The Hidden Child (59 page)

Erica had insisted on driving alone to Göteborg, even though Patrik had offered to go with her. This was something that she needed to do on her own.

She stood at the door for a moment, trying to make herself lift her hand to ring the bell. Finally she couldn’t put it off any longer.

Märta looked at Erica in surprise when she opened the door, but then stepped aside to let her come in.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ said Erica, feeling her throat go dry all of a sudden. ‘I should have phoned ahead, but . . .’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Märta smiled kindly. ‘At my age, I’m just grateful for some company, so this is very nice. Come in, come in.’

Erica followed her down the hall to the living room, where they both sat down. She wondered, panic-stricken, how to begin, but Märta spoke first.

‘Have you made any progress in the murder investigation?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry that we couldn’t be of more help when you were here last time, but as I said, I really knew nothing about our finances.’

‘I know what the money was for. Or rather, who it was for,’ said Erica. Her heart was thumping in her chest.

Märta gave her a puzzled look but didn’t seem to know what she meant.

With her eyes fixed on the old woman, Erica said gently: ‘In November 1945, my mother gave birth to a son who was immediately put up for adoption. She gave birth at the home of her aunt, in Borlänge. I think the man who was murdered, Erik Frankel, made the payments to your husband on behalf of that child.’

It was utterly silent in the living room. Then Märta looked away. Erica saw that her hands were shaking.

‘I thought as much. But Wilhelm never said anything to me about it, and . . . well, part of me didn’t want to know. He has always been our son, mine and Wilhelm’s, and we never loved him any less just because I hadn’t given birth to him myself. We’d wanted a child for such a long time, tried for so long, and . . . well, Göran arrived like a gift from Heaven.’

‘Does he know that . . .?’

‘That he’s adopted? Yes, we’ve never hidden that fact from him. But to be honest, I don’t think he’s ever given it much thought. We were his parents, his family. We did talk about it on occasion, Wilhelm and I, about how we might feel if Göran wanted to find out more about his . . . biological parents. But we always told ourselves that we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. And Göran never seemed to want to find out about them, so we let it be.’

‘I like him,’ said Erica impulsively, trying to get used to the idea that the man she had met here last time was actually her brother. Hers and Anna’s, she corrected herself.

‘He liked you too,’ said Märta, her face lighting up. ‘And part of me reacted subconsciously to the fact that you do look a bit alike. There’s something about your eyes . . . I’m not really sure, but you have similar features.’

‘How do you think he would react if . . .’ Erica didn’t dare finish her question.

‘Considering how much he always talked about having siblings when he was a child, I think he would welcome a little sister with open arms.’ Märta smiled and seemed to have already recovered from the initial shock.

‘Two sisters,’ Erica said. ‘I have a younger sister named Anna.’

‘Two sisters,’ repeated Märta, shaking her head. ‘How about that? Life never ceases to amaze me. Even at my age.’ Then she turned serious. ‘Would you mind telling me something about your mother . . . his mother?’ She gave Erica a searching look.

‘I’d be happy to tell you about her,’ said Erica, and then she recounted the story about Elsy and how she came to give up her son for adoption. She talked for a long time, for more than an hour, trying to do justice to her mother and her situation as she talked to this woman who had loved and brought up the son that Elsy had been forced to give away.

When the front door opened and a cheerful voice called from the hall, they both jumped.

‘Hi, Mamma. Do you have visitors?’ Footsteps approached the living room.

Erica looked at Märta, who nodded to give her consent. The time for secrets was over.

Four hours had passed and Paula and Martin were starting to despair. They felt like a pair of moles, trapped in the pitch-dark, though their eyes had now grown sufficiently accustomed to the gloom that they were able to distinguish the contours of the room.

‘This really isn’t how I imagined things would go,’ said Paula, sighing. ‘Do you think they’ll send out a search party soon?’ she joked, although she couldn’t help sighing again.

Martin was busy rubbing his shoulder, which was throbbing after several attempts to break down the door. He was going to have some serious bruises to show for this.

‘He must be long gone by now,’ said Paula, feeling frustration well up inside her.

‘There’s a good chance you’re right,’ Martin agreed, which only made her feel even more frustrated.

‘He certainly has a lot of creepy souvenirs down here.’ Paula squinted, trying to make out the outlines of some of the things that filled the shelves in the basement room.

‘They’re probably mostly Erik’s,’ said Martin. ‘From what I understood, he was the collector.’

‘But all these Nazi artefacts . . . They must be worth a fortune.’

‘No doubt. A person who devotes most of his life to collecting things is bound to end up with a lot of stuff.’

‘Why do you think he did it?’ Paula stared into the darkness, trying to wrap her head around what they now regarded as fact. To tell the truth, she had become convinced the minute she started looking into his alibi. That was when she got the idea to find out whether Axel Frankel’s name appeared on any other airline passenger list. When they’d checked his alibi, they had verified only that he departed on the day he had specified; it hadn’t occurred to them to see whether he had made any other trips. It was only this morning that she had learned a passenger named Axel Frankel had travelled from Paris to Göteborg on June sixteenth, and then returned on the same day.

‘I don’t know,’ Martin replied to her question. ‘It’s hard to understand. The brothers seem to have had a good relationship, so why would Axel kill Erik? What was it that triggered such a strong reaction?’

‘It must have something to do with the sudden renewal of contact between the four of them: Erik, Axel, Britta, and Frans. That can’t be a coincidence. And somehow that’s all connected to the murder of the Norwegian.’

‘I agree. But how? And why? Why now, after sixty years? It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘We’ll have to ask him. If we ever get out of here, that is. And if we ever manage to catch him. He’s probably on his way to the other side of the world right now,’ said Paula, discouraged.

‘Maybe they’ll find our skeletons down here sometime next year,’ Martin joked, but his attempt at humour was not appreciated.

‘If we’re lucky, maybe some kid will break in,’ said Paula drily.

‘Hey! You’ve got something there!’ Martin said excitedly, poking her hard in the side.

‘Whatever it is, I sincerely hope it’s worth the damage you just did to my ribs,’ said Paula, probing the tender spot where he’d jabbed her with his elbow.

‘Don’t you remember what Per said when we interviewed him?’

‘I wasn’t there. You and Gösta conducted the interview,’ she reminded him, but she was starting to sound interested.

‘Well, he said that he broke into the house through a window in the basement.’

‘I don’t think there are any windows down here. If there were, it would be a lot brighter,’ said Paula sceptically, squinting as she looked at the walls in the basement.

Martin got up and fumbled his way over to the outside wall.

‘But that’s what he said. There has to be a window. Maybe something is hanging in front of it. You said it yourself – the stuff stored in here must be worth a fortune. Maybe Erik didn’t want anyone to be able to see his collection from outside.’

Now Paula got up too and headed in Martin’s direction. She heard him say ‘ow!’ as he ran into the opposite wall, but when that was followed by ‘aha!’, she felt her hopes rise. And hope turned to triumph when Martin pulled aside a heavy curtain and daylight came flooding into the basement.

‘Couldn’t you have thought about this a couple of hours ago?’ Paula complained.

‘Hey, how about a bit of gratitude?’ said Martin cheerfully as he unfastened the latch and pushed the window open. He reached for a chair standing a metre away and put it directly under the window.

‘Ladies first!’

‘Thanks,’ Paula muttered as she climbed up on the chair and squirmed her way out through the gap.

Martin was right behind her. For a moment they both stood still to allow their eyes to adjust to the dazzling daylight. Then they set off running. They dashed up to the front door but found it to be locked, and this time there was no key above the door. That meant their jackets were locked in the house, with their mobiles and car keys. Martin was just about to run over to the nearest neighbour’s house when he heard a loud crash. He glanced in the direction the sound came from and saw that Paula, with a satisfied expression, had hurled a rock through a window on the ground floor.

‘Since we got out through a window, I thought we might as well get in the same way.’ She picked up a stick and knocked out the splinters of glass from the window frame, then looked at Martin.

‘Well? Are you planning to give Axel an even bigger head start, or would you like to help me get inside?’

Martin hesitated only a second before giving his colleague a leg-up and climbing through the window after her. What mattered now was catching up with Erik Frankel’s killer. Axel already had a huge lead. And they had far too many questions that were still unanswered.

Axel had made it only as far as Landvetter airport. When he locked the police officers in the basement and took off in his car the adrenaline had been surging through his veins, but that had ebbed away leaving only emptiness in its place.

He sat motionless, staring through the windows as the planes took off. He could have departed on any one of those flights; he had money and the contacts that would secure him a ticket to whatever destination he chose. Years of hunting had taught him everything there was to know about the art of vanishing without a trace. But he didn’t want to do that. That was the conclusion he had finally reached. He could escape, but he didn’t want to.

And so he was sitting here, in no-man’s-land, watching the planes taking off and landing. He was waiting for fate to catch up with him. And to his great surprise, he was no longer dreading the moment. Maybe this was the way the men he’d hunted had felt on the day when someone finally knocked on their door and called them by their proper name. A strange mixture of fear and relief.

But in his case, the price had been too high. It had cost him Erik.

If only Elsy’s daughter hadn’t brought over the medal. That small piece of metal symbolized everything they’d spent all those years trying to forget, and when it was delivered to his door Erik had taken it as a sign that the time had come for the truth to surface.

Of course they had talked in the past about setting things right if they could, or at least accepting responsibility. Not before the law, for the law was indifferent to crimes so ancient they lay beyond its statute of limitations. But on a human, moral level. They deserved to suffer the shame and condemnation of their peers, their fellow human beings. According to Erik, it was time for them to acknowledge what they had done and stop evading the judgement they deserved. Axel had always managed to talk him out of it, telling him that it would serve no purpose. Nothing they said or did now could change the past and it would be pointless to sacrifice all the good that he’d accomplished in his work merely to exact a penance that would change nothing. Instead he would atone for his sins by continuing to devote himself to that work.

Each time, Erik had listened and given in, but the feelings of guilt kept gnawing at him until, finally, only shame remained. To Erik the world had always been black and white. He dealt in facts, and was never more comfortable than when he was submerged in his books; there dates and names, times and places were set out in black letters on a white backdrop. Yet for sixty years Axel had persuaded him to inhabit a grey world of ambiguity and deceit. And they might have gone on that way had it not been for Elsy’s daughter – and Britta, whose defensive walls had begun to crumble from a disease that was slowly destroying her brain.

Axel had tried desperately to reason with Erik. Everything he was, everything he stood for, would be obliterated if he were to answer for this crime. No one would ever look at him in the same way. The work of an entire lifetime would be ruined. But this time his arguments failed to sway his brother. He was in Paris when he got the call from Erik. ‘It’s time,’ he said. Just like that. He had sounded drunk when he called, which was especially alarming because Erik never drank in excess. And he had sobbed on the phone, saying that he couldn’t take it any more, that he’d gone to see Viola to say goodbye so that she wouldn’t have to endure the shame when the truth came out. Then he had muttered something about how he had already set things in motion, but that he couldn’t wait any longer for someone else to air their dirty laundry in public. He was going to put an end to his own cowardice, put an end to the waiting, he had said, slurring his words as Axel gripped the phone, his hand sweating.

Axel had jumped on the first plane to Sweden, determined to make his brother see reason. He closed his eyes, heart aching as he relived that moment when he had rushed into the library and found Erik was sitting at his desk, scribbling absently on a notepad. In a dry and toneless voice he had said the words that Axel had lived in fear of for six decades. Erik had made up his mind. He couldn’t live with the guilt any longer.

He had been hoping that what Erik had said on the phone was merely empty talk, and that his brother would have come to his senses when he sobered up. But now he saw that he was mistaken. Erik was standing by his decision with frightening resolve. He had already begun to take steps to ensure that the truth would come out. He talked about the child, too. For the first time he revealed how he had managed to find out where the child had been placed, and the monthly payments he had made to the little boy’s adopted parents as a form of compensation for what they had taken from him. No doubt assuming that Erik was the boy’s father, they had accepted the payments without demur. But that still wasn’t enough for Erik. That act of penance hadn’t eased the pain that was tearing him apart. If anything, it had only made the consequences of their action all the more real. It was now time for the true penance, Erik had said, looking his brother in the eye.