Savage Spring (37 page)

‘What now?’ he asks.

‘Now we try to find Josefina Marlöw,’ Malin says. ‘Dead or alive, we’re going to find her. This means something, it has to mean something.’

41

Who was our daddy, Malin?

Who was it who came to Mummy that night?

We know who our mummy is now, Malin, and she isn’t here with us, we can promise you that.

You have to find her, Malin, only she can help you get any further, so that you find the other children before it’s too late. You have to, because otherwise we’ll never find peace.

Don’t be scared, Malin, no matter where this story takes you.

This is the story of your life, and surely you can’t be scared of your own life, can you?

It’s very warm where you’re going.

It’s burning.

There’s nothing but cruelty there, no hope, no singing, no mummy stroking her sleeping children on the cheek in the evening in a flat beneath pictures of a happy life.

The wind is rustling the treetops of Tegnérlunden, and up in the park Malin can hear children playing and shouting. She imagines she can hear something on the wind as well. Is that you, girls? she wonders. Are you whispering to me? But I can’t hear what you’re saying.

She and Zeke walk past a new building with a matt black façade and glass balconies, where someone has stuck up a huge silhouette of a leafless tree.

They walk down Tegnérgatan towards Sveavägen, and Malin’s mobile rings as they are passing Rolf’s Kitchen.

‘Malin.’

‘This is Ottilia Stenlund.’

Malin stops, and as she listens to what Ottilia Stenlund has to say, she looks in at the full restaurant, at all the smartly dressed, self-aware, Saturday brunch-eating types, the same age as her, the ones who made it in the big city.

What sort of jobs do they do?

Media. They look the sort. They probably work on glossy magazines, the sort Malin never reads.

And then she sees a man.

In profile.

And her stomach lurches, is that, no it can’t be, yes it is, no, surely not? It isn’t Dr Peter Hamse, but she can feel the tingling in her body. She wants to let go, just like Janne and Zeke and Daniel Högfeldt have let go, surrendering to their stupid masculine desires, and it occurs to her that that’s what she usually does as well, and she knows she’s going to sleep with Peter Hamse sooner or later, but when she connects the words with the doctor’s handsome face it makes her feel sick, as though she’s sullying something that ought to stay clean and pure and as sweetly scented as the spring.

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘I saw Josefina six months ago. I didn’t want to have to tell you, but I feel I ought to. Sorry. I bumped into her on a crossing outside Åhléns in the city centre. She looked wrecked, and she didn’t see me, she was filthy and skinny and it looked like she’d reached the end of the road, to be honest.’

‘Do you have any idea where she might be now?’

‘Like I said, I’ve no idea.’

‘Can you try to find out?’

‘I can ask the people who work with addicts in the city centre.’

‘Do you think she’s likely to have heard what happened to the children?’

‘Maybe. She probably tried to keep up with what they were doing. According to her own logic.’

‘In that case she could be in a bad way. Grief-stricken.’

‘That did occur to me,’ Ottilia Stenlund says.

A shiny silver Jaguar glides past.

A young girl next to an old man.

‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says.

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m sorry. Something else just occurred to me,’ Malin says. ‘Something private.’

Tove.

You can’t go to Lundsberg. You have to stay with me. I want you where I can keep an eye on you, don’t even imagine you can go.

She forces herself back to her conversation with Ottilia Stenlund.

‘She used to live in the underground. Various places. The central station, Slussen, Hornstull. There are loads of abandoned tunnels and passageways.’

‘So Josefina Marlöw could be underground somewhere?’

Ottilia Stenlund falls silent, before whispering: ‘That’s where she’s been for a long time.’

And Malin can hear the fear in her voice again.

The way it almost smothers Ottilia Stenlund’s last words: ‘I don’t want anything more to do with this. Don’t ever mention my name to anyone.’

At least you aren’t underground, Malin thinks as she looks in once more at the people crowded around the tastefully distressed wooden tables inside Rolf’s Kitchen. The diners behind the large windows seem to be making faces at her, and she feels scruffy in the dress she’s wearing, feels like swapping it for something more chic, and sitting down in there as one of the successful people, and her distaste turns to envy.

‘I’m hungry,’ Zeke says.

‘Me too,’ Malin says.

‘Let’s go in,’ Zeke says. ‘They’re bound to have a spare table for a couple of hungry cops from Linköping.’

‘It’s too expensive,’ Malin says.

‘We can afford it. We get a subsistence allowance.’

The people.

The food on their plates looks good, and they seem to be absorbed in incredibly interesting discussions about things that belong to life, not death.

‘Let’s find somewhere else,’ Malin says, turning away and starting to walk down towards Sveavägen.

Big steaks, small prices.

Jensen’s Bøfhus, a grubby steakhouse imported from Denmark. Lunchtime steak only sixty-seven kronor.

Perfect.

A different clientele here, even though the two restaurants are just a stone’s throw from each other, and outside the windows the cars go back and forth along the broad, prestigious avenue, and people seem to know exactly where they’re going.

‘Looks good,’ Zeke says, as a brick of meat arrives in front of him. Then he asks: ‘What do we do now?’

‘We eat,’ Malin says, and sees the look of irritation on Zeke’s face, so she forces a smile and says: ‘We try to get hold of Josefina Marlöw. And we find out more about the Kurtzon family.’

‘That sounds like the perfect job for Johan Jakobsson.’

‘Is he working today?’

‘Everyone’s working every day until we solve this one.’

Malin pulls out her mobile, Taps in a message: ‘Josef Kurtzon and family. Everything you can find, asap. Have you got time?’

The reply comes thirty seconds later, ‘Weirdly quiet here. Info soon.’

What sort of trail has Malin picked up on?

Johan Jakobsson has googled the name Kurtzon.

Tens of thousands of results.

Head of the family, Josef Kurtzon. Born 1925. Started a finance company after the war. Said to have focused on looking after the fortunes of Jewish families saved from the Nazis. Also supposed to have managed the affairs of those who did well out of the war, stealing from Jews who died in concentration camps or getting rich supplying the German army with whatever it needed.

One article addressed the contradictions in Kurtzon’s early activities. How no one seemed to care about ethics as long as their fortune grew.

Josef Kurtzon’s own origins are shrouded in obscurity. As is the question of what he did during the war. One website has it that he’s the child of a family that fled the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg in the early 1900s. Another says he comes from a family of sawmill workers in Sundsvall, a third that he was a junior officer in Mussolini’s army, a fourth that he came from a Belgian family that made a fortune from rubber in the Congo. There seemed to be any number of stories about Josef Kurtzon’s origins, but none could claim to be the truth. But after the war he was there, ready to double other people’s money.

He was said to have sold his company in the fifties to manage his own fortune through businesses based in Jersey, Gibraltar, and the Caribbean. He was surrounded by rumour and supposed to be one of the richest men in the world.

Then, at the start of the sixties, he was back in business. He started a company to manage the fortunes of the very richest and most successful individuals.

Ten percent of the profits, year after year. International clients. Nobility, famous people. There were rumours that the whole thing was a big Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. But no investigation ever found anything. Kurtzon was said to have invested in oil in Venezuela and Norway, and some claimed that the income from those investments saved the company.

But where did the money go?

In those days Kurtzon owned a large house on Lidingö, just outside Stockholm, but otherwise he kept a very low profile. He’d never given any interviews, and chose to contact potential clients through intermediaries. There were no photographs of him, he was said to have multiple citizenship, and wherever there was a krona or a dollar to be made, he seemed to be there. The money itself seemed to be the thing, rather than what he could buy with it. But maybe he was driven by the power that money brings? Johan thinks, as he carries on searching the Net.

A clear pattern is emerging: Kurtzon always seems to want more. He sets up a more public, accessible investment company, with no lower limit to deter investors in the so-called Kurtzon Funds. As if he is trying to get the souls of the entire nation.

He employs the best, pays the highest wages: guns for hire, the money-obsessed mercenaries that the financial world seems to be populated by, brilliant minds that are withered and burned out in the service of money.

Tragic, Johan thinks.

Then he pictures his own family’s terraced house. The tired wood. The ceiling that needs painting, the ramshackle, old-fashioned kitchen, the feeble lamp in the ceiling, the lack of money that has led to a lack of furnishings. His wife is interested in design, but a policeman’s wage and a teacher’s wage have their limits, just like Ikea does.

And Kurtzon’s mythical headquarters. A tall building by the bridge to Lidingö, entirely clad in expensive, shimmering white, ivory-like marble from Carrara. Johan knows the building, it’s a well-known landmark, but he never had any idea what went on inside. Kurtzon is said to have his offices on the top three floors. And that’s where he directs his primary business: managing the money of seriously wealthy people.

But the building has been sold now, and the business has moved to Kista, the core part of the company has been wound down, the money returned to the richest of the rich.

A lot of them moved their money to Madoff and Sandford when Kurtzon shut down.

A couple of articles, at VA.se and Swedish E24, deal with the mystery of Kurtzon.

No addresses listed in online databases.

The main Swedish business website. The
Financial Times
.

And then another rumour.

That Kurtzon doesn’t think he has any worthy heirs. He married late, and his wife Selda died of cancer a long time ago. He’s said to have withdrawn from life.

And that his three children, Josefina, Henry and Leopold, are all supposed to have fallen out with their father for reasons unknown. There’s another rumour that a foundation in Switzerland controls the whole empire.

Eighty billion kronor. Two thousand billion.

Josef Kurtzon’s fortune was estimated at each of these wildly different figures, and Johan can feel himself getting a headache just trying to work out how many zeros there would be if you wrote out eighty billion. Or two thousand billion.

No photographs, but on a website of financial profiles, Johan finds a sound-file that is supposed to be Kurtzon’s voice. No information about where and when the recording was made.

The voice streams out of the speaker, rasping and dark, neutral, and in a tone that suggests it is conveying unquestionable facts: ‘I have always wanted to uncover the very essence of what I am. And if I can do that, I will also understand what we are, and what we can be formed into.’

Johan plays the short clip again.

I? And who is this
we
? Johan wonders. His businesses? Human beings in general? Money? Who is to be formed? Us, human beings?

‘. . .what we are.’

What we are?

Can be formed into?

Johan closes his eyes. Sighs. What a weird fucking bloke this Kurtzon seems to be.

I’m not like that. I’m not, am I?

Time to call Malin. Go through what I’ve found. Hope it helps her.

She’s just paid the bill for their lunch when Johan calls.

She lets him talk, takes everything in, and thanks him, then checks on the situation back at home: nothing new, on any front.

Johan Jakobsson is curious. Asks how they arrived at Kurtzon, and she tells him.

Johan mutters something about taking responsibility for your children, then he ends the call.

She tells Zeke what she’s just found out.

‘The word rich has just taken on a whole new fucking meaning,’ Zeke says when she’s finished.

Zeke seems rather deflated at the thought of the Kurtzon family’s wealth, even though he’s close to money himself.

His son Martin is a millionaire ice-hockey star. But not a billionaire. Nowhere near. And definitely not a thousand times over.

No one needs that much money, Malin thinks as she gets up from their table and looks out at the half-empty restaurant. But greed is the worst virus a person can be infected with, and an awful lot of people seem to want more, that much she’s learned over the years.

Is our truth hidden in money? she goes on to wonder. Is that what this Kurtzon stands for? and Zeke says:‘Feels like it might be interesting to meet some of these Kurtzons. Do you think Josef Kurtzon knew about the twins?’

Zeke is entirely lacking in the instinctive respect and inferiority she feels in the face of people like this, this sort of naked power.

‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘Why? Do you think it’s important?’

‘No, but you have to admit it’s strange that she wanted to keep her pregnancy and the children secret from the rest of her family. And that she seems to avoid them like the plague.’

‘We’ll call Johan again, see if he really can’t dig out the address of any of the Kurtzons. Preferably Josefina. But I don’t suppose she’s got an address.’