The Darkest Room

44

“Where are we going?” asked Livia as they drove away from Eel Point the day before New Year’s Eve, with the car packed full.

She was still in a bit of a bad mood, Joakim noticed.

“We’re going to see your grandmother in Kalmar, then we’re going up to see your other granny in Stockholm,” he said. “But first of all we’re going to visit Mommy.”

Livia didn’t say any more. She just rested her hand on Rasputin’s cat basket and looked out at the white landscape.

Fifteen minutes later they pulled up at Marnäs church. Joakim parked, took a bag out of the car, and opened the wooden gate.

“Come on,” he said to the children.

Joakim hadn’t been there many times during the fall-but it felt better now. A little better.

There was just as much snow in the churchyard as

everywhere else along the coast, but the main pathways had been cleared.

“Are we going far?” asked Livia as they walked along the side of the church.

“No,” said Joakim, “we’re almost there now.”

At last they were standing in a row in front of Katrine’s grave.

The gravestone was covered in snow, like all the others in the churchyard. There was only one corner showing, until Joakim bent down and quickly swept it clean with his hand, so that the inscription could be seen.

KATRINE MÂNSTRÂLE WESTIN, it said, along with her dates.

Joakim took a step backwards and stood between Livia and Gabriel.

“This is where Mommy is,” he said.

His words didn’t make time stop, but the children stood motionless beside him.

“Do you think it… looks nice?” asked Joakim in the silence.

Livia didn’t reply. It was Gabriel who reacted first.

“I think Mommy will be cold,” he said.

Then he walked cautiously up to the grave in his father’s footsteps and silently began to brush away all the snow. First of all from Katrine’s headstone, then from the ground below it. A bunch of shriveled roses appeared. Joakim had placed them there on his last visit, before the snow came.

Gabriel seemed happy with the result. He rubbed his nose with his gloved hand and looked at his father.

“Well done,” said Joakim.

Then he took a grave lantern out of the plastic bag. The ground was frozen, but it was still possible to push it down firmly. Inside he placed a thick candle. It would burn for five days, into the new year.

“Shall we go back to the car?” Joakim asked, looking at the children.

Gabriel nodded, but bent down and started to tug at

something lying beneath the snow next to Katrine’s headstone.

It was a piece of pale green fabric, stiff and frozen to the ground. A sweater? The strip Gabriel had hold of looked like a sleeve.

Joakim felt a sudden icy chill down his back. He took a step forward.

“Leave that, Gabriel,” he said.

Gabriel looked at his father and let go of the material. Joakim bent down quickly and covered it with a layer of snow.

“Shall we go?” he said.

“I want to stay for a little while,” said Livia, her gaze fixed on the headstone.

Joakim took Gabriel by the hand and walked back to the main path. They waited there for Livia, who was still standing looking at the grave. After a few minutes she joined them and the family walked back to the car in silence.

Gabriel fell asleep in his seat after just a few minutes.

Livia didn’t start talking to Joakim until they were back on the main highway, and she didn’t mention Katrine. She asked how many days of the holiday were left, and talked about what she was going to do when preschool started again. Just small talk, but Joakim was happy to listen to her.

They arrived in Kalmar at about twelve o’clock and rang Mirja Rambe’s doorbell. She hadn’t made a special effort to clean up the apartment for Christmas-quite the opposite, the piles of books on the dusty parquet floor had grown even higher. There was a Christmas tree in the main room, but it had no decorations on it and the needles had already started to fall.

“I had intended to come out and see you all on Christmas Day,” said Mirja as she met them in the hallway. “But I didn’t have a helicopter.”

Ulf, Mirja’s young boyfriend, was at home and seemed really pleased to see them, especially the children. He took Livia and Gabriel into the kitchen to show them some toffee that he was in the middle of making on the stove.

Joakim took The Book of the Blizzard out of his bag and gave it back to the author.

“Thanks for the loan,” he said.

“Was it any good?”

“Sure,” said Joakim. “And I understand some things much better now.”

Mirja Rambe leafed through the handwritten pages in silence.

“It’s a book of facts,” she said. “I started writing it when Katrine told me you were going to buy Eel Point.”

“Katrine wrote a couple of pages at the end,” said Joakim.

“About what?”

“Well… it’s a kind of explanation.”

Mirja placed the book on the table between them. “I’ll read it when you’ve gone,” she said.

“I did wonder about one thing,” said Joakim. “How could you know so much about the people who’d lived at Eel Point?”

Mirja gave him a forbidding look. “They used to talk to me when I lived there,” she said. “Have you never talked to the dead?”

Joakim couldn’t answer that one.

“So it’s all true?” he said instead.

“You can never be sure of that,” said Mirja. “Not when it comes to ghosts.”

“But all the stuff you were involved in… did that actually happen?”

Mirja lowered her eyes. “More or less,” she said. “I did meet Markus one last time down at the café in Borgholm. We talked… then I went back to his place. His parents were out. We went up to the apartment, and he pulled me down onto the floor. Not exactly a romantic seduction, but I let him do it-I mean, I thought it proved that we… that we were a couple.

But when Markus got up afterward and I’d pulled my crumpled skirt back on, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He just said he’d met someone else on the mainland. They were getting engaged. Markus referred to what we’d done in his room as saying goodbye.”

There was silence in the room.

“So your boyfriend Markus was Katrine’s father?”

Mirja nodded. “He was a young man on his way out into the world… who closed the chapter involving me in an appropriate way. Then he moved on.”

“But he didn’t die in a ferry accident, did he?”

“No,” said Mirja. “But he should have done.”

They fell silent again. Joakim could hear Livia laughing in the kitchen. It sounded like a lighter version of her mother’s laugh.

“You should have told Katrine who her father was,” he said. “She had the right to know.”

Mirja merely snorted. “We get by…I didn’t know who my father was either.”

Joakim gave up. He nodded and stood up. “We’ve brought some Christmas presents,” he said. “I need some help to carry them up.”

“Ulf will help,” said Mirja. “Are the presents for me?” Joakim looked over at her studio, with all its bright summer paintings.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Lots of presents.”

Five hours after leaving Mirja’s apartment, Joakim and the children arrived in Stockholm. It was almost as cold there as on Öland. The area where Ingrid Westin lived was quiet and calm. She was the direct opposite of Mirja Rambe; her house had been cleaned to within an inch of its life, ready for the new year.

“I’ve got a job,” Joakim told her as they were having dinner.

“On Öland?” said Ingrid.

He nodded. “They called yesterday… I’m going to be filling in as a craft teacher down in Borgholm starting in February. I can carry on working on the house in the evenings and on weekends. I want to make the outbuilding and the upper floor look nice so that people can stay there.”

“Are you going to have summer visitors staying?” said Ingrid.

“Maybe,” said Joakim. “We need more people at Eel Point.”

Afterward they exchanged Christmas presents in Ingrid’s little living room. Joakim handed her a large, long package.

“Happy Christmas, Mom,” said Joakim. “Mirja Rambe wanted you to have this.”

The package was almost three feet long and was wrapped in brown paper. Ingrid opened it and looked inquiringly at him. It was one of the drainpipes Ragnar Davidsson had hidden in the lighthouse.

“Look inside,” said Joakim.

Ingrid turned one end of the pipe to face her. She peered inside, then reached in and pulled out a rolled-up canvas. She opened it out carefully and held it up in front of her. The oil painting was large and dark, and showed a foggy winter landscape.

“What’s this?” said Ingrid.

“It’s a blizzard painting,” said Joakim. “By Torun Rambe.”

“But… is it for me?”

Joakim nodded. “There are lots more… almost fifty of them,” he said. “A fisherman stole the canvases and hid them inside one of the lighthouses at Eel Point. And that’s where they’ve been for more than thirty years.”

Ingrid gazed at the big painting in silence.

“I wonder what it’s worth?” she said finally.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Joakim.

In the evening Livia and Gabriel went outside to make snow lanterns with their grandmother.

Joakim went upstairs. He went past the closed door of the room that had been Ethel’s many years ago and into the room that had been his own bedroom when he was a teenager.

All the posters and most of the furniture had gone, but there was a bed and a bedside table and an old tape player. The black plastic casing was cracked from falling on the floor during some party, but it still worked. It was possible to open the slot.

Joakim inserted a cassette. It had arrived at Eel Point in the mail a couple of days earlier. It was from Gerlof Davidsson.

He settled down on his old bed and pressed Play so that he could hear what Gerlof had to say.