Blackwater (11 page)

Mia sat in silence in the kitchen on an iron bed with a flock mattress and when Annie saw her face she thought: What have I done?

‘There are people around in the area,’ Åke Vemdal said. ‘We must get those two out.’

He had spread the map out on Oriana’s kitchen table and told Birger he could go down to the camping site if he liked. More police had come from Östersund. The forensic squad, too. So he needn’t stay.

‘We must cover all movements in the area. Check lists of those leaving it.’

He had begun to use the same language as the technical chief, whose squad was now installed in Henry’s barn. The man kept holding up a finger and saying, ‘Yes, sir! Eyes right!’ whenever he wanted to make a correction.

‘Barbro’s still there,’ said Birger.

He was not allowed to go and look for her. The police had taken over. He had asked to see the lists, but Vemdal said not many people had come out and they had been noted down. Three. They had been questioned when Birger and he had been down by the river with Annie Raft. None of them had been anywhere near the place where the tent was, or the ford.

Birger’s memory was silent, as if a lid had closed over his ears. A wide stony riverbed glazed by thin water, mobile, silent.

Åke thought he knew who the dead girl was. They had found a passport made out to Sabine Vestdijk, thirty-three years old, studying. Or student. Åke was not certain of the exact meaning of
étudiante.
The red Renault parked up at the homestead had an NL badge with the owner’s name on it and the name was the same as that in the passport. The girl’s appearance matched the passport photograph. There was a tent in the car.

Two things were unclear; the man’s identity and the tent. Why had they had two tents in such a small car?

Birger was hardly listening. He was thinking that Barbro must still be out there somewhere. The other demonstrators had come shambling back with their rucksacks an hour or two before the church service. They had come from Byvången in a minibus which had stopped at a timber-loading bay about a kilometre from the Strömgren homestead. Most of them were teachers. A couple of elderly women, silver-haired and in old-fashioned outdoor clothes. He recognised them from the Peace and Freedom movement and from Amnesty. Barbro used to hold their group meetings at home.

The commune from Röbäck came in an old Volkswagen bus. They brought with them the Starhill people, who had stayed overnight with them so that the children would not have to walk the long way down from Starhill in the morning. They were wearing Inca caps, patterned jerseys, pointed Lapp shoes and had leather backpacks. They had left their placards on the bus after they had been told there would be no service at Björnstubacken. But the police brought with them two placards they had found up there.

Birger had seen a great many variations of the texts on Barbro’s drawing board. Midsummer walk with us. See with your own eyes. The authorities are lying about the uranium. The council is not telling the truth. Come and see it on Bear Mountain.

He had asked what they would see. Stakes, she had replied. You could hardly walk on Bear Mountain at Midsummer, for the snow had not yet melted. But she had explained that a great many people would come to the open-air service. That was the only opportunity they had. Some people would go on up with them and the others would at least see the placards.

The two men Vemdal had sent up the path had seen neither the doctor’s wife nor any tent. The demonstrators didn’t know where she was. They hadn’t even known she was coming up the evening before. Birger had thought the whole group was going.

I hardly asked her anything, he thought. And why don’t the other demonstrators know anything? He reckoned they had answered evasively when he questioned them, or else they were lying outright.

The hours were long, a long, dazzlingly sunny day, full of voices and the tramp of feet, starting cars and barking dogs. The feeling would not leave him. Fear. Guilty conscience. Whatever it was. Whatever was inside him was hurting, anyhow, a fierce and lasting pain. A kind of force. He wished he could scream in the way that pale woman in the denim skirt had. For there were people left in the area. Barbro Torstensson and Dan Ulander. Perhaps others they knew nothing about.

‘Who is Dan Ulander?’ he asked Vemdal.

‘One of the demonstrators.’

Vemdal was short of staff. He was considering the local riflemen, in case there was a maniac on the loose out there. Birger watched him bending over the outspread maps. They wanted to turn it into a military operation in the area.

A maniac. That too was a name for a kind of force. You had to have names for things. There was something they called the Area.

What area? Where did it end? On the map it looked like lichen in faint shades of green, yellow and brown. But there were mountain peaks and marshlands. Right up to Multhögen. There was a road there, but miles upon miles of roadless countryside in between. Heathland, swamps, peaks.

Some of the demonstrators were still outside. Inquisitive people had come up from the village, several carloads. One or two had seen the Dutch car outside Fiskebuan on Midsummer Eve.

‘We’ll cordon it off,’ said Åke Vemdal. ‘Close it off down in the village and make sure all this lot go away.’

They were called inquisitive. But why had they really come? When Birger was a boy, it had been wartime and everything had been bad. Even the toilet paper had been thin. Thin and shiny, often tearing. He had never been able to resist smelling his finger when that happened. They were sticky and smelt bad. But you wanted to feel all the same.

It was wrong to say these people were inquisitive. They wanted to feel. Henry and Oriana’s children’s faces could be seen in the top windows. They were inquisitive. Henry had lugged the television up there and pulled the antenna in through the window. But they preferred to see what was going on down in the yard. And the dogs barked all day long, barking themselves hoarse.

Lill-Ola Lennartsson came up in a police car. He was wearing a brown plush tracksuit. Lill-Ola had been a Swedish champion athlete when he still lived in Byvången. His clothing looked implausible until Birger remembered Ola sold all kinds of leisure wear in his shop, playsuits and slippers made of reindeer and rabbit skin. The tracksuit was tight round his thin buttocks, revealing that this former long-distance runner was beginning to lose his arse.

Åke wanted Birger to go with him into Henry’s barn, but Lill-Ola was looking very shaky. That was when Birger realised that it had been wrong to make the woman in the denim skirt go down to the river to view the corpses. That had been cruel and done in a hurry. It could have waited. I ought to take a look at her, he thought.

The legs of the tracksuit were wide at the bottom and flapped round Ola’s ankles as he went up the barn steps, his shoulders hunched up and his head thrust forward. He stood in the same way as he looked down at the bodies. They looked older now. Greyer. One was on the back of the pick-up. Ola nodded.

‘That was the girl. She came into the shop.’

They showed him the man’s corpse lying on a police stretcher on the floor.

‘Never seen him before.’

‘Was she on her own in the shop?’

Yes, she had been alone and she had said nothing about a man. Vemdal asked him to look carefully at the man. He coped well with it and didn’t hurry. Birger looked away. Clothes and objects they had found in the collapsed tent were lying on an old baking table in sealed plastic bags. He could see the beads that had been among the feathers. They had found the thread and put it into the same bag. It was white, but a few centimetres had been stained brown by the blood. Small objects that weren’t at all obvious in a tent: beads, a hairslide, a notebook with signs of the zodiac on the cover: Sagittarius. They had no meaning now, nothing immediately obvious, anyway.

A faint twittering was coming from the table. He went closer and saw it was a small cage with a brown rat inside it. He retched. The rat twirled round once, then sat dead still, looking out with black eyes like glass beads.

Ola had finished. He was quite certain, he said. He recognised the girl, but not the man. He had never seen him before. Now he wanted to leave. But he had coped well. When they got out on the steps, he said the girl had bought some fishing gear from him – lines and a couple of small spinners. And she had borrowed his tent.

‘Well, hired,’ he added. ‘She had a damned great camping tent with her. I happened to see it when we went out to the car to look at her rods to see what size lines she wanted. They couldn’t have put up a tent like that by the Lobber.’

‘Why was she going there in particular?’

He didn’t know. He had sold her a fishing licence and given her the usual map.

‘Did she know the place?’

‘I don’t know. She spoke nothing but English.’

He had to go back into the barn to look at the tent and see if he was sure he recognised it.

‘It’s easy to recognise,’ he said. ‘It’s blue with a black and white sticker on it. A penguin. That’s the brand mark.’

But Åke wanted him to look. He lumbered back in, grey hairs and dandruff on the shoulders of his plush tracksuit. Birger had a feeling he had been surprised in bed or something equally private. He had never seen him in anything but very modern sports outfits before.

When Ola saw the tent, he let out a cry and took a step or two back. He clearly hadn’t known they had been stabbed to death as they lay inside the tent. He turned away to avoid having to look at the slashed canvas and brown bloodstains.

Then he collapsed. It was so unexpected, they hadn’t time to catch him. He lay in a small brown heap on the floor. His longish hair had been brushed forward and when it was disturbed, they could see he was going bald. As they carried him out, Birger spotted the Strömgren children in the top window.

‘You must get everything out of here,’ he said. ‘It can’t go on like this. You’re scaring the kids.’

But they took no notice of him. What a bloody mess, he thought. And where was Barbro?

There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Lill-Ola Lennartsson’s heart. It was just an ordinary faint.

‘But I’ll examine him properly,’ he said.

‘We’ll drive him back home. Come on down with us.’

Birger had no wish to, but it was hard to refuse. As he drove behind the police car down towards the village, he was thinking they were carrying out Barbro, that they had had her hidden behind the barn down by the river. Sheer madness. But his heart was thumping. Irregularly, as well.

When he took his doctor’s bag out of the boot, his eye fell on the salmon trout he and Åke had caught in the Blackreed. Maybe they aren’t too far gone, he thought. If they’re all right we’ll have them tonight. There are lemons in the fridge.

It was an incantation. Barbro and he and Tomas would have fried salmon trout for dinner. Everything would be just as usual. For a while, anyhow. Then he had to try to think about what all this meant. Why had she gone off earlier than the other demonstrators? And why hadn’t he bothered? Not even asked.

At the Lennartssons’, he got the same feeling he so often had when he was called out, that he was looking into something far too private, something they ought not to have to show. It often surprised him how badly people’s external appearances corresponded with what their homes looked and smelt like. They equipped themselves in the chain stores in town and the cut-price store in Byvången and looked like everyone else. But inside their own homes they had a whole lot of peculiarities. Big safes though they were dirt poor. Stacks of cardboard boxes. Tons of old home-made furniture. Lill-Ola’s long, narrow bedroom held only one picture that Birger reckoned had been bought, a picture of a naked girl. The rest, and there were many, were knotted in wool like rugs. He recognised them from other places. They all had motifs from nature: deer by the water, eagles in flight, mountain landscapes in the sun. Presumably he had made them himself together with his wife. A great many men worked on such things in front of the television at night.

Naked ladies, deer and waterfalls were nothing peculiar, nor was sleeping alone. But he wished he hadn’t had to go into this room. It was furry and intimate like a kangaroo’s pouch.

Anyhow, there was nothing wrong with Lill-Ola’s heart. But he had had a shock, a powerful mental shock. He had stretched out on the bed and he was cold. Birger told his wife to fetch a blanket and make a hot drink for him.

‘Not coffee.’

He gave him a tranquilliser tablet to wash down with water and left six more for him in a small white envelope.

‘Take one when you need it today and tomorrow. But no more than three a day.’

Ola’s wife stood beside him, watching. She looked inquisitive. Or whatever you call it. As if she’d seen a road accident. He had to ask her again to go and get a blanket. Then she started heating up some milk in the kitchen.

As he was leaving, he asked if he could put his fish in their freezer so that they didn’t go off. She nodded. Hitherto she had said nothing at all. He had a feeling she wouldn’t remember what he looked like once he had left the house.

He fetched the parcel of fish from the car and went back to put it in the freezer in the back kitchen. It was far on in the year and the freezer was half-empty. But packets and plastic boxes were still neatly if somewhat sparsely stacked in it. She kept berries on the left side, wild mushrooms and fish on the right, and meat evidently at the bottom. There were two bulky paper parcels labelled
capercaillie, unplucked
. When he took an ice-cream carton filled with cloudberry preserve to put on top of the fish so that they would freeze more quickly, he knocked down a pile of boxes of berries. The freezer rattled and she looked out from the kitchen. Lill-Ola appeared the next moment.

‘What the hell are you up to?’

His voice was a shrill cry, the same as when he had seen the tent in the lodge at Strömgrens’.