Echoes From the Dead (27 page)

Fingerprints?”

“There were no confirmed fingerprints of Nils Kant on record,”

said Lennart. “No dental records either. But he was identified because of an old injury to his left hand. He’d broken several fingers during a fight at the quarry in Stenvik. I’ve heard that myself from several people who lived in Stenvik. And the body in the coffin had exactly the same injury. So that decided it.”

There was silence in the kitchen for a few seconds.

“How did it feel?” asked Julia eventually. “Seeing Kant’s body, I mean.”

“I didn’t actually feel anything. It was the living Kant I wanted to meet. You can’t hold a dead body responsible for anything.”

Julia nodded pensively. There was something she’d been

thinking of asking Lennart to do for her.

“Have you ever been inside Kant’s house?” she asked. “Did

the police ever look for Jens in there?”

Lennart shook his head. “Why would we have looked in there?”

“I don’t know… it’s just that I’ve been trying to work out where Jens could have gone. Perhaps if he didn’t go down to the sea, and he didn’t go out onto the alvar, he might have gone into one of the neighbors’ houses. And Vera Kant’s house is only a couple of hundred yards from our cottage …”

“Why would he have gone in there?” said Lennart. “And why

would he have stayed?”

“I don’t know. If he’d gone in and fallen, or …” said Julia, thinking, Who knows, perhaps Vera Kant was just as crazy as her son.

Maybe you went in there, Jens, and Vera locked the door behind you.

“I know it’s a long shot… but would you take a look in there?

With me?”

“Take a look … You mean go inside Kant’s house?”

“Just a quick look, before I go back to Gothenburg tomorrow,”

Julia went on, her eyes holding his dubious gaze. She wanted to tell him about the light she’d seen inside the house, but decided against it in case she’d been imagining things. “I mean, it can’t be breaking and entering if the house is empty, can it?” she asked.

“And you must be able to go in anywhere you want to, as a police officer?”

Lennart shook his head. “There are very strict regulations. As the only policeman in a country posting, I’ve been able to improvise a little bit, but”

“But nobody’s going to see us,” Julia interrupted him. “Stenvik is practically empty, and the houses all around Vera Kant’s are summer cottages. Nobody lives nearby.”

Lennart looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go to this meeting,”

he said.

At least he hadn’t said no to her suggestion, thought Julia.

“And after that?”

“You mean you want to go in there tonight?”

Julia nodded.

“We’ll see,” said Lennart. “These meetings can drag on a bit. I can phone you if it finishes early. Have you got a cell phone?”

“Yes, ring me.”

There were a couple of pencils on the kitchen table, and Julia tore off a piece of the pizza box and wrote down her number.

Lennart tucked it in his breast pocket and stood up.

“Don’t do anything on your own,” he said, looking down at her.

“No, I won’t,” she promised.

“Vera Kant’s house looked as if it was about to fall down last time I went past.”

“I know. I won’t go in there on my own.”

But if Jens was there, all alone in the darknesswould he ever forgive her if she didn’t go and look for him?

The streets of Marnas were completely empty when they emerged from the station. The shops were dark, and only the kiosk over in the square was open. The damp air felt almost as if it were starting to freeze.

Lennart switched off the light and locked the station door behind them.

“So you’re going back to Stenvik now?” he asked.

Julia nodded. “But we might meet up later?”

“Maybe.”

Julia thought of something else.

“Lennart,” she said, “did you find out anything about the sandal?

The one Gerlof gave you?”

“No, unfortunately,” he said. “Not yet. I sent it to Linkoping, to the national forensic lab there, but I haven’t had a reply yet.

These things take time. I’ll give them a ring next week. But perhaps we shouldn’t hope for too much. I mean, so much time has passed, and we’re not even sure it’s the right”

“I know … It might not even be his shoe,” said Julia quickly.

Lennart nodded. “Take care, Julia.”

He held out his hand, which seemed like a rather impersonal

way to say goodbye after everything they’d revealed about themselves that night. But Julia wasn’t much of a one for hugging either, and she took his hand.

“Bye, then. Thanks for the pizza.”

“You’re welcome. I’ll phone you after the meeting.”

His gaze lingered on her face for a moment longer, in the way you can interpret however you like afterward. Then he turned away.

Julia crossed the street to her car. She drove slowly out of the center of Mamas, past the residential home, where Gerlof was perhaps sitting and drinking his evening coffee, past the dark church and the graveyard.

Was Lennart Henriksson married or a bachelor? Julia didn’t

know, and hadn’t dared to ask.

On the way down to Stenvik she pondered over whether she

had revealed too much about herself and her feelings of guilt.

But it had been good to talk and to get some perspective on this remarkable day in Borgholm, when Gerlof had shared his new theories: that the man who’d murdered Jens was lying there ill in a luxury villa in Borgholm, and that Nils Kant, who’d murdered District Superintendent Henriksson all those years ago, might be alive and working as a car salesman in the same town. It was difficult to know if her father was teasing her or not.

No. He wouldn’t joke about these things. But she didn’t feel that his ideas were moving them forward, somehow.

Might as well go home.

She decided to go back to Gothenburg the following day. First she would go to Ernst Adolfsson’s funeral, then she’d say goodbye to Gerlof and Astridand in the afternoon she’d drive home and try to live a better life than before. Drink less wine, swallow fewer pills. Get back to work as soon as possible. Stop clinging to the past and brooding over riddles that could never be solved. Live a normal life and try to look to the future. Then she could come back and visit Gerlofand perhaps Lennart tooin the spring.

The first houses in Stenvik appeared, and she slowed. At

Gerlof’s cottage she stopped the car, got out in the darkness and opened the gate, then drove in. She would spend this last night in her room at the cottage, she decided. She would sleep close to all the good and bad memories for one last time.

Inside, she switched on some lights. Then she left the cottage and went down to the boathouse to collect her toothbrush and everything else she’d left down thereincluding the bottles of wine she’d brought with her from Gothenburg, and never opened.

She was very aware of Vera Kant’s house in the darkness on

her left as she walked along the village road, but she didn’t turn her head. She merely glanced in passing at the lights in Astrid Linder’s house and in John Hagman’s to the south before she went down to the boathouse.

When she’d collected all her belongings, she caught sight of the old paraffin lamp hanging in the window; after a second’s hesitation, she unhooked it and took it up to the cottage with her. To be on the safe side.

On the way back she did look up at Vera’s house behind the

tall hawthorn hedges: big and black. There were no lights to be seen at the windows now.

“We never looked in there,” Lennart had said.

And why should the police have gone in? Vera Kant was

hardly suspected of having abducted Jens.

But if Nils Kant had hidden himself in there in secret, if Vera had been protecting him … If Jens had gone out onto the village road in the fog and down toward the sea, and stopped at Vera Kant’s gate and opened it and gone in …

No, it was impossible.

Julia kept walking. She went back inside the summer cottage, into the warmth, and switched on the lamps in every room. She took one of the bottles of wine out of her bag, and since this was her last evening on Oland, she opened it in the kitchen and filled a glass. When she’d drunk that, standing by the kitchen counter, she quickly refilled the glass. She took it into the living room.

The alcohol spread through her body.

Butjust a quick look. If Lennart’s meeting up in Marnas finished early, and if he phoned … she’d ask him again if he’d come down. Did he really not want to take a look inside the house where his father’s murderer had grown up? Just a quick look?

It was like a fever that Gerlof had infected her withJulia

couldn’t stop thinking about Nils Kant.

GOTHENBURG, AUGUST 1945

The first summer following the sixyearlong world war is

bright and warm and full of optimism for the future. In the city of Gothenburg, whole new residential areas are planned, and old ramshackle wooden houses are being torn down. Nils Kant sees several excavators working as he wanders through the streets of the city.

world peace Nils read on the creamcolored posters on the

walls in the city center at the beginning of August. A day or so later he buys a newspaper and reads the headline atom bomb new world sensation on the front page. Japan has surrendered unconditionally; the Americans’ new bomb brought the war to an end. It must have been quite some bomb to achieve such

success, according to what Nils has heard people saying on the trams, but when he sees a picture in the newspaper of the great mushroom cloud rising toward the sky, for some reason it makes him think about the bluebottle fly sitting on the dead soldier’s hand.

As far as Nils is concerned, there is no peacehe’s still a

wanted man.

It’s late afternoon. Nils is standing under a tree in a little park on the outskirts of the city, watching a young man in a suit approaching rapidly from one of the streets.

Nils himself is wearing a dark suit that he bought secondhand in a shop in Haga; it’s neither new nor noticeably shabby. On his head he wears a hat, pulled well down, and he has stopped shaving and cultivated a beard, a thick dark beard that he trims each morning in front of the mirror in his little rented room in Majorna.

As far as he knows, there is only one photograph of him in

existence, and it’s six or seven years old: a group photograph from school, with Nils standing in the back row, his eyes shadowed by his cap. It’s blurred and Nils doesn’t even know if the police have it, but he still wants to make sure he’s completely unrecognizable.

The

street below the park is above the docks, and is one of the most miserable in Gothenburg, more mud and dust than cobbles, and the unpainted wooden houses seem to be leaning on each other to avoid falling down. Nils Kant fits in here, with his beard and his secondhand suit and his slickedback hair.

He looks poor, but he doesn’t look like a criminal. At least he hopes not.

Much of his flight from Oland has been about fitting in, preferably not being seen, and definitely not drawing attention to himself.

Nils

found it difficult to leave the Baltic coast, where he could catch glimpses of his island through the fir trees. He hung around close to Uncle August’s sawmill, and it wasn’t until the third morning, when he saw a police car parked outside the office, that he set off toward the west.

Straight into the dense forest.

He was used to walking long distances from his time out on

the alvar, and good at finding the right direction with the help of the sun and his intuition.

During june he walked through the countryside, one of many

young men on their way to bigger towns and new opportunities after the war, and he didn’t attract much attention. Few people even saw him. He avoided the roads, moved through the forest, ate berries and drank water from the streams, and slept under a tree or in a barn if it was raining. Sometimes he found apples growing wild; sometimes he sneaked onto a farm and stole some eggs or a jug of milk.

His stock of Vera’s butter toffees had run out by the third day.

In Huskvarna he stopped for a few hours to have a look

at the town where his shotgun had been made, but he couldn’t find the gun factory, and didn’t dare ask anyone where it was.

Huskvarna felt almost as big as Kalmar, and the neighboring town of Jonkoping was even bigger. Even though his suit smelled of sweat and the forest, there were enough people out on the streets for him to walk around without anyone staring at him.

He even dared to eat in a restaurant and buy a new pair of

walking shoes. A good pair of shoes cost exactly thirtyone kronor from the reserve of money his mother had given him, topped up by his Uncle August. His cash was dwindling, but he still went into a little bar near the railway and ordered a big steak, a pilsener, and a small glass of Gronstedt’s cognac, which cost two kronor and sixtythree ore altogether. Expensive, but Nils felt he’d earned it after his long trek.

Fortified by his visit to the bar, he left Jonkoping behind him and kept moving west through the forests of Vastergotland for a few more weeks. Finally, he reached the coast.

Gothenburg is Sweden’s secondlargest city; Nils learned that at school. Gothenburg is enormous: block after block of tall buildings along the river Gota, hundreds of vehicles on the streets, and all kinds of people. At the beginning all the people around him almost made Nils panic, and for the first few days he kept getting lost. On the streets around the docks he has heard foreign languages, from seamen from England, Denmark, Norway, and

Holland. He has watched ships set sail for foreign ports, or slowly heave to at the quayside, laden with cargoes from other lands. For the first time in his life he has eaten a banana; it was almost black and slightly rotten, but it still tasted good. A banana from South America.

Everything on the docks is huge compared with the harbors