“Did she blackmail him too?”
“Oh yes, but I don’t have the full story. He was so humiliated by Camilla that he wasn’t willing to tell me the truth, even when all was lost. Kjell had been the rock in our family. If we lost our way while out driving, if there was a flood, if any of us fell ill, he was the calm, sensible one. ‘It’ll all be alright,’ he would say in his wonderful voice — I still fantasize about it. But after a few years with Camilla in the house he was a wreck. Hardly dared to cross the road, looked a hundred times to make sure it was safe. And he lost all motivation at work, he just sat with his head hanging. One of his closest colleagues, Mats Hedlund, rang and told me in confidence that an inquiry had been set up to investigate whether Kjell had been selling company secrets. It sounded crazy. Kjell was the most honest man I’ve ever known. Plus if he’d sold anything, where was the money? We had less than ever. His bank account was stripped bare, same with our joint account.”
“Forgive my asking, but how did he die?”
“He hanged himself — without a word of explanation. I came home from work one day and found him swinging from the ceiling in the guest room, yes, the same room in which Camilla had had her fun with him. I was a well-paid C.F.O. at the time, and chances are I would have had a great career to look forward to. But after that, Moa’s and my world collapsed. I won’t go into it any further. You want to know what happened to Camilla. But there was no end to the misery. Moa started cutting herself and practically stopped eating. One day she asked me if I thought she was scum. ‘My God, darling,’ I replied, ‘how can you say something like that?’ Then she told me it was Camilla. That Camilla had claimed every single person who had ever met Moa thought she was repulsive. I sought all the help I could: psychologists, doctors, wise friends, Prozac. But to no avail. One gloriously beautiful spring day, when the rest of Sweden was celebrating some ridiculous triumph in the Eurovision Song Contest, Moa jumped from a ferry, and my life ended with hers — that’s how it felt. I no longer had the will to live and spent a long time in hospital being treated for depression. But then... I don’t know... somehow the paralysis and grief turned to rage, and I felt that I needed to understand. What had actually happened to our family? What sort of evil had seeped in? I started to make enquiries about Camilla, not because I wanted to see her again, not under any circumstances. But I wanted to understand her, the same way a parent of a murder victim wants to understand the murderer.”
“What did you discover?”
“Nothing to begin with. She had covered her tracks — it was like chasing a shadow, a phantom. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of kronor I spent on private detectives and other unreliable people who promised to help me. I was getting nowhere, and it was driving me crazy. I became fixated. I hardly slept, and none of my friends could bear to be with me any more. It was a terrible time. People thought I was being obsessive and stubborn, maybe they still do — I don’t know what Holger Palmgren told you. But then...”
“Go on.”
“Your story on Zalachenko was published. Naturally the name meant nothing to me, but I started to put two and two together. I read about his Swedish identity, Karl Axel Bodin, and about his connection with Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club, and then I remembered all the dreadful evenings towards the end, after Camilla had turned her back on us. At the time I was often woken up by the noise of motorbikes, and I could see those leather waistcoats with that awful emblem from my bedroom window. It didn’t surprise me that she mixed with those sorts of people. I no longer had any illusions about her. But I had no idea that this was the world she came from — and that she was expecting to take over her father’s business interests.”
“And did she?”
“Oh yes. In her own dirty world she fought for the rights of women — at least for her own rights — and I know that it meant a lot to many of the girls in the club, most of all to Kajsa Falk.”
“Who was she?”
“A sassy, lovely looking girl, her boyfriend was one of the leaders. She spent a lot of time at our home during that last year, and I remember liking her. She had big blue eyes with a slight squint, and a compassionate, vulnerable side behind her tough exterior. After reading your story I looked her up again. She didn’t say a word about Camilla, though she was by no means unpleasant. I noticed that her style had changed: the biker girl had become a businesswoman. But she didn’t talk about it. I thought I’d hit another dead end.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No. About a year ago Kajsa looked me up of her own accord, and by then she had changed again. There was nothing reserved or cool about her. This time she was hounded and nervous. Not long after that she was found dead, shot at Stora Mossens sports centre in Bromma. When we met she told me there had been a dispute over the inheritance after Zalachenko’s death. Camilla’s twin sister, Lisbeth, came away more or less empty-handed — apparently she didn’t even want the little that she got — while the majority of the assets fell to Zalachenko’s two surviving sons in Berlin, and some to Camilla. She inherited part of the trafficking business you wrote about in your report, and that made my heart bleed. I doubt Camilla cared about those women, or felt any sort of compassion for them. But still, she didn’t want to have anything to do with those activities. She said to Kajsa that only losers bother with that sort of filth. She had a completely different, modern vision of what the organization should be doing, and after hard negotiation she got one of her half-brothers to buy her out. Then she disappeared to Moscow with her capital and some of the employees who wanted to follow her, Kajsa Falk among them.”
“Do you know what sort of business she was setting up?”
“Kajsa never got enough of an insight to understand it, but we had our suspicions. I think it was to do with those trade secrets at Ericsson. By now I’m almost certain Camilla really did get Kjell to steal and sell on something valuable, presumably by blackmailing him. I’ve also found out that in her first years with us she asked some computer geeks at school to hack into my computer. According to Kajsa, she was more or less obsessed with hacking. Not that she learned anything about it herself, not at all, but she was forever talking about the money one could make by accessing bank accounts and hacking servers and stealing information. She must have developed a business along those lines.”
“That sounds very possible.”
“It was probably at a very high level. Camilla would never settle for anything less. According to Kajsa, she soon found her way into influential circles in Moscow, and among other things became the mistress of some rich, powerful member of the Duma, and with him she began to forge connections with a strange crew of top engineers and criminals. She wound them round her little finger, and she knew exactly where the weak point in the domestic economy was.”
“And what was that?”
“The fact that Russia is little more than a petrol station with a flag on top. They export oil and natural gas, but manufacture nothing worth mentioning. Russia needs advanced technology.”
“She wanted to give them that?”