by Karin Nordin
Sara shot Kjeld a hard look.
Kjeld ignored her.
‘Dad? You called me the other day. Do you remember?’
Stenar’s gaze drifted from the table to the window. It wasn’t fully dark yet, but the security lamp on the front of the barn was already lit. Stenar seemed transfixed by the light as though that hypnotic glow across the untamed field of weedy grass and dead thistle between the house and the barn could imbue him with answers he hadn’t yet formed the questions for.
‘Dad?’
‘It was the birds,’ Stenar said, his attention still focused out the window.
Kjeld followed his gaze outside, but didn’t see anything more than an unkempt yard and a barn that should have been torn down years ago. ‘What about the birds?’
‘Kjeld, don’t. You’re going to confuse him,’ Sara said.
‘I just drove all the way out here because he picked up the phone and left me a message for the first time in over a decade. And then when I get here you tell me he claims to have seen a murder. I think that’s reason enough to try and get him to explain what he saw.’ Kjeld glared. Although his relationship with his father had always been difficult, he thought that he and Sara at least had something of an amiable rapport. He wasn’t blind to the fact that circumstances put her in an awkward position when it came to balancing their father and himself, but the revelation that she hadn’t called him about any of this left him confounded. ‘Tell me about the birds, Dad.’
Stenar directed his attention back to Kjeld, a look of honest bewilderment across his face. ‘The what?’
‘You called me to tell me something about the birds. Something you saw in the barn. Something you didn’t want Mum to know. What is it you wanted to tell me?’ Kjeld insisted.
Stenar furrowed his brows, staring at Kjeld with an uncontrolled incomprehension. He clearly couldn’t remember the conversation.
‘What did you see in the barn?’ Kjeld said, leaning over the edge of the table in the hope that it might focus Stenar’s attention. He could see a thought on his father’s face, but Stenar remained silent.
‘Kjeld, stop! Leave him alone.’ Sara reached over to place a comforting hand on Stenar’s arm. ‘Are you all right, Dad?’
Stenar jerked his arm away from her, knocking the edge of his plate and spilling his dinner all over his lap. The plate hit the floor with a crash and broke into large jagged pieces. The sound sent Stenar into a panic. He fought against the edge of the table, trying to push out his chair to get away. His foot caught on one of the chair legs and tilted him backwards.
Sara leaped forward and caught the back of Stenar’s chair before it could fall.
Kjeld stood up, unprepared for the outburst and uncertain of how to help. He’d never been very skilled at comforting the emotional distress of others. Or himself, for that matter. And the involvement of family only seemed to heighten his discomfort. Nevertheless, at the risk of causing more upset he moved around the edge of the table to offer what little help he could.
But Sara wasn’t having it.
‘Just stop! Just go away! You’re going to make things worse,’ she yelled. Then she lowered her voice to a soft, calming tone. ‘It’s all right, Dad. It’s nothing. A plate fell is all. Just relax. I can get you a new plate.’
Stenar shoved her to the side, pushing her into the corner of the table. Then he began to pull at the buttons on his shirt in a disorientated attempt to remove it.
Kjeld took another step forward. ‘Let me help, Sara. I can—’
‘Get out. I said get out!’ she yelled, wincing against the searing pain in her hip where the corner of the table stabbed her. She would have a bruise in the morning. ‘You’ve done enough.’
Kjeld backed away, watching the scene unfurl before him as if he were a stranger to the players involved. In a single snap he saw his father go from a normal adult conversation to grunting like a temperamental four-year-old, flailing his arms as though he were drowning. He knew this man, but he didn’t recognise him. It occurred to him then that Sara was probably right. Their father hadn’t seen anything in the barn. He was just confused, the memories of the past and the present merging into an incongruous mess that his mind couldn’t make sense of.
Kjeld walked to the kitchen door and wondered if it was too late now to drive to Mora. He was tired, physically and emotionally. It would be safer to wait until morning, assuming Sara let him stay after their father’s outburst. If he left early enough, he could even make it all the way back to Gothenburg before Esme left work to feed his cat.
He was halfway through the door when Stenar broke into tears.
‘It wasn’t just me,’ he said, his face wet and his mouth blubbering as bits of herring caught at the crusty corners of his lips. ‘I wasn’t the only one who was there. The birds were there. The birds saw everything.’
* * *
What was he doing here?
While Sara tried to calm their father down from his fit, Kjeld went out for a smoke.
It was cool outside, colder than normal for the time of year but certainly not as frigid as the feelings in the family home, although that wasn’t saying much. The Norrland weather, not unlike the Nygaards, was just as unpredictable in autumn as it was in summer, and it could turn on a dime. So while it wasn’t usually the kind of weather that necessitated a winter coat, Kjeld wished he’d had the foresight to bring a heavier jacket. Just in case. Then again, it probably wouldn’t be necessary. He’d all but decided that he’d be heading back to Gothenburg in the morning. Coming home hadn’t been the worst decision he’d made in recent months, but it was up there.
Curiosity, however, nagged at him.
He finished two unfiltered cigarettes, burned down almost to his fingertips, before he decided to cross the quiet field to the old barn. When he stepped inside, flipping the switch to light the hanging industrial lamps, he expected to see more signs of recent activity. Aside from a steady path, however, forged into the dirt floor from decades of repetitious behaviour by the bird-crazed men of the Nygaard family, which led from the door to the rookery, there was very little indication that anyone had been in the barn. No one but his father, sister, and the lone officer who could find no trace that something inauspicious had taken place on the property.
Nothing worse than a serious lack of upkeep, that is.
It wasn’t one of those massive, commercial-sized buildings meant to service an entire farm as was common in the southern provinces, but it was a decent-sized structure for the north. His great-grandfather had built it after moving to Sweden following the prolific industrialisation of Denmark that demolished much of the natural landscape surrounding the economic epicentres. That’s what inspired him to seek the solace of serene isolation in a region that, by measure of its hard-to-reach location and unforgiving winters, promised never to host a population with more than three people per square kilometre. Likewise, that isolation was what inspired him to invest in the birds.
Like the kitchen with its odes to the past in the form of his mother’s kitsch salt and pepper shakers, hand-knit potholders, and rose-print valance curtains that probably could have been sold online as retro were they not stained yellow from forty years of his father’s cigar smoke, the barn was like a snapshot of an earlier time. On the wall opposite the door hung shovels, rakes, the old hand plough from when the clearing between the house and the barn was a vegetable garden, a pickaxe, a frayed rope looped over a rusty nail, and various other equipment typical of an unused outbuilding. The floor along the edges of the barn was equally dishevelled. A collection of broken pails, rolls of chicken wire, the old outhouse door, the remains of Sara’s wooden childhood rabbit hutch, and a heavy dust-collecting tarp that Kjeld knew was covering the engine of his own ’78 Saab Turbo, which even without the frame probably still held the record for most speeding tickets in the entire province.
And on the far side of the barn were the birds.
Just thinking about them made him shiver.
/> At the height of the rookery’s capacity there had been at least thirty ravens packed into the back of the barn, but Kjeld’s father had always insisted to him that his father before him once had a colony of nearly fifty birds after a particularly prolific mating season with a breed of Corvus varius that had travelled east from the Faroe Islands and interbred with the current stock. That was why many of the birds that Kjeld remembered from his youth were less glossy and had distinct whitish coloured feathers at the base of their necks. He remembered being disappointed by that as a young boy, as though that minor morph of colouration somehow ruined the sweeping uniformity of a colony of otherwise near-identical birds. They were smaller than the crows he’d see in the summer foraging along the coast of Hammarstrand where Kjeld often celebrated Midsommar with extended family on his mother’s side, and it etched in him an inaccurate assumption that the ravens in the rookery were somehow defective.
It wasn’t until much later while he was sitting in a biology lecture at the university that he realised those white feathers weren’t a sign of weakness or deficiency, but the result of a very specific genetic drift and allelic mutation in a species that was currently extinct. Perhaps his father’s ravens had even been the last of that subspecies, slowly breeding themselves back to the more dominantly homogenous and recognisable shade of black. Now there were little more than a dozen ravens in those nests, most of which were beyond their years, bald patches between their feathers and scruffy plumage denoting their age and aggression towards each other.
They looked just as bad as his father and Kjeld almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. To think he’d once feared these creatures as much as his father’s disappointment.
The birds were quiet and placid as Kjeld approached them. He watched as they pruned their feathers on the small wooden perches and shot him sharp, seemingly systematic glances as though expecting him to do something threatening. Only one of the birds kept a consistent gaze on Kjeld as he peered into the rookery. He was a large bird, assertive in appearance, with deep-set eyes and a strong beak that curved into an abnormal hook at the end. He eyed Kjeld like a bouncer at an elite club, paid to keep out the riffraff. But he also had an almost mocking gleam to his expression, as though he knew something that Kjeld did not. Kjeld imagined that cheeky scorn he thought he saw on the bird’s face had something to do with the rookery itself; the sole scene of cleanliness in the entire barn. The only thing cared for. The rookery and its sable-hued residents were his father’s true pride and joy, after all. Even with Stenar’s scattered memory those damn birds still took precedence over his own children. Kjeld knew that. And the large steel-eyed raven knew that too.
Kjeld touched his ear where a scarred indentation broke the curve of his helix and grimaced.
This was a waste of time.
Kjeld’s phone buzzed in his pocket, scaring some of the birds nearest the chicken-wire wall into flying back into the nests they’d built in the high corners of the rookery. It was Esme again, insisting for the umpteenth time that he call her back. He texted her a quick message. Something light-hearted but nondescript. Enough to let her know that he was alive. Not enough to let her know when he’d be back.
He was about to leave when the large raven cawed at him. It craned its neck unnaturally and then picked at a mess of dried grass and twigs that made up its nest. As it dug its hooked beak into the debris, a shiny glimmer reflected off a low-hanging light bulb. Kjeld edged closer to the rookery door to get a better look. He squinted his eyes, peering into the shadowy corner of the nest. When that didn’t help he tapped the torch button on his phone and shined a bright light onto the spot. Many of the ravens flew to the darker sides of the rookery, but the large bird did not. It held its ground as it rearranged the nest, revealing a single tooth beneath the brush.
A human tooth. With a silver filling.
Chapter 5
Torsdag | Thursday
‘Goddamn, Nygaard. You got old.’
Kjeld reached over the desk and shook the hand of Gunnar Ek, county police inspector for the north-west district of Jämtland and Kjeld’s childhood friend. ‘You should try looking in the mirror sometime. At least I’ve still got all my hair.’
Gunnar laughed and ran his fingers back through his thinning blond thatch.
Kjeld recalled the thick head of hair that Gunnar had during their academy days. It was like something out of a magazine, evenly styled and coiffed to add an inch to his slightly shorter than average height. It hadn’t fooled anyone, but it had been a source of pride for the man. Now he had to comb it over to the side just to give the illusion that it wasn’t falling out. Except that illusion wasn’t working out so well.
‘My general practitioner suggested a multivitamin and a biotin supplement, but I just bought a volumising shampoo. It’s cheaper and it still gives what hair I have left a glossy shine.’ Gunnar smirked. ‘And sometimes that’s all it takes to get my Tinder matches to swipe right. You’d be surprised how many of the ladies are going for the bald look these days. Maybe I’ll shave it all off. It worked for Bruce Willis.’
‘Sure it works. In the movies,’ Kjeld said.
‘Well, we can’t all be born with good looks and good hair.’ Gunnar waved to the chair across from the desk. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. If someone told me that Kjeld Nygaard would be back in Varsund before I reached the age of retirement, I would have eaten my hat.’
‘Then you’d have to rely on your comb-over to hide your not-so-secret hair loss,’ Kjeld joked, sitting down in the chair across from Gunnar’s desk.
‘Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t make that bet then.’
Kjeld chuckled and glanced around Gunnar’s office. It was a small room. Simple like the rest of the police station, which was little more than a collection of offices and a two-celled drunk tank extending off the side of the local community centre. On the back wall hung a framed certificate of Gunnar’s promotion to county inspector. Beside that were a few pictures of him with friends and local businessmen. The most prominent of the photos was one of him standing between two tuxedo-clad gentlemen at what must have been an awards ceremony, followed by another of him fly-fishing with an older fellow who Kjeld couldn’t place, but thought looked familiar. And although it was clear that Gunnar took pride in these images, judged by the thorough dusting over the frames, there was nothing extravagant or particularly noteworthy about the rest of the room. Not like the offices of Kjeld’s higher-ups in Gothenburg, which displayed row after row of plaques, supercilious certificates, and the usual rewards for expected bravado. Probably because there was little need for extravagance in a town the size of Varsund. But also because the budget for county police was limited. Nothing ever happened in Varsund, after all. Or, at least, nothing that warranted an official report.
Gunnar sat in the vinyl chair behind the desk and leaned back like he was some kind of local big shot. Kjeld supposed that in a town like Varsund he probably was. But Kjeld remembered Gunnar from childhood and it was hard to reconcile the image he had of the boy who filled the girls’ toilets with fresh lobsters as a senior prank with the man shaking hands with Varsund Kommun council members in those photographs. He also felt a thorny unease being in Gunnar’s presence. But whether that was brought on by the uncomfortable nostalgia of being in the presence of someone he recognised but didn’t really know anymore or by his own reluctance to remember the events that ended their friendship, Kjeld couldn’t say. Maybe it would have been easier to talk to Gunnar if he still had that blond pompadour.
‘I didn’t expect to be here,’ Kjeld said.
‘This is about your old man, isn’t it?’ Gunnar asked, reaching across his desk to reposition a heavy glass paperweight a few millimetres to the right.
‘He says he saw something out in the barn.’
Gunnar sighed. ‘I hate to break it to you, Kjeld, but your dad is not all there. Now we went up there the day he called us. I can’t tell you the shock it gave your sister when we showed
up on the front porch. She had no idea about any of it. Didn’t even know Stenar had called us. But we looked around. Gave the barn and the back half of the yard a good once-over. Couldn’t find anything to corroborate what he said he saw.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we left. What do you want me to say? Someone says they’ve seen a murder, the very least I would expect to find is some evidence of a struggle. There wasn’t anything. Place looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.’
Kjeld searched Gunnar’s face for any sign of that sarcastic jokester he knew from school, but he didn’t see anything. Gunnar was being honest. And why shouldn’t he? What did he have to hide aside from the fact that his police skills were rubbish and he was suffering the emasculating effects of male pattern baldness?
‘Did he say who he saw in the barn?’ Kjeld asked.
Gunnar shook his head. ‘Like I said. Your dad isn’t all there. Sara used to bring him into town once a week to do some shopping and get a bite to eat at the snack bar, but he lost it on one of the waitresses once and she stopped bringing him.’
Kjeld raised a brow. ‘What’d he do?’
Gunnar took a deep breath and breathed out his nose. ‘He threw a cup of coffee at her. She got second-degree burns on her arm.’
‘Sounds like the coffee was too hot to begin with.’
Gunnar shot Kjeld a cold stare. ‘I’m serious, Kjeld. She could have filed a report against him. Could have pressed charges. You can thank Sara she didn’t. She agreed to pay for the girl’s medical costs. That couldn’t have been easy for her.’
Kjeld frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, Tom got laid off last year. You didn’t know? He’s been doing some temporary work on and off in Östersund and some work-from-home stuff, but nothing long term. Shit. You didn’t know, did you?’ Gunnar laughed. ‘Damn, you really did cut off all ties when you left.’
‘Not all ties,’ Kjeld insisted.
‘Right,’ Gunnar said. ‘Just the big ones.’