‘And losing control of the billions they’ve spent their whole lives looking forward to, that was their . . . I’ve done a bit of thinking about this. You know Juha Valjakkala, who killed his whole family up in Åmsele. He was overpowered by a woman who fled into the forest, where he eventually shot her. Then he dragged his girlfriend to the body so she could watch while he cut it up. That was his way of restoring his self-image. And it’s the same for the brothers with their father’s fortune. It has to be theirs, otherwise they lose sight of themselves, and their self-respect.’
‘What are they like, the brothers? As people, I mean,’ Malin says.
‘Leopold’s the confident one. Henry’s weaker, less confident. Or maybe just more reserved.’
‘So Henry could be influenced by Leopold?’
‘No, I don’t think that’s it. They’re just different sides of the same coin. They influence each other.’
There’s anger in Jörgen Stålsten’s eyes now.
Determination, like light forcing the darkness back.
‘Most of my work is with charities,’ he says. ‘I thought I was strong, but when the brothers showed up here I caved in to their demands straight away.’
Jörgen Stålsten blinks slowly.
‘Believe me,’ he says. ‘Henry and Leopold Kurtzon could have done anything. They could still do anything. If it’s in their interests. But don’t try to understand what they are. Because you’d never get a good night’s sleep again.’
Grilled sausages, lukewarm prawn salad, warm mash, sweet mustard, and ketchup that sticks to the side of your mouth, the fatty food doing good, all the way to the soul.
Malin and Zeke are both eating flatbread wraps. They’re standing in the sunshine beside the hotdog kiosk in the middle of Odenplan. Breakfast wasn’t included in the price of the hotel rooms, so they’re having an early lunch instead.
Inside the Tranan restaurant, media types are eating brunch with their families for four hundred kronor each.
Pushchairs everywhere. It’s as if the happy and successful inhabitants of this part of the city are literally popping out child after child, presumably hoping that they will be just as bland and middle class as themselves.
‘So, the brothers knew about the girls,’ Zeke says.
‘And it could have spurred them into action. They made a start just by threatening Jörgen Stålsten. That in itself is a serious offence.’
‘We’re on the right track,’ Zeke says. ‘I’m sure of it. Follow the darkness.’
‘He was just as scared as the social worker.’
‘Wouldn’t you be, Malin?’
‘Maybe,’ she says, thinking: No, I wouldn’t be scared, I’d be furious, and I’d protect what’s mine no matter what it cost. Then she goes on: ‘We have to get hold of the brothers. Johan will have to spend today trying to dig out some more addresses.’
Zeke nods.
‘What I don’t understand,’ he says, ‘is how Josefina Marlöw was able to keep her pregnancy secret. Surely a family like that, with so many tentacles, would have been keeping an eye on her?’
Soggy flatbread.
A pleasant sensation turning into something disgusting in one and the same mouthful.
‘She must have got very good at staying out of the way over the years,’ Malin says. ‘Good at staying hidden, not really existing. Maybe she disappeared to a different city.’
‘But you have to look after yourself while you’re pregnant.’
‘Life’s stronger than that, Zeke. Do you have any idea how many mothers with addictions give birth to completely healthy babies? You’d be surprised.’
Then her mobile buzzes.
A message from Sven Sjöman.
A video clip.
She clicks to start it. And looks for the first time straight into the face of the killer.
50
Brothers
Mother is calling us in to dinner.
It’s being served in the large dining room, we’ll be sitting on the Josef Frank chairs around the Swiss dining table.
Mother has got the cook to measure out exact portions of cod and perch with Iranian caviar, precisely as much as a seven-year-old and an eight-year-old need for their physical development according to the latest dietary research.
The housekeeper washes our hands, takes off our jackets, and leads Josefina in, she’s five, and her portion is smaller than it should be because little girls have to be kept thin, there’s no clearer sign of bad character than a couple of extra kilos.
If we squabble at the table, Mother hits us on the knuckles with a fork. We both have scabs on our knuckles, and so does Josefina, she gets hit if she so much as opens her mouth.
I, Leopold, get into more trouble than Henry, but I still want to do what Father wants, I want him to love me most, and sometimes I hit Henry to make him stop talking, to get him to follow Father’s example the same way I do.
But Mother hits us most of all.
On Father’s orders. And I can see that she enjoys hitting my brother, and she hits hard.
You shouldn’t talk while you’re eating. And if only pain can stop someone talking, then pain is what you have to use. That’s a perfectly rational conclusion, and in the end we believe it, we believe Mother, we believe in punishment as the path to proper behaviour, we believe in silence. But sometimes we can’t help ourselves, because after all we’re two little boys, and then she gets the housekeeper, sometimes with the gardener’s help, to lock us inside the empty storeroom in the cellar, and we get to spend the night in there. Father tells us to mock the servants, then lets them punish us, beat us, and lock us up.
We talk.
Regain control of ourselves. Grow bigger the more frightened we get. Often Josefina is with us, and I remember the stink of excrement. Sometimes she sits alone in the dark, empty, cold room, because it’s different for Josefina, it’s as if Mother thinks she’s inferior by nature and that her very existence is enough for her to deserve punishment.
We are given animals.
A grey rabbit, a brown guinea pig, a puppy.
Father encourages us to torment them even though we don’t want to. He hits us until we hit the animals.
Learn power, he says, learn to be ruthless. You’re the ones in charge.
Father travels to the Congo.
He brings home a large, live lizard that becomes his very own pet. He takes it for walks in the garden, on a leash, then sets it loose on us, and we run down into the cellar, to the storeroom, and he locks us in, and has the beast scratch at the door, scratching after us, hungry and starving, as if we are its prey, and I hug Henry, hugging away all his fear and anxiety, promising never to abandon him, promising to help him become like Father.
Sometimes we creep down into the cellar when Josefina’s there alone.
We stand outside the storeroom, listening to her cry the way we usually do when we’re locked up, when the lizard comes. We could open the door, but we don’t. We whisper cruel things to her through the door and she tells us not to, and that drives us mad. We chase after her when she’s been let out, hitting her, kicking her.
The contented look on Father’s face. Mother’s laughter.
We learn to believe Mother, we believe she’s right, because pain is always right, it comes from logic, or rationality, as Mother says. She uses that to justify everything, even though there are no logical reasons for her outbursts and material vanity.
We merge together. Try to be what he wants, she wants. Those we love. We don’t know any different.
Mathematics. Logical thinking.
All we have, Mother says, comes from mathematics, and that isn’t governed by emotion. What your father knows is how to count, and how to turn that into business into an empire. He was the most talented student of mathematics ever at a university in a faraway country.
Father is seldom at home.
In the garden, with a sated and happy lizard on its leash beside him, he encourages us to take risks. An
d when we don’t dare he drives us on, to do things like climbing the wall facing the Lidingö Sound, the one with the twenty-foot drop down to the rocks and the water, and he laughs at us, calls us cowards, and goads the lizard to chase us, and then Mother locks us in the cellar because she saw us climb the wall from the window.
You’re not to climb the wall. What would people say if you fell off and killed yourselves?
And Father laughs as the gardener, or the housekeeper, takes us off to the cellar.
To the darkness.
And we believe in both the mocking laughter and the justified anger, we believe in mathematics, in always acting rationally.
But what does that mean?
Sitting quietly beside Mother on a gilded sofa while she shows off what she’s got, what she’s acquired since she arrived here from the country where no one was allowed to have anything? Smiling when the photographer tells us to. Smirking at our little sister, who’s never learned how to smile, or even how to pretend to. Hitting her to show our strength, her weakness.
Does it mean hitting other children who think they’re better than us? Who know things we don’t?
You have to protect what you are.
At any cost.
Mother teaches us that.
Father teaches us that.
They teach us what it means to be human.
They teach Josefina.
Being human means being beaten by your seven- and eight-year-old brothers. Watching them get electric shocks if they refuse. And it means getting locked up in a dark room and accepting that this is right, because someone who knows best has decided that it’s right, and if you’re lucky you’ll learn to come to terms with your own fear, your own terror, you’ll learn to conquer it and grow fond of it, desire it, and without you even being aware of it you start to look forward to the moment when you get to set the rules, to your chance to be in charge.
It might mean being fourteen and lowering an eight-year-old pupil at the same school head-first into a crack in the ice when the teacher isn’t looking, with your brother’s help, even though he’s pleading for mercy on behalf of his friend.
It might mean tying another pupil from a poor family to a pommel horse in the storeroom of the school gymnasium.
It might mean smashing a bottle of champagne over the head of some stupid bitch from the suburbs in Café Opera the day your father laughed at your latest business proposal.
It might mean hitting a secretary in your New York office and drawing blood because she’s forgotten to book a restaurant for that evening.
But deep down you know all about your own shortcomings.
It might mean when your chain of sweetshops goes bankrupt and your father pays off your debts. Or when he laughs at your presentation at one of the management meetings of the family business, and sends you from the room in front of everyone else to do it again, like a naughty child who hasn’t understood his homework or is too stupid to be able to do it.
It might mean when someone sees your weaknesses, and points them out to you at a school reunion. It might mean when all the women you’ve ever met who have been worth loving turn their backs on you because you radiate the same smell as damaged, defective goods.
It might mean when you know you wouldn’t hold back from killing your own flesh and blood if that was what mathematics, rationality, demand. If that was what it took for you to save yourself.
You can’t run away from rationality like Josefina.
Or hold back and try to be nice, like Henry. Trying to pretend there’s another, gentler option.
There’s no such option.
All the beatings, all my failures and shortcomings have convinced me of that.
And what would be the point of trying to find a more lenient path?
You have to live in the present, in this suffering. Otherwise you’ll never be anything, and being anything at all has to be better than being nothing.
Archaeologists have found caves with paintings by those who came before us.
A different species’ pictures of their lives.
Dark, lonely places with pictures showing how they beat each other to death with sticks.
And beyond those places, those pictures, there are even darker places.
Where they eat their own children, in pictures made from paint mixed with blood.
And it was the strongest members of that species who slowly, slowly developed into human beings.
51
Images.
From a surveillance camera outside the bus terminal next to Linköping railway station.
Sven Sjöman is leaning forward in his office chair, almost pressing his nose against the screen, trying to get as close as possible to what he’s watching.
It took a long time to get hold of the images because the hard-drive they were on had crashed, and the junior officers in charge of getting hold of surveillance recordings hadn’t made it a priority, seeing as none of the other security cameras in the city had captured anything of interest on the day of the explosion.
But one of the technicians working for the regional transport company, Östgötatrafiken, had made it his mission to fix the hard-drive. He’d worked overtime for days, and all weekend, laboriously restoring the binary code.
Then he had looked at the restored recording.
And saw the bomber with his bicycle. He had personally brought the recording to Sven just half an hour ago, in a state of some excitement, aware that his hard work had paid off, and Sven had thanked him, said he’d be rewarded somehow, and now Sven sits back, double-clicks with his mouse, and watches the recording again.
The same man as outside the bank. The man with the bike.
No question.
He’s just sent the clip to Malin, and has summoned the others. The door opens and in come Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, and Waldemar Ekenberg.
‘Come over here,’ Sven says. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
And the three of them go and stand behind him, in silence, not even Waldemar comes out with any sort of crass comment, they all seem to have noticed how serious Sven is.
He clicks to start the clip.
They see the man on the screen, at some distance from the camera, removing the bike from a cycle carrier on the back of a black Volvo, then gently taking the rucksack from the backseat and carefully fixing it to the parcel rack of the bike.
Then he leads the bicycle past the camera at close range, and you can see his face. He has thin cheeks, a long nose, and cropped black hair, and a thin scar above his right eyebrow.
Sven thinks the man looks Slavic, and you can make out his eyes on the black-and-white pictures, the look in them determined, but neither enthusiastic nor scared.
Your whole being gives a professional impression, Sven thinks. You’re acting as if this is just one in a succession of jobs. Is this your job, blowing up little girls? Murdering people in hospitals at night? In which case, who are you? Or am I wrong, are you just concentrating on the task ahead of you?
‘A fucking professional,’ Waldemar says.
‘Definitely,’ Börje agrees, and Sven thinks the two of them sound tired, almost hungover.
‘Doesn’t he look familiar somehow?’ Johan asks.
You might be right, Johan, Sven thinks. I recognise him as well.
He freezes the clip.
‘So, who is he?’
‘No idea,’ Börje says.
‘Hang on,’ Johan says.
‘Fuck me, I think I do recognise him,’ Waldemar says.
The phone on Sven’s desk rings. A mobile. Must be Malin. Sven wonders how she’s really doing, but brushes the thought aside. No time to think about that now.
‘We’ve seen the clip,’ Malin says as she moves into the shade of the budding lime trees at Odenplan, past the little fountains next to the market stalls. ‘Bloody hell, do the Security Police know about this?’
‘No. The technician from Östgötatrafiken came straight here and handed over the r
ecording in person.’
‘Zeke and I both think we recognise him,’ Malin says. ‘But we can’t place him. He moves like a professional, it’s more obvious here than up at the bank, where he was presumably making an effort to look as natural as possible. But it looks like he knows what he’s doing, doesn’t it?’
‘Definitely professional,’ Sven says. ‘A hired thug, military maybe, possibly even police. The way he moves is extremely focused.’
A group of children goes past. A school class? No. Not on a Sunday. The children are shouting.
No, they’re not shouting, they’re singing a song that echoes right across Odenplan before it gets drowned out by the noise of the traffic.
‘What are you thinking of doing with this?’ she asks.
‘We’re about to have a meeting. Then we’ll circulate these images to our colleagues throughout the country, get a warrant out for him, and if that doesn’t come up with anything, we’ll release the pictures to the media. Obviously we’d prefer to avoid that, because then he’d know that we’re on to him and maybe go to ground, or flee the country. If he’s even still here, of course.’
‘It looks like he’s working alone.’
‘Yes, it looks that way.’
‘Then he must be a professional.’
‘That seems pretty likely.’
‘In which case he could have been hired by someone.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Sven asks, and Malin tells him what they’ve found out in Stockholm, about the Kurtzon family, the brothers, the complex game surrounding the inheritance and control of a family fortune probably worth over a hundred billion kronor.
‘That could fit,’ Sven says. ‘But there could be an entirely different explanation.’
‘We’ll carry on digging,’ Malin says.
‘You do that,’ Sven says. ‘I’ll update the others on how you’re getting on.’
‘Any other news?’
‘No.’
Malin looks out across Odenplan again.
For a few short seconds it’s completely free of cars and buses; the pedestrians and cyclists are in sole charge, and she feels a sudden desire to live in Stockholm again, to be part of a larger, less inbred city, where she would have a greater number of more interesting cases, and where she could live anonymously but still feel at home.
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