The Darkest Room

42

On the morning of Christmas Eve it was still dark at Eel Point. The power hadn’t been restored, and outside the windows huge banks of snow rose up.

Three police officers and a search dog had arrived in the all-terrain vehicle during the night and searched all the buildings without finding Martin Ahlquist’s murderer. Joakim had given them permission to look wherever they liked. After about three o’clock, when they had left for the hospital with Tilda Davidsson and the guy who had been stabbed, he actually managed to sleep for a few hours.

For the first time in several weeks he slept peacefully, but when he woke up at around eight in the silent house he couldn’t get back to sleep. The rooms were still pitch black, so Joakim got up and lit a couple of paraffin lamps. An hour later a stronger light penetrated the snow-covered windows.

It was the sun, rising over the sea. Joakim wanted to see it, but had to go upstairs, open the window on the landing, and

knock aside one of the shutters in order to be able to look out toward the sea.

The coast had been transformed into a winter landscape with a deep blue sky above sparkling snow dunes. The red walls of the barn looked almost black against the dazzling snow.

There was an arctic silence all around the place. There wasn’t a breath of wind-perhaps for the first time since Joakim had moved in.

The blizzard had blown itself out. Before moving on, it had hurled up a three-feet-high wall of sea ice down by the shore.

Joakim looked toward the shore. He had read about old lighthouses that tumbled into the sea during fierce storms, but the twin lighthouses had survived the blizzard. The towers rose above the banks of ice.

Joakim lit fires in the tiled stove at around nine, driving the cold out of the house. Then he woke the children.

“Happy Christmas,” he said.

They had fallen asleep with their clothes on in Gabriel’s bed. That was how he had found them when he came in from the barn the previous night. He had covered them with blankets and let them sleep on.

Now Joakim was ready for questions about what had happened during the night, about the noise of shooting and all the rest of it, but Livia merely stretched.

“Did you sleep well?”

She nodded. “Mommy was here.”

“Here?”

“She came in to see us while you were gone.”

Joakim looked at his daughter, then at his son. Gabriel nodded slowly, as if everything his sister said was true.

Don’t tell lies, Livia, Joakim wanted to say. Mommy can’t have been here.

But instead he asked, “So what did Mommy say?”

“She said you’d come soon,” said Livia, looking at him. “But you didn’t.”

Joakim sat down on the side of the bed. “I’m here now,” he said. “I’m not going to disappear again.”

Livia looked at him suspiciously and got out of bed without a word.

Joakim woke Freddy, who was a quiet, calm young man without his brother. There hadn’t been room for him in the army vehicle, so Freddy had stayed behind, handcuffed to one of the radiators in the hallway.

“Still no sign of your brother,” said Joakim.

Freddy nodded wearily.

“What were you actually looking for?”

“Anything… valuable paintings.”

“By Torun Rambe?” said Joakim. “We’ve only got one. Were you looking for more in the barn?”

“There were no more in the house,” said Freddy. “They were somewhere else, the board said. So we went out and set fire to the staircase.”

Joakim looked at him. “But why?”

“Don’t know.”

“Are you going to do it again?”

Freddy shook his head.

Tilda had given Joakim the keys to the handcuffs, and he decided to show a little good faith and trust this Christmas Eve. He released Freddy from the radiator.

When the power came back on at about eleven, Freddy settled down in front of the television to watch Christmas programs while he waited for the police to come and take him in. With a mournful expression he gazed at cartoons about Santa, live broadcasts showing people dancing around Christmas trees, and a cooking show filmed in some snow-covered mountain chalet.

Livia and Gabriel sat down beside him, but none of them spoke. There was still a kind of Christmas community spirit, and they all seemed to relax.

Joakim went and sat in the kitchen with the notebook he had found next to Ethel’s jacket. For an hour he read Mirja Rambe’s dramatic accounts of life at Eel Point. And the story of what had happened to her there.

At the end there were some blank pages, then a couple that had been written by someone other than Mirja.

Joakim looked more closely and suddenly recognized Katrine’s handwriting. Her notes were scrawled, as if she had been in a great hurry.

He read them several times, without fully understanding what she meant.

At twelve o’clock Joakim prepared Christmas rice pudding for everyone.

The telephone was working, and the first call came after lunch. Joakim answered and heard Gerlof Davidsson’s quiet voice:

“So now you know what a real blizzard is like.”

“Yes,” said Joakim, “we sure do.”

He looked out of the window and thought about last night’s visitors.

“It was expected,” said Gerlof. “By me, anyway. But I thought it would come a bit later… How did you cope?”

“Pretty well. All the buildings are still standing, but the roofs are damaged.”

“And the road?”

“Gone,” said Joakim. “There’s just snow.”

“In the old days it used to take at least a week to get through to some properties after a blizzard,” said Gerlof. “But it’s quicker these days.”

“We’ll be fine,” said Joakim. “I did as you said and bought plenty of tinned stuff.”

“Good. Are you and the children alone now?”

“No, we still have one guest here. We did have several visitors, but they’ve gone…It’s been quite a difficult Christmas.”

“I know,” said Gerlof. “Tilda called me this morning from the hospital. She’d been catching burglars out at your place.”

“They came here to steal paintings,” said Joakim. “Torun Rambe’s paintings… They’d got it into their heads that they were here somewhere.”

“Oh?”

“But we only have one painting here. Almost all the others were destroyed, but not by Torun or her daughter Mirja. It was a fisherman who threw them in the sea.”

“When was that?”

“Winter 1962.”

“Sixty-two,” said Gerlof. “That was the year my brother Ragnar froze to death on the coast.”

“Ragnar Davidsson… was he your brother?” said Joakim.

“My older brother.”

“I don’t think he froze to death,” said Joakim. “I think he was poisoned.”

Then he told Gerlof what he had read in Mirja Rambe’s book about her last night at Eel Point, and about the eel fisherman who set off into the storm. Gerlof listened without asking any questions.

“It sounds as if Ragnar drank wood alcohol,” was all he said. “It’s supposed to taste like ordinary schnapps, but of course it makes you ill. It kills you, in fact.”

“I suppose Mirja saw it as some kind of fair punishment,” said Joakim.

“But did he really destroy the paintings?” said Gerlof. “I’m just wondering. If my brother got hold of something, he kept it… he was too mean to destroy things.”

Joakim was silent. He was thinking.

“There was something else, before I forget,” said Gerlof. “I’ve recorded something for you.”

“Recorded?”

“I’ve been sitting here doing some thinking,” said Gerlof. “It’s a tape with a few ideas about what happened at Eel Point… you’ll get it when they start delivering the mail again.”

Half an hour after Gerlof had hung up, the police called from Kalmar to say they would be coming to collect the suspect from Eel Point-if Joakim could just find them a piece of flat, open ground near the house where a helicopter could land.

“We’ve got plenty of flat ground around here,” said Joakim.

Then he went out and shoveled a square in the field behind the house, hacking away the ice so that a black cross in the frozen ground marked the spot. When he heard a throbbing sound in the southwest, he went in and interrupted Freddy’s viewing.

“Are those your cars?” Joakim asked as they were waiting out in the field. He pointed to a couple of curved mounds of snow on the road down to Eel Point. A few blunt metal corners were protruding from the drifts.

Freddy nodded. “And a boat,” he said.

“Stolen?”

“Yeah.”

Then the helicopter swept in over the field and it was impossible to talk anymore. It hovered for a moment, whirling white clouds up from the ground, before landing in the center of the cross.

Two police officers wearing helmets and dark jumpsuits climbed out and came over to them. Freddy went along with them, without making any kind of protest.

“Are you all okay here now?” shouted one of the police officers.

Joakim simply nodded. Freddy waved, and he waved back briefly.

When the helicopter had vanished in the direction of the

mainland, Joakim plowed back through the snow, over toward the road and the two snow-covered vehicles.

He brushed away the snow from the sides of the largest of them, a van. Then he peered inside.

Someone was sitting in there, motionless.

Joakim seized the handle and opened the door.

It was a man, curled up as if he had desperately tried to preserve the warmth in the driver’s seat.

Joakim didn’t need to feel the man’s pulse to realize he was dead.

The key was in the ignition and it was switched on. The engine must have been ticking over until it stopped sometime during the night, and the cold began to creep back into the van again.

Joakim closed the door gently. Then he went back to the house to call the police and tell them the last burglar had been found.