Stalker

117

Beneath an ornate wrought-iron arch bearing the name ‘Fridhem’, a flight of stone steps leads up to the parish home for clergymen’s widows, where Peter Leer Jacobson’s older sister Ellinor was given permission to stay on after his death. Together with a younger woman from the Sköldinge village, she runs a café with a small exhibition about the village, and what life was like in bygone times for priests and their families.

Fridhem consists of three red cottages with white window frames and gables, open shutters and old-fashioned tiles on the roofs. The houses sit on three sides of a neat patch of lawn, with café tables beneath the weeping birch trees.

The two men enter the café and pass through a cramped room lined with framed black-and-white photographs. Joona glances along the pictures of buildings, teams of workers, priests’ families. Three glass cabinets contain mourning jewellery made of jet, letters, inventories and hymnbooks.

Inside the pleasant café Joona buys two cups of coffee and a plate of biscuits from an elderly women in a flowery apron. She looks nervously at Rocky, who doesn’t smile back when she tells them that the price includes a refill.

‘Excuse me,’ Joona says. ‘But you must be Ellinor? Peter Leer Jacobson’s sister?’

The woman gives him a quizzical nod. When Joona explains that they’ve just spoken to the new priest, who said so many nice things about her brother, her clear blue eyes fill with tears.

‘Peter was very, very popular,’ she says in a tremulous voice, then tries to catch her breath.

‘You must have been very proud of him,’ Joona smiles.

‘Yes, I was.’

In a rather touching gesture, she pulls her hands together over her stomach in an effort to calm down.

‘There’s something I was wondering,’ Joona goes on. ‘Did your brother have a particular colleague, someone he worked closely with?’

‘Yes… that would have been the rural dean in Katrineholm… and the vicars of Floda and Stora Malm… And I know he spent a lot of time in Lerbo Church towards the end.’

‘Did they see each other privately as well?’

‘My brother was a fine man,’ she says. ‘An honourable man, very well liked…’

Ellinor looks around the empty room, then walks round the counter and shows Joona a framed newspaper cutting from the King and Queen’s visit to Strängnäs.

‘Peter was chaplain at the jubilee service in the cathedral,’ she says in a proud voice. ‘The bishop thanked him afterwards, and-’

‘Show her your arms,’ Joona tells Rocky.

Without changing his expression at all, Rocky rolls up the sleeves of his top.

‘My brother was the orator at the diocesan meeting in Härnösand, and he-’

The old woman trails off when she sees Rocky’s ravaged arms, uneven and stained from hundreds of injection scars, dark with veins that have disintegrated from the ascorbic acid he’s used to dissolve the heroin.

‘He’s a priest too,’ Joona says without taking his eyes off her. ‘Anyone can get trapped.’

Ellinor’s wrinkled face turns pale and motionless. She sits down on the wooden bench with her hand over her mouth.

‘My brother changed after the accident… when his wife passed away,’ she says in a quiet voice. ‘Grief destroyed him, he withdrew from everyone… thought someone was following him, that everyone was spying on him.’

‘When was this?’

‘Sixteen years ago…’

‘What did your brother use to inject himself with?’

She looks at him with exhausted eyes.

‘On the boxes it said Morphine Epidural…’

The woman shakes her head and her old hands flutter restlessly over her apron.

‘I didn’t know anything… he was all alone in the end, not even his daughter could stand it, she looked after him for as long as she could, but now I understand why she couldn’t go on.’

‘But he was still able to conduct services, do his job?’

She raises her bloodshot eyes towards Joona.

‘Oh yes, he conducted his services, no one noticed anything, not even me, because we no longer spent any time together… but I used to go to the morning service, and… Everyone said his sermons were stronger than ever… even though he himself was growing weaker.’

Rocky mutters something and walks away from them. They watch him through the window as he emerges on to the lawn and goes and sits down at a table under the weeping birch.

‘How did you find out?’ Joona asks.

‘I was the one who found him,’ the old woman replies. ‘I was the one who took care of the body.’

‘Was it an overdose?’

‘I don’t know, he’d missed the morning service, so I went into the rectory… There was a terrible stench in there… I found him in the cellar… he had been dead for three days, naked and filthy, covered in scabs… he was lying in the cage like an animal.’

‘He was lying in a cage?’

She nods and wipes her nose.

‘All he had was a mattress and a can of water,’ she whispers.

‘Didn’t you think it was odd that he was in a cage?’

The old woman shakes her head.

‘It had been locked from the inside… I’ve always thought that he tried to lock himself in to escape the drugs.’

A younger woman in a similar apron comes out and stands behind the counter when some more customers arrive.

‘Could one of your brother’s colleagues have helped him write his sermons?’ Joona asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘He probably had a computer, could I take a look at it?’

‘He had one in the office, but he wrote his sermons by hand.’

‘Have you kept them?’

Ellinor slowly stands up from the bench.

‘I took care of his estate,’ she says. ‘I cleaned out the rectory so that there wouldn’t be any gossip… but he’d got rid of everything… There were no photographs, no letters or sermons… I couldn’t even find his diaries, he’d always kept a diary… He used to keep them locked up in his bureau, but it was empty.’

‘Could they be anywhere else?’

She stands still and her mouth moves silently until the words come.

‘I’ve only got one diary left… It was hidden in the drinks cabinet, they usually have a secret compartment at the back, where gentlemen could keep their saucy French postcards.’

‘What did it say in the diary?’ Joona says.

She smiles and shakes her head.

‘I would never read it, you don’t do that sort of thing…’

‘Of course not,’ he replies.

‘But many years ago Peter used to get his diaries out at Christmas and read about Mother and Father, and about ideas for sermons… he wrote very well.’

The door to the café opens once more and a draught sweeps through the cosy room, spreading the smell of fresh coffee.

‘Do you have the diary here?’ Joona asks.

‘It’s in the exhibition,’ she says. ‘We call it a museum, but it’s really just a few things we found here.’

He goes with her to the exhibition. An enlarged photograph from 1850 shows three thin women in black dresses in front of the home for widows. The buildings look almost black. The picture was taken early one spring, the trees are bare and there’s still snow in the furrows of the field.

Beneath the picture is a short caption about the priest who had Fridhem built so that his wife wouldn’t have to marry the next priest if he died before her.

Next to the earrings and necklace of polished jade lies a rusty key and a small colour photograph showing the funeral of Peter Leer Jacobson. A man dressed in black is acting as marshal of ceremonies, holding the black veil. The bishop, and the priest’s daughter and sister are standing by the coffin with their faces lowered.

They walk past pictures of the mine at Kantorp, women and children sorting the ore in bright sunshine, Sköldinge workhouse, and the opening of the railway station. One black-and-white photograph of the church has been hand-tinted, so that the sky is pastel blue, the vegetation looks tropical, and the wooden construction of the new steeple shines like polished bronze.

‘Here’s the diary,’ Ellinor says, stopping in front of a glass cabinet containing an array of objects.