The Swinging Sixties, thought Per. But that’s all over now.
He knocked on the door of the spare room. ‘Jerry?’
The snoring stopped, only to be replaced by coughing.
‘Time to get up, Jerry – breakfast.’
Per turned and saw a black mobile phone lying on the table in the hallway. It was Jerry’s. He noticed that it was switched on, and that someone had called at around seven o’clock that morning. Everybody had been asleep, of course.
He picked up the phone to see if he recognized the name of the caller, but the display showed only NUMBER WITHHELD.
Jerry shuffled out on to the patio quarter of an hour later wearing a white dressing gown he had borrowed from Per. The twins were still asleep, but that was fine – Nilla in particular needed her rest. Besides, Per wanted to talk to his father without the children eavesdropping.
They nodded at one another in the sunshine.
‘Pelle?’ said Jerry, looking at the glass in front of him.
‘No alcohol today,’ said Per. ‘Orange juice.’
As his father sat down, Per caught a glimpse of the white dressing on his stomach. He helped him to butter a slice of toast, and Jerry took a big bite.
Per looked at him. ‘You should have played things a bit cooler yesterday, Jerry.’
His father blinked.
‘You shouldn’t have told the neighbours what you used to do. You shouldn’t have shown them the magazine.’
Jerry shrugged his shoulders.
Per knew that his father had never been ashamed of anything. Not Jerry, he just did whatever he wanted. He had loved his job and had fun all his life.
Per leaned across the table. ‘Jerry, do you remember a girl called Regina?’
‘Regina?’
‘Regina, who worked with you back in the sixties … She used to wear a blonde wig.’
Jerry pointed to his own thinning hair, and shook his head.
‘Yes, I know you turned all your girls into blondes … But do you remember Regina?’
Jerry glanced sideways, as if he were thinking.
‘What happened to her? Do you remember?’
Jerry said nothing.
‘Got old, I suppose,’ he said eventually, and started coughing.
Per let him finish, then picked up his father’s mobile to show him the missed call.
‘Somebody’s trying to get hold of you, Jerry.’
25
Vendela woke up at about eight o’clock on Maundy Thursday with a dry mouth and a blocked nose. It was probably her imagination, but when she opened the blinds she thought the air outside was yellow with whirling pollen.
Aloysius was sleeping at the foot of the bed, and Max was completely wrapped up in his duvet on the other side of the double bed. His face was turned away, but he was snoring loudly, with his mouth open. It was the wine, of course. He had knocked back glass after glass of red wine last night, despite all the talk of thinking about his heart and cutting back on the alcohol.
He would be like a bear with a sore head when he woke up, so she let him sleep for a while longer.
Today would be the photographer’s final visit to the island, which meant she would have to cook and bake bread before the morning’s photo shoot.
She threw the covers aside, blew her nose as quietly as possible and got up.
When Max lumbered out of the bedroom in a sad-looking dressing gown an hour later, Vendela had taken an antihistamine tablet and was waiting for it to take effect. She had set the dough for two different kinds of artisan bread to rise, and was mixing melted butter and rye flour for another kind. Ally had eaten some chicken-flavoured kibble and was lying under the kitchen table.
‘Good morning!’ she said to Max.
‘Mm-hmm.’
He poured himself a cup of coffee and surveyed her efforts. ‘You’ve started on the bread too early,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to look freshly baked, so that steam comes out when I cut it.’
‘I know, but the problem is that the loaves cool really quickly,’ said Vendela, wiping her forehead. ‘But I’m just going to use these as decoration in the background … I’ll make some more when the photographer arrives.’
‘OK. Have you had breakfast?’
She nodded eagerly. ‘A banana, three slices of bread and cheese, and a yoghurt.’
That was a little white lie; breakfast had consisted of nothing but a cup of lemon tea.
‘Well done,’ said Max. He headed for the bathroom and locked himself in.
Vendela looked over at the front door, longing to be out on the alvar and to see if the coin had gone. She picked up the butter that was left over from her baking and began to form it into curls.
The golden-yellow butter looked good in photographs, but she had nothing but bad memories of real butter, however delicious it might be. She had had to churn it by hand when she was a little girl; Henry had made whisks from birch twigs and taught his daughter how to make butter from cream. It took eight litres of cream to make a tub of butter, and it had been bloody hard work, to say the least. It had given Vendela blisters on her hands.
An hour later, the young photographer from Kalmar turned up. He was met on the steps by a smiling Max, dressed in appropriately rural clothing in shades of grey, brown and blue, picked out for him by Vendela. The two men disappeared into the kitchen to discuss the composition of the pictures and various camera angles, and Vendela went out into the sunshine and walked up the road to fetch the newspaper. The mailboxes belonging to the summer cottages were arranged in a long row, to make life easier for the postman.
As she approached them she saw a tall man in a green padded jacket coming towards her, a newspaper under his arm. It was Per Mörner.
Vendela straightened her back and smiled instinctively. There had been a brief astonished silence at the party when Jerry Morner got out his magazine, but it had quickly passed.
That was when she had recognized him from various interviews and television documentaries. In the seventies Jerry Morner had been a high-profile figure, frequently seen in night clubs and exclusive bars. He had been one of the porn film directors who had taken the image of Swedish sinfulness out into the world, making the Americans and Europeans regard Sweden as a dreamland where every woman wanted sex all the time.
Before that, when Vendela was young, pornography was banned and couldn’t be sold. Then it became legal, but it was still something dirty. These days there were no moral rules; one day the newspapers were writing about the horrors of the sex industry, the next they were listing the best erotic films.
She nodded at Per Mörner, intending to walk past him, but he stopped, which meant she had to do the same.
‘Thank you for last night,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ Vendela said quickly. She added, ‘So now we all know each other a little bit better.’
‘Yes … quite.’
There was a silence, then Per went on: ‘That business my father was talking about …’
Vendela laughed nervously. ‘Well, at least he was honest.’
‘Yes, and the work he did was all above-board,’ Per said. ‘But he’s given all that up now.’
‘I see.’
Vendela was about to ask how Per could be so certain, when her kitchen window was flung open and Max yelled, ‘Vendela, we’re ready now! We’re about to photograph the bread, are you coming?’
‘Just a minute!’ she called back.
Max gave her and Per Mörner a quick glance and nodded briefly without saying anything, then he closed the kitchen window.
Vendela felt as if her husband had passed judgement on her and given her a black mark for conduct, but she was only chatting to a neighbour.
In a sudden burst of defiance she turned to Per. ‘So you’re a jogger too?’
He nodded. ‘Sometimes. I’d like to do more.’
‘Perhaps we could go out for a run together one evening?’
Per looked at her, slightly wary. ‘
OK,’ he said. ‘If you like.’
‘Good.’
Vendela said goodbye and went back to the house. That was good, she had been sociable, perfectly normal. And she had got herself a running buddy.
Of course, she wouldn’t run to the elf stone with Per Mörner. That was her place, and hers alone.
Öland 1957
Vendela sees the elf stone once again when she has left the village school and started at the bigger high school in Marnäs on the other side of the island, almost four kilometres away.
It’s a long way to walk six days a week, at least for a nine-year-old, but Henry never goes with her, not once.
All he does is take his daughter to the edge of the meadow, where the cows are chewing the cud beneath the open sky. Then he points east, towards the treeless horizon.
‘Head for the elf stone, and when you get there you’ll be able to see the church tower in Marnäs,’ he says. ‘The school is just past the church. That’s the shortest route … but if we get a lot of snow in winter, you’ll have to go along the main road.’
He hands over a packet of sandwiches for break time. Then he sets off for the quarry, humming some melody.
Vendela heads off in the opposite direction, straight across the burnt brown grass. Summer is over but its dryness remains, and dead flowers and leaves crunch beneath her shoes as she walks towards the church tower. She is terrified of adders, but on all those walks to and from school she encounters only nice animals: hares, foxes and deer.
She sees the elf stone again that very first day. It is still there in the grass, isolated and immovable. Vendela walks past it and continues on her way to Marnäs church tower.
School begins at eight thirty, and the children are met by Eriksson, the headmaster, who stands in front of the blackboard looking strict, and fru Jansson, whose hair is in a bun; she looks even stricter. She calls the register, reading each name in a loud, harsh voice. Then she sits down at the pedal organ to lead morning worship with a hymn, and lessons begin after that.
At half past one the first school day is over. Vendela thinks it has gone well. She felt lonely and a little bit scared of fru Jansson at first, but then she thought that the class was just like a herd of cows, and everybody else was afraid too; that made her feel better. Besides which, they had needlework after break, and music and movement at their desks every hour. If she can just make some friends, she will be happy at the high school.
On the way home she passes the big, flat elf stone once again, and stops. Then she walks over to it.
When she stands on tiptoe she can see that there are little hollows in the top of the stone, at least a dozen of them. They look as if they have been made deliberately then polished, like little round stone bowls.
She looks around, but there is no one in sight. She remembers what Henry told her about gifts to the elves and she wants to linger here, but in the end she leaves the stone and sets off home, back to the cows.
From then on hardly a day passes when Vendela does not stop on her way home from school to see if people have left any gifts on the elf stone. She never sees anyone else visiting the stone, but sometimes there are small gifts in the hollows, coins or pins or pieces of jewellery.
There is a strange atmosphere around the stone; everything is so quiet. But when Vendela closes her eyes, thinks of nothing and screws her eyes up so tightly that the light coming through her eyelids turns dark blue, she gets pictures inside her head. She sees a group of pale, slender people standing on the far side of the stone, looking at her. They become clearer and clearer the longer she keeps her eyes closed, and the clearest of all is a tall, beautiful woman with dark eyes. Vendela knows that she is the queen of the elves, who once upon a time fell in love with a huntsman.
The queen does not speak, she merely stares at Vendela. She looks sorrowful, as if she were missing her beloved. Vendela keeps her eyes closed, but thinks she can hear the sound of jingling bells in the distance; the grass beneath her feet seems to disappear, and the ground becomes hard and smooth. Fresh water is splashing from cool fountains.
The kingdom of the elves.
But when she opens her eyes, everything has vanished.
She goes home to the farm and looks up at the middle window upstairs, in spite of the fact that she doesn’t really want to.
The Invalid’s room. As usual the window is dark and empty.
Vendela goes into the porch and continues straight through the kitchen into Henry’s bedroom, where unwashed clothes, invoices from wholesalers and letters from the authorities are lying all over the place. She has no money to offer the elves, but in a dark-brown cupboard next to her father’s bed is her mother’s jewellery box.
Henry won’t be home from the quarry for several hours, and of course the Invalid can’t disturb her either, so she kneels down in front of the cupboard and opens it.
The white jewellery box is on the bottom shelf. It is lined with green fabric, and contains brooches, necklaces, earrings and tiepins – perhaps twenty or thirty pieces in total, both old, inherited items and things that were bought after the war, everything that her mother and her family gathered over the years and left behind.
With her thumb and forefinger, Vendela carefully picks up a silver brooch with a polished red stone. Even here in the darkness the stone has a glow about it, almost like a ruby.
A ruby in Paris, Vendela thinks.
She listens, but the house is silent. She takes the brooch and tucks it down her dress.
On her way home from school the next day, Vendela takes the brooch out of the inside pocket of her coat when she reaches the elf stone. She looks at the brooch, then at the empty hollows.
It’s funny, but she can’t think of anything to ask for. Not today. She is almost ten years old and there ought to be lots of things to wish for, but her head is completely empty.
A trip to Paris?
She mustn’t be greedy. In the end she just wishes for a trip to the mainland – to Kalmar. She hasn’t been there for almost two years.
She places the brooch in one of the hollows and runs home.
It is Saturday. For once the school is closed, because new stoves are being installed in the classrooms.
‘Hurry up with the cows this morning,’ her father says at breakfast. ‘And get changed when you come home.’
‘What for?’
‘We’re going to Kalmar on the train, and we’re going to stay overnight with your aunt.’
A coincidence? No, it was the elves.
But Vendela should have stopped wishing for things at that point.
26
Per was going to ring the police about the fire, but if the family was going to eat, he had to get some work done as well. So after breakfast, when he had settled his father on the patio, he shut himself in the kitchen with a list of numbers and his questionnaire. He placed his finger on the list and called the first number.
Three rings, then a male voice answered with his surname. The name matched the one on Per’s list, so he straightened up and took a deep breath in order to fill his voice with energy.
‘Good morning, my name is Per Mörner and I’m calling from Intereko; we’re involved in market research. I wonder if you have time to answer a few questions? It will only take a couple of minutes.’
(In fact it was more like ten minutes.)
‘What’s it about?’ said the man.
‘I’d just like to ask you some questions about a particular brand of soap. Do you use soap in your household?’
The man laughed. ‘Well, yes …’
‘Good,’ said Per. ‘I’m going to say the name of this soap, and I’d like you to tell me when you last saw it.’
He said the name, slowly and clearly.
‘I do recognize it,’ said the man. ‘I’ve seen adverts for it in town.’
‘Great,’ said Per. ‘Can you describe in three words what you felt when you saw these adverts?’
He was well under way now. Marika had looked
amused last year – or scornful, Per thought – when he told her he was interviewing people over the phone. When they met they had both been working in marketing, but Marika had become a team leader while Per had decided to quit after their divorce. It was a decision he had arrived at gradually, partly because of Jerry. His father had been hungry for money and success, and he didn’t want to follow him down that road.
But interviewing was a job he could do wherever there was a telephone. It was all about checking what image a particular item had, finding out people’s dreams and hopes about the product, so that future sales and marketing campaigns could build on that knowledge.
By shortly after ten o’clock he had called twenty-five of the numbers on his list, and had got answers from fourteen of them. When he put down the phone after the last interview, it rang immediately.
‘Mörner.’
He couldn’t hear a voice, just a strange, echoing noise. It sounded as if someone was yelling in the background, a few metres from the phone, but it sounded metallic. Recorded.
‘Hello?’
No reply. The yelling continued.
Wrong number – or perhaps another telephone interviewer. Per hung up.
He carried on working through his list, but at about eleven o’clock he took a break to go and fetch the Kalmar newspaper from the mailbox. It was supposed to be a morning paper, but it arrived much later in Stenvik.
He walked back to the cottage, flicking through the news pages, and stopped dead when he saw the headline:
BODIES FOUND AFTER HOUSE FIRE
The badly burnt bodies of a woman in her thirties and a man in his sixties were found on Wednesday in a house outside Ryd, to the south of Växjö.
The property was completely destroyed in a fire on Sunday night, and an employee who was believed to be in the house was reported missing. The police searched the remains of the house and discovered a body which has been identified as that of the missing man. Another person was also discovered in a different part of the house, a younger woman who has yet to be identified.
The Quarry Page 14
