Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  ‘So the man in the video from outside the bank could be one of the Kurtzon brothers?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘Maybe,’ Malin says. ‘Or they might have hired someone. They’re not short of money, even if they do want a whole lot more.’

  ‘But all this? Killing children for money? And their parents? Who could you hire to kill a child? I don’t know a single thug in the whole country who’d do a thing like that.’

  ‘Money,’ Malin says. ‘Money, Zeke, you know there are people who’ll do anything for money. And their father chased them with a lizard when they were little. What else was he capable of doing to them to turn them into the perfect businessmen? Who knows what sort of people they’ve become?’

  ‘The sort of people who kill children? I don’t want to believe that, Malin.’

  The look in Zeke’s eyes changes.

  Becomes hard and cold.

  He puts his foot down.

  But killing your own nieces? Malin wonders. Is that realistic? She doesn’t want to believe it, but it could be true. This investigation could be leading her into a darkness of unimaginable depths.

  ‘I can see why Josefina Marlöw gave the girls up for adoption,’ Zeke says.

  Malin nods.

  ‘I wouldn’t want any children to have to grow up in the atmosphere we felt in Josef Kurtzon’s apartment.’

  ‘No, definitely not. But do you really think he didn’t know about the girls? With all his power and influence?’

  ‘I honestly don’t think he did,’ Malin says.

  They find a vacant space outside the hotel. Before they get out of the car Malin says: ‘We’ll have to talk to Josefina Marlöw’s solicitor tomorrow. Stålsten. It’s too late now. If it turns out that the brothers did know about the children, and that Josefina’s will left everything to them, we could be on the right track. Almost certainly.’

  Zeke nods, says:‘Follow the money. Always follow the money.’

  It’s half past one by the time Malin sinks onto the bed in her hotel room.

  Her clothes are in a heap on the floor and she’s completely naked. She’s taken off her pants so they wouldn’t get dirtier than necessary, she’ll have to wear them inside out tomorrow, she doesn’t have any fresh ones with her.

  Killing your nieces.

  Malin’s hands are shaking. What sort of monsters are they dealing with?

  The brothers. Who are you? My brother. Who are you?

  She closes her eyes and soon the dream descends, like a black core, glowing orange, firing out a constant stream of faces, and all of those faces carries a story.

  First Tove.

  She whispers: ‘I’m leaving, Mum, but I’m not going to abandon you.’

  Dad.

  Smiling.

  But I can’t smile back.

  Then Peter Hamse, wearing his white doctor’s coat, and she feels her crotch contract, but he’s soon gone, and those feelings with him.

  Daniel Högfeldt.

  Janne.

  They come together. They wave goodbye to her, and she feels like running after them but can’t, doesn’t want to, feels it’s time to let go, that the struggle to keep alive that love, those desires, is over.

  Mum.

  Her face a mute mask. Where’s my grief? Malin wonders.

  Karim Akbar, Sven Sjöman, Johan Jakobsson, Waldemar Ekenberg, Zeke, Börje Svärd, Karin Johannison. They march past, smiling at her, stroking her on the cheek, wishing her well, and she wishes she could just sink into that feeling.

  Karim’s happiness with his new, unappealing woman.

  Karin’s longing for children, written all over her. Suddenly flaring up, but there the whole time, coming as a shock to her.

  All the good people, wishing her well. And then Malin sees Maria Murvall’s face.

  Her eyes are full of longing. And Malin can see the person inside Maria, the person who has shut herself away inside room after room after room, until there is only a white room left, entirely devoid of ill-will and fear, and therefore also entirely free from memories and emotions.

  I’m going to find my way into that room, Malin thinks. I’m going to take you by the hand and lead you out of there, Maria.

  Then she sees the girls.

  Their faces from the photographs in the flat in Ekholmen, and they’re smiling at first, but then they start to scream, and in the shadow of their screams Hanna Vigerö and Josefina Marlöw’s faces emerge, and they’re calling out to Malin, but she can’t understand what they’re saying.

  Am I dreaming now? Maybe.

  Then two different faces.

  Two men with prominent chins and almost identical straight noses, and neat, slicked-back hair with a side parting. One face is slightly fuller than the other, but they’re both chiselled. Their blue eyes anxious but harsh, full of desire and greed, and Malin tries in vain to find any kind of warmth in their eyes.

  You’re the Kurtzon brothers, aren’t you?

  But they don’t answer, they say nothing, and disappear into her darkness, and then another man’s face appears, contorted in a terrible grimace.

  ‘I’m doing what you did for Tove,’ the man says.

  ‘You feel love?’ she asks.

  ‘You saved Tove,’ the man says. ‘When she was in mortal danger. Now I’m saving my children.’

  Then he’s gone.

  Am I alone now?

  No.

  But I’m asleep. Tell me I’m asleep, dreaming.

  I’m in a different room that stinks of death, but also of stubborn life.

  I’m not alone here.

  I can see two little children.

  I can see them, but I don’t know who they are. They want me to rescue them.

  I have to rescue them.

  And now they’re screaming. They’re screaming with terror, and I want to reach them, but where are you?

  Where are you, children?

  Black water lapping against broken reeds in the darkness.

  Then Malin slips deeper into sleep, taking the two abandoned children with her into her dreams, trying to comfort them, tell them that everything will be all right, that everything will be fine, and in the dream the children turn into her own brother, into a dream within the dream that in the end people get to rest in a shimmering all-encompassing whiteness.

  Who arranged for us to be dead?

  Was it a longing for money that killed us? A longing to be like a father, to be good enough in his eyes, or just a longing for the power that comes with wealth, the power that allows you to own anyone, to get anyone to do anything at all?

  Or was it a desire for power over other people’s lives? Over children’s lives? Over your image of yourself, of your own life?

  Or are you on the wrong track, Malin?

  Does the solution to this mystery lie somewhere else entirely?

  You’re sleeping now.

  But don’t sleep too long.

  The other children, the captive children, the ones who aren’t dead, are still waiting to be rescued. Did we die for their sakes? If we did, then you have to rescue them, don’t you?

  The clock is ticking, the time has been set, but you don’t know that yet, Malin.

  49

  It’s just gone nine o’clock. The solicitor, Jörgen Stålsten, is standing behind his mahogany desk with his back to Malin and Zeke. He’s loosened his pale pink tie and is looking out across Odenplan, where blue city buses are parked by the entrance to the underground station, and people are going in and out of the same chains of shops that can be found in every town in the country, open all weekend in the service of commerce.

  Johan Jakobsson called earlier that morning. Told them what he’d found out about the Kurtzon brothers and their mother, and Malin felt her skin break out in goosebumps when Johan talked about how lonely Leopold and Henry Kurtzon seemed to be, and their elusive yet somehow unmistakeable personalities: how the two brothers seemed to have been raised and moulded from the start to become perfect greed-machines, with no
desire for love.

  Malin and Zeke are waiting for Jörgen Stålsten.

  They managed to get hold of him at his Östermalm address, and he agreed to see them even though it was Sunday.

  He didn’t ask what they wanted, and Malin could hear the fear in his voice.

  He invited them to take a seat when they came in, but they declined, preferring to remain standing to indicate that the reason for their visit was pressing.

  Jörgen Stålsten is the same age as Malin.

  Handsome, with chiselled features framed by fair hair that’s slightly too long, and he doesn’t look much like a solicitor. Maybe his hair is why he doesn’t work for one of the more uptight companies down near Stureplan, she thinks. That sort of hair wouldn’t fit in there, in the conservative Stockholm business world.

  They’ve explained why they’re there, told him what they want to know, and now they’re waiting for his response.

  Jörgen Stålsten doesn’t turn around. The look in his blue eyes just now was incisive and free from fear, like someone who’s committed a crime and is about to confess, and isn’t ashamed of what they’ve done. Like someone who knows that time has caught up with him.

  ‘I went to school with Josefina,’ Jörgen Stålsten says. ‘Lundsberg. She used to go through hell at home during the holidays. I know that much. Even the bullying at school was better than that.’

  Lundsberg.

  Bullying.

  The words splinter into jagged lightning in Malin’s brain, and she realises she can’t let Tove go there, can’t send her through the forest to some stuck-up school full of rich-kid bullies. But that debate, that anxiety, doesn’t belong here, so she rationalises it away, listens, lets Jörgen Stålsten talk.

  ‘She started back in year nine. With hash. There was loads of it going on in the school. Maybe she started with more serious stuff back then as well.’

  ‘What was going on at home?’ Zeke interrupts.

  ‘She used to talk about her mother. She said she was mad. She used to drill them, making them march around the dining table, forcing them to wear particular clothes, forcing them to eat only the food she thought suitable, and beating them and locking them in a closet when they didn’t do what she wanted.’

  ‘Were you close friends, you and Josefina?’ Malin asks, thinking that it’s best to let Jörgen Stålsten tell his story in his own way, not steer him into any dead-ends by asking specific questions.

  ‘Close friends? I’d say so. Well, no, actually, not really, Josefina didn’t let anyone get very close. But sometimes she would talk about her family, and her mother came to school on open days. In a chauffeur-driven limousine. She used to totter about in her vulgar Italian clothes, showing off. Everyone used to laugh at her, but she obviously thought she was royalty.’

  ‘What happened to Josefina after she left school?’

  ‘She didn’t come back to Lundsberg for the sixth from. I thought she’d started somewhere else instead, I only found out much later that she’d already fallen into addiction.’

  ‘Why do you think she did that?’

  ‘She probably had a predisposition towards it. And that home. Her father didn’t seem to care at all about his children, except as a sort of social experiment. Their mother treated them as accessories that had to perfectly match the image she wanted to portray of herself. The brothers were a few years above me, but I got the impression they were under a lot of pressure, and had had serious problems at their previous school. They were the worst bullies of all, capable of extreme violence in the most unexpected situations, but in retrospect I’ve come to realise that they were probably just doing to other people what was being done to them. They were extremely aware of the power and status of money: in their world money meant everything, tradition and family nothing, and they never even spoke to anyone they knew wasn’t rich. At the same time they seemed ashamed that they had money, and yet they couldn’t help flaunting it. It was like they had some massive internal conflict going on which could make them perfectly harmless one minute, and dangerous the next. They beat up one of the scholarship kids once in the gymnasium storeroom. He could do more pull-ups than them. They tied him to a pommel horse and gave him a serious kicking. The whole thing was hushed up because the boy refused to identify them. But everyone knew.’

  ‘Do you think their father beat them?’ Zeke asks.

  Jörgen Stålsten turns to face them.

  ‘No, but I think he encouraged them, right from the start, to care about money and nothing else, to think that wealth has an intrinsic value, that the important thing is to keep getting more and more, that you can never have enough.

  ‘I think Josef Kurtzon is only interested in money itself. But their mum, Selda, managed to make them completely dependent on a lifestyle that only money can buy, with all the trappings, and I think they ended up dependent on the power over other people that only money can give. And when they failed at pretty much everything they tried, their father mocked them for their lack of confidence and ability. When they were older I heard he threatened to deny them access to the family fortune.’

  ‘That all sounds pretty sadistic,’ Zeke says.

  ‘It is sadistic. They failed at most things, and when they were grown up they never earned any money, which meant they were good for nothing in their father’s eyes. And they were no good to their mother either. She wanted them to be perfect so she could show them off. No matter what they did, they were never good enough.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Malin asks, unwilling to think of the brothers as victims. They could be killers. Child-killers.

  ‘I knew them back then. And I’ve heard all the stories over the years. From other people we were at Lundsberg with, who in turn had heard rumours about the Kurtzon brothers. We had a reunion at the Grand Hotel back in the early nineties. They showed up together, suntanned in the middle of winter, I seem to remember they’d been somewhere in Asia, and it felt like Leopold was dragging Henry around. It was as if nothing had moved on for them. Everyone knew they hadn’t got anywhere in their father’s business, that he’d given up on them, a bit like Kamprad. They kept boasting about their own businesses, but if you looked below the surface it was pretty obvious it was all hot air.’

  ‘That fits what Johan said,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing. Please, go on,’ Malin says.

  ‘Then, later that evening, when someone had had enough of all their talk and said they were lying, Leopold flew into a rage, and there would have been a big fight if Henry hadn’t stepped in and pulled him away. I remember Leopold screaming something like: “Just wait till we get our inheritance. Then I’m going to buy your fucking arses and stick dynamite up them and make you run until you blow up. And the lizards can eat what’s left of you.”’

  Expectation of inheritance, Malin thinks.

  Desperate people. Lonely people. Despised people.

  ‘When did you last see Josefina?’

  ‘Two months ago, maybe. I was really shocked by the way she looked, I mean, I’d heard about her, but I still didn’t think it was possible to look that terrible and still be alive.’

  ‘And that’s when you drew up a will for her?’ Malin asks. ‘Leaving everything to the daughters she gave up for adoption?’

  Jörgen Stålsten turns away again, and looks out towards the pointed spire of Gustaf Vasa Church.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are the brothers mentioned in her will?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about any provision for what would happen to the money if the girls died before her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Josefina didn’t sign any other will that disinherited her brothers after her death?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The brothers came to see you, didn’t they?’ Malin asks. ‘Those frightened, confused brothers that you hadn’t seen since the reunion and presumably never wanted to see again. Did they put pressure on you to reveal the contents of the
will? Did they threaten you?’

  Jörgen Stålsten takes his eyes off the church and fixes his gaze on Malin.

  The confidence in his blue eyes replaced by fear, the same fear she saw in Ottilia Stenlund, as if the Kurtzon brothers were physically present in the room.

  ‘They haven’t been here. I have a duty of confidentiality, and I would never . . .’

  ‘Of course they’ve been here,’ Malin says, trying to convey both icy detachment and sympathy in her voice. ‘I can understand if you were frightened,’ she goes on. ‘You must have been more than aware of what they’re capable of.’

  ‘I’ve got a wife and two young children,’ Jörgen Stålsten says. ‘What could I do? They came in here in their bespoke suits, those reptilian eyes, and showed me pictures of my children that they’d got some photographer to take. That was enough. I knew what they wanted: the details of what was in Josefina’s will. I got the feeling that was the first they’d heard about the existence of the girls in Linköping. That Josefina had given birth to twins. And now she was planning to leave everything to the girls, everything that she was going to get from her father, and they weren’t mentioned at all.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Malin says.

  ‘Why are you asking me about this? Do you think the Kurtzon brothers are behind the bombing, and the murder of the girls’ adoptive mother? That Henry and Leopold would be capable of doing anything like that?’

  Neither Malin nor Zeke answers at once, just look at each other first, before Malin says: ‘That’s one of the theories we’re taking into consideration.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Zeke asks. ‘Could they do something like that?’

  ‘I can tell you this much,’ Jörgen Stålsten says. ‘I got the impression that they were capable of anything when they were here. They seemed to have crossed some sort of boundary. That when it comes to protecting their money, and making sure they get their hands on the family fortune, there was nothing they wouldn’t do, because without money the very foundation of their lives would vanish. You know, like Karl Vennberg wrote, “Deep inside the darkest gloom . . .”’

  ‘“. . .you have to fight for your life.”’ Malin completes the quote for him.