Johan Theorin - The Quarry

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.

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:

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 cause of the fire is not yet known, but after interviewing a witness, police believe it was started deliberately. A preliminary investigation into arson has begun.

Per folded up the paper and went back to the cottage. So he really had heard a woman screaming in the burning house, and no doubt the police would soon be in touch. He sat down in the kitchen and called them himself.

He rang the number for the station in Växjö and asked for the woman who had interviewed him after the fire, but she wasn’t at work and he was passed on to an inspector by the name of Lars Marklund, who demanded both Jerry and Per’s personal ID numbers before he said anything at all; even then he wasn’t particularly talkative.

‘This is a case of arson involving two deaths, and the preliminary investigation is ongoing. That’s all I can say.’

‘One of the dead is a woman, according to the paper,’ said Per. ‘Do you know who she was?’

‘Do you know who she was?’ asked the inspector.

‘No,’ Per said quickly.

The inspector didn’t say anything, so Per went on: ‘Do you have any suspects?’

‘I can’t comment on that.’

‘Is there any way I can help?’

‘Yes,’ said the officer. ‘You can tell me about the scene.’

‘The scene... Do you mean the house?’

‘Yes — our technicians have been wondering what the house was actually used for. There were several small bedrooms upstairs, and parts of the house were set out like a classroom, and a bar or a pub, and then there was some kind of prison cell...’