Echoes From the Dead (43 page)

been able to throw himself out, he might even have managed to avoid breaking any bones and made his way back to the main road before darkbut it was impossible to open the passenger door.

Ljunger had locked it using some kind of remote control device.

“Gunnar, I want to get out,” he said, trying to sound decisive, like the sea captain he had once been.

“Soon,” said Ljunger, driving on.

They crossed an old rusty cattle grid between two stone walls, and beyond it the Baltic finally appeared. The sea looked gray and cold.

“Why are you doing this, Gunnar?” asked Gerlof.

“Actually, it was quite unplanned,” said Ljunger. “I was following the bus from Borgholm, and I saw you get off at the southern turning for Stenvik. All I had to do was head straight to the northern turning, drive through the village, then pick you up.” Ljunger slowed down even more, and turned to face him. “What were you doing at Martin Malm’s today, Gerlof?”

Gerlof felt as if he’d been found out. He took his time before answering.

“At Martin’s?” he said. “What do you mean?”

“You and John Hagman,” said Ljunger. “You went in and

John waited outside.”

“Yes. Martin and I had a bit of a chat… We’re both old sailors, after all,” said Gerlof, and added: “How do you know about that?”

“AnnBritt Malm called me on my cell phone while you were

sitting there talking over old times with Martin,” said Ljunger.

“She was worried about all these visits Martin keeps getting from old sea captains … first Ernst Adolfsson, and now you. Twice in the last few weeks, apparently. It’s been pretty busy at Martin’s house.”

“So you and AnnBritt are good friends,” said Gerlof wearily.

Ljunger nodded. “Martin and I are former business associates, but you don’t get much of a conversation with him these days,” he said. “AnnBritt looks after his affairs, and she usually asks me for advice.”

Gerlof leaned back in his seat. Might as well stop pretending the sun was shining now. He couldn’t see anything out the window but darkness and blowing rain “Associates,” he said. “You worked together for quite some

time, didn’t you? Ever since the fifties?”

He reached into his briefcase and took out the book about

Malm Freight again.

“I showed Martin this picture,” he said, “and I’ve looked at it many times … but it took a long time before I saw what was really there.”

“Oh yes?” said Gunnar, swerving around a clump of low

growing trees. They must be near the sea, Gerlof thought. “But now you have? Seen what’s really there?”

Gerlof nodded. “There are two powerful men on the quayside

in Ramneby: August Kant, the factory owner, and Martin Malm, the captain of a cargo ship, standing in a group of young sawmill workers. And August’s hand appears to be resting on Martin’s shoulder in a friendly gesture. But it isn’t August Kant’s hand. It belongs to the man standing behind Martin Malm on the quayside.

I only noticed it a little while ago, on the bus.”

“A picture speaks more than a thousand words,” said Ljunger, braking. “Isn’t that what they say?”

The eastern shore of the island was now in front of them, on the far side of a grassy meadow that had turned yellow. The rain was falling over both land and water, a cold rain that really wanted to be snow.

“And the man standing behind Martin Malm is a sawmill

worker called Gunnar Johansson. Who later changed his name,”

said Gerlof. “Isn’t that right?”

“Not quite, I was a foreman at the mill at the time,” said

Ljunger. “But it’s true, I did change my name to Ljunger when I came to Oland.”

He switched off the engine and everything went very quiet.

The only sound was the wind and the rain.

“That picture should never have been included in the book,”

said Ljunger. “It was AnnBritt who put it in, I didn’t even know about it until after the book had been printed. But only you and Ernst Adolfsson recognized me. Ernst remembered me from school…”

“He grew up in Ramneby,” said Gerlof. “For me it wasn’t that easy to recognize you. But one thing I am wondering …”

He knew he was close to the end now; Ljunger would kill

him, just as he had murdered Ernst.

“… I’m wondering, you were a foreman at the sawmill and

you must have heard the stories about August Kant’s terrible nephew Nils. Was that when you got the idea to…”

“I actually met him,” Ljunger broke in.

“Who?” said Gerlof. “Nils Kant?”

“Nils, yes.” Ljunger nodded. “I’d started as an errand boy

at the sawmill after the war, and Nils came there, he’d escaped from Oland on the run from the police. He was creeping around in the bushes when he spotted me on the road. He told me to go and speak to August Kant. And I did, but the boss didn’t want to know a thing about his killer nephew. He shoved five onehundredkrona notes at me to give to Nils, to get rid of him. I pocketed two of them and gave Nils three.” Ljunger was smiling at the memory. “Then I lived like a king on the money for the rest of the summer.”

“So you realized early on that there was money to be made

out of Nils Kant,” said Gerlof, looking out through the windshield at the rain.

“Yes,” said Ljunger, “but not exactly how much there was to be made. I had no idea. I thought I might get a few thousand and a free trip across the Atlantic to fetch Nils, maybe, when all the fuss had died down. That was what I suggested to August, once he’d made me foreman at the mill, but the old man turned me down flat. He wasn’t in the least interested in bringing the black sheep of the family home to Sweden.”

He lifted his hand and pressed a button next to the steering wheel, and there was a click in the door beside Gerlof.

“It’s open now,” he said. “Get out.”

Gerlof stayed where he was.

“But you didn’t give up,” he said, looking at Ljunger. “When August said no, you contacted Nils’s mother, Vera Kant, in Stenvik.

You made her the same offer. And she said yes, didn’t she?”

Gunnar Ljunger sighed, as if he had a particularly stubborn

child sitting next to him. He gazed out through the windshield at the coastal landscape.

“It was Vera who made me discover this beautiful island,” he said. “I came here for the first time in the summer of ‘58. I took the ferry across to Stora Ror, then the train north. They were in the process of closing down the railway at that time, and seafaring on Oland was coming to an end too. I suppose many people thought Oland was dying … but I heard people on the train talking about a bridge that might be built. A long bridge, so that people could get off the island when they wanted to. And so that people from the mainland could come here.”

“The rich people from the mainland,” said Gerlof.

“Exactly.” Ljunger took a deep breath. “And then I came up

here to northern Oland and discovered the sunshine and all the beaches where you could swim. Plenty of sunshine and water, but hardly any tourists. So I’d been doing some thinking, even before I knocked on the door of Vera Kant’s house in Stenvik.” He sighed.

“Vera was sitting there in her big house, all alone and longing for her son. I started talking to her.”

“Lonely and unhappy,” said Gerlof. “But extremely rich.”

“Not as rich as you might think,” said Ljunger. “The quarry

was well on the way to closing, and her brother had claimed the family sawmill in Smaland.”

“She was rich in land,” said Gerlof wearily. “Land along the coast… beach land.”

He wondered how he was going to die. Did Ljunger have

some kind of weapon with him? Or was he going to pick up one of the millions of stones on Oland and simply smash Gerlof’s skull, more or less as he had done with Ernst?

“Vera had a great deal of land, yes,” said Ljunger. “I don’t think anybody in Stenvik actually realized how much land that old woman owned, both north and south of Stenvik. Of course it was worthless as long as she didn’t do anything with it, but the right person would be able to take it over and sell it to people from the mainland … In the fifties there were only a few summer cottages up here, but I knew there’d be a demand for plenty moreand hotels and restaurants too. And when the bridge was

built, the prices would skyrocket.”

“So you got Land from Vera,” said Gerlof.

“I got nothing.” Ljunger shook his head. “I bought all her

land, perfectly legally. At a very low price, of course, and with money I’d borrowed from Vera, but it’s all documented and perfectly legal.”

“And Martin Malm borrowed money from her for bigger

ships.”

“Exactly. We’d met when Martin was transporting timber

to Ramneby,” said Ljunger, nodding. “I needed reliable people to work with … somebody who would bring Nils’s coffin home from overseas, and later Nils himself. Of course it was going to have to be some time before Nils could come home, because the minute he did, Vera would stop giving me land. I realized that, naturally.”

He smiled at Gerlof with satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

Ljunger opened the driver’s door.

Gerlof looked out through the windshield. He saw a desolate meadow leading to the shore, with the wind and rain pressing the grass down to the darkened ground.

“What’s here?” he asked.

“Not much,” said Ljunger, getting out of the car. “You’ll see.”

Gunnar Ljunger had closed his own door, quickly walked

around the car, and opened the passenger door. He was waiting impatiently for Gerlof to get out.

“I need to put on” Gerlof began.

But Ljunger reached in with a gloved hand.

“You don’t need a coat, Gerlof.” Ljunger wore his yellow padded jacket, with lAngvik conference center in black on the back.

“You’re warm now, aren’t you?”

Ljunger was at least fifteen years younger than Gerlof, tall and broad and with plenty of strengthin his arms. He gripped Gerlof firmly under the arm and lifted him easily out of the car.

“Come on.”

He slammed the car door, pointed his key ring at it, and

pressed a little button. The car doors locked with a quiet click.

For Gerlof this sort of thing was almost like magic. He had his cane with him, but his briefcase was still on the floor inside the car.

He took a few uncertain steps, out onto the rainsoaked meadow by the sea, beginning to get an idea of Ljunger’s intentions.

For the first minute it was actually quite pleasant for his

body to get out of the saunalike heat of the car; the wind was oddly refreshing, and it felt as though he didn’t need any outdoor clothes.

But Gerlof wouldn’t survive without his overcoat, he knew

that. The cold was crippling out here, only a few degrees above zero. The wind was gusting in off the Baltic, and the drops of rain were like little nails on his face.

“Look at this, Gerlof.” Ljunger had gone a short distance along the gravel track beside the meadow and was pointing to a stone wall in front of a small clump of trees. A solitary, stunted tree was growing next to the wall. “Can you see what this is?” he asked.

Gerlof took a few stumbling steps toward him.

“An apple tree,” he answered quietly.

“Exactly, an old apple tree.” Ljunger gripped his arm and

pulled him carefully but firmly toward the shore. Once again he pointed. “And over there,” he said, “you can hardly see it, but it’s actually an old gooseberry bush.” He looked at Gerlof. “And what does that mean?”

“An abandoned garden,” said Gerlof.

“Exactly. There are stones from the foundations of the house beneath the grass.” Ljunger looked around. “I found this beach a few years ago. It’s usually peaceful here, even in the summer. You can sit and think and sometimes…” Ljunger looked at the apple tree again. “Sometimes I just sit here and think about this old tree and about the people who used to live here. Why aren’t they still here, when it’s such a lovely spot?”

“Poverty,” said Gerlof, shivering for the first time.

He was trying to hold himself erect in the wind, not to shake or sway. But all he had on his upper body was a thin shirt and an almost equally thin undershirt, and he was beginning to feel the autumn chill penetrating through the fabric.

“Yes, they would definitely have been poor,” agreed Ljunger.

“Maybe they sailed away across the Atlantic, like Nils Kant and thousands of others from Oland. But the point is …” He paused again. “The point is that they never saw all the great opportunities here on this island. People from Oland never have.”

Gerlof merely nodded; Ljunger could say whatever he liked.

“I want to get back in the car,” he said.

“It’s locked,” said Ljunger.

“I’ll freeze to death soon.”

“Go home to Mamas, then.” Ljunger pointed at the wall beside the stunted tree. “There’s a gap in the wall over there. Behind it a path leads north along the shore, past an old openair dance floor … It’s actually only a couple of kilometers up to the village, as the crow flies.”

Gerlof wobbled in the wind. He didn’t care what happened

now; he had something important to say.

“I know, Gunnar.”

Ljunger looked at him without replying.

“Like I said before … I worked it all out on the bus, when I saw that it was you standing behind Martin Malm.”

Ljunger shrugged. “Ernst Adolfsson waved that picture at

me too,” he said, “but he started gabbling about a whole lot of other stuff too, old land registrations and so on. I’m not that easily scared.”

“He got there ahead of me,” said Gerlof tiredly. “I thought

Ernst told me everything, but he didn’t. What did he want

from you?”

“The quarry. He wanted to buy the quarry from me for a

pittance, and in return he wouldn’t tell the whole world what he knew about my dealings with Vera.”

“That wasn’t too much to ask, surely?” said Gerlof.

“Don’t say that,” Ljunger snapped. “The land is worthless

now, but it could be extremely valuable in the future. A casino set into the hillside on Oland … who knows? So I turned down his offer.” Ljunger looked at Gerlof. “But you old sea captains overestimate your own importance, I think, if you imagine anyone else is interested in things that happened decades ago.”