Echoes From the Dead (18 page)

When he has made a broad hole in the ground, about a foot

deep, Nils has already hit the rock, but it’s deep enough. He takes the metal box and places it carefully in the bottom of the hole, then lifts several flat stones from the cairn and builds a little vault around it. He quickly fills in the hollow, packing the soil down as hard as he can with the palm of his hand.

He devotes most of his time to replacing the pieces of turf on top of the soilit’s important that everything looks the same as usual around the cairn.

It takes a long time to get the turf right, but in the end he gets up and looks at the spot from different directions. The ground looks untouched, he thinks, but his hands are dirty when he puts his rucksack back on.

He sets off toward home again.

He’ll tell his mother about the encounter with the Germans,

he decides, but he’ll tell her carefully so she doesn’t get worried.

He won’t tell her about the gemstones he’s hidden. Not yet, that Ś will be a surprise for her. Right now the spoils of war are hidden treasure that only he knows about.

He finally climbs over the stone wall and is back on the village road, but closer to the village than when he met Maja. He’s almost back in Stenvik.

Before he reaches home, two men in heavy boots come up >

onto the road from the sea and trudge past him. They are eel fishermen, carrying a freshly tarred hoop net between them, their hands blackened.

Neither of them says hello; both look away when they are

passing Nils. He doesn’t remember their names, but it doesn’t matter. Their rudeness doesn’t matter either.

Nils Kant is bigger than them; he’s bigger than the whole of Stenvik. Today he has proved that, during the battle out on the alvar.

into the silent garden, striding proudly up the stone path. The empty garden is flourishing and turning green. The grass scents the air.

Everything looks just as it did this morning when he left home to hunt for haresbut Nils himself is a new person it’s almost dusk. He opens the gate to his own house and goes inside.

Lennart Henriksson was standing next to Gerlof’s desk, weighing the plastic bag containing the little sandal in his hand, as if its weight might reveal if it was genuine or not. The fact that the shoe had turned up didn’t seem to please him at all.

“You need to tell the police about things like this, Gerlof,” he said.

“I know,” said Gerlof.

“Something like this needs to be reported straightaway.”

“Yes, yes,” said Gerlof quietly. “I just didn’t get round to it.

But what do you think?”

“About this?” The policeman looked at the sandal. “I don’t

know, I don’t jump to conclusions. What do you think?”

“I think we should have been looking in other places, not in the water,” said Gerlof.

“But we did, Gerlof,” said Lennart. “Don’t you remember?

We searched in the quarry and all the cottages and boathouses and sheds in the village, and I drove all over the alvar. We didn’t find a thing. But if Julia says it’s his shoe, then we have to take this seriously.”

“I think it’s Jens’s sandal,” said Julia behind him.

“And it came in the mail?” asked Lennart.

Gerlof nodded, with the unpleasant feeling that he was in the middle of an interrogation.

“When?”

“Last week. I phoned Julia and told her about it… That was partly why she came to visit.”

“Have you still got the envelope?” said Lennart.

“No,” said Gerlof quickly. “I threw it away … I’m a bit absentminded sometimes. But there was no letter with it, and no sender’s name, I do know that. I think it just said ‘Captain Gerlof Davidsson, Stenvik’ on the front, and it had been forwarded here.

But the envelope isn’t that important, is it?”

“There’s something called fingerprints,” said Lennart quietly, with a sigh. “There are strands of hair and a lot you can… Well, anyway, I’d like to take the sandal with me now. There could be traces on it too.”

“I’d really rather” Gerlof began, but Julia interrupted him

and asked, “Are you going to take it to a lab somewhere?”

“Yes,” said Lennart, “there’s a forensics lab in Linkoping. The national police lab. They examine this sort of thing there.”

Gerlof didn’t say anything.

“Fine, let them have a look at it,” said Julia.

“Do we get a receipt?” said Gerlof.

Julia looked annoyed, as if she were embarrassed by her father, but Lennart nodded with a tired smile.

“Of course, Gerlof,” he said. “I’ll write you out a receipt, then you can sue Borgholm police if the lab in Linkoping loses the shoe. But I shouldn’t worry if I were you.”

When the policeman left a few minutes later, Julia went out with him, but soon returned. Gerlof was still sitting at the desk, holding the receipt Lennart Henriksson had scrawled and staring gloomily out the window.

“Lennart said we shouldn’t tell anybody else about the sandal,”

said Julia.

“Oh, he did, did he.”

Gerlof kept on gazing out of the window. He did not look at

his daughter.

“What’s the matter?” asked Julia.

“You didn’t have to tell him about the sandal.”

“You said I should tell people.”

“Not the police. We can solve this ourselves.”

“Solve?” said Julia, her voice rising. “What do you mean, solve it ourselves? What on earth are you thinking? Do you think the person who took Jens away, if somebody did take him away … do you think that person’s going to turn up here and ask to see the sandal? Is that what you really think? That he’s just going to turn up here, after all these years, and tell you what he did?”

Gerlof didn’t reply; he was still staring out of the window with his back to her, and that just made Julia even more agitated.

“What did you actually do that day?” she went on.

“You know what I did,” said Gerlof quietly.

“Oh yes, I know,” said Julia. “Mum was tired and your grandchild needed looking after… and you went down to the sea to sort your nets out. Because you were going fishing.”

Gerlof nodded. “Then the fog came,” he said.

“Yes, a real peasouper … but did you go home then?”

Gerlof shook his head.

“You stayed with your nets,” said Julia, “because it was much more enjoyable being alone down by the sea than looking after a small child. Wasn’t it?”

“I was listening all the time I was down there,” said Gerlof without looking at her. “There wasn’t a sound. I would have heard Jens if he’d”

“That’s not what this is about!” Julia broke in. “It’s about the fact that you were always somewhere else when you should have been at home. That everything was on your terms … That’s always the way it was, all the time.”

Gerlof didn’t reply. He thought the sky had grown darker outside the window. Was the twilight coming already? He really was listening to what his daughter was saying, but he couldn’t come up with a good answer.

“I suppose I was a bad father,” he said at last. “I was often away, I needed to be away. But if I could have done anything for Jens that day … If the whole day could have been changed …”

He stopped speaking, struggling with his voice.

There was an unbearable silence in the room.

“I know, Dad,” said Julia, eventually. “How can I point the

finger at you? I wasn’t even on Oland that day. I went into Kalmar and I could see the fog drifting in under the bridge as I drove across the sound.” She sighed. “How often do you think I’ve regretted leaving Jens that morning? I didn’t even say goodbye to him.”

Gerlof breathed in, then out again. He finally turned and

looked at her.

“On Tuesday, the day before Ernst’s funeral, I’ll take you to the person who sent me the sandal,” he said.

Julia didn’t speak.

“I know who it was,” said Gerlof.

“Are you a hundred percent certain?”

“Ninetyfive.”

“Where does he live? Here in Marnas?”

“No.”

“In Stenvik?”

Gerlof shook his head. “Down in Borgholm,” he said.

Julia was quiet for a while, as if she thought this might be some kind of trick.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll take my car.”

She bent to pick her coat up from the bed.

“What are you going to do now?” Gerlof asked.

“Don’t know… I’ll probably go down to Stenvik and rake

up some leaves around the cottage, or something. Now that the electricity and the water are on I can cook in the cottage, but I’ll probably keep sleeping in the boathouse. I sleep well there.”

“Good. But stay in close touch with John and Astrid,” said

Gerlof. “You need to stick together.”

“Of course.” Julia put her coat on. “I was over in the churchyard, by the way. Lit a candle on Mum’s grave.”

“Good … That means it’ll burn for five days, right up to the weekend. The church council looks after the graves. I don’t get there very often, unfortunately…” Gerlof coughed. “Had they dug a grave for Ernst yet?”

“Not that I noticed.” She added, “But I did find Nils Kant’s grave by the wall. That was what you wanted me to see, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Before I saw the grave, I was thinking Nils Kant should have been a suspect,” said Julia, “but now I understand why nobody mentioned him.”

Gerlof contemplated whether to say somethingperhaps he

should point out that the best cover for a murderer has to be to play deadbut he didn’t speak.

“There were roses on the grave,” said Julia.

“Fresh roses?”

“Not really,” said Julia. “From last summer, maybe. And another thing…”

She pushed her hand into her coat pocket and took out the

little envelope that had been with the roses. It had dried out now, and she passed it over to Gerlof.

“Maybe we shouldn’t open it,” she said. “I mean, it’s private and not…”

But Gerlof quickly slit open the envelope, slid out the little piece of white paper, and read the contents.

” ‘We shall all stand before the judgment seat of God.’ ” He looked at Julia. “That’s all it says … it’s a quote from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans. Can I keep this?”

Julia nodded. “Are there usually flowers and notes on Kant’s grave?” she asked.

“Not often,” said Gerlof, placing the envelope in one of the desk drawers. “But it’s happened a few times over the years … flowers, at least. I’ve seen bunches of roses there.”

“So Nils Kant still has friends alive?”

“Yes … at least somebody wants to remember him, for some

reason,” Gerlof said, then added, “People who have a bad reputation sometimes attract admirers, after all.”

There was another silence.

“Okay. I’m off to Stenvik, then,” said Julia, buttoning her

coat.

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“I might go to Langvik. We’ll see.”

When his daughter had left the room, Gerlof’s shoulders

slumped with weariness. He raised his hands and saw that his fingers were shaking. It had been an exhausting afternoon, but he still had one more important thing to do today.

“Torsten, did you bury Nils Kant?” asked Gerlof a few hours

later.

He and the old man were sitting at separate tables, all alone in the activity room in the cellar. After dinner Gerlof had taken the elevator down to the activity room and sat there for over an hour waiting for another resident, an old woman from the first floor, to finish her interminable weaving.

His aim was to be alone with Torsten Axelsson, who had

worked in Marnas churchyard from the war years up to the mid1970s.

While Gerlof was waiting, the autumn darkness had thickened

outside the narrow cellar windows. It was evening.

Before asking his key questions, Gerlof had sat there chatting to Axelsson about the impending funeral, mainly to keep him in the room. Axelsson too suffered from rheumatism, but his mind was razor sharp and he was usually an entertaining companion.

He didn’t seem to have the same nostalgic yearning for his work as a gravedigger as Gerlof had for his years at sea, but he’d willingly stayed and chatted about old times.

Gerlof was sitting at a table covered with bits of wood, glue, tools, and emery cloth. He was working on a model of the ketch Packet, Borgholm’s last sailing ship, which had become a pleasure boat in Stockholm in the sixties. The hull was finished, but he needed to do some more work on the rigging, and of course it wouldn’t be completely finished until it was in the bottle, and he could raise the masts and fasten off the final ropes. It all took time.

Gerlof carefully filed a small groove in the top of a mast as he waited for a reply from the retired gravedigger. Axelsson was bent over a table covered with thousands of jigsaw pieces. He was halfway through a huge picture of Monet’s water lilies.

He fitted a piece into the black lily pond, then looked up.

“Kant?” he said.

“Nils Kant, yes,” said Gerlof. “The grave is still a bit isolated, over by the west wall. And that made me think about his funeral.

I wasn’t living up here at the time …”

Axelsson nodded, picked up a piece of the jigsaw, and pondered.

“Yes, I dug the grave and carried the coffin, along with my

colleagues from the churchyard … Nobody rushed to volunteer as a bearer for that particular duty.”

“Weren’t there any mourners?”

“His mother was there. She was there all the time. I’d hardly ever seen her before, but she was all skin and bone, dressed in a coalblack coat,” said Axelsson. “But as for calling her a mournerwell, I don’t know about that. She looked a bit too pleased to me.”

“Pleased?”

“Yes … Of course, I didn’t see her inside the church,” said Axelsson. “But I remember glancing at her when we were lowering the coffin into the ground. Vera was standing near the grave, watching the coffin disappear, and I could see that she was smiling beneath her veil. As if she was really pleased with the funeral.”

Gerlof nodded. “And she was the only one at the burial?

Nobody else?”

Axelsson shook his head. “There were several people there,