Where Ravens Roost

by Karin Nordin

  ‘Do you recognise any of the others?’

  ‘Naturally that’s Peter there. And Erik, of course. Always trailing behind Peter and Roland like a lost puppy.’ She licked her lower lip. ‘This man is familiar. Yes, yes I remember him.’

  Kjeld leaned in to see which man she was pointing to.

  ‘Valle Dahl.’

  ‘Is that his name?’ Sylvia shrugged and handed the photograph back to Kjeld. ‘He had a grudge against Roland for something. Can’t remember what. They quarrelled a few years after we were married and then I didn’t see him again. I assume he quit or was let go. If you’re no longer at the Christmas parties then you aren’t part of the family anymore.’

  ‘Family?’ That struck Kjeld as an odd choice of word.

  ‘You know. The Norrmalm family. The company family.’

  Kjeld slipped the photograph back into his pocket. He was disappointed. Although the information about Roland and Valle having an argument was interesting, he’d been hoping for more about his parents. More about their relationship to the Lindqvists and how that may connect to the body buried in his father’s barn.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have a drink?’ She peered at him again with that invasive stare, but as before Kjeld had the feeling that it wasn’t him she was really seeing. Like she was imagining someone else.

  Then again, that might not have been her second drink of the day.

  ‘I ought to be going.’

  ‘Do you have a card?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘So my husband can get in touch.’ She took a sip of her drink.

  Kjeld retrieved a card from his wallet. Sylvia tucked it between her index and middle fingers as one might a cigarette.

  ‘I’ll tell him you stopped by. Can’t promise he’ll call back. He’s a busy man. Or, at least, that’s what he’s been telling me for the last thirty years.’ She winked, intentionally provocative. Definitely not her first drinks of the day. ‘But I might call.’

  Once outside, Kjeld took a deep breath. That house had been suffocating. Not just Sylvia Lindqvist’s haughty affluent damsel routine, but the entire feel of the house had been tight and claustrophobic. Like the house’s history was desperately pushing from within the walls, forever trapped between wooden planks and timeworn insulation.

  It was stifling. Almost worse than the town itself.

  The sun was nearly buried beneath the horizon, that slender layer of light blue quickly dispersing into the purple-black of night. Not yet four in the afternoon and it felt like ten. In Gothenburg it would still be light for at least another hour.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. A message from Esme.

  Did you get in touch with Roland? Checked out the local library. Found old news articles on Valle Dahl. Cave-in led to the death of three miners in 1983. Dahl was supervising. Drinking on the job. Gonna look online and see if I can find anything else. Call me.

  A few seconds later she sent another. Also tried to contact the municipality about getting a list of Mercedes sedans registered in the area. No-go without a warrant.

  Kjeld sent a quick reply. Spoke with Sylvia Lindqvist. Roland’s wife. Confirmed bad blood between Roland and Valle. Heading back to hospital.

  Kjeld glanced back at the house. Sylvia Lindqvist stood in the parlour window, a dark shadow against the light in the room, watching him. Her earlier words echoed in his thoughts. Valle Dahl had a grudge against Roland. They’d quarrelled. Kjeld had no doubt that this argument directly related to the event at the mine Esme had just texted him about. But did that relate back to Peter or his father? Had they been involved somehow as well? Was the animosity between Roland and Valle enough to lead to murder? And if so, why Peter?

  Why not his brother?

  Chapter 34

  The heart monitor beeped in regular intervals until the sound blurred in with the background and added to the white noise of the room. Kjeld sat beside the hospital bed, his father’s aviary atlas on Northern European birds on his lap, and tried to read the chapter on ravens. His eyes kept getting distracted from the words and after having read the first paragraph on their worldly distribution he settled on skimming over the pictures instead.

  Stenar rolled over onto his back, his eyes partially open, stuck together by the crusty discharge that came with sleep. He wiped his fingers over his face, spreading the hardened residue “eye goobers”, as Kjeld’s daughter would call them, onto his cheeks.

  ‘Kjeld?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad. It’s me,’ Kjeld said. He leaned over and scratched off the crust from Stenar’s face. Then he wiped it on the starched hospital bedsheet.

  ‘Where am I?’ Stenar’s voice was slow and lethargic like a man who still wasn’t fully awake.

  ‘You’re in the hospital.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad. I’m fine. You had a mild heart attack, but the doctors say you’re going to be all right. Nothing to worry about.’

  Stenar raised a hand to his chest and noticed the IV tube stuck in his arm. He pulled at it.

  Kjeld reached forward and took his father’s hand so he would leave the tube alone.

  ‘Just calm down. It’s going to be all right. I know you’re confused,’ Kjeld said. ‘Sara was here earlier. She said she’s going to bring her kids up tomorrow to visit.’

  ‘I don’t want to see them,’ Stenar grumbled.

  ‘I think they’d like to see you. They would have been here today, but the doctors thought you needed more rest.’

  ‘I don’t need any rest. I need to go home. I have to feed the birds. Hermod will be waiting for me.’

  Stenar tried to sit himself up, but the angle of the bed prevented him from getting more than a few inches off the mattress.

  Kjeld placed his hands on his father’s shoulders and gently eased him back down. Then he adjusted the bed so his father could sit up more naturally. ‘I’ve been feeding the birds. You don’t have to worry about them.’

  ‘You?’

  Kjeld understood his father’s disbelief. Even he found it hard to accept that he’d gone out into that barn alone to feed the ravens. The last time he’d done that was when he was a child and it hadn’t gone overly well. Kjeld ran a finger over the tip of his ear where a piece of cartilage was missing.

  ‘I can’t say they enjoy what I’ve been feeding them, but they’re not going to starve. They’ll be there when you return.’ Kjeld held up the aviary atlas and handed it to Stenar. ‘I’ve been reading up. I couldn’t remember what their usual diet was.’

  Stenar coughed. It was a thick gurgling sound. ‘They’re opportunistic omnivores.’

  ‘That means they’ll eat anything, right?’

  ‘Grains, berries, fruit. Meat, of course.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember meat,’ Kjeld said, pushing back a memory from his childhood.

  ‘Serendipity.’

  ‘What’s that now?’

  ‘It’s how they feed. Ravens will take what they can get.’ Stenar coughed again. His eyes almost glazed over as he recalled the one thing dementia could never take from him. His birds. ‘Most people think they’re just scavengers, but that’s not true. They’ll eat carrion if they have to, but they’ll hunt and they’ll steal. They’ll do anything to survive, but not at the expense of their family. They’ll share with other ravens if they find more than they can eat on their own.’

  Kjeld leaned back into the plastic hospital chair. It was uncomfortable like the ones in the reception area and it caused his lumbar region to ache. After an hour of sitting there it was beginning to throb. The back ache combined with his father’s sudden lucidity on a topic that Kjeld had never enjoyed made him restless and uneasy. ‘I don’t want to talk about the birds.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t. I don’t like the birds, Dad.’

  ‘You used to when you were a boy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that was a long time ago,’ Kjeld said.

  A nurse walked by and peeked her he
ad in. She scribbled something on the whiteboard near the door and then moved on to the next room.

  ‘What changed?’ Stenar asked.

  ‘You know what changed, Dad.’

  Stenar didn’t respond. Instead he turned the page in the atlas. Raven conservation and management.

  ‘You left me in that barn for hours,’ Kjeld finally said, teeth gritted together. ‘You left me in there while they attacked me. While they bit at me and made me bleed.’

  ‘That’s absurd. Ravens don’t bite.’

  ‘Fine. Pecked. Tore. Whatever. That’s not the point. Why didn’t you do anything? Why did you just leave me there? Why didn’t you help?’

  ‘I was …’ Stenar wavered. His eyes took on a glossy sheen as though he remembered something, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t form the words to explain himself.

  Kjeld suspected it was a little bit of both. He waved a hand in the air as though to brush the conversation away. ‘Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.’

  But Stenar didn’t look relieved to have the topic changed. He held on to the aviary atlas as though it were keeping him grounded. As if he letting go of the book might disrupt the laws of gravity and send him floating up to the ceiling, out an open window, and into the vast nothingness of space. And when Kjeld saw that look on his face, that pained teeth-clenching strain of a man who had a secret, he knew his father remembered. He remembered a lot more than he was saying. In that brief interlude between Kjeld’s childish outburst and those shiny images of scavenging birds, Stenar might have remembered everything.

  ‘When is my granddaughter coming?’ Stenar asked, shaky fingers struggling to turn the page. He licked his index finger in a feeble attempt to give himself more grip. It didn’t help.

  Kjeld reached over and turned the page for him. ‘I told you. Sara is going to try and bring the kids up tomorrow. The doctors were afraid you would overdo it today if you had too many visitors.’

  Stenar shook his head. ‘My other granddaughter. When is Tove coming to see me?’

  Kjeld winced. ‘She’s not coming, Dad.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she’s in Gothenburg.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s where she lives.’

  ‘But why isn’t she with you?’

  ‘Because she’s with her father, okay? She doesn’t live with me.’

  The words came out louder than Kjeld had expected and he was immediately embarrassed, concerned that one of the nurses would tell him to keep it down. Or worse, leave. He stood up and crossed the room to the small sink. The room was cool, but he felt hot around his neck. He ran his palms under the sink and splashed a handful of water on his face to ease the sudden heat as well as his anger. No, not anger. Frustration.

  He cupped his palms under the tap and took two quick gulps of water before turning it off. Then he walked over to the window, which gave a rather unceremonious view of the car park, sporadically illuminated by commercial LED lighting that took on a murky yellowish haze against the falling snow. An ambulance turned on its emergency lights and pulled soundlessly out of the garage along the side of the hospital and peeled out into the road. Kjeld pulled down the shade, blocking the outside world from view.

  ‘But you’re her father,’ Stenar said, closing the atlas.

  ‘Biology doesn’t mean anything,’ Kjeld replied and he believed it. He may have provided the seed necessary for his daughter’s birth, but that didn’t make him her father. Not her real father, anyway. That title was reserved for the person who took care of her. For the man who made her breakfast in the morning, drove her to dance class, read her stories before she went to bed. Not for Kjeld. Not for the man who popped in when it was convenient or when he felt guilty. Real fathers didn’t do that.

  ‘No, I suppose not, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re her father, too.’

  Kjeld pressed his fingers into his lower back. Then he twisted from side to side in a failed attempt to get a crack out of his spine. ‘Sure. If you say so.’

  ‘I never begrudged your choices, you know,’ Stenar said, fussing with the top blanket on the bed. ‘I never cared about any of that. Did you know that among birds it’s fairly common for—’

  ‘Stop,’ Kjeld interrupted. ‘Just don’t. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear any of it.’

  Stenar frowned. ‘Why did you never bring her to see me?’

  ‘Why? This is why. Because you and I don’t have a relationship, Dad. We haven’t since I was a boy. If Mum were alive then maybe things would be different. She was the only reason I kept in touch as long as I did, but after she died—’ Kjeld took a deep breath. ‘I’m tired of pretending like you and I ever had a good relationship. You’ve never seen me as anything more than a failure. And you know what? I don’t care anymore. I don’t even know why I came up here. I don’t know what I thought it would achieve. We can’t even have a normal conversation without fighting with each other. That’s why I never brought Tove up here to meet you. Because she’s got enough disappointment in her life with me. She doesn’t need it from her grandfather, too.’

  Stenar ran his eyes over the cover of the atlas. It was an old edition. Outdated by probably twenty years, but still in readable condition. All of his books were well cared for. His books, his research documents that he rarely looked at anymore, his collections. They were all timeworn, cherished, and intact. It was a pity the people in his life couldn’t be the same way.

  ‘She has the right to meet her grandparents,’ Stenar said. His voice was soft, uncertain. ‘Your mother would like to meet her. I know she would. Eiji has always been very fond of children.’

  Kjeld frowned. Anger suddenly replaced with surrender. He’d been fooled again. Fooled into believing that his father knew what he was saying. How much of the conversation had been a farce? How much was just his father’s mind picking up on details of the past and correlating them to the present? How much of it was just lies provoked by cognitive glitches?

  ‘I’m going to go out for a bit.’ Kjeld grabbed his jacket, still inappropriately insulated for the unpredictable northern weather, and made for the door.

  ‘Could you tell Sara I’d like herring and pancakes for dinner?’

  ‘Sure, Dad,’ Kjeld said as he was halfway out the door.

  He slipped his jacket on as he headed for the stairwell. He tried not to think about how bitter he was. How he wanted to get outside and scream at the night. He tried to push the thoughts of Tove from his mind and the awareness that his father, despite his addled brain, was right. Kjeld was her father even if he didn’t feel like it. Even if he didn’t act like it. But he couldn’t shake an even harsher realisation – that he’d become his own father. Absent, obsessed with his work, unable to reconcile the misjudgements of his past with the faults of his present.

  Except Stenar had one thing over Kjeld. Stenar, despite everything, never ruined things with Kjeld’s mother. They were together until the end. Twenty-three years of marriage. And it would have been longer had that slow-growing glial tumour not taken his mother before her time. Kjeld’s longest relationship had been little more than five years and it only lasted that long because a baby came into the picture. Twenty-three consistent years to Kjeld’s on-and-off five. In that respect his father was the better man. But that didn’t stop Kjeld from wishing that his mother had been the one to live.

  * * *

  The blazing glare of his headlights against the blackness of night was the only sign of life on the road outside of Varsund. Snow pelted the windshield in a wash of white and the wipers worked overtime to keep the glass clear. But even when the flakes were swept away Kjeld could barely see more than fifty metres in front of him.

  He drove without heed or intention other than to get as far away from Varsund as possible. No destination in mind. No thoughts other than those of anger, spite and regret.

  On the radio a local late-night talk programme was discussing the current police i
nvestigation. No names were mentioned, but Kjeld was certain all of Varsund knew about the body found on the Nygaard property. Word travelled fast in a small town. He changed the channel. The lilting sound of a Sami woman singing joik wailed through the speakers. It was a sad song, the a cappella undulations of her voice ebbing and flowing at unexpected intervals, evoking the disquieting improvisation of pain. There weren’t any lyrics. Just sounds. Aching tonal expressions that reflected Kjeld’s own turbulent state of mind.

  He drove until there wasn’t anywhere left in Varsund Kommun to drive. Right up to the Norwegian border where a medium-sized stone pillar off the side of the road announced the boundary of the two countries in carved letters, as if Kjeld couldn’t already feel the change in the pavement. Bumpy and pothole-filled on the Swedish end suddenly turning into a smooth black surface on the Norwegian side. A small but fitting reminder that even the great social democracies of Scandinavia had varying qualities of life. It made Kjeld wonder if his own life would have been any different had he been born twenty miles to the west.

  The snow came down harder. Unforgiving. And the singer’s voice turned mournful like the endless dark that stretched out on either side of the road.

  It took minutes before Kjeld realised he was crying. Not the kind of weeping that congested the nose and made it difficult to breathe, but an unceasing flood of tears. Soundless and without reprieve.

  Chapter 35

  Aside from the occasional beeping of the monitor beside his bed, the hospital room was eerily quiet. But not quiet like home. Stenar clutched the aviary atlas between his fingers. He wasn’t agitated, but he did feel restless. His arms were tired, heavy, and his thoughts were dulled by whatever medication they’d given him to relax. Why didn’t he feel relaxed? Why did he feel like he had to be active? To get up and do something?

  Except there wasn’t anything to do. Kjeld was taking care of the ravens, which meant there was nothing for Stenar. And even though that nagging voice in his head had difficulty accepting the idea that his son was minding the birds in his absence, he believed him. Kjeld had always been a stubborn boy. Reckless and unruly, not to mention obstinate, but he wasn’t a liar. Eiji used to say that it was impossible for Kjeld to lie. The few times he had lied as a child he gave himself away with an awkward glance or a pout or by breaking down in tears because he felt guilty for trying to deceive his parents. Lying wasn’t in his nature. If he said he was taking care of the birds then Stenar had no reason to believe that wasn’t the truth. Even if he knew Kjeld hated the ravens more than anything. Stenar himself being the only possible exception.