Harald Steen’s words echo in her mind as she saws through the tough wood, cursing loudly.
‘I have no idea where the others went off to, but Anne-Marie died in eighty-six and Per lived alone here for years until he ended up in the hospital, too. We’d meet up occasionally for a game of cards for a few years, but both he and I found it increasingly difficult to move about. The bottle claimed him, they say, and that makes sense. Well, and Brandon and Janet who live up in Joms, of course.’
‘You mean Joms here on Heimö? They still live on the island?’
Karen had been well aware of how shrilly eager she sounded.
‘Calm down, lass, you’ll give yourself a heart attack. Well, they were still there last summer, because I ran into them at the market in Dunker after a visit to the dentist. Hellishly expensive, it was, but a person has to be able to chew their porridge.’
When Karen finally opens the front door of the last grey stone house north of Langevik and steps across the threshold with boots covered in grey mud, her mind is busy pondering how to get to Joms the next day if the deluge continues through the night. How to get out of Langevik at all, in fact.
That’s why the smell emanating from the kitchen escapes her notice at first. Only after she’s unlaced her boots and pulled off her sodden socks does she realise she’s not going to have to root through the freezer for something to pop in the microwave. Sigrid is standing by the kitchen counter with a colander in her hand.
‘It’s spaghetti Bolognese, because it’s really the only thing I know how to make. I put the pasta in when I heard the car, so it should be ready in ten minutes.’
Karen feels warmth spread through her body despite the rain-soaked clothes clinging to her.
‘You have no idea how great spaghetti Bolognese sounds to me right now. I’m just going to have a quick shower. How are you feeling, anyway? You look a lot better.’
‘I’m just a bit tired, but almost no fever, so I think I can have some wine. Do you want me to open a bottle?’
‘One glass, that’s all you’re getting.’
*
‘Have you decided what to do with the house?’ Karen asks between mouthfuls after they sit down at the table a little while later. ‘It’s yours now.’
Sigrid shrugs. Karen is starting to get used to that.
‘Sell it, I guess. If I can find a buyer.’
‘I don’t think that’ll be a problem. It’s a nice house and Langevik has become popular in recent years. So you’d prefer to stay up in Gaarda?’
‘No, I can’t stay there. We’re subletting from Sam’s brother, so it’s his. He called today to remind me I have to get my things out. Apparently, he’s been sleeping on a friend’s sofa since he left and figures it should be me doing that. I’m going to call around tomorrow and see what I can sort out.’
‘So you’re not considering moving into your mum’s house? Your house,’ she corrects herself.
‘It wouldn’t work. How would I get to and from work without a car? And before you say anything, no, I’m not going to ask my dad for money.’
‘You don’t have a licence?’
‘I do, but no car, like I just said.’
‘Well, but you do, actually; they found your mum’s car. There’s something wrong with the starter, apparently, but we can get that fixed before you go back to work.’
‘Are you serious?’
Sigrid lights up, but then looks doubtful again. Mercurial, Karen decides.
‘I don’t know if I want to live there. I kind of get a bad vibe from the last time I did. And now I can’t go into the kitchen even though they cleaned it all up. You saw it, didn’t you?’
Karen nods mutely while searching for the right words. Sigrid’s eyes signal both an urge to know and a plea not to have to hear it. For a moment, she looks very lost. Then she gets up quickly and walks over to the kitchen counter. Pretends to clean something up, clears her throat and continues.
‘Besides, all those things she bought make me gag,’ she continues. ‘Cushions everywhere and at least a hundred pairs of shoes.’
Karen studies the slim girl. Hears her efforts to bring her voice under control, to control the unfathomable.
‘It’s OK to be sad, Sigrid,’ she says.
‘She’s got stuff bloody everywhere. Did you know she has a home gym in her bedroom? And a machine to steam her face and another for foot rubs, at least I think that’s what it’s for . . . I can’t bear to live in the middle of all that crap.’
Karen nods and thinks about the heaps of ornaments Sigrid dumped on the lawn. So that was why she’d gone to her mother’s house, because she knew Samuel was going to kick her out of the flat. She’d probably figured she was going to have to stay in the house for a while at least. Karen studies Sigrid, who has got up again to clear the table. She’s proud, refuses to ask her dad for anything, even though he’s wealthy and would probably fly into action if she’d just let him. I wonder why she’s so angry with him. And why she was so angry with her mother?
‘How about this? You can stay here for a few weeks while we work on getting the house in order. We’ll throw away anything you don’t want to keep, repaint and make it yours. That way, you can take your time figuring out if you want to live there or if you want to sell it and buy something else.’
Sigrid seems to consider the offer.
‘I won’t have money for rent until next week after I go back to work.’
‘This dinner was worth a week’s rent to me.’
Sigrid eyes Karen suspiciously.
‘Why are you being so nice? Mum always said terrible things about you. She said you used to live in England but that your husband kicked you out and that’s why you had to move back.’
‘She said that, did she?’
Sigrid looks hesitant, then braces herself.
‘She said you were the kind of woman who went after other people’s husbands, since you’d lost your own.’
Karen reaches for the bottle and tops herself up with a trembling hand.
‘She was half right,’ she says, noting that she sounds completely unperturbed.
Sigrid says nothing, pondering Karen’s reply. When she finally speaks, Karen flinches as though she’s been slapped.
‘You have a son, don’t you?’
59
The rain has stopped. The pale moon, peeking out through a rift in the clouds, illuminates her bedroom and makes the big linden tree outside the window cast shadows across the walls.
Karen realises sleep is still a long way off.
*
Everything had come pouring out of her tonight. Everything she has kept carefully bottled up inside during the long years of pent-up grief. The whole truth, which previously only her mother knew, everything her closest friends guess at but have learnt not to ask about. She had unleashed a flood of words, heedless of the fact that her interlocutor was an eighteen-year-old girl, who was dismayed at the reaction to her simple question.
Everything that had been set in motion when two police officers and a doctor had given her the unfathomable news and Karen Eiken Hornby had ceased living. Had ceased existing while words like ‘massive collision’, ‘M25’, ‘Waltham Abbey’ and ‘one lorry and five cars’, sliced through her.
Both Mathis and John had died, they’d told her. They didn’t suffer, they’d said. She knew it wasn’t true.
Death had been instantaneous, the police officers had whispered to the nurses; the lorry had sliced the car open like a can of sardines. Four people had died and another six were badly injured.
That the woman in the car was unharmed was a miracle, the doctor had said, before immediately correcting himself. Physically unharmed; she still hadn’t said a word since they cut her out of the wreck.
Then the doctor had turned to Karen. Was there anyone they could call? She hadn’t replied. They must have called their old friends, Allison and Keith, who had turned up, pale, in shock, their eyes red.
She has no clear memory of th
e first twenty-four hours, only fragments; hushed voices and crying. Valium. Sleep. Worried eyes whenever she woke up.
And then another day. A brand-new morning had broken, as though nothing had happened. As though the world had failed to realise that everything was over.
A brand-new day. And the morgue.
Two bodies, two fallen soldiers with their arms along their sides; one tall, one short, hidden under sheets. They must have called her mother, too. Mum, who’d been standing there when Karen turned around and left John and Mathis in the tiled cold. Mum, who’d sat quietly in the back seat of the police car that drove them from the morgue to the house and squeezed Karen’s hand so tightly she could feel it. Mum, who’d found the keys in Karen’s handbag, opened the door and made her go inside. Mum, who’d been there every second of the unbearable series of days that followed, one after the other.
Mum, who’d set her own grief aside during the day and let it out at night when she thought Karen couldn’t hear her pacing downstairs, from the kitchen to the living room and back again. Hours of sobbing over everything she’d lost, too. John, whom she’d learnt to love. And Mathis, her only child’s only child.
Her mum’s grief had been given no space, no recipient. And yet, she’d continued to exist when Karen had been unable. With trembling hands, in broken English, she’d seen to everything.
Church. Coffins. Emptiness.
*
Every minute spent in the house had been unbearable; it was their house, not hers. Without them, it was nothing but a prison of memories. London. Every street a reminder, every neighbour looking for something appropriate to say, every child she saw, every song, every TV programme. Everything was a reminder of the life she’d had. The road forward lay in ruins; nothing tomorrow, nothing next week, not next Christmas, not next summer, not in a few years, never when Mathis is older. No life; there was nothing to look forward to.
Only by looking to her past had she found an ice floe to cling to. She had to go home. Back home.
*
Sigrid had been still and pale while the words tumbled out of Karen; the whole stinking truth about how her life had ended that day. All the things she’d sworn she’d never talk about she’d deposited in the lap of a young girl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sigrid had said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry, but I saw the picture in your bedroom when I was looking for more Tylenol.’
Karen holds her breath and listens for sounds from Sigrid’s room, but can only hear her own pulse. She turns her head to the bedside table and looks at the photograph that prompted Sigrid’s question. You have a son, don’t you?
John and Karen on a beach on Crete, with a tanned, laughing Mathis with a head full of sand between them. John had stubbornly refused to ask someone to take their picture; instead, he’d positioned the camera on a beach chair and used the timer. There had been countless failed attempts before he’d managed to both get all three of them in focus and make it back into the shot on time. Mathis had fallen over himself laughing at his dad’s clumsiness and Karen had laughed at her son’s trilling laughter and John had laughed at the two of them.
In the end, the picture had come out well, they’d decided, and then they’d headed over to the beach café to eat squid. Their last summer. The last picture of the three of them together.
*
Her body feels strangely heavy; her arms and legs like lead against the mattress, but her mind is racing. Why hadn’t she put the photograph away, like she normally does whenever she has company? Is Sigrid going to tell her father? And is Jounas going to tell everyone else? Is the truth going to spread like ripples of pity around her now? Is she going to have to smile consolingly at everyone who now knows and feels compelled to condole with her? Will her colleagues talk about her and fall silent when she enters the room? Are other people going to discuss her grief? Discuss John. Mathis.
She has worked so hard to keep that from happening. Because it was the only way she knew how to carry on. A past that no longer existed. And a present. Nothing in between. She isolated herself in the house that had been her mother’s and was now hers. Weeks of drawn curtains and untouched bowls of soup. Then weeks of furious walking up and down the shoreline; hours of vacant staring at the horizon and the constant pull of the cliff edge.
In the end, her mother had stepped in.
‘I’ve spoken to Wilhelm Kaste,’ she’d told her. ‘They’re hiring a detective sergeant and he’s promised to meet with you on Thursday at ten. I’ll drive you.’
For some reason, she hadn’t even tried to protest. And there, in Wilhelm Kaste’s office, the rest of her life had begun.
‘Your mother has told me what happened and I want to take this opportunity to tell you how sorry I am for your loss. No one else knows and I won’t mention it again, unless you want to talk about it. If you want the job, it’s yours; not because I feel sorry for you and not because I’ve known your mother since we were children, but because you’re the most qualified applicant. Or most over-qualified, I should say, but detective sergeant’s the only opening we have at the moment. Do you want the job?’
She’d said yes and the day she started, Kaste had called her into his office.
‘Since several people here will have access to your file, I’ve taken the liberty of changing some of the details. This is just the local archive, mind, more senior managers will of course still be able to access the correct information if they put their minds to it, but I sincerely doubt anyone will. As far as people here know, you’re divorced after a brief marriage in the UK. No children,’ he’d added and cleared his throat. ‘Your mother tells me that’s how you want it, but I need to hear it from you.’
‘That’s how I want it,’ she’d told him.
*
And that’s how it had been. A truth too painful to talk about, a guilt so overwhelming it had to be suppressed for her to be able to carry on.
Light is seeping out under the guestroom door when Karen gives it a gentle knock. Sigrid is lying on the bed with her backpack next to her, fully dressed, her eyes swollen from crying. She quickly sits up when Karen opens the door.
‘I’ll be out of here first thing tomorrow,’ she says.
Karen sits down at the edge of the bed and puts her hand on Sigrid’s.
‘Don’t leave. This isn’t your fault, Sigrid.’
‘I shouldn’t have asked. If I’d known, I would never have said anything.’
‘It’s not your fault, Sigrid,’ Karen repeats. ‘It’s just that I’ve never told anyone about this. It’s been my way of surviving.’
‘I get that. You don’t have to talk to me either.’
‘But I did. I just dumped it all on you. I’m so sorry about that.’
They sit in silence while Karen strokes Sigrid’s hand with her thumb.
‘But there’s one thing I didn’t tell you.’
And then she says it out loud.
‘It was my fault. I was driving.’
60
Even though it’s been almost eight hours since the rain stopped, the minor roads are still in a bad state. Traffic is flowing along Thorsbyleden again but the road under the railway viaduct in Västerport has had to close until the water has had a chance to subside.
Karen drives with her eyes firmly fixed on the road, listening through the hands-free to what the police chief inspector has to say about the traffic conditions this morning. According to his information, getting to Joms should be OK, so long as she’s careful and doesn’t try to drive through flooded sections of roadway.
‘They’ve had to tow nineteen cars so far this morning,’ Thorstein Klockare says with a voice tinged with a ghoulish kind of resignation. ‘But the inland and lowlands are worst hit. How’s the situation in Langevik, by the way?’
Karen adjusts her earbud.
‘It was properly slippery last night, but most of it was fine this morning. Do you know what the forecast is? I didn’t have time to check the weather before I left.’
‘No more rain today, they say, but low-pressure systems are queued up over the North Sea.’
‘So, the usual.’
‘Same as ever,’ Thorstein Klockare confirms.
They end the call and Karen glances over at the GPS. Assuming the police chief inspector is correct, she should be in Joms in half an hour.
*
Karen pulls over at the end of the paved road. She leans forward and peers out through the windscreen at the house and the narrow gravel road leading up to it. Then she kills the engine, opens the door and climbs out. True, the road looks passable from here, but she can feel how sodden the ground is under her wellies. Chances are the top layer of gravel will give way if she tries to drive up the hill. No need to add to the towers’ workload this morning. Instead, she starts walking up the steep hill.
Janet Connor had sounded drowsy when she answered the phone half an hour ago. Or like she’d just been woken up, actually, though she had assured Karen she and Brandon were both up. Of course Karen could stop by, though Janet had no idea what she and Brandon could possibly do to be of assistance.
Now she opens the door before Karen has reached the porch.
‘Welcome,’ she calls out in a voice that is now wide-awake, ‘would you like some tea or coffee?’
Janet Connor’s tall, slender body is wrapped in a long kimono that makes her look regal. Her grey hair is held back by a thin green scarf she’s artfully wrapped around her head, but on her feet are grey rag socks, which detract somewhat from her majestic air. She looks about seventy, but despite her grey hair, she gives a youthful impression as she smiles at Karen from the door.
Behind Janet, Karen can glimpse a man of the same age. He seems slightly winded and looks like he’s adjusting his fly. Karen tries not to think about what she interrupted as she climbs the front steps.
‘Either, thank you,’ she says with a smile. ‘Karen Eiken Hornby,’ she adds and holds out her hand. ‘You’re very kind to invite me on such short notice. I hope I’m not disturbing your morning routine too much,’ she adds, regretting it instantly when she notices Brandon and Janet Connor exchanging a quick look.
Fatal Isles Page 30
