Savage Spring (45 page)

Expectation of inheritance, Malin thinks.

Desperate people. Lonely people. Despised people.

‘When did you last see Josefina?’

‘Two months ago, maybe. I was really shocked by the way she looked, I mean, I’d heard about her, but I still didn’t think it was possible to look that terrible and still be alive.’

‘And that’s when you drew up a will for her?’ Malin asks. ‘Leaving everything to the daughters she gave up for adoption?’

Jörgen Stålsten turns away again, and looks out towards the pointed spire of Gustaf Vasa Church.

‘Yes.’

‘Are the brothers mentioned in her will?’

‘No.’

‘What about any provision for what would happen to the money if the girls died before her?’

‘No.’

‘And Josefina didn’t sign any other will that disinherited her brothers after her death?’

‘No.’

‘The brothers came to see you, didn’t they?’ Malin asks. ‘Those frightened, confused brothers that you hadn’t seen since the reunion and presumably never wanted to see again. Did they put pressure on you to reveal the contents of the will? Did they threaten you?’

Jörgen Stålsten takes his eyes off the church and fixes his gaze on Malin.

The confidence in his blue eyes replaced by fear, the same fear she saw in Ottilia Stenlund, as if the Kurtzon brothers were physically present in the room.

‘They haven’t been here. I have a duty of confidentiality, and I would never . . .’

‘Of course they’ve been here,’ Malin says, trying to convey both icy detachment and sympathy in her voice. ‘I can understand if you were frightened,’ she goes on. ‘You must have been more than aware of what they’re capable of.’

‘I’ve got a wife and two young children,’ Jörgen Stålsten says. ‘What could I do? They came in here in their bespoke suits, those reptilian eyes, and showed me pictures of my children that they’d got some photographer to take. That was enough. I knew what they wanted: the details of what was in Josefina’s will. I got the feeling that was the first they’d heard about the existence of the girls in Linköping. That Josefina had given birth to twins. And now she was planning to leave everything to the girls, everything that she was going to get from her father, and they weren’t mentioned at all.’

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Malin says.

‘Why are you asking me about this? Do you think the Kurtzon brothers are behind the bombing, and the murder of the girls’ adoptive mother? That Henry and Leopold would be capable of doing anything like that?’

Neither Malin nor Zeke answers at once, just look at each other first, before Malin says: ‘That’s one of the theories we’re taking into consideration.’

‘What do you think?’ Zeke asks. ‘Could they do something like that?’

‘I can tell you this much,’ Jörgen Stålsten says. ‘I got the impression that they were capable of anything when they were here. They seemed to have crossed some sort of boundary. That when it comes to protecting their money, and making sure they get their hands on the family fortune, there was nothing they wouldn’t do, because without money the very foundation of their lives would vanish. You know, like Karl Vennberg wrote, “Deep inside the darkest gloom . . .”’

‘“. . .you have to fight for your life.”’ Malin completes the quote for him.

‘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. And 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.