The Darkest Room

23

Tilda had put in a report on the black van to headquarters in Borgholm, describing it as an “interesting” vehicle worth looking out for. But Öland was a big place and the number of police officers out patrolling the roads was small.

And Gerlof’s talk of a murderer with a boat hook at Eel Point? She hadn’t put in a report on that particular theory. Without any proof that there had in fact been a boat out by the point, it was impossible to instigate a murder investigation-it would take more than a few holes in a top.

“I’ve returned the clothes to Joakim Westin,” said Gerlof the next time he called her.

“Did you tell him about your murder theory?” said Tilda.

“No… it wasn’t the right time. He’s still out of balance; he would probably believe that an apparition had dragged his wife down into the water.”

“An apparition?”

“Westin’s sister… she was a drug addict.”

Gerlof told her the story of Joakim’s sister, Ethel, her heroin addiction and her habit of disturbing the peace.

“So that’s why the family moved from Stockholm,” said Tilda when he finished. “A death drove them away.”

“That was one reason. But Öland might just have tempted them as well.”

Tilda thought about how tired and worn Joakim Westin had looked when they went to see him, and said, “I think he could do with talking to a psychologist. Or maybe a priest.”

“So I’m not up to the job of father confessor?” said Gerlof.

Almost every evening when Tilda passed a mailbox on her way home from work, she was on the point of taking out the letter to Martin’s wife and dropping it in the box, and yet it was still in her purse. It was as if she were carrying an ax around-the letter gave her power over a person she didn’t know.

Of course, she had power over Martin too. He had continued to call her from time to time, trying to make small talk. Tilda didn’t know what she would say if he asked if he could come and see her again.

Over two weeks had passed without a single reported break-in in northern Öland. But one morning the telephone rang in the police station. The call came from Stenvik on the west coast of the island; the man on the other end of the line spoke quietly, with a strong local dialect, and said that his name was John Hagman. She recognized the name-Hagman was one of Gerlof’s friends.

“I hear you’re looking for people who’ve been breaking into houses,” he said.

“We are,” said Tilda. “I was intending to call you…”

“Yes, Gerlof told me.”

“Have you seen anyone breaking in?”

“No.”

Hagman didn’t say any more. Tilda waited, then asked, “Have you perhaps seen any trace of someone breaking in?”

“Yes. They’ve been here in the village.”

“Recently?”

“I don’t know… sometime in the fall. They appear to have been in several houses.”

“I’ll come down and take a look,” said Tilda. “How will I find you in the village?”

“I’m the only one here right now.”

Tilda got out of the police car on a gravel track in the middle of a row of closed-up summer cottages, a hundred yards or so above the sound. She looked around in the cold wind, and thought about her family. They came from Stenvik; they had somehow managed to survive in this stony landscape.

A short, elderly man in dark blue dungarees and a brown cap came over to the car.

“Hagman,” he said. He nodded briefly and pointed to a dark brown one-story house with wide windows. “There,” he said. “I noticed it had blown open. Same thing next door.”

One of the windows at the back of the house was ajar. When Tilda went closer, she could see that the frame was split and broken open near the catch.

There were no footprints on the veranda below the window. Tilda went over and pulled it wide open. The room inside was a mess, with clothes and tools just thrown on the stone floor.

“Have you got a key to this house, John?”

“No.”

“In that case I’ll climb in.”

Tilda grabbed hold of both sides of the frame with her gloved hands and hauled herself into the darkness inside.

She jumped down onto the floor of a small storeroom

and flicked a switch, but no light came on. The power was turned off.

The traces left by the thieves were clearly visible, however-all the storage boxes had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor. And when she moved through into the main room, she saw fragments of broken glass, just as in the vicarage at Hagelby.

Tilda went over for a closer look. Small pieces of wood lay among the glass, and it was a while before she realized it was a ship in a bottle that had been smashed on the floor.

A few minutes later she heaved herself back out through the window. Hagman was still standing on the grass.

“They’ve been in there,” she said, “and they’ve made a real mess… smashed things.”

She held out a clear plastic bag and showed him the bits of wood she had collected-the remains of the model ship.

“Is it one of Gerlof’s?”

Hagman looked sadly at the bits and nodded. “Gerlof has a cottage here in the village… he’s sold ships in bottles and model boats to plenty of the summer visitors.”

Tilda pushed the bag into her jacket pocket. “And you haven’t heard or seen anything at night from these cottages?”

Hagman shook his head.

“No unusual traffic in the area?”

“No,” said Hagman. “I mean, the owners go home to the city in August every year. In September there was a firm out here replacing some floors. But since then there hasn’t…”

Tilda looked at him. “A flooring company?”

“Yes… they worked in these houses for several days. But they made sure everything was properly locked up when they’d finished.”

“It wasn’t a plumbing firm?” said Tilda. “Kalmar Pipes and Welding?”

Hagman shook his head. “They were laying floors,” he said. “Young lads. Several of them.”

“Laying floors…” said Tilda.

She remembered the newly polished floor at the vicarage in Hagelby, and wondered if she’d found a pattern.

“Did you talk to them?”

“No.”

Tilda went around the other cottages nearby with Hagman, and made a note of which ones had broken window frames.

“We need to get in touch with the owners,” she said as they walked back toward the police car. “Have you got contact details for them, John?”

“For some of them, yes,” said Hagman. “Those who have decent manners.”

When Tilda got back to the station, she called a dozen or so owners of cottages on Öland or in the Kalmar area who had reported break-ins during the fall.

Four of the owners she managed to get hold of either had floors sanded or replaced in their summer cottages earlier in the year. They had used a local firm in northern Öland: Marnäs Fine Flooring.

She also called the vicarage in Hagelby; the owners were now home from the hospital. Gunnar Edberg still had his hand in a cast, but he was feeling better. They had also used the firm in Marnäs to lay a new floor.

“It went really well,” said Edberg. “They were here for five days early on in the summer… but we never saw them, we were in Norway at the time.”

“So you lent them the keys,” said Tilda, “even though you didn’t know who they were?”

“It’s a reliable firm,” said Edberg. “We know the owner, he lives in Marnäs.”

“Have you got his number?”

Tilda had the bit between her teeth now, and she called the owner of Marnäs Fine Flooring as soon as she finished talking to Gunnar Edberg. She quickly spelled out the purpose of her call: to find out the names of the men who had been working in northern Öland laying floors over the past year. She stressed that they weren’t suspected of any crime, and that the police would appreciate it if the owner didn’t mention her call to his employees.

No problem. The owner of the flooring company gave her two names, along with their addresses and ID numbers.

Niclas Lindell

Henrik Jansson

Both good men, he assured her. Decent, capable, and conscientious. Sometimes they worked together, sometimes separately-usually for residents of the island when they were away on holiday, and in summer cottages out of season when the owners had gone home. There was plenty of work.

Tilda thanked him and asked one last question: Could she have a list of the houses where Lindell and Jansson had worked during the summer and fall?

That information was held on a calendar on the company’s computer system, the owner told her. He would print out the pages and fax them over to her.

When she had hung up, Tilda switched on her own computer and checked out Lindell’s and Jansson’s ID numbers in the police database. Henrik Jansson had been arrested and fined for driving illegally in Borgholm seven years earlier-he had driven a car at the age of seventeen without a license. There was nothing else relating to either him or Lindell.

Then the fax machine whirred into action and the list of jobs carried out by Marnäs Fine Flooring started churning out.

Tilda was quickly able to establish that of the twenty-two house owners who had had work done on their floors, seven had reported break-ins over the past three months.

Niclas Lindell had worked in two of the houses. But Henrik Jansson had worked in all of them.

Tilda felt the same excitement as the hunter in the forest when an elk appears. Then she noticed something else: during one week in August, Henrik Jansson had been at the manor house at Eel Point. According to the job sheet, the work had been “to sand floors, ground floor.”

Did it mean anything?

Henrik Jansson lived in Borgholm. According to the calendar, he was out on a job outside Byxelkrok today, and given the current situation, he was welcome to carry on laying floors in peace and quiet. Tilda needed more time before calling him in for an interview with the police.

Then the silence was broken by the sound of the telephone ringing. She looked at the clock-it was already quarter past five. She was almost certain she knew who it was.

“Marnäs police station, Davidsson.”

“Hi, Tilda.”

And she was right.

“How are you?” said Martin.

“Fine,” she said, “but I don’t have time right now. I’m just in the middle of something important.”

“But Tilda, wait-”

“Bye.”

So there. She put the phone down without feeling even the slightest bit curious about what he wanted. It felt like a liberation to realize that Martin Ahlquist had suddenly become so unimportant to her. Right now Henrik Jansson was the man in her life.

Tilda’s goal was to find Henrik and arrest him-and on the way to the cells, to ask him a couple of questions. She wanted to know why he had attacked pensioners, of course-but also why he had smashed the ship in a bottle that Gerlof had made.

The summer was unusually wet on Öland that year, and our second winter at Eel Point was worse than the first. Much colder, and with even more snow. In January and February the school in Marnäs was closed every Monday, as I recall, because the snowplows hadn’t managed to clear the roads after the snowfall over the weekend.

– MIRJA RAMBE