“Down!” he yelled.
He made John duck. A second later another shot rang out from the cliffs—it really was a gunshot, no doubt about it. Gerlof even imagined seeing the second bullet hit the water not far from the shore, like a white strip of bubbles.
He also saw that the Mossbergs had heard the shots. They were lying down behind the hull of their boat now, while he and John were entirely unprotected on the cliffs. Gerlof quickly slid away towards a couple of mulberry bushes. Unworthy but wise. John followed him, and they stayed down.
“Someone’s moving up there,” Gerlof said in a low voice.
John stayed pressed to the ground behind him but tried to look.
“Can you see who it is?”
Gerlof shook his head.
“Stay here,” he said softly. “I’ll move a bit.”
The bushes grew closer together there and, hidden by them, he slowly crept a couple of hundred feet north along the edge of the water. From there he went on, behind pines and boulders.
From a distance, the Virgin looked round and smooth, but close up the granite was full of cracks and steep rock faces. Gerlof certainly didn’t mind; they gave him protection.
The wind blew cold and the island felt more dangerous than ever. There were no more shots, but Gerlof didn’t relax. He moved in a wide circle towards the western side of the Virgin.
There he found an unknown rowboat pulled ashore. He saw it near the water from a long way off—it was made from pinewood and couldn’t be missed. But no owner was in sight.
Gerlof went on at a crouch. A hundred feet above the boat he came to a precipice, and on top of it he found trampled-down lyme grass and a fresh cigarette butt.
He looked up at the forest and saw, or believed that he saw, a dark flow of hair billowing in the wind and disappearing among the firs.
A woman?
He thought of the mythological sea warden of the Blue Virgin, she who ruled the waters and the winds and who punished those who mocked her. That legend was older than those about cursed stones and witches’ revels, but of course Gerlof believed in none of them. The sea warden would hardly sit on the grass smoking cigarettes.
He went faster, but tried to move as quietly as possible.
Then he was inside the forest, a labyrinth of boulders and twisted firs. Here were both tangled hazel shrubs and deep crevices, and it was easy to lose your way.
He stopped again to listen. Then he moved quickly, stepped around a thick maple—and almost collided with the person hiding behind the trunk. A woman in dark clothes. She sat looking down, and Gerlof was able to sneak up very closely behind her.
“How do you do?” Gerlof said calmly.
The woman gave a scream. She twisted round, saw that she had been found and threw herself forward, fists raised.
“Easy!”
Gerlof roared and stood his ground on the cliff, but didn’t hit back. He just raised his palms.
“Take it easy!” he shouted again. “I won’t hurt you.”
Finally the woman lowered her arms, stopped fighting. Gerlof could ease his breath and take a step back. He saw that she was around thirty-five and dressed for a visit on the Virgin, in a warm woolen sweater and heavy boots. Her eyes were tense and nervous—but at least she didn’t hold a rifle in her hands.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “Why are you sneaking around on us?”
She stared back at him.
“Who are you?”
“I’m from there,” Gerlof said, pointing across his shoulder at the coast of Öland. “We’ve been out fishing and came here to get away from the storm . . . we’re harmless.”
The woman slowly relaxed her tense shoulders.
“I’m Gerlof Davidsson,” he went on. “Do you have a name?”
She gave a short nod.
“Ragnhild,” she said. “Ragnhild Månsson. I’m from Oskarshamn.”
“Good, Ragnhild . . . How about us joining the others?”
She nodded without speaking, and Gerlof led her around the island close to the water’s edge. He kept looking up at the top, watching for movement. If Ragnhild wasn’t armed, someone else had fired the shots. But he couldn’t see anyone up there.
When they got back to the eastern side, John and the Mossberg cousins had sat up behind the boats. They were smoking again, throwing nervous glances at Gerlof.
The woman looked at them without speaking, then at the bones and skulls placed on the cliff. Her eyes were still worried, but Gerlof saw no surprise in her face.
“We found those in the strait. At the bottom of a rowboat.”
“An empty rowboat?” Ragnhild said.
Gerlof nodded.
“Have you seen them before?”
“I don’t know who they are,” she said finally.
Gerlof realized that she hadn’t denied anything.
“And the rowboat?” he said, nodding towards the water. “Do you recognize it?”
Ragnhild Månsson looked at the boat bobbing by the beach and paused for a while before answering.
“It’s Kristoffer’s,” she said at last. “My brother. It’s his boat.”
“And where is your brother?”
“I don’t know.”
The woman sighed, sat down on a boulder, then suddenly became more talkative.
“I came here for his sake . . . we were supposed to meet here today. I took my own motorboat from Oskarshamn and landed on the western side. Kristoffer was supposed to come from the opposite direction. He lives on Öland.”
“The rowboat was out in the storm when we found it,” Gerlof said. “Did he have a life belt, or a life vest?”
“I don’t think so.”
The cliff was silent.
“I think we could get our spirit stove going and make some coffee,” Gerlof said. “Then we can talk.”
Fifteen minutes later they had newly brewed coffee with biscuits. Gerlof handed a cup to Ragnhild and met her eyes.
“I think you should tell us more now, Ragnhild,” he said. “My guess is that you know some things about the bones and the stones in your brother’s boat. Or don’t you?”
“Some,” she said.
“Fine. We’ll be happy to listen.”
Ragnhild looked down into her coffee mug and drew a breath. Then she began talking in a low voice.
“My elder brother Kristoffer was a bird-watcher when he was young, or rather a bird lover. Back in the thirties, when we were teenagers, our family lived on Öland, near Byarum . . . closer to the Virgin than anyone else, I believe. So Kristoffer used to row out here to the island to look at the eiders and guillemots and all the other kinds of birds. Autumns and springs there was almost never anyone here. But when Kristoffer got here one morning he found traces of other visitors . . . And they were horrible traces, trampled nests and broken bird eggs on the rocks. People who hated birds had come to the island.”
She fell silent, drank some coffee and went on.
“We didn’t know who they were, but Kristoffer wanted to stop them. He brought me with him. That autumn we came often to the island, wanting to watch over the birds. It was a kind of an adventure. But one Sunday when we got here there was a strange boat moored by the old quarry. Kristoffer put ours beside it and then we sneaked up on the island. We heard loud screams from the birds . . . that wasn’t a good sign.”
Ragnhild turned her eyes upward to the cliffs.
“Up on the cliffs we met the people who were tormenting the birds. They were two young men, not much older than Kristoffer. Immature idiots. They had collected stones and broken branches and were throwing them at the black guillemots that were flying in flocks around them, terrified. The birds they hit fell with broken wings on the beach and in the water . . . I was heartbroken when I saw it. So I forgot to be scared, I just ran up to them and screamed that I would call the police. Which of course was a stupid thing to say out here. They just laughed, and one of them grabbed me.”
She lit a cigarette and continued.
Ragnhild blew out smoke.
“We rowed back home to Öland,” she went on, “and even before we got back a storm was rising in the strait. I remember thinking that the angry wind came from the Virgin, that it was the island that had called it up to take revenge on the bird haters. The storm increased almost to a hurricane during the evening and lasted for more than a week, nine or ten days. The Virgin was invisible in the mist, nobody could go there or get away from there. Kristoffer and I stayed inside, and we didn’t dare tell anyone that there were people on the Virgin.”
She lowered her eyes.
“Finally the wind in the strait slackened, and then we rowed back here. Kristoffer had brought one of our grandfather’s old rifles. But the guillemots were calm and silent and there was nothing threatening left on the Virgin any more.”
Ragnhild was silent for a few seconds.
“We found the two men almost at the top of the island. One of them lay sheltered by a large fir and the other one nearby, close to a boulder. The birds had pecked them . . . they no longer had any faces.”
She was silent again.
“Do you know how they died?” Gerlof said.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know if they had starved or froze to death, but dead they were. And then we panicked, I and Kristoffer. We felt like killers who had to cover up our crime. So we pulled their bodies down into a deep crevice and put a lot of beach stones on top of them. We carried stones for hours to fill that crevice. Then we rowed back home again . . . and a couple of days later we heard that two young men from the mainland were missing since the storm. They had taken their boat out, and police believed that it had gone down in the strait.”
She sighed again.
“We tried to forget what had happened, but of course that was impossible, and I’ve been thinking about it for almost twenty years. And nowadays there are just more and more tourists coming to the Virgin every summer . . . sooner or later they would be found. So I and my brother decided to get the bodies today and sink them out in the strait in a tarpaulin weighted with stone. That’s what we planned to do. But I was delayed on the mainland this morning, so I guess Kristoffer began without me. He must have fallen from his boat, or . . .”
Ragnhild fell silent and looked sadly at the empty rowboat. She had nothing more to tell.
But Gerlof did. He felt a smell in the air and looked up at the top of the Virgin.
“There is someone else on the island.”
“How do you know?” John said.
Gerlof pointed to the middle of the island.
“There’s a fire burning up there, and earlier someone shot at us.”
“Shot at you?” Ragnhild said.
“Someone shot to warn us off.”
“He said he would bring the rifle,” Ragnhild said in a low voice. “Kristoffer, I mean. Just as a precaution.”
Gerlof nodded.
“In that case your brother might still be here,” he said, “if the sea pulled his boat out without him. I think we should take a look at the top of the island.”
Ragnhild nodded quickly and stood up.
“But carefully,” Gerlof added. “Make sure he knows who you are before he starts shooting again.”
John and the cousins stayed down by the water and let him and Ragnhild start climbing to the top of the island.
As much as he could, Gerlof kept in the shelter of thickets and trees while he led the way up to the largest of the caves on the island. He had been there on earlier visits; it was called the Virgin’s Chamber and lay on the east side of the island’s highest cliff. The chamber was like a small church room hollowed out of the mountain and gave good protection against the winds.
Silently and carefully, Gerlof drew close to the opening. He hid behind a boulder to look into the chamber. It was dark inside, but the floor of the cave rose slightly and inside the narrow opening he saw a flickering light.
He stayed on behind his boulder, irresolute and still remembering the shots by the beach, but Ragnhild slipped closer and called out.
“Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”
For a few seconds, all was quiet. Then an echoing reply came from the vault, a tired male voice.
“Hello yourself.”
Ragnhild flew up and hurried into the chamber.
“Kristoffer?”
Fifteen minutes later Gerlof returned to the edge of the water, alone. Torsten, Erik and John stood smoking between their boats. They looked hard at the Mauser rifle Gerlof was holding, its barrel pointing to the ground.
“Her brother had this,” he said. “I thought it better to take care of it.”
“So her brother is here?” John said.
Gerlof nodded.
“He took shelter from the storm up in the Virgin’s Chamber. He had loaded the stones and the skeletons in the morning, but his rowboat had drifted off in the storm. When he saw us on the beach he shot a couple of warning shots. He was upset, wanted to scare us off . . . I guess we’ll have to try to understand.”
The others nodded, not very willingly.
“And what are they doing now, those siblings?” John asked.
“They’ll be leaving soon.” Gerlof nodded to himself and looked at the two skeletons on the cliff. “My thinking is we bring these back with us to Öland and tell the police that we happened to see some bones sticking out of a deep crevice here on the Virgin. That way maybe we can solve an old disappearance without getting anyone else involved. Is that all right by you?”
The other three nodded again.
“You can hardly accuse an entire island of murder if someone happens to die there,” John said. “Not even the Virgin.”
The other fishermen dragged thoughtfully on their cigarettes.
“It’s just one thing I don’t understand, Gerlof,” Erik said. “How you could be so sure there were others here on the island. Do you have second sight?”
Gerlof thought of praising his intuition or perhaps blaming the movements of vipers, but told them the truth.
“It was the smells.”
“The smells?”
“I didn’t notice any smells at all,” John said, dropping his butt between the stones.
“You should have,” Gerlof said. “I caught the smell of Ragnhild’s cigarette smoke from the very beginning, down on the beach . . . and then the smell of her brother’s fire up in the Virgin’s Chamber.”
“You did?”
“Oh yes, very clearly.”
The three fishermen silently regarded Gerlof, but he just pointed at their glowing cigarettes.
“I told you to stop that . . . The tobacco is ruining your noses.”
Johan Theorin was born 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city and its traditionally largest seaport, but spent his summers on the island of Öland. As a student, he lived for two years in Michigan and Vermont. After working as a journalist for many years, he published his first novel, Skumtimmen (Echoes from the Dead), in 2007; it received the best first novel award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy and the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger in Britain. His second novel, Nattfåk (The Darkest Room, 2008), won the bestnNovel of the year award in Sweden and in Britain the CWA International Dagger award. He has published a further three novels, the latest, Sommarboken, in 2013. Theorin describes his work as “a combination of dark crime stories and Scandinavian folklore and ghost stories.” Theor
in’s stylish, dark, and intensely personal novels have gained him a huge Swedish and international following; he is one of the most highly regarded Swedish crime writers.
MAITREYA
VERONICA VON SCHENCK
Veronica von Schenck is almost an atavism among current Swedish crime writers: her favorite character in fiction is Sherlock Holmes; her favorite crime author, Arthur Conan Doyle; and she is fascinated by the intricacies of plotting—planting leads in her work, letting her readers try to outguess her protagonists, and tying together the threads of the story. She came to crime writing after a number of other pursuits: she has been a live gamer, a computer game reviewer, editor of a computer magazine and of a Stockholm events magazine, and a recruitment consultant. She remains the last, part time, while writing; she lives with her husband and two children in a Stockholm suburb.
The protagonist of her first two novels was Althea Molin, a criminal profiler of half-Swedish, half-Korean parentage. She has also written three juvenile crime novels, all based on historical events, since the study of history fascinates her; in her juveniles, the reader is invited to explore both a historical period and a crime in the company of her two young sleuths, Milo and Vendela.
In her story for this book, Veronica von Schenck introduces a new protagonist who will be featured in her next novel. Stella Rodin reflects the author’s fascination with history, artifacts, and solving problems.
STELLA RODIN SIPPED THE CHAMPAGNE IN HER GLASS AND LOOKED AROUND at the exhibition room. The slate-gray walls showed off the colorful modern art covering them like an old quilt. The dark suits of the male guests showed off the colorful dresses of the female guests. The overall effect was attractive and the room was filled. At the center of the show was Stella’s father, Emmanuel Rodin. His glow competed with both his guests and his exhibits; he wore a light tweed suit with a burgundy vest, matching bowtie and pocket handkerchief. This was his favorite moment. To rule absolutely but with mild joviality one of the year’s most important showings and auction afterwards. To introduce with flattery and generosity his experts to interested and inquisitive customers possessing extremely well-stuffed wallets. To personally extol the quality of paper used in Warhol’s serigraphies. As for Stella, she loved art as passionately as did her father, but she hated this world. She had always been a black sheep, ever since day care. A girl as pretty as a doll and with a searing intelligence, who neither in day care nor since had had the sense of hiding her brain’s capacity and hunger for knowledge and truth. Definitely unattractive. She had a way of shaming, irritating or frightening most of the people she met. Mainly because she had never quite learned to keep her big mouth shut when someone stated an obvious lie. Her school years had been understandably painful, but had provided her with a hard shell. Instead of working in the family company atmosphere of flattery and hypocrisy (We do this just because of our passion for art, not at all to make money, of course not!) she had chosen to become a police forgery expert. It had made it possible for her to work with the art she loved, but in an environment a bit more tolerant of her abrupt personality and in her view at least slightly less hypocritical. But since her parents and her older brother, to whom she was close, still ran the auction house, here she was, reluctantly moonlighting as a poster girl for the family business. Her father had resolutely bribed her to do it. A beautiful, burgundy vintage dress with a tight waist, a boat neck and a flowing skirt with several petticoat layers. From the fifties. Dior. She stroked its crisp fabric. It was a bribe she had simply been unable to resist.
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