The Darkest Room

7

“S’o you think everything was better in the old days, Gerlof?” said Maja Nyman.

Gerlof lowered his cup onto the coffee table in the home at Marnäs and pondered his reply for a few seconds, as he always did.

“Not everything. And not always. But a great deal was certainly… better planned,” he said eventually. “We had time to think before we did something. These days they don’t.”

“Better planned?” said Maja. “Is that what you think?… Don’t you remember the shoemaker down in Stenvik? The one who was in the village when we were little?”

“You mean Shoe-Paulsson?”

“Arne Paulsson, that’s right,” said Maja. “The worst shoemaker in the world. He had never learned how to tell the difference between right shoes and left shoes, or else he thought it was unnecessary. So he just made one kind of shoe.”

“So he did,” said Gerlof quietly, “I remember them.”

“You remember the pain, if nothing else,” said Maja with a smile. “Paulsson’s wooden clogs managed to pinch and fit too loosely at the same time. And they always came off when you ran. Was that better?”

Tilda was sitting at the table in the dining room at the home, listening in total fascination. She had almost forgotten her troubles at work.

Conversations like these about the old days should be preserved, she thought, but the tape recorder was in the drawer of Gerlof’s desk.

“No, no,” said Gerlof, picking up his coffee cup. “Perhaps people didn’t think ahead too much in the old days. But at least they thought.”

Twenty minutes later Tilda and Gerlof were back in his room, and her tape recorder was up and running once again. The wall clock was ticking in the background as Gerlof began to talk about his early days as a teenage skipper on the Baltic.

Life wasn’t dreary and uneventful at the home, Tilda realized-it was restful. She felt more and more contented in Gerlof’s little room, because there she could almost forget what had happened over the last few days. Everything that had gone wrong at Eel Point.

Wrong name, wrong information about the deceased, wrong approach-a grieving husband who was refusing to speak to her and doubtless plenty of gossip among her colleagues in her first few days as a local police officer.

And yet she wasn’t the only one who’d done something wrong.

She suddenly noticed that Gerlof had stopped chatting and was looking at her.

“That’s the way it is,” he said. “Everything changes.”

The cassette tape was turning in the machine on the table.

“Yes, these are modern times,” said Tilda loudly. “And the

old times… what do you think about when you remember the old times?”

“Well… for me it’s shipping, of course,” said Gerlof, looking suspiciously at the tape recorder. “All the beautiful cargo ships slipping in and out of the harbor at Borgholm. The smell when you went aboard… wood tar and paint and fuel oil… stagnant bilgewater from the hold and frying food from the galley.”

“So what was the best thing about those days?” said Tilda.

“The calmness… and the silence. The fact that things could take their own time. When I sailed on the cargo ships, there were small engines on most of them, of course, but on those that had only sails there was nothing to be done when the wind dropped of an evening. You dropped anchor and waited for the wind to get up again next day. And nobody knew exactly where the cargo ships were, before the telephone and short-wave radio came in. One day they would just turn up off the coast again, on their way to their home harbor in full sail. And then the wives could relax, for this time.”

Tilda nodded. Then she thought again about the information she’d gotten wrong the previous week, and asked, “What do you know about the manor house at Eel Point, Gerlof?”

“Eel Point? Well, a little. It was on the wrong side of the island from Stenvik, but your grandfather was a neighbor, after all.”

“Was he?”

“More or less. His cottage was a mile or so further north. Ragnar used to fish for eels off the point, and he was a watchman for the lighthouses.”

“Are there any special stories about the place?”

“Well, the manor house does have something of a reputation,” said Gerlof. “They say that the foundations are made of granite from an old abandoned chapel, and that the timber in the house came from ships wrecked on the rocks. They were recycling even in those days.”

“Why is there only a light in one tower?” said Tilda.

“There was some kind of accident there, I think it was a fire… The twin lighthouses were built to distinguish Eel Point from other lighthouse locations around Öland, but in the end I suppose it got too expensive to have them both working every night. One was enough.” Gerlof thought for a while, then added, “And of course these days ships navigate with the help of satellites, so even that one is no longer necessary.”

“Modern times,” said Tilda.

“Exactly. Right shoes and left shoes.”

There was silence in the room.

“Have you been out to the point?” asked Gerlof.

Tilda nodded. They had finished talking about the Davidsson family now, so she switched off the tape recorder.

“I was at the house last week,” she said. “Someone drowned.”

“Yes, I read about it in Ölands-Posten. A young woman. I suppose it was the mother of the family who bought the manor house?”

“Yes.”

“So who found her?”

Tilda hesitated.

“I shouldn’t really say much.”

“No, of course not. It’s a police matter, after all. And a tragedy.”

“Yes. Especially for the husband and children.”

In the end Tilda told him most of it anyway. How she’d been called out to the scene of the accident. The body being pulled out of the water by the lighthouses.

“This woman, Katrine Westin, was alone. She had her lunch and put the dishwasher on. Then she walked down to the shore and out along the jetty. And slipped, or threw herself in the water.”

“And drowned?” said Gerlof.

“Yes. She drowned straightaway, despite the fact that the water is shallow there.”

“Not everywhere. It’s deeper out by the jetty; I’ve seen sailing boats moor there. Did anyone see it happen, this accident?”

Tilda shook her head. “No witnesses have come forward, at any rate. The coast was deserted.”

“The Öland coast is almost always deserted in the winter,” said Gerlof. “And there was no trace of anyone else at Eel Point? Someone who could have pushed her?”

“No, she was alone out on the jetty. You have to go across the shore to get onto the jetty, and there were no footprints in the sand.” Tilda looked at the tape recorder. “Shall we talk about Ragnar now?”

Gerlof didn’t seem to be listening to her. He got up with some difficulty and went over to the desk. He took a black notebook out of one of the drawers.

“I always make a note of the weather,” he said. He flicked through to the page he wanted. “There was hardly any wind that day. It was blowing at between three and six feet per second.”

“Yes, I guess it was. It was calm out at Eel Point.”

“So no waves can have raced up the shore and wiped out any traces,” said Gerlof.

“No. And the footprints from the woman’s shoes were still there in the sand-I saw them myself.”

“Was she injured in any way?”

Tilda hesitated before answering. Pictures she didn’t want to see came into her mind.

“I only saw her briefly, but she had a small wound on her forehead.”

“A graze?”

“Yes… it was probably from the fall, she probably hit her head on the stone jetty when she fell.”

Gerlof slowly sat down again. “Any enemies?”

“What?”

“Did she have any enemies… the woman who drowned?”

Tilda sighed. “How am I supposed to know that, Gerlof?

Do mothers with small children usually have mortal enemies here on the island?”

“I was just thinking that-”

“We need to change the subject now.” Tilda looked at her elderly relative with a serious expression. “I know you like mulling things over, but I shouldn’t be talking to you about this sort of thing.”

“No, no, you’re a police officer after all,” said Gerlof.

“Local police, yes. Not a murder investigator.” She added quickly, “And there is no murder inquiry anyway. There is nothing to suggest a crime has been committed, no motive. Her husband doesn’t seem to believe it was an accident, but even he can’t come up with a reason why anyone would have killed her.”

“Yes, well, I’m just doing a bit of thinking,” said Gerlof. “I enjoy it, as you said.”

“Good. But now we need to do a bit more recording.”

Gerlof was silent.

“I’m switching the tape recorder on now. Okay?” said Tilda.

“What about from the sea?” said Gerlof.

“What?”

“If someone came along the coast in a boat and moored by the jetty on Eel Point,” said Gerlof. “Then there wouldn’t be any footprints in the sand.”

Tilda sighed. “Okay, so I’d better start looking for a boat, then.” Tilda looked at him and asked, “Gerlof, are you finding these recordings difficult?”

Gerlof hesitated.

“I find it a bit difficult to talk about relatives who have died,” he said eventually. “It feels as if they’re sitting and listening in the walls.”

“I think they’d be proud.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Gerlof. “I suppose it depends what I’m saying about them.”

“It’s mostly Grandfather I want to talk about,” said Tilda.

“I know.” Gerlof nodded seriously. “But he might be listening too.”

“Was he hard work as an older brother, Ragnar?”

Gerlof didn’t speak for a few seconds.

“He had his moments. He had a long memory. If he felt someone had cheated him, he would never do business with that person again… He never forgot an injustice.”

“I don’t remember him,” said Tilda. “Dad hardly remembers him either. At any rate, he never talked about him.”

Silence once again.

“Ragnar froze to death in a winter storm,” Gerlof went on. “The body was found on the shore to the south of his cottage. Did your dad tell you that?”

“Oh yes, he was the one who found Grandfather. He was going out fishing, wasn’t he? That’s what Dad said.”

“He’d been checking his nets on the seabed that day,” said Gerlof, “and then when the wind got up he had gone ashore at Eel Point. He was the watchman, after all, and people had seen him out by the lighthouses. The boat must have broken up in the waves, because Ragnar walked home along the shore… and then the blizzard came. Ragnar died in the snow.”

“Nobody is dead until they are warm and dead,” said Tilda. “People have been found frozen stiff and with no pulse in snowdrifts, but they’ve come back to life when they’ve been brought into the warmth.”

“Who told you that?”

“Martin.”

“Martin? Who’s that?”

“My… boyfriend,” said Tilda.

She immediately regretted using that word. Martin would not have liked being described as her boyfriend.

“So you’ve got a boyfriend?”

“Yes… or whatever you want to call it.”

“I should think ‘boyfriend’ will do perfectly well. What’s his surname?”

“His name is Martin Ahlquist.”

“Nice,” said Gerlof. “Does he live here on the island, your Martin?”

My Martin, thought Tilda.

“He lives in Växjö. He’s a teacher.”

“But perhaps he’ll come and visit you sometimes.”

“I hope so. He has talked about it.”

“Nice.” Gerlof smiled. “You look as if you’re in love.”

“Do I?”

“Your face lights up when we talk about Martin; it’s lovely.”

He smiled encouragingly across the table, and Tilda smiled back.

Everything seemed so simple when she was sitting here with Gerlof talking about Martin, not complicated at all.