by Will Dean
‘They don’t pay you dividends?’ I ask.
Andersson steps back from me. ‘Must get on,’ he says, and then he walks away.
I pass through the arch and what’s left of the root barns is still smoking from random spots, melted tyre-rubber, slick and runny like asphalt in August.
To my right is the propane-gas device they used on Gustav’s grave plot. It’s on. Steaming. And it’s placed this side, on the factory side, but close to the boundary, close to the family burial plot on the other side of the stone wall.
Behind the collapsed root barns, now just a few charred joists, there’s a row of hideous snow skulls sitting on the wall of St Olov’s. I suppose they’ve been there all along but the view was obscured by the barns and the delivery trucks until now. They’re much bigger than the traditional skulls, these are marrow-sized. Or they were. Most are half melted from last night’s heat, their faces as smooth and as featureless as Henrik Hellbom’s. Their eyes must have fallen out, and what’s left of each icy head is as gaunt as a never ending scream.
The snow mountains that were in the delivery van area have drained away and all that remains is the smell of charcoal and the ash-flecked ice beneath my feet. I can see Thord and Noora speaking with two official-looking women. I wait for them to finish.
‘Bad night,’ I say to Thord.
‘Worse luck,’ he says. ‘They tell me bad things come in threes.’
I wonder which three he’s talking about. The suicide, the Ferryman attack, the truck crash, Cici’s fall, or this. Are we past three yet? Multiples of three? Which events qualify?
‘Can I get a quote for the paper?’
‘Thought you’d left?’ says Noora, her face expressionless.
‘New guy starts on Tuesday so I’m still working until then. Quote?’
Thord smiles at me like he’ll miss me. ‘Your replacement’s a semi-professional sailor, that’s the rumour,’ he says. ‘Won’t get much sailing done up here, will he?’
I laugh out loud and it hurts my head.
‘You can write,’ says Thord, ‘that Gavrik police department responded to an emergency call at approximately seventeen-hundred hours. You can write that we discovered a fire in the corner of the Grimberg Liquorice site which was promptly extinguished by Gavrik Kommun fire service. You can write that one individual suffered second degree burns and is currently recovering in Karlstad specialist burns unit. You can write that Gavrik police are investigating the cause of the fire and that if anyone has any information pertaining . . .’ He winks at me when he says pertaining, a word I think he’s probably borrowed from Chief Björn, ‘. . . to this incident, please contact Gavrik police immediately.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘Off the record we’re treating it as suspected arson.’
‘Are you connecting this to the Ferryman murder?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘But, and this is off the record, you get this many accidents in one place in such a short period and, I don’t know, I have to figure if and how they’re all linked together. There’s a lot of grudges held in this town. Some of them decades old.’
I adjust my hearing aid, it’s hurting my ear.
‘Did you know that the red-haired stamper was the person who reported Gunnarsson years ago. She was the one who saw him talking to Karin.’
‘We know,’ he says. ‘Some folks are asking us to impose a curfew.’
‘Can you do that?’ I say.
‘It’s February,’ he says. ‘We don’t need to.’
‘Can I ask,’ I say, gesturing to the out-of-town women with my head, ‘who are they?’
Noora and Thord look over to the women photographing the smouldering rubber glued to the cobbles. ‘Arson investigators from Karlstad. More like rocket scientists than detectives, if you ask me,’ he says. ‘They’ve got a laboratory but I ain’t never seen it. We were lucky to get them.’
‘Lucky?’
‘No fatalities, low-value fire,’ says Noora. ‘The Chief had to pull in a favour to get them here on a weekend. They’re just finishing.’
I try to smell her breath across the chilled air that separates us but I can’t.
Thord’s radio crackles and I look down and see it on his belt with its holstered gun and black extendable baton. He and Noora say bye and leave in the direction of the station. I photograph the scene again, this time with my proper camera, the Posten’s camera, the expensive one; the one I need to return.
I walk through the factory floor wearing my shoe covers and disposable hat. I try to read lips but most of the workers keep their heads down. The machines are too noisy for me to hear much but I can make out ‘insurance, always insurance’ from a guy with a covered-up nose stud and I can make out ‘twelve sets of summer tyres’ from a guy with big attractive lips; kissing lips. I walk on to the stampers and tasters but they’re not saying much. Red’s there stamping away twice as fast as everyone else, the muscles in her forearms bulging. There are two guys and a woman leaning against a forklift in the packaging area, close to the loading bay. Two have their backs to me but the third, I can read him despite his goatee, he says ‘melted most of her face off’ and then he shakes his head and says ‘within the month’ and then the other two talk and I slow my pace and one says, ‘that lawyer I reckon, and his partners’.
The canteen reeks of burnt matches and over-boiled spinach. I heave open the heavy door to the staircase and close it behind me, the noise of the canteen disappearing behind its oak heft. I stand where Cici landed. I walk up feeling dizzy, wrong, unsteady, and I brace myself against the banister and come face to face with a photo. It’s sepia but the woman in the centre, a woman being presented with some kind of shield, is the red-haired stamper. Or her mother. Or her grandmother. The man doing the presenting looks a bit like Hellbom. I photograph it with my phone and keep on climbing. Could Hellbom be related to the Grimbergs? A disinherited cousin?
‘Hello,’ says Anna-Britta from the top step. ‘A word in my office, please.’
I go in.
‘I’d appreciate it if you could make all reasonable efforts to keep the details of the fire out of your last article.’
‘The injured woman?’
She nods.
There are official-looking papers in front of her weighed down by the bone-handled letter opener I saw before. I try to read the text upside down.
‘I’ll be sensitive,’ I say.
Anna-Britta notices me reading and puts the papers face down on the desk, but I’m able to make out the letterhead. It says ‘Third Way Publishing’.
42
Karin looks stoic like a grieving mother holding it together for the sake of her surviving children. She stares at me from the top of the stairs, her razor-sharp fringe cutting her eyes in half, and leads me into the Receiving Room.
‘Mother would rather you were her daughter,’ she says. ‘And Granny will miss you; the chats you two have.’
‘I’ll miss her, too,’ I say, uncomfortable as I think back to the photo I saw in Anna-Britta’s bedroom. The photo of me.
Karin opens the residence door and sweeps the heavy velvet curtain with her arm and lets me through. She smells of nothing at all.
‘Ignore this,’ she says, waving her arm in an arc at the room. ‘We’re expanding.’
I walk in and stop. There are strings of beads laid out on the floorboards in long lines, each string uncoupled; the beads making a kind of racetrack circuit of the room.
‘Three done,’ says Karin.
She means the circuit is three deep, three beads deep. I can see cultivated pearls and pale-green plastic spheres and amber glowing warmly and then some black cuboid modern pieces. They’re laid end to end with a huge space in the centre of the room.
She knocks on the door nearest the chimney breast and then walks away.
‘Come in,’ says a voice. I can’t make out the words but I can guess.
‘Hello, Cici. How are you feeling?’
‘Like a m
ouse caught in a trap,’ she says, and then she grins and bares her old lady teeth, and says ‘I’m glad you came.’
‘I’m leaving tomorrow night and I have a few more questions before I go.’
‘You’re leaving tomorrow?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Before you flee, come and see me up here if you have time. I want to say goodbye properly and I want to tell you a very important secret.’
I urge her to tell me now but she shakes her head.
‘You say you have more questions?’ she asks. ‘For the book?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘We’re under contract, darling,’ she says. ‘I can’t mind.’
Via her complex arrangement of mirrors I can see a man outside – I think it’s Janitor Andersson – and he’s removing the propane device from the ground near the wall of St Olov’s.
‘Poor Puss,’ she says. ‘He was such a dear little friend and protector of lilla Ludo. He’d follow him around, brushing against Ludo’s bare legs, bothering him for a chin rub. Well, he never did that to any of us, nothing of the sort. They had a bond. They were spirit twins, Puss and Ludo.’
I see Karin walk toward the steaming ground, the propane contraption resting against the wall, the mirror framing her. Andersson digs a hole through the perspiring earth and throws the discarded soil up against the wall of the churchyard. Karin stands perfectly still.
‘Pass me my opera glasses so I can see this, would you, darling,’ Cici says.
I do as she asks.
‘KK’s heartbroken,’ she says. ‘It’s hit her very hard indeed. Not the cat per se, she and he never saw eye-to-eye, but she loved Puss because he loved Ludo. That creature was the last link to her brother.’
Andersson places a large cardboard box into the hole and removes his hat and holds it flat to his chest. They stand there, just the pair of them, looking down into the shallow grave, the weirdest mourners in the world attending the weirdest burial. But it’s not weird, it’s touching. Lilla Ludo’s only a metre or two away from that hole, no wall underneath the soil dividing him from his beloved pet.
‘It’s one way to go,’ says Cici. ‘Burnt alive in a liquorice inferno, it has drama at least, don’t you think? I didn’t know old Puss had it in him. No old cat’s home for our Puss.’
I look back to Cici and smile and notice the rabbit foot around her neck. It looks misshapen this morning like she’s slept on it or she’s been over-fondling it. She keeps her eyes forward on the intimate ceremony. Workers arrive for their shift and they give Karin and Andersson a wide berth.
‘We have a penchant for dramatic death, we always have,’ says Cici.
‘How do you mean?’ I ask, switching on the ‘record’ function of my mobile.
‘My father-in-law perished on a lake. He was ice fishing and we could never make our minds up. He either drowned or froze to death. Oh, look, Andersson’s backfilling the hole.’
‘And your husband?’
Cici drops her opera glasses to her nose and looks at me. ‘Oh, Ludvig was the most impressive of them all. We still haven’t found him.’
I frown and squint my eyes.
‘His body, I mean. He left a note but really it was more like a bloody treasure hunt, fifty paces here, and my favourite colour this and that. They found empty pill bottles but they could have been weeks old. He just went off to die. Well, either he got something wrong or we weren’t bright enough because we never found him.’
‘Goodness,’ I say.
‘Badness,’ she says. ‘The insurance company paid out far less than we were due, and only after years of fighting. The family never really recovered. My husband was a frightfully smart man and a wonderful lover and friend, but a diligent planner he was not.’
We look back to the burial. Karin and Andersson have gone. It’s about minus twenty out there and you can’t stand still that long, it’s not possible.
‘The lawyer, Hellbom. Is he a cousin of Anna-Britta’s or something? I can’t help but see a family resemblance.’
Her face darkens. ‘Nothing to do with me, that one,’ she says. ‘Who knows what he really looks like under all that surgery.’
‘Per Gunnarsson,’ I say. ‘The Ferryman’s victim. I know you see everything from your attics. Do you know who he bullied back in his schooldays? Can you remember any names?’
‘I remember the name of my own son,’ she says. ‘Gunnarsson was a lout back in high school. Made Gustav’s life very difficult. But apologies were offered and we all moved on. Gunnarsson tormented half his school, you see.’
‘Is there anything else you want me to know?’ I ask, hoping she’ll tell me her secret now. ‘Anything from your life you’d like included in the book?’
She snorts. ‘First time anyone’s bothered to ask me,’ she says. ‘Thank you, darling.’
I wait.
‘Stick my motto in somewhere, would you do that?’
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ I ask.
She grins, her teeth shiny and straight. ‘These days it’s more like all dressed up and can’t go nowhere.’
We laugh together, proper belly laughs with hands placed on hands and tears in our eyes.
‘Something funny?’ asks Karin, passing the door.
‘Oh, KK, come in, sit down.’
But Karin backs away.
‘Would you talk to her?’ Cici whispers. ‘She says you’re her one true friend.’
I watch Karin disappear out of view toward her corner room carrying a slim hammer and an oak-handled chisel.
43
I find Karin in her corner bedroom. I stand by the doorframe and peer into the bathroom next door. She sees me and gestures for me to come in. We walk past her bed, past the chisel resting on the bedpost, and stand at the end window, the one directly beneath Cici’s slanted attic window, the one facing the ruin of St Olov’s.
‘Woodwork?’ I ask, pointing at the fine chisel.
‘Clay work,’ she says. ‘Mother suggested I start a new piece, do something creative to clear my head.’
She looks through the window.
‘We live here and then we die here and then we rest there,’ she says.
The brown rectangle marking the cat’s final resting place is fading; fine white snowflakes filling in the brown like someone high above us dusting icing sugar to finish off a poison cake.
‘But you’re leaving us,’ she says. ‘You get to go.’
She looks unreal with her coal-black hair and the mole above her lip, the one she darkens each morning with an eyebrow pencil. I feel for her. I like Karin a lot and if I was staying on in Toytown I’d try to get her out of this place. To show her some fun.
‘We’re all chained to the spot.’ She turns her head toward me but not completely, and then she crosses her wrists as if about to be handcuffed. She doesn’t look me in the eye. ‘We can’t fly away. I thought I could, I managed one and a half semesters. Even then it was pulling me back. This monolith. This wet tomb of an inheritance. I felt its pull, even then.’
‘Karin, come on,’ I say, and then I feel bad for those two blunt words. Who am I to say ‘come on’ to anybody? ‘It’s been dreadful for all of you. I’m so sorry but things will get better. You’re twenty years old. You can do anything, go anywhere.’
She looks down to the family plot, to her brother, to her cat, to her father. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ She turns to me. ‘Or perhaps you don’t really have any idea.’
‘Of course I’m right,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you come visit me in Skåne this summer? I won’t know anyone down there. I’d be so grateful. What do you say?’
She looks at me, her eyes cut in half by her fringe, and smiles. But it’s not a stable smile, her lips are quivering, the tiny muscles in spasm as she tries to hold it.
‘I’ll come back later tonight,’ I say. ‘I could bring Thai food?’
She laughs out loud and shakes her head so her hair swings around and makes a mess of itsel
f.
‘Come as you are,’ she says. ‘No takeout.’
I walk back to the office and Lena’s sitting with her legs under my desk.
‘You been demoted?’ I ask, the bell above the door tinkling in my hearing aids.
She stands and helps me take off my coat and she hangs it up for me on a hook, something she’s never done before.
‘Not long now,’ she says.
‘Why did you hire Newboy? Don’t you think the locals will feel alienated, with him being a professional sailor, Daddy’s little rich boy and all?’
She pinches the end of her nose and my hearing aid beeps a battery warning.
‘Four years ago Lars thought locals might feel alienated with me hiring a jacked-up chip-on-her-shoulder deaf bisexual Stockholm kid straight out of college.’
‘He was right,’ I say.
‘It’s healthy for them, they need shaking up. And you were good enough to handle it, and so, I think, is Sebastian.’
‘You think?’
‘I hired him, didn’t I? When you applied for this position I only got three other applications and let me tell you they weren’t very hot prospects. Washed-up cynics yearning for the good old days. When I advertised this time round I got seventeen replies. Because of you. Because of your Medusa reporting. A handful of them were excellent, people I’d have hired in the blink of an eye four years ago, people that might one day be as good as you.’
‘Maybe you could have given some other poor schmuck a chance? Someone whose father didn’t buy him every opening in life?’
‘You’re quick to judge.’
‘You think?’ I say.
Lena sits up on Nils’s desk, next to his yuppie rolodex.
‘He’s good, that’s the first thing. Yeah, he looks like the crown prince of some central European country, but he’s a good writer. His family had money once-upon-a-time but not anymore. Daddy went bankrupt. Mummy died from a brain haemorrhage. No warning, boom.’
‘Shit,’ I say.
‘Shit,’ she says. ‘He’s got two little sisters and he’s been working multiple jobs all through school to help them out. His old man’s not dealt with single parenthood so well. He’s in a fragile state, signed off work sick.’