‘My grandfather was a very stylish man,’ Pyttan declared. ‘He had the typical Hamilton look, as we usually say in the family. Unfortunately, he also had the typical Hamilton brain, so my dear Grandma Ebba perhaps didn’t always have things terribly easy.’
‘What did she do, then? Ebba, I mean?’
‘I suppose she did what everyone else did,’ Pyttan said, unable to hide her surprise at the question. ‘She socialized with everyone one was supposed to socialize with at the time. She was at court when Gustaf V ascended the throne after Oscar. By some years, she was the youngest of the ladies-in-waiting to his wife, Queen Victoria. That was probably why she ended up with Prince Wilhelm and Maria. Of course, Maria Pavlovna was even younger than Grandma. And by then Ebba already had three children, so she was able to offer advice to Maria when the time came. My daddy, Archie, was the eldest, actually. He was born in 1901, I’m sure about that. After all, it’s an easy year to remember.’
‘Did anything special happen in 1901?’ Bäckström asked. ‘In the family, I mean.’
‘No,’ Pyttan said. ‘Why should it have done?’
‘You said it was an easy year to remember. That’s what made me wonder.’
‘I always find it easier to remember years at the start,’ Pyttan explained. ‘Like 1901, right at the start. But if you asked me when my daddy, Archie, died, I wouldn’t have a clue. I know it must have been sometime during the seventies, but of course I can’t remember exactly when. And that’s not at the start, if you understand what I mean, Superintendent.’
‘I understand,’ Bäckström said, who by now was certain that Pyttan had been blessed with the typical Hamilton brain as well.
‘I understand that your Grandma Ebba and Maria Pavlovna became good friends,’ Bäckström went on, keen to avoid getting stuck in a Hamiltonian dead end.
‘What makes you think that?’ Pyttan asked.
‘Considering all the gifts she got from Maria when Maria returned to Russia.’ Bäckström pointed at the pictures on the table in front of them.
It wasn’t that remarkable really, according to Pyttan. It was mostly rubbish, and the only reason Maria gave it away was probably that she couldn’t be bothered to drag it all back to Russia again. There was never any question of there being a great friendship between Ebba and Maria Pavlovna.
Neither the Hamiltons nor the Lewenhaupts were terribly fond of Russians. For the perfectly understandable reason that they had pretty much only encountered them in connection with various battles over the course of three centuries, and that a thousand or so of her older relations had lost their lives during these very masculine encounters.
Nor did they ever seem to have got terribly close to each other. Admittedly, when Maria first arrived in Sweden they had competed in sliding down the grand staircase in the entrance hall out at Oakhill on silver trays, but after Grandma Ebba had beaten her three times in a row Maria got fed up and replaced her with one of her chambermaids, who was so terrified that she went down backwards with her eyes closed.
Pyttan’s grandmother was an excellent rider, particularly at jumps and dressage, and was very careful with her health. Ebba didn’t smoke or drink, whereas Maria smoked like a chimney and drank as much as all the male members of the Romanov dynasty.
‘Take that cigar-lighter, for instance,’ Pyttan said. ‘I’m fairly sure she gave that to Grandma to tease her, because she knew she didn’t smoke.’
‘What about the dinner service?’
That was even easier to explain: her grandmother had been given it by Prince Wilhelm, not Maria. Among the family records was the letter confirming the gift. Prince Wilhelm was a fine, sensitive young man, several years younger than Grandma Ebba. The divorce from Maria had hurt him badly. Eating off the dinner service that his former wife had given him as a wedding present was quite out of the question.
‘He couldn’t get a thing down, poor man,’ Pyttan sighed. ‘So he gave it to Ebba, who he seems to have been rather more fond of than he dared admit. That’s how it ended up in the porcelain cabinet at home in Västergötland. The Hamiltons have never had to worry about having enough plates.’
Time to change tack, Bäckström thought, and went on to talk about Eriksson the lawyer. How come she had commissioned him to sell her art collection? Not least considering the regrettable consequences that ensued.
If Pyttan were to blame anyone apart from herself, it might perhaps be her father and grandfather. The Hamiltons had always been warriors, and they fought with cannons, rifles, pistols, swords, sabres and rapiers. But it was a different matter when it came to fighting with legal documents and money. That was a battle that demanded a different sort of soldier.
‘Grandpa Gustaf was very clear about that. You should always have judicial advisors as soon as legal documents and money were involved, and in the family we’ve always used Goldman’s law firm. First, old man Albert, then his son Joakim. Splendid people. As long as you’ve got a Jew by your side, your opponent doesn’t stand a chance. That was why I turned to Thomas Eriksson and asked him to sell those things for me. I’d moved house, after all. From a big house to a small apartment, only five rooms and a kitchen. There wasn’t even room for them in the attic. So I asked Thomas to sell them for me.’
‘So Thomas Eriksson was Jewish?’ Typical, Bäckström thought.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ Pyttan said. ‘If only he had been.’
According to a Hamilton family rumour, Thomas Eriksson was supposed to be the illegitimate son of the lawyer Joakim Goldman. Which explained why Eriksson started out at the Goldman law firm when he was a newly graduated lawyer, and the fact that he changed the name of the business after old man Goldman’s death had been explained away as another little act of rebellion against his father.
‘Sadly, it was rather worse than that,’ Pyttan declared. ‘Young Eriksson wasn’t remotely Jewish, because then I would never have ended up in this sorry mess. Eriksson was a common Swedish crook and a thief, and it was actually Mario who found him out. That rumour that Goldman was his father was probably something Eriksson made up himself.
‘But of course I don’t have to tell you that, Superintendent,’ Pyttan said. ‘That you need to be careful with people like Eriksson. All these Anderssons and Erikssons and Svenssons and Perssons and all the rest of them. We Hamiltons always fight without visors.’
Mario the Godfather Grimaldi seems to have ended up in the right place, Bäckström thought, but simply nodded in agreement.
‘By the way, I just thought of something,’ Pyttan said, holding a long, neatly manicured forefinger up in the air. ‘That picture of the fat Greek priest, the one that led to Mario working out what that fraudster Eriksson was up to, I was given that by Archie, my daddy. He bought it at auction at Christie’s, in London. He lived there for a couple of years towards the end of the war. He was the naval attaché at the Swedish Embassy.’
‘Tell me,’ Bäckström said, leaning back and clasping his hands over his round stomach. Another piece of the puzzle falls into place, he thought.
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Pyttan’s father, Count Archibald ‘Archie’ Hamilton, was born in 1901, which was of course practical because it made it easy to remember. Like all those who had gone before him, he grew up on the family estate in Västergötland. He graduated from Lundsberg private boarding school in 1920 and went on to study at the Royal Naval Academy, like so many Hamiltons before him. Not all of them, but enough.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed commander of a flotilla of torpedo boats stationed in Gothenburg, and was soon deeply involved in the clandestine smuggling of ball bearings from the Swedish Ball Bearing Factory in Gothenburg to Britain. Given the circumstances, it would have been hard to find anyone better suited to the job than Pyttan’s father.
The Hamiltons were on the side of the British. This was a consequence of their background, and they had had their roots, relations and close friends in England for the past thousand years. Grandpa Gus
taf was on the board of the Swedish Ball Bearing Factory, and considering the cargoes his son would be transporting, the typical Hamilton brain was hardly a disadvantage but more a prerequisite for success. Nocturnal sorties at high speed across the icy, storm-swept waters of the North Sea, lights switched off to evade all the German cruisers, destroyers and U-boats that were trying to sink them along the way and stop the British from getting the Swedish ball bearings that kept their military functioning.
‘People can say what they like about Daddy, but he wasn’t a coward. Archie was a daredevil, and if my mummy, Anna, hadn’t protested, he’d have stayed on that bridge for the rest of the war,’ Pyttan said, with evident pride in her voice.
‘But your mum disagreed,’ Bäckström said.
‘They had three children. I was the youngest when it all started. Before the war was over there were six of us, so Daddy was home a bit more regularly, if I can put it like that.’
‘You said your dad worked at the embassy in London,’ Bäckström said. ‘How did he end up there?’
It had been arranged by Pyttan’s maternal grandfather. He was not only a count, but also a general in Defence Command in Stockholm. First, he saw to it that his son-in-law was promoted to the rank of commander, meaning that he had to be dragged off the torpedo boat he was clinging on to so tenaciously. To make sure Archie remained in a remotely tolerable mood, he then arranged for him to be given a secret posting as naval attaché at the embassy in London, with special responsibility for the transportation of Swedish ball bearings. Close enough to the war that lent meaning to his son-in-law’s life. Far enough away to keep him alive and not make the count’s own daughter the widowed mother of half a dozen fatherless children. That was all there was to it, according to Pyttan. But the purchase of that painting of the fat priest, and all the rest of it, for that matter, had nothing to do with any of that.
The reason why Archie Hamilton, commander and count, had bought Versjagin’s painting of Saint Theodore was that Theodore bore a striking resemblance to the vicar in the village back home in Västergötland where the family estate lay. The commander and count didn’t get on with the parish priest, who was both hypocritical and sanctimonious, in Archie’s opinion. And he was no good at hunting either, which was pretty much a prerequisite if you were going to be in charge of a church and graveyard in the middle of the Hamilton estate, and one hundred pounds was a perfectly defensible price for one of the Hamilton counts who wanted to have a bit of fun with a servant of the Lord on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.
The priest hadn’t found the joke amusing. He returned the gift at once, with an indignant letter in which he encouraged Pyttan’s father to call in the Church authorities immediately to inspect his activities if he really did suspect him of stealing from the collection box.
‘Was he, then? Stealing from the collection box?’ Bäckström asked.
‘I’m quite certain he was,’ Pyttan snorted. ‘They all do, don’t they? And a hundred pounds wasn’t the end of the world. Because he got the painting back, of course, and he used to read the vicar’s letter out loud to us when he was in the mood. It was one of Daddy’s favourite stories.’
‘I was just thinking about something else,’ said Bäckström, who had suddenly been struck by a thought. ‘Your dad wasn’t bombed when he lived in London?’
‘Bound to have been,’ Pyttan said. ‘Wasn’t everyone who lived there? But that’s probably not the sort of thing you tell your children.’
‘I was wondering if that might have been why the hunting service got wrecked,’ Bäckström said, as another piece of the puzzle slipped into place.
The tragic remnants of what had once been a hunting service for maritime use, 148 pieces from the imperial porcelain factory in St Petersburg, which – in its original condition – would have been worth over ten million kronor.
‘You can blame Hitler for a lot of things,’ Pyttan said, shaking her head, ‘but he’s entirely innocent when it comes to that dinner service. I’m afraid the truth is much worse than that. If you want to track down the culprit, Superintendent, I think you should start with my brother, Ian.’
The hunting service was kept in four large wooden trays that were marked with the Romanov coat of arms. When it left Prince Wilhelm and Oakhill, it ended up being stored in a cellar at the family estate in Västergötland, and there it remained untouched until the fire.
Pyttan’s brother was home from Lundsberg for the Easter holidays. He had borrowed an illicit still from one of the farmhands, and began distilling alcohol in the cellar of the main house. While he was producing the alcohol that he intended to take with him when he returned to school, unfortunately a minor fire broke out, in which most of the 148 pieces were lost.
Archie, their father, had taken the matter calmly. The house and his wine cellar had survived, after all, and he preferred to eat off the family’s own porcelain anyway. The remnants of the service ended up in the children’s playhouse, where it was used for a number of children’s parties. Pyttan herself used to wash her dolls in one of the soup tureens, and on one occasion her brothers held a porcelain-smashing contest.
When Archie’s estate was being sorted out after his death, the remnants had been collected and packed in one of the original four trays. Pyttan had been given it by her brother. He didn’t want it. He thought it brought bad luck, he was missing his dad – it basically just nagged at his conscience.
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‘Sad story,’ Pyttan said, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘I heard from Mario that one of those nouveau-riche Russians bought it. He’s welcome to it. If you ask me, it never had any business being in Sweden. But would you like something to drink, Superintendent? I see we’ve already missed lunch, but I could imagine having a little glass of champagne.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say no,’ Bäckström said, as he was keen to stay on the right side of Pyttan, even if it had to be at the cost of a glass of fizzy wine at ten o’clock in the morning.
She must have put her watch on upside down, he thought.
In the absence of domestic staff – Mario had promised to take care of that particular detail as soon as they were properly installed – her guest would have to make do with Pyttan herself serving him. A quarter of an hour later she returned with a tray bearing a large ice bucket and an assortment of bottles and glasses.
Bäckström leapt up to help her, but Pyttan just shook her head. In her home, that wasn’t the guest’s job.
‘I brought whisky and vodka for you, Superintendent,’ Pyttan said. ‘I’m thinking of having a glass of bubbly, but I don’t imagine that’s the sort of thing you drink?’
‘It has been known,’ Bäckström lied. ‘But, given the choice, I’d love a small vodka.’
‘Wise decision,’ Pyttan said. ‘Daddy used to drink whisky, but that was probably only because he was so fond of boats. I mean, it tastes like freshly tarred oak, doesn’t it? But he did use to drink vodka with meals.’
Pyttan poured drinks for them both, and didn’t hold back when she filled Bäckström’s glass. Her daddy used to say that a proper man deserved a proper drink, and she could see no good reason to deviate from that.
‘Well, then,’ Pyttan said. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Superintendent?’
‘Well, there was one thing I’ve been wondering about,’ Bäckström said. ‘On that list I saw, there was mention of some sort of musical box. Do you remember anything about that?’
‘Money,’ Pyttan said, evidently thinking about something else entirely. ‘Apart from the money that little bastard Eriksson, the bloke who tried to shoot Mario, tricked me out of. Mario’s promised to take care of that. Whenever there’s a practical problem like that, I always ask Mario to sort it out.’
I can imagine, Bäckström thought.
‘As far as the money is concerned, I don’t think you have any cause for concern,’ he said. ‘According to my colleagues who are working on the matter, Eriksson seems to have trick
ed you out of around a million kronor.’
‘Really?’ Pyttan said, pouring more champagne. ‘A million. Who’d have thought it?’
‘But you don’t have to worry about the money. You’ll get it back as soon as we’ve worked out how much you should get.’
‘I suppose I’ve got enough to get by on. But of course I could always give it away to someone who needs it more than I do.’
Like little Mario, Bäckström thought.
‘Anything else?’ Pyttan asked, still sounding like she was somewhere else.
‘Yes, that musical box,’ Bäckström prompted. ‘You don’t remember anything about it? According to the notes I saw, it doesn’t seem to have been of any great value but, as I’m sure you can understand, we need to have our papers in order.’
‘Musical box, musical box, musical box,’ Pyttan said. She had evidently switched to thinking out loud now that she was well into her second glass of champagne.
She honestly couldn’t remember a musical box. But she did have a vague memory of a little enamel elf with a red hat on his head. It was far too heavy to hang on the Christmas tree, so perhaps it was one of those ornaments you got out for Christmas?
‘But no musical box?’
‘Daddy used to tell a story about a musical box,’ Pyttan said. ‘He was given it by his mother when he was a little boy. I think he had several musical boxes, now I come to think of it. I think he gave one of them away as a present when he was in London during the war.’
‘You don’t remember the name? Of the person he gave it to?’
‘Name, name, name,’ Pyttan said, shaking herself irritably. ‘Just think how practical it would be if everyone had the same name. I have a feeling it was that politician. The one who was in charge of everything. That fat bloke who was always smoking a cigar. The one who’s like a toilet.’
The Sword of Justice Page 50
