Savage Spring (50 page)

Nothing.

It was as if the Kurtzon family, the brothers, didn’t exist as anything more than shadows in Stockholm, as ghosts wherever there was money to be found.

Then he remembered something he had read in a profile of Josef Kurtzon in
Svenska Dagbladet
, about the man being eccentric and keeping large lizards as pets. And there was that picture of Selda Kurtzon taking a lizard for a walk in that old gossip magazine.

Surely you need an import licence for large lizards? Johan wondered. Assuming that they were actually legally allowed into the country at all.

One last chance.

The characters on the computer screen were starting to blur, and he had three messages on his phone from his wife, presumably wanting him to go home.

But he logged into the website of the Customs Office, and the only existing import licence for live lizards had been issued to a company by the name of Exotic Animals ten years ago.

One of the brothers’ companies.

Exotic Animals went out of business in 2003. But there was an address on the licence that hadn’t appeared anywhere else.

Number 37, Lundviksvägen.

In Norrhammar.

Where’s that?

He looked it up on Google Maps.

Norrhammar council district, one hundred and sixty kilometres north of Norrtälje, almost two hundred and fifty kilometres from where Malin is. That’s north of Stockholm, isn’t it?

No match for number 37. But the satellite image of the road ends with a small island in the archipelago, with a large white building in the middle of the island, and outhouses down by the water. The island ought logically to be number 37, seeing as number 35 lay some two kilometres back through the forest.

And who owns that property now? Johan logged back into the land registry and typed in the address, but there was nothing registered at number 37 Lundviksvägen, it was as if the address had ceased to exist, or had never actually existed.

But the house on the satellite picture in front of him had to be number 37. Didn’t it?

Can a property simply vanish from every register? From reality? Possibly, if you really want to be left alone, and if you bribe the right officials.

That picture of Leopold Kurtzon in the
Wall Street Journal
. It had looked as if it had been taken in warmer climes. Johan clicked his way to the picture again.

Studied it carefully. Sure, it looked like the Caribbean, but it could have been anywhere, with a bit of retouching.

It could be the Swedish archipelago. In soft light. And the reporter who had agreed not to reveal the location for the interview. The photographer’s name, Swedish: Stefan Björck.

The telephone directory.

A minute later he was talking to the photographer. A pleasant, helpful man, who said: ‘I remember it well. I took the pictures on some island north of Norrtälje. They retouched them. I got the impression that they owned the place. Leopold Kurtzon and his brother. They treated me like I didn’t exist. And there was something really weird about it. Of all things, they kept big lizards on the island.’

Johan hung up, stared out across the almost deserted open-plan office, thinking about Jokso Mirovic and the fact that the Kurtzon brothers might have his children. The way Jokso Mirovic had actually murdered other children in a calculated effort to save his own.

I would have done the same, Johan thinks, if it had been my children.

Leopold Kurtzon in the picture.

His brother in Johan’s mind’s eye.

Those children have to be rescued. I don’t give a damn about what happens to you.

Then he called Malin, noting that it was already eleven o’clock.

‘That’s the best I can give you,’ Johan Jakobsson says. ‘A property that doesn’t exist except in a photograph, and the photographer’s statement that it might belong to the brothers. They could be holding the children there.’

Zeke and Conny Nygren are sitting silently beside Malin.

Johan has just given her directions of how to find the island, and Malin has a feeling that this could be right, the brothers could have brought the children to Sweden, they could be holding them in a house that doesn’t exist, yet still exists.

The lizard in Josef Kurtzon’s room.

The import licence.

More lizards.

The peculiar logic of evil.

Are there lizards on the island now?

‘We’ll set off at once,’ Malin says. ‘It really is our only hope, it’s all we’ve got, isn’t it?’

Johan mutters in agreement at the other end of the line.

‘Good work,’ Malin says. ‘Damn good work.’

‘I’m going to head home to the kids now,’ Johan says, and hangs up.

56

Leopold Kurtzon’s mood sinks slightly as he sees his own face reflected in the screen of the laptop; his thin, pointed nose seems to dissolve in the reflection, as though his time is running out. The computer is sitting on a desk in a room on the second floor of the house.

Jokso Mirovic has been caught. So the police probably know everything by now.

Jokso Mirovic.

There’s an archive picture of him halfway down the main page of the
Dagens Nyheter
website, under the heading: Hitman caught at Arlanda. Suspected of Involvement in the Linköping Bombing.

Leopold reads on.

‘Unconfirmed sources suggest that Jokso Mirovic carried out the job on the orders of two brothers in financial circles . . .’

Even though he suspected that the police were onto them now, it’s still a shock to read it on the
DN
website. It feels like being hit twice, once in the gut, and once in the heart, and now he knows for sure that everything has gone to hell, that Jokso Mirovic has told his story to the police, and now it’s only a matter of time before they find their way here, isn’t it?

Before they catch us. And we’ll get life imprisonment. Thirty years. I’ll be an old man by the time we get out.

But then his mood rises again, he pulls a face, as energy and determination reassume their places inside him.

Because how could they find us here?

No one knows we’ve got this place.

By putting money in the right pockets, absolutely anything can be erased. A patch of land, a house? No problem. Father sorted that out, wanted to have a place that existed yet didn’t, and he let us take it over, ordered us to get hold of monitor lizards from Asia, to keep the beautiful, prehistoric creatures on the island. Try to breed them. ‘Maybe you can succeed at that, even though you’ve failed at everything else.’

Leopold goes out onto one of the house’s terraces.

Looks down towards the outhouses where they keep the animals.

He hates going down there, even when the creatures are full and sluggish and resting in their cages under the light of the heat-lamps. When they’re hungry they gnaw like mad on the bars of their cages, trying to get out.

They bought them in Thailand and Indonesia, set up a company purely for the purpose, and got hold of an import licence. Then they shut down the company, claimed that the creatures had been put down, and no one seemed to care.

They take turns feeding them. That was a while ago now, because neither of them wants to go down to the lizards in the outhouses, neither of them wants to see the snapping, greedy jaws.

And the man who helps them with the creatures when they’re away, often for long periods, he stays quiet, is so well paid that he never says anything to anyone, and he seems scared of the brothers. They’ve told him not to come back again until they call him.

Then Leopold suffers a moment of doubt again.

Who knows how the police work, who knows what they might dig out, and how, when they really have to and want to?

We’re responsible for four murders.

We’re pariahs.

The money won’t come to us. We can never show ourselves in public again.

And the police must know about the children, and kidnapped children are top priority.

Like murder.

They’re not going to drop the case.

Everything’s fucked. What are we going to do now? What the hell are we going to do now?

Leopold doesn’t want to think about it, but knows he has to.

Think logically now, Leopold.

Rationally.

He feels the chill from the sea and the surrounding forest, but it doesn’t take hold; as usual it’s warmer here than in most other places, a peculiar microclimate.

He looks down towards the buildings where they keep the lizards again, and suddenly the thought of them makes him feel safer, knowing that Father is aware that they’ve got the creatures here, and that they’ve actually succeeded in breeding them, even if all the female lizard’s young had died after just a week or so.

Then Leopold suddenly hears the lizards hissing and banging against their bars.

And he is filled with terror.

Are they about to gnaw their way out? Creep about in the forest, find their way up to the terraces of the houses and attack them?

But they can’t get out.

Can they?

Leopold tries to forget about the lizards and looks at his brother Henry lying on the sofa, listlessly drinking a glass of Coca-Cola, and Leopold calls him over.

Reluctantly his brother gets up.

They go off to the kitchen, and as they stand beside the Gaggenau units Leopold tells Henry what he’s seen on the Net, then says: ‘We have to kill them now, then we get away from here.’

At first Henry feels scared by how cool his brother seems, then he realises he’s right, his conclusion is the logical one. Kill the children, bury them, or give them to the lizards, let the carrion-eating creatures do the work, two small children could disappear without a trace here. Or just blow them up. Simple, so simple.

They were frightened when he last went down to them.

Screaming.

As if to drown out their fear.

To get the better of it.

Both he and Leopold have already felt anger building up inside themselves. Who do these kids think they are? The sort of people who can get the Kurtzon brothers to back down and go soft? Huh? Whatever gave them that idea? Do they really doubt that we’re tough, efficient?

We have to get rid of them.

But still Henry says: ‘Do we have to kill them?’

Leopold’s face contorts into a grimace, his eyes take on that focused look they always get when he’s convinced of something, as he often is, much more often than Henry, who is occasionally doubt personified.

‘Have you got a better suggestion?’ Leopold asks. ‘OK, we might need them as hostages, but they’re still more of a hindrance alive.’

‘But do the kids have to die? Isn’t everything pretty much lost anyway?’

‘We play this out to the end,’ Leopold says. ‘Do you want to spend thirty years in prison?’

‘No. No. It was a stupid plan from the start,’ Henry says, and sees his brother’s eyes boil with fury and frustration.

‘We knew exactly what we were doing when we kidnapped them on Phuket and chartered the plane to bring them up here. Didn’t we?’ he screams. ‘It wasn’t a stupid plan. Should we just have given up? You knew what you were doing when you sedated them before the flight and paid off the pilot.’

Henry stays quiet.

Then he says: ‘And now we’re going to end up with nothing.’

‘But we can show Father how strong we are,’ Leopold says.

And in what ought to be a moment of panic, a sense of calm settles, rather like the stories he’s heard about the sinking of the
Titanic
, when the passengers calmly awaited their fate and let the ship sink without panic breaking out.

Or the
Estonia
.

Similar stories when that sank.

‘We could let them live,’ Henry says. ‘Just let them go. Leave the house, let someone find them. They’re three and six years old, we can’t kill them.’

‘We have to.’

‘Why?’

‘To show how strong we are. How powerful. Show the whole world.’

And Henry looks at his brother, at the unshakeable clarity in his eyes, and his reasoning does seem to hold a certain cruel justice.

No one ever gets out of their own cramped, dark room.

No one who has been there will ever raise their eyes to the sky again.

Instead there is the desire, the greed for something else.

‘So where are we going to go afterwards?’ Henry asks.

‘We clear out. Let the timer count down. Wipe out everything that could prove we were ever here.’

‘Where do we clear out to?’

‘We’ll take the motorboat to Estonia. Straight across the Baltic, the boat can go much further than that on a full tank. Then we sort out a flight to South America. Or Asia. The world’s a big place. We’ve got enough money here to last a long time.’

‘OK. We’ll do as you say.’

‘Good. But first we have to kill the kids,’ Leopold whispers.

‘Can’t we just leave them to die in the explosion?’

‘Now, we have to do it, you have to do it, so we know they’re dead. Those kids down in the cellar have to die, and we have to do it.’

Henry finally nods.

He raises and lowers his head over and over again, and they go up to the next floor, to the unused fourth bedroom, open the wardrobe and take out the pistols and sub-machine guns.

They stand there with the guns in their hands in the dim light of the bedroom.

They look at each other.

Have only each other.

Are each other.

Hug each other, and feel their blood flow become one and the same, and doubt and determination, love and hate, good and evil, greed and generosity all melt together into a single quality that has no name, running through them, quick and clear.

And then the brothers pull free of each other’s arms, go down to the bottom floor of the house, the one that’s half-hidden below ground, dug into the rock of the steep slope the house is built on.

They open the door that leads to the room where they’ve got the children locked up.

They hear the ticking.

Have to sort that out.

They made a fuss to start with. In spite of the crayons they were given.

But we put a stop to that, Leopold thinks. Almost, at least. We knew how to do that. They got to experience our fury.