Thurn stopped dead. Her pulse was racing, her breathing heavy, and she had no idea what to say.
In the next instant, he recognized her.
“Caroline?” he said. “Is that you, Caroline? My… what a coincidence!”
She tried to compose herself.
“Headmaster Löwenheim,” she replied. “It’s… been a while.”
He held out a hand and she took it automatically, shaking it as though she was thanking him for a diploma at a graduation ceremony. His handshake was limp and damp, she remembered it well. But it wasn’t his handshake that the girls at school had gossiped about, it was the hugs that quickly became too intimate, the glances that lingered for far too long before they reached your eyes. The scandal with the matron in one of the boardinghouses was something Löwenheim could never shake off.
“I saw your father only last week, at a dinner in Nääs,” Löwenheim now said. “He seemed to be in good spirits.”
“Yes,” Thurn replied evasively. “I’m sure he is.”
“We spoke about your brother for quite some time, but we never got round to you…”
“No,” she said, “these things happen.”
Caroline von Thurn hadn’t used her noble “von” since she realized that Grefvelsta Gård in Närke, the place where she and her father, her grandfather and great-grandfather had all grown up, would be taken away from her.
She was fifteen at the time, and had recently enrolled at Lundsberg boarding school, where her classmates had explained what would happen. She wouldn’t get a thing. Thanks to laws dating back to the seventeenth century, the farm and its land would be inherited by her younger brother. Fifty years earlier, the Swedish parliament had agreed to phase out the so-called fideicommissum, the rule that decreed that the oldest son was the heir of his ancestors, but an exception had been made for Grefvelsta, among other places.
To begin with, she hadn’t believed her friends. Thurn had called her mother that evening, but all she had been able to do was refer her to her father. She explained that she had nothing to do with “all that”; it was something her father had decided.
And when her father came to her school a few weeks later, it wasn’t for Thurn’s sake, it was because he sat on the governing board. He was more irritated by her questions than anything else. He didn’t need to justify a thing, he couldn’t be held accountable. It was just how it was, the way it had always been, it wasn’t about fairness. People were born into a certain context, in a certain place, some were born men and others were born women. The girls in the family would never be running farms or inheriting land.
When her father left that day, the betrayal had burned in Thurn’s throat and heart. By evening, she could barely breathe. It was as though a thin, beautiful rug on which her entire childhood was depicted had been pulled out from beneath her feet, leaving her standing on an earth floor that stunk of old prejudices and was steeped in small-mindedness.
Over the week that followed, her initial shock was replaced by a deep sense of injustice. It was something she would nourish and develop during the three years she spent at that boarding school in the forests of Värmland. When she graduated from high school, it had long been too late for her to return to her family home.
The day she left school was the last time she saw her father, mother and brother. There were no dramatic farewells, she was far too well raised for that kind of drama; causing scenes was something that the boarding school drummed out of its pupils, if they hadn’t already learned it earlier. She would see her mother and father again if it was necessary. If not, she wouldn’t bother.
And so, Caroline von Thurn became Caroline Thurn, and she sought out a different life for herself.
She became a police officer.
“Well,” said Headmaster Löwenheim, “running into one another like this, in the middle of the night? But I’m afraid I must hurry off.”
“Aha?” said Thurn. “Where are you heading?”
In the moment he recognized her, he had let go of the door handle as though it had burned him. He now mumbled a vague reply.
“I have a sister whose sister-in-law lives around the corner. I sometimes help… it was urgent… she has trouble with her hip… living alone isn’t easy.”
He was already on his way, backing up a few steps.
“Say hello to your parents, Caroline,” he added before turning around.
She stood there, watching as he limped away. She let him leave.
Then she turned to the door he had been about to go through.
This address on Grevgatan, this entrance, led into the same building they had been watching on Karlavägen. And she realized it was the reason she had never seen anyone go in or out of the brothel.
The ambassadors and members of society who frequented the establishment would enter through this considerably more discreet entrance around the corner.
Sometimes, the answer was simpler than you wanted to believe, Thurn thought.
She slowly walked back out onto Karlavägen. As she did, she called for backup. The uniformed officers could go up into the building and catch the men there in the act.
There was no doubt about where Löwenheim had been heading, and when he failed to follow through on his plans, he had inadvertently revealed them.
Caroline Thurn no longer had any interest in going in to make the arrests herself. If the headmaster knew about the brothel, there was a risk that other men from her father’s circles might be up there in its bedrooms. And she was happy to avoid that discovery.
33
When Maloof pulled into the parking garage at Skärholmen Centrum on Tuesday, August 25, it wasn’t particularly busy. For once. He had planned for them to keep moving along the long, shop-lined corridors of the shopping center, but he changed his mind when he saw how quiet it was. Zoran Petrovic was a head taller than everyone else, and it took a real crowd to hide him.
Better to go for a walk in the woods around the shopping center, Maloof thought, pulling in between two dirty gray cars—it was impossible to determine their make, an Asian variant of some old car.
The parking garage smelled of exhaust fumes and greenery. Maloof took a deep breath and shivered in the cool breeze. On the backseat, he found a scarf that must have been lying there since spring. He wasn’t ready for autumn yet.
He also hated problems. Petrovic was suddenly having to find a new pilot. Nordgren hadn’t managed to blow a hole in the concrete roof, meaning they had to come up with another way of getting in. If that was even possible. Everything seemed to be going against them all of a sudden.
Maloof saw Petrovic’s blue BMW approaching from the north entrance. He also noticed the car that pulled in after it, a silvery-gray Saab. It was no more than a brief observation, however; the car rolled on and he soon forgot about it.
Petrovic parked and then the tall Yugoslavian came loping across the garage in his short, pale summer coat. He waved cheerily.
Maloof replied by pointing toward the woods.
Petrovic turned and started to walk in the other direction, away from the shopping center. Maloof followed him.
Rather than parking, the silvery-gray Saab continued to creep along at a safe distance behind Maloof and Petrovic.
The first stage of their walk took them down a winding path deep into the forest, over hills and past small fields. The ground was dry, the deep furrows the summer rain had dug into the gravel on the slopes had vanished without a trace, and Maloof’s new sneakers survived without getting dirty.
They were talking about helicopter pilots.