Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

Gerlof nodded to him. “Hello, Lennart.”

Lennart Henriksson had been a policeman for almost thirty-five years; he worked all over northern Öland, but lived in a house north of Marnäs, and had a local office by the harbor. His hair was gray, and he was slowly heading toward his pension. Normally his expression was rather listless and his broad shoulders were slumped in his uniform, but at the moment he was sitting up very straight next to Julia.

“Hello there, skipper,” Henriksson said to Gerlof.

“Hi, Dad,” said Julia quietly.

It was the first time in many years she’d used that word to him, so Gerlof knew she was unsettled. He slowly walked over and stood by the table.

“Would you like to sit down?” said Lennart.

“I’m fine, Lennart. I need a bit of exercise from time to time.”

“You’re looking well, Gerlof.”

“Thank you.”

There was a silence. Behind them John turned and left the room without a word.

“Julia was just telling me she’s your daughter,” said Lennart.

Gerlof nodded, and there was silence once again.

“Has the ambulance gone?” said Julia, looking at Gerlof.

“Yes... John and I passed it on the road.”

Julia nodded. “So he’s gone, then.”

“Yes.” He looked at Henriksson. “Was there a doctor?” he asked.

“Yes. A young one from Borgholm... I haven’t met him before. He just confirmed what had happened.”

“He said it was an accident?” said Gerlof.

“Yes. Then he left.”

“But he’d been lying out in the rain overnight,” said Gerlof.

“Yes,” said Lennart. “It must have happened yesterday evening.”

“So there wasn’t any blood,” said Gerlof. “I suppose all the traces had disappeared in the rain?”

He didn’t really know himself why he was asking these questions or where they might lead, but he presumed he wanted to make himself look important. The need to be important is perhaps the last thing that leaves us, he thought.

“He had blood on his face,” said Julia. “A little bit of blood.”

Gerlof nodded. Footsteps came clomping along the hallway, and the younger of the two police officers looked into the room.

“We’re done now, Lennart,” he said. “We’re off.”

“Fine. I think I’ll stay a little bit longer.”

“You’re the boss.”

There was something respectful in the younger officer’s voice, thought Gerlof. Perhaps the respect came from Lennart’s many years in service, or the fact that his father had been a policeman too, and had been killed in the course of his duty.

“Drive carefully,” said Henriksson; his colleague nodded and disappeared.

John was standing behind him holding a large brown leather wallet. He held it up to Gerlof and Julia and Henriksson.

“Three thousand two hundred and fifty-eight kronor, from selling the sculptures,” he said. “It was in the bottom drawer in the kitchen, underneath the plastic bags.”

“You look after it, John,” said Henriksson. “It would be stupid to leave that amount of money lying around here.”

“I can take it, until the family divide everything up,” said Gerlof, holding out his hand.

John seemed relieved to hand it over.

The room fell silent again.

“Right,” said Henriksson eventually. He leaned forward and got up from the sofa with some difficulty. “I suppose I’d better make a move too.”

“Thanks for...” Julia was still sitting on the sofa, searching for the right words. “... for taking the time.”

“No problem.” Henriksson studied her. “It isn’t easy, being first on the scene of a fatal accident. It’s happened to me a few times over the years, of course. You feel quite... lonely. Powerless.”

Julia nodded. “But I feel better now.”

“Good.” Henriksson put his cap on. “I’ve got an office in Marnäs. You’re welcome to call if anything comes up.” He looked at John and Gerlof. “You too, of course. It’s open house, just pop in. Will you lock up here?”

“We will,” said Gerlof.

Lennart Henriksson nodded his goodbyes and left.

They heard a car engine start, then slowly fade into the distance.

“We’ll be on our way soon too,” said Gerlof to Julia. He pushed Ernst’s wallet into his pocket, then looked at John. “Can we go out for a minute?” he asked. “I just wanted to show you something... Something I noticed outside.”

“Shall I come with you?” said Julia.

“No need.”

John let Gerlof lead the way when they got outside. Leaning heavily on his cane, Gerlof went out onto the steps, down onto the gravel, and round the corner of the house toward the edge of the quarry.

“What are we going to look at?” asked John.

“It’s over here by the edge, something I noticed before I went inside... Here.”

Gerlof was pointing down into the quarry where the polished stone that looked like a big egg or a misshapen head lay, split into a larger and a smaller piece.

“You recognize it, don’t you?” he said to John.

John nodded slowly. “It was the one Ernst called ‘the Kant stone,’ ” he said. “As a joke.”

“It’s been pushed,” Gerlof went on. “Hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed John. “It looks that way.”

“It was propped up behind the house last summer,” said Gerlof.

“It was standing here last week when I was here,” said John. “I’m sure of that.”

“Ernst pushed it over on purpose,” said Gerlof.

“You’re probably right.”

The old friends looked at each other.

“What are you thinking?” asked John.

“I don’t really know.” Gerlof sighed. “I don’t know. But I think Nils Kant might be back.”

Julia made sure the two grieving old men had a cup of strong coffee. She borrowed Ernst’s white porcelain with yellow Öland suns on it, and made each of them a cup in his cottage before they left, with the feeling that she was doing something useful for once. John and Gerlof sat on the sofa, talking quietly about Ernst.

Just little stories and fragments of memories, often without any particular point, about mistakes Ernst had made as a newly employed quarry worker when he first moved to Öland, or about beautiful pieces of sculpture he’d created in his workshop as an old man. Julia realized that Ernst, apart from a few years at sea on the Baltic during the war, had worked with stone all his adult life. When the quarry closed in the 1960s, Ernst had carried on alone. He took the reject stone that had been cast aside by the quarry workers and chiseled and polished and made some kind of art out of it.

“He loved this quarry,” said Gerlof, looking out of the window. “I’m sure he would have bought it from Gunnar Ljunger over in Långvik if he’d had the money; he didn’t want to live anywhere else. He knew everything about how different kinds of stone should be cut and split and worked.”

“Ernst made the best gravestones,” said John. “If you walk around Marnäs churchyard, or down in Borgholm, you can see that.”

Julia sat quietly looking at a pile of old books about the local area that were lying on Ernst’s coffee table. She was listening to John and Gerlof, but it was hard to forget what Ernst had looked like when she found him.

The first police officer to arrive at the scene, Lennart Henriksson, had quickly placed a blanket from his car over Ernst, and led her into the house. He’d stayed with her without saying much, and that had felt good. After the day Jens disappeared, she had heard too many empty words of consolation, words she hadn’t asked for.

“Would you be able to drive me home, Julia?” asked Gerlof when both the coffee and the stories had come to an end.