Savage Spring (43 page)

When he’d finished the article, Johan couldn’t help thinking that the reporter had evidently been bewildered by Leopold Kurtzon: in the article itself he actually wondered why Leopold Kurtzon had agreed to the interview. Perhaps, he speculated, it was an attempt to get closer to his father. The whole time the reporter had a sense that he was part of a plan, a pawn in a game beyond his comprehension: ‘Because why else would Leopold Kurtzon tell me all this?’

He described the way Leopold Kurtzon leaned back in his armchair and confessed that he had always wanted to get married, that he’d had hundreds of women but never managed to connect with any of them, none of them had been good enough.

‘My brother Henry hasn’t got a family of his own either,’ Leopold Kurtzon said further down in the article. ‘Maybe that’s our way of getting our revenge for Dad’s miserliness towards us: by not giving him any heirs, a next generation.’

The reporter said that Leopold Kurtzon had laughed at his own words, an uncertain, lonely laugh.

A finance company that the brothers had set up in Luxembourg was said to have gone bankrupt, then their father had apparently given them some property and homes in Sweden, and a yearly sum large enough for them to live in what most people would consider luxury.

After that Leopold and his brother were said to have set up everything from a chain of sweetshops to a business importing exotic pets.

When the reporter asked Leopold Kurtzon about his childhood, he turned aggressive for the first and only time, and told the reporter ‘in a scary, ice-cold voice’ that he shouldn’t ‘poke about in his childhood like some fucking therapist, those fuckers are completely useless’.

The reporter described leaving Leopold Kurtzon sitting alone in his armchair on a terrace overlooking the sea, and how he seemed to personify the loneliness and bewilderment that can be one of the consequences of money. The reporter described how unnerving it had been when Leopold Kurtzon’s mood changed, revealing ‘almost desperate chasms of darkness and boundless rage in the young heir’.

The article concluded: ‘It was a relief to get away from Leopold Kurtzon.’

And Johan felt much the same as he carried on surfing the Net, felt like leaving this case behind, and not have to read about people like the Kurtzons, and their evidently totally dysfunctional lives. Then he heard a familiar sound behind him.

A child’s footsteps padding through the dark. A little girl’s voice saying: ‘Daddy, I’m thirsty’, and he got up and went over to his daughter, who was standing in the hall in her pyjamas, rubbing her eyes. He took her into the kitchen, got her a glass of cold water, tucked her up in bed again, then went back to the computer, only after he’d held her tightly and felt her heart beating steadily and reassuringly.

Henry Kurtzon.

What was there about the other son?

Nothing in the
Wall Street Journal
.

Barely five hundred hits for his name.

One result took him to a gossip site with pictures of parties on the Riviera, Saint-Tropez in July, and there was a picture of Henry Kurtzon on his own in the bar of the Hotel Byblos, as if slightly removed from the hedonistic spectacle in the background.

‘Mr Kurtzon enjoying the party,’ the caption said.

But you don’t look like you’re having fun at all, Johan thought as he looked at the face, dark rings under watery, grey, alcohol-soused eyes.

His cheeks were red, soft from too much champagne. And in his mind’s eye Johan could see Henry Kurtzon and his brother Leopold drifting from party to party, alone, unwanted by anyone, yet not quite banished from the world they ought to fit into.

He went on to check the property register to find anything in the brothers’ names. Nothing.

He took a look at the register of companies, and found a number of defunct businesses. The Sweet Shack. Exotic Animals. L&H Financial Services. L&H IT Solutions. And plenty more.

None of the businesses had gone bankrupt, and the last of them had been closed down three years ago, wound down in what looked like an organised manner. Presumably your father tidying up after you, Johan thought. So what have you been doing since then? Have you been employed somewhere?

He looked up Henry and Leopold Kurtzon in the records of the Tax Office. They were registered at a PO box in Östermalm in Stockholm, and had registered zero earnings for the past three years. No income from capital. Nothing.

Did your father remove his protective hand? Did he stop supplying you with money?

Johan tried to conjure up an image of the brothers again, to understand who they are and where they’re from, to understand how demoralising it must feel to have a father who seemed to be able to conjure gold out of thin air, yet apparently never be able to succeed at anything yourselves, never finding any lasting love, and possibly also being incapable of recognising it.

Johan found nothing more in any registers, and now he is sitting with his face too close to the screen, feeling how dry his skin is getting and how tired his eyes are.

But he doesn’t want to stop yet, he has a feeling that he’s getting close to something that might somehow be important.

He types the boys’ mother’s name into Google, Selda Kurtzon. He comes up with an article from an old celebrity magazine from the late seventies that a blogger had found in the toilet of his country cottage and scanned ‘because it was so crazy’.

The pictures show a woman dressed in what is evidently a very expensive leopard-skin outfit from Roberto Cavalli. The woman is leading a large, yellow and black striped lizard around a garden with a view of the Lidingö Sound.

‘This is my husband’s pet. He’s very fond of it.’

The woman is said to speak with a Polish accent, but any further details of her background are kept hidden, and instead she talks about her cosmopolitan lifestyle and her trips around the world.

In one picture she’s sitting with her children on a gold-embroidered sofa in a huge sitting room with leaded windows in the background. Henry and Leopold, about twelve and thirteen respectively, are wearing pale blue suits, pink shirts, and white bow ties, their hair has been neatly combed, and their eyes are utterly blank.

On the other side of Selda Kurtzon sits a little girl. Josefina Kurtzon, according to the caption. Younger, smaller than her brothers, and when Johan sees the look in her eyes he feels a jolt of horror. He sees panic, restrained and controlled, yet unmistakeable, he sees pure and utter panic, as if this little girl wants nothing more than to escape from the picture.

What do you want to escape from?

What are they doing to you?

‘I teach my boys to love money,’ Selda Kurtzon says. ‘I teach them that greed is good, because what is anyone without money? I know that from my own childhood. You’re nothing. Absolutely nothing. A person has no value without money, it’s better to be dead.’

The reporter from the magazine suggests that Selda Kurtzon’s comment is a joke, and describes how they both laughed, but Johan can’t escape the feeling that it really wasn’t a joke at all.

Selda Kurtzon seems to enjoy having her picture taken, presenting herself to the world. She certainly doesn’t give the same conflicted impression as her son in the
Wall Street Journal
.

Josef Kurtzon is only mentioned briefly in the article, as one of several people in a series called ‘Swedish
Dallas
Lifestyles’.

Johan goes into the national population database.

Selda Kurtzon died just a few years after the article was published.

The boys couldn’t have been more than about fifteen at the time, the girl even younger.

A fucking lizard as a pet? But it takes all sorts. So, how the hell does this have anything to do with their case, if indeed it actually does? What line of inquiry is Malin following? Rich people behaving badly is nothing new. It doesn’t even count as tragic, it’s only when poor people do eccentric things that it becomes tragic.

He goes back the
Wall Street Journal
article.

Looks at the picture of Leopold Kurtzon.

Those eyes. They look as if they’re trapped in themselves, that he’s trapped inside his own ego. Someone unable to do anything, yet capable of everything.

Who are you? Johan thinks before he gets up and heads towards the bedroom. A failed creation? At least in your father’s eyes.

He stops at his daughter’s bedroom. Looks in at her sleeping form.

Listens to her breathing.

Thinks: If I teach you anything, it’ll be that money isn’t the most important thing on the planet. It doesn’t even come close.

Then Johan gets into bed beside his wife. She’s warm and familiar and the very smell of her body makes him feel calm.

I’ll call Malin first thing tomorrow morning, he thinks. Tell her what I’ve found out about the brothers.

48

It’s as if oxygenated blood is once again flowing through her veins when her body returns from its visit to the dead.

Malin greedily gulps air into her lungs, and even though the night traffic at Hornstull is heavy, the oxygen still feels as if it’s caressing her airways and lungs.

A large advertising hoarding covers an entire wall.

A woman in a bikini on a beach, palm trees in the background.

They head back to the car, parked outside a Chinese restaurant in the next block.

The pavements are practically empty, the restaurants have all shut for the night, and there are lights on in just a few of the apartment windows. Malin feels the tarmac almost swaying beneath her feet, as tiredness and confusion threaten to take over.

Zeke is walking silently beside her, and she knows his brain is working, trying to tease out the core of this investigation and find its innermost truth.

Piece by piece we’re putting it together, the truth, Malin thinks, and they stop by the car, and the evening feels warmer again now. Above them the sky is clear and starry, and she thinks that it’s a fairly decent night for the men outside the City Mission, and everyone else who doesn’t have a bed of their own.

Zeke settles into the driver’s seat.

Slowly they head along Hornsgatan, stopping at a red light at Zinkensdamm, and there’s a queue outside the bar on the corner, and Malin thinks she sees a famous singer, Ulf Lundell, go past on the other side of the street.

‘Soon the angels will land’.

She and Janne used to dance to that song when they were young, just after Tove was born, before all the problems. I hope he’s right, Malin thinks.

‘I can’t make any damn sense of this,’ Zeke says, drumming the wheel as if to keep himself awake. ‘Can you?’

And Malin forces herself to put the pieces together inside her head, making them form some sort of picture.

‘If the brothers had anything to do with this, surely they would have murdered Josefina Marlöw first?’ Zeke says. ‘She’s the one standing between them and their inheritance, isn’t she?’

‘I’m not sure that’s right,’ Malin says. ‘After all, Josef Kurtzon told Josefina that he’d leave the money to the National Inheritance Fund if she died before him.’

‘But why would the brothers kill the Vigerö girls, and Hanna Vigerö? What do they stand to gain from that?’

‘Maybe they reasoned that if Josefina Marlöw inherits Josef Kurtzon’s wealth and then dies, and the Vigerö girls are already out of the picture, then they’d stand to inherit everything from their sister as her only living relations, and get their hands on the money that way?’

‘But Josef Kurtzon had arranged things so they wouldn’t get anything?’

‘Do we know that for certain? Who knows what he’s decided should happen to the trust when Josefina dies. Maybe the brothers would inherit control of it? Either way, I don’t think Josef Kurtzon knew about the girls.’

‘So Josefina Marlöw’s life is in danger?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, if the brothers’ plan is to get hold of the money, they need her to stay alive until their father’s dead. Because of his threat to leave everything to the Inheritance Fund.’

Zeke seems to consider this, letting Malin’s reasoning sink in.

‘That solicitor Josefina mentioned. We need to talk to him.’

Malin nods.

‘He might be able to clarify things. If the brothers knew about their sister’s adopted children, and her will, then it makes sense. Because if they did know about the Vigerö twins, they would have wanted them out of the way, to stop them inheriting anything from either Josef Kurtzon or their mother.’

‘But surely Josefina Marlöw can still arrange things in such a way as to stop her brothers getting control of the money if she were to die now? She can leave most of it to other recipients?’

‘You saw her just now,’ Malin says. ‘She certainly didn’t seem to be in a fit state to plan anything that calculated. Whatever she arranged with this solicitor, Stålsten, I’m sure she wasn’t thinking about what would happen to the inheritance if her twin daughters were dead. She doesn’t even seem able to absorb the fact that they’re dead.’

Silence descends upon the car, the only noise the monotonous growl of the engine.

The Kurtzon brothers are there in the darkness with them, in their thoughts of what they might have done: wiping out an entire family in order to get their hands on a fortune.

‘Maybe Johan’s managed to find out a bit more about the brothers,’ Malin says. ‘I’ll give him a call.’

‘He’ll call us tomorrow,’ Zeke says. ‘Let him sleep. Not everyone’s as manic as you.’

‘Me, manic? What do you mean?’

Zeke grins, and in the gloom of the car his mouth becomes a clown’s smile, friendly but with a hint of horror.

They carry on down Hornsgatan, and as they pass the City Kebab restaurant Malin remembers dragging Tove halfway across the city just to eat there, and get a decent bit of junk food at a reasonable price. Imagine, it’s still there . . .

‘So the man in the video from outside the bank could be one of the Kurtzon brothers?’ Zeke asks.

‘Maybe,’ Malin says. ‘Or they might have hired someone. They’re not short of money, even if they do want a whole lot more.’

‘But all this? Killing children for money? And their parents? Who could you hire to kill a child? I don’t know a single thug in the whole country who’d do a thing like that.’