There was always some retort or question which niggled at her, and now she worried that she might have taken too tough a line, or been as partisan as the media she was criticising; that she had demanded nuance from others without living up to that herself. But then she never shrank from being self-critical, and she was well aware that the hysteria over Forsell had got under her skin. Maybe it was more about her than about him.
She knew only too well how such hatred and lies could destroy a person and, although she had never considered taking her own life, she did sometimes lose her footing and self-harm – just as she had when she was a teenager – by cutting herself. She had felt out of sorts ever since she woke up at dawn that day and prepared for her recording, as if something dark from the past were trying to come back. But she dismissed it. Götgatan was full of people. There was a group of day-care children milling about with balloons on the pavement in front of her, and she turned into Bondegatan and found her way to Nytorget, where she breathed a little easier.
Nytorget was considered one of the smartest addresses in Söder and, although to some it was almost a dirty word, it was a synonym for the in-crowd among the media elite. She felt safe in the neighbourhood, as if she had found both a home and place of refuge. It was true that she had over-mortgaged herself in buying it. But since her programme had become such a success – it was Sweden’s most-listened-to media podcast – she felt reasonably secure, and could in any case always sell the place and move to the suburbs if necessary. She never doubted that everything could be taken away from her at a moment’s notice.
She stepped up her pace. Were those footsteps behind her? No, she was just imagining it, silly old fears. Yet she wanted to get home as quickly as possible. She wanted to forget the world and lose herself in a romantic comedy, or anything that was not part of her own life.
Blomkvist was sitting on a balcony in Östermalm, interviewing the woman Modig had spoken about. He had come from Kungliga Biblioteket, the Royal Library, where he had spent the whole day reading. He was now beginning to see the chain of events more clearly, or at least where there were gaps and what else he needed to find out.
He had therefore invited himself to Elin’s home on Jungfrugatan. She was now thirty-nine years old, an elegant woman with distinctive features, very slim and somewhat distant. Felke was her married name, but in 2008 she had been called Malmgård and she was quite a celebrity in the fitness world – with her own advice column in Aftonbladet – and had been a member of the Everest expedition led by the American, Greg Dolson.
Dolson’s group made their summit bid on the same day as Viktor Grankin’s climbers: May 13. During their acclimatisation period, the two expeditions had lived side by side at Base Camp, and Elin had grown close to her countrymen Johannes Forsell and Svante Lindberg. She had also made friends with Klara Engelman.
“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” Blomkvist said.
“It’s not a problem, but as you can imagine I’m rather tired of this story. I’ve given almost two hundred talks about it.”
“Sounds like good money to me,” he said.
“There was a financial crisis then too, if you recall, so it’s never been that lucrative.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But tell me about Klara Engelman. I know she and Grankin were an item, so there’s no need to tiptoe around that.”
“Are you going to quote me?”
“Not if you don’t want me to. I only need to understand what happened.”
“O.K. They did have an affair. But they were discreet about it. Even at Base Camp not many people knew about it.”
“But you did?”
“Because Klara told me.”
“Isn’t it a bit odd that Klara was a member of Viktor Grankin’s expedition? With all her money and connections, why didn’t she choose one of the American leaders, Dolson, for example, who was better known?”
“Grankin had a good reputation too, but there was also a link of sorts between Viktor and Stan Engelman. They knew each other somehow.”
“Yet Grankin went after his wife?”
“Yes, that must have been unbearable for Stan.”
“I read that you thought Klara had been unhappy at first, when she was at Base Camp?”
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “I saw her as the ultimate stuck-up bitch. But then gradually I came to realise how sad she was and understood that, for her, the whole Everest adventure was about freedom. She hoped it would give her the courage to get a divorce. One evening, when we were drinking wine in her tent, she told me she’d got herself a lawyer.”
“Charles Mesterton, right?”
“Maybe, I don’t remember his name. And she’d also been in touch with a publisher. She said she wanted to write not only about climbing the mountain but also about Stan’s affairs with prostitutes and porn stars, and all his criminal contacts.”
“You would have expected Engelman to feel threatened by that.”
“I find that difficult to imagine. If Klara had one lawyer, then he had twenty, and I know she was scared. ‘He’s going to destroy me,’ she said.”
“But then something happened.”
“Our hero set his cap at her.”
“Grankin.”
“Precisely.”
“How did he do it?”
“I have no idea. But it was easy to be charmed by Viktor. He exuded such wonderful calm in the face of any practical difficulties. Just one look at him and we all felt: Viktor will fix it. He had a big, bear-like presence and dismissed all our worries with a glorious laugh. I remember envying the other group, I wished we had him as our leader too.”
“And Klara fell for him.”
“Hook, line and sinker.”
“Why, do you suppose?”
“Afterwards I wondered if it wasn’t something to do with Stan. I think Klara imagined that she could defeat her husband if she had Viktor by her side. He looked as if he could stand in a hail of bullets and simply smile.”
“But then something changed.”
“Yes. Even Viktor began to seem nervous, and that threw us all. It was a bit like, you know, when the flight attendant suddenly starts to look worried halfway through the flight. Then you really do begin to think that the plane is going to go down.”
“What do you think had happened?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s possible he was beginning to worry about his little escapade. Realised that Stan wasn’t to be trifled with, and that there would be consequences, and to be honest …”
“Yes?”
“He was right to worry. I was so young at the time, and I thought the romance was pretty cool. It was as if the world’s biggest secret had been entrusted to me. But with hindsight I realise it was bloody irresponsible. I’m not thinking so much about Stan or about Viktor’s wife, but the climbers on the expedition. Viktor was supposed to look after all of them and not favour anybody. He let them down by becoming so fixated on Klara, and I think that’s one of the reasons it all went pear-shaped. He wanted to get her up onto the summit, come what may.”
“He should have sent her down.”
“Definitely, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not just because she had such huge P.R. value. He was also upset that she had had to take all that crap in the press. He wanted to show the world she could do it.”
“There’s some suggestion that Grankin wasn’t really himself during the climb up from Camp IV?”
“I’ve heard that too. Maybe he just exhausted himself trying to keep the group together.”
“How did he get on with Nima Rita?”
“Viktor had tremendous respect for him.”
“And what about the relationship between Klara and Nima?”
“Different … it was a bit special. They weren’t on the same planet.”
“Did she treat him badly?”
“He was very superstitious, you see.”
“Did she tease him about it?”
“A bit, maybe, but I don’t think that
bothered him. He just got on with his job. It was something totally different that destroyed their relationship.”
“And what was that …?”
“He had a wife.”
“Luna.”
“That’s it, her name was Luna. She meant everything to him, and I honestly think you could have said anything you liked to him. Treated him like dirt, as if he didn’t exist. He didn’t care. But one bad word about his wife and he became like thunder. One morning Luna came up to Base Camp with fresh bread and cheese, and mangoes and lychees and all sorts of other things in a decorated basket. She went around the tents, handing things out, and faces lit up and everyone thanked her. But as she was walking past Klara’s tent she tripped over a pair of crampons, I think, or a handbag or something else that Klara definitely didn’t need up there. Everything flew all over the gravel and Luna grazed her hands. There was actually no great drama, but Klara was sitting right there and instead of helping she just snapped ‘Look where you’re going’ and made a fuss. Basically she behaved like a stupid prima donna, and Nima was about to explode, I could see. I was afraid that he would lose his temper. But before anything could happen, Forsell appeared and helped Luna to her feet again and picked up the bread and fruit.”
“So Forsell was friendly with them?”
“He was friendly with everyone. Have you met him? Before everyone started to hate him, that is.”
“I interviewed him just when he’d been made Minister of Defence.”
“In that case you certainly won’t get what’s going on now. At that time, you see, everybody loved him. He was like a whirlwind. He stormed ahead, giving his thumbs-up sign, and he never stopped smiling. But you could be right, he may have had a particular relationship with Nima. He kept saying ‘Let me bow to the mountain legend’, that sort of stuff, and would exclaim: ‘What a wife you have! What a beautiful woman’, and of course that delighted Nima.”
“Did Nima then reciprocate in any way?”
“How do you mean?”
Mikael did not know how to put it, nor did he want to make any baseless accusations.
“Is it conceivable that Nima might have helped Forsell on the mountain, at the expense of Klara Engelman?”
Elin gave him a bewildered look.
“How on earth would that have worked?” she said. “Nima was with Viktor and Klara, wasn’t he, and Svante and Johannes went on ahead towards the summit on their own.”
“I know. But later? What happened then? It says everywhere that Klara was beyond rescue. But was she really?” he said, and then something unexpected happened.
Elin lost her temper.
“Too bloody right she was,” she said. “I get so fed up with this. A bunch of idiots who’ve never been anywhere near those altitudes, they think they know it all. But I can tell you …” She was almost lost for words. “Do you have the slightest idea what it’s like up there? You’re barely able to think, and it’s excruciatingly cold and tough, and if you’re really lucky you’ve just about got enough strength to look after yourself. To take one step at a time. No-one, not even a Nima Rita, can get a person down when they’re lying lifeless in the snow with their face frozen solid at eight thousand three hundred metres, and that’s how she was. We saw them ourselves on the way down, you know that, don’t you? She and Viktor with their arms around each other in the snow.”
“I do know.”
“And there was nothing to be done. Not a hope in hell of anybody being able to help her. She was dead.”
“I’m just double-checking the facts,” he said.
“Bullshit, I don’t believe that for one second. You were trying to imply something, weren’t you? You’re out to get Forsell, just like everyone else.”
I’m not, he wanted to shout, I’m not! But instead he took a deep breath.
“I apologise,” he said. “I just think …”
“What do you think?”
“That there’s something about this story that doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that later Klara was no longer lying with Viktor. I know that wasn’t discovered until the following year, and that any number of things could have happened in-between – avalanches and terrible storms. But still—”
“Still what?”
“I don’t like what I’ve read of Svante Lindberg’s account either. I can’t help feeling that he hasn’t told the whole story.”
Elin calmed down and looked out at the garden.
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” she said.
“And why would you say so?”
“Because Svante was the big riddle at Base Camp.”
CHAPTER 22
27.viii
Catrin Lindås was curled up with her cat on the sofa at home on Nytorget, looking at her mobile. She had made far too many attempts to contact Blomkvist, and was both furious and embarrassed about it. She had laid herself bare, and all she had got back was one cryptic text message:
Mamsahib, she thought, and looked it up: “A respectful form of address for a white woman in colonial India, usually spelled Memsahib.” That may well have been what he said, but who cared anyway, and who was Klara Engelman?
She couldn’t be less interested, and she couldn’t give a damn about Blomkvist either for that matter. Surely he could have added a polite little note, like “Hi, how’s things?” But no, and certainly not an “I miss you”, as she herself had unaccountably written in a moment of weakness. He could get stuffed.
She went into the kitchen to find something to eat. But she realised she wasn’t hungry after all, so she slammed the refrigerator door shut and took an apple from a bowl on the dining table, which she didn’t eat either, maybe because at that very moment a bell went off in the recesses of her mind. Klara Engelman? It did sound familiar. Even glamorous in some way, and she googled it. Then the whole story came back to her.
She had read all about it in Vanity Fair some time ago, but now she could only find some images of Klara Engelman, a series of posed photographs from one of the Everest base camps, and also pictures of Viktor Grankin, the guide who died with her. Klara was good-looking in a slightly vulgar way, but she also seemed sad, or as if she were pretending to look happy, as if she needed to keep smiling to ward off depression, whereas Grankin seemed … well, what about him?
He was an engineer and also a professional climber, another article said, and a former consultant to adventure travel companies, but she thought he looked more like a soldier, special forces, especially when she saw him in another photograph from Everest, standing next to … “Johannes Forsell!” she exclaimed aloud, and even forgot to be angry with Blomkvist. She wrote back:
A moment earlier, Elin Felke had been indignant and angry. Now she looked uncertain and thoughtful, as if she had gone from one extreme to the other in no time at all.
“Well, my God, what can I say about Svante? What incredible self-confidence. Crazy, really. He could persuade people to do just about anything. We all even began to drink his bloody blueberry soup in the camp. He should have been a salesman or something. But I suspect that in the end things didn’t turn out quite as he wanted on Everest.”
“How’s that?”
“Svante had also worked out that Viktor and Klara had something going, and that seemed to trouble him in some way. I can’t explain it, it just felt like that. Maybe he was jealous, what do I know, and I think Viktor noticed. I even think it was one of the reasons he became more and more nervous.”
“Why should it have affected him?”
“Something did rattle him, as I said. From having been the solid rock in camp he became increasingly fearful, and sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t a little scared of Svante.”
“Why would he be, do you think?”
“If I were to g
uess, I’d say he was frightened that Svante would tell Stan Engelman.”
“Was there anything to suggest they were in contact?”
“Maybe not, but … there was something insidious about Svante, that became ever clearer to me, and occasionally he would speak about Engelman as if he knew him. The way he called him ‘Stan’ made it sound somehow … familiar. But I may be imagining it. It’s hard to remember things like that now. All I know is that even Svante appeared less and less cocky towards the end. So he was treading very carefully indeed.”
“You mean he too was nervous about something?”
“We all were.”
“That’s natural, in those circumstances,” Blomkvist said. “But you referred to Lindberg as the big riddle at Base Camp.”
“That’s exactly how it was. Most of the time he was self-assurance personified, yet he could also be hesitant and suspicious. Extravagant and generous, but also mean. He could flatter the shirt off your back one moment, needle you the next.”
“What about his relationship with Forsell?”
“Pretty much the same, I think. There was a part of him that loved Johannes.”
“But another …”
“… that kept tabs on him. Tried to get some hold over him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not sure. But I guess I’m just influenced by all this crap in the media against Forsell.”
“Influenced in what way?”
“It all seems so unfair, and sometimes I wonder if Johannes isn’t paying for something that Svante did. But now I really am being indiscreet.”
Blomkvist gave a careful laugh.
“Maybe you are. But I’m glad you’re helping me to think, and you don’t have to worry about my story, as I said. I too love to speculate, but in my articles I have no choice but to stick to the facts.”
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 19
