Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

Lennart shook his head.

“You and I never met... at least, we never spoke,” he replied. “Other officers were responsible for the contact with you and your family, and as I said, I was one of those leading the search. I assembled volunteers down in Stenvik who spent the entire evening searching along the shore, and I drove round in my patrol car, all along the roads around Stenvik and out on the alvar. But we didn’t find him...”

He stopped speaking, and sighed.

“Those were terrible days,” he went on, “particularly as I’d... I’d been involved with something similar before, in my private life. My father had...”

He stopped again.

“I know something about that, Lennart,” said Julia gently. “Astrid Linder told me what happened to your father...”

Lennart nodded. “It’s no secret,” he said.

“She told me about Nils Kant,” said Julia. “How old were you when... when it happened?”

“Eight. I was eight years old,” said Lennart, his eyes fixed on the floor. “I’d started school in Marnäs. It was almost the end of term, a beautiful, sunny day. I was happy... looking forward to the summer holidays. Then a rumor started going round among the pupils — there had been a shooting on the train to Borgholm, somebody from Marnäs had been shot... but nobody knew anything definite. It wasn’t until I got home that I found out. My mother was at home and her sisters were there. They sat there in silence for a long time, but in the end my mother told me what had happened...”

Lennart stopped, lost in the past. In his eyes Julia thought she could see the shocked, unhappy eight-year-old he had been that day.

“Are policemen not allowed to cry?” she asked tentatively.

“Oh yes,” said Lennart quietly, “but I suppose we’re better at keeping the lid on our feelings.” He went on: “Nils Kant... I didn’t even know who he was. He was more than ten years older than me, and we’d never met, although we lived just a few kilometers from each other. And suddenly he’d shot my father dead.”

There was silence once again.

“What did you think of him afterward, then?” asked Julia eventually. “I mean, I can understand it if you hated him...”

She was thinking of herself, the number of times she’d wondered how she would react if she ever met Jens’s murderer. She still didn’t know what she would do.

Lennart looked out of the window through the darkness at the back of the police station.

“Yes, I hated Nils Kant,” he said. “Deeply and intensely. But I was afraid of him too... Particularly at night, when I couldn’t sleep. I was terrified he’d come back to Öland and kill me and my mother too.” He paused. “It took a long time before those feelings went away.”

“Some people say he’s still alive,” said Julia quietly. “Have you heard that?”

Lennart looked at her. “Who’s still alive?”

“Nils Kant.”

“Alive?” said Lennart. “That’s impossible.”

“No. I don’t believe it either...”

“Kant is not alive,” said Lennart, cutting into his pizza. “Who says he is?”

“I don’t believe it either,” repeated Julia quickly. “But Gerlof has been talking about him ever since I got here... It feels as if he’s trying to get me to believe that Nils Kant is behind Jens’s disappearance. That Jens met Kant that day. Although he must have been dead for ten years by then.”

“He died in 1963,” said Lennart. “The coffin arrived in Borgholm harbor that autumn.” He set down his knife and fork. “And I don’t know if it would be a good idea if this came out... but the coffin was opened up by the police in Borgholm. Very discreetly, for some reason, perhaps out of fear or respect for Vera Kant, I mean, she did have a lot of money and she owned a considerable amount of land... but it was opened.”

“And there was a body in it?”

Lennart nodded. “I saw it,” he said in a low voice, adding, “This isn’t exactly official either, but when the coffin came ashore...”

“From one of Malm Freight’s ships,” Julia interposed.

“That’s right. Is it Gerlof who’s filled you in on all this background stuff?” he asked, then went on without waiting for her reply: “I’d just started as a police constable in Marnäs, after a couple of years in Växjö, and I asked if I could go down to Borgholm to be there when they opened up Kant’s coffin. Of course, my reasons were entirely personal, nothing to do with the police, but my colleagues understood. The coffin was in one of the sheds down by the harbor, waiting for the undertaker. It was a wooden box that was nailed shut, with documents and stamps from some Swedish consulate in South America.” He paused. “One of the older constables broke open the lid. And it was Nils Kant’s body lying in there, partly dried out and covered in furry black mold. A doctor from the hospital in Borgholm was there and confirmed that he’d drowned in salt water. He’d obviously been in the water for quite some time, because the fish had started...”

Lennart’s expression had become absent as he was telling the story, but suddenly he looked down at the table and seemed to remember that they were eating pizza.

“Sorry about all the details,” he said quickly.

“It’s fine,” said Julia. “But how did you know it was Kant? Fingerprints?”

“There were no confirmed fingerprints of Nils Kant on record,” said Lennart. “No dental records either. But he was identified because of an old injury to his left hand. He’d broken several fingers during a fight at the quarry in Stenvik. I’ve heard that myself from several people who lived in Stenvik. And the body in the coffin had exactly the same injury. So that decided it.”

There was silence in the kitchen for a few seconds.

“How did it feel?” asked Julia eventually. “Seeing Kant’s body, I mean.”

“I didn’t actually feel anything. It was the living Kant I wanted to meet. You can’t hold a dead body responsible for anything.”

Julia nodded pensively. There was something she’d been thinking of asking Lennart to do for her.

“Have you ever been inside Kant’s house?” she asked. “Did the police ever look for Jens in there?”

Lennart shook his head. “Why would we have looked in there?”

“I don’t know... it’s just that I’ve been trying to work out where Jens could have gone. Perhaps if he didn’t go down to the sea, and he didn’t go out onto the alvar, he might have gone into one of the neighbors’ houses. And Vera Kant’s house is only a couple of hundred yards from our cottage...”

“Why would he have gone in there?” said Lennart. “And why would he have stayed?”

“I don’t know. If he’d gone in and fallen, or...” said Julia, thinking, Who knows, perhaps Vera Kant was just as crazy as her son.

Maybe you went in there, Jens, and Vera locked the door behind you.

“I know it’s a long shot... but would you take a look in there? With me?”

“Take a look... You mean go inside Kant’s house?”

“Just a quick look, before I go back to Gothenburg tomorrow,” Julia went on, her eyes holding his dubious gaze. She wanted to tell him about the light she’d seen inside the house, but decided against it in case she’d been imagining things. “I mean, it can’t be breaking and entering if the house is empty, can it?” she asked. “And you must be able to go in anywhere you want to, as a police officer?”

Lennart shook his head. “There are very strict regulations. As the only policeman in a country posting, I’ve been able to improvise a little bit, but—”

“But nobody’s going to see us,” Julia interrupted him. “Stenvik is practically empty, and the houses all around Vera Kant’s are summer cottages. Nobody lives nearby.”