Echoes From the Dead

17

“I’ve always blamed my mother,” said Julia. “She fell asleep that afternoon and left him by himself.”

She blinked the tears away and went on:

“I’ve blamed my father even more... because he went down to the sea to mend his nets. If Gerlof had been at home, Jens would never have left the house — Jens loved his grandfather.”

Julia sniff led and sighed.

“I’ve blamed them for many years,” she said, “but it was actually my fault. I left Jens and went to Kalmar to meet a man. Although I knew it was a waste of time. He didn’t even turn up.” She stopped speaking, then she said, softly, “It was Michael... Jens’s father. We’d split up and he was living in Skåne, but he’d talked about catching the train and coming up to see me... I’d thought we might be able to try again, but he wasn’t interested.” She sniff led again. “So of course Michael was absolutely no help either when Jens disappeared, he was still in Malmö... But the main person who was to blame was me.”

Lennart sat in silence on the opposite side of the table, listening — he was a good listener, thought Julia — and letting her talk. Now he said:

“It was nobody’s fault, Julia. It was simply, as we say in the police... a series of unfortunate circumstances.”

“Yes,” said Julia. “If it was an accident.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lennart.

“I mean... unless Jens went outside and met somebody who took him away.”

“But who?” said Lennart. “Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Julia. “A madman? You know more than I do about these things, you’re a policeman.”

Lennart shook his head. “Such a person would need to be disturbed... extremely disturbed. And they would almost certainly have come into contact with the police already for other violent crimes. There was nobody like that on Öland at the time. Believe me, we looked for suspects... We knocked on doors, we went through our records.”

“I know,” said Julia. “You did what you could.”

“Our assumption was that Jens went down to the water,” said Lennart. “It’s only a few hundred yards, and it would have been easy to get lost in the fog that day. Many people who have drowned in Kalmar Sound have disappeared forever, both before and since...” He stopped. “It must be difficult for you to talk about this, and I don’t want to...”

“It’s fine,” said Julia quietly. She thought for a moment, then added, “I didn’t think it would be a good thing to come here in the autumn and face it all again, but it has been. I’ve started to get over Jens... and I know he isn’t coming back.” She made an effort to sound absolutely certain: “I have to move on.”

It was Tuesday evening in Marnäs. Julia had intended to call in briefly to see Lennart in the police station, but she was still there. And Lennart had obviously been about to finish work for the day, turn off the computer, and go home, but he’d stayed.

“So you’re not on duty tonight?” Julia had asked.

“I am, but not until later,” said Lennart. “I’m on the building committee and we’ve got a meeting tonight, but not until half past seven.”

Julia wanted to ask what political party he represented, but there was always the risk that she wouldn’t like the answer. Then she wanted to ask if he was married, but she might not like that answer either.

“We could order a pizza from Moby Dick,” said Lennart. “Would you like one?”

“That would be nice,” said Julia.

There was a kitchen in the office at the police station. Although the offices were impersonal, there was a certain level of home comfort in the kitchen in the form of curtains, red rag rugs on the floor, and even a couple of pictures on the walls. A spotlessly clean coffee machine stood on the equally spotless counter. There was a low table with armchairs in one corner, and when the pizzas topped with ham had been delivered from the bar down by the harbor, Lennart and Julia ate them there.

As they were eating they began to talk — and their conversation centered on sorrow and loss.

Afterward Julia couldn’t remember which of them had first started to make things so personal, but she assumed it was her.

“I have to move on,” said Julia. “If Jens disappeared in the sound, I have to accept it. It’s happened before, as you say.” She added after a pause, “It’s just that he was afraid of the water, he didn’t even like playing on the shore. So I’ve sometimes thought he went the other way, out onto the alvar. I know how it sounds, but... Gerlof thinks the same.”

“We looked on the alvar too,” said Lennart quietly. “We looked everywhere over the next weeks.”

“I know, and I’ve been trying to remember... Did we meet at the time?” asked Julia. “You and I, did we meet?”

The police officers who had turned up and asked questions when Jens disappeared were just a nameless row of faces to her. They had asked their questions, she had answered, frantically at first, and then numbly. Who they were had been irrelevant, just as long as they found Jens.

Much later she had realized that some of their questions had focused on the possibility that she herself — for some unknown reason, insanity perhaps — had killed her own son and hidden his body.

Lennart shook his head.

“You and I never met... at least, we never spoke,” he replied. “Other officers were responsible for the contact with you and your family, and as I said, I was one of those leading the search. I assembled volunteers down in Stenvik who spent the entire evening searching along the shore, and I drove round in my patrol car, all along the roads around Stenvik and out on the alvar. But we didn’t find him...”

He stopped speaking, and sighed.

“Those were terrible days,” he went on, “particularly as I’d... I’d been involved with something similar before, in my private life. My father had...”

He stopped again.

“I know something about that, Lennart,” said Julia gently. “Astrid Linder told me what happened to your father...”

Lennart nodded. “It’s no secret,” he said.

“She told me about Nils Kant,” said Julia. “How old were you when... when it happened?”

“Eight. I was eight years old,” said Lennart, his eyes fixed on the floor. “I’d started school in Marnäs. It was almost the end of term, a beautiful, sunny day. I was happy... looking forward to the summer holidays. Then a rumor started going round among the pupils — there had been a shooting on the train to Borgholm, somebody from Marnäs had been shot... but nobody knew anything definite. It wasn’t until I got home that I found out. My mother was at home and her sisters were there. They sat there in silence for a long time, but in the end my mother told me what had happened...”

Lennart stopped, lost in the past. In his eyes Julia thought she could see the shocked, unhappy eight-year-old he had been that day.

“Are policemen not allowed to cry?” she asked tentatively.

“Oh yes,” said Lennart quietly, “but I suppose we’re better at keeping the lid on our feelings.” He went on: “Nils Kant... I didn’t even know who he was. He was more than ten years older than me, and we’d never met, although we lived just a few kilometers from each other. And suddenly he’d shot my father dead.”

There was silence once again.

“What did you think of him afterward, then?” asked Julia eventually. “I mean, I can understand it if you hated him...”

She was thinking of herself, the number of times she’d wondered how she would react if she ever met Jens’s murderer. She still didn’t know what she would do.

Lennart looked out of the window through the darkness at the back of the police station.

“Yes, I hated Nils Kant,” he said. “Deeply and intensely. But I was afraid of him too... Particularly at night, when I couldn’t sleep. I was terrified he’d come back to Öland and kill me and my mother too.” He paused. “It took a long time before those feelings went away.”

“Some people say he’s still alive,” said Julia quietly. “Have you heard that?”

Lennart looked at her. “Who’s still alive?”

“Nils Kant.”

“Alive?” said Lennart. “That’s impossible.”

“No. I don’t believe it either...”

“Kant is not alive,” said Lennart, cutting into his pizza. “Who says he is?”

“I don’t believe it either,” repeated Julia quickly. “But Gerlof has been talking about him ever since I got here... It feels as if he’s trying to get me to believe that Nils Kant is behind Jens’s disappearance. That Jens met Kant that day. Although he must have been dead for ten years by then.”

“He died in 1963,” said Lennart. “The coffin arrived in Borgholm harbor that autumn.” He set down his knife and fork. “And I don’t know if it would be a good idea if this came out... but the coffin was opened up by the police in Borgholm. Very discreetly, for some reason, perhaps out of fear or respect for Vera Kant, I mean, she did have a lot of money and she owned a considerable amount of land... but it was opened.”

“And there was a body in it?”

Lennart nodded. “I saw it,” he said in a low voice, adding, “This isn’t exactly official either, but when the coffin came ashore...”

“From one of Malm Freight’s ships,” Julia interposed.

“That’s right. Is it Gerlof who’s filled you in on all this background stuff?” he asked, then went on without waiting for her reply: “I’d just started as a police constable in Marnäs, after a couple of years in Växjö, and I asked if I could go down to Borgholm to be there when they opened up Kant’s coffin. Of course, my reasons were entirely personal, nothing to do with the police, but my colleagues understood. The coffin was in one of the sheds down by the harbor, waiting for the undertaker. It was a wooden box that was nailed shut, with documents and stamps from some Swedish consulate in South America.” He paused. “One of the older constables broke open the lid. And it was Nils Kant’s body lying in there, partly dried out and covered in furry black mold. A doctor from the hospital in Borgholm was there and confirmed that he’d drowned in salt water. He’d obviously been in the water for quite some time, because the fish had started...”

Lennart’s expression had become absent as he was telling the story, but suddenly he looked down at the table and seemed to remember that they were eating pizza.

“Sorry about all the details,” he said quickly.

“It’s fine,” said Julia. “But how did you know it was Kant? 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 darkness — would he ever forgive her if she didn’t go and look for him?

The streets of Marnäs 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 Linköping, 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 Marnäs, 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 Astrid — and 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 Gerlof — and perhaps Lennart too — in 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 there — including 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 Öland, 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.

But — just a quick look. If Lennart’s meeting up in Marnäs 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 with — Julia couldn’t stop thinking about Nils Kant.