Sail of Stone

by Ake Edwardson

  “If he’s sleeping in that apartment, then Anette’s dad is in on it,” said Aneta. “We can’t tromp in there again.”

  “Of course we can,” said Halders. “But not tonight.”

  Aneta looked around when they parked. She couldn’t see the glow of any cigarettes in any front seats, no silhouettes.

  “Do you think he was serious?” she said.

  “About sleeping at your place?”

  “Did you think it was funny?”

  “Oh, Aneta, it was just another way to provoke us.”

  “You didn’t see his eyes.”

  “I did, too.”

  “He was trying to make eye contact with me,” she said.

  Halders opened the front door.

  “He wouldn’t dare come here,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I told him I’d kill him if he did. It was when you were inside and I was outside waving good-bye.”

  The morning was light and warm. There were people smiling on Vasagatan. The sun was round and kind. The sky was blue. Birds were singing.

  Winter was walking to the Palace. He saw the temperature on the gauge over Heden: sixty degrees. Already. No one was playing soccer on the fields at Heden. A mistake on a morning like this. The air was easy to breathe in and breathe out. He yearned to sacrifice an ankle.

  The sun shone in. Ringmar stuck in his head after Winter had sat down and started to go over the cases: thefts, assault, homicide, robberies, threats, more thefts, criminal damage, another homicide, two more robberies. Reports, testimonies, statements. Papers, cassette tapes, videotapes. Many cases, all at once. A suspected murder. A confessed murderer. A drunk dispute in a neighborhood in Gamlestaden. Almost all homicides and almost all murders looked like that. Case open and closed within twenty-four hours.

  “Do you have a minute?” said Ringmar.

  “No, I have two,” said Winter, putting down a sheet of paper.

  Ringmar sat down. His face was sharply lined. He was twelve years older than Winter, which meant that he had some hard years behind him that Winter had in front of him. Maybe the hardest. And Ringmar had twelve years more of duty as ombudsman and protector to the public in front of him. How would the lines in his face look then? And Winter had twenty-four years left, t-w-e-n-t-y-f-o-u-r years in front of him, in the same role. Dear God. A third of a life the same way as this. Lift me up, take me away.

  At the same time, this was his life. He knew this life. He was good. He had knowledge and aggression, maybe not as much aggression as Halders, but more knowledge. He had patience. He could work hard. He could think. That was that. One could think here; it was still possible to take time for thoughts. And thinking could lead to results. A person who didn’t think well didn’t get results. Not the big results, the ones you got from thinking outside the routine. Thinking outside the beautiful melodies. Winter listened to Coltrane when Coltrane was in his most discordant period, and it was a similar atonal platform that he, Winter, started out from. It never worked to think in a straight line. It was possible to follow logic, but it was logic that couldn’t be followed by anyone else. It was his logic, the same way it was Coltrane’s logic, Pharoah Sanders’s logic, or Miles Davis’s logic. He had sent off for a book from Bokus.com and he’d received it yesterday: Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, by Ashley Kahn, and he was going to try to start reading it tonight if he had time to listen first, which he was starting to do now. The Panasonic was on the floor. He was playing Kind of Blue for the thousandth time.

  “‘So What,’” said Ringmar.

  The first song. Ringmar knew Kind of Blue. It was simply part of a general education to know that album. Winter didn’t really understand people who didn’t understand it. There was nothing to understand, incidentally. You just had to listen.

  “The woman from Donsö called half an hour ago,” said Ringmar. “Möllerström transferred it to me.”

  “Good.”

  “It was this Johanna, in other words.”

  “I understand that, Bertil. What did she want?”

  “Just to ask if we’d heard anything.”

  “Have we?”

  “No.”

  “Has Möllerström checked with the national control center?”

  “I assume so.”

  “How did she sound?” said Winter.

  “Calm, I think. But of course he’s been gone a few weeks now, her father.”

  “Yes. Something has happened.”

  “Must have,” said Ringmar.

  The music continued, “Freddie Freeloader.” Winter thought of Johanna Osvald, of her brother, her father, her grandfather. He thought of Scotland, of Steve Macdonald.

  Ringmar rubbed his hand over the lines in his face.

  “How’s it going, Bertil?”

  “Not bad. Moa has a new apartment on the way. Good for her, I suppose. But for my part, she could have lived at home for a while longer.”

  Winter looked at him.

  “You’ll understand in twenty years,” said Ringmar.

  “Okay, we’ll discuss it then.” Winter fingered for his pack of Corps, but no. He wanted to be strong. There were many years left.

  “Where is she moving to?” he asked.

  “Kortedala,” said Ringmar.

  27

  The news came via Interpol before the morning was over. Or maybe it came directly from Inverness to Möllerström. He was the one who came in to Winter with the printout and directed him to the department’s intranet.

  “Just tell me,” said Winter.

  “He’s dead,” said Möllerström.

  Winter tried to call but couldn’t get through. He tried again five minutes later.

  The chief inspector’s name was Jamie Craig, from the Northern Constabulary, Inverness Area Command. He didn’t sound like a Scot but like an Englishman like anyone else, a dry accent, clinical, technical.

  “He seems to have been wandering around town for a little while,” said Craig.

  “You mean Inverness?”

  “No. Fort Augustus. It’s on the southern tip of the lake. Just a village, really.”

  “The lake? What lake?”

  “Loch Ness, of course.”

  Of course. The world-famous waterway southwest of Inverness. Nessie. The lake monster. Winter had not visited Loch Ness, hadn’t seen Nessie.

  “But they found him a bit up east, in the hills, by a minor road, and by a small artificial lake called Loch Tarff. At least I think it’s artificial.”

  “And the car?”

  “No car.”

  “Where is his rental?” asked Winter.

  “We don’t know. He didn’t have a car when we found him, and he didn’t have any clothes on.”

  “Come again, please?”

  “This looks strange, sure. He seemed confused when he wandered around the town but he was fully dressed and he paid his way in a pub. Bought a pint and a ploughman’s, I think.”

  Craig described what he knew.

  A man of about sixty had shown up in Fort Augustus and walked around as though he hadn’t been completely right in the head. People in the city were used to eccentrics from all corners of the world coming there to discover the lake monster again, become famous too, but this man hadn’t been crazy that way. He had moved strangely, spoken incoherently to people he ran into. He had gone into the pub next to the gas station and drunk a Scotch ale and left his ploughman’s lunch: bread, cheese, relish.

  Someone had seen him wandering off to the east. Then the bulletin about Axel Osvald was released, and this someone called Craig at Longman Road.

  After that it was only a question of a little time. They had driven on the old road, B862, east of the lake, back toward Inverness, and had people comb the countryside, and they hadn’t had to climb around in the hills and the rocks for more than half a day, and hardly that.

  “He was on the other side of that little lake,” said Craig, “hidden from the road.�
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  “Without clothes?”

  “Not even socks,” said Craig, and Winter wondered to himself if that was an English expression for someone who was truly naked.

  “But you think it’s our man, Axel Osvald? Why?”

  “This is where it gets even stranger,” said Craig. “Of course I can’t be one hundred percent sure that it’s him, not yet, but the fact is that his clothes are spread out on the ground almost from down by the southern tip of the lake and up to where we found him. It’s a distance of a few miles. You can get the precise distance if you want, naturally.”

  Naturally. Pronounced with dry self-certainty. Winter wasn’t sure that Steve Macdonald knew this man, not personally. They seemed to have made opposite journeys. Craig might have been from London, and he was a chief inspector in Inverness. Steve was from Inverness and a chief inspector in London.

  “So we find a naked man and in the area we find a whole set of clothes, including shoes and outerwear, and we think, aha, there might be a connection here,” said Craig. “We gather up the clothes. We find a wallet with a driver’s license in this Osvald guy’s name, and the photograph looks like the dead man.”

  “How did he die?” asked Winter. “Your preliminary assessment, I mean. The Interpol message mentioned possible natural causes.”

  “His heart,” said Craig. “That’s as preliminary as I can be. Of course, they’re not done in pathology but there’s no outward sign of violence on the body, no wounds or anything. The doctor has bet two pints on a heart attack. It was cold up there. An older man up in the mountains at night, without clothing, possibly confused—well, it probably couldn’t have ended any other way.”

  “Heart attack,” repeated Winter.

  “I don’t actually think I could survive a night up there naked,” said Craig. “At least not if I was alone,” he repeated in the same expressionless voice.

  “When can you have a complete report ready?” asked Winter.

  “About what?”

  Still the same voice, clinical and analytical.

  “I was thinking first and foremost of the cause of death.”

  “This afternoon, I think.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Everything else will be in the reports tomorrow, I hope. Everything we know, that is. It’s not so much. But the case, if we can call it that, sure seems to be clear.”

  Winter had expected Craig to say “open and shut” about the case, but he didn’t say it. For that matter, it wouldn’t have been consistent with his image.

  “But the rental car is still missing, then?”

  “Yes. We spoke with the people at Budget; it was rented for two weeks, and it so happens that the time wasn’t up until yesterday. They filed a report of a possible theft with us, and that meant that we, well, took a little extra notice about this … the disappearance, the missing-person bulletin. Along with the witnesses from Fort Augustus, of course.”

  Winter could hear a change of nuance in Craig’s voice, as though he might feel that he needed to justify his actions. That it had taken longer than it should have to start the search for Osvald. But Winter had no such views. He was aware of the assumptions and the reality. It couldn’t have been the first time a stranger had wandered around Loch Ness.

  “Shouldn’t the rental car be somewhere nearby?” said Winter. “In the city there, Fort Augustus.”

  “It should,” said Craig. “That bothers me. But if it had been in the same place for a few days, it was probably stolen. There are lots of cars and lots of car thieves around Loch Ness.”

  “I understand,” said Winter.

  “We have a bulletin out on the car, of course,” said Craig. “It will probably be found somewhere in the area, cannibalized, as usual.” He paused. “Naked, as we say.”

  “The dead man,” said Winter. “How long had he been lying there?”

  “The doctor said forty-eight hours the last time I spoke with him, within six hours either way.”

  “Could he have been moved to where he was found?” asked Winter. “Could he have died somewhere else?”

  “No,” said Craig. “We’re quite certain that he got to the place where he died on his own.”

  “Then the question is why,” said Winter.

  “Isn’t it always?” said Craig.

  “Yes. The big question.”

  “Steve told me that we would end up there sooner or later if I talked to you,” said Craig.

  “Steve? Steve Macdonald? You know him?”

  “Yes. We worked together for a while in Croydon. He put in a good word for me when I was trying to get the position as chief inspector up here.” Craig paused. Winter heard something that could have been a short laugh, dry as sand. “I don’t know if I should thank him or not.”

  There was a drop of warmth in Craig’s voice. Winter couldn’t help but smile. He had gotten a lesson in Englishness. Craig wasn’t the one who’d started this conversation with talk about their mutual friends. It was also a question of being professional, of course.

  “What do the witnesses say?” asked Winter.

  “Well, what I said before, more or less. He had acted confused, as though he didn’t really know where he was. He had said things … it seemed like he was asking questions; that was the impression one person had gotten from him. And the pub owner. He had repeated something that sounded like the same thing, if I can say so. But it wasn’t possible to hear what it was.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? It wasn’t in English, or Scottish. I assume he was speaking Swedish, but that’s not our everyday language in Fort Augustus.” Craig paused again, briefly. “Of course this is old Viking land, but I don’t think people remember the Nordic language.”

  Old Norse, thought Winter. There are many Nordic words in Scotland, words for places, other things.

  “So he walked around speaking to people in Swedish,” said Winter. “He wasn’t just talking to himself? You said yourself that he seemed to be confused.”

  “Well, we haven’t really asked in detail, but the witnesses have said that he spoke to them as though he were asking something.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “I can’t help you there. I can certainly press them a little more about how he spoke to them and whether he might have been asking questions, but I can hardly get farther than that, can I?”

  “No.”

  “If worse comes to worst you’ll have to come here and test Swedish words on people,” said Craig. “I’ve heard that there aren’t so many.”

  28

  Will you tell the next of kin?” Craig had said, and Winter had said yes. That was part of his job, a much too large part. There was no practice for it in the police training, and entirely too much experience of it later.

  He called Johanna Osvald’s cell but only got her voice mail in his ear. This wasn’t something you could tell someone on voice mail.

  He looked at the clock and looked up the timetable for the southern archipelago. He looked at the clock again. He would make the 10:20 Skarven if he drove too fast on Oscarsleden.

  Winter stood on the deck with the wind in his hair. Someone was fishing on the cliffs just behind the harbor. He had gotten a bite, or was about to: the gulls were wheeling in their own circles, screaming encouragingly to the man, who was wearing a wide cap for protection against the bird shit that sometimes fell like snow from the sky.

  The Skarven moved out. No café on board. Few passengers were going out to the islands at this time of day, and at this time of year. Two months earlier there wouldn’t have been room for him on board; the archipelago boats swerved out like overloaded passenger junks in the Yellow River, brown limbs everywhere, children, strollers. Last summer he and Elsa and Angela had planned to go to Vrångö but fled the boat when they got to Brännö Rödsten. Too many people, like a sun-and-sea-and-salt-and-sand madness that seized the people of the city when the sun was at its warmest.

  Madness. Winter tried to brush his hair out of his eyes
and thought of something Erik Osvald had said when they met out on Donsö.

  “There’s nothing wrong with mad cow disease,” he had said. He saw everything from the professional perspective of a fisherman: “We like to see one of those crazy cows on TV at regular intervals!”

  Skarven went directly to Köpstadsö. There had been a strong wind out on the open sea during the journey over, as though the weather had changed. Winter could see black clouds in the west now, on their way up from the other side of the earth.

  On the water down there, Erik Osvald and his three crew members were engaged in the eternal, anxious search for fish, the attempt to bring up the maximum legal amount.

  There is a higher power, Erik Osvald had said, besides the Norwegian Coast Guard! It was a joke, but there was gravity to it. A higher power. If there isn’t, everything is so meaningless, he had said.

  This life changes you, twenty-five years on the North Sea, all year round, all day long. It’s freedom. It’s loneliness.

  It’s an old-fashioned way to live.

  But we Swedish fishermen are still out one week and then home one week. The Swedes are almost the only ones who use that system, and it means that we earn less than the Danes and the Scots and the Norwegians.

  And the past. He had spoken about the past: My dad went out Monday morning and came home on Saturday morning.

  A life at sea until he became tired and stayed on land and listened to the weather reports when his son was out there.

  Axel Osvald, if it was Axel Osvald that Craig’s men had found; if it was him, his death had been strange and tragic, strangely tragic, alone and naked next to a pitiful little lake next to another, larger lake in a mountainous inland, miles from the sea.

  What had he been doing there? How had he ended up there? How had his thoughts wandered while he himself wandered up slopes and rough terrain? Winter had not been to Fort Augustus, but he could imagine what it looked like.

  The sea was calm between Styrsö Skäret and Donsö. Winter couldn’t see Osvald’s modern trawler, the blue Magdalena. They were out for a new week, west of Stavanger and east of Aberdeen, hunting for whitefish. In six days they would put in at Hanstholm and go home in the afternoon with invoices in hand. But Erik Osvald would come home before that, and he, Winter, was the one who was coming with the information that would make the fisherman return home. Or how would it happen? Would a helicopter pick him up? Or would he set course for Scotland and Moray Firth and the harbor entrance to Inverness right away? Go through the canal in the city, the river Ness, and down into Loch Ness and down to Fort Augustus? No, not with that monster of a trawler. And no, because his father was lying and waiting in a refrigerated room in Inverness. His son could anchor in the harbor.