Blackwater (57 page)

He got up and opened the window.

‘Johan!’

He had to call a couple of times. Johan wasn’t all that wet when he came in.

‘Has it stopped raining?’

‘It’s drizzling.’

‘We must go now before it gets too dark.’

Johan’s watchful eyes moved from Birger to Björne, still sitting at the table.

‘We’ve talked about it all now. Annie probably came here to ask Björne about the moped. But he was in Frösön.’

‘Yes, I know he wasn’t home,’ said Johan. ‘Mia and I were here early that morning. But Annie must have gone up to Gudrun to ask after you. Didn’t she know you were in Frösön?’

‘Let’s go now,’ said Birger. His voice had turned thin. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any longer.’

Björne went over to the door and took his cap off the nail. He put it on, but didn’t take a jacket. He was wearing a sweatshirt that had once been dark blue, but was now so faded it was greyish over the shoulders and back. They heard him putting on his boots in the porch. Birger collected up his things and put them back in the rucksack.

‘Turn the lamp out.’

Johan blew it out and the room turned dark. He had acted too soon: they had forgotten where they had put their jackets and started groping for them on the sofa.

‘Hurry up, for Christ’s sake,’ said Birger. ‘To hell with the jackets.’

They stumbled over their boots and started pulling them on in the dark. They were in too much of a hurry and it all went wrong. Out in the porch, the door was open and swinging in the wind.

They shouted out his name, then consulted together in whispers. They ran to the cookhouse, then the privy, rushed back inside and lit the oil lamp, as if trying to attract a moth.

But he didn’t come. They shouted and shouted, but there was no reply from the darkness. He was out there. Birger didn’t dare guess what was in his mind, whether his thoughts were straight and cunning. Or whether there was nothing but darkness there. A hole.

But they had to get him in.

Johan and Birger sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, the lamp between them; the flame was burning too high and sooting up the glass. They didn’t stay long.

‘He’ll take the car and drive down,’ said Birger. Yet how could he say that with any certainty? He had to decide on something he could believe in.

‘We must go down.’

‘You don’t think he’ll come back here?’

‘No.’

But before they blew out the lamp and set off for the second time, Birger took the shotgun off the wall. He didn’t know, after all. Björne might well come back and finish the whole thing off with the gun.

They started walking along the path. The rain came in little squalls on the gusts of wind. Their eyes got used to the dark. It could have been worse. They were no longer calling out. Birger noticed that Johan was also trying to walk as quietly as possible.

Walking was more difficult when they got out into the Area, but it was also a little lighter there. The sky seemed to give off some kind of light. They could see the swift-moving clouds as if they were lit up from inside. They tried to walk so that they had the river within earshot. Birger noticed he was relieved once they were out in the Area. He had been scared inside the forest. Only an hour ago he had sat at the kitchen table with Björne and put everything right. He thought then that he knew what was going on in the man’s mind. He had even told him. As people had probably always told Björne what he was thinking and what he had done. They had ordered him to fell the Area. Twenty years later, it was wrong to clear-fell like that. They let him do the wrong thing and then they told him so.

Now he was out there, not giving a damn for the oil lamp or Nostradamus. He was himself in the darkness.

They reached the car and Johan started it and drove away before Birger had had time to close the door on his side. Johan drove fast, the chassis striking hard in the potholes, the headlights flickering on the spruces. When they got down to the Strömgren homestead, there was no sign of Björne’s car.

‘Wasn’t it parked a bit further in? Towards the house.’

They stared along the houses on the slope, but at first could distinguish nothing.

‘I’ll go out and have a look,’ said Johan.

He had taken a torch out of the glove compartment. Birger watched him go with some reluctance. His figure blurred, the torchlight a small yellow spot jumping and slowly growing fainter. Birger stared until the buildings down in the Strömgren homestead started flickering. Grey in grey, everything moving in the rain and gusts of wind.

‘Wait! I’m coming too,’ he shouted.

He caught up with Johan and they walked into the grass, now gone to seed and wetting their trousers right up to their thighs. The torchlight flickered over the uncut yellow grass. There were no car tracks. When they finally found them, they were far up by the road. The Saab had gone. He had gone.

‘We’ll have to drive on,’ said Birger. ‘Wish we’d bloody taken my car. I’ve got a mobile phone.’

Johan drove fast, the car bouncing in the potholes. It’s the only thing we can do now, Birger thought. Drive fast. We’ve done wrong. Me and my officiousness. Johan and his thoughtless question. Though he wanted to know. He had been asking himself, and now he knows. Björne knows, too.

The dogs were barking in the Brandberg dog run. They stopped and saw them hurtling against the wire netting. Torsten had a bright light on at the end of the barn and it shone on them. The dog eyes caught the light from the headlights and looked like leaping pairs of dots. A more yellowish light was on in the porchway, illuminating the dark hop leaves.

‘Drive on up,’ said Birger.

Lights were on almost all over the house and the dogs went on barking as the car drove up. They saw Torsten come out on the steps and heard him quietening the dogs as they drove up. There was no car in the yard.

Johan did not get out. He wondered if Torsten could see who he was. He was standing up there in the light on the steps, trying to make out whose car it was.

‘Has Björne been down?’ Birger called out and got out of the car.

Torsten didn’t reply until he had seen who was asking.

‘He’s probably up at Nirsbuan,’ he said.

‘Is Gudrun there?’

‘She’s at her evening class.’

‘Where?’

‘At the school.’

Before Birger shut the car door, he leant in towards Johan.

‘I’ll go in here and wait. You must go down and fetch Gudrun. Take her to Annie’s house and wait there with her.’

‘Are you going to phone the police now?’

‘I must,’ said Birger. ‘I promised I wouldn’t. But that was on condition he went with me.’

He himself thought it was odd to be standing there arguing the toss about his promise. Torsten was still standing in the strong light on the steps, trying to peer into the car.

‘Who’s that?’ he said.

Women were on their way out to their cars when he got down to the school. But the Audi was still there. Johan drove up and parked as close to the steps as he could get. He wound down the window and listened to them chatting as they came out two at a time. He wondered what course they were taking this winter. Leatherwork? Genealogy? He marvelled at her going there. At the way she struggled on, day by day.

Her everyday life was to be ruined now. No more chat. No more coffee, lamplight, security. In a few moments, as soon as she looked up from the handbag she was just zipping up. Then he realised that it would take a little while. She wouldn’t twig straight away.

‘So it’s you?’

She didn’t want to go with him at first.

‘You must,’ he said. ‘Just leave the car here.’

The other cars started up and he saw one or two people waving to her. She was annoyed with him.

‘Why on earth should I go up to Annie Raft’s house?’ she said. ‘What business have I there?’

But in the end she had got into his car and then she could do nothing about where they were going to go.

‘You didn’t really know her. You were never friends, were you?’

She said nothing, but she looked sideways at him. He drove straight up there. The grass was wet and his wheels probably left ugly marks. But he had to get her into the house.

‘We’re going to wait here,’ he said. ‘Birger Torbjörnsson is with Torsten. The police are on their way.’

She asked no questions, but went ahead of him after he had unlocked. She was so small, her dark head level with his chest. He locked the outside door behind them.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t switch on the light.’

He went round pulling down all the blinds and when he turned the light on, she was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, her face closed and guarded. Saddie had been sleeping in the bedroom and came lumbering out in all her deafness, sniffing at Gudrun’s slacks with no real interest, her tail vaguely wagging.

‘Take your coat off and go in and sit down,’ he said. ‘We may have to wait quite a while.’

She sat down at the kitchen table. He wondered what she was feeling as she looked around. He could see the kitchen through her eyes. The batik cloth on the kitchen table was flimsy. A yellowed rice-paper shade hung from the ceiling. At least Mia had cleared away everything that had hung from the hood above the stove – a pair of pigeon feet, bunches of dried herbs, a birch fungus – all covered with cobwebs and dust.

‘Birger Torbjörnsson and I did just what Annie did,’ he said. ‘We went to Nirsbuan to see Björne.’

It was cold indoors, but he didn’t want to light the stove. He reckoned he had to keep an eye on her all the time.

‘We’d been down to take a look at my moped he’d sunk.’

She didn’t reply. She had put aside her bag but not unzipped her jacket. She was sitting straight up on the chair, her hands on the cloth in front of her. Her face was pale, but he had thought that every time he had seen her in recent years. Perhaps that was because she dyed her hair. He wondered whether she would now let it go grey.

This is where it all began, he thought. This is where Annie Raft stood looking out through the window and spotted me. How did she recognise me? No one knows.

She had thought she was seeing her child in the arms of a madman. A boy who had been insane or drunk and had plunged a knife over and over again into two people enclosed in a tent.

He suddenly noticed that Gudrun was cold. They had sat in silence for so long, and she hadn’t shifted position, but she was shaking and her nose was running slightly. She kept sniffing, a nervous sound, the only sound in the house.

‘I’ll light the stove,’ he mumbled.

He fumbled with birch bark and matches. It was easier to talk to her when he wasn’t looking at her.

‘Björne has told Birger that he’s the one who did that down by the Lobber. He was to come down with us, but he ran away. We were afraid he might come and hurt you. Now that he knows it was you.’

He very carefully made a little pile of kindling before putting a match to the bark. A long time went by before she said anything. Then her voice was dry. Or hoarse.

‘Björne?’

‘Yes. Björne. Not me. You were wrong. Annie Raft was, too.’

For a long spell she sat quite still, then he saw she was beginning to tremble.

‘Hasn’t she got electricity in here?’

She almost screamed it, her voice breaking. She had risen to her feet and wrapped her arms round herself. She was so cold she was shaking.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

He rushed into the living room and switched on the lamps and the radiators. He found a blanket folded up on the bed.

‘Here, put this round you. Sit on the sofa. It’ll soon warm up. Birger’s got some whisky somewhere. Wait.’

She wrapped the blanket round her and sat looking out of it at Annie Raft’s room. The curtains were of unbleached cotton. A colourful p. er monster floated below the ceiling. Must have been something the schoolchildren had made. She looked across at the bed and he thought about what she had said: ‘Hasn’t she got electricity?’ As if Annie Raft were still alive. And she looked as if she had never seen the room before. Yet she had gone in here with the key she had taken from the shed.

‘Had Björne told you where she kept the key?’

She looked up and nodded. Absent-mindedly, he would have called it. But it couldn’t have been that.

‘And the gun? That it was behind the bed?’

‘Everyone knew that.’

She looked so small, sitting there in that shapeless, grey blanket. It hurt him to see her; it was painful. He had had no idea you could feel so much for another person, and for a moment he felt terror at having a child. If the child were injured – was this what he would feel like? Helpless and in pain.

His hands were uncertain as he poured whisky out for her and he spilt some on the coffee table. She gazed vacantly at the little pool, and suddenly tears came into Johan’s eyes and his throat contracted. Normally she would have got up to fetch a cloth. She was always quick to do that kind of thing. Now she just sat there looking. She looked at him strangely as he wept. Guarded and timid. Almost frightened.

In the end he managed to control his tears. Gudrun sniffed again, that small moist sound in her nose so neat and tidy beside his noisy snivelling. He had to go and fetch some kitchen roll and took the opportunity to put another log into the stove. I’ll do what I have to, anyhow, he thought. In the past, she too had had the shell of habit and everyday routine around her. She did what she was supposed to do. Took courses. Joined search parties and went to the funeral, for that matter. Now it was over.

‘What did Annie say when she came to you?’

‘She asked about you.’

‘About that Midsummer Eve?’

She nodded.

‘The moped,’ she said. ‘She had worked out that Björne had sunk it. I don’t know how.’

‘You didn’t know they’d got it up?’

She shook her head.

‘It had being lying at Tangen for several years. Annie must have figured out it might have been the same one. She probably knew from Birger that Björne was on the lake that Midsummer Eve.’

They heard a sound on the window and Johan jumped. It sounded like someone scraping on the pane. Then it was repeated more faintly and he recognised it – the rain hurtling in gusts against the pane.