Midnight In Malmö: The Fourth Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery (The Malmö Mysteries Book 4) (30 page)

Halfway down Karl-Marx-Allee, on Manja Albrecht’s side of the road, Anita came to the entrance to the underground. She darted down to the station. She walked the length of the platform, came up the other end and turned right. Steps brought her back into the bright light of another cloudless evening on Andreasstrasse and the eastern end of the apartment block. A couple of minutes later, she was round the back of number 64 and standing at the door. Before pushing the intercom button, she took one further glance round, scoping the road behind the building. Opposite were trees, through which she could see a children’s play area. Further along were more modern apartments, pristine white with neat metal railings hemming in the narrow balconies. A woman passed her on the pavement; middle-aged – too old for Fanny Källström. She was as sure as she could be that she hadn’t been followed. She turned and pressed the buzzer, and Manja’s voice answered.

The door clicked open, and Anita stepped into the unknown.

Hans-Dieter Albrecht was younger-looking than Anita had expected. She knew he must be at least eighty, but the man who stood up when she entered Manja’s living room was tall and held himself upright. His hair was silver, and though thinning, still covered most of his head. A grey moustache adorned his upper lip. The face was lined, yet had a healthy, flushed pallor. This was a man who had looked after himself. But it was the dark eyes that Anita’s gaze was drawn to. They were guarded, and she knew that he was sizing her up. The hand that he offered to her was deeply wrinkled and veined, but the fingers pressed firmly as they enveloped hers in a handshake.

Manja brought in coffee, and then departed after a brief conversation in German with Albrecht, which Anita couldn’t understand.

‘I leave you with my grandfather,’ Manja explained to Anita, who was now sitting. ‘He does not like me to listen to the stories of the old days.’ Whether this was a warning, Anita wasn’t sure.

After Manja had left, there was silence as Albrecht continued to stare at Anita. Then he suddenly waved his hand in the direction of the easels.

‘Decadent art,’ he said in English with an amused smile. ‘The Nazis would have hated it. And also in my time, Manja would have attracted the interest of the authorities.’ Anita was impressed by his excellent, if accented, English. ‘But she is young, and the world in which I lived has gone. But why exist in such a mess?’

This loving indictment of his granddaughter was delivered despite the fact that Anita could see that Manja had actually made some sort of effort to tidy up.

‘I’ve a son of a similar age. They think differently. They expect more.’

Albrecht took a sip of coffee. He put the cup down slowly.

‘So, why do you want to see me?’

‘I explained to Manja that I’ve been brought in by the publishing company that is producing the biography of Albin Rylander. Due to Klas Lennartsson’s sad and untimely death, I’ve been assigned to complete the book.’ She produced a pocket voice recorder. Kevin had gone out and bought it in the shopping mall at Alexanderplatz after she’d invented the replacement-writer story for Manja. ‘At least you can make an attempt to look like a real writer,’ he’d said as he explained how to work the little machine.

‘Manja said there were two of you.’

‘Yes. But Kevin can’t make it tonight. He had another meeting.’

He smiled at her, but there was no warmth in the expression.

‘Bullshit! You may be a pretty lady, but you are no writer. I can smell police at fifty kilometres. Why are you really here, Anita? That is if “Anita” is your real name.’

Anita held her hands up as though someone was pointing a gun at her.

‘I didn’t want to deceive you, but I thought you might not see me if you knew the real reason I have come to Berlin. And I am Anita, by the way. And a cop.’

His face hardened. ‘I think your visit is over.’ He stood up.

Anita jumped to her feet. ‘No, wait! I’m here unofficially. The Swedish police know nothing of this. When you met Klas Lennartsson last week, I don’t know if he told you that he thought Albin Rylander had been murdered.’ There was no reaction from Albrecht, so Anita carried on. ‘Then Klas died. He was a friend of mine. I think he may also have been killed because of what you told him about Rylander. I’m trying to discover the truth. Only by finding out Rylander’s story can I uncover a reason for these two deaths. And you’re the only person who has the answer.’

‘And if you get the answer you want, what will you do then?’

‘That depends on what it is. I don’t know what I would do, but at least I might know what I’m up against.’

Albrecht rubbed an eye and then let his hand drop to his side.

‘If your friend died because of what I told him, are you not putting yourself in danger?’ This uncomfortable thought had been growing in her mind since their arrival in Berlin, and had waxed dramatically from the moment Kevin had spotted Benno Källström. But she couldn’t let it go now.

‘I know I could be.’

He gazed at Anita intently as though he was weighing up whether to cooperate or not. Then he slowly lowered himself back down onto the sofa and indicated that she should do the same.

‘Put that away,’ he said firmly, pointing to the recorder. As Anita compliantly slipped it back into her bag, he could see the mixture of fear and resolve in her eyes.

‘I’ve seen the same determination in the eyes of many who passed through Lichtenberg. After we had finished with them, they no longer had that defiance. Dazed, broken, haunted; mere shells.’

‘Stasi?’

‘And proud. But I am sensible enough not to proclaim it from the rooftops.
Schild und Schwert der Partei
. We were the Shield and the Sword of the Party. We did our job well, and there were rewards.’ He waved at the walls. ‘This. This was my reward. Karl-Marx-Allee. The best. But when the Wall came down and our Lichtenberg headquarters were occupied, life was difficult for a former member of
Staatssicherheit
. That it is why I do not live here. I learnt to keep a low profile and blend into the background. I am just an old Berliner who is seen wandering off to the local shops to buy his newspaper, his loaf of bread. I am invisible – and I intend to stay that way.’ He pointed at the window. ‘There are people out there who would happily harm me if they knew exactly who I was and what I did. I have no regrets. It was for a cause that I believed in. I still do. My father had been a communist, but the Nazis shipped him off to the death camps with so many other political prisoners. I remember the day they came to take him away. My mother crying, my sister screaming. None of the comrades returned. But our time came…’ He drifted off in thought, and Anita waited. She had time. She knew he’d tell her all.

‘Klas Lennartsson told me that Rylander said it all began and ended in Wilhelmstrasse.’

‘Did he?’

‘I think Rylander meant that Lenin’s journey to Russia was masterminded from the German Foreign Office in Wilhelmstrasse. It was in Malmö that his father Oscar saved Lenin’s life, and we think – that’s Kevin and I – that the event coloured the whole of Rylander’s life. But how did it end in Wilhelmstrasse? Was it because the Swedish embassy was there in the Cold War days?’

Albrecht crossed his legs and sat back in the sofa. She could see him relax, and his eyes brightened.

‘You are right about Lenin. But Albin Rylander did not grow up being a political animal. Far from it. He enjoyed life. I think he was what you call in the West a
bon viveur
. That man could hold his drink. But he found Sweden dull. After the war, he wanted to see the world and get the Swedish government to pay for it, so he joined the diplomatic service. He knew nothing of the Lenin connection until his father told him before he died. He gave him a red handkerchief that Lenin had given him.’

She clicked her fingers. ‘Yes! He used to wear it in the top pocket of his jacket. And he was clutching it in his hand when they found his body.’

‘I am pleased. He showed it to me once. He had not thought about it much at the time of his father’s passing, but he realized the story explained why his father was so vehement about the evils of communism. It was guilt, especially at the time shortly before the war broke out, because of Sweden’s fear of being swallowed up by the Russian Bear. It was only when Rylander junior had been in a number of diplomatic postings that his admiration for Moscow and what the Soviet Union stood for was kindled. But until then, he made the most of his life. He was tall, handsome, and had many homosexual encounters, especially in places like Algiers, London and Buenos Aires. In the days before mass communication, you could get away with almost anything… in the West that is. I did not approve of his sexual behaviour, but it proved useful to us. And so did he when he was based at the Swedish embassy in Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse—’

‘Wilhelmstrasse?’

‘Correct. That is when I first came into contact with him. But this goes back further. It really begins with a man called Bruno Krell…’ Anita sat on the edge of her seat and concentrated hard, as she knew Albrecht wouldn’t allow her to take notes. She wanted to get the story exactly right for when she repeated it to Kevin.

Bruno Krell was born near Lübeck in 1923. His real name was Gunter Ringel. As with many young, impressionable teenagers of his day in Germany, he was in awe of Hitler and the ideals of the National Socialists. He was in the Hitler Youth, and when the war broke out, he was absorbed into the army. He was brave and resourceful and very, very ruthless. These qualities were highly prized by the Nazis, and attracted the attention of a senior member of the Gestapo. Though young, Ringel was an enthusiastic participant in many Gestapo operations on the Eastern Front, where they followed the assault troops and barbarically “cleansed” the population.

In 1943, he was brought back to Germany and, because of his youth, was used to infiltrate the student unrest that was highlighted by the White Rose movement led by Sophie and Hans Scholl at the University of Munich. As the war was nearing its close and the Russians advanced steadily through the east of Germany, Ringel found himself working out of the Gestapo headquarters here in Berlin. He had been involved in rounding up the increasing number of dissidents, deserters and defeatists emerging from the woodwork when the war was obviously lost; there were still plenty of their own people for the Gestapo to kill even in the last days of the war. However, Gunter Ringel was astute enough to know that his time was up, and he managed to flee Berlin. He made for Lübeck, but realized that he would never get as far as the Baltic coast. Like many Nazis, he recognized that his Gestapo background would count against him if he was taken by the Allies. He found a fellow German soldier of a similar age, got him drunk, killed him, and stole his identity. Bruno Krell emerged and blended into the background; an ordinary trooper who had been separated from his unit. Who would have believed that a man of twenty-two could have packed so much death into his short life? Unfortunately for him, he was captured by the Russians and not by the Americans or British.

By 1950, Bruno Krell, the vehement communist, was living in East Berlin, and had started working in a lowly position for the recently formed Staatssicherheit. His old Gestapo skills came into their own. Surveillance, infiltration, interrogation and persuasion. There were a number of ex-Nazis who wormed their way into positions in the new GDR. You could not run a country on old communists alone. Not that anyone knew of Krell’s past at that time.

In the late fifties, he came under the influence of Markus Wolf, the head of Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung
–
the HVA
–
the foreign intelligence section of the Stasi. Again, he had the qualities and qualifications to be a good spy. He was attached to various embassies abroad – those that would accept a GDR embassy. And he spent time in Moscow, where he impressed the KGB. And it was the Russians who sent him to London in 1964 because the GDR did not have a diplomatic presence there at the time. He spoke good English, Russian and, of course, German. He was soon gathering intelligence. Both the KGB and the Stasi appreciated how valuable he was becoming. But he had one weakness that he had hidden during his Gestapo days. He was homosexual. It was illegal in Britain then, as it still is in Russia. Yet it was also a strength, in that he made a number of useful contacts in what would now be called the gay scene. He knew the pubs and clubs where they gathered
–
civil servants, scientists, MPs, lawyers, aristocrats, diplomats and the like, who could then be blackmailed if necessary.

And then one day, he was recognized in the street by a woman who had been arrested by the Gestapo near the end of the war. Krell, or to be more exact, Gunter Ringel, had interrogated her. She had survived and married an army captain who was part of the occupying force in the British Sector of Berlin. She was now living in London. She reported the sighting to her husband, and he passed the information on to MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence and security service. They did some digging and pieced together Krell’s past. Because of his youth in the war, he was not exactly in the first rank of war criminals. And besides, the diplomatic immunity of the Russian embassy would make arrest impossible. Expulsion from the country seemed to be the only option. However, MI5 felt there might be another choice. They put him under surveillance and soon realized what he was doing and the connections he was making. They had a spy in their midst but, because of his background, not a spy who was ideologically committed. He was a man of transferable loyalties
–
a man who could be turned.

That is where Albin Rylander came in.

Rylander was working at the Swedish embassy in London at that time. He came on the radar of the MI5 watchers who were keeping an eye on Krell because of his visits to similar haunts. Then, MI6, the agency for gathering foreign intelligence, got involved, and they made the decision that they would try and recruit Krell through a staged homosexual contact. But they didn’t want to compromise him or themselves by using a British or American man for the seduction. That was something the KGB could have sniffed out. So, what better than a neutral, who would seem to have no partial views? A Swede. MI6 contacted Sektionen för särskild inhämtning
–
the SSI
–
the Section for Special Collection; a very secret part of the Swedish Armed Forces, whose role was to liaise with foreign intelligence agencies. After carefully monitoring Rylander’s promiscuous activities, MI6 suggested Rylander would be suitable, and the SSI went about recruiting him on behalf of the British. He did not take much persuading. Money was probably an inducement to a socialite on a junior Swedish diplomat’s pay in the expensive London of the decadent sixties. But what really appealed to Rylander was that it was a dangerous adventure.