Killer's Island

by Anna Jansson

  “So where were you?” He calmed himself a little.

  “I swam too far out and almost didn’t manage to get back.”

  She saw him grow pale. She realized he was thinking about how he’d lost Isabel. “I wasn’t entirely sober.”

  “Goddamn right you weren’t!” He let go of her. “Never do that again! Never ever do that again!” To Erika’s great surprise he started crying. She put her arms round him and kissed him, rocked him in her arms and he let himself be consoled all the way into the bedroom.

  “I left because I felt I wasn’t good enough when you were with your friends. And I felt jealous.” Now he’d shown his more fragile side and his sadness, it was easier for her to tell the truth.

  Afterward, once he was asleep, she lay awake and watched him in the light of morning seeping in through the French blinds. His dark, curly hair, beautiful hands, and his clean profile. What she saw was etched into her memory, and she staked her claim on him. Anders is mine. Get thee hence, Isabel.

  CHAPTER 31

  AFTER A COUPLE OF HOURS of shallow slumber Erika woke up and needed the bathroom. Her left arm had gone to sleep and her muscles were dully aching after her exerting swim. Carefully she eeled out of Anders’s naked embrace, their clammy skin sticking together in the heat. His arm was heavy. She looked at her pale face in the mirror. Her mascara had caked round her eyes and down her cheek. She washed it off. The water was cold and she had to give it a good rub to get the smear off. Slowly, memories of the preceding night resurfaced in her consciousness. She felt her throat; there were no marks as far as she could see, yet she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the man on the beach had actually been there, had actually gripped her. She should really go to the emergency room and test herself to determine whether she’d been raped. But she’d run into people she knew down there. The thought of this was just as unpleasant as her fears. She could have got herself a rape kit at work; sending off the samples and getting them back herself, involving no one except Hartman.… If she’d been sober and together, that’s what she would have done. Erika squeezed her eyes shut and hated herself. If she had been sober and together this would never have happened in the first place.

  She got into the shower, letting the ice-cold water rake her skin as it slowly heated up. If I find out you were with someone else I’ll never forgive you, Anders had whispered as they pulled close together in the big double bed. He had held her so tightly that she almost lost her breath. And she’d assured him she hadn’t. Through ourselves we know others. She had no idea at this point where she’d been, nor did she have the strength to find out. Not now. All she’d wanted when she came back was to be enfolded in warm, forgiving arms. How would he react if she told him the truth – that she actually didn’t know what had happened? Maybe she should have told him straight away. If she had thrown herself in his arms, crushed and weeping, as soon as she arrived at the cottage at about two in the morning, or if the friendly couple had accompanied her and helped her explain, then it would have been clearer that she was a victim. But they hadn’t seen anyone else on the beach. They had only seen her shame.

  “You’re so quiet,” said Anders, as they sat having breakfast in the sun on the veranda. A fly buzzed round them, insistently landing on the cheese. She tried to wave it away, then looked up at the garden and its newly mowed lawn. She saw the sea beyond the trees. When she didn’t respond to his words, he continued.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Erika took a sip of her coffee to give herself time to think.

  “I was thinking about last night.…” She couldn’t finish her thought. She wanted to accuse him, but she immediately realized it would be turned back on herself. She wanted to know if he were ashamed of her; wanted to know what his friends meant to him, and particularly what sort of relationship he had with those two women. Had he been seeing one of them? She thought about that hand, resting on his thigh. Those kisses so close to his mouth and kisses on his neck. Fumbling kisses that had ended up almost anywhere – as long as there was an alibi for them, the right answer to the question. Was it true, what his friend had said? Had he been a womanizer in college?

  Anders leaned toward her and took her hands, to gain all her attention. “You scared me so much. Sorry. I wouldn’t want to lose you for anything in the world.” He put his arm around her across the table, and pressed his cheek to hers. “I want it to be you and me.”

  Maybe she should have been satisfied with his apology and his stated aim to move on with her. Maybe it would have been better if she’d left it at that.

  “I felt deserted last night,” she said, and those words were not possible to ignore. Now she’d opened herself to his accusations. She moved back, so that his arm no longer reached her.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t aware of it.” He grew silent, thinking it over. “You can’t mean you felt jealous of those girls. You don’t need to be, they’re childhood friends, like sisters more or less. If I’d wanted to be with one of them, I would have had many chances. But it would never work, somehow.” He chuckled, as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “Jonna and me had a try while we were at school, but it was nothing very exciting.”

  “Your friend said you were quite a womanizer while you were studying in Lund.” It felt good giving Anders the chance to defend himself, thus evading any shortcomings of her own.

  “I was so young then, I wasn’t thinking of the consequences, you took it for granted in those days that the girls were taking precautions.” Anders reached for the thermos and, with a gesture, offered her a top-off.

  Erika nodded. “Did you get anyone pregnant?” Straight away she regretted even asking, wasn’t even sure she wanted to know.

  Anders jumped at the direct question. “Yes, and I thought it went without saying that she should have an abortion. I didn’t want a kid. Not then. I was in the middle of my studies.” He put his hands to his head and all of a sudden there was a sharpness in his eyes. “I wasn’t even in love with her. It just happened. I panicked, didn’t want to see her again. I tried to persuade her to get rid of it, but she wouldn’t. I know I was a big shit. We only saw each other once after that.”

  Erika wanted to follow up with more questions, but Anders stood up and turned his back to her as he walked over and stood by the veranda railing, his cup of coffee in his hand. He clearly did not want to talk about it any more and she left him in peace for now.

  They packed a picnic, a portable barbecue, and a blanket in Anders’s backpack and headed off to the beach. The sun stood high in the sky, glittering in the water that rippled in the mild shoreward breeze. The light dazzled her eyes, and Erika got out her sunglasses. She felt his arm round her waist. Everything should really have been well with the world.

  They stopped at the Beach Café to buy ice cream. There were some new flavors to choose from, and Erika couldn’t make up her mind. Once she’d made her decision she realized she hadn’t brought her wallet, which was still in her purse. Before she knew it, Anders had opened his wallet to pay and Erika saw a photo inside it – of the woman he kept close to his heart in his jacket pocket. He noticed that she’d seen it. There was no way out of this. An explanation was required.

  “Julia wanted a mom like anyone else. She wanted me to get the photo out when we were reading her bedtime story so her mom could be there, too, and ever since the photo has been left in my wallet.”

  “She was very beautiful, Isabel.”

  He confirmed this almost inaudibly. Then took her by the hand.

  “You’re quite similar, in many ways.” They walked up the beach in a northerly direction. “As you understand, I haven’t had much luck with women. If you think I’m a bit rigid and careful there are some pretty specific reasons for it. Maybe it’s time to change Isabel’s photo now. Do you have some nice photo I could have?”

  “Should I take that as a promotion?”

  Vitvärs fishing huts were low and gray, with small windows. There were no nets hangin
g in the net enclosures. Beyond them lay some remains of lime ovens last used in the 1600s. Erika looked out over the green-blue sea and thought with a shudder about the events of last night. Anders put his arm round her and probably thought she was cold.

  “The Donner trading house was in business here until a merchant called Claudelin took over the company at the end of the 1800s. His farm is still standing, along with the warehouse, in the village.” Anders kissed her neck.

  Only now did she dare ask what the others had said when she was left the party in a mood, and they couldn’t find her. She steeled herself against his answer.

  “After you left we played games for a while, but when you weren’t in the bathroom and no one had seen you for an hour or so I got worried. To be honest, I was afraid you’d gone home with Stefan. He left more or less at the same time as you.”

  “I don’t even know who Stefan was.”

  “You were sitting in his lap when I came into the kitchen.” He gave her a look that spoke volumes about his opinion of that. “I suppose it wasn’t completely true what I said about everyone looking for you. I went straight to his house and asked if you were there.”

  “What did he say? It must have made him wonder?”

  “He laughed right in my face and said I should keep you close, or he’d consider you a single woman. I asked to have a look inside his cottage and he let me have a quick look round. I mean, you could have been hiding anywhere, so I tried to have a peek through the windows, but the lights were turned off in the house, I couldn’t see anything.”

  “What? You were jealous!”

  “Then I sat behind a spruce fir so I’d see you if you came sneaking out of the gate. I must have fallen asleep. Not for very long, but an hour or so, and then when I got back to the cottage and you weren’t there I didn’t know what to do. I was frightened and angry and upset. Sorry. I’m not usually jealous.”

  They took a shortcut through the woods. Folhammar Rauk Area was full of limestone formations polished by the sea into pillars, prehistoric animals, and dragons. It all looked so playful that Erika had to smile. An old man with a giant nose in limestone. A little door in a huge boulder that a six-year-old would have wanted to crawl through. Ugly trolls with overgrown heads. In the middle of nature’s haphazard playground someone had put out tables and arranged a neat and tidy barbecue spot.

  Anders unpacked the trout he’d stuffed with lemon butter and fresh herbs then wrapped in aluminium foil. They lit the disposable barbecue and put out the couscous salad, bread, and wine. Anders was in a good mood again and telling anecdotes from the hospital and his military service.

  “Military service is one of the most dangerous things you can do at that age. Every year more and more young men are wounded or killed, and that’s in peace-time. I was lucky enough to be sent home.”

  Erika was just about to ask why, when he put his head inside her sweater and kissed her stomach, nibbling her belly playfully.

  “Stop, it tickles!” She couldn’t stop herself from laughing. It had been a while since she last laughed as she did that day. Once they started they couldn’t stop.

  “If you’re going to cope with jobs like ours, I’d say laughter is almost a matter of mental hygiene. I mean, sometimes you feel like vomiting in the trash. When you hear about the abuses patients have been exposed to, while still managing to carry on, I’m filled with admiration. And I could only guess the things you see in your work.”

  “Shall we have a swim?” she interrupted. Work was the last thing she wanted to think about.

  “It’s shallow. You’d have to walk almost all the way to Russia to have a dip. What did you do to your back?”

  “What?” She tried to turn round, but she couldn’t see.

  “It’s a scratch. Looks like a letter, actually.”

  It was difficult for her to push the thought away, but at the same time she was worried that Anders would ask if she grew too remote. When they got back to the cottage she went straight into the bathroom and locked the door to have a look at her back in the mirror. After she pulled her sweater over her head she stifled a little cry with some difficulty. There was a letter. A large if not entirely clear letter: “K.” Just like the blood in the bedroom where Linn was murdered and in the gravel outside Harry’s place. It could not be a coincidence. The letter may not have been very symmetrical, but it was there, engraved in her own flesh.

  Never before had people in a civilization left so many traces of themselves, he thought. Every bill, every receipt, every time one logged onto a computer, there was an exact time and purpose. Every human life could be mapped out in detail. Books taken out in the library were only a password away from the observer. Interests, political alignments, and leisure activities could all be extrapolated. Secret e-mail messages exchanged between lovers might as well be sent as postcards – that’s how easy it was gaining access to them if you knew how. The real problem was how to filter the information. Faces gliding past surveillance cameras in a pedestrian underpass could be scrutinized hundreds of miles away. There was no longer such a thing as private lives – nothing personal. That was the price we had to pay for our security and comfort and our access to information. That was why one should not upload everything on the Internet. He had collected his secrets in an old-style scrapbook. Here, he nostalgically kept his most cherished moments from a summer on Gotland more than ten years ago. It had been his birthday. They were having a party. He wanted streamers in the trees. But Isabel had forgotten to buy streamers. So she tore up an old sheet into thin strips. It had been really beautiful, and for a moment he almost did not hate her at all.

  CHAPTER 32

  AND THEN CAME MIDSUMMER’S DAY, with its sun and clear blue sky. Lightly-dressed people jostled in Visby’s streets, but for Maria Wern it might as well have been any old weekday. Operation Door-Knocking in the neighborhood of the Botanical Gardens had yielded some results. On the night when Harry Molin was murdered four witnesses had seen a man wearing a dark cape. It was something that had not yet been publicized in the media, and thus more valuable. One of the witnesses, Louise Mutas, even lived on the same street as Harry Molin.

  Maria Wern was shown into a pleasantly furnished living room in Specksgränd. Admittedly she could not actually see Harry’s house or the mailbox – because these were on the same side of the street as Louise’s house – but she had a very good view of the lane itself.

  “It was from this window that I saw him,” said Louise. She was a bony woman of about eighty with a wonderful curly head of white hair like a halo around her friendly face. “It was about half past eleven. I sleep so fitfully. By nine o’clock I’m exhausted and have to lie down even if there’s something good on television. I sleep like a log. But then it’s completely impossible; I wake up after just a few hours and can’t go back to sleep. This was precisely what happened.”

  “Did you hear some noise, or what made you wake up?” Maria went up to the window and stood in the exact position from which Louise saw the man in the cape wandering down the road.

  “Harry Molin’s dogs were barking like there was no tomorrow. He usually keeps them under control, and it surprised me they kept barking for so long.” Louise kept moving nervously around the room. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Before Maria had time to answer, Louise had disappeared into the kitchen and started bustling with cups and saucers. Maria remained by the window. The old lady hadn’t turned on the lamp; she stood there in the dark. The man had come from Rostockergränd. Louise had perceived him as inebriated. Because the streetlights were broken, she hadn’t managed to form an opinion of his face or any other features, other than his unsteady and rather stiff gait. He seemed to be carrying a piece of firewood or some other weapon in his hand, but she couldn’t say for sure. It may have been something else he was carrying, but since hearing about Harry she thought it probably was a weapon.

  “So, coffee then. Let’s not be formal about it, shall we sit in the kitchen?”
Louise gave her a friendly smile, wiped her chapped red hands on the striped tea-towel and hung it up in the cleaning cupboard. They sat down at the kitchen table, where she had placed two rose-patterned cups in delicate porcelain. Most likely her best porcelain, Maria reflected and held the cup carefully with both hands. Louise offered her the platter on which she’d piled all the best the house had to offer: fritters, crullers, Tosca cakes, saffron buns, cardamom turns, and little biscuits with marzipan and red icing. Maria understood what was expected of her. Cakes were the pride and joy of this lady, and they had to be tasted. Each one of them would take at least twenty minutes on the rowing machine to burn off. She really hoped they were homemade, so at least they’d be worth the bother.

  “I’m staying with my sister in Endre. I daren’t sleep here at nights after what’s happened on this street. First Linn, our sweet nurse Linn… and then Harry Molin. I haven’t seen Linn’s husband, either, since… she was found in the Botanical Gardens. It’s so terrifying it doesn’t bear thinking about. I feel so sorry for Claes, poor little man. What will he do with himself now? I don’t think he has anyone to talk to.” By the time Maria stepped back into the street she was off-duty. The Midsummer sun was lavishing itself on everyone, the weather quite sparkling. Her children were with their grandparents in Uppsala. Erika had made off to Ljugarn with Anders Ahlström; this time it seemed to be for real. Maria hoped it would last, for Erika’s sake, so that she wouldn’t have to be disappointed again. She’d grown very aggressive toward men, and it didn’t suit her at all. Tomas Hartman was at a family reunion in Martebo. When Maria called Jesper Ek to ask if he wanted to do something, she learned that he was off fishing with Per Arvidsson. She was invited to tag along, of course.