“I haven’t the least idea what was going on inside Harriet’s head. You’re thinking of
her last year, of course. One day she was a religious crackpot. The next day she put
on make-up like a whore and went to school wearing the tightest sweater she
possessed. Obviously she was seriously unhappy. But, as I said, I wasn’t here and
just picked up the gossip.”
“What triggered the problems?”
“Gottfried and Isabella, obviously. Their marriage was totally haywire. They either
partied or they fought. Nothing physical—Gottfried wasn’t the type to hit anyone,
and he was almost afraid of Isabella. She had a horrendous temper. Sometime in
the early sixties he moved more or less permanently to his cabin, where Isabella
never set foot. There were periods when he would turn up in the village, looking
like a vagrant. And then he’d sober up and dress neatly again and try to tend to his
job.”
“Wasn’t there anyone who wanted to help Harriet?”
“Henrik, of course. In the end she moved into his house. But don’t forget that he
was preoccupied playing the role of the big industrialist. He was usually off
travelling somewhere and didn’t have a lot of time to spend with Harriet and
Martin. I missed a lot of this because I was in Uppsala and then in Stockholm—and
let me tell you, I didn’t have an easy childhood myself with Harald as my father. In
hindsight I’ve realised that the problem was that Harriet never confided in anyone.
She tried hard to keep up appearances and pretend that they were one big happy
family.”
“Denial.”
“Yes. But she changed when her father drowned. She could no longer pretend that
everything was OK. Up until then she was...I don’t know how to explain it:
extremely gifted and precocious, but on the whole a rather ordinary teenager.
During the last year she was still brilliant, getting top marks in every exam and so
on, but it seemed as if she didn’t have any soul.”
“How did her father drown?”
“In the most prosaic way possible. He fell out of a rowing boat right below his
cabin. He had his trousers open and an extremely high alcohol content in his blood,
so you can just imagine how it happened. Martin was the one who found him.”