The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  Henrik nodded. “Yes… could be worth something. Is it old?”

  “I think so,” said Tommy, opening the glass door. “If we’re lucky, it’ll be an antique. German or French.”

  “It’s not ticking.”

  “Probably needs winding up.” He closed the door and shouted, “Freddy!”

  After a few seconds the younger brother came clomping into the kitchen.

  “What?”

  “Give me a hand with this,” said Tommy.

  Freddy had the longest arms of the three of them. He unhooked the clock and lifted it down. Then Henrik helped to carry it.

  “Come on, let’s get it outside,” said Tommy.

  The van was parked close to the house, in the shadows at the back.

  It had kalmar pipes & welding on the sides. Tommy had bought plastic letters and stuck them on himself. There was no such welding company in Kalmar, but driving around in a company van at night looked less suspicious than some anonymous old delivery van.

  “They’re opening a police station in Marnäs next week,” said Henrik as they were lifting the clock out through the veranda window.

  There was almost no wind tonight, but the air was fresh and cold.

  “How do you know?” said Tommy.

  “It was in the paper this morning.”

  He heard Freddy’s hoarse laugh in the darkness.

  “Oh, well, that’s it then,” said Tommy. “You might as well ring them and rat the two of us out, then you might get a reduced sentence.”

  He dropped his lower lip, showing his teeth; that was his way of smiling.

  Henrik smiled back in the darkness. There were thousands of summer cottages for the police to keep an eye on all over the island, besides which they usually worked only during the day.

  They placed the clock in the back of the van, alongside the collapsible exercise bike, two large vases made of polished limestone, a video player, a small outboard motor, a computer and printer, and a television with stereo speakers that were already in there.

  “Shall we call it a night?” said Tommy when he had closed the back door of the van.

  “Yes… I don’t think there’s anything else.”

  Henrik went back to the house briefly anyway, to close the window. He picked up a couple of small pieces of shale from the ground and pushed them into the gaps in the wooden frame to hold the window in place.

  “Come on,” shouted Tommy behind him.

  The brothers thought it was a waste of time, closing the place up after a break-in. But Henrik knew it could be months before anyone came to the cottage, and with the window open the rain and snow would destroy the décor.

  Tommy started the engine as Henrik climbed into the passenger seat. Then he lifted off a section of the door panel and reached inside. Wrapped in small pieces of paper towels was ice-crystal meth.

  “Want another?” said Tommy.

  “No. I’ve had enough.”

  The brothers had brought the ice with them from the Continent, both to sell and for personal use. The crystals were like a kick up the backside, but if Henrik took more than one hit per night, he started quivering like a flagpole, and found it difficult to think logically. The thoughts thudded around in his head, and he couldn’t get to sleep.

  He wasn’t a junkie, after all-but nor was he boring. One hit was fine.

  Tommy and Freddy didn’t seem to have the same problem, or else they were planning to stay awake all night when they got back to Kalmar. They stuffed the crystals in their mouths, paper and all, and washed the whole lot down with water from a plastic bottle on the back seat. Then Tommy put his foot down. He swung the van around the house and out onto the empty village road.

  Henrik looked at his watch-it was almost twelve-thirty.

  “Okay, let’s go to the boathouse,” he said.

  Up by the main highway Tommy stopped obediently at the stop sign, despite the fact that the road was completely clear, then turned south.

  “Turn off here,” said Henrik after ten minutes, when the sign for Enslunda appeared.

  There were no other cars or people around. The gravel track ended at the boathouses, and Tommy backed the van up as close as possible.

  It was as dark as a cave down here by the sea, but up in the north the lighthouse at Eel Point was flashing.

  Henrik opened the van door and heard the rushing of the waves. The sound drifted in from the coal-black sea. It made him think of his grandfather. He had actually died here, six years ago. Algot had been eighty-five years old and suffering from heart disease, but he had still crawled out of bed and taken a cab out here one windy winter’s day. The driver had dropped him off on the road, and soon after that he must have had a major heart attack. But Algot had managed to

  get to his boathouse, and he had been found dead just by the door.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Tommy as they were unloading the stolen goods by the beam of the flashlights. “A suggestion. Listen up and tell me what you think.”

  “What?”

  Tommy didn’t reply. He just reached into the van and pulled something out. It looked like a large black woolen cap.

  “We found this in Copenhagen,” he said.

  Then he held the black fabric up to the flashlight, and Henrik could see that it wasn’t a cap. It was the kind of hood robbers wear, a balaclava, with holes for the eyes and the mouth.

  “My suggestion is that we put these on next time,” said Tommy, “and move on from the summer cottages.”

  “Move on? Move on to what?”

  “Houses that aren’t empty.”

  There was silence for a few moments in the shadows by the shore.

  “Sure,” said Freddy.

  Henrik looked at the hood without saying anything. He was thinking.

  “I know… the risks increase,” said Tommy. “But so do the gains. We’ll never find cash or jewelry in the summer cottages… only in houses where people live all year round.” He dropped the hood back in the van and went on: “Of course we need to check with Aleister that everything’s okay. And we need to choose safe houses that are a bit out of the way, with no alarms.”

  “And no dogs,” said Freddy.

  “Correct. No bloody dogs either. And nobody will recognize us with the hoods on,” said Tommy, looking at Henrik. “So what do you think, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It wasn’t really about the money-Henrik had a good

  trade these days-it was mostly the excitement he was after. It chased away the tedium of everyday life.

  “Freddy and I will go solo, then,” said Tommy. “It’ll bring in more money, so that’s no problem.”

  Henrik shook his head quickly. There might not be many more outings with Tommy and Freddy, but he wanted to decide for himself when to stop.

  He thought about the ship in the bottle, smashed to pieces on the floor earlier that evening, and said, “I’m in… if we take it easy. And nobody gets hurt.”

  “Who would we hurt?” said Tommy.

  “The house owners.”

  “They’ll be asleep, for fuck’s sake… and if anybody wakes up we’ll just speak English. Then they’ll think we’re foreigners.”

  Henrik nodded, not completely convinced. He pulled the tarpaulin over the stolen items and fastened the padlock on the boathouse door.

  They jumped into the van and set off south across the island, back toward Borgholm.

  After twenty minutes they were in town, where rows of streetlamps drove away the October darkness. But the sidewalks were just as empty as the country roads. Tommy slowed down and pulled in by the apartment block where Henrik lived.

  “Good,” he said. “In a week, then? Tuesday night next week?”

  “Sure… but I’ll probably go out there before then.”

  “You like living out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Henrik nodded.

  “Okay,” said Tommy, “but don’t start trying to do any deals of your own with th
e stuff. We’ll find a buyer in Kalmar.”

  “Fine,” said Henrik, closing the door of the van.

  He walked toward the dark doorway and looked at his

  watch. Half past one. It was pretty early despite everything, and he would be able to sleep in his lonely bed for five hours before the alarm woke him for his ordinary job.

  He thought about all the houses on the island where people lay sleeping. Settled.

  He’d get out if anything happened. If anyone woke up when they broke in, he’d just get out of there. The brothers and their fucking spirit in the glass could fend for themselves.

  3

  Tilda Davidsson was sitting with her bag containing the tape recorder in a corridor at the residential home for the elderly in Marnäs, outside the room of her relative Gerlof Davidsson. She wasn’t alone; on a sofa further down the corridor two small white-haired ladies had sat down, perhaps waiting for afternoon coffee.

  The women were talking nonstop, and Tilda found herself listening to their quiet conversation.

  It was conducted in a discontented, troubled tone, like a long series of drawn-out sighs.

  “They’re always on the move, flying all over the place,” said the woman closest to Tilda. “One trip abroad after another. The further away, the better.”

  “You’re absolutely right, they certainly don’t begrudge themselves anything these days,” said the other woman, “indeed they don’t…”

  “And the money they spend… when they’re buying

  things for themselves,” said the first one. “I rang my youngest daughter last week and she told me she and her husband were buying another new car. ‘But you’ve got a lovely car,’ I said. ‘Yes, but everybody else in our street has changed their car this year,’ she said.”

  “That’s all they do, buy, buy, buy, all the time.”

  “That’s right. And they don’t keep in touch, either.”

  “No they don’t…My son never rings, not even on my birthday. It’s always me who rings him, and then he never has time to chat. He’s always on his way somewhere, or there’s something he wants to watch on TV.”

  “And that’s another thing-they’re always buying television sets, and they have to be the size of a house these days…”

  “And new refrigerators.”

  “And stoves.”

  Tilda didn’t get to hear any more, because the door to Gerlof’s room opened.

  Gerlof’s long back was slightly bent and his legs were shaking just a little-but he was smiling at Tilda like an old man without a care in the world, and she thought he looked more alert today than when she had seen him the previous winter.

  Gerlof, who was born in 1915, had celebrated his eightieth birthday in the summer cottage down in Stenvik. Both his daughters had been there, his eldest daughter, Lena, with her husband and children, and her younger sister, Julia, with her new husband and his three children. That day Gerlof’s rheumatism had meant that he had to sit in the same armchair all afternoon. But now he was standing in the doorway leaning on his stick, wearing a waistcoat and dark gray gabardine trousers.

  “Okay, the weather forecast has finished,” he said quietly.

  “Great.”

  Tilda got up. She had had to wait before going into Gerlof’s room, because he had to listen to the weather forecast.

  Tilda didn’t really understand why it was so important-he was hardly likely to be going out in this cold-but presumably keeping an eye on the wind and the weather was a routine left over from his days as captain of a cargo ship on the Baltic.

  “Come in, come in.”

  He shook hands with her just inside the door-Gerlof wasn’t the kind of person who hugged people. Tilda had never even seen him pat anyone on the shoulder.

  His hand was firm as it grasped hers. Gerlof had gone to sea as a teenager, and despite the fact that he had come ashore twenty-five years ago, the calluses were still there from all the ropes he’d hauled, all the boxes of cargo he’d lifted, and the chains that had torn the skin from his fingers.

  “So what’s the weather got in store, then?” she asked.

  “Don’t ask.” Gerlof sighed and sat down on one of the chairs by his small coffee table, his legs stiff. “The radio station has changed the time when the forecast starts yet again, so I missed the local temperatures. But in Norrland it’s going to get colder, so I should imagine it will down here too.” He cast a suspicious glance at the barometer next to the bookcase, then looked out of the window toward the bare trees, and added, “It’s going to be a hard winter this year, a cold, early winter. You can see that by the way the stars shine so brightly at night, especially the Big Dipper. And by the summer.”

  “The summer?”

  “A wet summer means a hard winter,” said Gerlof. “Everybody knows that.”

  “I didn’t,” said Tilda. “But will it make any difference to us?”

  “It certainly will. A long, hard winter influences just about everything. The shipping on the Baltic, for example. The ice delays the ships and the profits fall.”

  Tilda moved into the room and was confronted by all the memories of Gerlof’s time at sea. On the walls were

  black-and-white pictures of his ships, oiled nameplates, and framed ships’ certificates. There were also small photographs of his late parents and his wife.

  Time stood still in here, thought Tilda.

  She sat down opposite Gerlof and placed the tape recorder on the table between them. Then she plugged in the flat table microphone.

  Gerlof gave the recording equipment the same look as the barometer. The tape recorder wasn’t very big, but Tilda could see his eyes flicking back and forth between it and her.

  “Are we just going to… talk?” he said. “About my brother?”

  “Among other things,” said Tilda. “That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?”

  “But why?”

  “Well, to preserve the memories and stories… before they disappear,” said Tilda, and added quickly, “Of course you’re going to be around for years yet, Gerlof, that’s not what I mean. I just want to record them to be on the safe side. My dad didn’t tell me much about Grandfather before he died, you know.”

  Gerlof nodded. “We can talk. But when something’s being recorded, you have to be careful what you say.”

  “There’s no problem,” said Tilda. “You can always record over a cassette tape.”

  Gerlof had agreed to the recording almost without thinking when she had called him in August and said she was moving to Marnäs, but it still seemed to be making him a bit tense.

  “Is it on?” he said quietly. “Is the tape running?”

  “No, not yet,” said Tilda. “I’ll tell you when.”

  She pressed down the Record button, saw that the tape was running, and nodded encouragingly at Gerlof.

  “Right… we’ve started.” Tilda straightened up, and it seemed to her that her voice was more tense and formal than usual as she went on: “This is Tilda Davidsson, and I am in

  Marnäs with my grandfather Ragnar’s brother Gerlof, to talk about our family… and about my grandfather here in Marnäs.”

  Gerlof leaned forward a little stiffly toward the microphone and corrected her in a clear voice: “My brother Ragnar did not live in Marnäs. He lived on the coast outside Rörby, south of Marnäs.”

  “Thank you, Gerlof… and what are your memories of Ragnar?”

  Gerlof hesitated for a few seconds.

  “There are a lot of good memories,” he said eventually. “We grew up together in Stenvik in the twenties, but then of course we chose completely different professions… he bought a little cottage and became a farmer and a fisherman, and I moved down to Borgholm and got married. And bought my first cargo ship.”

  “How often did you see each other?”

  “Well, whenever I was home from sea, a couple of times a year. Around Christmas and sometime in the summer. Ragnar usually came down to us in town.”

  �
�Were there celebrations then?”

  “Yes, especially at Christmas.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Crowded but good fun. Lots of food. Herring and potatoes and ham and pig’s trotters and dumplings. And of course Ragnar always brought plenty of eel with him, both smoked and pickled, and lots of cod soaked in lye…”

  The more Gerlof talked, the more he relaxed. And so did Tilda.

  They carried on talking for another half hour or so. But after a long story about a windmill fire in Stenvik, Gerlof raised a hand and waved feebly. Tilda realized he was tired, and quickly switched off the tape recorder.

  “Fantastic,” she said. “It’s amazing how much you remember, Gerlof.”

  “The old family stories are still in my head, I’ve heard

  them so many times. Telling stories like this is good for the memory.” He looked at the tape recorder. “Do you think it got anything?”

  “Of course.”

  She rewound the tape and pressed Play. Gerlof’s recorded voice was quiet and slightly grumpy and repetitive, but it could be heard clearly.

  “Good,” he said. “That’ll be something for those researchers into ordinary people’s lives to listen to.”

  “It’s mostly for me,” said Tilda. “I wasn’t even born when Grandfather died, and Dad was no good at telling stories about the family. So I’m curious.”

  “That comes with the years, as you acquire more and more of a past to look back on,” said Gerlof. “You start to get interested in where you came from, I’ve noticed that with my daughters too…How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “And you’re going to be working here on Öland?”

  “I am. I’ve finished all my training.”

  “How long for?”

  “We’ll see. Until next summer, at any rate.”

  “That’s nice. It’s always good when young people come here and find work. And you’re living here in Marnäs?”

  “I’ve got a one-bedroom place just by the square. You can see south along the coast…I can almost see Grandfather’s cottage.”