The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  It was Martin.

  “I just wanted to see how you were. Make sure everything’s okay.”

  Tilda didn’t speak; the pains in her stomach came back immediately. She gazed out at the empty quays in the harbor.

  “Fine,” she said eventually.

  “Fine, or just okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you fancy having a visitor?” asked Martin.

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it lonely in northern Öland anymore?”

  “Yes, but I’m keeping busy.”

  “Good.”

  The conversation was not unpleasant, but it was short. Martin ended by asking if he could ring her again, and she said yes in a very small voice.

  The wound somewhere between her heart and her stomach started bleeding again.

  It isn’t Martin who’s ringing, she thought, it’s his hormones. He’s just horny and wants a change from his wife again; he can’t cope with everyday life…

  The worst of it was that she still wanted him to come over, preferably that very night. It was sick.

  She should have mailed the letter to his wife long ago, but she was still carrying it around in her purse like a brick.

  Tilda worked long hours. She worked almost all the time to avoid thinking about Martin.

  In the evenings she would sit for hours preparing the talks on traffic awareness or law and order that she was due to give in schools or to local companies. And as often as she could, in between the talks, the foot patrols, and the paperwork, she went out in her police car all over the area.

  One Tuesday afternoon, on the deserted coast road, she slowed down when she saw the twin lighthouses at Eel Point. But she didn’t stop; instead she turned down toward the neighboring property where a farming family lived. Their name was Carlsson, she recalled. Her only visit there had been on that long, difficult night after Katrine Westin had drowned, when Joakim had broken down in the neighbors’ hallway.

  The lady of the house, Maria Carlsson, recognized her at once when she rang the doorbell.

  “No, we haven’t seen much of Joakim this fall,” she said when they were sitting at the kitchen table. “We haven’t fallen out, nothing like that, but he tends to keep himself to himself. His children play with our Andreas sometimes.”

  “And what about his wife, Katrine?” said Tilda. “Did you

  see more of her when she was living there alone with the children?”

  “She came over for coffee a couple of times… but I think she had her hands full with the house. And of course we work long hours too.”

  “Did you notice whether she had visitors?”

  “Visitors?” said Maria. “Well, there were a few workmen there, toward the end of the summer.”

  “But did you ever see a boat there?” said Tilda. “At Eel Point, I mean.”

  Maria pushed back her bangs and thought about it.

  “No, not that I remember. Nobody would have seen it from here anyway. The view is pretty much obscured.”

  She pointed toward the window in the northeast, and Tilda could see that the view of the lighthouses was blocked by the big barn on the far side of the yard.

  “But did you perhaps hear the sound of a boat at some point?” she ventured. “The sound of an engine?”

  Maria shook her head. “You do hear boats chugging past sometimes when there’s no wind, but I don’t usually take any notice of it…”

  When Tilda got outside, she stopped by the car and glanced to the south. There was a group of red boathouses out on the nearest point, but not a soul in sight.

  And no boats surging through the water.

  She got back in the car and realized it was time to put this particular criminal investigation to bed-and it had never really been an investigation anyway.

  When she got back to the station, she moved the file containing her notes on Katrine Westin into the tray marked Non-Priority.

  She had four substantial piles of paper on her desk, and half a dozen dirty coffee cups. Hans Majner’s desk on the other side of the room was, in contrast, completely empty of papers. Sometimes she had the urge to dump a huge bundle of traffic reports on his desk, but it always passed.

  ***

  In the evenings Tilda took off her uniform, got into her own little Ford, and drove around getting to know Öland, while listening to the recordings she had made with Gerlof. Most of them sounded good, the microphone picking up both his and Tilda’s voices, and she could hear that he had become more and more accustomed to talking each time they met.

  It was during one of these outings they she finally found the van Edla Gustafsson had mentioned.

  She had driven down to Borgholm, toured around the streets of the town for a while, then continued on south across the bridge to Kalmar. There were lots of streets there, lots of huge parking lots, and she drove slowly past hundreds of vehicles without spotting a dark van. The whole thing just seemed hopeless.

  After half an hour, when she heard on the local radio that there was horse racing tonight, she left the center and headed for the racecourse. The enclosed course was illuminated with huge spotlights. There was money to be won and lost in there, but Tilda stayed in the car and drove slowly along the rows of parked cars.

  Suddenly she slammed on the brakes.

  She had passed a van. It said kalmar pipes & welding on the sides, and it was black.

  Tilda made a note of the license number and reversed into a parking space a little further along. Then she called the central control number, asked them to look up the plates, and found that they belonged to a forty-seven-year-old man with no police record, in a village outside Helsingborg. The van had no record of traffic offenses, but it had been deregistered since August.

  Aha, thought Tilda. She also asked them to check out the firm called Kalmar Pipes & Welding, but no such firm was registered.

  Tilda switched off the engine and settled down to wait.

  “Yes, Ragnar used to fish illegally up by Eel Point,” said Gerlof in her headphones. “He was in fishing waters belonging to other people sometimes, but of course he always denied it…”

  After fifty minutes the spectators started pouring out through the gates. Two powerfully built men aged around twenty-five stopped by the dark van.

  Tilda took off her headphones and straightened up in her seat.

  One of the men was taller and broader than the other, but she couldn’t make out any clear facial features. She peered through the darkness as the man got into the van, and wished she had a telescope.

  The men responsible for the break-ins? Impossible to tell, of course.

  They’re just ordinary workmen, darling, she heard Martin’s self-assured voice saying in the back of her mind, but she ignored him.

  The men drove out of the parking lot. Tilda started her own car and put it in first gear.

  The van drove away from the racecourse, out onto the freeway and on toward Kalmar. Tilda followed, a couple of hundred yards behind.

  Eventually they reached a high-rise apartment block not far from the hospital, and the van slowed down and pulled in by the sidewalk. The men got out and disappeared through a doorway.

  Tilda sat and waited. After thirty seconds the lights went on in a couple of windows on the second floor.

  She quickly wrote down the address. If these were the burglars, then at least she now knew where they lived. The best thing would of course be to go into the apartment to search for stolen goods, but her only justification for doing so was old Edla’s information that the van had been on Öland. That wasn’t enough.

  “I’ve given up on the investigation into Katrine Westin’s death,” said Tilda as she was having coffee with Gerlof a couple of evenings later.

  “Her murder, you mean?”

  “It wasn’t a murder.”

  “Oh yes,” said Gerlof. “I think it was.”

  Tilda said nothing, she merely sighed and took out the tape recorder.

  “Shall we do one last-
”

  But Gerlof interrupted her.

  “I saw a man almost murdered once, without anyone touching him.”

  “Really?”

  Tilda put the tape recorder down on the table, but didn’t switch it on.

  “It was out by Timmernabben, a few years before the war,” Gerlof went on. “Two cargo ships carrying stone were moored up side by side, in perfect harmony. But aboard one was a first mate from Byxelkrok, and aboard the other an ordinary seaman from Degerhamn. They got into an argument about something, and stood yelling at each other across the gunwales. In the end one of them spat at the other… then it got serious. They started hurling shards of stone at each other, and in the end the guy from Degerhamn jumped up onto the gunwale to get across to the other ship. But he didn’t get far, because his opponent met him with a boat hook.”

  Gerlof paused, drank a little of his coffee, and went on:

  “Boat hooks these days are pathetic things made of plastic, but this was a sturdy wooden pole with a big iron hook on one end. So when this lout came hurtling over the gunwale, his shirt got caught on the hook, and he stopped in midair. Then he fell straight down like a stone into the water between the ships, with his shirt still tangled up on the boat hook… and he didn’t come up again, because the other guy

  was holding him under the water.” He looked at Tilda. “It was more or less the same as they did with those poor souls who were pushed down into the water with poles out on the peat bog.”

  “But he survived?”

  “Oh yes, the rest of us broke up the fight and got him out. But he only just made it.”

  Tilda looked at the tape recorder. She should have switched it on.

  Gerlof bent down and started rustling with some paper under the table.

  “Anyway, it was that fight I was thinking of when I asked to see Katrine Westin’s clothes,” he said. “And now I’ve had a look at them.”

  He took an item of clothing out of the paper bag. It was a gray cotton top with a hood.

  “The murderer came to Eel Point by boat,” said Gerlof. “He put in by the stone jetty, where Katrine Westin was waiting… and she stayed where she was, so she must have trusted him. He was holding a boat hook, which of course was perfectly natural because that’s what you use when you put in. But this was one of the old kind… a long pole with an iron hook that he twisted into the hood of her top, then he used it to drag her down into the water. Then he held her down until it was over.”

  Gerlof spread the top out on the table, and Tilda saw that the hood was torn. Something sharp had ripped two inch-long holes in the gray fabric.

  22

  Often when Joakim looked out of the kitchen window in the evening, he would see Rasputin slinking off to go hunting. But sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of other black shapes moving out there-sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two.

  Ethel?

  The first few times, Joakim had hurried out onto the veranda steps to get a better look, but the inner courtyard had always been empty.

  The shadows lengthened around Eel Point with every evening, and Joakim felt that the sense of unease in the house was also increasing as Christmas approached. The howling of the wind rose and fell around the eaves, and there was a constant tapping and creaking in the house.

  If there were some unseen visitor at the manor, it wasn’t Katrine, he knew that. She was still keeping herself from him.

  “I’ve brought the clothes back,” said Gerlof, handing over the brown package to Joakim on the other side of the table.

  “Did you get anything out of them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you don’t want to tell me what it was?”

  “Soon,” said Gerlof. “When I’ve finished thinking.”

  Joakim had never visited an old people’s home, as far as he remembered. Both sets of grandparents had remained at home until a ripe old age, and had spent their final days in the hospital. But he was sitting here now, drinking coffee in silence in Gerlof Davidsson’s room at the home at Marnäs. A candleholder with two lit Advent candles was the only sign that Christmas was coming.

  A series of old objects hung on the walls: ships’ name-plates, framed ships’ certificates, and black-and-white photographs of two-masted sailing ships.

  “Those are pictures of my cargo ships,” said Gerlof. “I had three different ones.”

  “Are any of them still around?”

  “Just one. She’s at a sailing club down in Karlskrona. The other two are gone… one of them burned, the other sank.”

  Joakim looked down at the package of Katrine’s clothes, then looked out of the only window in the room. Twilight was already starting to fall.

  “I have to pick up my children in an hour,” he said. “Can we talk for a while?”

  “Of course,” said Gerlof. “The only thing on my schedule this afternoon was a talk on incontinence in the dayroom. It wasn’t all that appealing.”

  For a long time Joakim had wanted to talk to someone about what had happened in the fall, someone who knew Eel Point. The pastor at the church in Marnäs seemed to have such rigid views, and Mirja Rambe thought too much about herself.

  It was only when Gerlof Davidsson came out to the house and proved himself to be a good listener that he thought he might have found the right person. A kind of father confessor.

  “I never asked you when you came out to the house, but… do you believe in ghosts?”

  Gerlof shook his head. “I neither believe nor don’t believe,” he said. “I do collect ghost stories, but not in order to prove anything. And of course there are so many theories about ghosts… that they are part of the framework of old houses, or electromagnetic radiation.”

  “Or just patches on the cornea,” said Joakim.

  “Exactly,” said Gerlof. He was silent for a few seconds, then went on: “Of course, I could tell you a story I’ve never written about in any folk history book, but it’s the only real ghostly experience I’ve had.”

  Joakim nodded.

  “I took over my first cargo ship when I was seventeen,” said Gerlof. “I’d been at sea for a couple of years before that, saving up, and my father helped out with the finances. I knew exactly which ship I wanted to buy, a single-masted sailing ship with an engine; she was called Ingrid Maria, and her home port was Borgholm. The owner, Gerhard Marten, was in his sixties and had sailed cargo ships all his life. But then he developed heart problems and his doctor told him he couldn’t go to sea anymore. Ingrid Maria was for sale, and the price was three thousand five hundred kronor.”

  “That was cheap, wasn’t it?” said Joakim.

  “Yes, that was a good price even then,” said Gerlof, and continued: “The evening I was due to go and hand over the money to Marten, I took a walk down to the harbor to have a look at her. It was April, and the ice had just disappeared from the sound. The sun was going down, and there was hardly anybody around in the harbor… the only person I saw was old Gerhard. He was walking around on the deck of the Ingrid Maria, as if he was finding it difficult to part with her, and I went aboard. I don’t remember what we talked

  about, but I took a short walk around the deck with him, and he pointed out a few little things that would need repairing. Then he told me to look after her, and we parted company. I went ashore and walked home to my parents’ house to have dinner and pick up the envelope containing the money.”

  Gerlof fell silent, looking at the pictures of the cargo ships on the wall.

  “At about seven o’clock I cycled over to the Marten family cottage north of Borgholm,” he went on. “But I arrived to find a house in mourning. Marten’s wife was there, her eyes red with weeping. Gerhard Marten was dead, it turned out. He had signed the purchase agreement the night before, then walked down to the shore early in the morning with his shotgun, and shot himself in the head.”

  “In the morning?” said Joakim.

  “That same morning, yes. So when I met Gerhard Marten down in the harb
or, he had actually been dead for many hours. I can’t explain it… but I know that I met him that evening. We even shook hands.”

  “So you met a ghost,” said Joakim.

  Gerlof looked at him.

  “Perhaps. But it doesn’t prove anything. It certainly doesn’t prove that there’s life after death.”

  Joakim shifted in his seat and looked down at the parcel of clothes.

  “I’m worried about my daughter, Livia,” he said. “She’s six years old, and she talks in her sleep. She always has done… but since my wife died she’s started to dream about her.”

  “Is that so strange?” said Gerlof. “I dream about my late wife sometimes, and she’s been dead for many years.”

  “Yes… but it’s the same dream, over and over again. Livia dreams that her mother comes to Eel Point, but can’t get into the house.”

  Gerlof listened in silence.

  “And sometimes she dreams about Ethel too,” Joakim went on. “That’s what worries me the most.”

  “Who’s Ethel?” asked Gerlof.

  “She was my sister. She was three years older than me.” Joakim sighed. “That’s my own ghost story. Kind of.”

  “Tell me about her,” said Gerlof quietly.

  Joakim nodded wearily. It was time.

  “Ethel was a drug addict,” he said. “She died one winter’s night close to where we lived… two weeks before Christmas, a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gerlof.

  “Thank you,” said Joakim, and went on: “I lied to you when I saw you last time… when you asked why we’d sold the house in Bromma and moved here. It had a lot to do with what happened to my sister. Once Ethel was dead, we didn’t want to stay in Stockholm.”

  He stopped speaking again. He wanted to talk about this, and yet he didn’t want to. He didn’t really want to remember Ethel and her death. Nor Katrine’s long depression.

  “But you miss your sister?” said Gerlof.