The Human Flies (K2 and Patricia series) (41 page)

The Feldmann case, which is mentioned briefly, was a widely discussed court case from 1946 to 1947 in which two former border guides were acquitted of the murder of a Jewish couple during the war on the grounds of self-defence. This has been used as historical background in the novel, but has no direct parallel with the plot or any of the characters. However, several of the characters were inspired fully or in part by people I know today – including myself.

The head of fiction at Cappelen Damm, Anne Fløtaker, has been my most important adviser in terms of both the content and writing of this novel. I have also received useful feedback from the publisher, Anders Heger, and editor, Marius Wulfsberg. I would also like to give two thousand thanks to a group of personal advisers who read all or parts of the manuscript and gave me constructive comments about the content and/or language. This includes my sister, Ida Lahlum, and my good friends Ingrid Baukhol, Mina Finstad Berg, Ingrid Busterud, Anne Lise Fredlund, Kathrine Næss Hald, Hilde Harbo, Kristin Hatledal, Bjarte Leer-Salvesen, Torstein Lerhol, Espen Lie, Ellisiv Reppen, Jane Iren Solbrekken-Nygård, Karen Thue, Arne Tjølsen and Katrine Tjølsen. Ellisiv and also Mina both deserve a special mention for their continued interest in this project and for their practical help in connection with the final rounds of proofing and editing the manuscript.

Only time will tell whether my first crime novel will also be my last or if it will be the start of a historical crime series. However, I can only hope that
The Human Flies
will be as exciting for some readers as it has been for the author. Readers who have any comments or questions for the author can quite simply email them to [email protected] or post them on the book’s Facebook page.

Gjøvik, 27 June 2010

Hans Olav Lahlum

About My Late Aunt, Dagmar Lahlum – and My Novel,
The Human Flies

As was stated at the beginning of this book, this novel is dedicated to my late aunt Dagmar Lahlum. It therefore seems natural to close the book with a short account of her life, and its relevance to this novel.

Dagmar Lahlum was born in Sørumsand on 10 March 1923, but grew up in Eidsvoll in the 1930s. Eleven years younger than her sister, she was very much her mother’s baby. Her father, who was fifty-one at the time of Dagmar’s birth, had grown up in poverty, as did his two sons from an earlier marriage, who went to stay with their grandparents following their mother’s premature death. As a rural shoemaker, Dagmar’s father no doubt struggled to feed his second family during the crisis years in the 1920s and 1930s. His youngest daughter was said to have had a hot temper as a teenager, and clearly voiced her dissatisfaction with the situation. For the rest of her life she was to demonstrate both a taste and greed for fancy clothes and luxury goods.

A few weeks before the German invasion on 9 April 1940, Dagmar arrived in Oslo, at the age of seventeen. She did a modelling course and earned a living working as a seamstress and hotel receptionist, among other things. It has not been possible to establish whether she was involved with the Norwegian Resistance movement. In April 1943, she started a whirlwind romance with Eddie ‘Zigzag’ Chapman, a British MI5 agent who was in Norway under the cover of working for the Germans. It seems that Dagmar believed Eddie was a German soldier when she fell in love with him. As a result of this romance, Dagmar also took on the role of a double agent for the remainder of the war, helping Chapman with his missions at the risk of her own life. The extent to which the MI5 saw her as an enlisted agent is not apparent from the archive documents that have now been released, but it is clear that they were aware of her role. Eddie is recorded as her fiance in 1943 and 1944 and some sources indicate that Dagmar also fell pregnant and had an abortion.

Eddie Chapman left Norway in spring 1944, still in his role as a German officer. Dagmar had never been a member of the NS, the Norwegian fascist party, but because she worked for the German censoring authorities in the final months of the war, and possibly because she was rumoured to be a German’s tart, she was arrested by the Norwegian police on 19 May 1945 and sent to Bredtveit Women’s Prison.

In a written statement from prison dated 15 June 1945, Dagmar refers to her contact with Eddie. She claims that her sympathies had always lain with the Resistance and the British, and that her job as a letter censor for the Germans had been cleared by Eddie, who had promised to come back for her as soon as the war was over, if he was still alive. If he was unable to return, he had assured her that if she contacted his employers in British intelligence, they would help her. Consequently, Dagmar was escorted to a meeting with official British representatives in Oslo on 19 June 1945, but they denied any knowledge of the case and she was returned to Bredtveit Women’s Prison.

During the treason trials in Norway in 1947, Dagmar was sentenced to 189 days, exactly the number of days she spent in remand in 1945. She also lost the right to vote for the next ten years. She chose to pay the price, rather than face another trial. Her motives for doing so are unknown. One likely explanation is that, as an uneducated girl from the country, with no money or contacts in Oslo, she considered her position to be hopeless, having being refused assistance by the English representatives and the Norwegian police. The odds were obviously stacked against her. Another possibility is, of course, that she had dubious motives for her contact with the occupying forces during the war, and so accepted the penalty. Whatever the case, the judgment in the treason trials and her reputation as a German’s tart dogged her life for many years after the war. ‘Remember your aunt was a Jerry bag!’ a neighbour once yelled after Dagmar’s little niece in Eidsvoll. Dagmar herself soon returned to the more anonymous streets of Oslo and left Eidsvoll for good when she received a small inheritance from her parents in the mid-1950s.

Dagmar never had any children and lived on her own for the rest of her life, with the brief exception of a short marriage in the early 1950s. She had several lovers – all older, wealthy men – who were able to satisfy her need for material luxury. None of these relationships was ever formalized and none of them lasted. She worked as a secretary and had other office jobs until she retired towards the end of the 1980s, but never applied for any public positions or sought to attract public attention in any way.

Dagmar was probably unaware that her wartime lover, Eddie Chapman, had survived and later married in England, until he contacted her again unexpectedly in the 1990s. Almost fifty years after the war had parted them, Eddie and Dagmar reestablished contact. Whether she actually travelled to England and met him again remains uncertain, but it seems that around 1996–7 Dagmar expected that Chapman would soon return to Norway and make public the story of her war effort. However, if that was his intention, Chapman was unable to fulfil it owing to ill health and he died on 12 December 1997.

The news that Eddie had died without coming to Norway, and telling the truth about her wartime experiences, was probably the last blow for Dagmar’s already fragile mind. Her final hope for some kind of vindication turned into just another disappointment. The last years of Dagmar’s life were very difficult. She was not only a heavy smoker and an alcoholic, but also suffered from Parkinson’s disease and became increasingly socially isolated and undernourished. A tragic shadow of her youthful beauty, she continued to walk alone on her circuit from Vinmonopolet (state alcohol shop) to the bank to her flat with increasingly unsteady steps through the late 1990s.

Dagmar was last seen alive by her only remaining friend, her ever helpful niece Bibbi, at a Christmas dinner on 25 December 1999. Four days later Dagmar Lahlum was found dead behind the locked doors of her flat. As was fairly typical for her life, the exact date of her death and the circumstances remain unclear. She was reportedly found lying on the floor among all her old clothes and empty bottles, in a somewhat unusual and defensive position. However, there was no evidence of violence and a routine police investigation concluded that no one else had been in the flat at the time of her death. I believe that, in the end, my old aunt died alone in her home during a fight against some mental ghost from the wartime years. Obviously no one will ever know whether that is what happened in her final moments.

Dagmar Lahlum was virtually forgotten by everyone and her war effort was still entirely unknown at the time of her death, so very few people came to her funeral. Her story was first made public in 2007, when it received a lot of attention in both Norway and Great Britain following two new biographies about her wartime lover.

Dagmar Lahlum was the youngest daughter of my great-grandfather, Karl Lahlum (1871–1954) and the half-sister of my paternal grandfather, Hans Lahlum (1898–1977). I was born in 1973 and never had the chance to get to know Dagmar. As she had no children herself, Dagmar initially demonstrated some interest in her brother’s little grandson and the survival of the family name. From the mid-1970s on, however, she came less and less frequently to family gatherings and kept a very low profile when she did. She spoke about herself and her past as little as possible. Every now and then her eyes would flash – and that was when the war was mentioned. And so it never was. My only childhood memory of my great aunt was an order never to mention the war if Dagmar should come to a family gathering again. She never did.

To the question as to whether my Aunt Dagmar’s fate inspired my decision to study history, with the Second World War as one of my specialisms, the answer is a definitive no. I only found out about her wartime story a few years after I had graduated. And given the close family relationship, I have later chosen not to write about her as a historian.

To the question as to whether Dagmar Lahlum’s life and fate has inspired this criminal novel, the answer is a definitive yes. In Norway, as in many other countries, the pictures painted of people’s fate in the Second World War have often been black and white. This has without a doubt been the right thing to do in relation to some war heroes and war criminals. But there are also many, many stories from the war’s ‘grey zone’ that are both moving and thought-provoking. It remains to be seen whether any new historical research in the future will be able to discover Dagmar Lahlum’s true position in the war’s grey zone. However, what is important in this context is that her experiences from the latter years of the war dogged her days for the remaining fifty-four years of her life. From the time of her release in the summer of 1945 until her death during Christmas 1999, my aunt Dagmar Lahlum was a living example of the fate that Patricia Louise I. E. Borchmann describes as ‘a human fly’ in this novel – which could also describe Patricia herself and several other of the main characters in the book. Thus, I was never in any doubt as to what my first novel should be called, or to whom I would dedicate it.

Gjøvik, 20 September 2013

Hans Olav Lahlum

P.S. About sources and further reading: Dagmar’s relationship with Eddie Chapman was first made public in the two Chapman biographies from 2007, Nicholas Booth’s
Zigzag. The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman
and Ben Macintyre’s
Agent Zizag. A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal
. Both brought to light interesting material about the case from British archives and other British sources. Four years later, their war story was covered on screen in the documentary
Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story
, produced by Walker George Films for BBC2.

Dagmar’s part of the story was further investigated in Norway in two lengthy newspaper articles written by the journalist and political scientist Hilde Harbo and published in the newspaper
Aftenposten
(14 Jan. 2007 and 22 Jan. 2008). The first historian to write about Dagmar was Professor Tore Pryser, who included a short portrait in his 2007 book
Kvinner i hemmelige tjenester. Etterretning i Norden under den annen verdenskrig
(‘Women in Secret Services. Intelligence Work in the Nordic Countries during World War II’). The highly talented young Norwegian historian Kristin Hatledal then studied the case in depth first in her Masters thesis, ‘Krigsheltinne eller tyskarjente? Historia om Dagmar Lahlum – i lys av andre etterretnings-kvinner’ (‘War heroine or German mistress? The story of Dagmar Lahlum – in the light of other female Resistance fighters’) in 2009 and then in her book
Kvinnekamp. Historia om norske motstandskvinner
(‘Women fighting. The history of Norwegian female Resistance fighters’), published in 2011.

I have discussed the case with Booth, Harbo, Pryser and Hatledal, and provided them with information needed from the Lahlum family, as well as from the file on Dagmar Lahlum’s court case in the national Norwegian archives. I owe many thanks to Dagmar’s niece Bibbi for sharing with me both the facts and her feelings about Dagmar’s life.

First published in the UK 2014 by Mantle