The Hidden Child

by Camilla Lackberg

Erica followed her out to the kitchen, regarding her mother-in-law with surprise. She hardly recognized her. She’d never seen Kristina look anything but well groomed, and she always wore a good deal of make-up. Whenever she came to their house, she was a bundle of energy, talking non-stop and in constant motion. Right now she was like an entirely different woman. Kristina had on an old, worn-out nightgown even though it was late in the morning, and she wasn’t wearing a trace of make-up. That made her look considerably older, with obvious lines and wrinkles on her face. She hadn’t done anything with her hair, either, and it looked flattened from lying in bed.

  ‘I must look a mess,’ said Kristina, as if she’d read Erica’s mind. She ran her hand through her hair. ‘It just doesn’t seem worth it to get all dressed up if I’m not doing anything special and don’t have to be anywhere.’

  ‘But it always sounds a though you have such a busy schedule,’ said Erica, sitting down at the table.

  At first Kristina didn’t say anything, just set two cups on the table along with some Ballerina biscuits.

  ‘It’s not easy to be retired after working all your life,’ she said at last as she poured coffee into their cups. ‘Everyone is so busy with their own lives. I suppose there are things I could do, but I just haven’t felt like . . .’ She reached for a biscuit, avoiding Erica’s eye.

  ‘But why did you tell us that you have so much going on all the time?’

  ‘Oh, you young people have your own lives. I didn’t want you to feel that you had to be bothered with me. Lord knows I don’t want to be a burden to you. And I can tell that my visits aren’t always that welcome, so I thought it was best if . . .’ She fell silent, and Erica stared at her in astonishment. Kristina looked up and went on: ‘If you must know, I live for the hours that I spend with you and with Maja. Lotta has her own life in Göteborg, and it’s not always so easy for her to come here, or for me to go there, for that matter, since they don’t have much room in their house. And as I said, I know that my visits with you aren’t always so welcome.’ Again she looked away, and Erica felt ashamed.

  ‘That’s mostly my fault, I have to admit,’ she said gently. ‘But you are always welcome. And you and Maja have so much fun together. The only thing we ask is that you respect our privacy. It’s our home, and you’re welcome to come over as our guest. So we, I, would appreciate it if you’d phone ahead to check if it’s a good time to visit before you come over. Please don’t just walk into the house with no warning, and for God’s sake please don’t tell us how we should run our household or take care of our child. If you can respect those rules, then you’re welcome to come over. I’m sure Patrik would appreciate it if you could lend him a hand while he’s on paternity leave.’

  ‘Yes, I think he would,’ said Kristina with a laugh that now made her eyes sparkle. ‘How is he doing?’

  ‘It was a bit touch-and-go at first,’ said Erica. She told Kristina about Patrik taking Maja along to a crime scene and to the police station. ‘But I think we’re now in agreement as to what’s important.’

  ‘Men,’ said Kristina. ‘I remember when Lars was going to stay home alone with Lotta for the first time. She was about a year old, and I was going out to do the shopping on my own. It took only twenty minutes before the shop manager came to find me, saying that Lars had phoned. He had some sort of crisis and I had to go home. So I left all my groceries and rushed home. And it certainly was a crisis.’

  ‘Really? What happened?’ asked Erica, wide-eyed.

  ‘Well, just listen to this. He mistook my menstrual pads for Lotta’s nappies. And he couldn’t figure out any sensible way to fasten them, so when I got home he was trying to put them on with duct tape!’

  ‘You’re kidding!’ said Erica, and they both laughed.

  ‘He learned after a while. Lars was a good father to Patrik and Lotta when they were growing up. I can’t complain. But those were different times.’

  ‘Speaking of different times,’ said Erica, seizing the opportunity to turn the conversation to the reason for her visit. ‘I’m doing a little research into my mother’s life, her childhood, and so on. I found some old things in the attic, including several old diaries, and well, they got me to thinking.’

  ‘Diaries?’ said Kristina, staring at Erica. ‘What was in them?’ she asked in a sharp tone of voice. Erica looked at her mother-in-law in surprise.

  ‘Nothing especially interesting, unfortunately. Mostly teenage musings. But the funny thing is that there’s a lot about her friends from back then. Erik Frankel, Britta Johansson, and Frans Ringholm. And now two of them, Erik and Britta, have both been murdered within a few months of each other. It could just be a coincidence, but it seems strange.’

  Kristina was still staring. ‘Britta’s dead?’ she asked, and it was obvious that she was having a hard time taking in the news.

  ‘Yes, didn’t you hear about it? I thought you would have heard it on the grapevine by now. Her daughter found her dead two days ago, and it seems that she died from suffocation. Her husband claims that he killed her.’

  ‘So both Erik and Britta are dead?’ said Kristina. Thoughts seemed to be churning in her head.

  ‘Did you know them?’ asked Erica.

  ‘No.’ Kristina shook her head. ‘I knew only what Elsy told me about them.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’ asked Erica, eagerly leaning forward. ‘That’s exactly why I’ve come over here. Because you were my mother’s friend for so many years, I thought that you, of all people, would know things about her. So what did she tell you about those years? And why did she stop writing in her diary so abruptly in 1944? Or are there more diaries somewhere? Did Mamma ever tell you about them? In the last diary she mentions a Norwegian who had come to stay with them, a Hans Olavsen. I found a newspaper clipping that seems to indicate that all four of them spent a lot of time with him. What happened to him?’ The questions came pouring out so fast that even Erica could barely keep up with them. Kristina sat across from her, not saying a word, with a shuttered expression on her face.

  ‘I can’t answer your questions, Erica,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t. The only thing I can tell you is what happened to Hans Olavsen. Elsy told me that he went back to Norway right after the war ended. After that, she never saw him again.’

  ‘Were they . . .’ Erica hesitated, not sure how to formulate her query. ‘Did she love him?’

  Kristina didn’t speak for a long time. She plucked at the pattern of the oilcloth on the table, weighing what she wanted to say. Finally she looked at Erica.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she loved him.’

  It was a splendid day. Axel hadn’t thought about such things for a very long time. The fact that certain days could be nicer than others. But this one truly was. Right on the cusp between summer and autumn, with a warm, gentle breeze. The light had lost the glare of summer and started to assume the glow of autumn. A truly splendid day.

  He went over to the bay window and looked out, his hands clasped behind his back. But he didn’t see the trees outside. Or the grass that had grown a bit too tall and was starting to wither as cooler weather approached. Instead he saw Britta. Lovely, lively Britta, whom he’d never regarded as anything but a little girl back then, during the war. One of Erik’s friends, a sweet but rather vain girl. She hadn’t interested him. She’d been too young. He’d been preoccupied with everything that needed to be done, with what he needed to do. She’d had only a peripheral place in his world.

  But he was thinking about her now. The way she was when he saw her the other day. Sixty years later. Still beautiful. Still slightly vain. But the years had changed her. Turned her into a different person than she’d been back then. Axel wondered if he had changed just as much. Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps the years he’d been imprisoned by the Germans had changed him enough for a whole lifetime, so that afterwards he hadn’t managed to change any more. All the things he’d seen, the horrors he’d witnessed – maybe that had changed something deep inside of him wh
ich could never be healed or redeemed.

  Axel pictured other faces in his mind. Faces of the people he’d hunted and helped to capture. It didn’t happen the way they showed it in the movies, with thrilling high-speed chases. Just hours of laborious work, sitting in his office and indefatigably following up five decades of paper trails, calling into question identities, payments, passenger lists, and possible cities of refuge. And so they’d brought them in, one by one. Made sure that they were punished for their sins, which were receding further and further into the past.

  They would never catch them all. He knew that. There were still so many of them out there, and more and more of them were now dying. But instead of dying in prison, in degradation, they were dying the peaceful death of old age, without having to confront their deeds. That was what drove him. That was what made him refuse to give up; he was constantly searching, hunting, going from one meeting to the next, combing through archive after archive. He refused to rest as long as there was a single one of them out there that he might help to catch.

  Axel stared unseeing out the window. He knew that it had become an obsession with him. The work had consumed everything. It had become a lifeline that he could grab hold of whenever he doubted himself or his humanity. As long as he was engaged in the hunt, he didn’t need to question who he was. As long as he was working to serve the cause, he could slowly but surely chip away at his guilt. Only by refusing to stand still was he able to shake off everything that he didn’t want to think about.

  He turned around. The doorbell was ringing. For a moment he couldn’t tear himself away from all those faces flickering before his eyes. Then he blinked them away and went to open the door.

  ‘Oh, so it’s you,’ Axel said when he caught sight of Paula and Martin. For a second he felt overwhelmed by fatigue. Sometimes it seemed this would never end.

  ‘Could we come in and talk to you for a few minutes?’ asked Martin in a kindly tone of voice.

  ‘Of course. Come in,’ said Axel, again leading the way to the veranda. ‘Is there any news? I heard about Britta, by the way. Dreadful business. I saw her and Herman just a couple of days ago, you know. It’s so hard for me to imagine that he would . . .’ Axel shook his head.

  ‘Yes, it’s really tragic,’ said Paula. ‘But we’re not about to jump to any hasty conclusions.’

  ‘But from what I heard, Herman has confessed. Isn’t that true?’ asked Axel.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Martin hesitantly. ‘But until we’re able to interview him . . .’ He threw out his hands. ‘That’s actually why we’ve come to talk to you.’

  ‘All right. Although I don’t really see how I can help.’

  ‘We’ve taken a look at the phone records – calls that were made from Britta and Herman’s house – and your number appears on three occasions.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you about at least one of them. Herman phoned me a few days ago and asked me to come over to see Britta. We haven’t had any contact for years and years, so it was a little surprising. But from what I understood, she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And Herman seemed to want her to see someone from the old days, in case that might help.’

  ‘And that’s why you went over there?’ asked Paula, studying him intently. ‘So that Britta could see someone from the old days?’

  ‘Yes. At least, that’s the reason Herman gave me. Of course, we weren’t exactly close back then. She was actually my brother Erik’s friend, but I didn’t think it would do any harm. And at my age, it’s always pleasant to talk about old memories.’

  ‘So what happened while you were there?’ Martin leaned forward.

  ‘She was quite clear-headed for a while, and we chatted a bit about the old days. But then she got confused, and, well, it didn’t make any sense for me to stay, so I excused myself and left. Incredibly tragic. Alzheimer’s is a horrible illness.’

  ‘What about the phone calls in early June?’ Martin looked at his notes. ‘First one from your phone on the second, then an incoming call from Britta or Herman on the third, and finally another one from their phone on the fourth.’

  Axel shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything about that. They must have talked to Erik. But it was probably the same sort of request. And it was actually more natural for Britta to want to see Erik if she’d started regressing into the past. They used to be friends, as I said before.’

  ‘But the first call was made from your house,’ Martin persisted. ‘Do you know why Erik might have phoned them?’

  ‘As I also said before, my brother and I may have lived under the same roof, but we didn’t interfere in each other’s business. I have no idea why Erik would have wanted to contact Britta. But maybe he wanted to renew their friendship. People get a little strange in that way, the older they get. Things from the distant past suddenly seem to get closer and assume greater importance.’

  Axel realized how true this was as soon as he’d said it. In his mind’s eye he saw jeering people from the past come bounding towards him. He took a firm grip on the armrests of his chair. This wasn’t the right time to allow himself to feel overwhelmed.

  ‘So you think it was Erik who wanted to see them, for the sake of old friendship?’ asked Martin sceptically.

  ‘As I said,’ replied Axel, relaxing his grip on the armrests, ‘I have absolutely no idea. But that seems the most logical explanation.’

  Martin exchanged a glance with Paula. It seemed unlikely that they’d get any further. Yet he still had a nagging feeling that he was being given only tiny crumbs of something much bigger.

  After they left, Axel went back to stand at the window. The same faces began dancing in front of him.

  ‘Hi, how did it go at the library?’ Patrik’s face lit up when he saw Erica come in the front door.

  ‘Er . . . I . . . didn’t actually go to the library,’ said Erica, with a strange expression on her face.

  ‘Where did you go then?’ asked Patrik. Maja was taking her afternoon nap and he was cleaning up after their lunch.

  ‘To see Kristina,’ she said, coming into the kitchen to join him.

  ‘Kristina who? Oh, you mean my mother?’ said Patrik, astonished. ‘Why did you do that? I’d better check to see that you’re not running a fever.’ He went over to Erica and pressed his hand to her forehead. She waved him away.

  ‘Hey, it’s not all that odd. She’s my mother-in-law, after all. Why shouldn’t I go over to visit her on the spur of the moment?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Patrik, laughing. ‘Okay, out with it. Why did you want to see my mother?’

  Erica told him about the sudden brainwave she’d had outside the library about Kristina’s friendship with her mother. And then she told him about Kristina’s peculiar reaction, and how she’d revealed that Elsy had had a love affair with the Norwegian who had fled from the Germans. ‘But she refused to tell me anything else,’ said Erica, sounding frustrated. ‘Or maybe that’s all she knew. I’m not sure. But it seemed that Hans Olavsen abandoned my mother in some way. He left Fjällbacka and, according to Kristina, Elsy told her that he’d gone back to Norway.’

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ asked Patrik, putting the lunch leftovers in the refrigerator.

  ‘I’m going to track him down, of course,’ said Erica, heading for the living room. ‘By the way, I think we should invite Kristina over on Sunday. So she can spend some time with Maja.’

  ‘Now I’m positive that you must have a fever,’ laughed Patrik. ‘But all right, I’ll ring Mamma later and ask her if she’d like to come over for coffee on Sunday. But she may not be able to. You know how busy she always is.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he heard Erica say from the living room in a strange tone of voice. Patrik shook his head. Women. He would never understand them. But maybe that was the whole point.

  ‘What’s this?’ called Erica.

  Patrik went to see what she was talking about. She was pointing at the folder on the coffee table, and for a second Patrik wanted to kick h
imself for not hiding it away before she came home. But he knew her well enough to realize that it was too late to keep it from her now.

  ‘That’s all the investigative material from the Erik Frankel murder case,’ he told her, raising an admonitory finger. ‘And you’re not to tell anybody about what you happen to read in that file. All right?’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Erica with amusement as she waved him away like an annoying fly. Then she sat down on the sofa and started leafing through the documents and photographs.

  An hour later she’d gone through all the material in the folder and started over again. Patrik had looked in on her several times, but eventually gave up any attempt to get her attention. Instead, he sat down with the morning newspaper, which he hadn’t yet had time to read.

  ‘You don’t have much physical evidence to go on,’ said Erica, running her finger over the techs’ report.

  ‘No, it seems pretty scanty,’ said Patrik, putting down the newspaper. ‘In their library there were no fingerprints other than those belonging to Erik and Axel and the two boys who found the body. Nothing seems to be missing, and the footprints don’t belong to anyone else either. The murder weapon was under the desk. A weapon that was already on the scene, so to speak.’

  ‘Not a premeditated murder, in other words. Most likely committed on impulse,’ mused Erica.

  ‘Right, unless, of course, somebody knew about the stone bust on the window sill.’ Patrik was again struck by an idea that had occurred to him a couple of days ago. ‘Tell me again, when exactly did you go see Erik Frankel to show him the medal?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ asked Erica, still sounding as if she were far away.

  ‘I’m not sure. It might not be important at all. But it would be good to know.’

  ‘It was the day before we went to visit Nordens Ark wild animal park with Maja,’ said Erica, still looking through the documents. ‘Wasn’t that on the third of June? In that case, it was on the second that I visited Erik.’

  ‘Did you ever get any information about the medal? Did he say anything while you were there?’