Echoes From the Dead

12

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 Linköping. 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 Linköping 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 pea-souper... 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 Öland 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?”

“Ninety-five.”

“Where does he live? Here in Marnäs?”

“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 something — perhaps he should point out that the best cover for a murderer has to be to play dead — but 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 Långvik. 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 Marnäs churchyard from the war years up to the mid-1970s. 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 coal-black coat,” said Axelsson. “But as for calling her a mourner — well, 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, but you’d hardly call them mourners. The police were there too, but they were standing further away, almost by the church door.”

“They probably wanted to see that Kant went into the ground, once and for all,” said Gerlof.

“True.” Axelsson nodded. “And that’s everybody who was there, I think, except for Pastor Fridlund.”

“At least he was getting paid.”

Gerlof polished away at the ship’s little hull for a few minutes. Then he took a deep breath and said:

“What you said about Vera Kant smiling at the graveside, it does make you wonder about what was in the coffin...”

Axelsson looked down at his puzzle and picked up another piece.

“Are you going to ask me if it felt strangely light when we were carrying it, Gerlof?” he said. “I’ve been asked that question several times over the years.”

“Well, people do talk about it sometimes... the fact that Kant’s coffin might have been empty. You’ve heard that too, surely?”

“You can stop wondering, because it wasn’t,” said Axelsson. “There were four of us carrying it, both before and after the service, and we definitely needed that many. It was bloody heavy.”

Gerlof felt as if he were questioning the old gravedigger’s integrity, but he had to persist:

“Some people say there might have been just stones in the coffin, or sandbags,” he said quietly.

“I’ve heard that rumor,” replied Axelsson. “I didn’t look inside myself, but somebody must have... when it arrived here on the ferry.”

“I’ve heard that nobody opened it,” said Gerlof. “It was sealed, and nobody had the nerve or the authority to break it open. Do you know if anybody opened it?”

“No...” said Axelsson. “I just remember vaguely that there was some kind of death certificate from South America that came with the coffin on one of Malm’s cargo ships. Somebody down at the truck depot in Borgholm who knew a bit of Spanish had read it... Nils Kant had drowned, it said, and he’d been in the water for a long time before they pulled him out. So I imagine the body didn’t look too good.”

“Perhaps people were afraid Vera Kant would start making trouble,” said Gerlof. “I suppose they just wanted to bury Kant and move on.”

Axelsson looked at Gerlof, then shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t ask me,” he said, placing another piece of a water lily in the pond on Monet’s painting. “I just put him in the ground; I did my job and I went home.”

“I know that, Torsten.”

Axelsson placed another piece in the jigsaw, looked at the result for a while and then at the clock on the wall. He got up slowly.

“Coffee time,” he said. But before he left the room, he stopped and turned his head.

“What do you think, Gerlof?” he said. “Is Nils Kant lying in his coffin?”

“I’m sure he is,” answered Gerlof quietly, without looking at the old gravedigger.

By the time Gerlof had returned to his room, it was already after seven and there was only half an hour left until coffee time. Routine, everything followed a routine at the senior citizens’ home.

But the conversation with Torsten Axelsson in the cellar had been useful, thought Gerlof. Useful. Perhaps he might have been a bit too talkative and insistent toward the end, attracting quizzical looks from Axelsson as a result.

No doubt the gossip had already started in the corridors of the home about Gerlof’s remarkable interest in Nils Kant. It might even spread outside the walls of the home, but so be it. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it: to stir the ants’ nest and maybe make things happen?

He sat down heavily on the bed and picked up that day’s copy of Ölands-Posten from the bedside table. He hadn’t had time to read the paper that morning, or rather he hadn’t had the inclination.

The death in Stenvik was the big news story on the front page, and there was one of Bengt Nyberg’s photographs of the quarry with an arrow to indicate exactly where the accident had happened.

It was an accident, according to the police in Borgholm. Ernst Adolfsson had been trying to move a stone statue at the edge of the cliff; the old man had tripped and fallen, and ended up with the huge block of stone on top of him. No crime was suspected.

Gerlof read only the beginning of Bengt Nyberg’s article, then leafed through the paper until he found news of less personal significance: a building project that was running well overtime in Långvik, a barn fire outside Löttorp, and the eighty-one-year-old suffering from senile dementia who had left his home in southern Öland a few days earlier to go for a walk, and who was still missing without a trace on the alvar. He was bound to be found, but not alive.

Gerlof folded up the paper and placed it back on the table, then caught sight of Ernst’s wallet. He’d put it aside when he got back from Stenvik. Now he picked it up, opened it, and looked at all the cash inside and an even thicker bundle of receipts. He left the money in the wallet, but he slowly went through the receipts.

Most of them related to small purchases from food stores in Marnäs or Långvik, or were handwritten receipts from Ernst’s own sales of sculpture last summer.

Gerlof was looking for later receipts, ideally from the same day the sculpture of Marnäs church tower fell on Ernst. He didn’t find any.

Almost at the bottom of the pile he found something else: a little yellow entrance ticket for a museum. Ramneby Wood Museum was printed on the ticket, along with a little drawing of planks of wood in a stack, and a date stamp in black ink: Sept. 13.

He left the ticket on the bedside table. He fastened the rest of the receipts together with a paper clip and pushed them into the desk drawer. Then he sat down at the desk, reached for his notebook, and opened it at the first clean page. He picked up a pencil, thought for a little while, then made two notes:

And:

Then he placed the museum ticket in the book, closed it, and settled down to wait for his coffee. Routine, everything was just routine when you got old.