Blood Song
BLOOD SONG
A Roy & Castells Thriller
JOHANA GUSTAWSSON
translated by David Warriner
For Elsa,
My little sister, my kindred spirit.
‘Is the sea beautiful?’
‘Yes, it is very beautiful.’
‘That’s what people who have seen it say. I would like it to be true – that it’s very beautiful.’
‘Why?’
‘Because my sons lie in the sea.’
—Dulce Chacón, The Sleeping Voice.
Quotation translated by Johana Gustawsson.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Falkenberg, Sweden
Grant Road, Harrow, London
El Palomar, Spain
Flask Walk, Hampstead, London, home of Emily Roy
Falkenberg, Strandbaden Hotel
El Palomar, Spain
Skrea Strand, Falkenberg
Falkenberg Police Station
El Palomar, Spain
Falkenberg Police Station
Sunday, 4 November 1990
Olofsbo, Falkenberg, home of the Bergströms
Alicante, Spain
Falkenberg, home of the Lindberghs
Monday, 12 November 1990
Gothenburg Forensic Laboratory, Sweden
Las Ventas Women’s Prison, Madrid, Spain
Skrea Strand, Falkenberg, home of Carina Isaksson
Falkenberg Police Station
Strandbaden Hotel, Falkenberg
Las Ventas Women’s Prison, Madrid
Falkenberg Police Station
Thursday, 22 November 1990
Gustaf Bratt restaurant, Falkenberg
Las Ventas Women’s Prison, Madrid, Spain
Old Town, Falkenberg
Monday, 7 September 1992
Gothenburg, home of the Blom family
Las Ventas Women’s Prison, Madrid
Gothenburg, home of Albin Månsson
5 Calle San Isidro, Madrid, prison for nursing mothers
Lindbergh Clinic, Gothenburg
Falkenberg Police Station
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Falkenberg Police Station
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Diplomat Hotel, Stockholm
Diplomat Hotel, Stockholm
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Grand Hotel, Falkenberg
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Falkenberg, home of the Lindberghs
Falkenberg Police Station
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Falkenberg Police Station
Calle de Alfonso XII, Madrid
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Murillo Café, Calle Ruiz de Alarcón, Madrid
The Principal Hotel, Madrid
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Chocolatería San Ginés, Madrid
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Chocolatería San Ginés, Madrid
The Principal Hotel, Madrid
The Principal Hotel, Madrid
60 Avenida de Menéndez Pelayo, Madrid
Thursday, 17 May 2012
El Retiro Park, Madrid
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
The Principal Hotel, Madrid
Coca, Spain
La Virgen de los Desamparados Orphanage, Madrid
Coca, Spain, home of Pedro Santos
Friday, 1 June 2012
Coca, Spain, home of Pedro Santos
Plaza de la Corrala, Madrid
Olofsbo, Falkenberg, home of Stellan Eklund
Falkenberg Police Station
Skrea Strand, Falkenberg, home of the Lindberghs
Skrea Strand, Falkenberg, home of the Lindberghs
Skrea Strand, Falkenberg, home of the Lindberghs
Friday, 2 December 2016
Strandbaden Hotel, Falkenberg
Flask Walk, Hampstead, London, home of Emily Roy
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Translator
Copyright
Author’s Note
PARTS OF THE BOOK you are about to read take place in Spain, during the Civil War and under the Franco regime.
During the Spanish Civil War, Republicans and Nationalists battled for nearly three years. The Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, emerged victorious in 1939. Franco went on to tyrannise Spain for thirty-six years, until his death in 1975.
Every dictatorship brings its share of atrocities. The Franco regime was no exception and under it Spain suffered one of Europe’s highest death tolls of the twentieth century, second only to Germany. Here are some numbers that may convey some sense of the sheer scale of Franco’s repression:
During the Spanish Civil War, between 1936 and 1939, 150,000 people were executed by Franco’s army – not counting the many more who died in combat.
From 1939 to 1940, Franco’s regime imprisoned close to a million people.
More than 500,000 prisoners of war were deported to around 200 concentration camps.
300,000 women and men were incarcerated in prisons that were only made to hold 20,000 inmates.
In March 1939, nearly 500,000 people fled Spain and crossed the border into France.
Between 1944 and 1954, more than 30,000 children disappeared without a trace.
After Franco’s death, some 800 mass graves were discovered all around Spain, containing the remains of an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people who had been arbitrarily executed.
During the same era, Vichy France and Fascist Italy, respectively, imprisoned 60,000 and 15,000 people. For Franco, war was just the first stage in what he – with the Spanish Catholic Church’s blessing – saw as a crusade: the complete eradication of undesirable ‘Reds’ from the country. These included Communists, freemasons, socialists and Republicans – in other words, anyone who did not share the dictator’s ideology. Hence, even the slightest word uttered against the regime or the state, against the Church, the police or the army, would be considered a personal insult to El Caudillo and constitute grounds for immediate arrest.
As an assertion of his power, Franco perpetuated the state of war he had declared in 1936 for twelve years, only lifting it in 1948. For these twelve years he imposed on the people of Spain his state of terror, barbarity, killing, moral repression, Church-sanctioned morality, media censorship and obscurantism. Once his people were enslaved by fear and the Republicans were silenced, Franco used the Church to maintain his grip on the country.
While the victims of execution, deportation and imprisonment were mainly men, women were certainly not spared. If they did not fall victim themselves to arbitrary execution for simply adhering to the Republican ideology, or because they were close to a ‘Red’ loyalist, the killing or imprisonment of their husbands would leave many women socially isolated or struggling in extreme poverty. It is practically impossible to determine exactly how many women were imprisoned for political reasons. The Franco regime did not confer this label on women: as such, their prisons were filled with prostitutes and delinquents. However, according to numbers from Spain’s national institute of statistics, in 1942 there were 7,275 female political prisoners.
Madrid’s Las Ventas prison alone housed close to 11,000 women between 1939 and the end of the Second World War in 1945. It was designed to hold 500 inmates. Those who were mothers were allowed to keep their children until they turned three years old. However, many did not live to that age due to overpopulation, famine, lack of care and hygiene and disease. Meanwhile, their mothers often vegetated for years in these death camps, living in fear that they might be hauled before the firing squad at any time.
The nature of the conflict was what made this dark time in Spain’s past particularly terrifying. This intense and bloody episode of Spanish history saw some of the worst human atrocities imaginable: one people with two political ideologies opposing one another, first with arms, before the ‘victors’ subjected the ‘victims’ to their fierce repression – giving thousands of torturers and executioners the power of life or death over strangers, neighbours, friends, fathers and brothers.
The acts of violence depicted in the historical chapters of this novel were inspired by actual events that have been recognised and confirmed. While these acts are certainly cruel and some may find the images hard to stomach, there has been some softening to spare sensitive readers the most brutal details and avoid these pages sinking too deeply into the misery of those times.
Although the characters who live and die in these pages are the figment of my writerly imagination, the experiences they endure are rooted in the terrible truth of a dark, dark chapter in Spanish history.
—Johana Gustawsson, 2019
Falkenberg, Sweden
Friday, 2 December 2016, 10.00 pm
KERSTIN WISHED SHE COULD have stopped the hands of time ticking. Cling on for just a few more seconds, so she could hold back the monster. Hide it. Tame it, somehow. But she had no longer had a choice. It had been now or never. So she had taken Göran by the hand, thrown open the gates of hell and released her inner demons.
Now Göran was asleep, face down in the well of his pillow. None of the words exchanged after their dinner had stopped sleep from coming and his anger had ebbed away into the night. Set free from the day and numbed by fatigue, his whole bod
y now rested soundly, in childlike surrender.
Kerstin took off her dressing gown and slipped into bed beside him. Placing a hand on her husband’s greying chest, she kissed his shoulder, where it curved to meet his armpit, the sweet spot where she loved to lay her head. She wished she could slide her thigh across Göran’s legs and quiver at the touch of the soft hairs and hard muscles. She longed to hold him until the grief fought its way to the surface and flooded over her. She was waiting for the tears to come. For them to trickle timidly, one held-back drip at a time, then suddenly well into a raging torrent that would sweep her away. She wanted to cough up all the sadness caught in her throat and spit it out. Feel the panic set in as she struggled to breathe. She wanted the sorrow to sweep her away. She wanted to drown in it.
Kerstin shivered and pulled the duvet up to her shoulders. She hated this never-ending darkness. Some days, the sun seemed to never rise at all, and only snow would break up the clouds. Without it the moon could never part the heavy blanket of the night. Their bedroom was above the living room, overlooking the sea. Every night, Kerstin savoured the moment when she would lie in bed, gazing out at the water. But the sea was never more resplendent than when it shimmered in the summertime. Now, on the cusp of winter, it shivered with goosebumps as the wind whipped the surface into whitecaps. Perhaps the snow wasn’t far away, after all.
Earlier, as Kerstin had stepped out of the shower, Göran had asked her to sleep in the guest room; nowhere near him. He had then taken the cushions off the bed, folded the fur throw and placed them all on the chaise longue with the same calm, calculated movements as every other night, but this time avoiding her gaze. Kerstin had left the bedroom in her dressing gown, her damp hair dripping splotches onto the floorboards. She had closed the door behind her and waited as obediently as a dog told to sit outside. With her nose pressed to the door frame she had listened to the silence, and waited for stillness, before opening the door again and getting into bed beside her husband. She didn’t know how to sleep any other way.
Suddenly, she felt a weight descend on her lower abdomen, as if a heavy rock were crushing her pelvis. That was where all her repressed anger tended to build up. According to her acupuncturist, it was a boundary thing – something to do with how she related to others. Whatever. Although perhaps there was some truth to that. She had to admit, she hadn’t really known whether she’d been coming or going that evening. Kerstin massaged her belly in a circular motion, pressing with the tips of her fingers to smooth the edge off the pain.
The mattress heaved as Göran stirred and turned onto his side, staring out to sea, at anything but his wife. Kerstin reached for her husband’s hand, intertwining their fingers, pressing her moist palm to his. Trying to catch his eye. She wanted to draw him closer, put in words what had happened. But Göran twisted out of her embrace as if she were a stranger he couldn’t bear to be around. He threw off the duvet, sprang out of bed and left the room.
Kerstin opened her mouth and drew a deep breath of air; the atmosphere in their bedroom was stifling. Fire flared in her chest, and flames of rage and desperation licked their way up her throat. She clamped her hands over her mouth and screamed. Creases ravaged her face, but the tears never came, only dry sobs. Always the same arid anguish. Except this time, she warmed to it, snuggling up to it as if it were Göran’s arms and she were finding solace in his embrace, taking refuge in his shadow. She let the grief wash over her.
Suddenly, hands grabbed her ankles, yanking her naked body off the bed. Her head cracked against the floorboards, and the pain felt like it was crushing her skull, shooting all the way down to her fingertips. She clawed desperately at the floorboards, but only succeeded in tearing her nails to shreds.
The panic felt like it was tearing her chest apart. As the blows pummelled her body from left to right, all she could do was stare wide-eyed at the ceiling as the searing pain gave way to sheer terror, which paralysed her lungs and her throat.
Louise, Louise, Louise, Louise.
Her sleeping daughter in the bedroom down the hall.
Grant Road, Harrow, London
Saturday, 3 December 2016, 1.00 am
JENNIFER MARSDEN’S FATHER had contacted the police at eight that night. Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Pearce’s first reflex was to turn to Emily Roy. The profiler had interviewed the girl’s parents, then her grandparents, who lived a few doors down the street, before moving on to the neighbours.
Emily looked to Aliénor Lindbergh for the go-ahead. Aliénor nodded. Emily rang the bell and retreated a few steps.
The door was opened almost right away by a thirty-something woman bundled up in a dressing gown, black hair pulled into a messy bun on top of her head.
‘Martine Partridge?’
The young woman scratched at her cheek with blue false nails. ‘Yeah…’
Aliénor registered Emily’s smile. Took a mental picture of it. Tight-lipped, mouth turned up at the corners. Narrowed eyes, too.
‘I’m Emily Roy. I work with the Metropolitan Police. This is my colleague, Aliénor Lindbergh.’
The woman looked down her nose at Aliénor, giving her the once-over. ‘You recruitin’ in primary schools these days then, are yer? This about young Jennifer, innit?’
Emily squinted at her. ‘Sorry to bother you so late, Martine,’ she continued. ‘Is it all right if I call you Martine?’
‘I prefer Marty.’
‘Marty.’
‘What’s ’er name again – your colleague I mean? I didn’t catch it.’
‘Her name’s Aliénor.’
‘Alien-or? Well that don’t exactly ’elp a girl get ahead in life, does it! They must’ve ’ad a field day wiv you at school, innit?’
Emily frowned.
Aliénor bit her tongue. That was the hardest thing, really: knowing when to say something and when to keep her mouth shut, even when the other person was expecting a reply. So much behaviour to decode all the time. To understand and integrate. A whole other language to learn.
‘That’s not from ’round ’ere, is it? Alien-or,’ Marty went on. ‘Where’s that from, then?’
Emily gave a discreet nod.
Aliénor replicated Emily’s smile: mouth turned up at the corners, narrowed eyes. ‘It’s French,’ she said, trying not to let her smile falter.
‘French? Ooh la la! You don’t have a French accent, though. I’d never ’ave pegged you as a frog.’
‘I’m not French; I’m Swedish.’
‘Swedish? Why make fings easy, I s’pose…’
‘When was the last time you saw Jennifer, Marty?’ Emily interjected.
‘This morning. She walks past ’ere to catch the 182 on ’er way to the ’igh school.’ Marty slowly opened and closed her eyes like a lizard lazing in the sun.
Emily let the silence percolate between them for a moment. ‘Would you mind if we continued our conversation inside?’ she suddenly ventured.
Marty’s eyes zeroed in on her sharp nails. She traced an index finger around the edges. ‘Jones … My Jones needs ’is rest…’
‘Jones? Is he your husband, Marty?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, as if suddenly afraid she would wake him up.
‘I’ll be careful,’ Emily replied, striding forwards.
Marty had no choice but to step aside and let her pass.
The profiler made her way through to the kitchen and took a seat at the small, square table. The dirty dishes from what looked like dinner had not been cleared away. Marty stood on the other side of the table, as if she were waiting to be told what to do. Emily motioned for her to sit down.
Aliénor was still standing in the doorway, watching Marty fidget with the belt of her dressing gown.
‘You didn’t see her come home again this afternoon?’ Emily prompted.
‘What?’
‘Jennifer. You didn’t see her coming home from school this afternoon?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know the Marsden family well, Marty?’
‘Not really … Just as a neighbour, y’know,’ she replied, with shifty eyes.
‘Jennifer never stopped in here on her way home from school, for a chat?’
The corners of Marty’s mouth turned downwards. She smoothed her dressing gown with the back of her hand. ‘Do you really fink I’d let a tramp like that set foot in ’ere? In my ’ouse? Under my bleedin’ roof?’