The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  Brushes, handsaws, spirit level, folding rule…

  Joakim was holding a plane in his hand when he suddenly heard the front door opening on the floor above. He straightened up and listened.

  “Hello?” came a woman’s voice. “Kim?”

  It was Katrine, and she sounded anxious. He heard her close the front door behind her and walk into the hallway.

  “Down here!” he shouted. “In the cellar!”

  He listened, but there was no reply.

  He took a step toward the cellar stairs, still listening. When everything remained deathly silent up above, he quickly went upstairs, realizing at the same time how improbable it was that he would see Katrine standing there in the hallway.

  And of course she wasn’t there. The hallway was just as empty as when he had come into the house half an hour before. And the front door was closed.

  He went over and tried the handle. It was unlocked.

  “Hello?” he shouted into the house.

  No reply.

  Joakim spent the next ten minutes going through the entire house, room by room-despite the fact that he knew he wasn’t going to find Katrine anywhere. It was impossible, she was still on Öland.

  Why would she have taken her car and driven after him all the way to Stockholm, without even calling him first?

  He’d misheard. He must have misheard.

  Joakim looked at the clock. Ten past four. It was almost dark outside the window.

  He took out his cell phone and keyed in the number for Eel Point. Katrine should have picked up Livia and Gabriel and be back home by now.

  The phone rang out six times, seven, eight. No reply.

  He rang her cell phone. No reply.

  Joakim tried not to worry as he packed the last of his tools and carried them out to the trailer along with the furniture. But when everything was done and he’d turned out all the lights in the house and locked up, he took out his cell phone again and rang a local number.

  “Westin.”

  His mother, Ingrid, always sounded worried when she answered the phone, Joakim thought.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s me.”

  “Hi there, Joakim. Are you in Stockholm now?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “When will you be here?”

  He heard the pleasure in her voice when she realized it was him, and just as clearly the disappointment when he explained that he couldn’t come over and see her this evening.

  “But why not? Has something happened?”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “I just think it’s safer if I drive back to Öland tonight. I’ve got our Rambe painting with me in the trunk and a load of tools in the trailer. I don’t want to leave them out overnight.”

  “I see,” said Ingrid quietly.

  “Mom… has Katrine called you today?”

  “Today? No.”

  “Good,” he said quickly. “I was just wondering.”

  “So when are you coming to see me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We live on Öland now, Mom.”

  As soon as they’d hung up, he rang Eel Point.

  Still no reply. It was half past four. He started the engine and pulled out onto the street.

  The last thing Joakim did before he headed south was to hand in the keys of the Apple House at the real estate office.

  Now he and Katrine were no longer property owners in Stockholm.

  The rush-hour traffic heading for the suburbs was in full swing when he hit the freeway, and it took him forty-five minutes to get out of the city. By the time the traffic finally thinned out it was quarter to six, and Joakim pulled into a parking lot in Södertälje to call Katrine one more time.

  The phone rang four times, then it was picked up.

  “Tilda Davidsson.”

  It was a woman’s voice-but he didn’t recognize the name.

  “Hello?” said Joakim.

  He must have keyed in the wrong number.

  “Who’s calling?” said the woman.

  “This is Joakim Westin,” he said slowly. “I live in the manor house at Eel Point.”

  “I see.”

  She didn’t say anything else.

  “Is my wife there, or my children?” asked Joakim.

  A pause at the other end of the phone.

  “No.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m a police officer,” said the woman. “I’d like you to-”

  “Where’s my wife?” said Joakim quickly.

  Another pause.

  “Where are you, Joakim? Are you here on the island?”

  The policewoman sounded young and slightly tense, and he didn’t have much confidence in her.

  “I’m in Stockholm,” he said. “Or rather on the way out… I’m outside Södertälje.”

  “So you’re on your way down to Öland?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been to pick up the last of our stuff from our house in Stockholm.” He wanted to sound clear and lucid and make the policewoman start answering questions. “Can you tell me what’s happened? Have any of-”

  “No,” she interrupted him. “I can’t say anything. But it would be best if you got here as quickly as possible.”

  “Is it-”

  “Watch your speed,” said the policewoman, breaking off the conversation.

  Joakim sat there with the silent cell phone to his ear, staring out at the empty parking lot. Cars with their headlights on and lone drivers whizzed past him out on the freeway.

  He put the car in gear, pulled out onto the road, and carried on heading south, doing twelve miles above the speed limit. But when he began to see pictures in his head of Katrine and the children waving to him outside the house at Eel Point, he pulled off the road and stopped the car again.

  The phone rang only three times on this occasion.

  “Davidsson.”

  Joakim didn’t bother saying hello or introducing himself.

  “Has there been an accident?” he asked.

  The policewoman didn’t speak.

  “You have to tell me,” Joakim went on.

  “Are you still driving?” asked the woman.

  “Not right now.”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone for a few seconds, then came her reply:

  “There’s been an accident. A drowning.”

  “A… a death?” said Joakim.

  The policewoman was once again silent for a few seconds. Then she replied, sounding as if she were reciting a formula she’d learned by heart:

  “We never give out that kind of information over the telephone.”

  The little cell phone in Joakim’s hand seemed to weigh two hundred pounds; the muscles in his right arm were trembling as he held it.

  “Possibly. But this time you have to,” he said slowly. “I want a name. If someone in my family has drowned, you have to give me the name. Otherwise I’ll just keep on calling.”

  Silence at the other end of the phone.

  “Just a moment.”

  The woman disappeared again; it felt to Joakim as if several minutes passed. He shivered in the car. Then there was a scraping noise on the phone.

  “I have a name now,” said the woman quietly.

  “Whose?”

  The policewoman’s voice was mechanical, as if she were reading out loud.

  “The victim’s name is Livia Westin.”

  Joakim held his breath and bowed his head. As soon as he had heard the name, he wanted to get away from this moment, away from this evening.

  The victim.

  “Hello?” said the policewoman.

  Joakim closed his eyes. He wanted to put his hands over his ears and silence every sound.

  “Joakim?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I heard the name.”

  “Good, so we can-”

  “I have one more question,” he interrupted her. “Where are Katrine and Gabriel?”

  “They’re with the neighbors, over at the farm.”


  “Okay, I’m on my way. I’m setting off now. Just tell… tell Katrine I’m on my way.”

  “We’ll be here all evening,” said the policewoman. “Someone will meet you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want us to send for a priest? I can-”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “We’ll sort things out.”

  Joakim switched off his phone, started the car, and pulled quickly out onto the road again.

  He didn’t want to spend any more time talking to some policewoman or priest, he just wanted to get to Katrine right now.

  She was with the neighbors, the policewoman had said. That must be the big farm to the southwest of Eel Point,

  whose cows grazed on the meadows down by the shore-but he didn’t have the telephone number, and right now he couldn’t even remember the name of the family who lived there. Evidently Katrine must have had some kind of contact with them. But why hadn’t she called him herself? Was she in shock?

  Suddenly Joakim realized he was sitting there thinking about the wrong person.

  He could no longer see anything. The tears started pouring down his cheeks, and he had to pull over to the side of the road, switch on his hazard lights, and rest his forehead on the steering wheel.

  He closed his eyes.

  Livia was gone. She had sat behind him in the car listening to music this morning, and now she was gone.

  He sniveled and looked out through the windshield. The road was dark.

  Joakim thought about Eel Point, and about wells.

  She must have fallen down a well. Wasn’t there a well lid in the inner courtyard?

  Old wells with cracked lids-why hadn’t he checked to see if there were any around the place? Livia and Gabriel had run about wherever they wanted between the buildings; he ought to have talked to Katrine about the risks.

  Too late now.

  He coughed and started up the Volvo. He wouldn’t stop again.

  Katrine was waiting.

  When he was back out on the road, he could see her face before him. It had all started when they met while they were viewing the same apartment. Then Livia had come along.

  Becoming responsible for Livia had been a big step, he recalled. They both wanted children, but not quite yet. Katrine wanted to do things in the right order. They had intended to sell the apartment and buy a house outside the city in plenty of time before the first child came along.

  He remembered how he and Katrine had sat at the kitchen table talking quietly about Livia for several hours.

  “What are we going to do?” said Katrine.

  “I’d love to take care of her,” Joakim had said. “I’m just not sure the timing is quite right.”

  “It isn’t right,” Katrine had said crossly. “Far from it. But we’re stuck with it.”

  In the end they had decided to say yes to Livia. They had bought the house anyway, and three years later Katrine had gotten pregnant. Gabriel had been planned, unlike Livia.

  But just as Joakim had predicted, he had loved watching her grow up. Loved her bright voice, her energy and her curiosity.

  Katrine.

  How must she be feeling right now? She had called to him inside his head, he had heard her.

  Joakim changed gear and put his foot down. With the trailer behind the car he couldn’t drive to Öland at top speed, but almost.

  The most important thing now was to get to the manor house on the island as quickly as possible-home to his wife and son. They needed to be together.

  He could see Katrine’s bright face floating in the darkness in front of the car.

  5

  By eight o’clock in the evening everything was quiet again around the lighthouses at Eel Point. Tilda Davidsson was standing in the big kitchen of the manor house.

  The whole house was absolutely silent. Even the slight breeze from the sea had died away.

  Tilda looked around and got the feeling she was in the wrong era. Apart from the modern kitchen equipment it was like traveling back to a household at the end of the nineteenth century. A wealthy household. The dining table was large and heavy, made of oak. On the shelves stood copper pans, porcelain from the East Indies, and hand-blown glass bottles. The walls and ceiling were painted white, but the cupboards and wooden cornices were pale blue.

  Tilda would have loved to walk into a Carl Larsson kitchen like this every morning, instead of the little kitchenette in her rooms on the square in Marnäs.

  She was completely alone in the house now. Hans Majner

  and two other colleagues who had traveled from Borgholm up to the scene of the accident had left Eel Point at around seven. Her boss, Göte Holmblad, had come along with them to the scene, but had kept a low profile and left at five, almost at the same time as the ambulance.

  The father of the family who lived at Eel Point, Joakim Westin, was due to arrive by car from Stockholm late that evening-and it had been obvious that Tilda was going to be the one to stay behind and wait for him. She was the only one who had offered, and her colleagues had quickly agreed.

  It wasn’t because she was a woman, Tilda hoped, but because she was the youngest and had the shortest service record.

  The evening shift was okay. The only thing she had needed to do all afternoon, apart from answering the radio and the telephone, was to stop a reporter from Ölands-Posten from approaching the scene of the accident with his camera. She had referred him to the duty press officer in Kalmar.

  When the paramedics went down to the shore with their stretcher, she had followed them, stood out by the jetty and watched as they slowly lifted the body out of the water between the jetty and the northern lighthouse. The arms hung there lifeless, water pouring from the clothes. This was the fifth death Tilda had been involved in during her time with the police, but she would never get used to seeing lifeless bodies pulled out of the water or out of smashed-up cars.

  It was also Tilda who had answered when Joakim Westin rang. It was really against police procedure to inform relatives of a death over the telephone, but it had gone okay. The news had been bad-the worst imaginable-but Westin’s voice had sounded calm and collected throughout the conversation. It was often better to hear bad news as quickly as possible.

  Give both the victims and the relatives as much accurate information as possible, as quickly as possible, she had learned from Martin at the Police Training Academy.

  She left the kitchen and went into the house. There was a

  faint smell of paint here. The room closest to the kitchen had new wallpaper and a newly polished floor and was warm and cozy, but when she went on along a corridor she could see rooms that were cold and dark, with no furniture. It made her think of condemned apartments she had been into shortly after she became a policewoman, apartments with no heating where people lived like rats.

  The house at Eel Point wasn’t really a house Tilda would want to live in, particularly not at this time of year, in the winter. It was too big. And no doubt the coast was lovely when the sun was shining, but in the evening the desolation was complete. Marnäs, with its single shopping street, felt like a densely populated metropolis in comparison to the emptiness of Eel Point.

  She left the light on, went out into the glassed-in veranda, and opened the outside door.

  A damp chill was drifting in off the sea. There was just one lamp outside, a single lightbulb covered with a cracked glass shade, casting a yellow glow over the cobblestones and rough tufts of grass in the inner courtyard.

  Tilda stood in the shelter of the big barn’s stone wall, next to a pile of wet leaves, and took out her cell phone. She really wanted to hear another voice, but she hadn’t got around to ringing Martin this evening, and now it was several hours too late-he would already have gone home from work. Instead she called the number of the neighbors, the Carlsson family, and the mother picked up after two rings.

  “How are they?” asked Tilda.

  “I’ve just had a look at them and they’re both a
sleep,” said Maria Carlsson quietly. “They’re in our guest room.”

  “That’s good,” said Tilda. “How long will you be up tonight? I was intending to come over with Joakim Westin, but I don’t think he’ll be back from Stockholm for three or four hours.”

  “Just come over. Roger and I will stay up for as long as necessary.”

  When Tilda had switched off her phone, she immediately felt lonely again.

  It was eight-thirty now. She thought about going home to Marnäs to rest for an hour or so, but of course there was the risk that Westin or someone else might telephone here.

  She went back into the house through the veranda.

  This time she continued along the short corridor and stopped in the doorway of one of the bedrooms. This was a small, cozy room, like a bright chapel in a dark castle. The wallpaper was yellow with red stars, and along the walls sat a dozen or so cuddly toys on small wooden chairs.

  This must be the daughter’s room.

  Tilda went in cautiously and stood on the soft rug in the center of the room. She guessed that the parents had fixed up the children’s rooms first, so that their son and daughter would quickly feel at home in the manor house. She thought about the room she had grown up in, a small room she had shared with one of her brothers in a rented apartment in Kalmar. She had always longed for a bedroom of her own.

  The bed in this room was short but wide, with a pale yellow coverlet and lots of fluffy cushions with cartoon figures on them: elephants and lions wearing nightcaps and lying in their own little beds.

  Tilda sat down on the bed. It creaked slightly, but it was soft.

  The house was still completely silent around her.

  She leaned back, was received by the pile of cushions, and relaxed, her gaze fixed on the ceiling. If she let her thoughts run free, the white surface could become like a movie screen, showing pictures from her memory.

  Tilda could see Martin on the ceiling, the way he had looked when he had slept beside her in bed for the last time. It had been in her old apartment in Växjö almost a month ago, and she hoped he would come over to visit her soon.

  Nothing is as warm and cozy as a child’s bedroom.

  She breathed out slowly and closed her eyes.

  ***