Gustafsson seemed pleased to have a visit from a relative of Gerlof’s. Edla was cheerful and energetic, hardly bothering to listen to Tilda’s explanation of why she was there. She quickly put some coffee on and fetched some small pastries from the larder. Pastries with jelly, with pearl sugar, with chocolate-ten different kinds altogether on a silver dish, all laid out beautifully in the small parlor. Tilda stared at the coffee table as she sat down.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many pastries.”
“Really?” said Edla in surprise. “Have you never been to a pastry shop?”
“Well, yes, but…”
Tilda looked at a black-and-white wedding photograph on the wall and thought about the letter to Martin’s wife. She had decided to send it that evening. Then Karin Ahlquist would receive it at the end of the week and have all weekend to kick Martin out.
She cleared her throat.
“I have one or two questions, Edla. I don’t know if you’ve seen the newspaper, but there has been a break-in with serious violence in Hagelby, and the police could do with some help.”
“I’ve had a break-in as well,” said Edla. “They got into the garage and took a gas can.”
“Really?” said Tilda. “And when was this?”
“It was the fall of ’73.”
“Right…”
“I remember, because my husband was still alive and we still had the car.”
“Okay, but we’re looking at more recent break-ins at the moment, over the last few months.” Tilda held up her notepad. “So I have a few questions about unfamiliar cars on the main highway… Gerlof tells me that you keep an eye on the traffic.”
“Through the window, that’s right. I always have done; I
can hear them getting closer. But there are so many nowadays.”
“But I don’t suppose there are too many cars at this time of year, in winter?”
“No, it’s easier now than when the tourists come… but I don’t write the numbers down anymore, I haven’t time. They drive past so quickly. And I’m no good at identifying the make of a car.”
“But have you seen any cars you didn’t recognize over the past few days? Late at night… last Friday, for example?”
Edla gave it some thought.
“Big cars?”
“Probably. In some cases they have stolen quite a lot, so they would have needed a car with plenty of space to stow everything.”
“Trucks often drive past here. Garbage trucks too, and tractors.”
“I don’t think they’re driving a truck,” said Tilda.
“A big black car came past here last Friday. It was heading north.”
“Like a van? Was it late at night?”
“Yes, it was just before twelve, after I’d switched the lights off up in the bedroom,” said Edla. “A big black van, that’s what it was.”
“Good… did it look new or old?”
“Not particularly new. And there was some kind of writing on the side. ‘Kalmar,’ and something to do with welding.”
Tilda made a note of that.
“Great. Thank you so much for your help.”
“Will there be a reward if you catch them?”
Tilda lowered her notepad and shook her head sadly.
After visit to Edla, Tilda headed back toward the north and turned onto the coast road south of Marnäs. It
went past Eel Point, but that wasn’t where she was going. She wanted to take a quick look at her grandfather Ragnar’s old place in Saltfjärden before she went back to the police station.
PRIVATE ROAD, it said on a piece of wood by the side of the road. An icy, overgrown track led down toward the sea, and Tilda’s police car bounced along in the wheel ruts.
The track led past an old Iron Age burial ground covered in round stones, and ended at a closed gate in front of a white cottage. She could just catch a glimpse of the sea through a grove of pine trees.
Tilda parked by the gate and walked in among the overgrown grass in the yard. Her memories were vague, and everything seemed smaller than when she had last been here with her father, fifteen years earlier. At that time Ragnar was long dead and Tilda’s grandmother had been taken into the hospital. The house had been for sale. She vaguely remembered the smell of tar, and that there had been several old eel tanks in the yard. They were gone now.
“Hello?” she called out into the soughing wind.
No reply.
The house itself was small, but it was just one of several buildings. There was a boathouse with closed shutters at the windows, a woodshed, a barn, and something that might have been a sauna. It was a fantastic location, right by the shore, but the whole place needed painting and there was an air of gloom and abandonment about it all.
She knocked on the door of the cottage. No reply there either, as expected. The house was probably just a summer residence now, as Gerlof had thought. All traces of the Davidsson family were gone.
Eel Point wasn’t visible from here, but when Tilda had passed the pine trees and walked out onto the meadow by the shore, she could see the old wreck a few hundred yards away and the twin lighthouses on the horizon to the south.
She moved closer to the water, and a large bird that had
been sitting on a rock on the shore took off slowly, its wings beating heavily. A bird of prey.
On the edge of the wood there was another cottage, she noticed, and in front of it on the lawn was a chair where someone had placed a pile of blankets.
Then the blankets moved. A head poked out and Tilda realized there was a person wrapped up in them. She went closer and saw that it was an elderly man with a gray beard and a wooly hat, with a thermos flask beside him and a long, dark green telescope in his hands.
“You scared off my Haliaeetus albicilla,” he called out.
Tilda went over to him.
“Sorry?”
“The sea eagle,” said the man. “Didn’t you see it?”
“I did, yes,” said Tilda.
A birdwatcher. They turned up along the coast at all times of the year.
“It was watching the tufted ducks,” said the ornithologist. He pointed his telescope out to sea, where a dozen or so black-and-white birds were bobbing along on the waves. “They swim here all year round and hang out with the birds of prey. They’re tough little devils.”
“Very exciting,” said Tilda.
“It sure is.” The man in the blankets looked at her uniform and said, “This has to be the first time we’ve ever had a cop out here.”
“Well, it does seem very quiet out here.”
“It is. In the winter, at least. Just cargo ships passing by, and a few motorboats now and again.”
“This late in the year?”
“I haven’t seen any here this winter,” said the man. “But I’ve heard them further down the coast.”
Tilda gave a start. “You mean around Eel Point?”
“Yes, or even further south. You can hear the sound of an engine several miles away, if the wind is in the right direction.”
“A woman drowned over by the lighthouses at Eel Point a few weeks ago,” said Tilda. “Were you here then?”
“I think so.”
Tilda looked at him, her expression serious. “You remember the case?”
“Yes. I read about it… but I didn’t see anything. You can’t see the point through the trees.”
“But can you remember if you heard the sound of an engine on that particular day?”
The ornithologist thought it over.
“Maybe,” he said.
“If a boat went past going south out in the bay, would you have seen it?”
“It’s possible. I often sit out here.”
It was a vague testimony. Edla Gustafsson’s supervision of the highway was much better than this birdwatcher’s monitoring of the Baltic.
She thanked him for his help and set off back to the car.
“Perhaps we could keep in touch?”
T
ilda turned around. “Sorry?”
“It’s a bit lonely here.” He smiled at her. “Beautiful but lonely. Perhaps you’d like to come back sometime?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You’ll have to find a whooper swan to keep you company.”
After lunch Tilda spent almost three hours at the school talking about law and order with the pupils. She had several traffic reports to write up when she got back to the station, but couldn’t quite let go of the drowning at Eel Point.
She collected her thoughts, then picked up the telephone and rang the manor house.
Joakim Westin picked up after three rings. Tilda could hear the sound of a ball thudding and happy children’s voices in the background, a good sign. But Westin himself
sounded tired and distant when he answered. Not angry-it was just that there was no strength in his voice.
Tilda didn’t bother with any small talk.
“I need to ask you something,” she said. “Did your wife know anyone who has a boat here on Öland? A boat owner close to your place?”
“I don’t know anyone at all who has a boat here,” said Westin. “And Katrine… she never mentioned anyone with a boat either.”
“What did she do during the week when you were in Stockholm? Did she talk about it?”
“She was renovating the house and furnishing it, and looking after the children. She had her hands full.”
“Did she ever have any visitors?”
“Only me. As far as I know.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Tilda. “I’ll be in touch if-”
“I have a question too,” Westin interrupted her.
“Yes?”
“When you were here, you said something about a relative of yours who knew Eel Point… someone from the local history society in Marnäs.”
“That’s right, Gerlof,” said Tilda. “He’s my grandfather’s brother. He’s written a few things for the society’s yearbook.”
“I’d really like to have a chat with him.”
“About the manor?”
“About its history… and about a particular story about Eel Point.”
“A story?”
“A story about the dead,” said Westin.
“Right. I don’t know how much he knows about folk stories,” said Tilda, “but I can ask. Gerlof usually likes telling stories.”
“Tell him he’s very welcome to come over.”
By the time Tilda hung up, it was four-thirty. She switched on the computer to do some work on new cases and her own
reports, including the one about the black van. It was a reasonably concrete piece of information in the investigation into the break-ins. Everything the birdwatcher had told her about the sound of motorboat engines around Eel Point was too vague to put in a report.
She wrote and wrote, and when she had finished the reports it was quarter to eight.
Hard work-that was the best way to avoid thinking about Martin Ahlquist. To drive him out of her body and soul.
Tilda still hadn’t mailed the letter to his wife.
When the Second World War broke out, the manor at Eel Point was taken over by the military. The lighthouses were extinguished and soldiers moved into the house to guard the coast.
In the loft in the barn there is one name preserved from this time, but it is not a man’s name.
IN MEMORY OF GRETA 1943 it says, carved in thin letters.
– MIRJA RAMBE
WINTER 1943
The alarm is raised at the air-monitoring station at Eel Point the day after the great blizzard has passed by-a sixteen-year-old girl is missing.
“Lost in the blizzard,” says the director of the station, Stovey, when the seven men gather in the kitchen in the morning, wearing the gray uniform of the crown. Stovey’s real name is Bengtsson, but he has acquired his new name because he prefers to sit indoors next to the iron stove when there’s a cold wind outside. And there is almost always a cold wind outside in the winter at Eel Point.
“I shouldn’t think there’s much hope,” he goes on. “But we’d better search anyway.”
Stovey himself stays inside to coordinate the search-everyone else sets off in the snow. Eskil Nilsson and Ludvig Rucker, who is nineteen years old and the youngest at the station, are sent off to the west to search in the area around the peat bog, Offermossen.
It is only fifteen degrees below zero and there is just a light breeze today-considerably milder than previous winters during the war, when the thermometer has sometimes dropped to somewhere between minus thirty and minus forty.
Apart from the blizzard the previous night, it has been a quiet winter at Eel Point. The German Messerschmitts have more or less stopped appearing along the coast, and after Stalingrad it is the Soviet Union’s supremacy over the Baltic that Sweden fears most.
One of Eskil’s older brothers has been sent over to Gotland to live in a tent all the year round. Eel Point is in radio contact with southern Gotland-if the Soviet fleet attacks, they will be the first to know.
Ludvig quickly lights a cigarette when they get outside, and starts plowing through the snowdrifts in his boots. Ludvig smokes like a chimney, but never offers anyone else a cigarette. Eskil wonders where he gets hold of all his supplies.
Most things have been rationed at the manor for a long time. They can get fish from the sea and milk from the two cows at the manor, but there is a severe shortage of fuel, eggs, potatoes, cloth, and real coffee. Worst of all is the tobacco rationing, which is now down to three cigarettes a day.
But Ludvig seems able to get hold of tobacco with no problem, either in the mail or from someone in the villages around Eel Point. How can he afford it? The conscripts’ pay is just one krona per day.
When they have gone a few hundred yards, Eskil stops and looks for the main highway. He can’t see it-the blizzard has made it magically disappear. Bundles of fir branches had been pushed into the ground to mark out the route for the sledge teams, but they must have blown away during the night.
“I wonder where she came from?” says Eskil, clambering over a snowdrift.
“She came from Malmtorp, outside Rörby,” says Ludvig.
“Are you sure?”
“I know her name too,” says Ludvig. “Greta Friberg.”
“Greta? How do you know that?”
Ludvig merely smiles and takes out a fresh cigarette.
Now Eskil can see the western watchtower. A rope has
been fixed up to lead the way there from the highway. The tower is built of wood, insulated with pine branches and camouflaged with gray-green sheets of fabric. The snow has been driven up into an almost vertical wall against the eastern side by the blizzard.
The other air-monitoring watchtower at Eel Point is the southern lighthouse, which was converted to electricity just before the war broke out; it has heating and is a very comfortable place to sit and watch for foreign aircraft. But he knows that Ludvig prefers to be alone here out on the peat bog.
Of course Eskil suspects that he is not always alone in the watchtower. The Rörby boys hate Ludvig, and Eskil thinks he knows why. The girls from Rörby like him too much.
Ludvig goes over to the tower. He sweeps the snow from the steps with his glove, climbs up, and disappears for a minute or so. Then he comes back down again.
“Here,” he says, handing over a bottle to Eskil.
It’s schnapps. The alcohol content is high; it hasn’t frozen, and Eskil unscrews the cork and takes a warming gulp. Then he looks at the bottle, which is less than half full.
“Were you drinking in the tower yesterday?” he asks.
“Last night,” says Ludvig.
“So you walked home in the blizzard?”
Ludvig nods. “More like crawling, really. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face… good job the rope was there.”
He puts the bottle back in the tower, then they plow on northward through the snow, toward Rörby.
Fifteen minutes la
ter they find the girl’s body.
In the middle of a vast expanse of snow north of Offermossen, something that could be the slender stump of a birch tree is sticking up. Eskil peers at it and moves closer.
Suddenly he sees that it is a little hand.
Greta Friberg had almost reached Rörby when the snow caught her. Her rigid face is staring up at the sky when they scrape away the snow, and even her eyes are covered in ice crystals.
Eskil can’t stop looking at her. He falls to his knees in silence.
Ludvig stands behind him, smoking.
“Is this her?” says Eskil quietly.
Ludvig knocks the ash off his cigarette and leans over for a quick look.
“Yes, that’s Greta.”
“She was with you, wasn’t she?” says Eskil. “Yesterday, up in the tower.”
“Maybe,” says Ludvig, and adds, “I’d better varnish the truth a bit for Stovey about all this.”
Eskil gets to his feet. “Don’t lie to me, Ludvig,” he says.
Ludvig shrugs his shoulders and stubs out his cigarette. “She wanted to go home. She was freezing cold, and she was terrified of getting stuck in the tower with me all night. So she went her way in the blizzard and I went mine.”
Eskil looks at him, then at the body in the snow. “We have to fetch help. She can’t stay here.”
“We’ll use the tow sled,” says Ludvig. “We can put her on that. We’ll go and fetch it.”
He turns and heads toward Eel Point. Eskil walks slowly backward so that he won’t be turning his back on the dead girl too quickly, then catches up with Ludvig.
They plow along silently in the snow, side by side.
“Are you going to carve her name up in the barn?” he asks. “Like we did with Werner?”
Werner was a seventeen-year-old who had been called up for military service; he fell into the water from a boat and drowned off the point in the summer of 1942. Greta’s name should be carved next to his up in the hayloft, in Eskil’s opinion. But Ludvig shakes his head.
“I hardly knew her.”
“But…”
“It was her own fault,” says Ludvig. “She should have stayed with me in the tower. I’d have warmed her up.”
Eskil says nothing.
“But there are plenty of girls in the villages,” Ludvig goes on, looking across the far side of Offermossen. “That’s the best thing about girls, they never run out.”
The Darkest Room Page 20
