a search party. Missing Persons have rounded up almost a
hundred people.’
‘It’s easier when a celebrity is involved.’
‘Definitely. Although it might be tricky to persuade everyone to keep their mouths shut about the wife being missing.’
‘It’ll get out sooner or later,’ said Sara. ‘How’s it going with the gang of burglars?’
‘We’re checking up on where they all are. Then we’ll bring them all in at the same time. That was the plan.’
‘OK. But look, I had another possibility I wanted to put to you.’
‘Shoot.’
‘I met a researcher. A professor of history. She’s written books about Swedes who were spies for the Stasi – and according to her, Stellan was one. An informal collaborator, they called it.’
‘Uncle Stellan? A spy?’
‘Informant stroke collaborator.’
‘You think that might be why he was murdered?’
‘Seems more likely than a break-in that Stellan didn’t notice. Don’t you think?’
‘But the Stasi . . . East Germany hasn’t existed for fifty years.’
‘Thirty.’
Anna was silent for a moment.
‘I don’t know . . . I think we’ve got a better theory. And it’s not actually up to me what we focus on.’
‘But you can have a word with Bielke? I assume his lordship is running the show?’
Sara liked Bielke as a preliminary lead investigator, but couldn’t help making fun of his noble ancestry.
‘Absolutely. I’ll pass it on.’
It didn’t sound as though Anna would. Even if the information was a little unexpected, it bothered Sara that it wasn’t being taken seriously.
If she wanted the spy theory to be followed up on, it seemed she would have to do it herself. And that wasn’t her job.
At the same time, Sara realised that the murder of Stellan Broman wasn’t work, as far as she was concerned. Not in the slightest. It was extremely personal.
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