‘What?’
‘What does them calling Stellan actually mean?’
‘That something very dangerous is happening.’
24
Sea-green tiling with an air of the Mediterranean, Schlossberg towels, a steam room with plenty of space for four people and an enormous bath from Duravit offering magnificent views of Vasaparken. The whole lawn and sports pitch at your feet. Life on the street unfolding right before the eyes of the landed gentry, as if they were seated in an amphitheatre.
And that was just one of the bathrooms – the en suite in the biggest of the bedrooms. The ‘master bedroom’, the Anglicism it had become known by in Swedish of late. Featuring a ‘walk-in closet’, as the new bourgeoisie put it. With an enormous double bed from Dux. Or it might have been Hästens . . . Shiny silk sheets in pale pastels.
There was a small bathroom off the hall, and probably a separate WC somewhere else. An orangery and a couple of smaller bedrooms for the kids in the rear portions of the apartment.
The walls were adorned with photographic art – as people liked to call it when ordinary photos were signed, framed and cost a bloody fortune. Art for the uncertain, Sara thought to herself. She recognised a few of the pictures, while others she could at least tell had been well composed – or whatever you were supposed to say.
There were guitars on one of the smaller walls. They were no doubt expensive. They were probably a mausoleum for the husband’s atrophied dreams of rock stardom. There was no trace of Lotta’s old musical ambitions. Sara remembered how she’d always got to play at the end-of-year school assemblies. She’d been so vapidly talented in a way that left all the adults completely blown away, while the kids would sit there bored and jealous of the attention.
The apartment must have been heading for 200 square metres, of which the lion’s share comprised a gigantic open-plan kitchen, living room and study all in one. Outside, there was a balcony running the length of the wall that faced the park. Although it was a rather narrow one, Sara thought to herself with a note of malicious delight. It wasn’t as deep or secluded as her own terrace, but perhaps that was the point of somewhere like this. To see and be seen. Show your place in the pecking order.
When Sara had called, Lotta had invited her round together with Malin. A lot of people with beautiful homes seemed to be terribly eager to invite people round, or so Sara had noticed. Perhaps because they were so thrilled to show off what they had.
Sara never invited anyone around except Anna, yet she lived a grander existence than any person whom she’d ever visited. She wasn’t shy; she simply found people difficult.
Naturally, Lotta had an espresso machine in her home – a proper, professional machine that she used to make a perfect flat white. Like a latte, but with less milk. It tasted amazing. Sara had never managed to make a latte without ending up with a bitter aftertaste. Fucking Lotta.
Even if her childhood friend had known that Sara lived even more luxuriously than she did, she probably wouldn’t have cared. That was just what the privileged were like. It was impossible to break them. They were never envious – and wasn’t that what was worst about them?
Lying on the coffee table were papers from a funeral director – brochures with different types of coffins and flower arrangements. There were also printouts with poems and hymns, photos of Stellan and a pad of paper with a long list of names on it. Probably guests to be invited to the funeral. A reminder of life’s finite nature – in the midst of all the material success that surrounded them.
‘I’ve had it confirmed,’ said Sara. ‘By German intelligence. Your dad really was a Stasi informant. When you heard the phone ringing, Malin, it was a call from abroad. From people with terrorist connections. A call that triggered all of this.’
‘Sara,’ said Lotta. ‘You came round loads. You practically lived with us for a bunch of summers. Does it sound reasonable to you?’
‘Don’t know. But the BND think it might be connected to this car that was blown up in Germany. Have you read about it? There was a bomb under the road.’
Lotta shook her head, and Sara wasn’t sure whether it was because she hadn’t read about it or because she didn’t believe it could be connected with the death of her father.
‘They’re looking for the person who recruited Stellan,’ said Sara. ‘But they only have his code name. They think there’s some sort of meeting taking place.’
‘I have real difficulty believing this. It’s possible they got him to work for them somehow. But he won’t have seen it as spying – I promise you that. Dad was a bit naive. Always saw the best in people. Perhaps they made him feel important, stroked his ego, made him think he was making the world a better place.’
‘The important thing right now is for us to find the other members of the spy ring. Above all, its leader. He had the code name “Ober”. Does that ring any bells for you? Ober?’
‘No,’ said Malin.
Lotta stared straight ahead – seemingly both concentrating and absent at the same time. A couple of seconds passed and then she shook her head.
‘Apparently it was someone who visited your dad at home. That was where Stellan was recruited, indoctrinated and then reported back. Can you think of anyone who came round a lot? Someone who must have talked to your father one-to-one. It’s quite possible he would have been there in the evening after you’d gone to bed, but this went on for many years. It can hardly be a complete stranger. Are there any recurring faces?’
‘There were always loads of people in and out of the house. New faces all the time.’
‘Of course, some were there more often than others. TV bosses, Dad’s colleagues, cultural personalities, the odd government minister, a few CEOs. But that was when he and Mum had guests. Otherwise he mostly kept himself to himself.’
‘No one you remember talking politics?’
‘No. Not that I recollect,’ said Malin.
‘Everyone talked politics back then,’ said Lotta. ‘Don’t you remember the shows on kids’ TV? It was straight-up indoctrination.’
‘Could you write me a list of names of people who visited the house a lot?’
‘Is this your investigation now?’ said Lotta, looking at her challengingly.
Sara stumbled slightly. Lotta clearly didn’t like being bossed around, but she couldn’t very well lie to her.
‘No,’ said Sara. ‘Not formally. But I’m helping out – since I knew Stellan.’
‘We’ve got a lot to deal with around Dad’s funeral right now. If the people leading the investigation ask us for help then we’ll do it, but we can’t spend lots of time on random tasks.’
‘It’ll take no time,’ said Sara, almost pleading in tone, but Lotta had made up her mind.
Sara didn’t know what to say. She had no mandate to demand anything from them in a police capacity, and she’d apparently failed to acquire enough personal authority during her lifetime to assert herself against her childhood friend.
‘Have you watched the videos?’ said Malin, possibly just to break the silence. ‘Dad filmed everything.’
‘He probably didn’t film secret meetings with a spy,’ said Lotta acidly. ‘If he even had them.’
But Sara wasn’t as sceptical.
The videos . . . Malin could sometimes be pretty sharp.
If Ober had been such a frequent visitor to the Bromans’ as the Germans thought, it wasn’t at all improbable that he’d been caught on film.
He must have had some other reason for being there – he would have needed to display an innocent facade. It would have been strange if Stellan had refrained from filming one single person when he filmed everyone else. Ober had probably done his best to blend in among all the friends, colleagues and partygoers.
Stellan’s videos . . .
25
Sara stepped across the police tape and approached the house. She tried to take in the scene in front of her eyes, but it was still not quite possible to see the Bromans’ ho
me as a crime scene.
A glance down towards the water made her stop in her tracks. Once again, her mind was drawn to the memory of the three girls on the jetty, chucking sandwiches in the water and laughing.
Loud, happy laughs.
One reason for Sara’s joy was that she hadn’t had to swim, she now remembered. As a child, she’d been frightened of the water and what might be below the surface: fish, eels, water snakes, seaweed, junk, sharp sticks and the like.
Sara had felt anxiety at the mere smell of sun cream, and it lingered on in her, even now in adulthood – because she still associated it with swimming, she assumed. Although they never had swum when they were hanging out on the jetty. Not so far as she could remember.
She’d never told the sisters about her fear, because she knew that it would have led to constant encouragement to jump into the water, hold her breath beneath the surface and swim among the reeds.
Now she remembered how hungry she’d been when they’d been lobbing their sandwiches in. But the laughter and the solidarity with the sisters had taken priority over the needs of her body.
It was stupid, but Sara still smiled at the memories.
Then her gaze settled on the fisherman’s hut, the small building down by the water’s edge that doubled up as a visitor’s cottage with its bunks screwed into the walls, its compost toilet and its kitchenette.
The fisherman’s hut that Sara and her mother had lived in. As if on the Bromans’ charity.
So close to the happy family, while simultaneously so separated from it.
Like staying in the hall throughout the duration of a party.
The cramped little hut that she’d been so upset at being forced to leave.
She went up to it and peeked through the window. The sunlight made it hard to see anything inside, but it was still possible to make out the table in the main room as well as an armchair. Had they even had a TV? Sara wasn’t sure.
She left the small building and all its memories of crampedness and rows with her mother, Jane. She went round to the back of the Bromans’ house and picked up a lobelia. Lying in the cracked white pot containing the flower was the spare key to the house. Just as usual. Sara went back round to the front and stepped across the threshold.
In the hallway she came to a halt and took in the scents once again – just as she’d done the day before. It really did smell just like it had back in the day. This time she spotted Malin’s old pink baseball cap on the hat rack. It was tatty and a little grimy with earth. Perhaps Agneta had taken it over from her daughter, who’d probably owned dozens of hats since then.
The sisters had always got as many clothes as they wanted. Expensive clothes, designer gear. Sara remembered her shame in the presence of the stylish sisters. It had got even worse when she’d started to inherit Malin’s and Lotta’s discarded garments. The finest clothes from last season – something that others at school had naturally commented on. Beautiful, expensive clothes. But clothes that she’d been given second-hand. Sara had been both ashamed and proud.
It was probably Agneta who’d had the idea, and thought she was doing a good deed. That she was making the three friends more equal.
Autumns had not just been about comments from her classmates about her inherited wardrobe. They had also been about Malin and Lotta going back to their usual friends – the ones who’d all been in Torekov or Båstad or the French Riviera for the summer.
Was it really just the summers that had been so enchanting? All her positive memories were from that season, at any rate. Bathed in constant sunshine. In pure weather terms, the uninterrupted heat of this year’s summer was reminiscent of her childhood – at least the way Sara remembered it. But given the knowledge of climate change at the back of her mind, it was a pretty alarming insight.
Stellan’s murder felt like an incomprehensible tragedy in the promised land. It had set the innocence and happiness of childhood against the shitty world in which they now lived. A world where Sweden’s playful uncle could be murdered.
It was like someone murdering Santa Claus.
Hasty, unexpected endings had been a common feature of her entire childhood.
Like the day when Jane had suddenly said they were moving, and had shoved Sara and their possessions into a taxi and left. Without any prior warning.
In the morning, Sara had lived in a fisherman’s hut in a land of fairy tales, and by evening she’d been resident in a cramped rented flat in a concrete-clad suburb. She’d quickly realised at her new school that her ties to the Broman family were nothing to boast about. On the contrary, each reference she made to her old world had been severely punished.
It had been a new reality that had shaped her into the person she was today, in many more ways than her previous existence had ever done.
The years had gone by and Sara had been invited to Malin’s high school graduation party – completely unexpectedly. She assumed that it was Agneta who had added her name to the list, but she’d gladly accepted the invitation. Perhaps everything would be like it had been in the past . . .
It hadn’t been.
Malin hadn’t spoken to Sara, and the other guests had smirked at her peaked graduation cap with the name of a school so far out in the suburban wilderness. Eventually, she’d got hammered and faceplanted the floor.
A total disaster.
But that had been then. She came back to the present.
Or, rather, she didn’t. She was there to dig around in the past. Not just her own past, though, even if there was some connection.
So what might be left? Pictures, photos, videos, articles?
A man like Stellan would surely have documented his life in the limelight. Sara remembered how important it had been for him to emphasise how ordinary all the great men and women he spent time with were. How rarely he thought about the fact that the people around him were idols and global stars.
As ever, the vanity became clearer the more one attempted to conceal it.
She’d known since childhood that the walls of Stellan’s study were covered in photos of him with various celebrities. She could make a start there.
And back then, almost every family had kept a detailed photo album. The Bromans must have done that too. In fact, especially the Bromans.
And as the sisters had told her, Stellan had recorded a lot of film.
Were the films still around?
Where would they be?
Sara quickly rifled through drawers and cabinets in the study, the living room and the kitchen before climbing the stairs to the upper floor.
But then she stopped herself and retraced her steps to the kitchen. Something had caught her attention.
Was it related to the investigation?
She opened the cleaning cupboard again.
Vacuum cleaner, duster, pail, mop. And lying on the bucket were a pair of green washing-up gloves with a name written on them.
‘Jane.’
Her mother’s old washing-up gloves were still there. The Bromans probably used a cleaning company these days.
What had it felt like for Jane to cook and clean in a house where her own daughter was running around and playing with the kids? With the upper classes. Wasn’t it rather strange for Jane and Sara to have lived on site?
Having your domestic help living in had a rather nineteenth-century British vibe about it. Like Downton Abbey, but without the reassuring drama.
Or was it more honest?
Nowadays, domestic help would vanish when they were done, since the servants worked for their own companies and stayed out of the way. There was no need to hang around, looking the class divide in the whites of its eyes.
But perhaps that was exactly what the Bromans had wanted to do?
Sara felt like the servant girl’s daughter – the cleaner’s bastard child. And she realised this was a feeling she’d had many times before. She tried to be proud of it.
When she didn’t succeed, she focused instead on the upstairs bedrooms.
In Malin’s old room, she found the school yearbook from her first year at sixth form. Bromma Sixth Form – the one that Sara had never got the chance to go to.
Unlike Sara, Malin had left her old yearbooks at her parents’. She presumably had no interest in digging through the past. Not yet, anyway. But before long, external influences would take hold and the flight into the memories of her youth would begin.
Yet again, Sara had a guilty conscience at her own malicious joy in all of this. She had nothing against the grown-up Broman sisters. They were strangers, and in that regard completely uninteresting to her. She would dearly have loved to see cracks in the facade of the sisters as children. A glimpse into the teenage soul of Malin might be caught through her reviews of the other pupils in the yearbook.
‘Ugly’, ‘bimbo’, ‘loser’, or a red or purple heart. A difficult-to-interpret line under a name, or simply a black cross over a face.
There weren’t many who got a good write-up from Malin.
There’s no harsher judge than a teenager, Sara reflected. And it actually softened her guilty conscience in relation to Ebba just a little when she was reminded of quite how complicated teenagers had always been. It was probably not just Sara’s fault that things were the way they were between the two of them.
Towards the back of the yearbook, she found one of the graduating classes and she felt her stomach flip when she was met with a pair of warm brown eyes.
Martin in his late teens, before they got together. When all the girls at school were still competing for him.
Even Malin had been infatuated with Martin. And Lotta had done what she could. But it had been Sara who had got him in the end.
She leafed to the back of the yearbook, where all the associations and clubs were listed. She saw Martin listed against the am-dram group, the student council and the literary society, Nemo saltat sobrius. What on earth had he been doing there? He’d surely never been interested in books. He had probably only been in it because ‘Nemo’ had been exclusive and had used selections and secret rituals. An Olympus for the most popular. Books weren’t all that important in a literary society. Not in sixth form.
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