Echoes From the Dead (29 page)

the outside, so they weren’t still inside the house. Unless of course there was another way out.

Julia walked across the threshold of Vera Kant’s house.

It felt even colder inside than outside, and as dark and still as in a cave. She couldn’t see a thing, and then she remembered that she was carrying the paraffin lamp.

She took a box of matches out of her pocket, struck one, and lifted the glass. The broad wick began to burn with a small, flickering flame, which grew bigger and brighter when Julia lowered the glass over it. There was enough light to illuminate the empty veranda with a thin gray glow, even though the darkness remained, in the form of shadows creeping around the corners of the room.

She raised the lamp and made her way through the veranda

toward the inside door. It was closed but not locked, and Julia opened it.

Vera’s hallway. It was narrow and long, with flowery wallpaper faded by the sun, and it was just as empty as the veranda. Julia wouldn’t have been surprised to find a hall stand with Vera’s black coats still hanging there, or a row of narrow ladies’ shoes, but the floor was completely bare. Along the walls and from the ceiling hung white curtains made of cobwebs.

There were four doors leading off the hallway. They were all closed.

She reached out for the nearest door along the long wall, and opened it.

The room inside was small, only a few square yards, and completely empty except for some glass jars on the floor, containing something moldy. A storeroom for cleaning materials.

She closed the door carefully, and opened the next one.

This was Vera’s kitchen, and it was huge.

Julia could see a brown linoleum floor that changed to polished stone in the center of the room, where an enormous black iron stove stood resplendent against the wall. Straight ahead were two big windows looking out from the back of the house, and Julia knew that the summer cottage lay behind the trees, just a few hundred yards away. It made her feel less alone, and gave her the courage to step into the room.

To the left along the wall, a narrow, steep wooden staircase with a rickety banister led to the upper floor. A faint smell of rotting vegetation hung in the dark, motionless air. Dust and dead flies lay in drifts on the floor.

This is where Vera Kant must have stood in the evenings,

bending over her steaming pots and pans. This was the room Nils Kant had left with his shotgun hidden in his rucksack one beautiful summer’s day after the war.

I’ll be back, Mother.

Had he promised her that?

There was a halfopen door under the stairs, and when Julia

took a couple of silent steps toward it, she saw a steep drop on the other side.

It was the staircase down into the cellar. The cellar would be a good place to start if she was looking for …

A dead body, hidden away. But she wasn’t. Was she?

Just a quick look.

Julia could feel the weight of her cell phone in her pocket.

Lennart’s number was in the memory, and she could ring him any time she wanted tosome small consolation.

She leaned in through the doorway under the stairs, holding

the paraffin lamp up in front of her.

The staircase leading underground was made of roughhewn

planks of wood. At the foot of the steps below was a hardpacked earth floor, black and moist and glistening in the glow of the lamp.

Butsomething was wrong.

Julia went down a couple of steps so that she could see more clearly. She bent her head to avoid catching it on the sloping ceiling, and stared downward.

The earth floor in the cellar had been dug up.

The patch at the bottom of the steps had been left untouched, but somebody had made little holes all over the place along the stone walls. And there was a spade leaning against the staircase, as if the person who’d been digging had just gone for a short break.

Patches of dried mud from a pair of boots led up the cellar

stairs toward her.

Earth was piled up in a little heap along the wall, and a couple of full buckets stood a little further away. Somebody was in the process of methodically digging up the entire cellar.

What was going on?

Julia moved backwards up the stairs. She moved as noiselessly as she could until she was back in the kitchen, holding her breath while she listened, her heart thudding in her ears.

Everything was still silent.

She could phone Lennart nowbut she didn’t want to be

heard, or seen.

She reached carefully into her pocket and took out her cell

phone. She started to walk across the kitchen taking small steps, switching on the cell phone and retrieving Lennart’s number from the memory as she did so. Then she let her thumb rest on the call button.

If something happened, if…

She tried to convince herself that her son was with her in this dark house, even if he was dead, and that he wanted her to look for him. She kept on walking.

Piles of fluff swirled noiselessly away from her shoes and scuttled along the walls to hide as she walked across the linoleum in the kitchen, onto the stone floor and past the iron stove.

Then she went up the first flight of stairs to the upper floor, her heart pounding.

The wood creaked beneath her feet, but only faintly. Julia allowed her right hand, clutching the cell phone, to rest lightly on the banister so that she could feel the solid security of the wall, and continued moving upward, where the light of the paraffin lamp didn’t reach. When another stair creaked, she placed her foot on the one above instead.

It was utterly dark above her.

Halfway up the staircase she stopped, breathed out, and listened once more. Then she set off again.

The banister ended by an opening without a door, and Julia

stepped cautiously onto the wooden floor of the upper story.

She was in a corridor, just as narrow as the hallway downstairs, and with a closed door at either end.

Fear and indecisiveness made her stop once more.

Right or left? If she stood still for long, it would be impossible to move, so she chose the left side of the corridor. It seemed less dark, somehow. She kept going, moving through yet more balls of fluff and the black corpses of flies.

Paler rectangles were visible on the wallsthe traces of pictures that had once hung there.

She had reached the end of the corridor. She pushed open the door, holding the lamp in front of her.

The room inside was small and unfurnished, like the rest. But it wasn’t completely empty. Julia stepped inside and stopped when she saw a dark figure lying by the wall next to the room’s only window.

No. It wasn’t a person lying there, she could see that now. It was a sleeping bag, unrolled like a black cocoon. It was lying below a collection of newspaper cuttings stuck up on the wall.

Julia took another step forward. She saw that the cuttings were old and yellow, attached to the wallpaper with pins.

GERMAN SOLDIERS FOUND DEADEXECUTED WITH SHOTGUN was

printed in black on one of them. On another:

POLICE KILLER HUNTED NATIONWIDE

And on a third, slightly less yellow:

In the slightly blurry picture beside the headline, a little boy smiled his carefree smile at her, and Julia was seized by the same feeling of despair that overwhelmed her every time she saw her son. There were more cuttings, but she didn’t stay to read them.

She quickly looked away and backed out of the room.

Then she stopped. In the light of the paraffin lamp she saw

that the door at the other end of the corridor was now open.

It had been closed before, she was certain of it, but now the threshold leading into the darkness of the room beyond was visible.

This room wasn’t just dark, it was pitchblack.

And it wasn’t empty. Julia could feel that there was someone waiting in there. An old woman. She was sitting on a chair by the window.

This was her bedroom. A cold bedroom, full of loneliness and waiting and bitterness.

The woman was waiting for company, but Julia stood there in

the corridor, rooted to the spot.

She heard a scraping noise from within the darkness. The

woman had got up. She was moving slowly toward the door.

Dragging footsteps were moving closer …

Julia had to get away. She had to get back downstairs.

Julia ran.

Onto the landing and then down.

She thought she could hear footsteps above her, and she felt the old woman’s cold presence behind her.

He deceived me!

Julia felt the hatred like a hard push in her back. She ran

blindly forward in the darkness, missed the next step, and lost her balance, three or four yards above the stone floor.

Her arms flailed in the air, both the cell phone and the paraffin lamp went flying.

The lamp and the cell phone smashed onto the kitchen floor

down below. Flames shot up from the paraffinand Julia knew that she too would very soon land on the stone floor down below.

She gritted her teeth against the pain.

The day that Ernst Adolfsson was to be buried, Gerlof woke

up in the cold, gray dawn feeling as if he’d been hurled onto the floor from a great height. The pain in his arms and knees was agonizing.

It was stress: Sjogren’s syndrome had come calling againit

was such a bloody nuisance. He was going to need a wheelchair to be able to get to the church at all.

The rheumatic condition Sjogren’s syndrome was a companion,

not a frienddespite the fact that Gerlof had tried to welcome and disarm him many times, simply by relaxing and trying to be pleasant when he turned up. Sjogren had open access to his body, just help yourself, but it was no use. The syndrome was always equally merciless when it came, hurling itself at him and burrowing deep into his joints, tugging and pulling at his nerves, making his mouth dry and his eyes sore.

Gerlof allowed the pain to continue until it grew tired. He

laughed in Sjogren’s face.

“I’m back in the pram,” he stated after breakfast.

“You’ll soon be back on your feet, Gerlof.”

Marie, his helper for the day, placed a small cushion behind his back for support and folded down the wheelchair’s footplates beneath his best shoes.

With Marie’s help, Gerlof had laboriously put on his only

black suit, which was shiny and much cleaned. He had bought

it for his wife’s funeral, then worn it to twenty or so since then: a long series of friends’ and relatives’ funerals in Mamas church.

Sooner or later he would be wearing the suit to his own funeral.

Over the suit he put on his gray overcoat, with a thick woolen scarf around his neck and a fedora pulled well down over his ears.

The temperature had dropped to near freezing on this gloomy day in the middle of October.

“Ready?” said Boel when she came out of the office. “How

long will you be away?”

Always the same old question.

“That depends on how inspired Pastor Hogstrom is today,”

replied Gerlof.

“We can warm up your lunch in the microwave,” said Boel,

“if need be.”

“Thank you,” said Gerlof, who doubted if he would be particularly hungry after Ernst’s funeral.

He thought Boel should be happy now that Sjogren had forced

him into a wheelchair and made it easy to keep an eye on him; she liked to be in control of things. But he would soon be back on his feet again, when the syndrome subsided. Once he could walk again, he would find the person who murdered Ernst.

Marie pulled on a pair of gloves and grabbed hold of the

wheelchair’s handles.

Off they went. Into the elevator, slowly down, then out into the bright cold air, down the ramp, and onto the turning area for cars. The frosty gravel crunched beneath the wheels of the chair as they set off along the empty track to the church.

Gerlof gritted his teeth. He hated feeling so helpless in the wheelchair, but he tried to relax and let go of the responsibility.

“Are we late?” he asked.

It had taken far too long to get into his suit.

“Not much,” said Marie. “A bit, but that’s my fault… Good thing the church is nearby.”

“I don’t think we’ll get a detention,” said Gerlof, and Marie laughed politely.

He was pleased about thatnot all the helpers at the Mamas

home realized it was the duty of the young to laugh at the wit of the old.

They rolled along toward the church, and Gerlof leaned

forward slightly in an attempt to protect his face from the biting wind blowing in off Kalmar Sound. He could tell it was a strong, steady southwesterly, which would have made it possible to sail a ketch closehauled straight up the Swedish coast, all the way up north to Stockholmbut he had no desire to be out at sea on a day like this. The wind would have been whipping the waves up over the gunwale, and the cold would have covered the thwarts with ice. After more than thirty years ashore, Gerlof still felt like a seaman, and no sailor wants to go to sea in the winter.

The bell started to toll as they passed the bus stop by the

church and turned in along the track. The sound was desolate and long drawn out, echoing over the flat countryside, and it made Marie walk faster.

Gerlof was in no hurry to get to the funeralhe regarded it

mostly as a ritual for other mourners. He himself had said his goodbyes to Ernst the week before, down at the quarry. The sense of loss he felt for his friend had mingled with his sorrow over Ella, and that would remain with him for as long as he lived. And at the same time he had an unpleasant feeling that Ernst wasn’t resting in peace; his old friend was waiting impatiently for Gerlof to put together all the pieces of the puzzle he’d left behind.

There were at least a dozen cars parked in the narrow space in front of the church. Gerlof looked for Julia’s red Ford, but couldn’t see it. But he noticed that Astrid Linder’s Volvo was there, and decided she’d given Julia a lift from Stenvik. If his daughter was at the funeral at all.