Where Ravens Roost

by Karin Nordin

  He’d practically inhaled two cigarettes and half the chocolate bar when the boy waved to him from inside the kebab shop that his order was ready. Kjeld stubbed out his cigarette on the sidewalk, threw the second half of the chocolate bar in the trash, picked up his order, and began the bumpy drive home.

  When he pulled up in front of the house, Sara was already storming out the front door ready to give him a tongue-lashing for taking so long. She was late picking up her husband from Östersund and both the kids needed rides to the community centre for some kind of school service project. She was speaking so quickly that Kjeld couldn’t keep up with what she was saying. And before he could get a word in edgewise she was slamming the door of her Volvo and speeding down the drive.

  Kjeld looked to the house and saw his father standing at the window, staring out at him with tired, watchful eyes. By the time Kjeld walked in the house the pizzas were cold.

  * * *

  When Kjeld entered the living room after reheating the pizzas in the oven he thought he saw his father’s eyes light up like a kid on Christmas morning. He even set his book, a collection of northern Scandinavian nature photography, to the side and sat forward in his chair expectantly. Something about that action reminded Kjeld of his cat when he sat in front of the food bowl waiting for him to finish measuring out the kibble into a plastic cup on the kitchen scale. He never used to measure pet food. Not until he moved in with Bengt. He’d been as strict on the cat’s diet as he had been on Kjeld’s and the habit stuck with him even after the separation. Although, if Esme’s text messages were to be believed, it hadn’t helped any.

  Kjeld set the pizzas on the coffee table and pulled it closer to his dad’s chair, an old leather recliner that had stopped reclining before Kjeld left home as a teenager. It was cracked along the armrests where the fabric had begun to thin and peel and the way his father sat in it, half hunched and sinking, made Kjeld suspect that some of the springs beneath the cushion were broken. It was a wonder that Sara hadn’t replaced that chair years ago. She’d probably tried and their father probably threw a fit. He’d always been good at that, even before he was diagnosed with dementia.

  Kjeld cut the tuna and shrimp pizza into eight manageable slices and held the plate out to Stenar. Stenar took it and placed it in his lap.

  ‘I haven’t had a pizza in years,’ Stenar said, his voice harsh and gravelly.

  ‘Do you need a napkin?’ Kjeld asked.

  ‘I can manage.’

  Kjeld screwed the lid off one of the colas – Share a Coke with Emily – and set it on the end table beside the photography book. He kept the Matthias bottle for himself, chugging most of the bottle before he started in on the pizza.

  ‘It might not be any good,’ Kjeld said with his mouthful. ‘I had to reheat it.’

  ‘Frozen?’

  ‘Kebab place on 340.’

  ‘Three-forty?’

  ‘Fiskevägen. Next to the petrol station.’

  Stenar nodded his head. ‘That used to be a bait and tackle shop.’

  ‘Really?’ Kjeld tried to remember that, but nothing came to him. Then again, he hadn’t really been out that way much as a boy. When he wasn’t at school or on the football field he was out in the woods, trying to discover what his father and grandfather had found so fascinating about the wilderness. For a time he thought he’d found it, but he lost it quickly after.

  ‘Owner was German,’ Stenar said. ‘Can’t recall his name. Came out here in the late Seventies. Left in the Nineties, I think.’

  ‘I think they’re Turkish now,’ Kjeld said. He finished off a slice of pizza. It was good, but the mushrooms were soggy. ‘At least, I think that’s what they were speaking behind the counter.’

  ‘Turkish?’

  ‘The people working at the kebab place.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Stenar said between bites. ‘I’ve never seen a Turkish fisherman.’

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, Stenar slouched in his chair and Kjeld hunched over the coffee table so he wouldn’t spill any of the gooey cheese on the floor. On the outside it probably looked like a casual scene, a father and son sharing lunch, talking about the olden days. But for Kjeld it was anything but casual. Anything but normal. For him it was uncomfortable, but the longer he spent in the presence of his father, the more difficult it was for him to determine if that discomfort came from the past and the events that had pushed them apart or from the present and Kjeld’s reluctance to let go of bad memories.

  Memories that he was beginning to believe were coloured by the unforgiving perspective of a confused and lonely child. Memories that may not have been as bad as he’d allowed them to become in his mind.

  Kjeld finished off the rest of his cola in a single gulp and forced back the urge to belch.

  ‘That reminds me,’ Kjeld said, cutting himself a new slice of pizza. This time he pulled the mushrooms off and set them on the side of the plate. ‘I found something in the cellar.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go down there,’ Stenar said, his voice becoming traditionally paternal, and Kjeld knew what he was going to say before he said it. Because he’d heard it so many times in his youth. ‘The stairs aren’t solid. You could trip and fall.’

  ‘I was careful.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to fix those stairs.’

  ‘The stairs are fine, Dad. You did fix them.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Stenar brought another slice of pizza to his mouth. One of the shrimps fell off and landed in his lap. He didn’t notice.

  ‘I found a fishing tackle box in the basement with a bunch of photos inside.’

  ‘Someone should organise the family photos one day. Your mother was working on that. She was putting together a scrapbook. But she’s too sick to work on it now. I don’t want to bother her with it.’

  Kjeld held back a sigh. ‘These were different photos, Dad. They were locked up.’

  ‘Locked up?’

  ‘In a tackle box. Old photos of you and Mum and some other people. A couple were from a Christmas party.’

  Stenar slowed his chewing. His gaze drifted away from Kjeld and focused on the pizza. It could have been his memory striving to make a connection, but Kjeld had the distinct impression that his dad was trying to avoid the conversation. Or, perhaps, come up with a lie that would appease Kjeld to drop the topic.

  Stenar shrugged. ‘We used to go to a lot of parties. Eiji is a beautiful dancer.’

  ‘Someone wrote 1978 on the back of the photo. Sara would have already been born,’ Kjeld insisted.

  Stenar looked down at his pizza. Then he took a sip of cola and set it down shakily beside his nature book. ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘There were quite a few people in the photo I didn’t recognise. Especially the one with Mum. Where was that Christmas party? The house didn’t look familiar.’

  Stenar stiffened. He set the unfinished slice of pizza back on his plate. ‘I’m not hungry anymore.’

  ‘You’ve barely eaten anything,’ Kjeld said.

  ‘You shouldn’t be digging around in my old things,’ Stenar snapped. His face contorted into one that Kjeld remembered clearly from his childhood. Anger and disappointment. ‘Can’t you learn to respect another person’s privacy? You have no business trifling through my things or your mother’s. It’s nothing that concerns you.’

  It was like a slap to the face. Just when Kjeld was beginning to think he had misjudged his father and his childhood, perhaps even this bizarre situation in the barn, he was reminded of how things had really been. Endless memories of yelling and blaming. A tight grip on his arm when he didn’t listen. The hurtful words. His mother’s quiet sobbing. Stenar may not have had any memory of it, but Kjeld still did. And when Stenar raised his voice, Kjeld was transported back to his childhood and all those altercations, fleeting in the moment but significant over time, that had led to his sudden departure from Varsund.

  It filled him with rage.
r />   ‘Eat your lunch,’ Kjeld said through gritted teeth.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Eat your goddamn lunch or I won’t make you any dinner.’

  Stenar glared at him. There it was. There was the man who never saw anything of worth in his son. The man that Kjeld always knew despised him although he could never figure out why.

  ‘Sara won’t stand for this,’ Stenar said.

  ‘Sara isn’t here!’ Kjeld yelled. ‘Sara is sick and tired of taking care of you and listening to you talk crazy about your goddamn birds and not even being able to remember what fuckin’ day it is. She’s not here. And as soon as this bullshit with the barn is settled, I won’t be here either.’

  Kjeld laughed out of hurt and frustration. He could feel the heat in his face rising. He clenched his fists together just to keep them from shaking and even though he knew he would regret every word he was about to say he didn’t stop himself. ‘You had a dead body in your yard! For Chrissakes, Dad. A dead body that you say you saw, but you can’t remember. It’s a fuckin’ joke. You’re a joke.’

  Stenar threw his lunch on the floor. The ceramic plate hit the edge of the coffee table and chipped, but didn’t completely break. The leftover pizza slices slid and landed cheese-side down on the small circular rug on the centre of the floor.

  ‘I’m not making you anything else,’ Kjeld said between agitated breaths.

  ‘I don’t want anything from you,’ Stenar said. His eyes were watering, but Kjeld thought the tears were more from the frustration of the heightened emotion in the room than any actual regret. ‘I’ve never wanted anything from you. I never wanted you.’

  Kjeld’s breath caught in his chest.

  It was something he’d known unconsciously for a long time. He’d always had the sense that his father preferred his sister. Kjeld rationalised it as a child. He told himself it was because Sara was older than him, smarter than him, more polite. He was the younger child and as much as he tried to be like his older sister, they really had nothing in common with each other. Kjeld was always getting into trouble. In school, outside of school, at home. And while he tried to relate to his father as a young boy and show interest in the things his father cared deeply about, Kjeld never seemed to be able to reach past Stenar’s distant exterior. It was as if his father had put up a wall between the two of them from birth and no matter how hard Kjeld tried he could never scale that wall, let alone break it down.

  Then his mother died and all hope of ever having a relationship with his father died with her.

  He needed a cigarette.

  Kjeld pushed his plate closer to Stenar’s side of the coffee table and stood up. ‘You can eat mine if you get hungry.’

  His hands were still trembling when he stepped out on the back porch and shook a cigarette from the pack into his hand. Out in the barn the ravens were rustling, cawing like they had when the stranger broke into their space and disturbed their ground. Except the door was closed this time, sealed off with cordon tape. They were alone. Alone and yet they still made noise.

  * * *

  ‘What did you do?’ Esme’s voice was quiet on the other end of the line.

  Kjeld sat at the desk in his old bedroom and exhaled a cloud of smoke out the open window. It was cold in the room, the icy coolness in the air signalling that it would snow again tonight, but old habits died hard. He’d never been allowed to smoke in the house. Not in his parents’ house. Not in Bengt’s house. Not even his own house, thanks to his insufferable landlord. And like measuring the kibble for the cat, the fear of the unseen consequence stuck with him.

  He dangled the cigarette out the crack in the window and watched as his smoky breath disappeared into the grey sky.

  ‘I said some things I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘How is that any different than normal?’

  Kjeld looked down at the tackle box photos, spread out over the desk. ‘These things were cruel.’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean it, Kjeld,’ Esme said. She was trying to be reassuring, but Kjeld could hear in her voice that she was more worried than anything else.

  ‘I did mean it though. I meant every word.’

  ‘You’ve been under a lot of stress lately. The Aubuchon case, this thing with your dad, Nils—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Nils,’ Kjeld said.

  ‘You’re going to have to talk about it eventually.’

  Kjeld picked up the photo with him, Sara, and his parents in it. His mother was holding him, one arm tucked up under him for support, the other wrapped partly around his chubby infant body. His legs were dangling like two pale sausages. He didn’t have any hair in the photo. His mother said he was the exact opposite of his sister when he was born. Sara came out easy with a thick head of hair. Kjeld, on the other hand, took almost twenty-seven hours of labour before he decided to enter the world, “bald as a baboon’s bottom” his mother used to say. It was one of her favourite stories to tell people. He supposed a story like that would have embarrassed most young boys, but Kjeld had always liked that story. Maybe because he could hear in his mother’s voice the unconditional love she had for that moment. For him. She’d always wanted a son, she told him.

  ‘He’s alive. He’s been arrested. When I get back to Gothenburg the chief will make me see a shrink just to make sure I’m fit for duty. I’ll talk then.’

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Kjeld tried to hear sounds in the background, but wherever Esme was it was quiet. Quiet aside from her slow steady breaths.

  ‘Tell me what’s going on, Kjeld.’

  ‘I don’t even know anymore,’ he said, turning his gaze away from the photographs to exhale another cloud of smoke out the window. ‘I’m beginning to think I’m the one going crazy. They haven’t identified the body yet, but—’

  Esme interrupted him before he could even finish taking a breath. ‘The body? You didn’t tell me anything about a body.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Esme. I’ve been in a haze.’ Kjeld held up the Christmas party photograph. His mother looked so happy. He’d never seen a smile like that on her before. It was so honest. Genuine. Free from the burdens of being a wife and a mother out in the middle of nowhere. ‘My dad was right. He did see something. We found a body in the barn. Someone broke in and tried to remove it. I chased them into the woods, but lost them.’

  The silence on Esme’s end repeated itself except this time Kjeld couldn’t even hear her breathing. She did that sometimes when she got frustrated with him. She just clenched her teeth and fumed.

  ‘I’m coming out there,’ she finally said.

  It didn’t surprise Kjeld that she would say that. He appreciated her concern for him, unnecessary as it often was. It was comforting to know that he at least had one person on his side. One of these days he would ask Esme why she cared so much. Why she always went out of her way to be protective of him, even when he was wrong. Why she was willing to occasionally bend the rules for his benefit. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t ask. Maybe he didn’t want to know. If he knew then he’d have to be responsible for that knowledge and any consequences that resulted from it.

  And Kjeld had already made it clear that he was a failure when it came to his responsibilities.

  ‘You don’t need to do that.’ Kjeld’s gaze went over the rest of the picture. There were at least ten people in total. With the exception of his mother they were all men. His father was missing from the photo. Was he the one with the camera? The man directly beside his mother was the same man from his father’s military photograph. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had one of those dangerous smiles that looked like it could charm just about anyone into doing anything. The man’s arm was wrapped around his mother’s shoulder. Not intimately, but in that familiar way of two people who’d known each other for many years.

  ‘The case has been postponed pending witness testimony. The defence is considering changing their plea. The chief has me on desk work anyway. Give me your address. I can
be there in two days.’

  Kjeld didn’t say anything. He barely even heard Esme over his own thoughts. His attention was focused on another figure in the back of the photograph. One he hadn’t noticed until that moment. He was younger in the picture and he had more hair than he did now, but Kjeld still recognised that short stature and those wide eyes.

  ‘I have to call you back, Esme.’

  ‘Don’t you dare hang up on me, Kjeld Nygaard.’

  Kjeld ended the call. Then he smudged his cigarette out on the inside of the window pane and raised the picture to the light to get a better look.

  What was Erik Norberg doing at a Christmas party with his mother?

  Chapter 21

  Gunnar printed out the preliminary forensic results from Dr Akerman and read them three times before he decided to make the call. He knew it was too early to say anything. Akerman would be handing off the cadaver to a more established team from Östersund and they would be able to do a full analysis, including a search for matching dental records. If they were lucky this would give them an almost one hundred per cent chance of uncovering the identity of the body or, at the very least, narrow the field of investigation. And while Gunnar didn’t know with any certainty whose body had been discovered in the Nygaard barn, he had his suspicions. Suspicions that were very nearly affirmed by Akerman’s note about an old leg injury. Suspicions he had to share with Roland Lindqvist.

  He just didn’t want to make the call. That’s why he read the report three times before he decided to pick up the phone. He wanted – no, he needed to be certain of the facts even if there weren’t many. And he needed the confidence that came with making such a call. Confidence that came with reading those results multiple times and committing the words to memory.

  Gunnar cleared his throat and dialled the number. After the fourth ring he thought it might go to voicemail and he felt a weight in his chest lift. Then the phone connected.

  ‘Yes?’ Roland’s voice was business direct, but Gunnar thought he could hear impatience in his tone.