Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  ‘I’d like to talk to Josefina Marlöw again. Try to find out if she actually knows about her father’s plans for his estate.’

  ‘And the trust,’ Zeke says. ‘What’s to say that the brothers wouldn’t gain control of it and the money if Josefina Marlöw no longer existed? Do you think the old man considered that? That he might have put Josefina in danger?’

  ‘He strikes me as the kind of man who thinks of everything,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe he’s trying to manipulate yet another game from his deathbed?’

  ‘What if the brothers knew about the daughters their sister gave up for adoption, and wanted to get rid of them to stop them popping up to claim any of the money?’

  ‘No, we can’t make that fit,’ Malin says. ‘We don’t have enough to go on.’

  And she thinks about the infamous Stenbeck family. How badly the siblings treated Jan Stenbeck’s unknown son when he popped up out of nowhere after the financier died. They acted as if he didn’t exist, even though he was their half-brother. But maybe that was only the distorted picture portrayed by the media?

  Then Malin sees the man with the bike in the video in her mind’s eye.

  One of the Kurtzon brothers?

  ‘Drive to the refuge,’ she says. ‘I’d like to try to talk to Josefina Marlöw this evening. Something tells me it’s urgent.’

  ‘But she never sleeps there?’

  ‘Maybe there’ll be someone there who can tell us where she is. Have you got any better ideas?’

  Then she says: ‘I’ll give Johan Jakobsson a call. Ask him to see what he can find out about the brothers.’

  ‘He’ll be asleep by now. Or at least the kids will be, he’s bound to be at home by now. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ Malin says.

  46

  The day’s spring warmth has been replaced by a damp night chill, and there’s no longer any shouting or yelling from Gröna Lund.

  It’s almost eleven o’clock.

  Johan Jakobsson was still up. He said he’d have a look on his computer at home and see what he could find about the brothers.

  The noise of Stockholm’s nocturnal traffic mixes with the rumble from the air-conditioners, and beside the entrance to the City Mission at Slussen sits a group of run-down men, passing bottles between them.

  Malin and Zeke go up to them.

  Malin recognises several of them, they were milling about outside the City Mission earlier, waiting to get in, but maybe they were too drunk, too high, or simply too unruly to get a bed.

  Calm now.

  No threat. Just cold and tired, and Malin asks, without looking at any of them in particular: ‘Do you know where we could find Josefina?’

  ‘What do you want with that whore?’ one of the men snarls, but there’s nothing threatening or critical in his voice, it’s just a statement of fact.

  ‘We’re from—’

  Zeke is interrupted.

  ‘We know you’re cops,’ another of the men says.

  ‘We just want to talk to her,’ Malin says. ‘Nothing else.’

  The men stay silent, looking at Malin and Zeke, waiting for the inevitable.

  Malin takes out her wallet. Holds up a five-hundred-kronor note.

  ‘What do you take us for?’ a third man says, and the others laugh.

  Malin pulls out another five-hundred-kronor note.

  One of the men takes the money.

  ‘Try looking in Hornstull underground station. She usually hangs around there. One of the guards will be able to show you down into the tunnels.’

  At first the guard was reluctant, but they managed to persuade him, and he said he knew where the junkies usually hung about, and that he and the other security guards usually left them alone, that they’d removed anything flammable from where they congregated, so that there was no risk of them causing a fire.

  ‘Well,’ the guard said. ‘They’ve got nowhere else to go, and it gets bloody cold up here in the winter.’

  And now Malin is following the back of the guard’s grey uniform as they head down the escalator towards the platforms.

  The underground station has its own microclimate.

  A train thunders into the station.

  People get on and off, and by the time the train pulls out again they’ve reached the end of the platform, and the guard leads them into the tunnel, where he opens a rusty iron gate and heads down a rickety galvanised metal staircase. They walk slowly and carefully along a narrow ledge into the darkness.

  ‘OK, take it nice and slowly,’ he says. ‘If you stumble and fall, there are ten thousand volts running through those rails. Just so you know.’

  The lights from another train approaching blind Malin, and her ears feel as if they’re going to burst from the noise.

  The guard stops.

  ‘Stand still. Press yourselves up against the wall and it’ll be fine,’ he shouts, and as the train sweeps past, the lights disappear, and Malin can see into the carriages, people on their way home from work or an evening out.

  Men on their own.

  Groups of teenage girls, no older than Tove. Couples in love. Pensioners.

  They all look tired. Eager to get home to bed.

  Tough lads from the suburbs, wearing nothing but vests in spite of the cold. Gang tattoos. The sort of thing they never really see back home in Linköping. The level of crime there is tamer, even if it can sometimes get pretty violent between the various gangs of youths. Mostly they have to deal with solitary nutters.

  There’s a strong gust of wind and Malin thinks she’s going to be swept away and fall onto the rails, dying from the shock from the conductor rail, burning and boiling from the inside as a punishment for all her sins, for her inability to deal with the things that really matter.

  But she doesn’t fall.

  And soon the train is gone, and the guard carries on until he reaches a steel door that he opens with some effort, and inside the door is a ladder that leads down to yet another tunnel, and the guard switches on a torch.

  They head down a flight of steps, then there’s a long passageway lit up by intermittent lamps hanging from dusty electric cables.

  ‘Who was it you were trying to get hold of?’

  ‘Josefina Marlöw.’

  The guard nods to them, and in the weak light of the torch his face becomes a skull with black holes for eyes, yet he still radiates friendliness, and Malin gets the impression that he’s quite protective of his underground dwellers.

  They carry on, turning off into an even narrower passageway, then the guard nudges a door open, and a strong smell of faeces and urine and dirt hits them. Malin fights an urge to throw up, and the guard lights the way into the cramped space.

  Josefina Marlöw is lying on a filthy scrap of cardboard. The damp, dirty brown walls are covered in small, elegant chalk drawings of people.

  She’s asleep, snoring in that vacant, assured way that only a seriously high addict can, soft and self-contained, with a desire never to wake up again.

  ‘I’ll leave you on your own,’ the guard says. ‘You can find your own way out?’

  Mummy.

  What are you doing here, underground? In this room where nothing living should have to be. But you’ve chosen it yourself, haven’t you? As protection against the cruelty. You wanted to withdraw, and you withdrew further and further, and you abandoned us because you knew there was no way back any more.

  And now you’re lying here.

  In a sleep that’s dreamless and vacant, yet still soft.

  Hold on, Mummy.

  You are dreaming, aren’t you?

  You’re dreaming that you’re dead, drifting here beside us and looking down on a different, much better world.

  There’s something you need to know.

  We forgive you.

  We want you to come to us. Together we shall exist as love.

  Malin and Zeke wait. They’ve agreed not to wake Josefina Marlöw, and wait until she wakes up of her own a
ccord.

  Their nostrils get used to the stench.

  They sink down onto the dirty stone floor. Illuminate the cave-like space with the light of their mobile phones. Look at the drawings, presumably made by Josefina Marlöw herself with some of the chalk on the floor. Stick figures, like letters in a foreign alphabet. They look like children playing.

  Malin and Zeke are sleepy, it’s almost midnight and they want to sleep, but can’t yet, mustn’t sleep here. Yet still, in spite of the hardness of the floor and the strange, damp climate, they both doze off.

  Malin and Zeke sleep, and they both dream about a closed room, like the one they’re in now, and in the room are two frightened little children crying for help, but there’s no sound, just the children’s lips moving.

  ‘Here we are!’ the children cry. ‘Here we are!’ and Malin can hear the voices now, and feels someone shaking her by the arm, someone saying: ‘So here you are. How did you find your way?’

  Malin opens her eyes. Zeke does the same, and they find themselves looking at Josefina Marlöw.

  She’s crouching in front of them, and the look in her eyes seems to cut straight through the weak light of a flickering candle, and they can see that she’s clear and focused in the aftermath of her hit. Malin stares at her, tries to focus her gaze with groggy eyes, before saying: ‘Your girls, we’re trying to find out what happened to them, who killed them. You’re the only person who can help us.’

  Josefina Marlöw sits down on a piece of cardboard, looks at them. Beside her are a spoon and a syringe, several blood-stained scraps of cloth, and the whole of her lower arms are covered with track marks.

  ‘I know,’ she says, ‘that Father, Josef, has written a will giving me control of everything. He got some heavies to come and pick me up and take me to Strandvägen a few months back, I think it was. He’s going to die soon, I know that. Maybe I’ve been back there since. I’m not sure.’

  No shakes now.

  No stammering.

  More an assured flow of words from a well-brought-up girl.

  No grief in her voice or eyes.

  But possibly relief. The same relief that Dad seemed to feel at Mum’s funeral, Malin thinks. The same relief I felt.

  ‘He told me he’d disinherited my brothers, Henry and Leopold. That I’d be given control of a foundation in Switzerland in which he’d placed all his assets. He lay there in bed smiling when he told me. What was I supposed to do? Say I wasn’t interested? He knew that. Maybe he just wanted to upset my brothers. I’m not interested in his games.’

  ‘You don’t remember anything else from your meeting with him?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘He said that if I died before him he might leave everything to the State Inheritance Fund instead. Or appoint some sort of independent management. Money for money’s sake.’

  ‘Why do you think he’s made you his main beneficiary?’ Malin asks as she feels an icy chill spread through her stomach.

  An inheritance, billions managed by a foundation, or lost to the Inheritance Fund. Two disinherited brothers. This could be the motive for the bombing, for the girls’ deaths.

  Josefina Marlöw is silent for a while, then says: ‘He wanted to give me the poison. His poison, instead of my own. He hates the fact that I turned my back on him and live a life of my own choosing. However fucked up that life might be. He wants me to become like him. But at the same time he loves the fact that I am who I am, and don’t hold back. The way I inhabit my life so perfectly.’

  ‘Why do you think he doesn’t want to give your brothers any money?’

  ‘They didn’t turn out the way he wanted.’

  ‘The way he wanted?’

  ‘Yes. He used to experiment on them when they were little. Wanted to turn them into the perfect, greedy, ruthless businessmen.’

  ‘What did he do to them?’

  ‘He tried to get them to feel special, chosen, gave them power over various pets he bought, guinea pigs, rabbits, a golden retriever puppy, and he taught them that animals can be tamed through beatings. He gave them large sums of money to spend even when they were children, let them experience what it was like to have power over assistants, and traders, to have people fawning over them, so that they’d end up obsessed with the possibilities that money offers, the power. We had servants at home, and he put my brothers in charge of them, but they were also allowed to punish the boys. He never comforted them, he would hit them and yell at them, punishing them whenever anything went wrong, all to encourage them to be ruthless.

  ‘He had a lizard. Sometimes he used to tease it, then set it on my brothers. To scare them, put them in their place.’

  The stuffed beast in Josef Kurtzon’s sickroom.

  Josefina Marlöw falls silent and closes her eyes, then goes on: ‘And he’d get them to beat me,’ she says. ‘He had them beat me in the cellar, and if they didn’t, because they didn’t want to, he’d give them electric shocks. So they beat me. Gave me electric shocks. He wanted to make them understand the meaning of consequences, of brutality.’

  Malin feels the contours of the little room wavering before her eyes.

  Nausea rising from her gut.

  Then she forces herself to focus.

  So Josef Kurtzon tried to turn his sons into psychopaths? Some sort of warped characters, perfect for business: was that what you tried to shape your children into, Josef Kurtzon? And Malin feels a sudden urge to go back to the apartment on Strandvägen and crush the old man’s blind, cataract-damaged eyes into his skull. And the Kurtzon brothers, what would they be capable of as adults? Murder? A bomb in a city square?

  ‘Father always despised them,’ Josefina Marlöw says, opening her eyes again.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the strength and business success he hoped to instil in them ended up as weakness and failure. He sometimes supported their business ventures, but in the end I think he only did it to play with them, to mock them with their failures. But at the same time he despised them for wanting to see themselves reflected in wealth.’

  ‘Reflected in wealth?’

  ‘They enjoyed showing how rich they were. But Father thought that money itself was what mattered. Buying status and boasting about your wealth disgusts him. A truly great man is above that.’

  ‘So they like showing off their wealth?’

  ‘Yes. Just like Mum. For Mum the most important thing was showing off a perfect, extravagant façade.’

  Josefina Marlöw falls silent.

  ‘That was what Mum tried to teach them,’ she goes on after a pause. ‘That a person’s true worth is measured by how much money they have. And to do that, you have to show off your wealth, because what else is it good for? Mum was crazy about money. We had a toilet with a gold seat at home.’

  ‘She and your father seem to have been very different?’

  ‘Yes. But there were similarities. Money meant everything, love nothing.’

  ‘Tell us more about your brothers,’ Malin says.

  ‘What else is there to say? Henry’s the oldest, two years older than me, and there’s a year between him and Leopold. Leopold’s the dominant one, even though he’s younger. Henry mostly follows his lead. At least that’s how it’s always looked to me. But in Father and Mum’s eyes they’re united by weakness.’

  ‘They must have been confused by the conflicting attitudes of your parents?’ Malin asks. ‘That she wanted to show off her wealth, and he loathed that sort of behaviour?’

  ‘No matter who talked to them as children, the result was always the same: money. Money, and still more money. Take away their money, and the promise of inheriting money, and you take their lives away from them.’

  Malin feels the icy chill in her stomach growing as she hears Josefina Marlöw say those words.

  ‘Where are your brothers now?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘They’ve both got flats on Strandvägen. I was given one as well, but that went in here a long time ago.’

  Josefina Marlöw points at the
track marks on her arm.

  ‘They’re not at Strandvägen,’ Malin says. ‘And we haven’t managed to find any other addresses. Do you have any idea where they could be? Does either of them have a house anywhere else? A summer house? Something abroad?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ Josefina Marlöw says, the light in her eyes gradually fading. ‘It’s a long time since I cared.’

  She looks as if she wants to vanish from the face of the earth, but if that were really the case, why not jump in front of an underground train, or off the Western Bridge, or just pump yourself full of heroin? Malin wonders.

  Why drag it out like this?

  She realises how impossible it is ever to understand someone like Josefina Marlöw, what drives her, why she’s ended up like this, what fears she carries within her.

  ‘But I have done one thing,’ Josefina Marlöw says. ‘If I get Father’s inheritance, then the girls will get everything when I die, which probably won’t be long now. Even if I hate money, the girls can have some use out of it. I’ve sorted it all out officially with a solicitor.’

  She falls silent.

  ‘Would have got,’ she whispers. ‘Even if the money could have harmed them. It doesn’t matter what you do, it never ends up right, does it?’

  ‘Could your brothers have known about that?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘How would they have found out?’

  ‘Could your father have known about it?’ Malin asks, and now she can see Josefina Marlöw starting to drift away, and she looks down at her spoon, her syringe, the little bag of white powder in the far corner of the room.

  ‘No,’ Josefina Marlöw says. ‘Father didn’t know. I’m sure he didn’t know about the girls.’

  Or so you reckon, Malin thinks.

  ‘So you don’t think your brothers could be behind the explosion in Linköping that killed your girls, as a way of somehow getting their hands on the inheritance?’

  ‘When people are put under pressure they’re capable of anything,’ Josefina Marlöw says. ‘Who knows what my brothers might get into their heads? What Father could come up with? What he said about the trust and the State Inheritance Fund could have been rubbish.’

  Malin and Zeke look at each other. Surreptitiously, without nodding or saying anything, they exchange a glance of confirmation in an attempt to hold something frightening, unknown, at bay.