A Darker Shade of Sweden (36 page)

Veronica von Schenck was born in 1971 and has been a computer gamer, a journalist, and editor in chief of a computer magazine as well as of a Stockholm event magazine. She is also a recruitment consultant and a mother of two, living in a Stockholm suburb with her family. She published her first crime novel,
Änglalik
(
a play on words, meaning both
Like an Angel
and
Corpse of an Angel),
in 2008 and her second,
Kretsen
(The Group),
in 2009; the second was one of five nominated for the best novel of the year award by the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy. The two novels feature profiler Althea Molin, a heroine of half-Swedish, half-Korean extraction. A third Molin novel will be published. More recently, von Schenck also published three well-received juvenile crime novels based on historical events.

TOO LATE SHALL
THE SINNER AWAKEN

K
ATARINA
W
ENNSTAM

Katarina Wennstam is a journalist, author, and lecturer. She was born and raised in Gothenburg, but now lives in Stockholm. For a number of years she was a crime reporter with the Swedish state TV network, but since 2007 she has been a full-time writer.

Wennstam is one of many Swedish crime writers whose fiction is based on her principled views on current social problems. Her novels and stories deal with violence against women, homophobia and intolerance. Her first crime novel was
Smuts
(Dirt
, 2007
);
her second,
Dödergök (
a made-up word borrowed from a children's song
)
, in the opinion of this writer was the best published in Sweden in 2008. She has written three more novels and is currently one of the leading, and bestselling, crime authors in Sweden.

This story marks the first appearance of one of Wennstam's recurring protagonists, Detective Captain Charlotta Lugn, who along with lawyer Shirin Sundin, plays the lead in a projected trilogy beginning with
Svikaren
(The Quitter, 2012)
. It also reflects one of her basic themes. The story is set at Christmas, and non-Swedish readers should perhaps be familiar with two peculiarities of Swedish Christmas traditions. For one thing, Christmas is celebrated on December 24 in Sweden, which is the day Swedes eat their traditional Christmas ham and children expect Santa Claus to visit. And for another, virtually every year since 1960, Swedish state TV has shown a cartoon special called
From All of Us to All of
You
, the 1958 Christmas special of the Walt Disney Presents series. The program runs for one hour, from 3 to 4 p.m., and is habitually watched by more than one-third of the Swedish population; it more or less defines a traditional Swedish Christmas celebration, and most people in the country know its recurring, classical Disney cartoons by heart: memorably, “Ferdinand the Bull,” “Toy Tinkers,” or “Santa's Workshop.”

Incidentally, until July 1, 2010, the statute of limitations in Sweden set a twenty-five-year limit on prosecutions for murder. The revised penal code since then contains no time limit regarding murder or attempted murder.

“
WHO THE HELL PHONES IN THE MIDDLE OF DONALD DUCK
”

Her phone is lying on the dining table and
gives
its urgent summons, an embarrassingly selected tune cheerfully calling to mind a pop song competition four years ago. Every time she hears it, Charlotta wonders why she never remembers to change it. Agneta glares at Charlotta's phone but immediately turns her eyes back to Cinderella, slips a piece of marzipan between her lips and sinks back against the couch pillows. The phone keeps playing its little tune.

“Why don't you answer it!”

“On Christmas Eve?”

“It's got to be your job.”

“I suppose so.”

Charlotta hurries to the phone, almost but not quite hoping that whoever is calling will give up. Hidden number. Charlotta takes a deep breath to confront whoever may be disturbing her in the peace of her home at twenty past three in the afternoon on December 24, of all days.

“Charlotta Lugn.”

The phone is silent. She can hear that there is someone at the other end of the connection, but seconds pass. Nobody speaks.

“Hello? This is Charlotta Lugn. Who is it?”

“Hello . . . How are you? I'm sorry. I . . . I didn't mean to disturb you.”

“No problem. What's it about?”

Charlotta looks at the couch, the lit candles, the Christmas tree and the TV showing dancing mice and small birds. Agneta on the couch, her legs comfortably beneath her. The bowl of Christmas candy beside her on the couch. She is sucking the bottom of a paper toffee mold to get the candy out, puts it in her mouth accompanied by Cinderella's singing.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, Gonna help our Cinderelly, Got no time to dilly-dally
.

Charlotta closes her eyes and knows already before she hears the voice on the phone that she will have to leave her Christmas peace behind.

Call it female intuition, call it twenty-six years of police experience, call it grim realism. Nobody making a work call on Christmas Eve does it just to wish a Merry Christmas.

“Oh, and Merry Christmas, by the way. I'm very sorry to disturb you like this. But it's important. I really had to phone you today.”

“I'm sorry, but I still don't understand what this is about. Who are you?”

A small laugh at the other end of the connection. Indulgent, slightly embarrassed.

“No, of course not. You couldn't recognize my voice. It's been forever. I'm very sorry. Of course I should have . . . Well, you meet new people all the time, of course there's no way for you to remember . . . I just thought . . .”

The woman on the phone lets her sentences trickle out in endless silence. In some strange way she seems both stressed and very calm. As if she possessed some inner peace while at the same time being worked up, wanting to say too much in too short a time.

“Hnh. I understand. But couldn't you help me along a bit and tell me your name? That would make everything so much simpler.”

“Oh, of course, how right you are. What would you say to doing it this way—do you remember Erik Granath? I'm his mother.”

Hearing those words, Charlotta Lugn is absolutely certain that this Christmas Eve will resemble no other.

While still holding the phone to her ear she silently sneaks back to Agneta, kisses her forehead softly, soundlessly, and gives her an apologetic look. There's no need for more; Agneta understands.

Her expression is far from happy, but their agreement is old and they're both used to it. Charlotta's job doesn't end even when it's a holiday, or when it's night or someone's birthday or the flu is at its worst. How often she has rushed away from dinner parties, shopping rounds and quiet evenings at home.

But still, Christmas Eve . . . They had looked forward so eagerly to this evening. Their first Christmas in the new row house. Their first without any of their children. Their first without mothers, siblings or cousins. Just the two of them.

Charlotta caresses Agneta's cheek and her mouth soundlessly forms, “I'm sorry.” And she walks out into the hallway. Puts her feet into her curling shoes without bothering with the heel zippers, pulls her heavy jacket across her shoulders.

“I'm on my way. How do I get there?”

Charlotta Lugn picks the downtown route. Takes a short cut across the Sahlgrenska hospital grounds, almost collides with a rattling streetcar at Wavrinsky Square. She can hardly see it, in the dark and heavy rain visibility is awful. Temperature is down to thirty-two and at any moment the rain can turn to sleet. The streetcar driver signals at the last moment. Those endless streetcars.

The streetcar snakes its lonely way up the incline towards Guldheden. Charlotta can see three people within, all of them dressed in black and seated far from each other, looking out the rain-whipped windows. Hopefully they're all on their way home to someone. She can hardly bear the thought of all those who are abandoned at Christmas. She wants everyone to be safe, warm, surrounded by their loved ones.

She knows better than most that it doesn't work that way. Least of all at Christmas.

As much as she loves Bing Crosby, shiny red wrapping paper, saffron buns and the smells of sealing-wax and mulled wine, she also intensely hates Christmas with all of its drunken and violent traditions. Regardless of how hard she tries to burrow down into her own and Agneta's married bliss, how hard she tries to glut herself with Christmas pottering and glittery garlands. Still the damned Christmas season remains the worst time of year to be a police officer.

All the other days of the year she loves her work, but at Christmas it stinks. She still remembers working her first Christmas night, when she had inaugurated her fairly new police boots by slipping in the blood of a woman beaten to death by her blind-drunk husband.

He had sat in a corner of the kitchen, mumbling. “She fell, the fucking cow. I swear, can't understand how she can be so fucking clumsy.” The table was laid with their Christmas ham. Charlotta can still see the five slices cut from it on the plate. He had used the same knife on his wife's face.

Other Christmases she has cut down lonely souls hanging from telephone cords, their staring eyes still forlorn. She has cried secret tears into the soft hair of a little terror-stricken girl who had seen her mother beaten to a pulp by her raging, aquavit-stinking stepfather while “Ferdinand the Bull” was playing on the TV. Year after year she has been forced to face what everyone in fact knows but refuses to acknowledge while they're opening their gifts and watching their children's eyes glitter along with their Christmas tree lights.

No wonder Detective Captain Charlotta Lugn hates Christmas just as much as her private self loves it.

Charlotta arrives at St. Sigfrid's Square and turns in behind the Russian Embassy. The guard outside stands immobile with a face that gives no smallest hint either of the heavy rainfall or of the fact that the Soviet state disappeared long ago.

She drives on toward the luxury apartment buildings in Jakobsdal. Squeezes the car in between two others outside the last building on the cliff, where the view encompasses all of downtown Gothenburg. For a moment Charlotta stares at the play of light from the millions of small bulbs decorating the trees of the Liseberg amusement park at Christmastime, but the bitter wind wets her hair and bites her naked throat. Shivering, she enters the door code and steps into the building.

“Just walk straight in. I'll leave the door unlocked for you. I'm in the last drawing room and don't always hear the doorbell. You're very welcome.”

Erik's mother, Lovisa Granath, has both given her careful directions and carefully explained why she specifically wants Captain Lugn to visit her this particular afternoon.

“I want to tell you what happened. I'd be very grateful if you could possibly listen to what I have to say.”

Charlotta Lugn has waited twenty-six years for those words. But to be honest she never believed that she would really know. Somehow she has learned to live with the fact that her first major murder case is also the only one still unsolved.

What older colleagues have said about similar defeats in the end has made her understand that everyone's past includes cold cases. All of them at least once have had to accept that some mysteries remain unsolved. Have learned to live with the fact that not everything hidden in snow is revealed by thaw.

But what Lovisa Granath had said promised more.

“I know who killed Erik and I've kept silent much too long.”

It feels strange, almost forbidden to open the door of a private home she has never visited and just walk straight in. Charlotta met the Granath family during the murder investigation more than twenty-five years ago. And even though they didn't live in this apartment back then, the feeling now is the same as it was then. Heavy furniture, objects of the kind you can call heirlooms, ugly paintings in colors so stifled that their subjects are difficult to distinguish.

With so much money you should be able to make things look a little brighter, but this home breathes of dull sorrow, uneasiness and restrained emotions. At the time, Charlotta had believed that it was all due to the sorrow and shock of having lost a child, but a quarter of a century later the feel of the Granath home is identical.

From the hallway she can see huge candelabras and lamps lit on side tables and writing desks, she feels cold and only very reluctantly hangs her rain-heavy jacket in the cloakroom.

“Hello,” she calls towards the rest of the apartment, even though Lovisa Granath has asked her to just walk in without announcing herself. No reply.

From beyond the dining room and a farther room she feels certain is called the library, or possibly the smoking room, she hears a soft sound of music. The wallpaper is dark plaid, and giant leather armchairs are placed around a table with a cigar box and an ashtray. The walls are covered by full bookcases.

Charlotta Lugn walks through the rooms and finally enters the drawing room. Lovisa Granath sits by the window, watching the lit trees of Liseberg.

“Oh, there you are. I'm happy to see you. Please have a seat.”

Lovisa Granath doesn't rise, doesn't shake hands, hardly even moves in the pale blue-striped armchair where she is sitting. The sitting room is a dramatic contrast to the rooms Charlotta has passed through. The wallpaper is light, the curtains hanging down to the floor are certainly heavy, but lime-blossom green and pulled open. The corner room is framed by four windows and in their deep recesses grow beautiful white cyclamen in the eight-edged pots designed by Prince Eugen.

Lovisa Granath holds one of her hands raised, immobile, palm up, fingers slightly bent. She is offering Charlotta Lugn a seat in a dainty couch.

“Please sit down. I took the liberty of making some tea before you arrived. I never have coffee this late in the afternoon. And I'm not at all fond of mulled wine . . . Would you like a cup of tea? Perhaps it would . . .”

Lovisa Granath again lets her sentences hang unfinished in the air. It seems to be a bad habit with her.

Charlotta Lugn shakes her head and sits down. Looks at the mother of Erik Granath, at how she looks twenty-five years later.

What is it they used to say, Charlotta thinks. Life hasn't treated her gently. The years have begun to tell. Consumed by sadness.

The expressions all fit the old woman. Charlotta remembers Lovisa Granath as genial, a woman who seemed out of place in the somber upper-class home. Today she fits in more naturally, as difficult to decipher as the dark paintings in the dining room and the library. On the verge of undernourishment, with sharp furrows around her lips and eyes. Ugly. From grief.