Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  So she said.

  Josefina Marlöw was the daughter of the financier Josef Kurtzon, one of the richest men in Sweden, and the owner of a wide-reaching financial empire. The name Kurtzon seemed familiar to Malin, but she couldn’t summon up an immediate picture of the man. It had been Ottilia Stenlund’s duty as a social worker to ensure that the children were taken care of after they were born: the idea that they would be looked after by Josefina Marlöw, single, and a heavy heroin user, had been out of the question. Ottilia Stenlund confirmed what Malin had heard, that the natural solution in cases like that was to place the children with members of their immediate family, or find a foster home for them. Usually Social Services did everything they could to avoid going straight for adoption, there were hardly any Swedish infants adopted at birth any more.

  But Josefina Marlöw had insisted on it, her family must never know that she had been pregnant, let alone that the children existed, or where they had gone. She had turned her back on her family and changed her name, and Ottilia Stenlund didn’t want to, or perhaps couldn’t, go into the reasons why.

  Thoughts were bouncing around inside Malin’s head.

  So, even if the girls had been adopted, they were members of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families?

  What did that mean?

  Could someone have wanted to get at them somehow because of money? And what could have turned this Josefina Marlöw into a drug user, so heavily addicted that it made her abandon her children?

  Ottilia Stenlund went on.

  ‘Josefina kept herself clean while she was pregnant, but no longer than that. She was adamant that the children should be adopted by a decent Swedish couple with no connection at all to her family, and that they mustn’t be rich. Josefina was careful to stress that the adoptive parents should be ordinary people, as she put it. We did as she asked. There were no legal problems about not telling anyone else. The pregnancy and children were legally considered to be Josefina’s private business.’

  ‘What about her family, weren’t they keeping an eye on her?’ Zeke asked, and Ottilia Stenlund just shook her head and said: ‘That family scares me. I’ve no idea if they knew about what was going on. Maybe Josefina just disappeared off their radar.’

  ‘Why didn’t she want anything to do with her family?’

  ‘She didn’t want to talk about it. But I got the impression that a lot of terrible things had happened in her childhood.’

  ‘Her name wasn’t mentioned on the adoption papers.’

  ‘No,’ Ottilia Stenlund replied. ‘Information sometimes gets lost . . . Not even our system is perfect.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Josefina is one of Stockholm’s underground angels.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Malin asked.

  ‘She told me she lived underground. In tunnels and sewers, in the passageways of underground stations, and all she could think about was heroin. Don’t ask me where she was getting the money, but she had no bank account, we knew that much. I assume she was prostituting herself, maybe stealing as well. Well, the way a lot of them do.’

  ‘But if her family was so rich, why work as a prostitute?’

  ‘She didn’t want anything to do with their money.’

  Malin nodded, then fell silent, and in that silence she now sees Ottilia Stenlund stand up and walk about the room, thinking before she says: ‘I presume you’ll want to talk to Josefina. I honestly don’t have any idea of where she might be. She disappeared straight after the girls were born. She was exhausted when she left the hospital, and I haven’t had any contact with her since then. That was six years ago . . .’

  ‘How did you come to be involved in the first place?’

  ‘I was her social worker when she returned to the city after she was sectioned for rehab up in Norrland. Long before she got pregnant.’

  When Malin hears the word ‘sectioned’ the memories come flooding back to her, the disgust and seediness and shame, and the offensive intimacy she experienced when Sven Sjöman sent her to the rehab centre out in the forest.

  But still.

  Since then she’s managed to stay in control of the urge to drink – but that wasn’t thanks to any sort of fucking group therapy. That was down to me.

  ‘So you’ve got no idea where we might find her?’ Zeke asks.

  Ottilia Stenlund shakes her head, but in her eyes Malin sees something that suggests that Ottilia Stenlund knows more than she’s prepared to say about Josefina Marlöw’s whereabouts.

  She’s just about to put pressure on Ottilia Stenlund when the woman raises her hand to Malin and says: ‘I’ve already told you far more than I should. I’ve gone far enough. You’ll have to ask your colleagues in the Stockholm force. If Josefina is still alive, they might know where she could be.’

  Malin makes do with this.

  Zeke shakes his head slightly, as if to say that this will do, that she’s already given them more than they could have hoped, and then Malin asks: ‘What about Kurtzon? What do you know about her father? The family?’

  ‘If you google them you’ll find loads of information. He’s a bit like a latterday Wallenberg, only more secretive. You know, working invisibly behind the scenes.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the name,’ Zeke says. ‘They have those investment funds, don’t they?’

  ‘Those, and much more,’ Ottilia Stenlund says, going over to the door.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, detectives. I’ve got a client waiting. I don’t want to have to put in too much overtime on a Saturday.’

  Do you know, Malin, do you know?

  We floated down and were hanging in the air right in front of the woman’s face, and we tried to read her lips when she spoke to you and do you know, do you know, Malin, we could understand, and we kept seeing the name Josefina. Josefina, is that the name of our real mummy, the woman who carried us and gave birth to us?

  So who is she? Where is she? Shall we look for her together, Malin? We want to see her, want to read her lips to see what she says about us.

  Does she think about us?

  Do we exist for her?

  But we do, we must. Maybe she’s drifting here with us as well, even though we can’t see her.

  What about our real daddy? Who was he?

  Maybe she didn’t know anything about him, our real mummy.

  Things are coming together, Malin.

  Can you feel it?

  Spring is showing its anxious face now, and those are our faces you can see, contorted by grimaces, Malin, that’s us you can hear calling: Mummy, Daddy, come to us, we daren’t be on our own any more, we don’t want to be frightened any more.

  The other children, the ones who are locked up, they’re shouting, just like we are. And we’re wondering: Did we have to die so that they can live? Isn’t that rather unfair? Isn’t everything supposed to be fair?

  How are we supposed to understand any of this?

  As they’re standing in the lift on the way down from their encounter with Ottilia Stenlund, Malin switches on her mobile.

  Two missed calls. Two new messages.

  Dad.

  Don’t call me.

  Tove.

  SHIT, shit, shit.

  I forgot to call Tove and tell her I was coming to Stockholm.

  Her stomach clenches.

  Her heart turns black, the blood inside it congeals. How could I?

  She brings up Tove’s number, but there’s no answer.

  Instead Tove’s beautiful, slightly hoarse voice, saying: ‘I can’t talk right now. Leave a message after the bleep and I’ll get you back.’

  Malin smiles, then she starts laughing, she’d forgotten what Tove’s sense of humour was like, and she thinks she could stay in that lift for weeks, just listening to the message over and over again.

  ‘What’s going on, Malin?’ Zeke asks.

  She holds her hand over the phone.

  ‘Nothing. I think I might be going a bit mad.’

  She t
akes her hand away.

  ‘Tove. I’m in Stockholm for work. I’ll call you later.’

  ‘You’ve been mad for a while now,’ Zeke says, and they leave the lift and walk out of the building.

  ‘What now?’ he asks.

  ‘Now we try to find Josefina Marlöw,’ Malin says. ‘Dead or alive, we’re going to find her. This means something, it has to mean something.’

  41

  Who was our daddy, Malin?

  Who was it who came to Mummy that night?

  We know who our mummy is now, Malin, and she isn’t here with us, we can promise you that.

  You have to find her, Malin, only she can help you get any further, so that you find the other children before it’s too late. You have to, because otherwise we’ll never find peace.

  Don’t be scared, Malin, no matter where this story takes you.

  This is the story of your life, and surely you can’t be scared of your own life, can you?

  It’s very warm where you’re going.

  It’s burning.

  There’s nothing but cruelty there, no hope, no singing, no mummy stroking her sleeping children on the cheek in the evening in a flat beneath pictures of a happy life.

  The wind is rustling the treetops of Tegnérlunden, and up in the park Malin can hear children playing and shouting. She imagines she can hear something on the wind as well. Is that you, girls? she wonders. Are you whispering to me? But I can’t hear what you’re saying.

  She and Zeke walk past a new building with a matt black façade and glass balconies, where someone has stuck up a huge silhouette of a leafless tree.

  They walk down Tegnérgatan towards Sveavägen, and Malin’s mobile rings as they are passing Rolf’s Kitchen.

  ‘Malin.’

  ‘This is Ottilia Stenlund.’

  Malin stops, and as she listens to what Ottilia Stenlund has to say, she looks in at the full restaurant, at all the smartly dressed, self-aware, Saturday brunch-eating types, the same age as her, the ones who made it in the big city.

  What sort of jobs do they do?

  Media. They look the sort. They probably work on glossy magazines, the sort Malin never reads.

  And then she sees a man.

  In profile.

  And her stomach lurches, is that, no it can’t be, yes it is, no, surely not? It isn’t Dr Peter Hamse, but she can feel the tingling in her body. She wants to let go, just like Janne and Zeke and Daniel Högfeldt have let go, surrendering to their stupid masculine desires, and it occurs to her that that’s what she usually does as well, and she knows she’s going to sleep with Peter Hamse sooner or later, but when she connects the words with the doctor’s handsome face it makes her feel sick, as though she’s sullying something that ought to stay clean and pure and as sweetly scented as the spring.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I saw Josefina six months ago. I didn’t want to have to tell you, but I feel I ought to. Sorry. I bumped into her on a crossing outside Åhléns in the city centre. She looked wrecked, and she didn’t see me, she was filthy and skinny and it looked like she’d reached the end of the road, to be honest.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where she might be now?’

  ‘Like I said, I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Can you try to find out?’

  ‘I can ask the people who work with addicts in the city centre.’

  ‘Do you think she’s likely to have heard what happened to the children?’

  ‘Maybe. She probably tried to keep up with what they were doing. According to her own logic.’

  ‘In that case she could be in a bad way. Grief-stricken.’

  ‘That did occur to me,’ Ottilia Stenlund says.

  A shiny silver Jaguar glides past.

  A young girl next to an old man.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Something else just occurred to me,’ Malin says. ‘Something private.’

  Tove.

  You can’t go to Lundsberg. You have to stay with me. I want you where I can keep an eye on you, don’t even imagine you can go.

  She forces herself back to her conversation with Ottilia Stenlund.

  ‘She used to live in the underground. Various places. The central station, Slussen, Hornstull. There are loads of abandoned tunnels and passageways.’

  ‘So Josefina Marlöw could be underground somewhere?’

  Ottilia Stenlund falls silent, before whispering: ‘That’s where she’s been for a long time.’

  And Malin can hear the fear in her voice again.

  The way it almost smothers Ottilia Stenlund’s last words: ‘I don’t want anything more to do with this. Don’t ever mention my name to anyone.’

  At least you aren’t underground, Malin thinks as she looks in once more at the people crowded around the tastefully distressed wooden tables inside Rolf’s Kitchen. The diners behind the large windows seem to be making faces at her, and she feels scruffy in the dress she’s wearing, feels like swapping it for something more chic, and sitting down in there as one of the successful people, and her distaste turns to envy.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Me too,’ Malin says.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ Zeke says. ‘They’re bound to have a spare table for a couple of hungry cops from Linköping.’

  ‘It’s too expensive,’ Malin says.

  ‘We can afford it. We get a subsistence allowance.’

  The people.

  The food on their plates looks good, and they seem to be absorbed in incredibly interesting discussions about things that belong to life, not death.

  ‘Let’s find somewhere else,’ Malin says, turning away and starting to walk down towards Sveavägen.

  Big steaks, small prices.

  Jensen’s Bøfhus, a grubby steakhouse imported from Denmark. Lunchtime steak only sixty-seven kronor.

  Perfect.

  A different clientele here, even though the two restaurants are just a stone’s throw from each other, and outside the windows the cars go back and forth along the broad, prestigious avenue, and people seem to know exactly where they’re going.

  ‘Looks good,’ Zeke says, as a brick of meat arrives in front of him. Then he asks: ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We eat,’ Malin says, and sees the look of irritation on Zeke’s face, so she forces a smile and says: ‘We try to get hold of Josefina Marlöw. And we find out more about the Kurtzon family.’

  ‘That sounds like the perfect job for Johan Jakobsson.’

  ‘Is he working today?’

  ‘Everyone’s working every day until we solve this one.’

  Malin pulls out her mobile, Taps in a message: ‘Josef Kurtzon and family. Everything you can find, asap. Have you got time?’

  The reply comes thirty seconds later, ‘Weirdly quiet here. Info soon.’

  What sort of trail has Malin picked up on?

  Johan Jakobsson has googled the name Kurtzon.

  Tens of thousands of results.

  Head of the family, Josef Kurtzon. Born 1925. Started a finance company after the war. Said to have focused on looking after the fortunes of Jewish families saved from the Nazis. Also supposed to have managed the affairs of those who did well out of the war, stealing from Jews who died in concentration camps or getting rich supplying the German army with whatever it needed.

  One article addressed the contradictions in Kurtzon’s early activities. How no one seemed to care about ethics as long as their fortune grew.

  Josef Kurtzon’s own origins are shrouded in obscurity. As is the question of what he did during the war. One website has it that he’s the child of a family that fled the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg in the early 1900s. Another says he comes from a family of sawmill workers in Sundsvall, a third that he was a junior officer in Mussolini’s army, a fourth that he came from a Belgian family that made a fortune from rubber in the Congo. There seemed to be any
number of stories about Josef Kurtzon’s origins, but none could claim to be the truth. But after the war he was there, ready to double other people’s money.

  He was said to have sold his company in the fifties to manage his own fortune through businesses based in Jersey, Gibraltar, and the Caribbean. He was surrounded by rumour and supposed to be one of the richest men in the world.

  Then, at the start of the sixties, he was back in business. He started a company to manage the fortunes of the very richest and most successful individuals.

  Ten percent of the profits, year after year. International clients. Nobility, famous people. There were rumours that the whole thing was a big Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. But no investigation ever found anything. Kurtzon was said to have invested in oil in Venezuela and Norway, and some claimed that the income from those investments saved the company.

  But where did the money go?

  In those days Kurtzon owned a large house on Lidingö, just outside Stockholm, but otherwise he kept a very low profile. He’d never given any interviews, and chose to contact potential clients through intermediaries. There were no photographs of him, he was said to have multiple citizenship, and wherever there was a krona or a dollar to be made, he seemed to be there. The money itself seemed to be the thing, rather than what he could buy with it. But maybe he was driven by the power that money brings? Johan thinks, as he carries on searching the Net.

  A clear pattern is emerging: Kurtzon always seems to want more. He sets up a more public, accessible investment company, with no lower limit to deter investors in the so-called Kurtzon Funds. As if he is trying to get the souls of the entire nation.

  He employs the best, pays the highest wages: guns for hire, the money-obsessed mercenaries that the financial world seems to be populated by, brilliant minds that are withered and burned out in the service of money.

  Tragic, Johan thinks.

  Then he pictures his own family’s terraced house. The tired wood. The ceiling that needs painting, the ramshackle, old-fashioned kitchen, the feeble lamp in the ceiling, the lack of money that has led to a lack of furnishings. His wife is interested in design, but a policeman’s wage and a teacher’s wage have their limits, just like Ikea does.