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  But now the sensation-hungry hacks were taking the opportunity to depict Agneta as a mother figure to anyone who’d grown up between the years 1965 and 1990.

  She didn’t dare buy any copies of the papers, even if it would be good to know which other photos of her they had. She hoped that her new appearance was sufficient disguise.

  Hoped, but she needed to be certain.

  A grey crew cut, no makeup and a pair of thick-rimmed reading glasses. A new coat – a cheap one from H&M, so that she used as little of her war kitty as possible.

  The haircut felt good. It was a bit like being young again. Her schooling, the training camp, the constant state of readiness. The restlessness and the commitment. The same haircut that she’d had back then, when she’d been passionate about something. When she’d made the choices that were governing her actions today.

  She wondered what her daughters would say if they could see her now. Now that the groundskeeper and housewife had been peeled away. Would they be able to understand who she was? What she was?

  What would her daughters think? What would they make of their own childhood when the truth about their parents eventually emerged? That the girls had simply been – in one way – part of a facade? Pawns in Agneta’s game. Did that change anything? Would they view their childhoods differently? She supposed they would, but how?

  She knew that when that big Russian spy ring in the USA had been uncovered in 2010, and the spies had been deported after spending almost twenty years living under false identities, at least one child of the various couples had remained in the USA and continued his career as a pianist. He’d opted to transform his fictitious life into his real one, because that was what he had believed in.

  But which parts of Agneta’s life were real?

  Well, that was surely what all this was about. All the secret loyalties and hidden agendas meant that it wasn’t easy to know what was true.

  If anything was.

  She could only hope that her children would continue to live their lives on their own terms – that they wouldn’t assume and perpetuate their parents’ poor choices. Agneta was ready to do everything she could to protect her grandchildren. To bring an end to the damnation. The traitor’s original sin.

  She’d had her daughters when she was still absorbed by the mission – the struggle for peace. She’d had them as part of her cover; she was aware of that.

  It was unfair on them. She was also aware of that. But the grandchildren had come into the world when it had all been over. Or when she’d believed it was all over. When she’d dared to become Agneta Broman for real.

  She didn’t want to lose them in the way she felt she’d lost her daughters – or, at least, lost the right to call herself their mother. Since she’d had them for a purpose, rather than for their own sake. Not even for her own sake.

  The grandchildren were the proof that normal life was the victor over ideology in the long run. They had grown up completely ignorant of the threats and dark alliances that had marked Agneta’s own life. The Cold War and all the old enemies were completely alien to them. They were a symbol of real life. The life that even she had begun to believe in after all those years.

  The square at Mariatorget was full of people. Tourists from Asia, young girls with dyed hair and nose rings, fifty-year-old beardy guys you only found in the Söder neighbourhood, with flat backsides and T-shirts emblazoned with the names of guitar manufacturers. She’d been lucky to find a spare seat on one of the park benches, and had taken the chance to enjoy the sun and rest for a while. But now it was time.

  A ball came rolling towards her. She stood and picked it up before walking over to Hugo.

  ‘Does this belong to you?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was no credit due to Malin that Hugo had said ‘thank you’. Her daughter hadn’t much cared about the raising of her children. It had been Agneta who’d taken care to ensure they said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. And asked whether they could leave the table.

  However, the important thing was that Hugo hadn’t recognised her. Despite the fact that he’d just spent an entire week in her company.

  Agneta remained where she was until her grandson had gone back to Malin. She put her hand in her coat pocket and ran her fingers over the object she’d taken with her from home – the secret weapon that was going to help her if she encountered any obstacles. She felt immediately reinforced by the power of it. Then she pushed the object to one side and caressed the barrel of the Makarov in her pocket. In her other pocket she had Kellner’s Smith & Wesson. If the test didn’t go according to plan, then she would need to make her getaway – and fast. A shot in the air ought to be enough. Or into someone’s leg, so that there was also a real shriek of fear.

  Predictably enough, her daughter was holding a latte in her well-manicured hand and chatting to a friend. Next to her was a handbag that had cost the same as two washing machines.

  Hugo pointed at Agneta, and her daughter looked at her distractedly but didn’t respond. Perfect.

  She went over the checklist:

  Meet her grandchildren and remind herself why she was doing this – check.

  Test her new appearance in a tight spot – check. Her nearest and dearest hadn’t recognised her.

  She was no one now. She was invisible.

  For safety’s sake, she strolled past Malin and the friend as she left. From the corner of her eye, she saw her daughter looking straight at her without recognising her. Agneta let go of the pistol, removed her hand from her pocket and closed the zip.

  Now she didn’t have to be so worried that someone might recognise her. She was free to act.

  Now she could concentrate on the meeting that was to come.

  27

  The entire apartment was dark when Sara got home. There was light visible in the crack at the bottom of Olle’s door, but otherwise everywhere was dark. He was often up late playing computer games unless someone told him to stop. Sara hadn’t been able to make up her mind what she thought about his gaming. She’d forbidden him from playing the most violent releases, and had had to be clear with Martin that he was not to buy those games for himself either. They had to set a good example. But what was she supposed to make of all the hours spent gaming, if the games themselves were harmless? Wasn’t it just a hobby like any other? Would they have imposed any equivalent of their screen time limits on Olle if he’d been interested in stamp collecting as an alternative? Or football? Wasn’t it the countless hours of training that had turned Zlatan Ibrahimovic into the player he was? Or Björn Borg, back in the day – he’d hit tennis balls against a garage door in Södertälje hour after hour, day after day. How exactly did computer gaming differ from other interests? Sara carried on through the apartment while she turned this over in her head. Even though the evenings were light, the apartment was so big that it was still necessary to turn on the odd light here and there.

  Sara remembered that Ebba was at another party. There really were parties every single evening at the moment. And it felt as if they were much wilder than they’d been back in Sara’s day. More alcohol, more sex – maybe there were drugs, too.

  Sara found her husband asleep on the living room sofa, his beloved Martin guitar in his arms. The same name as its owner – that had to mean something, surely, Martin used to say.

  Was this how he spent his evenings when she was gone?

  Striking chords? Keeping his dreams of rock stardom alive? The guitar had cost over 40,000 kronor, so Sara was careful as she prised it free from his grasp so that he wouldn’t drop it on the floor or roll over onto it.

  Paying 43,000 kronor for a guitar that he was almost incapable of playing, she thought to herself. Like hiring the biggest stage at the national theatre to tell a joke.

  Martin let out a snore, and Sara looked at him. There was drool all over his chin. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  Her catch.

  Would she have gone to the lengths she had to get him, if Lo
tta hadn’t tried to take him from her?

  If she was being honest, she wasn’t sure. The decision to win him over had undeniably had an impact on Sara’s whole life.

  Ebba and Olle.

  The years when Martin had been trying to break through as an artist, and they’d lived on her salary.

  When he’d sold his company and they’d been able to move into this gigantic apartment.

  Spending time with his parents.

  Without Martin, none of that would have been a part of Sara’s life.

  Suddenly she felt ashamed. She tried to shake off the feeling that Martin was, more than anything, proof that she’d won against the sisters. Revenge for a childhood spent under their heel. She’d got the guy that Malin had been infatuated with, and Lotta had tried to snare.

  Was Martin just a symbol for the fact that Sara always had to win?

  And if that was true, once she’d won, what was she supposed to hang around for?

  Martin had been part of the idyll in Bromma. He’d lived just a couple of blocks away and had often passed by with his mates on a bicycle, later to be replaced by a moped and then a motorbike, before eventually ending up with a car. They’d been checking out Lotta while Malin and Sara had been checking them out. Older boys. Martin had been in eighth grade and Malin and Sara had been in sixth grade when Jane had suddenly quit at the Bromans and taken her daughter to Vällingby, just a week before the schools broke up for the summer holidays. When her classmates had sung ‘Now Comes the Time for Flowers’, Sara had been alone in an echoey, empty flat with a bowl of Sugar Puffs. Back then, she’d thought she would never see her idol again – but the move had merely delayed her plans for love a few years, rather than crushing them entirely.

  Sara remembered how jealous she’d been when she’d heard the rumour that Martin had slept with Lotta. It had been at Malin’s graduation party – the same party at which she’d hit rock bottom. There had been something going on with Martin, but if it had ended up with them being together that night, then it might just have been a passing teenage infatuation that lasted a year or so before they went their separate ways. When Lotta had got involved, things had turned serious in a completely different way.

  Now that she’d been allowed back into the sisters’ lives, she didn’t intend to give him up. Martin was hers.

  Sara had spent the whole summer feeling sorry for herself because she’d been cut out by Lotta, until one day she’d been taking off her makeup after attending a fashion show at the NK department store. She’d looked in the mirror and thought to herself that if she was good enough to be a model at Stockholm’s hottest agency, then perhaps she didn’t have to be so under-confident.

  She’d simply called Martin and asked him whether he wanted a coffee. And he did. To begin with, there had been a slightly weird, hesitant atmosphere – probably as a result of what had happened at Malin’s party. But it seemed as if neither of them wanted to leave the other – that they were both hoping for something.

  And after an hour or so, they’d both loosened up and they’d carried on seeing each other.

  The realisation that she had the power to control her own life had been decisive for Sara. It had induced her to quit modelling after a couple of years. She’d started martial arts training, and read lots of rambling self-help books about taking command of your own existence. She’d jumped between different jobs in cafes, domestic care, working as a courier and as a caretaker – until she’d finally settled on the idea of being a police officer. By then, she and Martin had moved in together and he was getting by in the entertainment industry. The most common fee he received was free beer, so their rent had been paid with Sara’s salary.

  Over those years, Sara had had almost no contact with her mother. It was only really after the kids had been born that she rekindled the relationship – with decided reluctance. She realised now that the reason she’d broken away from her mother was to do with her own personality, and how ashamed she’d been at the anger she felt towards Jane.

  But she’d never understood the point of the move away from Bromma. Instead of cooking and cleaning in Stellan and Agneta’s home, Jane had cleaned schools for the rest of Sara’s childhood. Was that better? Had she felt inferior to the Bromans because she dealt with their dirty laundry – because she was dependent on them? It was thanks to them she’d found a job as a young, pregnant, recently arrived woman escaping the Polish dictatorship.

  Sara picked up her laptop and went online to search for the sisters’ names. She convinced herself that it was connected to the investigation, but she knew in her heart of hearts that wasn’t true. Lotta and Malin had begun to eat away at her brain again, and she wanted to find a way to put some distance between them. She wanted to free herself from their influence.

  By the time she’d reached the second page of links about Malin, she’d found articles, blogs and forum posts about her stint presenting Sommarbubbel. Sara read everything carefully. Malin had been a disaster – she’d turned to the wrong camera, asked the guests daft questions and not understood their answers. Most of the other links were about shows where she’d worked behind the camera, and the reviews in that regard were much more mixed. And there were lots of crowd photos from celebrity and TV parties. Plus the mandatory thread on a major online forum where lonely men shared their gossip and fantasies about famous women who were out of reach, in terms that were awful. In this case, Malin Broman was listed under the heading ‘Where are they now?’

  Lotta’s appearances in crowds were only at serious events – if a party could be described as serious. Parties at the development agency, those thrown by other aid organisations, Almedalen Week, some TV gala with a touching purpose. The Guldbagge film awards gala. Otherwise, there were lots of links to the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s work, to committees she’d been on, her career in the athletics movement and much more. The only actually negative things Sara could find were a few articles about aid to organisations that the writers argued were supporting terrorism, where Lotta was made the scapegoat, given that she was the boss.

  Her browsing was interrupted by a strange hissing. Sara left the computer and headed towards the sound. In the kitchen, their cat Walter was skittering about. He was scratching his claws along the floor, jumping up, wandering around and then returning to the same spot. He would lie there, still and waiting, then shoot out a paw and strike again before resuming his dance. Then Sara saw that he’d caught a mouse. That was how it was in Stockholm’s old town – there were rodents all over the place, in the pipes and walls. It was a relief that it wasn’t one of the big sewer rats, but if it had been one of those, it would probably have got the better of Walter.

  Then the game stopped. The cat abandoned the mouse, went over to his food bowl and ate hungrily after the physical exertion.

  Sara went over to look. The mouse had been bitten on the body several times and it was now in pain. Dying and suffering. It might be drawn-out. Walter no longer cared. She sighed. She really didn’t want to do it, but she fetched a small plastic bag and a hammer. She wrapped the bag around her hand, picked up the mouse and turned the bag inside out. Then she put it on the floor and crushed the mouse with a hammer blow. She hated doing it, but she didn’t want it to die slowly and painfully, and she didn’t want to ask her husband to do it either – it seemed too nineteenth-century.

  Walter didn’t react to the blow. He merely wandered out of the kitchen without looking back.

  Sara found it hard to make head or tail of his various character traits. On the one hand, he was a cuddly cat – the world’s friendliest; he loved being stroked and never bit anyone. He didn’t jump down to the floor if you put him on your lap. On the other hand, he was a sadistic murderer and mouse torturer.

  She flushed the mouse corpse down the toilet and threw the bloody bag in the bin. On the way down the hall, she saw that the light was still on in Olle’s room. Had he fallen asleep and forgotten to turn off the light?


  Sara opened the door and saw Olle at his computer. Over his shoulder, the screen was showing two busty naked girls taking turns to suck a huge black penis. Olle slammed the laptop shut as soon as he heard the door open.

  ‘What is it?’ he said in a stressed tone of voice.

  ‘I was just coming to turn off the light.’ Sara was shaken. ‘Were you watching porn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But don’t you know that they exploit people?’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘There are better depictions of sex, if you want to watch that kind of thing. But that’s just downright degradation of women.’

  ‘Out!’

  Her son leaped up from his chair and shoved Sara out of the room. She shouted through the closed door.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ she attempted to say.

  There was no answer. It was as if there were an invisible wall between them. If they didn’t discuss this now, the wall might always be there.

  ‘Olle, we really could do with talking about this.’ She paused briefly to wait for a reply. It didn’t come. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it’s really a dreadful industry.’

  Still no reply.

  Jesus.

  Perhaps she was just making the wall even higher now.

  Of course he was ashamed. And angry. Your own mother discovering you doing something sexual – it didn’t get worse than that. Plus the fact that you know what you’re doing is wrong. Olle was fully aware of Sara’s views on the porn industry. But it was so easily accessible – so easy to find. And those interests in the younger teenage years could be extensive. Guiding her son to ‘good’ porn felt weird – a mother shouldn’t get involved in her children’s sex lives. Unless they had questions, of course. Normal questions. Not questions about where to find good porn films.

  Sara was convinced that it was all connected – porn and prostitution. It was as if Olle was nudging open the door to a world that she knew was incredibly dirty and depressing. A world she really wished didn’t exist.