She blinked hard, didn’t want to see.
“Who would do such a thing?” he asked.
“No one,” she said.
He looked at her. Someone had.
“I don’t know. Everyone liked her,” she repeated. Loved her, she thought.
“Anything else that strikes you as strange or unusual, lately?”
“I haven’t seen her since February. I don’t know what was going on in her life recently.” It hurt to admit that.
“Was she politically active?”
“No. She had strong opinions of right and wrong . . . of justice, but she wasn’t engaged in a party or anything . . .”
She didn’t tell him about Britta supposedly meeting with Sven Olov Lindholm. Andreas could tell him that himself. She still didn’t believe it.
“Why did you come here to look for her?” he asked.
“Like I said, it was the only place left. We went to her dorm. Andreas had asked in class.”
“Who comes here?”
“The history students. The professors.”
“Who has a key to this house?”
“You’ll have to ask the administration. The caretaker does. There’s a key at the historical administration. It hangs on the wall. We all know this.”
“All, as in . . . ?”
“Students, teachers . . . But why?” she said. “Why on earth would anyone do this? Britta was . . .” her voice broke. Lovely. Wonderful. Harmless.
He didn’t respond.
“Is there anything else you can think of that might be important?” he asked instead. “Arguments, past lovers . . . ?”
She shook her head. There were plenty of past lovers, of course, but that had been innocent. They had fought—their group—toward the end, but that had nothing to do with this. She thought back to Britta’s room. Something about it still bothered her.
The image of her ravaged friend floated up before her again. “Her upper body.” Her hand flew up to touch her own blouse. “Her eye . . . What happened to her?”
He shut his book. For a moment she thought he wouldn’t respond. “It looks as if she was tortured,” he said then.
Laura gasped. To hear it said out loud . . . “Tortured?”
He nodded. She covered her mouth, then removed her hand. “And shot?” she asked, remembering the wound in the temple.
He nodded again. “We will know more after the autopsy.”
Laura shivered. “The shot to her temple . . . It’s so . . . cold.”
“I don’t know,” he said, rising to stand. “The coldest wounds can display the most passion, don’t you think?”
2.
Jens
It’s not reasonable.” Daniel Jonsson, one of the archivists, followed Jens Regnell down the corridors—not for the first time—waving a bunch of papers. “You have to tell him.”
“I have.” Jens took the steps up to the second floor two at a time. You don’t know how many times, he thought.
They were in the Arvfurstens palats, the seat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The unreasonable person they were speaking about was the minister himself, Christian Günther, to whom Jens was a secretary.
“He’s been doing this since the beginning of his tenure. There must be archives. Especially now, when we’re changing our positions, there must be trails of what we say and do.”
The civil servant’s curly gray hair was standing on end as if he had thrust his fingers through it before coming to find Jens. His glasses had slid down his nose and he pushed them up with a finger as he blinked and walked sideways trying to catch Jens’s gaze.
“The minister runs things the way he decides,” Jens said. “And he is successful.”
This was a partial truth. In his short time with Christian Günther, Jens had learned that the foreign minister was popular with the prime minister, detested by the Swedish people, mistrusted by the press, perceived as pro-German.
The archivist scoffed. “He doesn’t follow the government’s policies but makes up his own as he goes.”
Jens slowed his steps. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said.
The archivist gave him a look—you know I’m right—and they walked a couple of steps in silence.
Jens did know Daniel was right. He might be new in his post, but he had heard the rumors. German activities approved with no government protocols or records, least of all from Günther. Sweden might be neutral, but they’d had to acquiesce, even now with Allied pressure on them to “cut the Germans off, or else . . .” It was a balancing act. Sweden was completely dependent on German imports and although, after Stalingrad, Günther had instructed his staff that their foreign policies must now include the possibility of a German defeat, Germany had not yet lost. The commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, Törnell, still thought they would win.
“There are rules,” Daniel said. “If he won’t record the minutes of the meetings, you’ll have to.”
Jens wanted to laugh. Or cry. At most meetings, Günther would ask his staff to leave, despite them grumbling it was against due process. In their communications, the Germans called him an “unobjectionable friend of Germany.”
Jens stopped. In the gold-framed mirror behind Daniel he caught a glimpse of himself: too blond, too blue-eyed, too bloody earnest; a schoolboy soon to turn thirty-five in some dressing-up game, wearing a dark suit and a white shirt with a darker tie. What on earth was he doing here?
“Listen,” he said to Daniel. “I will do what I can. What are you missing?”
“The records show there have been several phone calls between our minister and the Danish foreign minister over the last few weeks. I spoke with my counterpart in Denmark and he said the exiled Norwegian foreign affairs minister was also involved. These contacts aren’t logged at our end. There aren’t any notes. I need to at least log them and list what was discussed.”
“I’m sure they were just updating each other on recent events.”
“There should still be records.”
“Weren’t they listened to?”
Calls had been monitored by the Security Services since the beginning of the war—listened to, registered. Mail was read and censored. Daniel had likely gotten his information from those registers.
Daniel scoffed. “You try getting information out of the Security Services.”
“And your counterparts . . . Didn’t they tell you what the meetings were about?”
“I didn’t ask! What will it look like if it’s revealed we have zero insight?”
The archivist looked dejected. Jens softened.
“I will find out. I promise.” He touched Daniel’s sleeve before turning to walk away. “I promise,” he said again over his shoulder and sensed more than saw his colleague shake his head.
Günther didn’t share anything with anyone. It wasn’t a lack of trust, Jens thought, as much as the belief that he knew best. He simply thought himself better than the others in his department, and the other men in the government, for that matter.
The door to the large meeting room opened and the head of the Foreign Affairs’ political department, Staffan Söderblom, exited, followed by the secretary to Prime Minister Hansson, Jon Olof Söderblom.