‘What a fancy lady you’ve become,’ said Dagmar. ‘Looks like you’ve come up in the world.’
Laura clenched her fists behind her back. Everything that she’d chased away, everything that now appeared only in her dreams, had suddenly caught up with her.
‘What do you want?’
‘I need help.’ Dagmar sounded on the verge of tears. She moved in a strange, lurching fashion, and her face twitched.
‘Do you need money?’ Laura reached for her purse.
‘Not for me personally,’ said Dagmar, fixing her eyes on the purse. ‘But I need money so I can go to Germany.’
Laura stared at her. ‘Germany? What are you going to do there?’
‘I never had a chance to say goodbye to your father. I never said goodbye to my Hermann.’
Dagmar started to cry, and Laura glanced around nervously. She didn’t want Sigvard to hear something and come out to the hall to find out what was going on. He mustn’t see her mother here.
‘Shh! I’ll give you the money. But calm down, for God’s sake!’ Laura held out a bundle of bills. ‘Here! This should be enough for a ticket to Germany.’
‘Oh, thank you!’ Dagmar flung herself forward and seized the money. Then she grabbed her daughter’s hands and kissed them. Disgusted, Laura yanked her hands out of Dagmar’s grasp and wiped them on her skirt.
‘Go now,’ she said. The only thing she wanted was to get her mother out of the house, out of her life, so that perfection would reign once again. After Dagmar left, she sank with relief on to a chair in the hall.
Now a couple of years had passed, and it seemed likely that her mother was dead. Laura doubted that the money would have taken her very far, especially in the chaos after the war. And if Dagmar had raved about saying goodbye to her Hermann Göring, she probably would have been seen as the crazy woman that she was and been stopped somewhere along the way. It was not a good idea to speak of knowing a man like Göring. The brutality of his crimes was not diminished simply because he had killed himself in prison a year after the war ended. Laura shuddered at the thought that her mother had continued to tell people in the area that he was the father of her child. It wasn’t a matter for boasting. Laura had only a vague memory of visiting his wife in Stockholm, but she did remember the shame, and the look that Carin Göring had given her. Carin’s eyes had been filled with sympathy and warmth, and it was undoubtedly because of Laura that she hadn’t called for help, even though she must have been terrified.
Well, that was all in the past now. Her mother was gone, and no one talked any more about Dagmar’s deranged fantasies. And Nanna saw to it that Laura could live her own life, as she was used to doing. Order had once again been restored and everything was perfect. Exactly as it should be.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gösta looked at Patrik, who was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, his eyes resolutely fixed on the cars in front of them. The traffic was practically gridlocked, and the narrow country roads weren’t made for such a crush, so he had to stay close to the verge.
‘You weren’t too hard on her, were you?’ Gösta turned his head to gaze out the window on his side of the car.
‘I think both of you have behaved stupidly, and I’m not about to change my mind about that,’ said Patrik, but he sounded significantly calmer than he had the day before.
Gösta didn’t reply. He was too tired to argue. He’d been up most of the night, going through the files. But that wasn’t something he wanted to tell Patrik, who probably wouldn’t appreciate anyone doing anything on his own initiative at the moment. He put up his hand to hide a yawn. He was still feeling disappointed at the lack of results from his night’s work. He hadn’t discovered anything new, and nothing had stirred his interest. At the same time, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that the answer was there, right in front of his nose, hidden somewhere in that pile of documents. Initially it had been curiosity, possibly combined with professional pride, that had motivated him to keep going. But now it was a sense of unease that was driving him. Ebba was no longer safe, and her life depended on the police finding out who was responsible for these attempts on her life.
‘Take that exit on the left.’ He pointed to a side road a short distance ahead.
‘I see it,’ said Patrik, making a death-defying swerve to the left.
‘Apparently you never passed the driver’s test,’ muttered Gösta as he gripped the handle above the passenger door.
‘I’m an excellent driver,’ said Patrik.
Gösta snorted. He motioned with a nod of his head at Junk-Olle’s place.
‘His kids are going to have a lot of trouble cleaning up when he dies.’
It was more like a junkyard than a home. Everyone who lived in the area knew to call Olle if they wanted to get rid of something. Happy to be of service, he would come to fetch whatever it was, which meant that now there were cars, refrigerators, trailers, washing machines, and everything else imaginable piled up around a couple of outbuildings and warehouses. Gösta even spotted a hairdryer from a beauty salon as Patrik parked between a discarded freezer and an old Volvo Amazon.
A skinny old man wearing bib overalls came out to greet them.
‘It would have been better if you could have come earlier. Half the day is already gone.’
Gösta glanced at his watch. It was 10.05 in the morning.
‘Hi, Olle. I hear you’ve got some things for us.’
‘You sure took your sweet time about it. I don’t understand what you do over there at the police station. Nobody ever asked about these things, so I just held on to them. They’re over there with the stuff belonging to the crazy duke.’
They followed Junk-Olle into a dark barn.
‘The crazy duke?’ queried Patrik.
‘I don’t know whether he’s really a duke, but he had some sort of noble name.’
‘Do you mean von Schlesinger?’
‘That’s right. He was notorious around here because he sympathized with Hitler, and his son went off to fight on the side of the Germans. The kid no sooner arrived down there than he took a bullet in the head.’ Olle started rummaging through all the rubbish. ‘And if the old man wasn’t crazy before, that did him in. He thought the Allies were going to come out to the island and attack him. You’d never believe me if I told you all the weird things he was doing out there. Finally he had a stroke and died.’ Junk-Olle paused and peered at them in the dim light as he scratched his head. ‘That was in 1953, if I remember right. After that there was a series of owners until Elvander bought the place. Good Lord, what a thing to do! Opening a boarding school out there and attracting all those toffee-nosed boys. Anybody could see that it was bound to end badly.’
He went back to rummaging around as he muttered to himself. A cloud of dust rose into the air, and both Gösta and Patrik started coughing.
‘Here we are. Four boxes of stuff. The furniture stayed in the house when it was rented out, but I was able to pick up a lot of loose items. You shouldn’t just throw things out and besides, nobody knew whether they might come back. Although most people, me included, thought they were probably dead.’
‘And it never occurred to you to contact the police to say that you had the family’s belongings?’ asked Patrik.