The Darkest Room

21

Just when Tilda had stopped thinking about Martin Ahlquist every morning and night, the telephone rang in her little kitchen. She thought it was Gerlof, and picked up the receiver without any misgivings.

It was Martin.

“I just wanted to see how you were. Make sure everything’s okay.”

Tilda didn’t speak; the pains in her stomach came back immediately. She gazed out at the empty quays in the harbor.

“Fine,” she said eventually.

“Fine, or just okay?”

“Fine.”

“Do you fancy having a visitor?” asked Martin.

“No.”

“Isn’t it lonely in northern Öland anymore?”

“Yes, but I’m keeping busy.”

“Good.”

The conversation was not unpleasant, but it was short. Martin ended by asking if he could ring her again, and she said yes in a very small voice.

The wound somewhere between her heart and her stomach started bleeding again.

It isn’t Martin who’s ringing, she thought, it’s his hormones. He’s just horny and wants a change from his wife again; he can’t cope with everyday life…

The worst of it was that she still wanted him to come over, preferably that very night. It was sick.

She should have mailed the letter to his wife long ago, but she was still carrying it around in her purse like a brick.

Tilda worked long hours. She worked almost all the time to avoid thinking about Martin.

In the evenings she would sit for hours preparing the talks on traffic awareness or law and order that she was due to give in schools or to local companies. And as often as she could, in between the talks, the foot patrols, and the paperwork, she went out in her police car all over the area.

One Tuesday afternoon, on the deserted coast road, she slowed down when she saw the twin lighthouses at Eel Point. But she didn’t stop; instead she turned down toward the neighboring property where a farming family lived. Their name was Carlsson, she recalled. Her only visit there had been on that long, difficult night after Katrine Westin had drowned, when Joakim had broken down in the neighbors’ hallway.

The lady of the house, Maria Carlsson, recognized her at once when she rang the doorbell.

“No, we haven’t seen much of Joakim this fall,” she said when they were sitting at the kitchen table. “We haven’t fallen out, nothing like that, but he tends to keep himself to himself. His children play with our Andreas sometimes.”

“And what about his wife, Katrine?” said Tilda. “Did you

see more of her when she was living there alone with the children?”

“She came over for coffee a couple of times… but I think she had her hands full with the house. And of course we work long hours too.”

“Did you notice whether she had visitors?”

“Visitors?” said Maria. “Well, there were a few workmen there, toward the end of the summer.”

“But did you ever see a boat there?” said Tilda. “At Eel Point, I mean.”

Maria pushed back her bangs and thought about it.

“No, not that I remember. Nobody would have seen it from here anyway. The view is pretty much obscured.”

She pointed toward the window in the northeast, and Tilda could see that the view of the lighthouses was blocked by the big barn on the far side of the yard.

“But did you perhaps hear the sound of a boat at some point?” she ventured. “The sound of an engine?”

Maria shook her head. “You do hear boats chugging past sometimes when there’s no wind, but I don’t usually take any notice of it…”

When Tilda got outside, she stopped by the car and glanced to the south. There was a group of red boathouses out on the nearest point, but not a soul in sight.

And no boats surging through the water.

She got back in the car and realized it was time to put this particular criminal investigation to bed-and it had never really been an investigation anyway.

When she got back to the station, she moved the file containing her notes on Katrine Westin into the tray marked Non-Priority.

She had four substantial piles of paper on her desk, and half a dozen dirty coffee cups. Hans Majner’s desk on the other side of the room was, in contrast, completely empty of papers. Sometimes she had the urge to dump a huge bundle of traffic reports on his desk, but it always passed.

In the evenings Tilda took off her uniform, got into her own little Ford, and drove around getting to know Öland, while listening to the recordings she had made with Gerlof. Most of them sounded good, the microphone picking up both his and Tilda’s voices, and she could hear that he had become more and more accustomed to talking each time they met.

It was during one of these outings they she finally found the van Edla Gustafsson had mentioned.

She had driven down to Borgholm, toured around the streets of the town for a while, then continued on south across the bridge to Kalmar. There were lots of streets there, lots of huge parking lots, and she drove slowly past hundreds of vehicles without spotting a dark van. The whole thing just seemed hopeless.

After half an hour, when she heard on the local radio that there was horse racing tonight, she left the center and headed for the racecourse. The enclosed course was illuminated with huge spotlights. There was money to be won and lost in there, but Tilda stayed in the car and drove slowly along the rows of parked cars.

Suddenly she slammed on the brakes.

She had passed a van. It said kalmar pipes & welding on the sides, and it was black.

Tilda made a note of the license number and reversed into a parking space a little further along. Then she called the central control number, asked them to look up the plates, and found that they belonged to a forty-seven-year-old man with no police record, in a village outside Helsingborg. The van had no record of traffic offenses, but it had been deregistered since August.

Aha, thought Tilda. She also asked them to check out the firm called Kalmar Pipes & Welding, but no such firm was registered.

Tilda switched off the engine and settled down to wait.

“Yes, Ragnar used to fish illegally up by Eel Point,” said Gerlof in her headphones. “He was in fishing waters belonging to other people sometimes, but of course he always denied it…”

After fifty minutes the spectators started pouring out through the gates. Two powerfully built men aged around twenty-five stopped by the dark van.

Tilda took off her headphones and straightened up in her seat.

One of the men was taller and broader than the other, but she couldn’t make out any clear facial features. She peered through the darkness as the man got into the van, and wished she had a telescope.

The men responsible for the break-ins? Impossible to tell, of course.

They’re just ordinary workmen, darling, she heard Martin’s self-assured voice saying in the back of her mind, but she ignored him.

The men drove out of the parking lot. Tilda started her own car and put it in first gear.

The van drove away from the racecourse, out onto the freeway and on toward Kalmar. Tilda followed, a couple of hundred yards behind.

Eventually they reached a high-rise apartment block not far from the hospital, and the van slowed down and pulled in by the sidewalk. The men got out and disappeared through a doorway.

Tilda sat and waited. After thirty seconds the lights went on in a couple of windows on the second floor.

She quickly wrote down the address. If these were the burglars, then at least she now knew where they lived. The best thing would of course be to go into the apartment to search for stolen goods, but her only justification for doing so was old Edla’s information that the van had been on Öland. That wasn’t enough.

“I’ve given up on the investigation into Katrine Westin’s death,” said Tilda as she was having coffee with Gerlof a couple of evenings later.

“Her murder, you mean?”

“It wasn’t a murder.”

“Oh yes,” said Gerlof. “I think it was.”

Tilda said nothing, she merely sighed and took out the tape recorder.

“Shall we do one last-”

But Gerlof interrupted her.

“I saw a man almost murdered once, without anyone touching him.”

“Really?”

Tilda put the tape recorder down on the table, but didn’t switch it on.

“It was out by Timmernabben, a few years before the war,” Gerlof went on. “Two cargo ships carrying stone were moored up side by side, in perfect harmony. But aboard one was a first mate from Byxelkrok, and aboard the other an ordinary seaman from Degerhamn. They got into an argument about something, and stood yelling at each other across the gunwales. In the end one of them spat at the other… then it got serious. They started hurling shards of stone at each other, and in the end the guy from Degerhamn jumped up onto the gunwale to get across to the other ship. But he didn’t get far, because his opponent met him with a boat hook.”

Gerlof paused, drank a little of his coffee, and went on:

“Boat hooks these days are pathetic things made of plastic, but this was a sturdy wooden pole with a big iron hook on one end. So when this lout came hurtling over the gunwale, his shirt got caught on the hook, and he stopped in midair. Then he fell straight down like a stone into the water between the ships, with his shirt still tangled up on the boat hook… and he didn’t come up again, because the other guy

was holding him under the water.” He looked at Tilda. “It was more or less the same as they did with those poor souls who were pushed down into the water with poles out on the peat bog.”

“But he survived?”

“Oh yes, the rest of us broke up the fight and got him out. But he only just made it.”

Tilda looked at the tape recorder. She should have switched it on.

Gerlof bent down and started rustling with some paper under the table.

“Anyway, it was that fight I was thinking of when I asked to see Katrine Westin’s clothes,” he said. “And now I’ve had a look at them.”

He took an item of clothing out of the paper bag. It was a gray cotton top with a hood.

“The murderer came to Eel Point by boat,” said Gerlof. “He put in by the stone jetty, where Katrine Westin was waiting… and she stayed where she was, so she must have trusted him. He was holding a boat hook, which of course was perfectly natural because that’s what you use when you put in. But this was one of the old kind… a long pole with an iron hook that he twisted into the hood of her top, then he used it to drag her down into the water. Then he held her down until it was over.”

Gerlof spread the top out on the table, and Tilda saw that the hood was torn. Something sharp had ripped two inch-long holes in the gray fabric.