Sara stood by her car for a long time, thinking. Jenna hadn’t wanted any help. Sara was used to that. But this time, the girl’s friend had wanted Sara to intervene and warn her. That hadn’t happened before. Nadia was afraid of something that was worse than the revenge of the traffickers. But Jenna didn’t seem to have understood what Sara was saying, why she should be frightened. So there wasn’t much she could do.
She got into the car, which she had left in the disabled bay outside number 10. Like all the roads around here, Grevgatan was a one-way street. The result was an almost labyrinthine road network that not everyone knew how to escape. Östermalm locals continued to uphold their streets without oncoming traffic. In the case of other areas, the politicians at city hall had decided to open many one-way streets to two-way traffic, but this meant more passing cars and fewer parking spaces. Östermalm had not accepted that. Here, the streets remained one-way. They stood up for their peace and quiet, as well as their parking spots. And they knew the right people, which meant they could influence the decision.
She drove along Kaptensgatan as far as Artillerigatan, turned left towards Strandvägen and continued on towards Gustav Adolfs torg. ‘Sophia Albertina Aedificavit,’ she knew it said on the façade of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but she had forgotten what it meant. Was that still considered general knowledge these days?
As she was driving across Norrbro bridge, her phone rang.
‘Hello. This is Herman Cederqvist from the Linköping police. We’ve got a chap here – well, actually, we don’t any longer, I suppose. It’s a death, rather sudden and unexpected, and I think it may have a connection to you, if I can put it like that. Well, not to you personally, but to a case that you worked on. It was you who called us about a bloke called Jürgen Stiller at Torpa vicarage down in Ydre, back at the start of the summer, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought as much. Well, thought and thought. I did save your number, but then I said to myself, “was it her who called about that pastor?”. I only had your name and a number, but I remembered you were working on Uncle Stellan. Well, his murder. Bloody tragedy for it to end that way for him. After entertaining so many people for so many years and spreading nothing but joy. But that’s how it is in our line of work – we see a lot of awfulness. Makes you wonder sometimes how you manage.’
‘What about Stiller?’ said Sara, who was getting slightly impatient.
‘He’s dead.’
Jürgen Stiller. Code-named Koch, a Church of Sweden priest and Stasi informant. When the others in his spy ring had been executed one after another, Sara had requested police protection for Stiller. Then she had found the murderer, and Stiller had been assessed as out of danger. Until now.
But it couldn’t be the same murderer – Agneta Broman was dead.
Sara took all the information that Cederqvist had on the death, thanked him for getting in touch and ended the call.
And then it hit her.
Stiller.
Bloody hell – hadn’t he been one of the many phone calls that Sara had rejected of late?
Instead of driving into the underground car park on Slottsbacken, she stopped in the car park outside. With a growing knot of unease in her stomach, she called her voicemail and worked her way backwards through the messages.
And there he was. He had indeed called Sara two days earlier. Several times, in fact. And she hadn’t picked up or listened to the message he had left.
‘Hello, Sara.’ Wheezing breath, a moment’s silence before he continued. ‘This is Jürgen Stiller. I’ve got information about a very dangerous man. Please call me as soon as you get this. It’s important. A matter of life and death.’
Fuck.
And now he’d killed his wife and hanged himself. Would all that have happened if Sara had picked up? Or if she had at least bothered to listen to the message and return his call? It might be far-fetched, but she was still a little oversensitive after everything that had happened. She couldn’t bear the thought of more lives on her conscience. She didn’t want to be dragged into any more old conspiracies.
But who was this dangerous man he had wanted to tell her about? Was he linked to Stiller’s suicide? And the murder of his wife? Had the fear become too much, meaning he could no longer stand it? Might Stiller’s wife have been alive now if Sara hadn’t been so self-absorbed? It was impossible to know, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling of responsibility. Could she do something for Stiller now, after-the-fact? A bit late, she berated herself.
In the absence of a better idea, she called Eva Hedin, the woman who had told Sara about Jürgen Stiller back when it had all kicked off the first time. Hedin was a retired history professor and the person who had told Sara quite how many of the Cold War’s old secrets were still live. She had done research in the old East German archives and after a long legal battle and a Supreme Court judgment, she had been given the right to see the Swedish Security Service’s files on Swedes who had worked for the Stasi. Sara had eventually realised that Hedin had been wrong about the identity of the spy, Geiger, but she hadn’t told the academic the truth. She couldn’t, because she’d had to sign loads of documents from both the German and Swedish intelligence services, promising never to tell anyone about what had happened during that dramatic week in June. Sara had been reluctant to say the least, but it had been the condition for keeping her job given that she had violated most of the police rulebook.
But when she got Hedin on the line, she didn’t sound particularly interested in the fact that yet another of the men she had identified was now dead. She agreed to meet, but not at home. She suggested they meet in the Cornelis park. Sara had to put it into her satnav to find out where it was.
A left off Folkungagatan and then on the right at the top of the hill. Sara parked up on Mäster Mikaels gata, passed the primary school of the same name, noting the macabre gesture of naming a school after a hangman, then she walked the few steps it took to reach the end of the street. The cobbled street was lined with small, picturesque wooden houses – as if taken from an Astrid Lindgren story, but right in the heart of Stockholm.
The Cornelis park was just a small patch of open space with benches, but it afforded an incredible view of the old town, Skeppsholmen, the Stadsgården wharf and over to Djurgården. The towers and rides at Gröna Lund were visible – she could hear the distant screams from the free-fall ride, gulls laughing and the hoarse horns sounding from the many white steamers out on the water of Saltsjön. She had a bird’s eye view of the green elevator cabin that had served as Carl Anton’s art studio in later years. The people passing by down below on Katarinavägen had no idea that Sara was looking at them from above. She felt like Arvid Falk in The Red Room, one of the few novels she had read at school and could actually remember parts of.
Hedin was sitting on a green park bench waiting for her, wearing sunglasses and a headscarf, which made her look like someone in a 1950s film.
‘Ever been here before?’ asked Hedin, and Sara had to confess that she had not. The researcher seemed exhilarated to be the first to introduce the place to her.
‘You said he hanged himself?’ Hedin continued.
‘Wife stabbed to death upstairs, Koch hanged in the kitchen. With a Bible opened to the passage in which Judas hangs himself.’
‘A bit blatant, don’t you think?’ said Hedin with a smile. Sara blinked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There are Stasi methods for all kinds of murders, including those that need to look like something else. This is pretty much a textbook example.’
‘You don’t think it was suicide? The Linköping police do.’
Sara was not at all keen on the idea that it might be murder. That was a dreadful proposition. Because if it were murder, then it was probably the dangerous man that Stiller had wanted to warn her about who was responsible, and that made it feel like the guilt definitely rested on Sara’s shoulders, because she had ignored his call.
‘Reshuffling the deck was the Stasi’s most successful strategy,’ said Hedin. ‘Confusing the opposition was considered to be a valuable end in itself, even when they didn’t truly gain anything from it. But my guess is that this murderer wants to hide the truth for some reason.’
‘OK. But which truth? Why would someone want to kill Stiller?’
‘To avoid detection, now that everyone else in the spy ring has been killed. He might even have known a name. Or known something we didn’t know.’
‘He . . .’ Sara wasn’t really sure she was up to telling the truth, but she forced it out. ‘He called me on Thursday and left a message saying he had information about a very dangerous man.’
‘That sounds like it might be relevant. What else did he say?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t listen to the message until just now.’ Sara paused. ‘Do you think he was referring to the murderer?’
‘I don’t want to speculate. But it’s a pity you didn’t speak to him and find out more.’
Yes, Sara agreed. It really was a pity that she hadn’t spoken to Stiller. And perhaps saved both him and his wife.
‘Who do you think the murderer is then?’ said Sara. ‘Another spy?’
‘Or an employer. Or an old opponent. And we can’t forget revenge. The Stasi informants did a lot of harm to a lot of people. Stellan’s death may have reawakened old traumas.’
‘Or was the murder revenge for the failure of the spy ring?’
Sara reflected that it was actually down to her that they had failed. It felt strange to have stopped a huge terror attack and to have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And even stranger to never be able to tell anyone about it.
‘It’s possible it was some kind of punishment – it wouldn’t be the first time. But I’m sorry, I can’t help you with this.’
‘Help me?’
‘I can tell you’re invested in this from your voice.’
‘I just wanted to tell you about Stiller. You’re the one who researches these people.’
‘But once they’re dead, they’re no longer of interest to me.’
‘OK. I just thought you’d like to know.’
‘Here. I brought some new documents for you. They’re still piecing together old, shredded documents in Germany. This is a list of names of agents who were active in Sweden and had a connection to Koch, a.k.a. Stiller.’
Hedin passed over a plastic wallet containing sheets of paper. Sara took it and glanced at the contents. The heading on the first page read: ‘Files for IM Henker, IM Axt, IM Ritter, IM Faust.’
‘But I don’t need this,’ Sara said, leafing through the pages. Code names, assignments, contacts. There were names with question marks noted against some of them. And then a couple of pages titled: ‘Notes from Säpo archives’ and a list of what Hedin had been able to memorise from what she had seen of the Security Service’s top secret archives on former Stasi collaborators in Sweden.
Sara felt strong reluctance to engage with the case. Getting involved in the murder of Stellan Broman and all the other old connections to the Cold War had led to nothing but a plethora of unwanted insights about her own life and how the world she had grown up in had actually been constructed. What was more, it had almost taken her life from her. And if there was one thing she felt with extreme certainty now, it was that her family was priority number one. She wanted to be with them as much as she could. She wanted to find Martin again, she wanted to get to know teenage Olle, and to make friends with the young woman that her daughter had become.
So she had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with old spies. There was enough unpleasantness in her present, the terrible murder of Cesar Bekas, for starters.
Sara suddenly realised that Hedin was watching her through narrowed eyes.
‘What is it?’ said Sara.
‘What actually happened? That night?’
‘They stopped Abu Rasil.’
‘They?’
‘The BND.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t actually have any details.’
‘And where’s Lotta Broman? I don’t believe she’s having time out, as I’m sure you can understand. And what happened to Agneta?’
Sara shrugged.
‘I know you pretty well by now,’ said Hedin. ‘You would never have settled for not knowing. I regard that shrug as an insult to my intelligence.’
‘I promise, I don’t know anything.’
‘You’re refusing to tell me, but you want my help with Stiller?’
That was the rub.
‘I don’t want to get involved in Stiller’s death. And I really didn’t mean to insult you. I’m telling you all I can.’
‘You sound like Brundin and her boss.’
Brundin. The spook who had said nothing but ‘no comment’ to Sara’s questions until she had allied herself with the officers of the BND instead.
Would it really be such a bad thing to tell Hedin?
The problem was that Sara didn’t know all that much. Nothing about what had happened to Lotta afterwards. And out of consideration for Lotta’s family, she had to keep the truth secret. That much she had understood from Agneta’s explanation. For Agneta, it had been all about ensuring that her grandchildren wouldn’t have their lives controlled by the choices of older generations. She wanted to give them a childhood free of international politics and secret alliances – the opportunities to make their own choices in life. Which Sara could fully understand.
So she had signed all those documents in which she had promised to keep it all a secret. An older German man had shown up at the hospital where Sara was being treated for her gunshot wounds and burns. He was white-haired, wore a three-piece suit with a bow tie, and radiated a quiet authority that appeared as friendly unobtrusiveness. He had smelled of pipe tobacco in a way that no one in Sweden did these days. The man had introduced himself as Herr Doktor Schönberg and said that he was Breuer’s and Strauss’s boss – they were the two BND agents who had been chasing the terrorist Abu Rasil in Stockholm. Given the prevailing security situation and terrorist threat level, he had told Sara that she had two options to choose from. She could swear lifelong silence about what she had experienced or she could quite simply be detained without any contact with the outside world until such a time as her knowledge was judged to be no longer dangerous. Which might be decades. He had also thanked her for her efforts and offered her a medal, even if it would never officially be acknowledged. Sara had turned down the medal, but had signed all the papers that Schönberg had laid out before her. All she wanted was to go home to her family, and more than anything she wanted to forget what had happened to her. So against her instincts, she kept quiet as Hedin asked her questions. The official version would have to do. Lotta Broman had resigned as Director General of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and turned down the offer of a role in the government citing family reasons. Then she had taken a long sabbatical and gone abroad – without her family.
No one wanted people to find out that a possible member of the government had been unmasked as a terrorist and that Säpo had missed this petty detail. The whole imbroglio with Breuer was also hushed up. She was posthumously celebrated in intelligence circles as the person who had stopped Abu Rasil. And Rasil’s true identity remained a secret.
Nor could anyone know about Sara’s role in the drama. Or the truth about Stellan and Lotta Broman. All that was known to the public was that a garden shed in Bromma had burned down – which generated nothing more than a small story in the local newspaper Mitt i Bromma.
Where Lotta was today Sara did not know, and she would probably never know, either.