Martin nodded, and a solitary tear trickled down his cheek. Billie swallowed hard to stop herself from crying too.
‘You have to understand . . .’ Martin began. ‘I wanted . . . I wished . . . I . . .’ His voice disappeared in a sigh.
‘What?’ Aladdin said, stepping into the room. ‘What is it that Billie has to understand?’
Martin took a deep breath. ‘I just didn’t want anything bad to happen to you and your mum. The way something bad happened to me once upon a time.’
Billie shook her head. ‘You didn’t want anything bad to happen to us? How does that work? You did everything in your power to make me hate this house. And bad things have happened to everyone who lived here before me and Mum. Everyone. Someone’s stove even caught fire. I suppose you were behind all that as well?’
‘No,’ Martin said. ‘No, I’ve never hurt anyone. Not like that. The business with the stove must have been an ordinary accident. I just wanted the house to stand empty. Because that’s what they want. The glass children. No one can escape them. Sooner or later, it will all end badly. For everyone.’
It was Simona who suggested they should go and sit in the living room. Martin sank wearily into the armchair that had once belonged to Billie’s dad; it was one of the few pieces of furniture they had brought with them from town.
‘I’m not sure how much you already know,’ Martin said. ‘But I used to live in this house with my mother and father.’
‘We know all about that,’ Aladdin broke in. ‘We’ve spoken to your father.’
Martin’s mouth dropped open. ‘You’ve spoken to Manne?’ he said in astonishment.
Billie nodded proudly. When she thought about it, they’d spoken to quite a few people.
‘In that case you must know a lot already,’ Martin said quietly. He patted one leg of his trousers, as if he could see a crease that needed smoothing out.
And then he began to talk.
‘I was five years old when the house caught fire and my mother died. The police said it was an accident, but when I was older I found out about the history of this house. It had been a children’s home where some of the children had died, and a nurse had hanged herself in the living room.’
Martin paused for a moment and glanced up at the light that Billie and her mum had put up.
‘Our light used to swing to and fro,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘Even though the doors and windows were closed. It happened several times. I don’t remember anything else, but that’s enough. This house is haunted by the dead who cannot rest in peace. They don’t want anyone else to live here. They punish those who stay. That was why they burned down our house.’
He fell silent once more and looked at Billie.
‘That’s why I’ve been coming here and doing all those things – so that no one will want to stay here long enough for something serious to happen. For someone to die.’
‘You’re lying,’ Billie said. ‘You’re the one who’s been making the light swing to and fro. You’re the only ghost in this house.’
‘Besides, serious things have happened here,’ Aladdin said, sounding quite angry. ‘Take the family who lived here before Billie, for example. The little girl nearly drowned!’
Billie suddenly had a horrible suspicion. ‘Was it you who tried to drown her?’ she said, hardly able to make herself look at Martin.
He looked as if he might start crying again. ‘They’d been living here for such a long time,’ he whispered. ‘And they’d moved out all the furniture. It was only the little girl who thought the place was haunted, and that wasn’t enough. Something really terrible had to happen in order to convince them. I swam underwater when she was playing on her own. I pulled her down and held onto her. I would never have killed her. Never. And she wasn’t hurt, just frightened.’
Simona tucked her legs under her on the sofa. ‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You’ve upset people to make them move out. You just can’t do that kind of thing.’
‘But I’ve succeeded,’ Martin said loudly, suddenly sounding angry. ‘No one has died since my mother burned to death here! Not one person!’
No one spoke. Billie didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t find the right words for what she thought Martin needed to hear.
‘You think this house is full of dangerous ghosts? For real?’ Aladdin said eventually.
‘I don’t think. I know.’
‘But the fire that killed your mother was an accident.’
‘It most certainly was not!’
‘And that’s why you’ve persecuted everyone who’s moved in here?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why did you rebuild the house in the first place?’ Billie said. ‘If you already knew there was something wrong with it, why did you restore it?’
‘Because I had to,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t you understand? If the glass children didn’t get back their home, they would never leave me in peace. When my father bought the house, a lot of furniture from the children’s home was still here. He cleared out the lot, and repainted the whole place inside and out. I think that was his biggest mistake, trying to get rid of all the old stuff, as it were. Before we moved in, the ghosts had been left in peace. When I renovated the house, I made sure everything was just as it had been from the start. To keep the children happy.’
His strange story made Billie’s head spin. She didn’t think there was much point in talking to Martin any more. It was just as his father had said: he had been damaged by what had happened when he was a child. Sad but true. However, there was one more question she had to ask:
‘If you thought the house was so dangerous, why didn’t you leave it empty? Why did you sell it?’
Aladdin and Simona nodded in agreement. They were wondering exactly the same thing.
‘Because I needed the money,’ Martin said with a sigh. ‘I had no choice. The bank was after me. My fishing business was going downhill. If I didn’t sell the house, I would end up homeless. I wasn’t living here myself; I had another house. And it just got too expensive. I couldn’t possibly move in here, of course, but I have always seen this house as my responsibility. Whenever a family has moved out, I’ve come along and sorted everything out before the next family moved in. I’ve always tried to be a support for those who have lived here, and made sure that they escaped in time. Before the glass children came after them.’
He leaned back in the armchair. ‘You can say what you like, but I know I’ve done the right thing. The responsible thing.’
Billie thought that Manne had probably been right when he said that Martin went a bit funny on the night when his mother died. Everything he said was so odd. To think that he had spent his whole life chasing ghosts that didn’t exist.
‘Tell me how you made the light swing,’ she demanded.
Martin shook his head. ‘I’ve already told you,’ he said. ‘It moves by itself. I swear!’
Billie looked at Aladdin and Simona. They shook their heads. Martin was lying. Obviously he was the one who had made the light swing to and fro on its hook. Somehow.
‘So what about the handprint in the dust?’ Billie said. ‘I suppose that wasn’t you either.’
‘That was me,’ Martin said. ‘I sneaked in when you and your mum had gone off on your bikes and made a little print using a doll’s hand. And I climbed up a stepladder to tap on the windows.’
A doll’s hand. And Billie had thought it was the hand of a small child.
‘What are we going to do now?’ Aladdin said.
Billie got to her feet. ‘I’m going to call Josef,’ she said.
She turned to Martin and said firmly: ‘You stay here.’
‘Of course,’ he whispered. ‘Where else would I go?’
Chapter Thirty
The leaves lying on the ground looked as if they were on fire. Red and yellow and brown. Billie thought they were beautiful, and trod on them as gently as possible as she carried the last box to the trailer Josef had borrowed from a friend.
Billie breathed in the cold autumn air and squinted up at the sun, which for once had appeared in the sky.
‘Is everything OK now?’ Josef asked.
Billie thought about it. Yes, everything was OK.
‘Good,’ Josef said. ‘But you still want to carry on going to school here in town?’
‘This is where all my friends are,’ Billie said.
‘What about Aladdin?’
‘I see him all the time anyway.’
Billie’s mum emerged from the house.
‘It’s a bit sad, isn’t it?’ she said once they were in the car.
Billie looked at the house one last time. Several weeks had passed since she, Simona and Aladdin had unmasked Martin as the ghost. Her mum was better now, and with Josef’s help, Billie had told her everything that had happened. Mum hadn’t been able to apologize enough for not believing Billie when she had tried to tell her what had been going on in the house at night.
‘You must have been so frightened,’ she said over and over again, hugging Billie as tightly as she could.
Billie didn’t try to stop her. Because she had been frightened. Almost all the time.
Josef had arrived less than twenty minutes after Billie called him that day. He wasn’t alone; he had another police officer with him. They listened as Billie and her friends explained what they had done and what they had found out, then they took Martin off to the police station in town. Later Josef told Billie that Martin had told them everything; a lot of the things he had done were illegal, so he would probably end up being punished in some way.
Of course it wasn’t exactly news that you couldn’t go around doing what Martin had done, but Billie couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him.
‘I really believe he thought he was doing the right thing,’ she said to Josef.
‘I agree,’ Josef said. ‘But unfortunately that doesn’t make it less illegal or less wrong. What if that little girl had drowned, for example? That would have been terrible.’
When it was all over and Billie’s mum was back home, Billie and Aladdin had cycled over to see Ella and to tell her what had happened. She had sat and listened in silence.
‘I was so sure the house was actually haunted,’ she said when they had finished.
‘But it wasn’t,’ Billie said firmly. ‘It was just Martin, doing a load of weird stuff.’
When Mum was completely better, she and Billie had had a long talk about what to do with both their houses. Mum had said that she would really like to carry on living in Åhus.
‘I know it’s been hard for you,’ she said to Billie. ‘But I still think it would be better for us if we didn’t stay in the house in town. There are so many sad memories there. Lots of good ones too, of course, and we will bring those with us. But I’d like to leave the rest behind. What do you think?’
Billie thought it over for a long time, and eventually she said that she would agree to move to Åhus, but on two conditions.
‘Whatever you say,’ Mum said with a big smile.
First of all, Billie wanted to stay on at her school in Kristianstad. And secondly she wanted them to get rid of all the old furniture from the children’s home, and bring their furniture from town. Mum immediately agreed on both counts.
And now they were sitting in the car with everything packed in the trailer, heading for Åhus. Their new home.
She had asked her mum about Josef. Were he and Mum together, and would he be moving in with them?
Her mum had said: ‘Josef and I are just friends. We’ll see what happens in the future. He might become more than a friend, and he might not.’
Aladdin was sitting waiting on the steps when they pulled onto the drive. He waved, grinning from ear to ear as he ran towards the car.
‘Food from Mum and Dad,’ he said to Billie’s mum, handing her a plastic carrier bag.
‘Thank you, that’s so kind!’ Mum laughed.
Aladdin and Billie carried the boxes that were to go up to Billie’s room, while Mum and Josef carried the rest.
The house was transformed. They had got rid of all the old furniture, and repainted the walls and ceilings. It was much lighter and more homely. On the outside the walls were still patchy, but the paint had stopped falling off. A painter had been to have a look.
‘I should think the paint has been flaking off because the surface wasn’t prepared properly when it was redone,’ he said. ‘If you just paint on top of the old stuff, there’s always a chance that it won’t take.’
So that was that. Mum had decided that they would have the outside of the house repainted next spring.
Billie started unpacking while Aladdin sat on her bed, flicking through a magazine.
‘Your dad was pretty stylish,’ he said, looking at a photograph Billie had placed on her bedside table.
Billie laughed. It was just typical of Aladdin to use a word like stylish.
Mum called up the stairs: ‘Billie, can you come here for a minute? I want to know if you think the pictures we got from Grandma and Grandpa look OK in the spare room.’
‘Coming!’ Billie shouted, running downstairs.
She could hear Josef and Mum talking in the spare room, and headed in that direction.
And that was when it happened.
As she walked past the living room, she stiffened. Had she really seen what she thought she had seen, or was it just her imagination? And did she want to know the answer?
But it was already too late.
Slowly she turned round and looked into the room where she had sat with Simona, Aladdin and Martin. She hadn’t been imagining things.
The ceiling light was slowly swinging to and fro.
As if someone was hanging from it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristina Ohlsson is a political scientist, with recent experience as a Counter-Terrorism Officer. She has previously worked at the Swedish Security Service, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish National Defense College. The Glass Children is her first novel for children and has been a prizewinning bestseller in Sweden.
Kristina lives in Stockholm and is now a full-time writer.
Also by Kristina Ohlsson for adult readers:
Unwanted
Silenced
The Disappeared
Hostage
Stars of David
THE GLASS CHILDREN
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 19416 2
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Penguin Random House Company
This ebook edition published 2014
Text copyright © Kristina Ohlsson, 2013
Translation © Marlaine Delargy, 2014
Cover artwork copyright © Sarah Watt, 2014
First published in Sweden as Glasbarnen by Lilla Piratförlaget
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, 2014
The right of Kristina Ohlsson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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