He walked around a huge armchair upholstered in red brocade and headed for the open French doors leading on to the balcony. A bottle of rosé was sitting in an ice bucket on the table, with a half-empty wine glass next to it.
‘May I offer you a glass?’ He was already reaching for the bottle. His silk gown fluttered around his thin, pale legs.
‘That would be lovely, but I’m driving,’ said Erica, thinking how good it would be to have a glass of wine on this sunny veranda with its view of the sound and Hamburg Island.
‘Oh, but that sounds so boring. You sure I can’t tempt you to have even a teeny drop?’ He waved the bottle enticingly as he lifted it out of the ice bucket.
Erica couldn’t help laughing. ‘My husband is a police officer, so I’m afraid I daren’t, no matter how much I’d like to.’
‘I’ll bet he’s terribly handsome! I’ve always loved men in uniform.’
‘Me too,’ said Erica, sitting down on one of the patio chairs.
The man moved away to turn down the volume on the CD player. He poured Erica a glass of water and handed it to her with a smile.
‘So, why is a lovely girl like you paying me a visit?’
‘My name is Erica Falck, and I’m a writer. At the moment I’m doing research for my next book. You’re Ove Linder, right? And you were a teacher at Rune Elvander’s boarding school for boys in the early seventies.’
His smile faded. ‘Ove. That was a long time ago…’
‘Have I come to the wrong place?’ said Erica, realizing that she might have misread Magnus’s convoluted directions.
‘No, no, but it’s been a while since I was Ove Linder.’ Pensively he twirled the glass in his hands. ‘I haven’t officially changed my name. If I had, you wouldn’t have been able to find me, but nowadays I’m called Liza. No one says Ove, except Walter, and that’s only if he’s cross with me. I chose the name Liza after Liza Minelli, of course, although I’m only a pale imitation.’ He cocked his head, apparently waiting for Erica to protest.
‘Stop fishing for compliments, Liza.’
Erica turned her head. She assumed that the person in the doorway had to be Walter, the husband.
‘There you are. Come here and say hello to Erica,’ said Liza.
Walter came outside, standing behind Liza and tenderly placing his hands on her shoulders. Liza put her free hand over her husband’s and squeezed it. Erica found herself hoping that she and Patrik would be as loving towards each other after they’d been together for twenty-five years.
‘What’s this all about?’ asked Walter as he sat down. Unlike his partner, he would have passed unnoticed in a crowd: average height and build, with a receding hairline and discreet attire. The kind of person witnesses would find it impossible to remember if asked to identify him in a criminal case, Erica thought. But he had intelligent eyes, and he seemed nice. In a strange way, she had the feeling that this odd pair was perfectly matched.
She cleared her throat. ‘As I said, I’m trying to find out more about the boarding school on Valö. You were one of the teachers, right?’
‘Yes, unfortunately,’ said Liza with a sigh. ‘That was an awful time. I hadn’t yet come out, and back then it wasn’t as acceptable to be gay as it is today. Plus Rune Elvander was a terrible bigot, and he wasn’t afraid to air his prejudices. Before I decided to accept my true self, I tried desperately to fit in with everyone else. I’ve never been the lumberjack type, of course, but I made an effort to appear to be heterosexual and so-called normal. I got plenty of practice while I was growing up.’
He gazed down at the table, and Walter stroked his arm sympathetically.
‘I think I managed to fool Rune. But I had to put up with a lot of taunting from the students. That school was full of nonentities who got a kick out of finding other people’s weak spots. I was only there six months, and I probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer. In fact, I wasn’t planning to go back after the Easter holiday, but I was saved the trouble of handing in my resignation.’
‘What was your reaction to the disappearance? Do you have any theories?’ asked Erica.
‘Of course it was dreadful, no matter what I thought of the family. I assume that something horrible happened to them.’
‘But do you have any clue what that might be?’
‘No, it’s as much a mystery to me as it is to everybody else,’ said Liza.
‘What was the atmosphere like at the school? Were there people who didn’t get along?’
‘That’s putting it mildly. That place was an absolute pressure cooker.’
‘How do you mean?’ Erica felt her pulse quicken. For the first time she had the chance to find out what had gone on behind the scenes. Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier?
‘According to the teacher whose place I took, the pupils were at each other’s throats right from the start. They were accustomed to having their own way, but they were also under a lot of pressure from home to succeed. Which inevitably resulted in cock-fights. By the time I started at the school, Rune had cracked the whip and the boys were toeing the line, but I could sense the tension simmering below the surface.’
‘What was the boys’ relationship with Rune?’
‘They hated him. He was a sadistic psychopath.’ Liza’s voice was coldly matter-of-fact.
‘You don’t paint a very nice picture of Rune Elvander.’ Erica regretted not bringing along her tape recorder. She was going to have to try to remember as much as possible from this conversation.
Liza shuddered. ‘Rune Elvander was one of the most despicable people I’ve ever met. And believe me…’ Liza cast a glance at Walter, ‘if you live a life like ours, you run into plenty of unpleasant types.’
‘What about his relationship with his family?’
‘That depends on which family members you’re talking about. I wouldn’t have said Inez was happy. It’s hard to see why she married Rune. She was young and sweet. I suspected that it was her mother who forced her into the marriage. But the old crone died shortly after I started at the school – which probably came as a relief for Inez, because that woman was a nasty piece of work.
‘What about Rune’s children?’ Erica went on. ‘How did they view their father and stepmother? It can’t have been easy for Inez to become part of the family. Wasn’t she only a few years older than her oldest stepchild?’
‘Yes. An awful boy, much like his father.’
‘What was his name, the oldest son?’
‘Claes.’
A long pause followed. Erica waited patiently.
‘He’s the one I remember most. I get shivers just thinking about him. I can’t say why that should be. He was always polite to me, but there was something about Claes that made me unwilling to turn my back whenever he was present.’
‘Did he and Rune get along?’
‘It’s hard to say. They circled around each other like two planets, without ever crossing paths.’ Liza laughed with embarrassment. ‘I sound like some New Age woman or a bad poet…’
‘Not at all. Please go on,’ said Erica, leaning forward. ‘I get what you mean. So there were never any conflicts between Rune and Claes?’
‘No, they pretty much kept to their own turf. Claes seemed to obey Rune’s slightest command, but how he felt about his father is anyone’s guess. Yet there was at least one thing that they had in common. They both worshipped Carla – Rune’s deceased wife and Claes’s mother – and they both seemed to despise Inez. In Claes’s case, that might be understandable, since she was supposed to take his mother’s place, but Rune was the one who’d married her.’
‘So Rune treated Inez badly?’
‘Yes. Or at least, it was not a loving relationship. He was always ordering her around, as if she was his subordinate instead of his wife. Claes, on the other hand, was openly mean and shameless in the way he treated his stepmother. And he didn’t seem to have any affection for Ebba either. It wasn’t much better when it came to his sister Annelie.’