H01 - The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  CARIN GERHARDSEN

  THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE

  This book is part of Stockholm Text’s Scandinavian Crime series. To find more titles in the series, make sure to regularly visit http://stockholmtext.com.

  Stockholm Text

  www.stockholmtext.com

  stockholm@stockholmtext.com

  © 2012 Carin Gerhardsen

  Translation: Paul Norlen

  Editing: Deborah Halverson

  Cover: Dorian Mabb & Simon Svéd

  ISBN e-book: 978-91-87173-15-8

  ISBN print book: 978-91-87173-23-3

  KATRINEHOLM, OCTOBER 1968

  THE BROWN QUEEN ANNE-STYLE villa is a stately structure, perched at the top of a grass-covered hill, surrounded by tall pine trees. The white corner posts and window casings, with their rounded corners, give it an inviting, fairy-tale shimmer. In summer the pines offer shade to the children playing around the house. But now, in autumn, they look almost threatening, like stern guards tasked with protecting the preschool against winter cold and other unwanted guests. The first snow sits on the ground like a wet rag and has not yet melted away. All is silent, except for a dog barking somewhere in the distance.

  Suddenly the door flies open and out swarm the children: boisterous children in clothes new or old, neat or tattered; tall and short children, skinny and round; blond children, dark children, with braids, freckles, glasses or caps; children walking and jumping, chattering and listening; children running ahead and children following behind.

  The door slams shut, then opens right up again, and out walks a little girl with a white fur cap and red quilted jacket. Behind her is a boy in a dark-blue quilted jacket, scarf, and red-white-and-black Katrineholm SC cap–KSC has to be your team, at least in this part of town. The two children do not speak to each other; instead the girl, whose name is Katarina, walks quickly down the hill until she reaches the big, black iron gate. With some effort, she opens the gate just enough to slip through before it closes behind her. Right behind her comes the boy, whose name is Thomas, and before he opens the gate to squeeze out, he stops a moment and takes a deep breath.

  Once out on the sidewalk, his fears are confirmed: all the children have clustered on the opposite street corner. He sees how Katarina, apparently without hesitation, crosses the street, right into the jaws of the wild beast. Thomas makes a quick decision and, instead of crossing the street, turns left to take a detour home. He has only taken a few steps before they are on her. One of the girls, the resourceful Ann-Kristin, always with a cutting smile and a malicious gleam in her eye, tears off Katarina’s cap and throws it to Hans–“King Hans”–as the other children shout and laugh with delight.

  Thomas stops to consider helping Katarina, but before he can complete the thought, the children catch sight of him, too. At a clear signal from Hans, they rush eagerly back across the street and throw themselves on Thomas. The rest of the children follow like bloodthirsty dogs, and Katarina remains behind, astonished and relieved: for whatever reason, it was not her turn this time. She leans over and picks up her no longer particularly white fur cap, puts it on anyway, then crosses the street to follow the spectacle at close range.

  Where does this resourcefulness come from? This unfailing bond that unites twenty-one, perhaps twenty-two children, out of twenty-three? And the obvious but unspoken authority of the leaders when half the group, suddenly and enthusiastically as one, finds itself tying a terrified little boy to a light pole with jump ropes and scarves, while the other half gathers stones to hurt him?

  Thomas, incapable of offering resistance, incapable of screaming, sits on the wet, cold asphalt. Unmoving, silent. Quietly he looks at his schoolmates. A few throw rocks at him, at his head, his face, his body. Someone bangs his head against the light pole over and over again, while someone whips him with a jump rope. A few of the children just stand there laughing, others whisper with condescending, knowing expressions on their little faces, and a few simply stand impassively and watch. One of those is Katarina; she gets to be one of them now–her schoolmates.

  At some point during the assault, the teacher herself passes by on the sidewalk. She casts a quick glance at the tied-up boy and his playmates, and raises her hand to wave goodbye to a few of the girls standing closest.

  Just as suddenly as it started, they are done. In half a minute the children have scattered and are once again just ordinary, delightful kids on their way home from school. They go their separate ways, one by one, or two by two, perhaps three or four together. Left on the sidewalk is a six-year-old boy with an aching body and an insurmountable sorrow.

  STOCKHOLM, NOVEMBER 2006, MONDAY EVENING

  IT WAS ONLY FOUR O'CLOCK in the afternoon, but it was already dark. Snow was falling in large white sheets that melted as soon as they touched the ground. Passing cars blinded him with their headlights, and he had to take care not to get splashed while walking on the sidewalk. Why did cars drive so fast and spray dirty water up on him? Drivers weren't supposed to splash pedestrians; that was something you learned in drivers ed. But maybe they didn't see him; maybe he wasn’t visible walking in the darkness, with his rather unassuming, rather short body, in his rather dark clothing. His posture was maybe not the best either and he probably did look a little silly, because his feet did not point straight ahead, but a little outward, like a clown. But he was not a clown.

  He was a quiet person who never got into arguments, probably because he never contradicted anyone. This was not really all that remarkable, since he seldom saw anyone. Except at his job of course, out in Järfälla, where he worked in the mail room of a big electronics company. He delivered internal and external mail to all the engineers, secretaries, managers, and everyone else who worked there. That was all he did, because he was not entrusted, for example, with sorting the mail. There were other, more qualified persons who could handle such things and who could make important decisions, such as deciding whether the mail was properly addressed.

  He was very bad at making decisions. When he thought about it, he seldom had an opinion of his own about anything. If, on some random occasion, he was playing with some other children and, contrary to expectations, they asked him what he thought, he didn't really think anything in particular. Even if he asked himself what he really thought about this very question, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. He really had no desire other than to be with the children and to do what they wanted. His only desire was to be accepted by those around him. He was forty-four years old, and this had still never happened.

  The question was: If he were to have this one small desire fulfilled at some point, would he then move up a rung on his ladder of needs and suddenly start asserting his own opinions about other things, too? Do you automatically get to do that when you are a valued person?

  He looked up toward the windows of the building on the other side of Fleminggatan. They were pleasantly illuminated and inviting in the autumn darkness, with potted plants and curtains, lamps with beautiful shades, colorful fans, and other decorative objects. Some windows already displayed Advent candleholders, as if to further underscore the picturesque scene, and behind every illuminated window a happy family, a happy couple, or at least a happy individual could be found. This was clear from the warm light and cozy setting.

  His own window, on the other hand, gaped dark and empty, except for a sparsely foliated ficus and the cord trailing from a blind. The kitchen window likewise, completely bare, except for the old transistor radio sitting there in lonely majesty. He did actually read the occasional home decorating magazine with interest. Not because he was looking for inspiration for his own home, for why waste effort on an apartment that no one else was ever in. Jus
t him—one small, insignificant person, or maybe no one at all. He was not visible to the cars that splashed water from the curb in the autumn darkness, and he was not heard—in fact, he hardly heard himself. No, he read home decor magazines for the same reason he looked up at other people's windows. In his imagination he moved to another world, a world of friendly people with warm smiles and big, soft, colorful pillows on their couches.

  Today he had almost been offered a piece of cake at work. It didn't happen often, for in the mail room there was never any reason to celebrate. Besides, he was almost never there more than a few minutes at a time, when he picked up fresh, sorted mail to be delivered to other departments.

  However, when he dropped off the mail at section eleven, the workers were all sitting around eating cake, for some reason unknown to him. He always felt a little uncomfortable delivering mail to section eleven in particular. They always seemed to be having a coffee break right then, so they could see him as he arrived in his ridiculous mail room uniform. Maybe “uniform” was too big a word—it was just a pair of blue trousers and a blue jacket, but in any event, he was the only one dressed that way and it was never good to stick out.

  And so they saw him there, or to be more precise one person saw him. A real joker too, who made fun of everything and everyone, and had lots of opinions about everything. The others laughed at his jokes and seemed to share his opinions for the most part, for he was never contradicted. “Hey there, Mr. Postman!” he said today, sitting with his arms crossed and legs stretched out under the break table. “Would you like some cake?” Without expecting an answer he continued, “If you do, then you better get a move on your little scooter and fetch that circuit board at TX first, like I told you yesterday and the day before yesterday. Is everyone in the mail room a little slow or is it just you?” Laughter from the others at the table, maybe at the mail carrier, or maybe out of habit. There would be no cake for him, for he had no authority to act as a courier and run errands for people. His task was simply to dole out the mail that was assigned to him.

  Mentally, he was not slow. True, he had no education to speak of, but he did read a lot. He was probably not of above-average intelligence, but he was not slow. He did quite well in school the first few years, but that had to come to an end. In Katrineholm, you did not do well in school, it was absolutely forbidden. Actually, you weren’t supposed to be good at anything, except bandy and soccer and that sort of thing. There were definite, unspoken rules for everything: what you could be good at (sports), what you should not be good at (music, language, crafts, conduct), what you should be mediocre in (any other school subject), what you should wear (store-bought clothes of the right brands), what you shouldn’t wear (caps, glasses, anything hand-made), where you should live (apartment building), political values (Social Democrat, but definitely not communist), and what bandy team you should cheer for (KSC, not Värmbol). Above all, you were not allowed to excel or be different in any way.

  But here, for a grown man in Stockholm, other rules applied. Here individual ideas were appreciated, and a deviant appearance was often positively accepted. Above all, an education and self-confidence were a necessity.

  Life was hard. His mother died when he was very young, and his father was a shift worker at a printing company and did not have much time left over for his son. He was a loving father, but lacked skills in how to run a household or bring up a child. After decades of chain smoking, he, too died at an early age, leaving behind a great void.

  From the very start he had been different, but he could never really figure out exactly how. Well, he had the wrong dialect to start with -- he had spent the first few years of his life in Huskvarna, and then he was actually forced to wear a cap, but still—that was probably not the main reason. No doubt there was something wrong with his personality even then. As a little boy he was happy and outgoing. He liked people, but he realized early on that people did not like him in return. And they soon took his peculiarities and good humor out of him. It was probably there—in preschool—that he started to turn into the person he was today. The constant physical abuse, interspersed with ostracism and name-calling, had not only transformed him into a silent shadow, it deprived him of all self-confidence as well.

  Even so, he started elementary school as a seven-year-old with enthusiasm, curious and interested. But raising your hand to answer questions proved to be impossible from the very start, because you had to be careful not to think you were somebody. If he was asked a question that he could answer, there was giggling and looks exchanged among the other children. If the answer was wrong there was laughter. Several of his old tormentors from preschool were in the same class, and the other children were quickly initiated in how he should be treated. At recess they beat him up, made up mean rhymes about him, or else he stood alone, watching the other children play games. Sometimes he did not even go to school, but stayed home in bed, either sick—headache and stomachache—or pretending to be sick. His grades suffered, and in ninth grade he dropped out. He was given a so-called extended trainee position, which he did not choose himself, in a haberdasher's shop where he did what he was told.

  As far as he was concerned, his schooling was a wasted decade, but maybe things were better for children growing up now. On the news the other day there was something about the successful “Katrineholm Project,” as the TV news anchor called it. In the interview, the pompous county councilman Göran Meijer called it “Project Forest Hill,” after the primary school where the successful anti-bullying program had first been introduced. He wondered whether the new methods, described with big words like “respect for the individual”, “physical contact”, “adult supervision”, and “mentoring”, might even allow a Huskvarna dialect and Värmbol caps.

  After his stint in the haberdasher's shop he moved to Stockholm, where he lived with his great-uncle, who occupied a studio apartment on Kungsholmen. Here he completed his education at night school. Against all odds, and without further qualifications, he managed to get the job he still had. His great-uncle was long since dead and the apartment was now his.

  Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted and he stopped short. He remained standing in the crosswalk, in the middle of the street outside his own apartment building. There was something very familiar about the man who had just passed, and without knowing why, he turned and followed him. The clear-blue eyes and blond, curly hair, the somewhat eager but purposeful expression, a scar by his left eyebrow, the way he walked—everything added up. But was it really possible that after all these years he would recognize a person he had not seen since he was six or seven years old? It was probably his thoughts just now about the attention given to the Katrineholm Project that was making him see ghosts.

  This doubt was based on common sense, but emotionally, he had no doubts. In his mind's eye he saw him almost every day. There was no doubt that it was him.

  The man took the stairs down to the subway and rapidly approached the turnstile, where, with a practiced hand, he slid his transit card through the reader and pushed his way through. He walked the whole way down the long escalator that led into the underworld. Once on the platform he pulled a newspaper out of his jacket pocket and thumbed through it while waiting for the train.

  He kept ten or twelve yards from the man the whole time, and then sat down on the bench behind him, where he was standing with his newspaper. Thoughts were flying through his head and he could not give any reasonable explanation for his actions. During the last twenty years he had not done anything out of the ordinary: going to work, going home, shopping, eating, sleeping, going to the movies or taking an occasional walk, reading, and watching TV. And then suddenly he found himself down in the subway, on his way toward an unknown destination, following a man he had not encountered in almost forty years. He was filled with a sense of unexpected well-being. Something was happening in his life, he was on an adventure, and he was enjoying it.

  * * *

  It was always pleasant to settle down in
the subway car with a newspaper on the way home from work. His day at the real estate firm began at seven in the morning, so he could be home before the day was over, and spend time with his kids before they went to bed. He had to be up by five thirty and seldom got to bed before eleven thirty, so he suffered from a constant shortage of sleep. But he had learned to live with it, and in a few years the kids could more or less take care of themselves. Then he and Pia would be able to sleep in on weekends.

  They had three children, three wonderful children who, despite their stubbornness and their nagging and their unlimited energy levels, still made him feel very good. It was the same with Pia, whom he met at college, although they did not get together until eight years later when they met again at a party. She worked part-time as a dental hygienist in the suburb where they lived, and their relationship was still exceptional after fifteen years. They were best friends and could talk with each other about almost anything.

  He was basically happy with his work too, even if he did not always like having to show properties on weekends. The company was doing well, and that was the main thing. Work as a real estate broker meant freedom and variety and he and his partner took home a good salary every month, so there was nothing to complain about as far as money went.

  With the odds he had started with, it was not a given that he would ever become a happy adult. He grew up as the only child of a single, semi-alcoholic woman who supported herself as a hairdresser—to the extent she worked at all—and whose only interest seemed to be men of all types. They moved a lot and never really settled down anywhere. Various, more or less serious, stepfathers came and went over the years. When he was little, he was considered noisy and unruly, and his childhood was marked by countless fights and detentions. He must have been a real handful. Of course, it affected his schoolwork, but for some reason, in high school, he started taking his studies seriously.