‘Was Tommy a good friend?’ she says. The old man sits there in silence, but she thinks she spots what could have been a nod.
‘Were you a good friend, Kjell-Åke?’
This time the nod is more pronounced.
‘I helped Tommy when he first went to sea. He was only a young lad. I taught him, kept an eye on him.’ He falls silent again.
She wishes she’d brought a notepad with her.
‘Was Tommy a good friend?’ she asks again.
Sailor looks up. ‘A good friend doesn’t let you down,’ he says in a hollow voice. ‘Tommy wasn’t like that. Never. Not until that summer.’
‘Do you think Tommy let you down? That he abandoned you?’
Sailor looks down again without saying anything.
‘You were there for Tommy. You were a good friend, but he left you here. Left you among people who were angry with him for what he’d done, angry with you because you knew him.’ She stops, wanting to make sure that she hasn’t lost him.
‘I was a good friend,’ Sailor mutters. ‘A good friend.’
‘Did he ever get in touch? Later on?’ Veronica realises that she’s holding her breath.
‘Never.’ He shakes his head. ‘Not a peep.’
Veronica forces herself to wait rather than interrupt with another question.
‘He got what he deserved,’ Sailor says abruptly. His voice is suddenly sharper.
‘Who did? Tommy?’
‘No! Aronsson. He got just what he deserved. He shouldn’t have fucked about. He took Tommy’s livelihood away from him. From his family. So Tommy did it. Tommy . . .’ The words seem to catch somewhere between his brain and mouth. Sailor’s eyes start to dart about anxiously.
She takes a deep breath.
‘What did Tommy do?’ she says.
The old man’s lips make a wet sound. As if he’s trying to find the words but failing.
‘What did Tommy do with my little brother?’
‘Sh-shack,’ the old man says.
‘What shack?’
‘Askedalen. The hunting shack. It wasn’t Tommy’s fault . . .’ The rest of the sentence collapses into mumbling.
She leans closer.
‘Tell me about the shack.’
‘None of your damn business!’ Sailor suddenly cries, spraying her with saliva, and she jerks away. He starts to rock back and forth in the wheelchair. ‘Secret, the shack’s secret. Why didn’t you say anything, Tommy? Why didn’t you say what happened?’
He stops short, and his body seems to slump. His fingers start picking at the blanket again.
‘Kjell-Åke?’ she says tentatively. ‘Sailor?’
Veronica puts her hand on his lap gently, but he doesn’t react. She thinks she can hear the sound of sandals approaching.
She gets an idea, pulls out the photofit picture, unfolds it and puts it in the old man’s lap. The steps outside are getting closer. It sounds like two people. Sailor looks at the picture. Then at her.
‘Do you recognise him, Sailor?’
Voices now, a hand on the door handle. Veronica picks up the picture and holds it closer to the man’s face. His eyes are darting about, as if he finds the picture unsettling. His lips move again.
‘The truth is up there,’ he mumbles. ‘Deep in the forest where no one can find it. I said as much to him.’
‘Who?’
The door opens. Marie is standing in the doorway with another carer. ‘Time for lunch, Kjell-Åke.’
Veronica pulls the photofit picture towards her, and is about to fold it up and tuck it away when her fingers slip and it falls to the floor. Marie bends down and picks the sheet of paper up.
‘Oh, so you know Handsome Isak?’
‘Who?’
‘Handsome Isak. Well, that’s what we call him. Sailor’s nephew.’ She waves the picture, then shows it to her colleague.
‘Has Isak been here?’ She feels her stomach tighten. ‘When?’
‘About a month ago, something like that. Not the sort of person you forget easily, if you know what I mean?’ Marie winks at her, then turns to Sailor. ‘OK, Kjell-Åke. Time to go to the dining room. Stuffed cabbage leaves today, one of your favourites.’
The old man grins. There’s no trace of his earlier anxiety now. Veronica is about to stand up, but just as the nurse releases the brake of Sailor’s wheelchair he reaches out and takes hold of Veronica’s hand.
‘Thank you for listening, Vera,’ he says, with unexpected clarity. ‘And send my regards to your father. Tell him . . .’
Sailor stops, and seems to lose his train of thought. He goes on squeezing her hand with his old man’s fingers as if he doesn’t want to let go.
‘Tell him what?’ From the corner of her eye Veronica sees Marie lean closer to hear. His voice is weak, barely more than a whisper.
‘Tell Ebbe summer will soon be over.’
Chapter 37
Y
ou remember some things from childhood better than others. For instance, she can still remember all the words to Abba’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’. Abba split up in the January of the year Billy went missing. She knows it made her mum sad, and is pretty sure that’s why she played the song so often, both on the record player and on the untuned piano in the best parlour.
Later, when Mum was in the home, Veronica used to shut herself in her room after they’d been to visit her, put her headphones on and listen to that particular song. The sad, high voice that reminded her a bit of her mum’s. The words that she didn’t quite understand, but which still felt right somehow.
After Leon left her she played the song again. Listened to it through whole nights instead of sleeping, convinced that it described exactly how she felt. That all she had to do was explain that to Leon, and he would be hers again.
The registration number of the green Volvo 245 that they drove to the care home in every Sunday is also etched on her memory. KBH 278. As is the institutional smell inside the old building, the number of steps from the entrance to Mum’s room, and the number of shadow squares the grille on the window cast on the floor when the sun shone through the window. She can recall all this in a millisecond.
Other things, however – how to conjugate German verbs, the chemical symbol for mercury, or which year Charles XII got shot in the head by a brass button – are completely gone, even though she once made a real effort to learn them. Which really only proves that the brain lives a life of its own and can’t be controlled, even by itself.
*
She doesn’t remember much about Askedalen, except that it’s deep within the Northern Forest and that there was once a coal mine there. The roads leading to the valley have long since been abandoned and reclaimed by the pine forest, and she has only the vaguest idea of how to get there.
After driving around aimlessly for over an hour she eventually finds a narrow, half-overgrown loggers’ track that leads off in what she thinks is the right direction. The car bounces and jolts some five hundred metres along it before it comes to a halt.
She gets out of the car, taking the pocket torch she keeps in the glove compartment along with her mix tapes and MOT certificate. She tries to figure out which direction Askedalen is in, and how far away it might be.
She gets it half right. The direction is fine, but it takes almost three quarters of an hour of trudging through the dense forest – twice as long as she’d thought – before she comes across the first deciduous trees. By now her top is soaked with sweat and her trainers are like two lumps of clay from the mud in the hollows of the tracks left by logging machinery, which have somehow managed not to dry out in the heat.
The hike has given her plenty of time to think. The blond man has been in the village. He said his name was Isak, and he visited Sailor in the care home, so it can hardly have been a coincidence that he turned up in her therapy group.
Sailor’s fragmented story seemed to confirm that Tommy Rooth took Billy as revenge on her uncle. If Isak really was Billy
, that meant that Rooth didn’t kill him, as everyone believed. In which case, what happened after the kidnap, and what did Sailor mean about the truth being up here? Why has Isak only just appeared, and why doesn’t he just say who he is? And if he isn’t Billy, as her dad and Mattias say, then who is he and what is he after?
There are plenty more questions, all just as valid, such as how any of this is connected to the events of the previous night and the smooth pebble on the headstone. Not to mention what might actually be the most pressing questions of all: why had she set off into the forest on her own, and what was she hoping to find?
*
When she reaches the valley she stops on the edge, crouches down and tries to get an idea of the scene in front of her. The slope is far too steep for forestry machinery, and the deciduous trees and bushes along the side of the valley form a canopy, making it almost impossible to see all the way to the bottom. For the same reason she can only just make out the other side, but she guesses that the valley must be a couple of hundred metres across.
A crooked sign attached to a tree trunk bearing the words DANGER! RISK OF SUBSIDENCE! wakes an old memory. Something Uncle Harald said about never going hunting in Askedalen in case the dogs or any of the hunters fell into one of the sinkholes caused by the collapse of the old mine workings.
She takes a few more minutes to catch her breath before carefully beginning her descent. The ground is covered by a thick layer of leaves in varying stages of decay, which makes her footing slippery and unpredictable. Halfway down she slips, and slides a few metres on her backside before managing to grab a birch trunk and get to her feet again. She can see the bottom of the valley now. A green carpet of moss, grass and ivy, broken in places by saplings and fallen trees that hadn’t managed to cling on to the loose ground. She can also make out a number of sinkholes of varying sizes.
It’s almost completely quiet down here. The only sound is a woodpecker far in the distance. The foliage filters the light, transforming it into an odd mixture of day and night. She looks around and estimates that she’s somewhere in the centre of the valley now, and tries to figure out which way to go.
If she was Tommy Rooth or Sailor – two poachers wanting a safe place to set camp – she’d want to find ground that was as high as possible. So she follows that instinct, and heads slowly north, up the gradual incline.
The ground is soft, her feet sink several centimetres each time she puts them down. The floor of the valley is like some green lunar landscape. Most of the sinkholes are no deeper than a metre, and roughly three times as wide. The ground at the bottom of them looks much like the surrounding terrain, but she can’t be sure that it will hold her weight and skirts carefully round them as she slowly makes her way upwards.
Ten minutes later she finds the first evidence of human activity. A heap of twisted scrap metal, already half consumed by rust. She can see wheels and pulleys, and guesses they were part of some sort of haulage system. She nearly trips over an almost completely overgrown concrete pad right next to the heap, presumably the foundations of one of the buildings that must have been here when the mine was active. When she looks up towards the edge of the valley she can just make out a slight depression that could be the remains of a track that once led down here. The pine forest looms dense and tall above it, suggesting that the track was abandoned many years ago, long before Rooth and Sailor started coming here.
She carries on up the valley, and eventually comes across something resembling a path. It’s too narrow and indistinct to have been made by a human being so she guesses deer, and is proved right when she sees some hoofmarks in a patch of mud. There’s no sign of any footprints. Nor of campfires, marks on any of the trees to indicate which ones should be felled, no shelters or anything else to suggest that anyone has been here. In theory, she could actually be the first person here since Sailor and Rooth stopped coming.
She passes a stack of half-rotted sleepers, and beside them the metal skeleton of what, to judge by the wheels, was once a mine cart. Then she comes to a large, dense thicket. The path continues straight through it, and she considers walking round to pick up the trail again on the other side, but something tells her to keep going. She pushes the branches aside and has to crouch down and bow her head, so almost walks right into the small shack hidden a short way into the undergrowth. Perhaps it was too far away when the mine was dismantled and had already been forgotten, unless the ground around it had become so unstable that they simply hadn’t been able to get up here with their machinery.
Whatever, the shack is still here, even if nature is well on its way to finishing it off. There are plants sticking out of from between the planks, and up on the tin roof there’s such a thick layer of moss, leaves and grass that the walls have started to bow.
She takes a step closer and feels something under her foot. Looking down, she sees an empty vodka bottle, half buried in the ground. She finds another one when she goes round the corner of the shack.
The remains of the door are lying on the ground, and the entrance is gaping open darkly. There’s something hanging from the roof next to the door, something a pale yellow in colour. When she gets closer she realises that it’s a windchime made out of animal bones and pieces of horn – someone’s drilled holes in them and strung them up on a long strip of leather. She stifles a shudder, then walks over to the doorway and peers inside.
Chapter 38
O
nce, when they were playing hide-and-seek out in the garden when she was a child, she managed to shut herself inside the old milking parlour in the cowshed. The heavy door swung closed and locked behind her, and it was over an hour before she was found and let out. An hour during she which she cried so hard that her voice broke, and banged on the door until her hands hurt.
She was playing with Mattias and three of his friends. Mattias was always better at making friends than her. Which wasn’t that strange, really. He was open, kind and loyal, and good at games and sports. The sort of thing that makes a boy popular with both sexes, at least in junior and high school. Sometimes – fairly often, to be honest – she was jealous of him for that.
That day it was he and his friends who rescued her. They let her out of the milking parlour and said nothing to her mum and dad about what had happened. She even remembers Mattias comforting her later on when she used to wake up at night from nightmares about the darkness, damp and cold. The following year, when Billy was old enough to join in their games, Dad put a padlock on the door and used the room to store his winter tyres. But the smell of the milking parlour is stuck in her head. It will be there as long as she lives. A rank, raw smell, almost exactly like the smell inside the shack, and she has to stop several times and remind herself that she isn’t nine years old anymore, and doesn’t need to be rescued or comforted by her big brother.
It takes just five minutes to explore the shack. It contains nothing but a rusty stove, some firewood and a few empty beer and vodka bottles. There’s a box of empty cartridges on a shelf, and a box of waterproof matches. Anything else that might once have been here has long since disappeared. She can’t be sure that the shack is the place she’s looking for, of course. But judging by the creepy windchime and the empty cartridges, it’s an abandoned hunting shack, and the vodka bottles inside and out speak volumes. There can hardly be more than one hunting cabin in Askedalen, and her gut feeling is that she’s in the right place. But she can’t see anything that might help answer any of her questions.
She decides to make her way out of the thicket and carry on along the path, up the steadily narrowing valley. It’s darker here now, the sloping sides are getting closer together as the gradient of the incline gets steeper. In places the sides are so steep that the bare rock sticks out. It’s black and porous, a bit like ash, which is presumably what gave the valley its name.
A large sinkhole forces her to stop. It’s over ten metres in diameter, stretching across the whole of the valley floor. In the centre of the inverted green cone is
a gaping black hole. She can hear the splash of water, and realises that the hole leads down into one of the mine tunnels. It could even be one of the vertical shafts, in which case the hole could be very deep indeed, twenty metres, maybe more, and almost certainly full of water.
The neck of yet another broken vodka bottle is sticking out of the ground a metre or so from the opening of the hole. She feels her pulse quicken. The hole would be the perfect place to get rid of anything you didn’t want to be found again, and the bottle suggests that Rooth and Sailor were here.
She looks around, trying to figure out if there’s any way to get a better look without going down into the sloping funnel. There isn’t. The ground looks pretty stable, though, so she decides to risk it. She takes a tentative step over the edge, pushing down with her foot a few times. When nothing happens she stamps a bit harder. She shifts her bodyweight and takes another step. The ground here is less overgrown, and almost feels firmer than the rest of the valley. She moves slowly towards the centre of the funnel, one step at a time. The sound of running water gets louder, and she can detect a damp, subterranean smell that reminds her a little of the metro.
The opposite wall of the hole is clearly visible now. Densely packed earth with plant roots sticking out of it like hairy worms. Below that, black rock and darkness.
She shortens her steps and inches forward until she reaches the edge. She takes out the torch, points it into the hole and leans forward to be able to see. Gently now . . .
The hole isn’t as deep as she thought. She can see the bottom, some three or four metres below. There’s a heap of earth, leaves and stones, presumably a mixture of the collapsed roof and things washed down later by the rain. Surrounding the heap is a pool of water, its surface broken by the constant dripping from the edge of the hole. The water stretches into the darkness, and it’s just possible to see that there’s an open space down there, considerably larger than the hole itself.
End of Summer Page 18