The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  As for the car that had been parked in the garage, Klingberg’s ticket was still valid. The vehicle had been located and searched by the police; after that, it had been picked up by Angela Klingberg. Julin had attached the GPS log in his email. It was consistent with what Angela Klingberg had told him, except that Joel had stopped at the tennis courts in Traneberg a second time before he drove back into the city, parked the car, and vanished into thin air.

  As Katz glanced through the route a second time, he toyed with the thought that Klingberg had wanted to tell him something, that this was why he had been sitting in his car two hundred meters from Katz’s home. But why would that be the case? Everything pointed to it just being a coincidence.

  What would cause a person to disappear voluntarily? What if he assumed that Angela Klingberg was right, that it didn’t have anything to do with their fight? Could there have been some sort of threat? Had Klingberg been so scared of something that he chose to disappear? Something criminal? Was he involved in something illegal? Or was he an addict, or a former addict, and had suffered a relapse?

  Unless it was a case of infidelity, and he had gone somewhere with a mistress. But no normal man would leave a woman like Angela for someone else. He pictured her in front of him at the café table in Ritorno, the sadness she radiated—which, to his surprise, turned him on. Her long, elegant fingers had trembled slightly, with a tension that came from worrying about her husband, and, unable to stop himself, he started fantasizing about her. She unbuttoned his shirt, one button at a time, running her nails down his chest to his navel, cupping her hand around his sex; her hand with its wedding ring started to massage him through his pants until he grew hard, and then soft again from something that was like self-contempt but might actually have been envy.

  He devoted the rest of the afternoon to googling Klingberg but didn’t find anything that might be connected to his disappearance. The family company, at least, seemed to be doing well. They had signed new contracts with manufacturing industries in Russia and China. Joel popped up in a few business articles; among other things, he had changed his position on the board of directors, from being a regular member to becoming vice president. There was no mention outside the business world. Nothing on LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other social network.

  At four thirty, he called Klingberg Aluminum to try to speak to Joel’s uncle, but he didn’t get beyond a secretary who explained in an authoritative voice that she would contact him once she’d checked the calendar. He hung up, but then picked up the receiver and dialed Angela Klingberg’s number instead.

  “Could I take a peek at Joel’s car?” he asked once he had her on the line.

  “You mean in case there’s something there the police missed? When?”

  “Now, if possible.”

  He heard her long, even breaths close to his ear, as if they were lying beside each other in bed and she’d placed her mouth against his cheek and was about to fall asleep.

  “Would later this evening work?”

  “Of course. And I’d also like to examine his computer.”

  “No problem. It’s in his study, just as he left it.”

  “Great, is there a particular time that works best for you?”

  “How about eight thirty?”

  “Sure. It won’t take long.”

  The Klingbergs’ duplex was on the top two floors of an art nouveau building on Skeppargatan, not far from the prestigious Strandvägen. Katz walked through a stairwell with plasterwork moldings and giant marble pilasters on the walls and took the elevator right up into the Klingbergs’, where Angela Klingberg met him in the hall, unlocked a black security gate, and let him in.

  She was dressed in jeans and a pussy bow blouse, and her hair was up in a ponytail. Katz was painfully aware of her perfume, and just as painfully aware of the strap of her cream-colored bra, which was visible on her shoulder where the fabric of the blouse had slid down.

  “Sorry I couldn’t meet you earlier,” she said. “I had a couple of things to arrange. The car’s in the garage. We can look through it first, and then come back here and look at the computer.”

  They took the elevator to the basement, and then the stairs down another level until they came out into the garage. In the farthest corner was Klingberg’s red Lexus. A hybrid, Katz noted, powered by both gasoline and electricity.

  “I’m the environmentally conscious one in this household,” Angela Klingberg said, as if she had read his mind. “If Joel had had his way, we would have driven an SUV like all his friends. Or each had our own car. But I happen to be the chairperson of an organization that deals with environmental issues. You have to practice what you preach.”

  “Is that what you do for work? Environmental issues?”

  “Only as a volunteer. I used to give lectures on sustainable development at businesses where the level of environmental awareness is, to put it mildly, negligible. I started out as a marine biologist. Although a lot of people have trouble believing that.”

  She gave him a defiant look. And Katz realized that this was the price she had to pay for her looks: people didn’t take her seriously.

  As he opened the driver’s-side door and looked around the interior, he asked her how she had met Joel.

  “Through mutual acquaintances. I grew up in Djursholm, just a few blocks from Joel. But, strangely enough, we had never met before that party. I was abroad for a few years; I lived in Paris until I came back to Stockholm to study. That was twelve years ago now. And, of course, it turned out that we had tons of common denominators. My grandfather was on several boards of directors with Joel’s grandfather. And Joel’s uncle, Pontus, moved in the same circles as my parents for a while. They even founded a golf club together in Marbella in the ’70s. And we both went to boarding school. Joel was in Sigtuna and I was at Lundsberg.”

  Katz let his eyes roam across the car’s interior. It was very clean. Not so much as a chewing-gum wrapper in sight. He called up the GPS log from the past few days. Angela Klingberg had gone out to Djursholm at one point. Otherwise, she had taken only a few short trips in the neighborhood, to Östermalmstorg, among other places. He scrolled the computer back to the date of Klingberg’s disappearance and saw that the display matched the information he’d received from Julin.

  “Has Joel ever disappeared like this before?” he asked.

  “Not as long as we’ve been together.”

  “Does he have any enemies?”

  “What an odd question. No, not that I know of.”

  “A mistress?”

  He could tell that she was hurt by this question.

  “No,” she said firmly. “Joel is incredibly loyal. Besides, I don’t think he has the nerve to lead a double life. He’s not cold-blooded enough.”

  Or else he was, but he was also clever enough to keep people in the dark. Katz didn’t know him; he hadn’t even really known him during their time in the military. He didn’t know anything about his or Angela’s world, the existence of truly wealthy people.

  “And what about the firm, Klingberg Aluminum—Joel never said anything about a threat against the firm?”

  “We never talk about Joel’s job when we’re home. It’s a silent agreement we have. It’s bad enough to have a husband who works sixty hours a week at a family business and all that involves—a sense of duty and family tradition. We try to talk about other things. Books we’re reading. Movies we see. Theater . . . on the few occasions that Joel can come along.”

  A workaholic, Katz thought. Maybe that was what all of this was about. Being burnt out. A man who hit a wall and fled, wild with panic.

  He climbed out of the car and bent down to peek under the front seat. A crumpled tissue spotted with blood lay next to an old parking pass.

  “He gets nosebleeds sometimes,” said Angela Klingberg, taking it from him. “For no particular reason. It runs in the family. The Klingberg family.”

  Cocaine, Katz thought as he closed the door, but that didn’t square with
the image he had of Joel.

  He walked around the vehicle and opened the trunk. Nothing of interest. Just a warning triangle and an empty paper bag from the department store NK. He noticed that his jacket and his shirtsleeve had pulled up a bit when he’d bent to look under the seat. His scars were clearly visible in the light of the garage—the yellowish lunarscape the drug abuse left behind, sticks from thousands of needles. Angela saw them, too, and averted her eyes.

  “I had a thought,” Katz said, as he continued around the vehicle. “Did the police look at the surveillance cameras in the garage where he parked? There should have been film of the car when it was driven in and parked.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about that. But, as I said, they didn’t take me seriously.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  He checked the backseat without finding anything of interest; then he opened the door to the passenger seat, looked around, and closed it again.

  “We’re finished here,” he said. “I’d like to look at the computer, too, before it gets too late.”

  Katz followed Angela Klingberg through what he imagined was a servants’ passage from the olden days. Behind a half-open sliding door, he caught sight of a bedroom as large as his own apartment. They passed a renovated luxury kitchen and a dining room with tiled heating stoves and stained glass in the bay windows; then they walked through a gigantic living room and up a flight of stairs to the top floor, finally arriving in an office. Before a picture window that faced a roof terrace stood a desk with a computer on it.

  “No one has used it since Joel disappeared,” said Angela. “Except for me . . . I went through his email to see if there was anything there. But I didn’t find anything that seemed suspicious. Joel isn’t a particularly secretive person. You don’t need a password. Just turn it on.”

  As the hard drive began to whir, Katz took in the rest of the room. A built-in bookcase full of binders and folders ran along one of the long walls. A lone painting hung above the door; it looked like some sort of still life, depicting two crossed feathers, a champagne cork, and a perfume bottle, clumsily painted by an amateur. A wedding picture stood in the window that looked onto the roof terrace. Klingberg in tails. Angela in a cream wedding dress. They looked genuinely happy.

  Katz called up the web browser. The history had been deleted in the middle of April, a week or so before Klingberg had disappeared. He restored it with the help of a recovery program but didn’t find any conspicuous traffic. In recent weeks, Klingberg had mostly read foreign business journals on the net: the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Finanzwelt. He had searched Wikipedia for Bordeaux wines and had googled the addresses of a few restaurants.

  Katz moved on to the email program. The farewell letter to Angela had been sent from Klingberg’s mobile phone, so it wasn’t there. The trash contained only spam, and the saved emails seemed to be about only the family business.

  “I’d like to install another program,” he said. “Is that okay? I might find things you don’t want to know about.”

  “Strange tendencies?” She gave a crooked smile. “I’m prepared to take that risk.”

  Katz connected a USB drive to the computer, clicked on the icon that popped up, and dragged a program to the hard drive. He had written the code himself and was quite pleased with the results. Essentially, the program would miss nothing of importance but, above all, it didn’t waste time on worthless information, the binary trash heap that every computer contained.

  Ten seconds later, the search was finished. Klingberg didn’t seem to have anything to hide. The only hidden information on the hard drive was a zip file that had been saved as a system file, whether consciously or by mistake. Katz tried to open it, but the file appeared to be damaged. He dragged it to the USB memory to check it later. Everything else was transparent.

  “And the computer has been here since Joel disappeared? No one else has been here? No one has borrowed it?”

  “No . . . why?”

  “It’s almost too clean.”

  “You didn’t find anything strange?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Completely sure.”

  Angela Klingberg shook her head and looked over at the wedding picture in the window.

  “That was taken ten years ago, almost to the day,” she said. “I was twenty-five. We left for our honeymoon the next morning. Went to the Dominican Republic. That was where Klingberg Aluminum was founded once upon a time. Joel’s grandfather, Gustav, started dealing in sugar and bauxite in Santo Domingo in the ’40s. He was from a Swedish missionary family that was stationed on the island. Gustav’s parents did poverty-relief work out in the country. There’s even a road named after them in Comendador, a city on the border with Haiti. Joel told me that they saved a lot of people’s lives when the Dominican army massacred Haitian refugees in the borderlands. The Parsley Massacre, I think it’s called.”

  “Was that why Joel wanted to go there, to travel in his family’s footsteps?”

  “At least partially. He had been there a lot as a child, with his grandfather, every summer. We visited the company’s first bauxite quarry and the family grave in the Lutheran cemetery in Santo Domingo.”

  Angela Klingberg smiled dreamily.

  “It was a wonderful trip. I taught Joel to dive. He got his PADI certification in a village on the northern coast. I was already studying marine biology. The Caribbean has fantastically rich marine life. We saw barracudas and tiger sharks. I would have loved to go back this year as a sort of anniversary. We even talked about it . . .”

  She grew silent and looked over at the still life on the wall. “Joel did the sketch for that painting while we were there. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t know he painted,” said Katz.

  “He doesn’t. As far as I know, that’s the only painting he’s ever finished. It’s a sort of commemorative picture of the day his brother disappeared. Joel was only a few years old when it happened, but he claims to remember things from that day. There was a woman who promised to wait on a metro platform with Kristoffer while Joel and his father took the elevator with the stroller. When they came up to the platform, the woman and Kristoffer were gone. They were supposed to have waited by a bench, but no one was there.”

  “What does that have to do with the painting?”

  “Joel claimed that there were two feathers lying in a cross on the ground under the bench. And on top of the feathers was a champagne cork. Somehow he was reminded of all of this when we were in Santo Domingo.”

  “That’s peculiar.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?”

  “And what about the perfume bottle?”

  “I don’t really remember. I think the woman who took Kristoffer from them was wearing an excessive amount of perfume. Anyway . . . whether or not the memories are correct, they were real to Joel.”

  Katz stood up from the desk and turned off the computer. Angela Klingberg brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen into her face. The same way Eva Dahlman used to. They looked like each other; why hadn’t he noticed it before now?

  “Is that all?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “I need to get in touch with Joel’s uncle. But that doesn’t seem to be the easiest thing in the world.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll call Pontus and make an appointment for you.”

  It was ten o’clock by the time Katz parked the car near Central Station and then walked the short distance to the parking garage. A uniformed guard was sitting in a Plexiglas booth on the ground level, doing sudoku. The man was in his thirties, and he was bald and sallow. Katz introduced himself and was admitted through a door at the rear of the booth.

  “You’re the one who just called and wanted to see the surveillance films?” said the guard. “I got them out for you. There’s not much to do here, you know; any sort of inte
rruption is nice. It was April twenty-second you were interested in? Around lunchtime? A red Lexus.”

  Katz nodded.

  “It’ll cost you, of course, unless you’re a cop. Let’s say a thousand kronor for you to think of this place as a nonstop video booth . . . as long as my boss doesn’t show up.”

  Katz fished out two 500-kronor bills and placed them on the table in front of him.

  “The car was parked on the second basement level,” said the guard. “Next to a pillar, at eleven fifty-four.” He pulled up videos sorted by date on a screen and clicked on one of them. Eight frames popped up. “We have two cameras on each level and one at the entrance, but that one’s on a different system. The guy you’re looking for is visible in the two frames on the bottom left, first when he drives in and parks, and then when he gets out of the car and walks to the stairwell door, but, if you ask me, there’s not much to see.”

  The guard clicked on the frame on the lower left and it entered full-screen mode. Klingberg’s Lexus rolled down the ramp from street level; it was impossible to see what the driver looked like. But he appeared to be alone.

  “Can you enlarge the image?”

  “Nope. It’ll just get grainier. Here, you can see him as he gets out of the car.”

  The screen had shifted to the other camera. Klingberg’s car turned into a parking space, but a pillar blocked the view.

  “Hold on . . . you can see all of him here. You can’t see what he looks like, but I bet a thousand kronor he’s an immigrant. They’re the only ones who can afford to drive luxury cars.”

  A man stepped in shot from the blind spot; he was wearing a gray raincoat with a hood. It was a Fjällräven jacket, Katz noticed; he had bought one like it the previous autumn, but it had been stolen when his building’s storage area had been broken into.