‘And Ebba has no idea who they’re from?’ asked Patrik before he realized that he was speaking as if she wasn’t present. He turned to her and repeated the question. ‘You have no idea who has been sending these cards to you?’
‘No.’
‘What about your adoptive parents? Are you sure they don’t know anything?’
‘They haven’t a clue.’
‘Has this “G” ever tried to get in touch with you in any other way? Or threatened you?’
‘No, never. Nothing like that, right, Ebba?’ Tobias reached out as if to touch his wife, but then he let his hand drop back on his lap.
She shook her head.
‘Torbjörn is here,’ said Martin, gesturing towards the path.
‘Good. In that case we’ll stop now and let the two of you rest. The medics are on the way, and if they feel you ought to go to the hospital, I think you should do that. These kinds of things need to be taken seriously.’
‘Thanks,’ said Tobias, standing up. ‘Let us know if you find out anything.’
‘We’ll do that.’ Patrik cast another worried glance at Ebba. She still seemed to be enveloped in a bubble. He wondered how the tragedy of her childhood had shaped her, but then he pushed that thought aside. Right now he needed to focus on the job at hand. And that meant determining whether they were dealing with an arsonist.
FJÄLLBACKA 1912
Dagmar still didn’t understand how it could have happened. Everything had been taken from her, and she was utterly alone. No matter where she went, people whispered ugly words behind her back. They hated her because of what her mother had done.
Sometimes at night she missed her mother and father so much that she had to bite the pillow to stop herself sobbing aloud. Because if she did that, the horrid witch she lived with would beat her black and blue. But she couldn’t always hold back her screams when the nightmares got so bad that she woke up drenched in sweat. In her dreams she saw the chopped-off heads of her mother and father. Because in the end both of them had been beheaded. Dagmar had not been present to see it happen, but the image had been burned into her mind.
And sometimes images of the children also hounded her dreams. The police had found the bodies of eight infants when they dug up the earthen floor in the cellar. That was what the witch had said. ‘Eight poor little children,’ she said, shaking her head, whenever anyone came to visit. Her friends would then turn to glare at Dagmar. ‘The girl must have known about it,’ they said. ‘Even as young as she is, surely she must have realized what they were doing, don’t you think?’
Dagmar refused to be cowed. It didn’t matter whether that was true or not. Mamma and Pappa had loved her, and nobody wanted those dirty, squealing little kids. That was why they had wound up with her mother. For years she had worked so hard, yet the only thanks she ever received for taking in all those unwanted children was that people ended up demeaning her, jeering at her, and then they killed her. The same thing had happened to her father. He had helped Mamma bury those children and for that reason people said that he too deserved to die.
Dagmar had been sent to live with the witch after the police took her parents away. No one else was willing to have her, not the relatives or any friends. No one wanted anything to do with her family. The angelmaker from Fjällbacka – that was what people had started calling her mother the day those little skeletons were found. Now people even sang ballads about her. About the murderer who had drowned the children in a basin, and about her husband who had buried them in the cellar. Dagmar knew those songs by heart. Her foster mother’s snotty-nosed kids sang them to her whenever they got a chance.
None of this mattered to her, because she was still her parents’ little princess, and she knew that she had been both wanted and loved. The only thing that made her tremble with fear was the sound of her foster father’s footsteps approaching across the floor. At those moments Dagmar wished that she could have followed her mother and father into death.
Chapter Three
Josef nervously ran his thumb over the stone that he was holding. This meeting was important, and he wasn’t about to allow Sebastian to ruin things.
‘Here it is.’ Sebastian pointed at the drawings that he’d placed on the conference table. ‘Here’s our vision. A project for peace in our time.’ He said the last phrase in English.
Josef sighed to himself. He wasn’t convinced that the local council representatives would be impressed with fancy phrases in English.
‘What my partner is trying to say is that this is an amazing opportunity for Tanum to do something for peace. An initiative that will bring the area a great deal of prestige.’
‘Sure, peace on earth is a good thing. And financially it’s not such a daft idea, either. In the long run, it should increase tourism and create new jobs for the people who live here, and you know what that means.’ Sebastian held up his hand and rubbed his fingers together. ‘More money for the whole area.’
‘Yes, but above all it’s an important peace project,’ said Josef, resisting the urge to give Sebastian a kick in the shins. He’d known this would happen when he accepted Sebastian’s money, but he’d had no choice.
Erling W. Larson nodded. After the scandal over the renovation of the Badhotel in Fjällbacka, he’d found himself out in the cold for a while, but now he was once again involved in local politics. This sort of project would show that he was still a force to be reckoned with, and Josef hoped that Erling would realize this.
‘We think it sounds interesting,’ said Erling. ‘Could you tell us more about how you envision the whole thing?’
Sebastian took in a breath as he prepared to speak, but Josef beat him to it.
‘This is a little piece of history,’ he said, holding out the stone. ‘Albert Speer purchased granite from the quarry in Bohuslän for the German Reich. He and Hitler had grandiose plans to transform Berlin into the world capital of “Germania”, and the granite was supposed to be shipped to Germany for use in construction.’
Josef stood up and began pacing back and forth as he talked. In his mind he heard the stomping boots of German soldiers. The sound that his parents had so often told him about in horror.
‘But then the war turned,’ he went on. ‘Germania never evolved beyond a model that Hitler fantasized about during his last days. An unfulfilled dream, a vision of stately monuments and edifices that would have been built at the cost of millions of Jewish lives.’
‘How awful,’ said Erling, showing little concern.
‘The shiploads of granite never left Tanum-’
‘And that’s where we come in,’ Sebastian interrupted Josef. ‘We were thinking that from that granite we could make peace symbols that could then be sold. It would bring in a lot of money, provided it’s done properly.’
‘And we could then use the money to build a museum devoted to Jewish history and Sweden’s relationship to Judaism. Including our purported neutral position during the war,’ Josef added.
He sat down, and Sebastian put his arm around his shoulders. Josef had to stop himself from shaking off his arm. Instead he mustered a strained smile. He felt just as phoney as he had during those days on Valö. Even back then he’d had nothing in common with Sebastian or his other so-called friends. No matter how hard he tried, he knew he’d never be able to enter the upper-class world that John and Leon and Percy came from. Nor did he want to.