Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

“No,” said Hagman. “I mean, the owners go home to the city in August every year. In September there was a firm out here replacing some floors. But since then there hasn’t…”

Tilda looked at him. “A flooring company?”

“Yes… they worked in these houses for several days. But they made sure everything was properly locked up when they’d finished.”

“It wasn’t a plumbing firm?” said Tilda. “Kalmar Pipes and Welding?”

Hagman shook his head. “They were laying floors,” he said. “Young lads. Several of them.”

“Laying floors…” said Tilda.

She remembered the newly polished floor at the vicarage in Hagelby, and wondered if she’d found a pattern.

“Did you talk to them?”

“No.”

Tilda went around the other cottages nearby with Hagman, and made a note of which ones had broken window frames.

“We need to get in touch with the owners,” she said as they walked back toward the police car. “Have you got contact details for them, John?”

“For some of them, yes,” said Hagman. “Those who have decent manners.”

When Tilda got back to the station, she called a dozen or so owners of cottages on Öland or in the Kalmar area who had reported break-ins during the fall.

Four of the owners she managed to get hold of either had floors sanded or replaced in their summer cottages earlier in the year. They had used a local firm in northern Öland: Marnäs Fine Flooring.

She also called the vicarage in Hagelby; the owners were now home from the hospital. Gunnar Edberg still had his hand in a cast, but he was feeling better. They had also used the firm in Marnäs to lay a new floor.

“It went really well,” said Edberg. “They were here for five days early on in the summer… but we never saw them, we were in Norway at the time.”

“So you lent them the keys,” said Tilda, “even though you didn’t know who they were?”

“It’s a reliable firm,” said Edberg. “We know the owner, he lives in Marnäs.”

“Have you got his number?”

Tilda had the bit between her teeth now, and she called the owner of Marnäs Fine Flooring as soon as she finished talking to Gunnar Edberg. She quickly spelled out the purpose of her call: to find out the names of the men who had been working in northern Öland laying floors over the past year. She stressed that they weren’t suspected of any crime, and that the police would appreciate it if the owner didn’t mention her call to his employees.

No problem. The owner of the flooring company gave her two names, along with their addresses and ID numbers.

Niclas Lindell

Henrik Jansson

Both good men, he assured her. Decent, capable, and conscientious. Sometimes they worked together, sometimes separately-usually for residents of the island when they were away on holiday, and in summer cottages out of season when the owners had gone home. There was plenty of work.

Tilda thanked him and asked one last question: Could she have a list of the houses where Lindell and Jansson had worked during the summer and fall?

That information was held on a calendar on the company’s computer system, the owner told her. He would print out the pages and fax them over to her.

When she had hung up, Tilda switched on her own computer and checked out Lindell’s and Jansson’s ID numbers in the police database. Henrik Jansson had been arrested and fined for driving illegally in Borgholm seven years earlier-he had driven a car at the age of seventeen without a license. There was nothing else relating to either him or Lindell.

Then the fax machine whirred into action and the list of jobs carried out by Marnäs Fine Flooring started churning out.

Tilda was quickly able to establish that of the twenty-two house owners who had had work done on their floors, seven had reported break-ins over the past three months.

Niclas Lindell had worked in two of the houses. But Henrik Jansson had worked in all of them.

Tilda felt the same excitement as the hunter in the forest when an elk appears. Then she noticed something else: during one week in August, Henrik Jansson had been at the manor house at Eel Point. According to the job sheet, the work had been “to sand floors, ground floor.”

Did it mean anything?

Henrik Jansson lived in Borgholm. According to the calendar, he was out on a job outside Byxelkrok today, and given the current situation, he was welcome to carry on laying floors in peace and quiet. Tilda needed more time before calling him in for an interview with the police.

Then the silence was broken by the sound of the telephone ringing. She looked at the clock-it was already quarter past five. She was almost certain she knew who it was.

“Marnäs police station, Davidsson.”

“Hi, Tilda.”

And she was right.

“How are you?” said Martin.

“Fine,” she said, “but I don’t have time right now. I’m just in the middle of something important.”

“But Tilda, wait-”

“Bye.”

So there. She put the phone down without feeling even the slightest bit curious about what he wanted. It felt like a liberation to realize that Martin Ahlquist had suddenly become so unimportant to her. Right now Henrik Jansson was the man in her life.

Tilda’s goal was to find Henrik and arrest him-and on the way to the cells, to ask him a couple of questions. She wanted to know why he had attacked pensioners, of course-but also why he had smashed the ship in a bottle that Gerlof had made.

The summer was unusually wet on Öland that year, and our second winter at Eel Point was worse than the first. Much colder, and with even more snow. In January and February the school in Marnäs was closed every Monday, as I recall, because the snowplows hadn’t managed to clear the roads after the snowfall over the weekend .

– MIRJA RAMBE

My mother, Torun, continues to paint, although her sight never recovers after her experience out in the snowstorm. She can only just see where she’s going by this stage, and she is no longer able to read.

Her glasses don’t help much. In Borgholm we find a kind of big halogen lamp that stands on a sort of tripod. It shines with a dazzling white light, making our two dark rooms in the outbuilding at Eel Point look like a film studio. In the middle of this brilliant sunshine my mother sits painting, using the darkest tones she is able to mix.

Torun’s spatula and brushes rasp across the taut canvas like stressed-out mice. My mother is painting the blizzard in which she got lost the previous winter, and she has her face so close to the canvas that the tip of her nose is almost permanently dark gray. She stares intently at the dark shadows that develop-I think when she is painting she feels as if she were still out there among the dead in the pools on the peat bog, Offermossen.

Canvas after canvas is covered in oils, but since no one wants to buy or even exhibit the paintings, she keeps the rolled-up canvases in the empty, dry room next to the kitchen in the outbuilding.

I am also doing some painting, when there are colors and

paper left over, but the atmosphere in the house at the end of the world still remains grim. We never have any money, and Torun can no longer see well enough to work as a cleaner.

Torun has her forty-ninth birthday at the beginning of November; she celebrates alone with a bottle of red wine and begins to talk about the fact that her life is over.

Mine feels as if it hasn’t even begun yet.

I am eighteen years old, I have left school, and I have taken over some of Torun’s cleaning jobs while I wait for something better to turn up. I have missed the 1950s in every way. It is only when they are over that I come across some old copies of Picture Journal and find out that the fifties, apart from the death of Stalin and the fear of the atom bomb, was the decade of the teenagers, with white ankle socks, house parties, and rock and roll-but there wasn’t much of that out in the country. Our radio was old, and usually broadcast a mixture of crackles and ghostly voices. After the blissful season when it’s possible to go swimming, life on the coast is nine months of darkness, wind, long muddy roads, wet clothes, and constantly frozen feet.