“We can get a bit of lunch somewhere along the coast,” he said. “And then be back by mid-afternoon.”
“A very good idea,” said Blomquist. “I don’t know this part of the country at all.”
They set off, following the coastal road through a series of small resorts. It was a fine day, with broad sunshine and only the hint of a breeze. “Who needs to go off to Italy for a holiday?” said Ulf. “We have all this right here in Sweden.”
“True,” said Blomquist. “Mind you, there’s a lot to be said for going to Italy. I went, you know, a few years ago. My wife and I flew to Milan and then we went by train down to Rome. You know what we saw there?”
Ulf shook his head. “Let me guess, though. The Pope?”
Blomquist burst out laughing. “Right first time. Or almost. We didn’t quite see him, but had we been in St. Peter’s Square a few minutes earlier, we might have. There was a big crowd, you see, and when I asked somebody what was going on, they said that the Pope had just gone past on a bicycle.”
“A bicycle?” exclaimed Ulf. “No, surely not.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Blomquist. “But that’s what he said. He was a Dutchman, I think—this fellow I asked.”
“I think he might have been pulling your leg,” said Ulf.
“I don’t think so,” said Blomquist. “And I suppose it’s possible, isn’t it? Didn’t one of them play tennis? John Paul II, I think. He played tennis, I think.”
“Yes, but that’s rather different, isn’t it? Somehow that seems the sort of thing a pope might do. But ride a bicycle through St. Peter’s Square? It’s hardly in keeping with the dignity of the office. I don’t think any pope would do that, Blomquist—I really don’t.”
After they had been driving for about half an hour, they came to a sign beside the road that announced Sunshine Beach 400 metres. Ulf slowed down. “Should we take a look?” he asked. “These dunes seem rather attractive.”
Blomquist nodded his assent. “Perhaps we might have a stroll along the sand,” he said. “We could get a bit of fresh air into our lungs.”
They followed a rough track that led off into the dunes. It was bumpy, and at one or two points the underside of the Saab scraped along the sand. Ulf slowed down to walking pace.
“There,” said Blomquist, pointing to a parking area beside the track.
There were several cars already parked in the small, tree-lined enclosure, but there was room for the Saab. Ulf nosed it into a parking place, and he and Blomquist got out. Between them and the sea, which they could hear nearby, was a ridge of dunes, largely covered with wispy reed grass.
“Let’s take a look,” said Ulf.
A narrow path wound its way through the dunes in the direction of the sea. A short distance along this, a small sign, standing at something of an angle, gave information about the beach. Ulf pointed to this, and he and Blomquist made their way over towards it.
Nudist beach, the sign said. Members of the public are asked to respect the privacy of users of this beach. No radios; no dogs; no consumption of alcohol.
Blomquist chuckled. “Look where we’ve ended up, Mr. Varg. A nudist beach.”
Ulf smiled. “Well, it’s the weather for it.” And then he added, “Not for you and me, of course. I wasn’t suggesting that we should...”
“No, of course not,” said Blomquist. “But what does this sign mean? Respect their privacy? Does that mean we can’t go any farther?”
Ulf said that he did not think that. “I suspect it probably means no photography. And no, well, looking.”
“Or not too much looking,” suggested Blomquist. “No staring. That’s different from just looking. Staring is...”
“Looking intently,” offered Ulf. “Or looking in the wrong places.”
They fell silent. Then Blomquist ventured, “I still want to take a look at the sea.”
“Not stare at it?” asked Ulf.
“No, just look. After all, they don’t own the beach. Beaches belong to everybody, don’t they?”
Ulf said that he thought that was the case. “I think we can go and take a quick look at the sea—and then come back. We don’t need to hang around.”
“No,” said Blomquist. “You first, Mr. Varg.”
They continued to walk along the path. After a short distance, it climbed over the ridge of a dune, the windswept sand crumbling away under their feet.
“Coastal erosion,” said Blomquist. “They need to plant more of this grass. It binds the sand.”
“Yes,” said Ulf.
“There are some countries that are being blown away, you know,” said Blomquist. “Many people don’t know that, but wind erosion is really serious.”
“Yes,” said Ulf. They were almost at the top of the dune, and his attention was drawn by an umbrella top he could see in a hollow ahead. He pointed to this, and he and Blomquist stopped.
“Nudists,” whispered Blomquist. “Look.”
A man and a woman were lying half in, half out of the shade provided by the umbrella. Being in the hollow, they could not see Ulf and Blomquist, even though they themselves were afforded little privacy from anybody approaching on that path.
Then the man moved, rolling out from the shade and into the sun. The woman followed, and it was at this moment that Ulf gave an involuntary gasp. The woman was Angel.
Blomquist saw her too, and pointed mutely.
“That’s Angel,” whispered Ulf. “From the spa.”
“Yes,” Blomquist whispered back. “And who’s he?”
Ulf shrugged. “Heaven knows.”
“What are they doing?” asked Blomquist.
The man was applying sunscreen to the woman’s back, rubbing it in with wide, sweeping movements.
“Sun protection,” said Ulf.
“Very important,” whispered Blomquist. “You know, if you don’t use that stuff you can get serious skin damage. But there’s something else to bear in mind. Vitamin D. Sunblock can prevent you getting the necessary—”
Ulf interrupted him. “You’ve told me this already, Blomquist. In the car.”
Blomquist looked puzzled. “Did I?”
“Yes, you did. You told me about how sunblock can prevent the body making vitamin D.”
“Well, it can,” said Blomquist firmly. “And that couple down there should be careful. Mind you, I suppose nudists have better vitamin D levels than most of us, wouldn’t you say?”
Ulf tapped Blomquist on the shoulder. “Look,” he said. “They’re getting up.”
The man, having suddenly looked at his watch, had said something to the woman. She answered him and then, reaching for a towel, stood up.
“They’re leaving,” whispered Ulf. “We’d better turn back.”
“But we were going to take a look at the sea,” Blomquist protested.
Ulf pushed him gently. “Come on, Blomquist. We don’t want her to see us.”
“I don’t see why—”
Ulf cut him short. “There’s a reason, Blomquist. That’s her lover—pretty obviously.”
“So?”
“So that may throw some light on what’s going on at the spa. It’s relevant information.”
They made their way down the track and were back in the car by the time Angel and her companion appeared. Their car was parked some distance away from the Saab, and so they did not see the detective and his colleague watching them. Nor did they notice when the old Saab slipped out of the parking place and followed them, discreetly, down the track and onto the main road. Angel was at the wheel; the man in the passenger seat beside her.
Making sure that he did not lose sight of the couple, but careful not to get too close, Ulf followed Angel’s car into the traffic.
“I want to see where she goes,” he said to Blomquist. “I think tha
t could not only be relevant, but very relevant.”
Blomquist looked thoughtful. “You don’t necessarily know that he’s her lover,” he mused.
“Oh come on, Blomquist. A man and a woman lying naked on a sand dune...let’s not be too naïve.”
“But nudists are odd,” Blomquist persisted. “They could just be friends. Presumably nudists have ordinary friendships—unclothed friendships, so to speak.” He paused. “When I was a boy, there was another boy who brought a nudist magazine to school to show it around. It had photographs of nudists playing Ping-Pong. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Ulf smiled. Blomquist was almost quaint—in a slightly irritating way: Ping-Pong, nudists, vitamin D. “As well you might not,” he said. “But usually nudists do these things in big groups, rather than à deux.”
“He might just be a relative,” said Blomquist. “You can’t exclude that, can you?”
Ulf sighed. Would he have to spell it out? “I don’t think so, Blomquist. There was an aspect of the situation that indicated otherwise. Perhaps you didn’t notice.”
“Notice what?” asked Blomquist.
“That particular aspect.”
“What aspect?”
“Suffice it to say,” Ulf replied. “Suffice it to say that there was an indication of...Well, really, Blomquist, I don’t think we need to go there.”
“Where?” asked Blomquist.
Ulf said nothing. So much communication between people, he thought, depends on what is not said rather than what is said. Yet there were people—and Blomquist was clearly one of them—who seemed unable to pick up the unarticulated clues that conveyed our meaning. They needed things to be spelled out; not just alluded to, but made brutally clear. And yet poor Blomquist, for all his failings, only wanted to be helpful; only wanted to be appreciated as a colleague; only wanted his efforts to be recognised. But he would never make a proper detective if he failed to observe the glaringly obvious.
“Where?” repeated Blomquist. “We don’t need to go where?”
Ulf sighed. There was not a place, it was a metaphor. Or was it, more correctly, a metonym? Without thinking, he muttered, “It’s a metonym.”
Blomquist looked puzzled. He hesitated for a few moments, as one might do when anxious about displaying ignorance. Then he said, “You may think I’m ignorant, but I don’t know what a metonym is.”
“I don’t think you’re ignorant,” Ulf reassured him.
“I don’t have as much formal education as you do,” Blomquist went on. “I know you went to university. I didn’t have that opportunity.”
Ulf swallowed. He felt acutely embarrassed; he had not intended to make Blomquist feel inadequate, but that was exactly what he had done. He should not have said anything about metonyms—it was grossly insensitive on his part. What could one expect if one were a senior detective in the Department of Sensitive Crimes and one went on about metonyms to members of the uniformed branch? It was a form of flaunting of superior knowledge that Ulf, by deepest instinct, would never consciously engage in.
“I didn’t know about metonyms myself,” Ulf said quickly. “Not until recently, that is. Then I read about them.”
Blomquist looked out of the window. “I thought you might have learned about them at university.”
“No. We didn’t. I studied criminology, you know. And a bit of philosophy.”
Blomquist continued to gaze out of the window. “I never had the chance to study philosophy.”
Ulf kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead and the car they were following. It seemed to him that Blomquist was verging on self-pity now, and there was no reason why he should pander to that. Self-pity was almost always unattractive, and it did Blomquist no favours to indulge him.
“You can’t really say that, Blomquist,” he said briskly. “Anybody can study philosophy at any time. There are plenty of courses you can take. You can even study philosophy online, you know.”
“My English isn’t good enough,” said Blomquist.
“There are courses in Swedish,” countered Ulf. “Plenty of them. You don’t need English to study philosophy.” He paused. “How about enrolling on one of those courses? You could become quite knowledgeable, don’t you think? You could be quoting Aristotle to me next, eh, Blomquist!”
“I’m not sure who he is,” said Blomquist.
“He was a Greek philosopher,” Ulf explained. “He lived...” He hesitated. When had Aristotle lived?
Blomquist turned to face him. “So?” he said. “When did Aristotle live?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” said Ulf. “A long time ago, though.”
“Anyway,” said Blomquist. “What’s a metonym?”
“It’s a word you use to refer to something else. So if you say, ‘The White House is under pressure,’ you don’t mean that the actual building is under pressure—you mean the administration that works in the building is under pressure. That’s a metonym.”
“So why don’t we go there?” asked Blomquist.
“Where?”
“The place you said we shouldn’t go to. The metonym.”
Ulf’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. “I suggest we move on,” he said. “Metaphorically.”
Blomquist pursed his lips. “I’ve been thinking of those nudists back there,” he said. “What do you think drives people to take their clothes off, Mr. Varg?”
“I suppose they want to get back to a more natural state of being,” said Ulf. “Clothes are an encumbrance, after all.”
Blomquist smiled. “I’ve just remembered something,” he said. “When I was a boy we used to play a game of thinking of people without their clothes. We did this with teachers, mostly. We’d whisper, ‘In the bathroom,’ and that would be a signal for all of us to imagine the teacher with no clothes on. Then we’d start to laugh, of course, and the teacher would say, ‘What are you people laughing about?’ And of course we couldn’t reply. It was very funny.”
Ulf raised an eyebrow. “Children,” he said. “We were all childish once.”
“Mind you,” Blomquist continued, “I still do it from time to time. I find it helps.”
“You think of people with no clothes on?”
Blomquist was taken aback by Ulf’s surprise. “Why? Don’t you?”
“Not these days,” said Ulf. “Maybe when I was much younger. A boy, perhaps.”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with it,” said Blomquist, somewhat peevishly. “It’s not harming anybody.”
“No,” said Ulf. “I’m not being judgemental. I’m just a bit... well, surprised. That’s all.” He made a mental note to tell Anna. He would have to warn her, he thought, that if she saw Blomquist looking at her in a peculiar way, she should be aware...
The car in front slowed down. They were now not far from their hotel, and Ulf wondered whether Angel was driving directly back there, without dropping off her lover first. Would she do that? Was Baltser aware of this man’s existence? Was this an open marriage of the sort one read about occasionally—prevalent, it would seem, amongst a certain set of advanced thinkers and artists, people for whom conceptions of marriage and fidelity were risibly bourgeois and conformist?
The car now indicated it was about to turn off the road. Ulf slowed down further, keeping well back from their quarry. And then, as the car made the turn, Blomquist read the sign at the turning: Hotel Lillebäck. Sea views. All facilities. Home cooking.
The side road onto which Angel and her companion had turned was no more than a brief track, ending in front of the hotel. From where they had pulled in on the main road, Ulf and Blomquist were able to watch unobserved as the man alighted from the car, waved to Angel, and then disappeared through the hotel’s main door. As he did so, Angel started her car again and began to make her way back to the main road. This was the signal for Ulf to pull away
quickly and head back to the spa. Neither he nor Blomquist said anything for a short while, but as they neared their hotel Ulf revealed to his colleague what he thought was happening.
“That’s her lover,” he said. “We know that. We can also conclude that he runs the Hotel Lillebäck. That we know.”
“Yes,” agreed Blomquist. “We know that. But what does it tell us?”
“It means,” said Ulf, “that Angel might have split loyalties—in hotel terms, that is. So, imagine that you’re close to the owner of the Hotel Lillebäck...”
“...close enough to go to a nudist beach with him...”
Ulf grinned. “Yes, that close. And further imagine that you don’t like your husband...”
“Are you sure of that?” asked Blomquist.
Ulf assured him that his assessment of relations between Baltser and Angel was correct. “Unexpressed feelings,” he said. “Unexpressed feelings will out. I saw them. Those two are not friends.”
Blomquist shook his head. “I’ve never been able to understand how people can stay together when relations become that sour. How do you feel when you wake up and see a head you don’t like on the pillow next to you?”
“Regretful?” suggested Ulf. “Trapped? Resigned?” He thought of all the ways that so many people felt about life. Life was a matter of regret—how could it be anything else? We knew that we would lose the things we loved; we knew that sooner or later we would lose everything, and beyond that was a darkness, a state of non-being that we found hard to imagine, let alone accept.
Blomquist sighed. “I knew a boy at school who was always unhappy. Nothing was right for him. And when I saw him later—in adult life—he was still miserable. He had done none of the things he’d wanted to do. He was in the wrong job. He was living in the wrong place, and he had married the wrong girl. Everything was wrong.”
“That’s very sad,” said Ulf.
“Yes,” said Blomquist. “I remember his father’s car very vividly. He used to come to collect his son—this boy was called Lars—from the school gate. The car was an old Saab—much older than yours—much older. A Saab 92. It had that lovely sweeping back that those cars had. It was rounded too. People called it a feminine car because of its curves. It was very beautiful.”
The Department of Sensitive Crimes Page 21