The Darkest Room

10

“The police are back in Marnäs now, and we’ve got our eye on every criminal. I want everyone in northern Öland to be aware of that fact.”

Inspector Holmblad certainly had a gift for public speaking, Tilda realized as she listened to him, and he seemed to like being in the center of things. He gazed out over the audience of a dozen or so who had gathered in the cold wind on the street outside the new police station in Marnäs-journalists, colleagues, and perhaps a couple of ordinary residents-and continued his inaugural speech:

“The local police is a new aspect of police work, a more personal police force… comparable with the beat constables in the old days, who knew everyone in the community where they worked. Of course, our society has become more complex since then, there are more networks, but our local police officers here in northern Öland are well prepared. They will be working together with clubs and companies and will be

devoting particular attention to crimes committed by young people.”

He paused. “Any questions?”

“What are you going to do about the graffiti around the square?” said an elderly man. “It’s a disgrace.”

“The police will be bringing in anyone who is caught spraying graffiti,” replied Holmblad. “We have the right to search them and to confiscate any aerosols, and we will of course be applying a zero tolerance approach in this matter. But vandalism is equally an issue for schools and parents.”

“And what about the thieving, then?” asked another male voice. “All these break-ins into churches and summer cottages?”

“Breaking and entering is one of the key targets for the local police force,” said Holmblad. “We will be making it a priority to solve these cases and to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Tilda was standing behind her boss like a dummy, her back stiff and her eyes fixed firmly ahead. She was the only woman present, but would have preferred to be anywhere but Marnäs on this particular day. She would also have preferred to be someone else-not a police officer, at any rate. The uniform was too thick and too tight; it was suffocating her.

And she didn’t want to stand so close to her new colleague, Hans Majner.

The father of the family over on Eel Point, Joakim Westin, had written a critical letter to Ölands-Posten three days ago, about the police mix-up between his dead wife and his living daughter. He hadn’t mentioned anyone in particular by name, but after the letter had appeared Tilda thought that people on the streets of Marnäs had begun to stare at her in a different way, scrutinizing and judging her. And last night Holmblad had called her to say that she had to go out to Eel Point with him-to apologize.

“… and finally I have a couple of items for our new local police team, Hans Majner and Tilda Davidsson. The keys to the station and this…” Inspector Holmblad picked up a rectangular brown parcel that had been leaning against a desk. He opened it and took out an oil painting of a sailing ship, a three-masted ship out at sea in the middle of a violent storm. “This is a gift from Borgholm… a symbolic way of showing that we are all in the same boat.”

Holmblad handed over the painting and a bunch of keys each to Majner and Tilda with great ceremony. Majner unlocked the station door and invited everyone in with a sweeping gesture.

Tilda stepped to one side and let the men go in first.

The office had recently been cleaned, and the floor was spotless. On the walls were maps of Öland and the Baltic. Holmblad had ordered open-faced prawn sandwiches, which were laid out on a coffee table between Majner’s and Tilda’s workstations.

There were already several piles of paper on Tilda’s desk. She picked up one of the plastic folders and went over to her colleague.

Majner was standing by his own desk tucking into the sandwiches. He was talking to two male colleagues from Borgholm, who were laughing at something he’d just said.

“Hans, could you spare a moment?”

“Absolutely, Tilda.” Majner smiled at his colleagues and turned to her. “What is it?”

“I’d really like to talk about your message.”

“What message?”

“The message about the death at Eel Point.” Tilda moved to one side and Majner followed her. “You recognize this, I presume?”

She held up the piece of paper she had placed in the folder the day after she had received it from Majner. This was her proof.

Three names were written in ink on the note. The first was Livia Westin. The second was Katrine Westin. The third was Gabriel Westin.

Next to Livia’s name was a cross: †

“So?” said Majner, nodding. “Those were the names I got from the emergency call center.”

“Exactly,” said Tilda. “And you were supposed to mark the name of the person who drowned. That’s what I asked you to do.”

Majner was no longer smiling.

“And?”

“You put the cross in front of Livia Westin’s name.”

“Yes?”

“But that was wrong. It was the mother, Katrine Westin, who had drowned.”

Majner speared a few prawns with his fork and stuffed them in his mouth. He seemed completely uninterested in the conversation.

“Okay,” he said, munching on his prawns. “A mistake. Even the police make a mistake sometimes.”

“Yes, but it was your mistake,” said Tilda. “Not mine.”

Majner looked up at her.

“So you don’t trust me?” he said.

“Well, yes, but…”

“Good,” said Majner. “And just remember…”

“Are you two getting to know each other?” a voice interrupted them.

Inspector Holmblad had come to join them. Tilda nodded.

“We’re trying,” she said.

“Good. Don’t forget we’re going out after this, Tilda.”

Holmblad nodded and smiled and moved on, over to the reporter and photographer from the local paper.

Majner patted Tilda on the shoulder.

“It’s important to be able to rely on a colleague, Davidsson,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”

She nodded.

“Good,” said Majner. “Right or wrong… a police officer must be sure that he or she will always have backup. If anything happens.”

Then he turned his back on her and returned to his colleagues.

Tilda stood there, still wishing she was somewhere else.

“Right, Davidsson,” said Göte Holmblad half an hour later, when three quarters of the sandwiches had been eaten and the rest put away in the refrigerator. “We’d better get to our little meeting. We’ll take my car.”

At this point Tilda and the inspector were alone in the newly opened police station. Hans Majner had been one of the first to leave.

By this stage Tilda had decided she wasn’t even going to try to like him.

She put on her uniform cap, locked the station door, and went out to the car with Holmblad.

“We’re under no obligation to make a visit like this,” Holmblad explained when they were sitting in the car. “But Westin has called Kalmar a couple of times wanting to speak to me or someone else in authority, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a conversation with him face-to-face.” He started the car, pulled away from the sidewalk, and went on: “The important thing is to avoid official complaints and investigations. A visit like this isn’t an official gesture, but it usually clears up most misunderstandings.”

“I contacted Westin a few days after his wife’s death,” said Tilda, “but he wasn’t interested in talking at the time.”

“I can try to reason with him on this occasion,” said Holmblad. “That might work better. I mean, it isn’t a question of apologizing, but rather-”

“I have nothing to apologize for,” said Tilda. “I wasn’t the one who supplied the wrong information.”

“No?”

“It was a colleague who gave me a note with a mark next to the wrong name. I just read it out.”

“Oh? But as you know, it’s best not to inform relatives of a death over the telephone. I think we all have to accept responsibility for the fact that routine procedure wasn’t followed on this occasion.”

“That’s what my colleague said,” said Tilda.

They left Marnäs and drove along the coast road, south toward Eel Point. The road was completely deserted this afternoon.

“I’ve been thinking about buying myself a house on the island for a long time,” said Holmblad, glancing across at the meadows along the shoreline. “Here on the eastern side.”

“Oh yes?”

“It really is beautiful here.”

“Yes,” said Tilda. “This is where my family comes from, the villages around Marnäs. My father’s side of the family.”

“I see. Was that why you came back?”

“One of the reasons,” said Tilda. “The job was attractive too.”

“The job, yes,” said Holmblad. “Today it begins in earnest.”

A few minutes later they reached the yellow sign for Eel Point, and Holmblad turned off onto the winding gravel track.

They could see the lighthouses now, and the red buildings. This time Tilda was able to see the lighthouse keepers’ estate in daylight, even if gray cloud cover was hiding the sun.

Holmblad pulled up in front of the house and turned off the engine.

“Remember,” he said, “you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

Tilda nodded. Bottom of the heap-so keep quiet. Just like when she was little, at the dining table with her two older brothers.

In daylight the house at Eel Point seemed more appealing, thought Tilda, but it was still much too big for her to like the idea of living there.

Holmblad knocked on the glass pane in the kitchen door; the door opened after a minute or so.

“Good afternoon,” said Holmblad. “Here we are.”

Joakim Westin’s face had become even more gray, Tilda thought. She knew he was thirty-four, but he looked like a fifty-year-old. His eyes were dark and tired. He simply nodded at Holmblad and didn’t even acknowledge Tilda. Not even with a glance.

“Come in.”

Westin disappeared into the darkness, and they followed him. Everything was neat and clean, no dust bunnies, but when Tilda looked around it was as if a gray film had settled over everything.

“Coffee?” asked Westin.

“Thank you, that would be good,” said Holmblad.

Westin went over to the coffeemaker.

“Are you on your own here now… you and the children?” asked Holmblad. “No relatives?”

“My mother has been staying with us,” said Westin, “but she’s gone back home to Stockholm.”

There was a silence. Holmblad adjusted his uniform.

“We’d very much like to start by expressing our regrets… and saying that this sort of thing simply shouldn’t happen,” he said. “The procedures with regard to informing relatives about a death fell down somewhat in this case.”

“You’ve got that right,” said Westin.

“Yes, we do regret what happened. But…”

“I thought it was my daughter,” said Westin.

“I’m sorry?”

“I thought my daughter had drowned. I thought that for several hours, all the way from Stockholm to Öland. And the only consolation… it wasn’t much of a consolation, but the only consolation was that my wife, Katrine, would be

there when I arrived, and she would be feeling even worse than me. Then at least I would be able to try and console her, for the rest of our lives.” Westin paused, then went on very quietly: “We would have each other, at least.”

He fell silent, gazing out of the window.

“As I said, our sincere regrets,” said Holmblad. “But it’s happened now… and we have to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. To a relative of someone else, I mean.”

Westin hardly seemed to be listening. He was studying his hands as Holmblad stopped speaking, then he asked, “How’s the investigation going?”

“The investigation?”

“The police investigation. Into my wife’s death.”

“There is no investigation,” said the inspector quickly. “We carry out investigations or preliminary investigations only when a crime is suspected, and in this case there are no grounds for suspicion.”

Westin looked up from the table. “So what happened was nothing out of the ordinary?”

“Well, of course it wasn’t exactly normal,” said Holmblad, “but…”

Westin took a deep breath and continued: “My wife said goodbye to me outside the house that morning. Then she went inside and scraped windows. Then she made herself some lunch, and after that she went down to the shore. And then she walked right to the end of the jetty and jumped into the water. Does that seem normal to you?”

“Nobody’s saying it was suicide,” said Holmblad. “But as I said, there are no grounds to suspect any kind of crime. For example, if she’d had a couple of glasses of wine with her lunch and then walked along stones that were slippery…”

“Do you see any bottles around here?” Westin interrupted him.

Tilda looked around. There were in fact no bottles of wine in the kitchen.

“Katrine didn’t drink,” Westin went on. “She didn’t drink alcohol. You could have checked that out with a blood test.”

“Yes, but…”

“I don’t drink either. There is no alcohol here at all.”

“May I ask why?” said Holmblad. “Are you religious?”

Joakim looked at him, as if the questions were insolent. And perhaps they were, thought Tilda.

“We have seen what drink and drugs can do,” he said eventually. “We don’t want that kind of stuff in our house.”

“I understand,” said Holmblad.

There was silence in the big kitchen. Tilda looked out of the window toward the lighthouses and the sea. She thought about Gerlof, about his constant curiosity.

“Did your wife have any enemies?” she asked suddenly.

From the corner of her eye Tilda could see Holmblad looking at her as if she had suddenly appeared out of nowhere at the kitchen table.

Joakim Westin also seemed surprised by the question. Not annoyed, just surprised.

“No,” he said. “Neither of us has any enemies.”

But Tilda thought he seemed hesitant, as if there were more to say.

“So she hadn’t been threatened by anyone here on the island?”

Westin shook his head. “Not as far as I know… Katrine has been living here alone with the children over the past few months. I’ve only come down from Stockholm on the weekends. But she hasn’t mentioned anything like that.”

“So she seemed perfectly normal before she died?”

“More or less,” said Joakim Westin, looking down into his coffee cup. “A bit tired and low, maybe… Katrine was finding it quite hard to be alone while I was working in Stockholm.”

Silence fell again.

“May I use your bathroom?” said Tilda.

Westin nodded. “Out through the porch and it’s to the right along the corridor.”

Tilda left the kitchen. She found her way easily; after all, she had been in the house before.

The smell of paint had almost gone from the porch and corridors now, and the house felt a little more lived in.

In the corridor leading to the bedrooms a painting had been hung up recently. It was an oil painting depicting a grayish-white landscape-it looked like northern Öland in the winter. A snowstorm was swirling over the island, blurring all the contours. Tilda couldn’t remember having seen the island depicted in such a dark, forbidding way before, and remained standing in front of the picture for a while before she went on to the bathroom.

It was small but warm, tiled from floor to ceiling, with a thick blue rug on the floor and an old-fashioned bathtub standing on four lion’s paws made of cast iron. When she had finished, she went back into the corridor and past the closed doors leading to the children’s rooms. She stopped at the next bedroom along; the door was half open.

A quick look?

Tilda poked her head in and glimpsed a small room with a big double bed. There was a small bureau next to the bed, with a framed photograph of Katrine Westin, waving from a window.

Then Tilda saw the clothes.

A dozen or so hangers with women’s clothes on them were hung around the bedroom walls like pictures. Sweaters, pants, tops, blouses.

The double bed had been neatly made, and a white nightgown lay tidily folded on one pillow-as if it had been placed there in the expectation that the woman who owned it would come and put it on when darkness fell.

Tilda looked at the strange collection of clothes for a long time, then backed out of the bedroom.

On the way back to the kitchen she heard the inspector’s voice:

“Well, time we were getting back to our duties.”

Göte Holmblad had finished his coffee and got up from the table.

The atmosphere in the room seemed less tense now. Joakim Westin stood up and glanced briefly at both Tilda and Holmblad.

“Fine,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

“No problem,” said Holmblad, and added, “Of course you are at liberty to pursue this matter, I want you to know that, but of course we would very much appreciate it if…”

Westin shook his head. “I won’t be taking it any further…

It’s over.”

He accompanied them into the hallway. Out on the steps he shook hands with both officers.

“Thanks for the coffee,” said Tilda.

Dusk had fallen, and there was a smell of burning leaves in the air. Down by the shore the lighthouse was flashing.

“Our constant companion,” said Westin, nodding toward the light.

“Do you have to take care of the lighthouses in any way?” asked Holmblad.

“No, they’re automated.”

“I heard the stones they used to build them were taken from an old abandoned chapel,” said Tilda, pointing toward the forest in the north. “It was somewhere down by the point.”

It felt as if she were showing off and trying to play the tourist guide, but Westin was actually listening.

“Who told you that?”

“Gerlof,” said Tilda, and explained: “He’s my grandfather’s brother over in Marnäs; he knows quite a bit about Eel Point. If you want to know more, I can ask him…”

“Sure,” said Westin. “Tell him he’s welcome to come over for coffee sometime.”

When they were back in the car, Tilda looked over at the big house. She thought about all those silent rooms. Then she thought about the clothes hanging on the walls in the bedroom.

“He’s not feeling too good,” she said.

“Of course he isn’t,” said Holmblad. “He’s grieving, after all.”

“I wonder how the children are doing?”

“Small children forget pretty quickly,” said Holmblad.

He pulled out onto the coast road heading for Marnäs and glanced over at Tilda.

“Those questions you asked in the kitchen were a little… unexpected, Davidsson. Did you have something in particular in mind?”

“No… it was really just a way of making contact with him.”

“Well, maybe it worked.”

“We could probably have asked him a lot more.”

“Oh?”

“I think he had things to tell us.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” said Tilda. “Maybe… family secrets.”

“Everybody has secrets,” said Holmblad. “Suicide or accident? That’s the question… but it’s not our job to investigate.”

“But we could look for traces,” said Tilda, “quite impartially.”

“Traces of what?”

“Well… of someone else at the scene.”

“The only traces that were found were of the dead woman,” said Holmblad. “Besides which, Westin was the last person to see his wife. He said that, after all. In which case, if we’re going to look for a murderer, we need to start with him.”

“I was thinking, if I have time to…”

“You’re not going to have any time, Davidsson,” Holmblad

went on. “Local police officers are always short of time. You’ll be visiting schools, picking up drunks, stopping the graffiti, investigating break-ins, patrolling the streets of Marnäs, and keeping an eye on the traffic on the roads outside town. And you’ll also be sending reports to Borgholm.”

Tilda thought for a moment.

“In other words,” she said, “if there’s any time left after all that, I can knock on doors in the properties around Eel Point and look for witnesses to Katrine Westin’s death. That would be okay, wouldn’t it?”

Holmblad looked out through the windshield, without a smile.

“I suspect I’ve got a future inspector sitting next to me,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Tilda, “but I’m not looking for promotion.”

“That’s what they all say.” Holmblad sighed, as if he were contemplating his own career choices. “Do what you want,” he said eventually. “As I said, you’re responsible for organizing your own time, Davidsson, but if you find anything you must hand it over to the experts. The important thing is that you report all activities to Borgholm.”

“I love paperwork,” said Tilda.

When the abyss suddenly opens up, Katrine-what do you do then? Stay where you are, or jump?

At the end of the 1950s, I was sitting on a train in northern Öland next to an old woman on her way to Borgholm. Her name was Ebba Lind; she was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, and when she heard that I lived at Eel Point, she told me a story about the manor house. It was about what happened the day before she went up into the loft with a knife and carved her brother’s name and dates into a plank in the wall: PETTER LIND 1885-1900.

– MIRJA RAMBE