The flames licked up the cardboard box intended for donations to the city mission.
Busnel, Chevignon, Moncler, Lyle & Scott.
Sara no longer kept up. But Malin’s and Lotta’s expensive jackets and clothes from their teens burned well. They let off an acrid, pungent odour.
In the 1980s, no one had bothered to try and avoid chemicals in clothes.
Sara turned around and contemplated the paving slab on the ground. The first of the twelve leading to the garden shed.
The slabs that Stellan had referred to as the ‘twelve-step model to a better life’.
The words had taken on a completely different meaning now. The shed represented something else.
Sara chose to walk alongside the slabs as she aimed for the garden shed. She almost expected to see Stellan and one of the young girls inside when she opened the door.
Rake, lawnmower, jerrycan. Perfect.
She picked up the jerrycan in her hand and felt its weight. Almost full.
Then she unscrewed the cap and emptied the contents over the furniture in the shed. She flung the can about so that the walls were properly drenched. Top to bottom. Petrol splashed across her forearms. She’d never get the smell out of her clothes. It didn’t matter.
When the can was almost empty, she put it to one side on the floor so that the few drips that were left could be reached by the fire. Then she put her hand in her pocket, but realised that she’d used up the box of matches.
Typical.
Well, she’d just have to get another one. She knew where the Bromans kept everything.
In the kitchen, she realised she was famished.
She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. Oh yes, scrambled eggs at dawn.
She opened the fridge door and reviewed its contents. Something she would never have dared to do back in the day.
Now all she had to do was help herself. But there wasn’t much she fancied.
Plastic bottles of mineral water, an open milk carton, margarine, cheese, liver pâté and salami. In the bottom drawer were rinsed salad in bags, organic carrots, onions and potatoes. Sara put two slices of salami in her mouth. That would have to satisfy the worst of her hunger.
The milk still hadn’t gone out of date, so she grabbed the carton. Better for it to be drunk than left there to go off. Then she shut the door while she chewed on the salami and raised the milk carton to her mouth. She was amused to see the mixture of important and unimportant things stuck on the Miele fridge. Letters from the grid saying there was a scheduled power cut that had already passed, photos of the grandchildren, contact details for the GP, a magnet depicting the temptation of St Anthony, and a calendar covering June.
‘M & L back,’ was annotated against the day Stellan had been shot.
‘Kids’ was scrawled across the entire preceding week. ‘Theatre’ at the beginning of the month and ‘Bills’ at the end. ‘Dentist’ was noted against a date next week. It was unclear whom it applied to, but the visit most likely wouldn’t be taking place.
And against every Sunday there was the word ‘Joa’ noted. What did ‘Joa’ mean?
Sara pulled out her mobile and called Malin.
Lotta knew more about her parents, but Sara wasn’t up to talking to her right now. She got the impression that Lotta would somehow be able to work out down the phone what she was up to.
Would Malin pick up after the film screening at the office?
Yes – she answered. She probably hadn’t got round to saving Sara’s number, so she didn’t know who was calling.
Malin changed her tone from neutral to suffering when she heard who it was, but she was still able to explain that ‘Joa’ was Joachim – her parents’ gardener. Did he come every Sunday, Sara asked. The younger sister was able to confirm that. Every Sunday for as long as Malin had been able to remember.
Then she called out to someone at the other end of the line and ended the call without saying goodbye.
Well, Sara had other things on her mind than her childhood friend’s lack of manners.
Every Sunday for as long as Malin could remember.
But Joachim had turned up on the day Stellan had been shot.
It was a Monday.
The old phone contact book made from artificial leather was lying on the kitchen counter, a telephone gilded on the front cover. Inside, the pages were marked in the corners with letters in alphabetical order. It was the same book as when the girls were little – most of the numbers in it had been entered decades ago. Perhaps Stellan and Agneta, like most other people, had switched to saving new numbers and contacts in their mobiles, but they had still kept the old version. And since Joachim had worked for the family for so long he was in it. Under J.
Sara went to the landline phone on the wall, dialled the number and got an answering machine with a voice that she recognised as Joachim’s, apologising that he couldn’t answer and providing a mobile number. She tried that. It rang out without being answered.
Why had he been there on the wrong day? On the day that Stellan happened to be murdered?
Sara checked Joachim’s number in the phone book online, and found out what his last name was.
Joachim Böhme.
It sounded German.
Hadn’t Joachim always had a bit of an accent . . .?
She had the same gut feeling that she got just before a fourth ace turned up in the river in a game of Texas hold ’em. She looked up Joachim Böhme online again and discovered that he lived out in Vaxholm.
That settled it.
You didn’t come all the way from Vaxholm to Bromma every week for several decades just to mow the lawn, Sara thought to herself. Why even have a gardener when Stellan loved doing all those jobs? What kind of ordinary suburban garden needed the dedicated efforts of two men?
The problem with the recruitment and indoctrination of Geiger had been that Uncle Stellan was so well known. All those hours of education that had been reported by the leader of the spy ring, Ober – how would they have pulled that off without being spotted and without anyone around them becoming suspicious?
Hour after hour as they looked after beds, did the watering, planted seeds and pruned. Endless ideological discussions. Lessons.
Joachim Böhme was Ober.
As she jogged out of the house, she dialled Breuer’s number.
Agneta Broman tracked Sara’s rapid exit to her car from a distance of thirty metres.
In her hand she was holding Joa’s mobile.
On the display it said: ‘Missed call: Bromans.’
Agneta thought to herself: Run along, little Sara. Out of the house. Otherwise you may come to harm.
43
The task force were mobilised. A raid in Vaxholm.
They were pulling on their kit while simultaneously checking maps and satellite images, going through conditions on the ground and establishing their tactics. They were scheduled to depart in ninety seconds’ time.
No one was worked up, no one was nervous.
They were all wired.
They knew the target was a potential suspect in two murders, and that if that were the case, then he would be armed and possibly dangerous. But as ever, the safety of those in the surrounding area was their top priority. Things usually worked out, but only as long as the team knew what they didn’t have to worry about.
Sara, Breuer and Strauss were already in the Germans’ BMW heading out of the city. Sara had wanted to leave in advance, since she thought the task force would drive much faster than them. But Strauss was doing 160 kilometres per hour on the E18 heading towards Norrtälje. He was weaving between lanes, almost brushing cars each time he switched. She was thrown forwards and back in her seat as if she was a crash test dummy on a roller coaster.
Strauss had one hand on the horn all the way to make the cars ahead of him move. Sara wished he would keep both hands on the wheel instead.
She called David to let him know she might be late. She’d been forced to step in
and help out German intelligence. She’d hoped that David would accept that explanation, but he didn’t sound at all happy about it. He merely said that he couldn’t very well go out on his own, and questioned whether she’d really thought he would.
Filled with equal parts expectation and guilty conscience, Sara ended the call, before looking at the satnav on her phone. She was pretty sure she knew the way to Vaxholm, but she didn’t want to take any risks. It was easy to mix up the junctions on the motorway. When they left the motorway and joined route 247, Sara began to worry that Strauss would keep going at the same speed on this smaller road, but she was distracted by her mobile ringing.
It was Anna, who said that they’d done a search on the name Joachim Böhme ahead of the raid and got a hit from Uppsala University Hospital.
Apparently the Böhme they were looking for was there – dead after being run over in Roslagen. And inside the car that had hit him, they’d found a loaded AK-47.
‘He’s dead,’ said Sara.
‘Shit,’ said Breuer.
‘Run over by who?’ said Sara to Anna.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Going to check.’
‘And the Kalashnikov? What does that mean?’
‘That we should be very careful,’ said Anna, ending the call.
Sara couldn’t avoid feeling somewhat gratified that Anna and her boss were finally taking her lead seriously. And they weren’t even opposed to her accompanying the Germans.
‘You should have found Böhme long ago,’ Breuer said to Sara. As if it were her responsibility.
‘The question is what role he had,’ said Strauss. ‘Is he the third one to be murdered by the same perpetrator, or has he tried to get rid of the others but failed?’
‘But who did it?’ said Breuer.
‘Could it just have been an accident?’ said Sara.
Breuer simply looked at her.
Apparently not.
Before she had time to say anything else, Anna rang again.
‘I spoke to Cederquist, who was the first officer on the scene. Böhme was apparently reversed over in the harbour at Räfsnäs outside Norrtälje. By an old woman who seemed to be confused and on the verge of a breakdown.’
‘An accident?’
‘It looked that way. But when the police arrived she was gone.’
‘And the AK-47?’
‘They’ve got no explanation for that.’
An old woman who seemed to be confused, Sara thought to herself.
Just like at Kellner’s.
Was it a coincidence?
‘And the car was registered to a man called Lennart Hagman in Sollentuna,’ said Anna. ‘But he lives in Thailand, and hasn’t been to Sweden for twenty years.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Don’t know. But here’s the funny thing – witnesses on the scene told the police that Böhme called the woman who’d run him over “Agneta”.’
*
Tied to a chair and two bullets to the head.
The pattern correlated with the murders of Kellner and Geiger, while Ober had been killed by other means.
Different perpetrators, or a murderer who mixed their methods?
Breuer had pulled up alarmingly detailed information about the four people in Räfsnäs with any form of ties to East Germany. An old theatre director who had participated in cultural festivals there in the 1970s, and two middle-aged artists who had visited East Berlin in the 1980s and gone to underground clubs. But the most interesting person was one Elisabeth Böhme, raised in the DDR and sister of the deceased, Joachim Böhme. They had gone straight there.
When no one had opened the door, Strauss had simply kicked it down. The cabin was small and they found her quickly. Ober’s sister. Shot in the head, and with a bucket of water and several damp towels next to her.
Strauss and Breuer searched the house before they let Sara call Anna to tell her about the body.
Then they handed over the police work to their colleagues and went to sit down in the harbour.
Strauss bought a Daim ice cream for himself and an ice cream sandwich for Sara. He didn’t even ask Breuer. Perhaps he knew better from past experience. Sara accepted the ice cream and put it next to her on the bench, where she promptly forgot about it.
She surveyed the idyllic spot.
Archipelago, sun and seagulls. Families and their kids, weather-beaten pink-cheeked summer types and youths on the way out to the islands, perhaps for some summer job in one of the restaurants out there.
‘Agneta?’ Sara looked at Breuer.
Neither she nor Strauss said anything.
‘Anna said that Ober said the person who’d run him over was called Agneta. Could he have meant Agneta Broman?’
Still no answer.
‘Was it Agneta? Do you know something?’
‘Anything is possible,’ Breuer said.
‘Why would she do that? To avenge Stellan’s death? Assuming it was Ober who murdered him?’
‘It’s possible,’ Breuer replied, pausing for a few seconds. ‘But Agneta Broman wasn’t just the wife of a Stasi informant.’
But?
What else could Agneta have been? Once the wife of Sweden’s most famous man and a glamorous hostess at all his parties. Additionally, the mother of two evil girls and later a doting grandmother to her grandchildren.
Why run over Böhme?
Her gardener.
Her husband’s colleague in espionage, codename Ober.
‘Do you know what an “illegal” is?’ said Breuer.
Sara shook her head.
‘A planted spy. Someone who lives under someone else’s identity in another country while spying for their home country.’
‘You mean that Agneta . . .?’
Breuer picked up her white handbag, removed a file with elastic around the corners from it and passed it to Sara.
‘This is for you.’
When Sara opened the file, she found a copy of an article from a Swedish gossip magazine from the early 1970s, with a note containing a translation of the text to German. The headline read UNCLE STELLAN BAGS HIS YOUNG BRIDE FROM NORRLAND. The article was about Stellan and Agneta’s wedding, and she was described as a beautiful, taciturn woman from the north who had tragically lost her parents in an accident when she was a child. The article was equally sympathetic towards Stellan Broman for taking in the orphaned beauty, who was in fact fifteen years his junior.
‘And?’ said Sara.
‘The couple she gave as her paternal grandparents really did have a son who died in an accident with his wife, but the grandchild also died after spending many years in a coma. Someone acquired the entire house at auction after they died, and photos of both the grandparents and the young couple turned up in the home of Agneta Öman, and later with Stellan and Agneta Broman.’
Breuer put down a wedding photo from the early twentieth century that Sara immediately recognised. It was framed in the Bromans’ living room, and was one of the many pictures that she and the sisters had fooled around with as children. They’d made up their own stories about it. Now she understood that they hadn’t been the only ones inventing stories.
After that, Breuer drew another sheet from the bundle, roughly A5 sized.
‘Birth certificate’ was printed at the top.
For Agneta Öman.
Her maiden name.
‘Look at the signature,’ said Breuer.
The birth certificate had been issued by a pastor in Västerbotten.
It was Jürgen Stiller, the same man who was now a pastor in Torpa, just outside Tranås. One of the IMs that Hedin had written about. The one being guarded by the police in Östergötland.
‘The KGB and GRU worked hard to get reliable people into the authorities and into organisations where they could be useful. Like this kind of assignment.’
‘So Agneta isn’t from Norrland?’ said Sara. ‘Is she East German, too?’
Breuer shook her head.
‘This is where it gets complicated. And remember that you signed those confidentiality papers.’ Breuer stumbled slightly on the word. ‘Illegals were primarily used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They planted many spies under false identities in the USA and around Western Europe. In Sweden as well.’
‘So Agneta is from the USSR?’
Breuer’s silence was reply enough.
It was too much to take in. Aunt Agneta was a Soviet spy with a false identity. She had completely duped those around her. She’d taken Sara in.
‘Did Stellan know?’ said Sara.
‘We don’t know,’ said Breuer.
‘And the children?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘You’re sure?’
The German merely gave her a look in reply.
‘So what was her mission? And what is she doing now?’ Breuer’s silence was suddenly harder to interpret. ‘Did Böhme know she was an illegal?’
‘There are three theories,’ said Breuer. ‘Either she killed Böhme because he shot Stellan. Pure revenge. Or Böhme tried to annihilate the spy ring, and Agneta’s mission was to stop him in order to help those under her protection to complete their missions and pass on the information to Abu Rasil. The KGB often planted so-called “overcoats” to monitor spies so that they could step in and help if necessary. Overcoats that the spies themselves had no idea existed.’
‘And the third option?’
‘That she’s the one getting rid of the spy ring. Just like Ober said.’
Sara didn’t know what to believe. Images of the Agneta Broman of her childhood flickered through her head. Agneta in the kitchen serving up sandwiches and hot chocolate to the girls. In a sun lounger in the garden, wearing sunglasses and clutching a Sjöwall–Wahlöö novel. At parties with a drink in one hand and a slender brown More cigarette in the other. The perennially smiling Agneta, who made almost everyone feel welcome. Who comforted Sara when she was sad more often than her own mother had done. But in a matter-of-fact, almost brusque manner.
‘Why, then?’ was all she managed to say.
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