Page 129 of Sixty Meters Under

“If I knew the real owner of this bunker, I would never buy a room here!” another resident shouted from the crowd.

“What do you mean?” Lennart asked as calmly as he could, even though his nerves started twitching.

“Lennart Landberg! The infamous detective!” a woman yelled from farther away.

“Yeah. That’s him! I recognize him now.”

Cowards.Lennart scanned the crowd, rolled his eyes, and sighed.

And, here we go.

In the back of the crowd, Björn grinned, satisfied, and watched the show he’d prepared for his brother.

“You sent innocent people behind bars! And innocent families suffer because of you!”

It wasn’t me. They set me up.Lennart thought, but he didn’t say it out loud. He knew there was no point in explaining. People always choose to believe what they want, especially the mass media.

“It was not the way you all mean!” Lennart heard his mother’s voice. Anna and Hugo stepped forward in his defense.

“Are you his mother, or a mistress? Huh?” another man mocked.

“Don’t insult my mother!” Lennart clenched his fists.

Anna shook her head. “This is neither the time nor the place to turn against each other.”

“I’m disgusted!” someone else exclaimed.

“Me too. We were misinformed and misled!”

“You weren’t. This is still that same place you entered the first day. We’re here to protect each other. And to help each other in these challenging times,” Anna insisted.

Another man pointed at Lennart. “I think it would be fair if this man was kicked out of the bunker.”

“Can you hear yourself? No one will be banished if they don’t break the rules,” Hugo spoke up.

Lennart stood quietly and listened to it all. Deep down he was his ten years younger self, sad, confused, angry, hopeless, and lost. He remembered seeing the headlines on the TV screen back in their home.

Detective Johan Landberg died on a mission.

Even though Lennart at that point knew that his father had died, the headlines hadn’t managed to make the situation any more real. He had been convinced it was all just a bad dream.

“They set him up!” Anna yelled at that point.

“Those are just cheap excuses.”

“They killed my husband; then they wanted my son off the case!” Tears gathered in Anna’s eyes at the memory. “Those weren’t innocent people! They deserved to be behind the bars!” she said through the sobs.

The residents just looked at each other. Some seemed to trust her words, others not so much.

“My husband got murdered on a mission. His murder was set up.”

Murmurs intensified in the room.

Anna raised her voice. “Lennart devoted his life to finding out who did it and to avenge his father! He was on the murderer’s trail years later.”

Residents shook their heads in various directions.

Anna proceeded nonetheless, “And for this reason there was a scandal which involved my son, making him a bad guy in the public eye to get him off the case because those who were responsible didn’t want the truth to be disclosed!”