Camilla Läckberg - The Hidden Child

When the front door opened and a cheerful voice called from the hall, they both jumped.

‘Hi, Mamma. Do you have visitors?’ Footsteps approached the living room.

Erica looked at Märta, who nodded to give her consent. The time for secrets was over.

Four hours had passed and Paula and Martin were starting to despair. They felt like a pair of moles, trapped in the pitch-dark, though their eyes had now grown sufficiently accustomed to the gloom that they were able to distinguish the contours of the room.

‘This really isn’t how I imagined things would go,’ said Paula, sighing. ‘Do you think they’ll send out a search party soon?’ she joked, although she couldn’t help sighing again.

Martin was busy rubbing his shoulder, which was throbbing after several attempts to break down the door. He was going to have some serious bruises to show for this.

‘He must be long gone by now,’ said Paula, feeling frustration well up inside her.

‘There’s a good chance you’re right,’ Martin agreed, which only made her feel even more frustrated.

‘He certainly has a lot of creepy souvenirs down here.’ Paula squinted, trying to make out the outlines of some of the things that filled the shelves in the basement room.

‘They’re probably mostly Erik’s,’ said Martin. ‘From what I understood, he was the collector.’

‘But all these Nazi artefacts… They must be worth a fortune.’

‘No doubt. A person who devotes most of his life to collecting things is bound to end up with a lot of stuff.’

‘Why do you think he did it?’ Paula stared into the darkness, trying to wrap her head around what they now regarded as fact. To tell the truth, she had become convinced the minute she started looking into his alibi. That was when she got the idea to find out whether Axel Frankel’s name appeared on any other airline passenger list. When they’d checked his alibi, they had verified only that he departed on the day he had specified; it hadn’t occurred to them to see whether he had made any other trips. It was only this morning that she had learned a passenger named Axel Frankel had travelled from Paris to Göteborg on June sixteenth, and then returned on the same day.

‘I don’t know,’ Martin replied to her question. ‘It’s hard to understand. The brothers seem to have had a good relationship, so why would Axel kill Erik? What was it that triggered such a strong reaction?’

‘It must have something to do with the sudden renewal of contact between the four of them: Erik, Axel, Britta, and Frans. That can’t be a coincidence. And somehow that’s all connected to the murder of the Norwegian.’

‘I agree. But how? And why? Why now, after sixty years? It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘We’ll have to ask him. If we ever get out of here, that is. And if we ever manage to catch him. He’s probably on his way to the other side of the world right now,’ said Paula, discouraged.

‘Maybe they’ll find our skeletons down here sometime next year,’ Martin joked, but his attempt at humour was not appreciated.

‘If we’re lucky, maybe some kid will break in,’ said Paula drily.

‘Hey! You’ve got something there!’ Martin said excitedly, poking her hard in the side.

‘Whatever it is, I sincerely hope it’s worth the damage you just did to my ribs,’ said Paula, probing the tender spot where he’d jabbed her with his elbow.

‘Don’t you remember what Per said when we interviewed him?’

‘I wasn’t there. You and Gösta conducted the interview,’ she reminded him, but she was starting to sound interested.

‘Well, he said that he broke into the house through a window in the basement.’

‘I don’t think there are any windows down here. If there were, it would be a lot brighter,’ said Paula sceptically, squinting as she looked at the walls in the basement.

Martin got up and fumbled his way over to the outside wall.

‘But that’s what he said. There has to be a window. Maybe something is hanging in front of it. You said it yourself – the stuff stored in here must be worth a fortune. Maybe Erik didn’t want anyone to be able to see his collection from outside.’

Now Paula got up too and headed in Martin’s direction. She heard him say ‘ow!’ as he ran into the opposite wall, but when that was followed by ‘aha!’, she felt her hopes rise. And hope turned to triumph when Martin pulled aside a heavy curtain and daylight came flooding into the basement.

‘Couldn’t you have thought about this a couple of hours ago?’ Paula complained.

‘Hey, how about a bit of gratitude?’ said Martin cheerfully as he unfastened the latch and pushed the window open. He reached for a chair standing a metre away and put it directly under the window.

‘Ladies first!’

‘Thanks,’ Paula muttered as she climbed up on the chair and squirmed her way out through the gap.

Martin was right behind her. For a moment they both stood still to allow their eyes to adjust to the dazzling daylight. Then they set off running. They dashed up to the front door but found it to be locked, and this time there was no key above the door. That meant their jackets were locked in the house, with their mobiles and car keys. Martin was just about to run over to the nearest neighbour’s house when he heard a loud crash. He glanced in the direction the sound came from and saw that Paula, with a satisfied expression, had hurled a rock through a window on the ground floor.

‘Since we got out through a window, I thought we might as well get in the same way.’ She picked up a stick and knocked out the splinters of glass from the window frame, then looked at Martin.

‘Well? Are you planning to give Axel an even bigger head start, or would you like to help me get inside?’

Martin hesitated only a second before giving his colleague a leg-up and climbing through the window after her. What mattered now was catching up with Erik Frankel’s killer. Axel already had a huge lead. And they had far too many questions that were still unanswered.

Axel had made it only as far as Landvetter airport. When he locked the police officers in the basement and took off in his car the adrenaline had been surging through his veins, but that had ebbed away leaving only emptiness in its place.

He sat motionless, staring through the windows as the planes took off. He could have departed on any one of those flights; he had money and the contacts that would secure him a ticket to whatever destination he chose. Years of hunting had taught him everything there was to know about the art of vanishing without a trace. But he didn’t want to do that. That was the conclusion he had finally reached. He could escape, but he didn’t want to.

And so he was sitting here, in no-man’s-land, watching the planes taking off and landing. He was waiting for fate to catch up with him. And to his great surprise, he was no longer dreading the moment. Maybe this was the way the men he’d hunted had felt on the day when someone finally knocked on their door and called them by their proper name. A strange mixture of fear and relief.

But in his case, the price had been too high. It had cost him Erik.

If only Elsy’s daughter hadn’t brought over the medal. That small piece of metal symbolized everything they’d spent all those years trying to forget, and when it was delivered to his door Erik had taken it as a sign that the time had come for the truth to surface.

Of course they had talked in the past about setting things right if they could, or at least accepting responsibility. Not before the law, for the law was indifferent to crimes so ancient they lay beyond its statute of limitations. But on a human, moral level. They deserved to suffer the shame and condemnation of their peers, their fellow human beings. According to Erik, it was time for them to acknowledge what they had done and stop evading the judgement they deserved. Axel had always managed to talk him out of it, telling him that it would serve no purpose. Nothing they said or did now could change the past and it would be pointless to sacrifice all the good that he’d accomplished in his work merely to exact a penance that would change nothing. Instead he would atone for his sins by continuing to devote himself to that work.