The Hidden Child

by Camilla Lackberg

  ‘They’re probably mostly Erik’s,’ said Martin. ‘From what I understood, he was the collector.’

  ‘But all these Nazi artefacts . . . They must be worth a fortune.’

  ‘No doubt. A person who devotes most of his life to collecting things is bound to end up with a lot of stuff.’

  ‘Why do you think he did it?’ Paula stared into the darkness, trying to wrap her head around what they now regarded as fact. To tell the truth, she had become convinced the minute she started looking into his alibi. That was when she got the idea to find out whether Axel Frankel’s name appeared on any other airline passenger list. When they’d checked his alibi, they had verified only that he departed on the day he had specified; it hadn’t occurred to them to see whether he had made any other trips. It was only this morning that she had learned a passenger named Axel Frankel had travelled from Paris to Göteborg on June sixteenth, and then returned on the same day.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Martin replied to her question. ‘It’s hard to understand. The brothers seem to have had a good relationship, so why would Axel kill Erik? What was it that triggered such a strong reaction?’

  ‘It must have something to do with the sudden renewal of contact between the four of them: Erik, Axel, Britta, and Frans. That can’t be a coincidence. And somehow that’s all connected to the murder of the Norwegian.’

  ‘I agree. But how? And why? Why now, after sixty years? It just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘We’ll have to ask him. If we ever get out of here, that is. And if we ever manage to catch him. He’s probably on his way to the other side of the world right now,’ said Paula, discouraged.

  ‘Maybe they’ll find our skeletons down here sometime next year,’ Martin joked, but his attempt at humour was not appreciated.

  ‘If we’re lucky, maybe some kid will break in,’ said Paula drily.

  ‘Hey! You’ve got something there!’ Martin said excitedly, poking her hard in the side.

  ‘Whatever it is, I sincerely hope it’s worth the damage you just did to my ribs,’ said Paula, probing the tender spot where he’d jabbed her with his elbow.

  ‘Don’t you remember what Per said when we interviewed him?’

  ‘I wasn’t there. You and Gösta conducted the interview,’ she reminded him, but she was starting to sound interested.

  ‘Well, he said that he broke into the house through a window in the basement.’

  ‘I don’t think there are any windows down here. If there were, it would be a lot brighter,’ said Paula sceptically, squinting as she looked at the walls in the basement.

  Martin got up and fumbled his way over to the outside wall.

  ‘But that’s what he said. There has to be a window. Maybe something is hanging in front of it. You said it yourself – the stuff stored in here must be worth a fortune. Maybe Erik didn’t want anyone to be able to see his collection from outside.’

  Now Paula got up too and headed in Martin’s direction. She heard him say ‘ow!’ as he ran into the opposite wall, but when that was followed by ‘aha!’, she felt her hopes rise. And hope turned to triumph when Martin pulled aside a heavy curtain and daylight came flooding into the basement.

  ‘Couldn’t you have thought about this a couple of hours ago?’ Paula complained.

  ‘Hey, how about a bit of gratitude?’ said Martin cheerfully as he unfastened the latch and pushed the window open. He reached for a chair standing a metre away and put it directly under the window.

  ‘Ladies first!’

  ‘Thanks,’ Paula muttered as she climbed up on the chair and squirmed her way out through the gap.

  Martin was right behind her. For a moment they both stood still to allow their eyes to adjust to the dazzling daylight. Then they set off running. They dashed up to the front door but found it to be locked, and this time there was no key above the door. That meant their jackets were locked in the house, with their mobiles and car keys. Martin was just about to run over to the nearest neighbour’s house when he heard a loud crash. He glanced in the direction the sound came from and saw that Paula, with a satisfied expression, had hurled a rock through a window on the ground floor.

  ‘Since we got out through a window, I thought we might as well get in the same way.’ She picked up a stick and knocked out the splinters of glass from the window frame, then looked at Martin.

  ‘Well? Are you planning to give Axel an even bigger head start, or would you like to help me get inside?’

  Martin hesitated only a second before giving his colleague a leg-up and climbing through the window after her. What mattered now was catching up with Erik Frankel’s killer. Axel already had a huge lead. And they had far too many questions that were still unanswered.

  Axel had made it only as far as Landvetter airport. When he locked the police officers in the basement and took off in his car the adrenaline had been surging through his veins, but that had ebbed away leaving only emptiness in its place.

  He sat motionless, staring through the windows as the planes took off. He could have departed on any one of those flights; he had money and the contacts that would secure him a ticket to whatever destination he chose. Years of hunting had taught him everything there was to know about the art of vanishing without a trace. But he didn’t want to do that. That was the conclusion he had finally reached. He could escape, but he didn’t want to.

  And so he was sitting here, in no-man’s-land, watching the planes taking off and landing. He was waiting for fate to catch up with him. And to his great surprise, he was no longer dreading the moment. Maybe this was the way the men he’d hunted had felt on the day when someone finally knocked on their door and called them by their proper name. A strange mixture of fear and relief.

  But in his case, the price had been too high. It had cost him Erik.

  If only Elsy’s daughter hadn’t brought over the medal. That small piece of metal symbolized everything they’d spent all those years trying to forget, and when it was delivered to his door Erik had taken it as a sign that the time had come for the truth to surface.

  Of course they had talked in the past about setting things right if they could, or at least accepting responsibility. Not before the law, for the law was indifferent to crimes so ancient they lay beyond its statute of limitations. But on a human, moral level. They deserved to suffer the shame and condemnation of their peers, their fellow human beings. According to Erik, it was time for them to acknowledge what they had done and stop evading the judgement they deserved. Axel had always managed to talk him out of it, telling him that it would serve no purpose. Nothing they said or did now could change the past and it would be pointless to sacrifice all the good that he’d accomplished in his work merely to exact a penance that would change nothing. Instead he would atone for his sins by continuing to devote himself to that work.

  Each time, Erik had listened and given in, but the feelings of guilt kept gnawing at him until, finally, only shame remained. To Erik the world had always been black and white. He dealt in facts, and was never more comfortable than when he was submerged in his books; there dates and names, times and places were set out in black letters on a white backdrop. Yet for sixty years Axel had persuaded him to inhabit a grey world of ambiguity and deceit. And they might have gone on that way had it not been for Elsy’s daughter – and Britta, whose defensive walls had begun to crumble from a disease that was slowly destroying her brain.

  Axel had tried desperately to reason with Erik. Everything he was, everything he stood for, would be obliterated if he were to answer for this crime. No one would ever look at him in the same way. The work of an entire lifetime would be ruined. But this time his arguments failed to sway his brother. He was in Paris when he got the call from Erik. ‘It’s time,’ he said. Just like that. He had sounded drunk when he called, which was especially alarming because Erik never drank in excess. And he had sobbed on the phone, saying that he couldn’t take it any more, that he’d gone to see Viola to say goodbye so that she wouldn’
t have to endure the shame when the truth came out. Then he had muttered something about how he had already set things in motion, but that he couldn’t wait any longer for someone else to air their dirty laundry in public. He was going to put an end to his own cowardice, put an end to the waiting, he had said, slurring his words as Axel gripped the phone, his hand sweating.

  Axel had jumped on the first plane to Sweden, determined to make his brother see reason. He closed his eyes, heart aching as he relived that moment when he had rushed into the library and found Erik was sitting at his desk, scribbling absently on a notepad. In a dry and toneless voice he had said the words that Axel had lived in fear of for six decades. Erik had made up his mind. He couldn’t live with the guilt any longer.

  He had been hoping that what Erik had said on the phone was merely empty talk, and that his brother would have come to his senses when he sobered up. But now he saw that he was mistaken. Erik was standing by his decision with frightening resolve. He had already begun to take steps to ensure that the truth would come out. He talked about the child, too. For the first time he revealed how he had managed to find out where the child had been placed, and the monthly payments he had made to the little boy’s adopted parents as a form of compensation for what they had taken from him. No doubt assuming that Erik was the boy’s father, they had accepted the payments without demur. But that still wasn’t enough for Erik. That act of penance hadn’t eased the pain that was tearing him apart. If anything, it had only made the consequences of their action all the more real. It was now time for the true penance, Erik had said, looking his brother in the eye.

  In that instant Axel had understood that the life he had built – a life filled with admiration and respect – would be destroyed. Images from the camp flooded his mind: the prisoner next to him who had been shoved into the pit they were digging, the hunger, the stench, the degradation. The rifle butt striking his ear so that something broke inside of him. The dead man toppling against him in the bus as they headed home to Sweden. Suddenly he was back there: the sounds, the smells, the rage that had smouldered in his heart, even when he had no strength left and could focus only on survival. He no longer saw his brother sitting in the chair in front of him. Instead, he saw all the people who had demeaned him, harmed him, and who were now jeering at him, rejoicing in the fact that this time he would be the one who was led to the scaffold. But he refused to give them that satisfaction, all those people, dead and alive, who were lined up to taunt him. He wouldn’t be able to survive that. And he had to survive. That was the only thing that mattered.

  There was a rushing in his ear, worse than usual, and he stopped hearing what Erik was saying; he just saw his lips moving. And then it was no longer Erik. It was the blond youth from Grini who had seemed so friendly when they talked, who had duped him into believing that he was the one human in that inhuman place. That same boy who had raised his rifle and then, with his eyes fixed on Axel’s, smashed the butt down into Axel’s head.

  Filled with rage and pain, Axel picked up the object closest at hand. He had raised the heavy stone bust, held it high overhead as Erik continued to talk and scribble on the notepad on his desk.

  Then he had let the bust fall. He hadn’t exerted any force, just let gravity make the bust strike his brother’s head. No, not Erik’s head. The prison guard’s head. Or was it Erik, after all? Everything seemed so confused. He was at home in their library, but all the smells and sounds were so vivid. The stench of corpses, boots stomping in time, German commands that could signify one more day to live, or death.

  Axel could still hear the sound of the heavy stone striking skin and bone. Then it was over. Erik uttered a single groan before slumping lifeless in his chair, eyes still open.

  After the initial shock and the realization of what he had done, a peculiar calm had settled over Axel. What was done was done. He had placed the stone bust under the desk, pulled off the bloody gloves he was wearing, and stuffed them in his jacket pocket. Then he had pulled down all the blinds, locked the door, and got in his car. He drove to the airport and caught the first flight back to Paris. And over the weeks that followed he had tried to suppress the whole thing and throw himself into his work, until the police phoned him.

  It had been difficult to return home. At first he didn’t know how he would bring himself to set foot in that house again. But after the two friendly police officers had collected him at the airport and dropped him off at home, he had pulled himself together and simply done what he had to do. And as the days passed he had made peace with Erik’s spirit, which he could still feel as a presence in the house. He knew that his brother had forgiven him. But Erik would never forgive him for what he had done to Britta. Axel hadn’t laid hands on her himself, but he knew what the consequences would be when he had that phone conversation with Frans. He knew what he was doing when he told Frans that Britta was going to reveal everything. He had chosen his words carefully. Said what was necessary to provoke Frans into action, like a deadly bullet aimed with precision. He knew that Frans’s political ambitions, his longing for power and status, would make him react. During their phone conversation Axel could already hear the ferocious anger that had always been Frans’s driving force. So he bore just as much blame for her death as Frans did.

  He pictured her face the last time he had seen her. Still beautiful. And Herman, looking at her with an expression of love that Axel had never even come close to. That love, that sense of togetherness, was what he had taken from them.

  Axel watched yet another plane take off, bound for some unknown destination. He had reached the end of the road. There was nowhere for him to go now.

  It came as a relief, after hours of waiting, to feel at last the hand on his shoulder and hear a voice speaking his name.

  * * *

  Paula kissed Johanna on the cheek and then kissed her son on the head. She still couldn’t believe that she’d missed the whole thing. And that Mellberg had been here instead.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she repeated for the umpteenth time.

  Johanna smiled tiredly. ‘I have to admit that I did my share of swearing when I couldn’t get hold of you, but I know it wasn’t your fault that you got locked in. I’m just glad that you’re all right.’

  ‘Me too. I mean, that you’re all right,’ said Paula, kissing her again. ‘And he is . . . amazing.’ She looked at her son in Johanna’s arms and could hardly believe that he was here. That he was actually here.

  ‘Take him,’ said Johanna, handing him to Paula, who sat down next to the bed, rocking the baby in her arms. ‘What are the odds that this would be the day Rita’s mobile would fail?’

  ‘I know. Mamma is completely devastated,’ said Paula, cooing to her newborn son. ‘She’s convinced that you’ll never speak to her again.’

  ‘Hey, she couldn’t help it. And I did find somebody to help me, after all.’ She laughed.

  ‘I still can’t get over it,’ said Paula. ‘You should just hear Bertil out in the waiting room with Mamma. He’s sitting there boasting about what a “splendid boy” our son is, and how great you were. If Mamma wasn’t in love with him before, she definitely is now. Good Lord.’ Paula shook her head.

  ‘There was a moment when I thought he was going to run away, but I have to admit that he’s made of stronger stuff than I realized.’

  As if he’d heard them talking about him, Bertil knocked on the door and then appeared in the doorway with Rita.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Johanna, motioning to them. ‘We just want to see how you’re all doing,’ said Rita, going over to Paula and her grandson.

  ‘Of course. It’s been all of half an hour since you were here last,’ said Johanna, teasing her mother-in-law.

  ‘We just want to see if he’s grown any. And if he has a beard yet,’ said Mellberg, beaming, as he hesitantly approached, gazing tenderly the baby. Rita regarded Bertil with an expression that could only be interpreted as love.

  ‘Could I hold him again?’ Mell
berg asked.

  Paula nodded. ‘Sure, I think you’ve earned it,’ she said, handing him her son.

  Then she leaned back and watched as Mellberg studied the baby, and Rita studied both of them. And she realized that, even though it had occurred to her that it might be nice for her son to have a male figure in his life, she had never really pictured Bertil Mellberg in that role. But now that she was actually facing the possibility, she thought it might not be such a bad idea after all.

  Chapter 50

  Fjällbacka 1945

  He’d taken a chance that Erik would be at home. He thought it was important that they have a talk before he left for Norway. He trusted Erik. There was something sincere, something honest behind his rather reserved façade. And Hans knew that he was loyal. That was what he was counting on most of all. Because Hans couldn’t ignore the possibility that something might happen to him. He was going back to Norway, and even though the war was over, he couldn’t predict what might happen to him there. He had done things, unforgivable things, and his father had been one of the foremost symbols of the evil the Germans had done in his country. Now that he was going to be a father, Hans needed to think of all the eventualities. He couldn’t leave Elsy without a protector. And Erik was the only person he could think of who might fill that role. He knocked on the door.

  Erik was not at home alone. Hans sighed to himself when he found Britta and Frans in the library as well. They were listening to records on Erik’s father’s gramophone.

  ‘Mamma and Pappa won’t be home until tomorrow,’ Erik explained as he took his usual place behind the desk. Hans stood in the doorway, hesitating.

  ‘I was actually hoping to talk to you in private,’ he said, looking at Erik.

  ‘What sort of secrets do the two of you have?’ Frans teased them, draping one leg over the armrest of the chair he was sitting on.