Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

Lennart looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go to this meeting,” he said.

At least he hadn’t said no to her suggestion, thought Julia. “And after that?”

“You mean you want to go in there tonight?”

Julia nodded.

“We’ll see,” said Lennart. “These meetings can drag on a bit. I can phone you if it finishes early. Have you got a cell phone?”

“Yes, ring me.”

There were a couple of pencils on the kitchen table, and Julia tore off a piece of the pizza box and wrote down her number. Lennart tucked it in his breast pocket and stood up.

“Don’t do anything on your own,” he said, looking down at her.

“No, I won’t,” she promised.

“Vera Kant’s house looked as if it was about to fall down last time I went past.”

“I know. I won’t go in there on my own.”

But if Jens was there, all alone in the darkness — would he ever forgive her if she didn’t go and look for him?

The streets of Marnäs were completely empty when they emerged from the station. The shops were dark, and only the kiosk over in the square was open. The damp air felt almost as if it were starting to freeze.

Lennart switched off the light and locked the station door behind them.

“So you’re going back to Stenvik now?” he asked.

Julia nodded. “But we might meet up later?”

“Maybe.”

Julia thought of something else.

“Lennart,” she said, “did you find out anything about the sandal? The one Gerlof gave you?”

“No, unfortunately,” he said. “Not yet. I sent it to Linköping, to the national forensic lab there, but I haven’t had a reply yet. These things take time. I’ll give them a ring next week. But perhaps we shouldn’t hope for too much. I mean, so much time has passed, and we’re not even sure it’s the right—”

“I know... It might not even be his shoe,” said Julia quickly.

Lennart nodded. “Take care, Julia.”

He held out his hand, which seemed like a rather impersonal way to say goodbye after everything they’d revealed about themselves that night. But Julia wasn’t much of a one for hugging either, and she took his hand.

“Bye, then. Thanks for the pizza.”

“You’re welcome. I’ll phone you after the meeting.”

His gaze lingered on her face for a moment longer, in the way you can interpret however you like afterward. Then he turned away.

Julia crossed the street to her car. She drove slowly out of the center of Marnäs, past the residential home, where Gerlof was perhaps sitting and drinking his evening coffee, past the dark church and the graveyard.

Was Lennart Henriksson married or a bachelor? Julia didn’t know, and hadn’t dared to ask.

On the way down to Stenvik she pondered over whether she had revealed too much about herself and her feelings of guilt. But it had been good to talk and to get some perspective on this remarkable day in Borgholm, when Gerlof had shared his new theories: that the man who’d murdered Jens was lying there ill in a luxury villa in Borgholm, and that Nils Kant, who’d murdered District Superintendent Henriksson all those years ago, might be alive and working as a car salesman in the same town. It was difficult to know if her father was teasing her or not.

No. He wouldn’t joke about these things. But she didn’t feel that his ideas were moving them forward, somehow.

Might as well go home.

She decided to go back to Gothenburg the following day. First she would go to Ernst Adolfsson’s funeral, then she’d say goodbye to Gerlof and Astrid — and in the afternoon she’d drive home and try to live a better life than before. Drink less wine, swallow fewer pills. Get back to work as soon as possible. Stop clinging to the past and brooding over riddles that could never be solved. Live a normal life and try to look to the future. Then she could come back and visit Gerlof — and perhaps Lennart too — in the spring.

The first houses in Stenvik appeared, and she slowed. At Gerlof’s cottage she stopped the car, got out in the darkness and opened the gate, then drove in. She would spend this last night in her room at the cottage, she decided. She would sleep close to all the good and bad memories for one last time.

Inside, she switched on some lights. Then she left the cottage and went down to the boathouse to collect her toothbrush and everything else she’d left down there — including the bottles of wine she’d brought with her from Gothenburg, and never opened.

She was very aware of Vera Kant’s house in the darkness on her left as she walked along the village road, but she didn’t turn her head. She merely glanced in passing at the lights in Astrid Linder’s house and in John Hagman’s to the south before she went down to the boathouse.

When she’d collected all her belongings, she caught sight of the old paraffin lamp hanging in the window; after a second’s hesitation, she unhooked it and took it up to the cottage with her. To be on the safe side.

On the way back she did look up at Vera’s house behind the tall hawthorn hedges: big and black. There were no lights to be seen at the windows now.

“We never looked in there,” Lennart had said.

And why should the police have gone in? Vera Kant was hardly suspected of having abducted Jens.

But if Nils Kant had hidden himself in there in secret, if Vera had been protecting him... If Jens had gone out onto the village road in the fog and down toward the sea, and stopped at Vera Kant’s gate and opened it and gone in...

No, it was impossible.

Julia kept walking. She went back inside the summer cottage, into the warmth, and switched on the lamps in every room. She took one of the bottles of wine out of her bag, and since this was her last evening on Öland, she opened it in the kitchen and filled a glass. When she’d drunk that, standing by the kitchen counter, she quickly refilled the glass. She took it into the living room.

The alcohol spread through her body.

But — just a quick look. If Lennart’s meeting up in Marnäs finished early, and if he phoned... she’d ask him again if he’d come down. Did he really not want to take a look inside the house where his father’s murderer had grown up? Just a quick look?

It was like a fever that Gerlof had infected her with — Julia couldn’t stop thinking about Nils Kant.

The first summer following the six-year-long world war is bright and warm and full of optimism for the future. In the city of Gothenburg, whole new residential areas are planned, and old ramshackle wooden houses are being torn down. Nils Kant sees several excavators working as he wanders through the streets of the city.

WORLD PEACE Nils read on the cream-colored posters on the walls in the city center at the beginning of August. A day or so later he buys a newspaper and reads the headline ATOM BOMB — NEW WORLD SENSATION on the front page. Japan has surrendered unconditionally; the Americans’ new bomb brought the war to an end. It must have been quite some bomb to achieve such success, according to what Nils has heard people saying on the trams, but when he sees a picture in the newspaper of the great mushroom cloud rising toward the sky, for some reason it makes him think about the bluebottle fly sitting on the dead soldier’s hand.

As far as Nils is concerned, there is no peace — he’s still a wanted man.

It’s late afternoon. Nils is standing under a tree in a little park on the outskirts of the city, watching a young man in a suit approaching rapidly from one of the streets.

Nils himself is wearing a dark suit that he bought secondhand in a shop in Haga; it’s neither new nor noticeably shabby. On his head he wears a hat, pulled well down, and he has stopped shaving and cultivated a beard, a thick dark beard that he trims each morning in front of the mirror in his little rented room in Majorna.