Sara couldn’t sleep. She woke before five, feeling wide awake.
‘I can tell you’re invested in this from your voice.’
Hedin apparently knew her better than she did herself. At least in this case.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the murdered priest and his wife. It felt as if she had another two lives on her conscience, simply because she hadn’t felt like answering the phone. As far as Jürgen Stiller went, she could possibly convince herself that he only had himself to blame, given his choice to become a spy for an evil dictatorship. But his wife had, so far as Sara understood, never made such a choice. She had in all likelihood been murdered simply because she was married to the wrong man. And because Sara hadn’t listened to Stiller’s warning.
She lay there for twenty minutes to see whether there was any hope whatsoever of drifting back off.
There was not.
Especially not with Martin, who was lying beside her, snoring like an elephant with a cold.
An author, she thought to herself as she looked at her husband in the semi-darkness. She’d had no idea. She had always thought he’d been born a diva. She wondered whether he would have written about her if he’d become a writer and, if so, what he would have said. Probably something painful about the emotional decay that crept into a long-term marriage. Or was that what Sara would have written? Hopefully something about how to re-establish a connection to each other instead.
Sara got up and showered. Then she headed for the kitchen to switch on the bright yellow Moccamaster. As usual, the kitchen door was shut, also as usual the big black cat, Walter, was sitting inside. He glowered at her in an accusatory fashion. Martin had done the usual and shut the cat in there for the night so that he would catch rats. Stockholm’s old town might be a charming idyll on the surface, but behind those seventeenth and eighteenth century façades there were rats everywhere. In the walls, floors and sewage pipes. And Martin had a rat phobia. Sometimes Sara would emphasise the unsuitability of owning a large apartment in the old town for people who were terrified of these rodents, but Martin didn’t want to move. Instead, he put all his hopes in the cat.
Once Walter, a Norwegian Forest cat, had been fed, Sara stood and thought for a while. Her curiosity was struggling against her guilty conscience. Eventually, she resigned herself and went to the hall to fetch the folder that Hedin had given her.
Had she really thought it would stay there? That she would forget Stiller and his connection to Stellan? Her own responsibility for his death?
Of course not.
And of course it wasn’t suicide.
Quite how Sara could be so sure of that, from a distance of 350 kilometres and without having ever met the deceased or been to the murder scene, was unclear.
‘Without having been to the murder scene . . .’
The words bounced around inside her skull for a while.
No, she mustn’t.
She had to stand firm.
She had promised herself for her family’s sake, for her kids that she would never again get involved in things that didn’t concern her. Never break the rules in the way that had led her all the way into that burning garden shed with bullets whistling past her head.
But at the same time she knew she would never be able to let go of this, never be able to convince herself that the local police had made the right call – detectives who hadn’t seen a fraction of what she had in terms of the way that the past still controlled the present, how old alliances determined life and death several decades later.
Sara had herself witnessed how deadly old secrets could be. She couldn’t, with a clear conscience, ignore Stiller’s death. Perhaps it was the first of a string of deaths . . . just like Stellan’s had been.
No, she needed to see the scene of the crime for herself in order to put it to rest, to convince herself that there was nothing she could do, to be sure that the local police hadn’t missed something. It was nothing more than that. And, in a way, she could persuade herself that it was actually for the sake of her family that she was doing this: to make sure that it didn’t fester and gnaw at her. Because she needed to put this behind her.
So at around half past five in the morning she set off. She drove at well above the legal speed limit and arrived well before nine o’clock, even though the roads were narrow and winding after she had taken the exit for Mjölby. Sara liked these kinds of roads that still followed the old trails used by cattle, roads that had long ago grown into gravel tracks before later being widened and asphalted. They were so essentially different to the soulless E4 motorway which was constantly being rebuilt to make it straighter and faster and keep it further away from built-up areas. She remembered when the E4 had led drivers past Tintomaras plats, when it had gone straight through the centres of Norrköping and Linköping. A long, long time ago it had even run the length of Götgatan in Södermalm. Now the E4 was nothing but a minor Autobahn. But after taking the Mjölby exit the country roads wound their way through the beautiful landscape as if in a fairy tale. Lakes, meadows, farmyards – and a cistern with a gigantic cheese painted on the side in Boxholm. Wasn’t that the one there’d been all that fuss about? That creamy cheese? All because the new owners had wanted to move the Boxholm cheese factory away from Boxholm? Hmm. And the fur trading town of Tranås, where surely no one bought or sold furs any longer. Another twenty kilometres along the road, now back in Östergötland again, Sara pulled off route 131, in the direction of Torpa church. Bubbetorp. Peculiar name. A sign for Solviken. The occasional red house with white trim. A barn. A pond. And after a while a beautiful church on the right-hand side above a lake that her satnav told her was known as Sommen.
After the church there was a field rolling down and then back up again, like a hammock. Opposite the field was a row of older houses and then the red-painted vicarage situated behind a thick hedge.
The drive wasn’t cordoned off, so Sara pulled into the front yard and came to a halt. She lingered for a couple of seconds, looking at the house. It appeared to be nineteenth century in origin, but perhaps it was far older than that. It was painted in the classic red paint of the Swedish countryside, with white sills; two storeys and two outbuildings, with an expanse of gravel in the middle.
The blue and white police tape probably lent the peaceful scene a hefty dose of drama in the eyes of most, unless you were Sara, who was completely desensitised. For her, the tape was nothing more than a marker of being at work.
She climbed out of the car, stopped and hesitated for a moment. Was she really going to do this? She could just get back in the car and go home – and nothing would come of it.
‘Whatever it is will probably have to be put to the diocese.’
Sara turned around and saw two figures standing watching her from the gate: an elderly woman and a huge man with a long beard. It was the woman who had spoken, but the man took over in a mild, placatory tone.
‘What Mother is trying to say is that the vicarage is out of bounds. The priest has departed. So any matters will probably have to be raised with the diocese in Linköping.’
‘“Trying to say”?! That’s what I said.’
‘In Mother’s own way.’
‘Did you know Stiller?’ Sara interrupted, taking a few steps towards them.
‘Not very well. He did what he had to, said his goodbyes and left.’
‘What Mother means is that he would come to the coffee morning at the local hall, but he didn’t say much more than was demanded of him.’
‘Thank you. I’m quite capable of explaining what I mean myself.’
Her towering son swept his arms in a gesture of ‘be my guest’.
‘What was he like as a person?’ Sara asked. ‘Was he unstable? Depressed?’
‘German.’
‘Oh?’
‘Abrupt. Effective. Kept himself to himself. The wife too.’
‘Mother’s perception of Germans is her own, as you can tell.’ Angry looks were exchanged between mother and son.
‘Have you seen any strangers around here lately? Any cars you didn’t recognise?’
‘We can’t see the front of the house from ours. We live on the other side of the river,’ the woman explained.
‘Which is actually a bay of the lake, as it happens. It’s just become overgrown.’ The son’s hand fumbled around his chin and vanished into his beard.
‘The outlet from the Boxholm mill is so rich in nitrogen that the reeds have run riot.’
‘“The reeds have run riot”? Good grief. Talk some sense.’
Sara followed the ping-pong match between the two figures, realising that they might keep going for some time without achieving more than a draw, and decided to find information by herself.
‘Thanks for your help. I need to get to work.’
‘Are you a policewoman?’ the bearded giant said. Sara flashed her police ID, wondering whether it was wise but discarding the thought.
‘He played music,’ said the bearded hulk. ‘Lalle, who lives in the tenant farmer’s cottage, passed on Friday night and said that he heard music coming from inside.’ A nod towards the vicarage. ‘Some sort of hard rock or opera, he said. But that’s never been Stiller’s style.’
‘So far as we know,’ said the elderly woman.
‘So far as everyone knows,’ the son countered.
‘Yes, so far as everyone knows. We all know.’
Sara judged that she had got all she was going to get out of the two, so she thanked them and turned to head towards the house.
Unsurprisingly, the vicarage was locked, and Sara was unable to find a spare key in any of the usual spots.
But she had elbows.
She went round to the rear, checked the coast was clear, put her back to the back door and rammed her elbow through the pane of glass. The glass fell to the floor with a faint tinkle and Sara was then able to stick her hand through unimpeded and unlock the door from the inside. Nothing but a good old chamber lock with a knob on the inside. Once she had crossed the threshold, it was too late to go back.
The wide wooden floorboards creaked reproachfully. She tried to stick to the rag rugs, but it was basically impossible to move through the vicarage silently. She looked around. A violin on the wall triggered a guilty conscience at the thought of her own lack of playing, but judging by the dust on it, this violin was used no more frequently than her own had been before she had smashed it to pieces in a rage at the Bromans, who had given it to her. Embroidered tapestries hung on the walls with messages like ‘Sunny outside, sunny inside, sunny in your heart, sunny in your disposition’ and ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ On one wall there were dozens of photos of brides and grooms with handwritten notes of thanks for their beautiful weddings. A living room with a rocking chair, a folded-down gateleg table and an old-fashioned sofa bed where you raised the lid and pulled out the base. It smelled damp and musty.
Room by room, Sara went through the house. No music player anywhere, she noted. An unassuming transistor radio – too small to be heard out on the road. Patches of blood on the upstairs landing, and there was still a knotted rope hooked to the ceiling in the kitchen with the stump of the cut-off rope still hanging there. Had they checked for fingerprints on the knot, or were they so sure it was suicide that they hadn’t looked for any evidence at all? Cederqvist hadn’t said anything about forensics. They must have done something, but they clearly hadn’t found anything.
Apart from the fact that the bodies had been removed, nothing seemed to have been touched. The Bible was still lying on the kitchen table open to the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew. Hedin had been right – it was too blatant. Almost as if the murderer wanted to test how stupid the investigating officers actually were.
She leafed through the Bible without knowing why. Like most people, she thought to herself. Of all places, it was surely here in the deceased’s home that there would be something that would offer a clue as to why Stiller had been killed. But where?
Sara searched each room inch by inch. Did old vicarages like this have secret passages or hidden rooms? It seemed not. When it was almost half past ten, she had reached the priest’s study, which had several shelves of books and scriptures. Theology and history, but nothing about politics, a number of notebooks and a diary written in German. After spending a half hour or so leafing through all the books without finding any mysterious notes or loose leaves, she settled down with Stiller’s diary. Sara didn’t remember all of her schoolgirl German, but she had enough to understand most of the contents. The notes seemed to relate primarily to daily routines and ecclesiastical tasks that fell to the leader of a flock with a small congregation.
In a cigar box hidden behind a copy of the Swedish Biblical Reference Encyclopaedia in the bookcase she found thousands of kronor in coins and notes, together with lists of names, dates and sums. Sara noted that all the dates were Sundays and that most of the name were recurrent – she guessed that Stiller had been keeping records of how much his congregation members had been donating to the weekly collection. And that he had kept the money for himself.
Sara continued to root through all the drawers of the desk, checked under the rug and heaved the bookcases forward without finding anything else.
Eventually, she stood in the doorway and surveyed the room.
She had checked it all. Well, other than the classic one, she realised: the bottoms of the desk drawers.
She went over to the desk and pulled the drawers out, and that was where she actually found something. There was a note stuck to the underside of the bottom drawer on the right-hand side, a handwritten note in red ink in ornate, pedantic handwriting, that read:
Messer 100
Axt 100
Faust 100
Lorelei 100
It was the only thing out of the ordinary that Sara had found, but the position of the note told her that it was important. What was more, a couple of the words were familiar to her.
Axt and Faust.
Weren’t they?
Yes. Sara had seen them somewhere . . .
It didn’t take her long to remember where.
Hedin’s papers.
They were code names for Stasi collaborators.
Had one of them killed Stiller? Or were they mixed up in something that had led to his death? Was this yet another spy ring? And what did the numbers mean?
She called Hedin but went straight through to her voicemail. She left a message reading out the list of code names and numbers, firmly convinced that the information would pique the academic’s interest too.
Sara looked around thoughtfully, but made up her mind that she had found what she was going to find. She found a roll of tape and a plastic bag in the kitchen, using them to cover the hole in the pane of glass she had left in the back door before exiting, then she stood there for a while surveying the view of the lake and church. A field of cows grazing down by the shoreline, a couple of boats out on the water and dark, dense pine forest on the other side. What a picturesque place for a spy to end up! Sara wondered whether it had been God’s will for Stiller to live in such a beautiful setting, or whether it was only his final fate that God had determined.
At half past eleven, she got back behind the wheel again. She called Herman Cederqvist at the police in Linköping and explained that in connection with the murder of Stellan Broman she had come across several code names related to Stiller, which she had cause to believe were relevant to his death. She said nothing about where she was. Cederqvist noted the four names and on the off-chance, Sara asked him to check whether the priest’s bank accounts showed any trace of unusual deposits or withdrawals. Sums in the hundreds of thousands – kronor or euros – were of particular interest. Or dollars, for that matter.
Cederqvist responded with a long-winded pontification that boiled down to a demand that if he told Sara what he found then Sara would share everything she knew with him, even if there wasn’t much to be found in relation to a tragic suicide and the murder of a family member.
‘Of course,’ said Sara, without meaning it.
As she drove through the small village of Hestra, passing what must once have been a grocery store, she dialled the number for Brundin at Säpo. A modest bluff was worth a punt.
‘Brundin.’
‘Who killed Stiller?’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh yes you do. Jürgen Stiller. Koch. Found hanged. Was supposed to look like suicide, but it’s so textbook it’s almost provocative. Who did it? Messer, Axt, Faust or Lorelei?’
‘No comment.’
‘You know I won’t give in.’
Because it was true.
The very possibility that the two murders were somehow her fault was enough, she realised. If that was true, then the least she could do was find the murderer, if not for Stiller’s sake then for his innocent wife’s. She wasn’t going to give up.