“A warning,” said Aneta.
“He wanted to warn his daughter?” said Halders.
“A warning,” said Aneta, nodding to herself. She looked up at Halders. “Or a punishment.”
“Punishment? Punishment for what?”
“I don’t know if I dare to think about it,” said Aneta. She closed her eyes and opened them again. “It has something to do with Forsblad. And his sister.” She grabbed the arm of Halders’s jacket. “It has to do with them. But not how we think.”
Halders had the sense to keep quiet.
“It’s not like we think,” she repeated. “They’re playing some game. Or keeping quiet about something they don’t want us to know. Or they’re just scared. One of them, or some of them, are scared.”
“Like I just said,” said Halders. “What is it that I’m not getting here?”
Maybe we shouldn’t know, she thought, suddenly and intensely. We shouldn’t know! Maybe we should let it go, like a hot coal. Maybe Fredrik was right when he said that a long time ago. Maybe it’s dangerous, really dangerous, for us, for me.
For me.
“So she’s done something to her father that he has to punish her for?” Halders scraped his hand across the back of his head. “He steals the furniture?” Halders looked at Aneta. “Of course, it could also be as simple as that the warehouse out on Hisingen is a perfect storage facility for her things for the time being. Lindsten had the manpower and the vehicle, and Anette wanted out of the apartment fast, so Dad sent his thieves there to get the whole lot and then they drove to the warehouse and stacked it up nice and neat. Think of how it’s arranged all by itself, behind screens. Most of the other stuff is all helter-skelter out there.”
“Does Anette know about it, do you think? The warehouse? And the stolen goods? The trafficking?”
“No idea,” said Halders. “But surely she wonders where her things are.”
“If she knows, maybe it’s yet another reason to keep quiet,” said Aneta. “She doesn’t dare to do anything else.”
That evening she ran a hot bath. The sound of the water rushed through the entire apartment. She walked to the bathroom and dropped her clothes behind her. She had always left her clothes everywhere, and her mother had picked them up after her.
Now Fredrik picked them up.
“Jesus Christ,” he sometimes said when pieces of clothing were lying from the door to the bathroom.
It was the first time he followed her the whole way.
She had dragged him down into the half-full bathtub before he had had time to take off a damn thing.
That had been good.
She threw her panties into the hamper next to the washing machine and climbed carefully into the hot water and turned off the faucet. She sank very slowly down into the water, one inch, two, three, and so forth.
She lay with her chin underwater. There was foam everywhere. The water started to cool, but she intended to keep lying there. It was quiet in the apartment. No steps up above that was rare. No banging from the elevator door out in the stairwell; that was rare too. No sounds of traffic; it wasn’t audible from here. She heard only the familiar sounds of her own home, the refrigerator in the kitchen, the freezer, some other hum; she’d never really figured out what it was but she’d accepted it long ago, the faucet that dripped slooowly behind her neck, some sigh that could have been from the electronics that were scattered here and there in modern homes.
She heard a sound.
She didn’t recognize it.
Macdonald led the way north on High Street. They passed many shops and cafés. Here there were neighborhood services for the locals; we crushed those long ago in Sweden, thought Winter. This place might be poorer, but not in that way.
Macdonald stopped at one of the dark stone houses. A sign hung above the door: The Forres Gazette—Forres, Elgin, Nairn.
They went in. They were expected.
“Awful long time, no see, Steve,” said the man who came up to them. He gave Macdonald a punch on the back.
Macdonald clipped him back and introduced Winter, who quickly extended his hand for safety’s sake.
“Duncan Mackay,” said the man, who looked older but was the same age as Macdonald, who had told Winter about his classmate in the car.
Mackay’s hair was coal black and shoulder length. He had matching circles under his eyes. He guided them in behind a wooden counter. They sat down on two chairs in front of Mackay’s desk, which contrasted almost comically with Chief Inspector Craig’s in Inverness. They could barely see the editor on the other side of the piles of paper. Even though he was standing.
“Coffee, beer, whisky?” asked Mackay. “Claret? Marijuana?”
Macdonald looked at Winter.
“No thanks,” Winter said, pointing at his pack of Corps, which he had taken out. “I have smokes.”
Mackay had a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Macdonald shook his head at Mackay.
“We just saw Lorraine,” he said when Mackay had sat down and rolled a bit to the side in his chair.
“Steve the Heartbreaker Macdonald,” said Mackay. “It took her some time.” He turned to Winter. “To get over it.”
“She told us about Robbie.”
“Yeah, shit.”
“No doubt he’s disappeared.”
“He’ll show up,” said Mackay. “Unfortunately.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds, as though to reflect upon the fate of humanity. The room lay half in shadow.
Mackay got up and searched through the top of the piles of paper. He held a paper up to the light from the window.
“I asked the local editors to look around, but no one has seen this Osvald guy,” said Mackay. “Axel Osvald, right? There was a bulletin that went out, too, and obviously we checked then too—a foreigner who dies in Moray—but nothing about the man.”
“Okay,” said Macdonald.
“Your colleagues over at the Ramnee haven’t seen or heard anything either,” said Mackay.
“I know. I called a few days ago.”
“Have you been there?”
“Not yet.”
Mackay read from his paper again.
“There’s just one thing …”
“Yes?”
“Billy in the editorial department in Elgin did a thing about the fish market’s new dismal numbers, and he interviewed people up in Buckie. That was before the bulletin.” Mackay looked up. “Billy’s a little slow, but he’s good. But slow. Okay, he was talking to some of the old forgotten guys at the shipyard and he had parked the car on one of the little streets right across from there, and when he came back and he was going to drive home he saw a Corolla parked on the same street. It had been there when he arrived, too. Metallic green.”
“Did he get the number?”
“Hell no. Why should he have? He wasn’t even thinking about that then. He didn’t remember it until after the bulletin came out. No. Not then. It was when I called him yesterday. And actually, not even then. He called this morning and said that he’d seen the car.”
“Is he sure?”
“He’s pretty good with cars. And of course it appeared to be new, he could see that. A new car in Buckie … well, you don’t see that every day. At least not on those streets.”
43
He had made a journey he hadn’t planned on. It was a farewell. If you saw it on a map it looked like a circle, or at least part of a circle.
When had he last walked down Broad Street? Years or days or hours. A red sky. Down toward Onion Street and toward the harbor the sky was always red, always.
Four hundred boats per year!
Biggest whitefish port in Europe.
And out there, there were people he could have been close to. Maybe. No.
The smell. It was the sea, as it has always been, and then something more, which he hadn’t smelled then but did now: oil.
This city had changed after the oil. The trawlers were there, still a fore
st of masts, but people who walked the streets came because of the oil too.
The city had grown. The entrances were different, that was a sure sign of everything that had happened.
He stood on one of the western breakwaters. The trawlers here were largest. There was a blue one twenty yards away. He saw a man moving on the quarterdeck. He read the name on the trawler, which was made of steel.
That was something else, a hull of steel.
He heard a yell from the man down by the mess, a few words.
He lingered outside the Mission.
It was here.
The next-to-last night.
Meals 7:00–2:30, then and now. The Congregational church. Sick bed. Emergency facilities.
A notice that hadn’t existed then:
Zaphire went down in October 1997, four lives.
Everyone knew almost everything here. There were exceptions. There was one.
He walked in but turned around in the outer room. He was pushed away by the memories, and by something else: A man looked up from the counter, an expression on his face.
He was on his way out, didn’t look around, he wasn’t invisible here, he was deaf to the voice behind his back, the shout.
Caley Fisheries was still there. The fish market. There was a new notice at the entrance. Prohibited: smoking, spitting, eating, drinking, breaking of boxes, unclean clothing, unclean footwear. A guide for life, too.
Men in blue rubber garments and yellow boots were loading boxes of flounder or lemon sole. A truck to Aberdeen, and on to the south.
He walked on Crooked Lane; it was as crooked now as it had been then.
He walked toward the summit. The sky opened out. It was windy.
He felt the weapon against his thigh. It was just as cold. He wanted to fire it.
Half an hour later he was on his way, straight across and to the north. A long farewell. He drove through Strichen. He looked in his rearview mirror. Was anyone following him? It was possible, but he didn’t think so.
The weapon was under his jacket in the front seat.
He drove along the narrow roads to New Aberdour and through the village and stopped three yards from the formidable edge down to the sea. Three yards. He let the motor race. From where he was sitting he could only see sea and sky. Everything was one. The sea and the wind roared. He opened the car door. He got out. He held the pistol in his hand. He shot at the sky.
There were two roads down Troup Head. Over the slope and down the road to the community that hid itself from the world.
He knew. He had hidden here when the houses were still red like the cliffs, when the smugglers still defined life there. That was why no one had asked any questions.
When the cameras came he ran away.
Like now.
He sat in the car again.
He felt his foot on the pedal, a longing. A longing.
Jesus. Jesus.
Now he could see only the sky.
44
Spey Bay was still. Buckie Shipyard was empty and silent. Two trawlers from before were rusted in place in the shipyard frame, like a symbol.
It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar sight for Winter. He came from a city with dead shipyards.
They had parked on Richmond Street. This was where the local editor Billy had seen the green Corolla.
“How many people in Buckie own that kind of car in this year’s model?” Macdonald asked straight out during the drive north, and he called Craig in Inverness.
Craig had put a guy on it. The answer came while they were still driving through the harbor.
No one.
There were sixteen front doors on Richmond Street, eight on each side. The row houses looked like they were built out of one stone block. Only one car was parked on the street. It was a wreck from the seventies.
“What the heck,” Macdonald said, and rang the first doorbell.
People were home at all but one of the addresses; they were all women. They would have been happy to be at work. No one drove a new Corolla and no one had any immediate plans to do so. No one knew exactly what that model looked like. No one had had a visit from anyone in a Corolla.
“Sometimes people who are going to the shipyard park here,” said one of the women, older, wearing a dress with a large floral pattern that had survived two world wars.
“What are they going to the shipyard to do?” said Macdonald.
Just then they heard heavy hammering from the other side of the shipyard wall. It was a strange noise. It was suddenly everywhere, like a reminder. Doonk—doonk—doonk.
They said good-bye to the woman and crossed the intersection to the shipyard and found the large gate, which was locked. Next to that, a twenty-foot section of the nine-foot-high fence was missing. They walked in.
The hammering had stopped but started again, doonk … doonk … with a hollow echo that sounded different in there, where everything was reminiscent of a cemetery. The blows came from inside a building that looked like a partially bombed cathedral. One of the walls was missing. Inside everything was dark. They walked closer and went in. The hammering stopped; someone had seen them first.
“You’re trespassing,” said an unfriendly voice.
“Police,” said Macdonald into the darkness. It smelled like rust and dirty water, iron, burned steel, sulfur, fire, earth, tar, sea. It’s a smell from the past, thought Winter. I remember it from when I was a child.
“What tha fockin’ is a’matter?” they heard the voice say, and a man stepped forward, and he still held the hammer, a sledgehammer, in his hand. Behind him stood something that looked like a bow door, and he had banged the shit out of one side. Winter suddenly felt a strong urge to grab that sledgehammer and devote himself to attacking the masses of iron, strike them until he collapsed, powerless. That must be good for you.
The man with the sledgehammer didn’t look like he was here for therapeutic reasons. He wore a coverall that had been around so long that it had lost all color and looked most of all like the skin of the man’s face, which was possibly gray, possibly black and white. A cigarette butt hung from the corner of his mouth. The worker was around sixty, maybe younger, maybe older. In the car, Macdonald had said that it wasn’t exactly easy to determine men’s ages up here. Thirty-five-year-olds might look sixty-five. It was seldom the other way around.
“We just want to ask a couple o’questions,” said Macdonald.
“Aye,” said the man, spitting out the butt and hobbling toward them with a severe limp. He moved the sledgehammer from his right to his left hand as though to compensate for his lack of balance.
He was surprisingly tall, almost as tall as Macdonald, who was the tallest Scot Winter had seen yet. Winter had commented on this earlier. I kept away from the haggis, Macdonald had said. It pushes you toward the earth. It’s like rice for the Japanese.
Bullshit, Winter had said.
It was a conversation that Winter hardly understood; actually, he didn’t at all. The man spoke an awful gibberish, and Winter suspected that Macdonald was guessing at half of it. And suddenly the conversation was over, without ceremony. It was like watching a sport you didn’t understand.
They walked back to the car on Richmond. A double sheet of newspaper blew across the main road to Portessie. Winter could see half a headline, like half a message.
“He’s unemployed, but he goes there for old times’ sake,” said Macdonald. “He’s not alone in that.”
“But he hadn’t met any Johnson or Osvald or anything, from what I understand.”
“No.”
“But our man could have been here,” said Winter.
“Which one?”
“Well, that’s one of the questions,” said Winter.
They drove slowly back through the harbor district: Harbour Office, Marine Accident Investigation Branch, Carlton House, Fisherman’s Fishselling Co. Ltd., JSB Supplies Ltd., Buckie Fish Market. Winter could see trawlers in the small wet dock; he read off the boats’ sterns: Three
Sisters, Priestman, Avoca, Jolair, Monadhliath.
“We might as well ask at the Marine,” said Macdonald.
The Marine Hotel looked like it had been taken from a noir film. If walls could talk, Winter thought as they stood in the lobby. The woman behind the desk was a dyed blonde and maybe fifty and had lively eyes. Behind her was a sign for the “Cunard Suite,” which must have been the most charming the hotel had to offer.
But even in the lobby there was wall-to-wall carpeting.
Winter noticed that the carpets covered all surfaces. The British had a special relationship with wall-to-wall carpeting, as though the myth of British properness was reflected in these carpets that had to cover all naked floors.
Their colors were reminiscent of the hammer man’s coverall.
“I’ll get the man’ger fur ya, luv,” she said, and lifted the telephone receiver.
They stood on the square, Cluny Square. There was a hotel in front of them that looked like a castle. The Cluny Hotel. It was the lunch hour. Winter could see a group of little old ladies mince their way in through the hotel’s wide entrance. Time for tea.
“So,” said Macdonald about the conversation they’d had with “the man’ger.”
“Could be the old man making a return visit,” said Winter.
“Could be any nostalgic at all,” said Macdonald.
“This isn’t a nostalgic,” said Winter.
“What is he, then?” said Macdonald.
“According to all reports, dead since the war,” said Winter.
“Well, then there’s probably not much nostalgia left.”
“Shall we have a cup of tea?” said Winter, nodding toward the hotel.
Macdonald looked at his watch.
“Okay,” he said.
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