The Darkest Room (24 page)

The last year of the fifties—that’s when my own story begins. The story of Mirja at the manor house at Eel Point, and of Torun and her paintings of the blizzard
.

I was sixteen years old and fatherless when I arrived at the lighthouse station. But I had Torun. She had taught me something all girls ought to learn: never to be dependent on men
.

—
MIRJA RAMBE

WINTER 1959

The two men my artistic mother
, Torun, hated most were Stalin and Hitler. She was born a couple of years before the First World War and grew up on Bondegatan in Stockholm, but she was restless and wanted to venture out into the world. She loved painting, and at the beginning of the 1930s she went to art school in Gothenburg first of all, and then on to Paris, where, according to Torun, people constantly mistook her for Greta Garbo. Her paintings attracted a certain amount of attention, but she wanted to get back to Sweden when the war broke out, and traveled back via Copenhagen. There she met a Danish artist and managed to fit in a quick romance before Hitler’s soldiers suddenly appeared on the streets.

When she got home to Sweden, Torun discovered that she was pregnant. According to her, she wrote several letters to the father-to-be, my Danish daddy. It might be true. However, he never got in touch.

I was born in the winter of 1941, when fear covered the world. At that time Torun was living in Stockholm, where all the lights had been turned off and everything was rationed. She kept on moving to different rooms for unmarried mothers, poky little holes rented out by disapproving old ladies, and supported herself by cleaning for the rich folk of Östermalm.
She had neither the time nor the money to be able to paint.

It can’t have been easy. I know it wasn’t easy.

When I first heard the dead whispering in the barn at Eel Point, I wasn’t afraid. I’d experienced far worse in Stockholm.

One summer after the war
, when I am seven or eight years old, I start to have problems peeing. It’s terribly painful. Torun says I’ve been swimming too much, and takes me to a doctor with a beard on one of Stockholm’s widest streets. He’s nice, my mother says. He charges next to nothing to see children.

The doctor is very friendly when he says hello. He is old, he must be at least fifty, and his coat is all creased. He smells of booze.

I have to go in and lie down on my back in a special room in his surgery, which also stinks of booze, and the doctor closes the door behind us.

“Unbutton your skirt,” he says. “Pull it up and just relax.”

I am alone with the doctor, and he is very thorough. But at last he is satisfied.

“If you tell anyone about this, they’ll put you away in an institution,” he says, patting me on the head.

He buttons up his coat. Then he gives me a shiny one-krona coin and we go back to Torun in the waiting room—I stagger along, my legs trembling, and I feel even more ill than I did before, but the doctor says there isn’t anything serious wrong with me. I am a good girl, and he will prescribe some suitable medicine.

My mother is furious when I refuse to take the doctor’s tablets.

At the beginning of the 1950s
, Torun takes me to Öland. It is one of her ideas. I don’t think she had any connection
with the island, but just as when she traveled to Paris, she longs for an artistic environment. And of course Öland is famous for its light and for the artists who have succeeded in capturing it. My mother babbles about Nils Kreuger, Gottfrid Kallstenius, and Per Ekström.

I am just happy to be leaving the city where that old doctor lives.

We arrive in Borgholm on the ferry. We have all our possessions with us in three suitcases, plus Torun’s package of canvases and oils. Borgholm is a neat little town, but my mother is unhappy there. She thinks the people are stiff and haughty. Besides, it’s much cheaper to live out in the country, so after a year or so we move again, to a red outbuilding in the village of Rörby. We have to sleep under three blankets, because it is always so cold and drafty.

I start at the local school. All the children there think I speak a kind of affected big-city talk. I don’t say what I think of their dialect, but I still don’t make any friends.

Soon after we end up out in the country, I start to draw in earnest; I draw white figures with red mouths and Torun thinks they’re angels, but it is the doctor and his slashed mouth that I am drawing.

When I was born, Hitler was the big bad wolf, but I grow up filled with the fear of Stalin and the Soviet Union. If the Russians want to, they can conquer Sweden in four hours with their airplanes, according to my mother. First they will occupy Gotland and Öland, then they will take the rest of the country.

But for me, as a child, four hours is quite a long time, and I give a great deal of thought to what I would do during this last period of freedom. If the news comes that the Soviet planes are on their way, I will run off to the store in Rörby and stuff myself with as much chocolate as I can, I’ll eat all they’ve got, then I’ll grab some crayons and paper and watercolors and rush back home. Then I’ll be able to cope with
living the rest of my life as a communist, just as long as I can carry on painting.

We move around as lodgers from one place to another, and every room we rent stinks of oils and turpentine. Torun makes enough money to live on by cleaning, but paints in her spare time—she goes out with her easel and paints and paints.

In the last fall of the 1950s we move again, to an even cheaper room. It is in an old building at the manor house at Eel Point. An outbuilding, built of limestone, with whitewashed walls. Cool and pleasant to live in during the hot summer days, but freezing cold the rest of the year.

When I find out that we are going to live near lighthouses, of course I get a whole lot of magical pictures in my head. Dark, stormy nights, ships in trouble out at sea, and heroic lighthouse keepers.

Torun and I move in one October day, and I immediately feel unwelcome there. Eel Point is a cold and windy place. Walking between the big wooden buildings feels like sneaking around some desolate castle courtyard.

The pictures in my imagination turn out to be entirely false. The lighthouse keepers have left Eel Point, and only come to visit a few times a year—the lighthouses were converted to electricity a year or so after the war, and ten years later everything was automated. There’s an old watchman; his name is Ragnar Davidsson and he lumbers around at Eel Point as if he owned the place.

A couple of months after
we move in, I experience my first blizzard—and almost end up an orphan at the same time. It is the middle of December, and when I get home from school, Torun isn’t there. One of her easels and the bag with her oils in it is also missing. Twilight falls and it begins to snow; the wind from the sea grows stronger.

Torun doesn’t come back. At first I am angry with her, then I start to feel afraid. I have never seen so much snow whirling past the windows. The flakes are not falling, they are slicing through the air. The wind shakes the windowpanes.

Half an hour or so after the storm begins, a small figure finally appears, plowing through the snowdrifts in the inner courtyard.

I hurry outside, grab hold of Torun before she collapses, and help her inside, to the fire.

The bag is still hanging over her shoulder, but the easel has been swept away in the storm. Her eyes are swollen shut; grains of ice mixed with sand have blown into them, and she can hardly see. When I take off her clothes, they are soaked; she is frozen stiff.

She had been sitting painting on the far side of the peat bog, Offermossen, when the clouds gathered and the storm came. She tried to take a shortcut through the tussocks of grass and the thin ice of the bog, but fell into the water and had to fight her way onto firmer ground. She whispers:

“The dead came up out of the bog … lots of them, clawing at me, ripping and tearing … they were cold, so cold. They wanted my warmth.”

Torun is rambling. I get her to drink some hot tea and put her to bed.

She sleeps peacefully for more than twelve hours, and I keep watch by the window as the snowfall gradually diminishes during the night.

When Torun wakes up, she is still talking about the dead who walked in the blizzard.

Her eyes are scratched and bloodshot, but the very next evening she sits down at a canvas and begins to paint.

Just when Tilda had
stopped thinking about Martin Ahlquist every morning and night, the telephone rang in her little kitchen. She thought it was Gerlof, and picked up the receiver without any misgivings.

It was Martin.

“I just wanted to see how you were. Make sure everything’s okay.”

Tilda didn’t speak; the pains in her stomach came back immediately. She gazed out at the empty quays in the harbor.

“Fine,” she said eventually.

“Fine, or just okay?”

“Fine.”

“Do you fancy having a visitor?” asked Martin.

“No.”

“Isn’t it lonely in northern Öland anymore?”

“Yes, but I’m keeping busy.”

“Good.”

The conversation was not unpleasant, but it was short. Martin ended by asking if he could ring her again, and she said yes in a very small voice.

The wound somewhere between her heart and her stomach started bleeding again.

It isn’t Martin who’s ringing, she thought, it’s his hormones. He’s just horny and wants a change from his wife again; he can’t cope with everyday life …

The worst of it was that she still wanted him to come over, preferably that very night. It was sick.

She should have mailed the letter to his wife long ago, but she was still carrying it around in her purse like a brick.

Tilda worked long hours
. She worked almost all the time to avoid thinking about Martin.

In the evenings she would sit for hours preparing the talks on traffic awareness or law and order that she was due to give in schools or to local companies. And as often as she could, in between the talks, the foot patrols, and the paperwork, she went out in her police car all over the area.

One Tuesday afternoon, on the deserted coast road, she slowed down when she saw the twin lighthouses at Eel Point. But she didn’t stop; instead she turned down toward the neighboring property where a farming family lived. Their name was Carlsson, she recalled. Her only visit there had been on that long, difficult night after Katrine Westin had drowned, when Joakim had broken down in the neighbors’ hallway.

The lady of the house, Maria Carlsson, recognized her at once when she rang the doorbell.

“No, we haven’t seen much of Joakim this fall,” she said when they were sitting at the kitchen table. “We haven’t fallen out, nothing like that, but he tends to keep himself to himself. His children play with our Andreas sometimes.”

“And what about his wife, Katrine?” said Tilda. “Did you
see more of her when she was living there alone with the children?”

“She came over for coffee a couple of times … but I think she had her hands full with the house. And of course we work long hours too.”

“Did you notice whether she had visitors?”

“Visitors?” said Maria. “Well, there were a few workmen there, toward the end of the summer.”

“But did you ever see a boat there?” said Tilda. “At Eel Point, I mean.”

Maria pushed back her bangs and thought about it.

“No, not that I remember. Nobody would have seen it from here anyway. The view is pretty much obscured.”

She pointed toward the window in the northeast, and Tilda could see that the view of the lighthouses was blocked by the big barn on the far side of the yard.

“But did you perhaps hear the sound of a boat at some point?” she ventured. “The sound of an engine?”

Maria shook her head. “You do hear boats chugging past sometimes when there’s no wind, but I don’t usually take any notice of it …”

When Tilda got outside, she stopped by the car and glanced to the south. There was a group of red boathouses out on the nearest point, but not a soul in sight.

And no boats surging through the water.

She got back in the car and realized it was time to put this particular criminal investigation to bed—and it had never really been an investigation anyway.

When she got back to the station, she moved the file containing her notes on Katrine Westin into the tray marked
Non-Priority
.

She had four substantial piles of paper on her desk, and half a dozen dirty coffee cups. Hans Majner’s desk on the other side of the room was, in contrast, completely empty of papers. Sometimes she had the urge to dump a huge bundle of traffic reports on his desk, but it always passed.

In the evenings
Tilda took off her uniform, got into her own little Ford, and drove around getting to know Öland, while listening to the recordings she had made with Gerlof. Most of them sounded good, the microphone picking up both his and Tilda’s voices, and she could hear that he had become more and more accustomed to talking each time they met.

It was during one of these outings they she finally found the van Edla Gustafsson had mentioned.

She had driven down to Borgholm, toured around the streets of the town for a while, then continued on south across the bridge to Kalmar. There were lots of streets there, lots of huge parking lots, and she drove slowly past hundreds of vehicles without spotting a dark van. The whole thing just seemed hopeless.

After half an hour, when she heard on the local radio that there was horse racing tonight, she left the center and headed for the racecourse. The enclosed course was illuminated with huge spotlights. There was money to be won and lost in there, but Tilda stayed in the car and drove slowly along the rows of parked cars.

Suddenly she slammed on the brakes.

She had passed a van. It said kalmar pipes & welding on the sides, and it was black.

Tilda made a note of the license number and reversed into a parking space a little further along. Then she called the central control number, asked them to look up the plates, and found that they belonged to a forty-seven-year-old man with no police record, in a village outside Helsingborg. The van had no record of traffic offenses, but it had been deregistered since August.

Aha, thought Tilda. She also asked them to check out the firm called Kalmar Pipes & Welding, but no such firm was registered.

Tilda switched off the engine and settled down to wait.

“Yes, Ragnar used to fish illegally up by Eel Point,” said Gerlof in her headphones. “He was in fishing waters belonging to other people sometimes, but of course he always denied it …”

After fifty minutes the spectators started pouring out through the gates. Two powerfully built men aged around twenty-five stopped by the dark van.

Tilda took off her headphones and straightened up in her seat.

One of the men was taller and broader than the other, but she couldn’t make out any clear facial features. She peered through the darkness as the man got into the van, and wished she had a telescope.

The men responsible for the break-ins? Impossible to tell, of course.

They’re just ordinary workmen, darling
, she heard Martin’s self-assured voice saying in the back of her mind, but she ignored him.

The men drove out of the parking lot. Tilda started her own car and put it in first gear.

The van drove away from the racecourse, out onto the freeway and on toward Kalmar. Tilda followed, a couple of hundred yards behind.

Eventually they reached a high-rise apartment block not far from the hospital, and the van slowed down and pulled in by the sidewalk. The men got out and disappeared through a doorway.

Tilda sat and waited. After thirty seconds the lights went on in a couple of windows on the second floor.

She quickly wrote down the address. If these were the burglars, then at least she now knew where they lived. The best thing would of course be to go into the apartment to search for stolen goods, but her only justification for doing so was old Edla’s information that the van had been on Öland. That wasn’t enough.

“I’ve given up on
the investigation into Katrine Westin’s death,” said Tilda as she was having coffee with Gerlof a couple of evenings later.

“Her murder, you mean?”

“It wasn’t a murder.”

“Oh yes,” said Gerlof. “I think it was.”

Tilda said nothing, she merely sighed and took out the tape recorder.

“Shall we do one last—”

But Gerlof interrupted her.

“I saw a man almost murdered once, without anyone touching him.”

“Really?”

Tilda put the tape recorder down on the table, but didn’t switch it on.

“It was out by Timmernabben, a few years before the war,” Gerlof went on. “Two cargo ships carrying stone were moored up side by side, in perfect harmony. But aboard one was a first mate from Byxelkrok, and aboard the other an ordinary seaman from Degerhamn. They got into an argument about something, and stood yelling at each other across the gunwales. In the end one of them spat at the other … then it got serious. They started hurling shards of stone at each other, and in the end the guy from Degerhamn jumped up onto the gunwale to get across to the other ship. But he didn’t get far, because his opponent met him with a boat hook.”

Gerlof paused, drank a little of his coffee, and went on:

“Boat hooks these days are pathetic things made of plastic, but this was a sturdy wooden pole with a big iron hook on one end. So when this lout came hurtling over the gunwale, his shirt got caught on the hook, and he stopped in midair. Then he fell straight down like a stone into the water between the ships, with his shirt still tangled up on the boat hook … and he didn’t come up again, because the other guy
was holding him under the water.” He looked at Tilda. “It was more or less the same as they did with those poor souls who were pushed down into the water with poles out on the peat bog.”

“But he survived?”

“Oh yes, the rest of us broke up the fight and got him out. But he only just made it.”

Tilda looked at the tape recorder. She should have switched it on.

Gerlof bent down and started rustling with some paper under the table.

“Anyway, it was that fight I was thinking of when I asked to see Katrine Westin’s clothes,” he said. “And now I’ve had a look at them.”

He took an item of clothing out of the paper bag. It was a gray cotton top with a hood.

“The murderer came to Eel Point by boat,” said Gerlof. “He put in by the stone jetty, where Katrine Westin was waiting … and she stayed where she was, so she must have trusted him. He was holding a boat hook, which of course was perfectly natural because that’s what you use when you put in. But this was one of the old kind … a long pole with an iron hook that he twisted into the hood of her top, then he used it to drag her down into the water. Then he held her down until it was over.”

Gerlof spread the top out on the table, and Tilda saw that the hood was torn. Something sharp had ripped two inch-long holes in the gray fabric.