The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren, Rachel Willson-Broyles

Genres: Private Investigators

Synopsis

1970: In an overcrowded Stockholm subway station, a harried father and his two boys are late for their train. Joel, the youngest, is howling in his stroller and his seven-year-old brother, Kristoffer, refuses to take the elevator.
A woman approaches and helpfully offers to lead Kristoffer up the stairs. Reluctantly his father agrees, but when he arrives on the platform Kristoffer and the woman have vanished without a trace. The kidnapping becomes a national sensation, but the boy is never found . . .
Today: Joel, now an adult, goes missing in suspicious circumstances. His frantic wife turns to Danny Katz--an old friend with a troubled past--for help. A brilliant computer programmer and recovering heroin addict, Katz is also the divorced father of two young girls. Katz begins to dig behind the digital veil in search of Joel, even though the investigation quickly interferes with his duties as a parent. Before long, Katz discovers he isn't the only one trying to find Joel.
The deeper Katz digs, the more upsetting the secrets he uncovers about the wealthy and powerful family at the heart of the investigation. Chillingly, the case takes a violent turn that reveals a disorienting connection to Katz's own troubled childhood--soon there will be no backing out of his unofficial investigation.

Release date: January 29, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Stockholm, 1970

He had taken bus 49 from Stadshagen with the younger boy sleeping in the pushchair. It was early June. The seventh of June, to be precise. He would remember the date for the rest of his life.

The older boy was now walking alongside him, holding on to the canopy of the pushchair. The little brown hand was sticky from all the sweets the boy had eaten at the party. A minute ago he’d said that his stomach hurt and he had to throw up, but now they were out in the fresh air and he seemed to feel better.

They had got off at the bus stop at Nordenflychtsvägen. As they waited for the bus to drive off so they could cross the street, the older boy studied the front pages of the newspapers outside the shop. On Aftonbladet’s was a photo from the World Cup in Mexico. The Swedish players’ faces sombre after their loss to Italy at the group stage. Ove Grahn was quoted on the possibility of getting revenge when they played Israel. Expressen had gone for Palme’s state visit to the US.

‘Dad,’ said the boy. ‘I’m hot. Can I take off my jacket?’

‘Sure. Put it in the pushchair.’

Summer had finally arrived, a bit late this year. He had been stressed out all day. First he’d been out on Lidingö to look at the property Gustav had bought for them, where they would build a house in the autumn. Then he’d come in to Stadshagen, where Kristoffer had been invited to a friend’s party, and then he’d gone off to Fridhemsplan with the little guy to have a bite to eat while Joanna visited a friend.

He’d taken the opportunity to have a few beers while Joel slept in the pushchair – three large, strong beers, to be on the safe side – and he’d lost track of time and had to run to the bus to pick Kristoffer up in time.

They walked over the pedestrian crossing. A wino was pissing in Kristinebergs Slottspark. The man hadn’t even bothered to turn away; he was casually showing his cock as he stood there watering the flowers. At least he hadn’t gone that far. He was careful; he never drank so much that he was obviously tipsy.

‘Can I have an ice cream, Dad? It’s hot.’

The boy’s voice warmed his heart, even when he was nagging.

‘Isn’t your bag of sweets enough? And didn’t you have ice cream at the party? Peter’s mum said you did, anyway.’

‘But I want more. Please, Dad . . . it feels like I’m burning up.’

‘Listen, a few minutes ago you were complaining that your stomach hurt and you had to throw up. And now you want ice cream. Which is it?’

‘But I feel better now. My tummy ache is almost gone.’

He loved this little boy, who had come to the world seven and a half years earlier, and who was walking at his side and whining about ice cream and refusing to hold his hand because he thought he was too old for it. That amiable, high little-boy voice. The sense of humour he’d developed, even though he was only seven. And then, the moving fact that he was black, that the blood had skipped a generation, skipped him, and instead settled in a little Swedish boy.

But no matter how much he loved him and no matter how hard it was to resist him, he had no intention of giving him any more treats.

‘Sorry, no more.’

‘But, please . . .’

He yanked the boy towards him as a Volvo Amazon came speeding down Hjalmar Söderbergs Väg and passed them only half a metre away. Fucking roadhog. The boy could easily have run out into the street just now, angry because he hadn’t got his way.

He held tight to the boy’s arm and took a deep breath to calm himself. He looked to the right, where the Traneberg Bridge rose up against the sky. A train that looked like a gigantic caterpillar on wheels rolled into the metro station. No point in getting stressed. They could take the next one. Joanna had gone straight back to the apartment after visiting her friend, and she was making dinner. They would have a cozy evening at home, enjoying Saturday night together, the whole family. And when the children had gone to bed, he and Joanna would open a bottle of wine and look at the drawings for the new house. The house with which his father was trying to buy his love.

The Volvo disappeared down towards Stadshagen and they crossed Hjalmar Söderbergs Väg. The little boy had woken and was sitting up in the pushchair. Joel. The very opposite of his big brother. Pale skin, almost snow-white, with no hint of biracial features. The man loved him just as much as he did Kristoffer, of course, but in a different way – a bit less intensely, a little less painfully. As if Joel hadn’t had time to make as big an impression on him yet.

The door to the ticket hall slid open. He walked a metre to the side in order to look at the timetable. The trains were still running every five minutes; he had two Green Line trains to choose between.

The little guy had started howling – maybe he’d had a bad dream. He looked at the clock on the wall: five thirty. That couldn’t be right. Had he lost track of a whole hour? He looked at his wristwatch: four thirty. But the second hand wasn’t moving. The damn watch had stopped.

A woman came out of the Pressbyrån kiosk with a newspaper under her arm.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘do you happen to know the time? Is it really five thirty?’

‘Sure is. Five thirty. A few minutes past, even.’

She gave him a friendly smile. She was in her fifties. Wearing a kerchief, a colourful cotton dress and rubber boots. She made him think of a farmer’s wife. The way they had looked when he was little, out in the country.

‘Thanks.’

‘It was nothing. Have a nice weekend!’

So he had lost track of a whole hour, which meant that Joanna was waiting for them at home, with dinner ready, wondering where they were. He accidentally ran the pushchair into the metal column in front of the turnstiles. What a fucking place to put a bearing element. The little guy was crying louder; his legs had probably been bumped, even though the collision hadn’t been all that hard.

‘Everyone calm down,’ he said. ‘We’re a little late. Mum is waiting with dinner. We have to try to hurry.’

He handed the ticket to the turnstile guard in the booth and went through the pushchair gate. The little guy was screaming even louder now. He was working up to hysterical tears, and only Joanna could comfort him.

‘There. Shh, please don’t cry now.’

It was the beer. He shouldn’t have had it, or at least not the last two. Even if he wasn’t drunk, they had made his judgement waver, had made him get out of rhythm with the world, lose track of time, run into posts and barely avoid traffic accidents.

Another train was coming into the station; he could hear the thuds in the rails overhead. Several people were streaming in from the street, shoving from behind. The little guy tried to get out of the pushchair, still screaming, and he had to hold on to him with one hand while clutching Kristoffer with the other, thrusting the pushchair ahead with his stomach.

The stairs or the lift?

The stairs would be faster. But the pushchair ramp looked steep, and with Joel about to unravel it was probably a better idea to take the lift. He pressed the call button.

‘Dad, can I take the stairs?’

Kristoffer looked at him with those eyes he couldn’t refuse. Those Caribbean eyes. His own mother’s eyes, although he could barely remember them.

‘No.’

‘Please? I can walk by myself if you take the lift. It’ll be fun.’

‘You’re too little.’

The half-empty bag of sweets he held firmly in his hand. The chocolate-brown child’s hand that wasn’t even half as big as his own. The red goo from a lollipop that was stuck on his cheek. How could he be drunk in the company of his sons?

‘Please! I’ll wait for you up there.’

‘I said no.’

All of a sudden a shadow fell across the boy’s face as someone stopped beside them.

‘You can walk with me if you like. I’ll hold your hand until your dad arrives in the lift.’

It was the woman in the kerchief again. She had come through the turnstile behind them, politely making room for a dad alone with a pushchair and two whining kids. Kristoffer looked at her with wide eyes, judging whether this was someone he ought to be shy of or accept right away. Then Kristoffer looked at him, pleading.

‘Please, Dad, can I go with the lady?’

‘Okay. But hold her hand so you don’t fall. You can see how crowded it is. Lots of people everywhere. And then sit down on the bench up there and wait until I arrive in a minute.’

‘I’ll sit with him until you’re there,’ the woman said gently. ‘Come on now, young man, let’s go.’

Kristoffer smiled at him, showing his missing teeth. The woman gave him a motherly look. He would never forget it. Some moments, some images, would forever drill their way into his consciousness.

He watched as they started up the stairs. Kristoffer’s little hand in the woman’s larger one. She said something to him and he looked up at her with his big eyes and nodded in agreement just as the lift dinged its arrival in the ticket hall.

He pushed the pushchair in and pressed the up button. His brain took small Polaroid pictures that would later etch themselves into his memory: the coffered ceiling with its three lights. The sign: 750 kilograms or ten people. The cigarette butts on the floor, the half-empty beer can in one corner.

The lift stopped at platform level, swaying slightly. He opened the door, having no idea why he had broken out in a cold sweat, and abruptly he felt sober. The little guy was totally quiet now, as if he no longer wanted to be a bother. He walked quickly along the walkway to the tracks. A wall of metal grating on one side. Plexiglas on the other – you could see across the tracks, but you couldn’t see the stairs. A westbound train was in the station; the last few passengers were getting on. The driver shouted the usual ‘Please take your seats, the doors are closing’ as he hurried forward. He heard the sucking sound as the train doors closed and the squeal of the metal wheels as the train began moving.

The glass door to the stairs opened. Soon he would see Kristoffer sitting there on the bench, waiting for him with his bag of sweets in his hand, beside the woman.

His beloved Kristoffer.

He turned the corner with the pushchair and looked around. The stairs were empty. No one in sight. He could see the lift door he’d stepped through a minute earlier on the lower level, the white tiles on the walls of the stairwell, the two large, fluted glass lights hanging from the ceiling. The graffiti on the empty bench.

Joel had started whimpering again. He unstrapped him from the pushchair and put him down on the floor. Then he turned in the other direction, towards the platform. That was empty, too. Just the rear lights of the train as it disappeared towards Alvik. He turned towards the stairs again, and the ticket hall below. A lone senior citizen with a cane was reading something on a bulletin board.

He called the boy’s name:

‘Kristoffer!’

He was nearly whispering at first, as if he had lost his voice. Then, loudly, in a full panic:

‘Kristoffer! KRISTOOFFEER!’

His voice echoed off the walls, and then, as far off as if it were coming from another world, another time, he heard Joel, who had started to cry again.

For Katz, it all started with a melody. Six notes in each phrase, floating between major and minor:

I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel . . . Dull and distant, as if the music, or he himself, were underwater. I focus on the pain/The only thing that’s real.

To his surprise, there was a strange woman squatting next to him, holding a spoon. She didn’t seem to hear the music, or else she didn’t care. Too desperate, Katz thought; the brain had an incredible ability to shut out anything that wasn’t essential.

She handed him a ten-pack of five-millilitre syringes from a handbag. The standard orange-topped kind, which matched the veins in most people’s arms. She had separate implements for herself. Tuberculin syringes with detachable needles. To draw blood from the feet or hands, where the veins were smaller. He sneaked a look at her arms. Long-sleeved blouse. The same trick he used. Always long-sleeved shirts with cuffs, to hide the scars.

The needle tears a hole/The old familiar sting/Try to kill it all away/But I remember everything . . .

He thought he saw his parents at a distance, under the bridge abutment. Anne and Benjamin, arm in arm, always so bound up in their love, always keeping everyone else out – not least him. He hated them for it, his Norrlander mother and his Jewish father. Wasn’t it true, even though he never wanted to admit it? Then they disappeared, dead as they were, behind a pillar marred with graffiti.

He looked around. Was this where he lived now, was he back at square one, on the street? On a dirty mattress next to a ventilation grate under a bridge in north-western Stockholm?

Someone had used stones to mark a sort of property line around the sleeping place, or maybe it was meant to depict a symbolic bedroom wall. A pair of boots stood nearby on a piece of tarp. His own?

He looked down at the water, towards the swimming area and the marina on the other side of the sound. Traneberg Bridge, once the world’s longest concrete-arched bridge, rose above him; it had been built at a time when a belief in the future ruled the country, but nowadays it was a refuge for addicts and the homeless.

‘Dol Fool’, ‘Drag’ and ‘Sork’, he read on the pillars. The taggers had thrown their spray cans on the ground afterwards. Farther off, there was a scattering of small cotton balls; one might mistake them for flowers in the May warmth – daisies, he thought.

Katz remembered the desperate addicts at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin fifteen years earlier, toothless Kotti junkies who crouched by the canal, setting fire to old cotton balls to squeeze out the last bit of junk, collecting enough for half a shot of brown horse to mix with citric acid. People who took water from puddles on the street, or from toilet tanks in public lavatories. He’d done it, too, he had to admit, when he was at his worst. He’d been lucky to survive.

You could have it all/My empire of dirt . . .

The melody went on, mechanically somehow, from far away. A kingdom of shit, he thought; he wanted to give it away – he thought he’d already got rid of it.

‘The tar is plugging up the syringe, fucking crap heroin.’

The woman was desperate. And he was, too, he realized. That terrible bodily longing for the kick, to kill everything with the buzz. The longing for emptiness. Timelessness. The bodily homecoming. The woman swore . . . goddamn fucking shit . . . as she fumbled with the equipment. Where had he met her? He recognized her, but he didn’t remember where from.

A newspaper lay open on the ground. And on it was a soup spoon with a bent handle, to lessen the risk of losing the dose. He could see the fear in her eyes now, and he suggested that she snort a little of it to calm down.

‘Shut up, don’t mess me up . . .’

‘Fuck it, then.’

He didn’t care any more. He prepared his own dose instead, taking the bottle of water out of his jacket pocket, filling the syringe and emptying it into the bottom half of a Coke can, where the heroin was already waiting. Cooking, waiting. He tore a piece of cotton from the tampon she’d taken out of her bag, he rolled it into a ball for a filter and pulled the dose into the syringe. He was surprised at how sure his hand was after all these years; it was like swimming or cycling – once you’d learned how, you could do it for the rest of your life.

He rolled up his sleeve, took the nylon stocking she’d laid out and knotted it just above his elbow. He tapped the last few air bubbles out of the syringe and pressed the plunger down until it touched the solution.

It had been ten years, and every motion was still there. And he was just as good at injecting with his left hand as with his right; he’d practised it because it had been a matter of life and death back then, because he took so much junk that he constantly had to rotate injection sites and he had to be able to shoot up into his right arm if the left one didn’t respond, and to do it quickly and painlessly before withdrawal made it impossible.

Sunlight filtered in between the pillars of the bridge. A metro train rushed past thirty metres above his head, slowing down as it approached the station in Alvik. It was a sunny afternoon; the warm May weather had arrived suddenly after a period of cold and snow that had lasted late into April.

Did he live here now? Was he homeless again? No, his office was only a few hundred metres away in Traneberg – he’d just been there, bent over his computer . . . or had someone changed the timeline, placing the end at the beginning, or the other way around?

That wasn’t right. He knew who he was: Danny Katz, forty-four years old, only child of two parents who died young. Former interpreter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Former civilian translator and computer programmer with the armed forces. Former homeless drug addict. But he was on his feet again. Self-employed. Nothing remarkable – he ran a small translation firm and received freelance assignments from private firms and, sometimes, the military. It didn’t bring in that much money, but it was enough for him to break even, to pay for the two-room apartment in the same building as his office, for his modest life with no excesses, because excesses would inevitably lead him back here, to a life on the street.

Farther down by the water, where his parents had just disappeared, there was now a man. Naked, it seemed. It was as if he had built-in binoculars and could zoom in on him. Yes, a naked man, wounds on his legs, leaking blood. He didn’t understand it. The vision. A sign of some sort. But when he blinked and looked again, the man was gone.

He fixed his gaze on the inside of his forearm instead, tapping it a little with his fingertips, pulling a bit at the tie, and found the vein he needed. He aimed the needle at his arm at a twenty-degree angle, towards his heart; always in the direction of his heart. A good angle, he thought, not too steep; otherwise, he risked going through the vein.

He didn’t understand. Why was he doing this? Ten years after he finally managed to get clean. Ten years of NA meetings, ten years of daily struggle. The short time on methadone, the first treatment programme down in Ytterjärna, paid for by his former military colleague Rickard Julin, who had dedicated so much power and prestige to getting him into the system again, giving him a job, managing the old network, smoothing the way for him, putting him in contact with clients. That would all be in vain now. He was throwing it all away.

This couldn’t be right. What had his last assignment been? An IT firm had requested information about a Belarussian telephone company; he had translated a couple of balance sheets for them, as well as some articles from a business journal in Minsk.

He hesitated, the needle one centimetre deep in his arm, mechanically pulling back the plunger to see if he’d hit his mark.
Dark-red blood, never bright red, then you’ve missed the vein. He didn’t want to inject the dose into tissue by mistake, then it would just swell up and hurt terribly, and it would take forever for the kick to hit him.

Now!

He had found it; the blood was dark red, trickling into the syringe. He pulled off the tie with his teeth and injected. The rush came immediately. He collapsed around his own skeleton, let his flesh rest on the scaffolding of bones and cartilage, and his eyelids came down like blinds. The feeling was divine; he realized how much he had missed it. He pulled the needle out slowly; the blood squirted up on the front of his shirt, but he didn’t care any more – he just took a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and pressed it against the site of the injection.

There was a different man standing where the naked man had stood, and he was wearing a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. He blinked until the man disappeared like the dream-vision he likely was. Another train rumbled above his head.

He looked at the woman again. Her dose was ready now, and she held the syringe up to the light and emptied it of bubbles. Her raven-black hair framed a symmetrical face with vaguely Asian features. Blue-green eyes, beautifully formed mouth. White skin. Like Snow White.

‘I recognize you,’ he said. ‘Where have we met?’

‘We don’t know each other . . . you just think we do.’

Strange answer, he thought, as she searched for a vein, first at her hip; she pulled her pants and burgundy underwear down a bit, but then she changed her mind and her broken nails felt around up by her jugular. Too close to the carotid artery, he thought, please don’t inject it there!

To his relief, she found a vein in her right upper arm instead and injected the dose with a resolute expression. Right away she started booting – pulling the plunger back and forth, drawing out blood which she then re-injected, to rinse out every microgram of the dose.

‘So we just met right here?’ he slurred, gesturing at the mattress.

‘I just happened by. But you live here.’

‘Under the bridge?’

‘Yes – shit, you’re badly off. And people are looking for you. Someone wants to set you up.’

He nodded as if accepting what she’d said, as if he had already submitted to his new reality.

‘So who are you?’

‘Me? I’m no one . . .’

Her pupils were so small he could hardly see them. She had collapsed and was half lying against him; her underpants stuck up above her waistband at the back. Lifeless. He wondered if she’d overdosed, if he should call 112 for an ambulance, ask them to bring Narcan, which they could inject straight into her chest to bring her back to life.

Then he saw the bite marks. A line of bloody wounds around her neck made by teeth, bites that had ripped through the skin. Like that time with Eva Dahlman, his first girlfriend, whom he had been accused of beating unconscious and biting like a wild animal. He had been convicted for it. Sixteen years old. He’d been sent to yet another reform school, where things had finally turned around for him: he had decided to make a break with his old life, get away from crime. But it hadn’t been him! He hadn’t been in a condition to do anything like that, no matter what the technical evidence had shown.

I wear this crown of shit/Upon my liar’s chair/Full of broken thoughts/I cannot repair . . .

Where was the music coming from? He looked around, but he couldn’t find the source.

And the woman who seemed to have fallen asleep on his lap – who was she? He stroked the black hair away from her face, laid her on the mattress and got up.

Five notes in each phrase now, the shifts between major and minor, just a melody, no words any more; he had added those in his head. He recognized it. Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’.

The notes . . . getting stronger and stronger, seeming to reach him from the bottom of his consciousness, erasing his surroundings, the bridge, the woman, the dirty mattress, the syringes, the junk. It was the ringtone on his mobile, he remembered triumphantly as he climbed ever faster towards the surface of consciousness, but just as a melody, without Trent Reznor’s bitter voice. And the melody kept playing until he managed to grab the phone, which lay next to him on the floor of his apartment.

He sat up and answered the call. He saw the grey light filtering in through the blinds of his bedroom window; he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone.

She sounded like the woman under the bridge, like Eva Dahlman, except at the same time she didn’t. As if the timeline were out of order.

Angela Klingberg was a strikingly beautiful woman. Beautiful in a way that must cause her problems, Katz thought as he sat down across from her in one corner of Ritorno, the old café on Odengatan where they’d arranged to meet. Considering to whom she was married, it was natural that she was dressed so elegantly. He made note of the Hermès handbag at her feet, the expensive gloves on the table, her angora sweater, her discreet make-up and the almost as discreet diamond bracelet around her left wrist. She was about thirty-five, blonde, lanky, with an aura that was simultaneously sad and attentive. He felt a stab of pain at the thought that she was taken, and he was surprised by that feeling, by how low it was – but also how honest.

Until her phone call that morning, he hadn’t even known she existed. Actually, despite the wedding ring on her left hand, he had a hard time picturing her married to Joel Klingberg – or maybe it was just difficult to picture Klingberg being married at all.

As he took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, he wondered why he’d agreed to meet her. Curiosity had to be one reason. Twenty-five years earlier, when he’d just managed to break away from his life as a juvenile delinquent, he and Joel Klingberg had both been students at the Armed Forces Interpreter Academy. They had been in the same barracks during their basic training in Karlsborg, and after that they shared a room for two intensive semesters of Russian studies in Uppsala. What little he knew about Klingberg’s life since then was only what he’d read in the papers – gossipy reports about the upper-class circles he moved in; pictures of parties where Klingberg, with his sombre looks, didn’t seem to fit in; items about a real-estate firm he and a few friends from his boarding school in Sigtuna ran on the Riviera for a short time, just to get some business experience. After that, he’d studied law and done a year at th. . .