“Do these have anything to do with your family history?” Katz asked. He had taken out the pieces of cloth Angela Klingberg had given him; he placed them on the coffee table.
Pontus Klingberg looked at them expressionlessly. “What are they?”
“They were sent anonymously to Joel shortly before he disappeared. Do they mean anything to you?”
Pontus Klingberg shook his head.
“No,” he said sadly. “Unfortunately, I can’t help you.”
He walked slowly toward the door that led back to the foyer.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I promised to meet my daughter for an early lunch.”
Pontus Klingberg led Katz out to the foyer, his arm across his back. Almost tenderly, as if he were confusing Katz with his nephew.
One hour later Katz found himself in the microfilm room at the National Library in Humlegården. The room was quiet. There were only two other visitors there, plus the librarian, who was working on a computer.
He walked over to the compact shelves and moved two sections in order to get to the evening papers. He took out the boxes containing microfiche issues of Expressen and Aftonbladet from June 1970, the papers which, according to the catalog, had published the most articles about the abduction of Kristoffer Klingberg.
He opened the first box, inserted the roll into the holder on the microfiche reader, lifted the glass plate, and advanced the film to June 8, the day after the incident.
Six different headlines, but none of them was about Kristoffer. Thirty thousand people were feared dead in an earthquake that had taken place in Peru a week earlier. Olof Palme was on an unofficial state visit to the United States and had given a speech to the National Press Club in Washington.
Katz moved on through the newspaper. Sports headlines about the World Cup in Mexico. Lee Hazlewood visiting Stockholm. Cigarette ads he hadn’t seen in Swedish papers since he was a child: “I switched to Prince, too.” The movie listings, with Love Story and A Man Called Horse, before the weather forecast showed up on the last page.
He didn’t get a hit until the June 15 issue of Expressen: “Boy abducted at metro station.”
The article was short, and it was on the very bottom of the domestic news page. It was practically just a notice. It was made clear that the incident had happened a week earlier at the Kristineberg station. No names were mentioned.
It took a few more days before it became big news. But then the entire Klingberg family was splashed across the center spread of both evening papers. The boy had been abducted by a woman who had managed to trick the heartbroken father into trusting her. There was speculation that it was an extortion scheme, but the police and a spokesperson for the family denied this. And, for the first time, there was a photograph of Kristoffer.
The picture was clipped from his first class picture. A toothless little boy smiled at the camera. Naturally, there was no mention of the color of his skin, but at the same time it was puzzling when one saw the pictures of his parents and little brother.
The articles continued for two weeks before they faded away and were replaced by other news. Nothing new turned up. The story was stylized as a Greek tragedy, where Nemesis afflicted the rich and powerful. A nationwide alert had gone out, and the story had been publicized in neighboring countries as well. There had been some tip-offs, including anonymous ones, but none of them had led anywhere.
Pontus was the crown prince of the family company, Katz thought as he put the microfiche back in the right place. Jan didn’t seem to have anything to do with the firm at all, except symbolically, by way of his name. According to the articles, he had studied to be a teacher and hadn’t had any interest in making himself a career in the company. He was a child of his time, passionate about things other than business; he was married to a woman who was two years his elder, Joanna, a social anthropologist; he dressed in line with the post-hippie fashions of the time, traveled by public transportation on principle—a very wealthy heir disguised as a bohemian. Gustav had provided financially, of course; among other things, he had bought beach-front property on Lidingö for the family, and he had also planned to pay for the construction of a luxury home there. By golly, his grandsons would live in dignity even if his son was slumming. But then catastrophe had struck.
Katz took a break to eat lunch at the restaurant in the library: potato pancakes with pork and two cups of coffee to go with them. The canteen was full of researchers and students. The people at the next table were speaking Russian; three men were gossiping about a female research colleague. Katz shut them out. He felt distant in the sudden buzz of people.
He drank up the last of his coffee and called Angela Klingberg. She wasn’t answering now either. He logged in to a computer on the ground floor and checked his mail. There she was. She had sent a short message an hour earlier, asking if he could come to Skeppargatan at eight o’clock that evening. She needed to see him, she wrote; could he confirm that he could come?
For a brief instant Katz pictured her walking naked and perfect through the quiet apartment, her hand touching the objects she passed. He pushed away the thought and replied that it was fine; he would come at eight.
Then he took the elevator back down to the microfiche room and walked over to the catalog computer.
He entered Kristoffer and Jan Klingberg’s names in the search field. There was an article in the magazine Se that seemed interesting. A few minutes later, the library had retrieved it for him.
It was a frank interview with Jan Klingberg on the ninth anniversary of the tragic incident. He had been photographed on the metro platform where his son had disappeared. He had consented to an interview because he wanted to help others who had experienced similar tragedies.
In the interview he said that he still dreamed about his son—sometimes several times a week—and in his dreams the boy was still seven years old. Just like the last time he had seen him, when he disappeared hand in hand with the strange woman. He had been frozen in time that afternoon, Jan explained, “glassed into my memory.”
The years had gone by extremely slowly for Jan, the reporter wrote, but the days went by far too quickly. And they carried him farther and farther from Kristoffer. The boy was slowly fading, even though Jan did everything he could to keep him in his memory. He could no longer remember his voice, and he was angry with himself for that.
The seventh of June 1970. That was when his life had ended. And now it was that time of year again, the reporter wrote—the prelude to summer, the end of school, graduates in their white caps—the worst time of year for Jan. His son would have been sixteen.
On the metro platform where he was photographed, Jan Klingberg expressed amazement that life went on with so little concern in a place that he found so terrible. People getting on and off the trains; the bus stop where he had disembarked with Kristoffer after the party they’d been to in Stadshagen. It was inconceivable. From where he stood he could see the paddling pool in Fredhäll, the children playing down there, boys of Kristoffer’s age, the age he’d been when he was taken away.
The journalist wrote that the mystery remained unsolved, that Kristoffer had disappeared without a trace. No ransom letter had ever been sent; the international searches hadn’t brought any results. And the boy himself would have contacted them if he had managed to get away from his kidnapper. Jan had come to terms with the thought that Kristoffer was dead.
The journalist asked Klingberg what the woman might have done to get Kristoffer to come with her on the metro.
This was a question he had asked himself every day since the train had vanished off in the direction of Alvik, Jan explained. Because the boy would have protested. But maybe the passengers had mistaken them for a grandmother with a fussy grandchild; maybe she’d even said as much to a skeptical fellow passenger: “Don’t pay any mind to my grandson; he gets like this sometimes.” And he also asked himself where she had gotten off with him. At the next station? Alvik? Anyway, that was the direction he’d gone in right af
ter it happened, he explained, in a total panic and with his younger son in the stroller, ice-cold inside, as if he were already dead; he thought that the woman wouldn’t have dared go any farther with him, but no one had been there, and the turnstile guard hadn’t seen or heard anything.
He talked about the time after the kidnapping. He remembered it in a sort of haze. The newspaper articles. The police interrogations. The nationwide alert. The search. The tip-offs that had come in, which had kept his and his wife’s hopes alive for a few days or weeks but which had later fizzled out. And the newspaper articles that became fewer and farther between because the fate of a single person—even if it was a child, even if it was the child of a rich family—didn’t mean anything as time went on. The flickers of hope had been extinguished one by one, replaced by darkness.
The body of a boy had been found in Denmark that summer, and Jan had hoped it was Kristoffer so at least they could have some closure. But it wasn’t Kristoffer; it was another child. One year later, a madman had taken responsibility for the kidnapping; he’d claimed that he’d killed the boy but couldn’t give the location where he’d buried the body. Jan had hated the man for that, for giving them a bizarre hope of an answer and then taking it away.
Now that nearly a decade had passed, Jan realized that Kristoffer’s body would never be found, but not a day went by that he didn’t wonder what they’d done to the boy. He consciously thought “they,” because he felt there must have been more than one person. He couldn’t imagine that a lone woman was behind the kidnapping.
The journalist asked once again about the ransom rumors; after all, the Klingberg family was incredibly wealthy.
But Jan Klingberg denied any such rumors. In his darkest moments he believed that sexual offenders had been involved. He had heard of people like that. Adults who assaulted children. Pedophiles.
In the concluding paragraph, the reporter wrote that Jan now lived for his younger son, for Joel’s future and well-being. The tragedy had taught him to cherish the days, to see what was important in life.
Katz spooled back to the beginning of the article and looked at the picture of Jan Klingberg. It was impossible, of course, to tell if a person was suicidal just by looking at him, but it seemed inconceivable that the same man would be found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning a few months later in a garage at the family’s country home in Sörmland, along with his wife, Joanna.
They were connected, Katz thought as he sat in his car later that afternoon. Joel Klingberg had received two mysterious objects shortly before his disappearance, embroidered pieces of cloth that probably had something to do with Kristoffer’s abduction.
Someone must have contacted Joel Klingberg by telephone and claimed to have information about his brother. The same person who’d sent him the package? Joel seemed to have received the information while driving; otherwise, why would he have suddenly cut his errands short and driven toward Kungsholmen?
Where had he met the person? At Thorildsplan? In Stadshagen, where Kristoffer had been at a party before he was abducted?
Katz looked at the printout of the travel log. It was clear: Joel had followed the path Kristoffer had taken before being abducted. He’d gone through Stadshagen and up to the Kristineberg station, as if he’d wanted to follow in the kidnapper’s footsteps. Because it had to have been planned: the person or people—the woman, with or without accomplices—must have been shadowing the family until they arrived at a golden opportunity, more or less by chance.
Joel had stopped at the site of the abduction and then kept going, across the bridge. He had stopped again at the station where, forty-two years earlier, his panicked father had gotten off the train to ask the turnstile guard if he’d seen Joel’s brother.
Then he had kept driving. The person who had been with Klingberg, or who had spoken to him on the phone, had told him to stop at the tennis courts. It had nothing to do with the fact that Katz lived nearby; it had to do with Kristoffer’s disappearance, just like the rest of the journey that Sunday three weeks earlier.
It had been cold, Katz remembered, as he followed Klingberg’s route down to the industrial area. It had been cold throughout April; they had hit record low after record low. He tried to imagine the cozy warmth in Klingberg’s Lexus, the scent of the leather seats, his confused thoughts deep down in the middle-aged businessman he’d become . . . and the person he’d been talking to. Who was it?
Katz kept driving, going down Margretelundsvägen, past the newly built light-rail bridge that led to the Solna side of the water, on past the small industrial buildings along Missionsvägen, the old sheet-metal shops and boat-cover manufacturers. Rundown brick buildings from the ’30s, annexes made of Eternit from the late ’60s, before development in the area stagnated. He stopped where Klingberg had, at a rest stop near a community garden. He turned off the engine and removed the key from the ignition.
First a stop at the tennis courts, and then here.
Or was he wrong? Was it a case of extortion? Had he been there to hand money over to someone, or to pay for information?
To his left was a wooded hill; on his right was a spit of land extending into the lake. Farther off was a shipyard for small boats and a marina.
Or was this just a good thinking spot for a tortured man who had fought with his beautiful wife?
Katz put the key in the ignition, started the car, and drove back in the opposite direction.
If Klingberg had disappeared, he thought, and he didn’t show up again, there wasn’t anyone left in his little branch of the family. No children of his own. His parents dead. His brother abducted as a child.
Joel had started to suspect that there was a connection between Kristoffer’s abduction and the death of his parents. Had he been lured into meeting someone who claimed to have information about the incidents—a person who had sat in the car with him? The same person who had parked it in the garage near Central Station? Because Joel wasn’t the one Katz had seen on the tape, he was sure of that. Something had happened to him before then.
At five thirty in the evening, just as Katz stepped out of the shower, he got a call from Rickard Julin.
“Before you ask any questions . . . I’ve taken the liberty of checking out your client. Out of pure curiosity. Angela Klingberg seems to be something of a gold digger. Or at least she used to be.”
Katz wriggled into his bathrobe and went out to the kitchen.
“Pontus Klingberg suggested as much too,” he said. “But he seems to have a personal grudge against her.”
“She comes from a Djursholm family that lost status. Her father ran an auditing firm that went bankrupt. It was seized, and the family had to move from a luxury home in Stocksund to a rented apartment in Täby Centrum. Social climbing in reverse.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“You can come to your own conclusions. But she has a criminal record. She was fined for cheating a former boyfriend out of money.”
Katz looked at the clock. He had more than two hours before he was supposed to meet her. He took an apple from the fruit bowl, looked in vain for his kitchen knife, and grabbed a table knife instead. He cut the fruit into slices as he held the phone between his shoulder and ear.
“When was that?” he said.
“She was eighteen. The guy was at Lundsberg with her, the boarding school she had to leave when her parents could no longer afford tuition. She confessed during interrogation. She said she needed the money for clothes . . . she wanted to maintain a certain way of life.”
“She was a child. And that doesn’t make her a kidnapper twenty years later.”
“And then she was married once before, to another multimillionaire, a Frenchman, but just for a year. She tried to get a record-breaking amount of alimony after the divorce, but it wasn’t granted. Her husband had managed to include a lot of fine print in the prenup.”
Katz heard a dog barking in the background, and then he heard Julin yelling something at his children.
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br /> “Sorry for the racket,” he said. “We bought a dog and the kids are absolutely beside themselves. It’s an Ovcharka, a Russian shepherd dog. The company is thinking about starting to import them. They’re not exactly child friendly. I have to keep it in a cage in the garage to start with. But the kids want me to let it out so they can pet it. That would be a bad idea. I don’t know how much longer I can talk. Whatever you do, Katz, don’t have kids in your old age.”
“Did you check up on what I asked about—the police officer who looked at the surveillance tapes?”
“There’s something odd about that. My contacts don’t know anything about it. They seemed truly surprised.”
“Could it have been another department doing parallel work on the same case?”
“That should have come up by now. If it’s not someone working half privately, something being done ‘outside normal working hours,’ so to speak. If it even was a police officer?”
“Why wouldn’t it have been?”
“Don’t ask me. Katz, one more thing.”
“Sure.”
“They don’t have any kids, right, Klingberg and his wife?”
“That’s right.”
“So she’s the sole heir. And that guy is good for a couple of hundred million, maybe more.”
“Angela just isn’t the type to organize someone’s disappearance.”
“How do you know that?”
“If she were, why would she have hired me? Why not just leave it alone? After all, everyone, including the police, thinks that he left of his own volition.”
“Maybe she wants to stay a step ahead. If he doesn’t come back, or if he’s found dead, she’s above suspicion.” Julin sighed on the other end of the line. The dog barked again; it was loud and agonizing. “I have to go now,” he said. “Before the kids do something stupid. The dog is just here on trial. We’re going to test him out later tonight. Do a few guard-dog tests with a proper dog handler.”
“Can you do me one last favor, Rickard?”
The Boy in the Shadows Page 7
