Echoes From the Dead (45 page)

Gunnar changes direction without saying a word.

Nils thinks he can hear a faint sound in the fog; he stops again and listens. A car on the village road? He listens hard, but hears nothing more.

They’re close now, but when Gunnar and Martin finally stop

at a fairly big mound of grass, Nils still doesn’t think they’ve arrived.

He can’t see the stones of the cairn anywhere.

“Here it is,” says Gunnar tersely.

“No,” says Nils.

“Yes.”

Gunnar kicks at the grass a few times, revealing the edge of a stone.

Only then does Nils realize that the memorial cairn doesn’t

exist anymore. It’s been forgotten. No traveler has placed a stone on it to honor the dead for decades, and the yellow grass of the alvar has swallowed it.

Nils thinks about the last time he was here, when he hid the treasure. He was so young then, young and almost proud of having shot the soldiers out on the alvar.

Nothing has been right since then. Everything has gone

wrong.

Nils points. “Here… somewhere here,” he says. “Dig here.”

He looks at Martin, standing there with the shovel in his hand, fumbling as he tries to get yet another cigarette into his mouth.

Why is he so nervous?

“Get digging,” says Nils. “If you want the treasure.”

He steps aside and walks round to the other side of the cairn.

Behind him he can hear a shovel being driven into the ground.

The digging begins.

Nils gazes out into the fog, but nothing is moving. Everything is silent.

Behind him Martin has begun to dig a deep trench in the

ground. His shovel has already struck several rocks, which Gunnar has had to remove with the pick, and he is red in the face. He is breathing heavily and looking nastily at Nils.

“There’s nothing down here,” he snarls. “Just rocks.”

“There must be,” says Nils, looking down into the hole. “This is where I hid it.”

But the hole is empty, he can see thatjust as Martin says.

“Give me that,” says Nils crossly, reaching for the other

shovel.

Then he begins to dig himself, with rapid, deep thrusts.

After a minute or so he sees the flat slabs of limestone he took off the cairn so long agothe slabs he placed around the metal box to protect it.

They’re still there, blackened by the earth now, but the treasure is gone.

Nils looks up at Martin.

“You’ve taken the treasure,” he says quietly, taking a step

closer to him. “Where is it?”

“Here we are, said Lennart, switching off the engine of the police car. “What do you think of my little hideaway?”

“It’s lovely,” said Julia.

He’d turned onto a private drive a few kilometers north of

Marnas, driven slowly along between the trees, then stopped in a glade. The bluegray sea lay ahead, and in front of it Lennart’s redbrick house and his little garden.

It wasn’t big, just as he’d said, but the location was wonderful.

The only thing visible beyond the house was the sweeping

expanse of the horizon. The neatly cut lawn sloped down toward the sea, almost imperceptibly blurring into a broad, sandy beach.

The bare trunks of the pine trees framed the garden like the walls of a church, providing shade and subduing any sound.

Once Lennart had switched off the engine, the silence had an air of solemnity about it; the only sound was the wind soughing in the treetops.

“The pine trees were brought in and planted, of course,” said Lennart, “but that was long before my time.”

They got out of the car, and with her eyes closed, Julia inhaled the scent of the forest.

“How long have you lived here?”

“A long time … almost twenty years. But I’m still very happy here.” He glanced around, as if he were looking around for the first time, then asked, “Are you allergic to cats? I’ve got a Persian called Missy, but I think she must be out somewhere.”

“No problem, I’m fine with cats,” said Julia, following him

into the house on her crutches.

Its brick walls looked sturdy, as if no winter storm from the Baltic would ever be able to move them. Lennart unlocked the door and held it open for her.

“You’re not very hungry yet, are you?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine,” said Julia, walking into a small entrance hall that led into the kitchen.

Lennart wasn’t a fussy housekeeper, just tidy. The whole house was much neater than Julia’s little apartment in Gothenburg, with copies of OlandsPosten tidily arranged in a wooden newspaper rack on the wall. The only clue to his profession was a few copies of the magazine Swedish Police in the same rack. There were several fishing rods in the hall, two or three plants in each window, and a wellstocked shelf of cookbooks above the stove in the kitchen.

Julia couldn’t see any beer cans or bottles of alcohol anywhere.

She was pleased about that.

Lennart moved around switching on lamps in the windows of

the big room beyond the kitchen.

“Do you want to go down to the shore,” he called out, “before it gets too dark? If we take an umbrella?”

“Love to, as long as I can manage on my crutches.”

Lennart laughed. “We’ll take it carefully. If you go out onto the point, you can see Boda on a clear day,” he said, adding, “You know, the bay with the big sandy beach.”

Julia smiled. “Yes, I know where Boda is,” she said.

“Of course you do. I forgot you were brought up here. Shall

we go?”

She nodded, and glanced at the clock. A quarter past five.

“Do you mind if I use the phone first?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“I’ll just give Astrid a quick ring and tell her where I am.”

“It’s on the countertop,” said Lennart.

Astrid always gave her number when she answered the

phone, so Julia had learned it off by heart. She keyed it in quickly and heard the phone begin to ring. On the fifth ring Astrid picked up, with Willy barking furiously in the background.

‘Julia,” she said when she realized who it was. “I was out at the back raking leaves. Where are you?”

“I’m in Marnas, or rather north of Marnas, at Lennart

Henriksson’s. We’ve”

“Is Gerlof there with you?”

“No,” said Julia. “I assume he’s at the home.”

“No, he isn’t,” said Astrid firmly. “The lady who’s in charge there, Boel, rang me a little while ago, wondering where he was.

He went off this morning with John Hagman, and he hasn’t come back.”

“I expect he’s with John, then,” said Julia.

“No,” said Astrid, again firm. “It was John who called Boel.

He’d left Gerlof at the bus station, and Gerlof was supposed to phone him when he got home.”

Julia thought for a moment. Gerlof ought to be allowed to do whatever he wanted, and he was sure to be fine, but…

“I’d better ring the home, then,” she said, despite the fact that all she really wanted to do at the moment was to go down to the shore with Lennart.

“Good idea,” said Astrid, and they said goodbye.

Julia hung up.

“Everything okay?” asked Lennart behind her. He was standing in the doorway and had already put his jacket back on. “Shall we go? We can have a cup of coffee when we get back.”

Julia nodded, but she had a thoughtful furrow in her forehead.

The

sky had darkened now; it was almost evening, and even

colder than before. The soughing of the wind in the tops of the pine trees surrounding the house sounded even more desolate now.

None of the dead has been identified, thought Julia.

It was a headline about a car accident she had read on a placard down in Borgholm, she remembered. It was going round and round in her brain: None of the dead identified, no dead identified…

She turned.

“Lennart,” she said, “I know I’m being a pain and I know I’m worrying for no reason … but can we go down to the shore a bit later on this evening, and drive down to the home in Marnas now?

I need to check that Gerlof has got there.”

OLAND, SEPTEMBER 1972

”“Treasure,? j httvin i taken any fucking treasure, says the man whose name is Martin.

“You hid the metal box,” says Nils, taking a step forward.

“When I turned my back on you.”

“What box?” says Martin, taking his cigarette packet out

again.

“Let’s just all calm down,” says Gunnar behind him. “We’re

all on the same side.”

He’s standing too close, right behind Nils’s back.

Nils doesn’t want him there. He glances quickly behind him,

then looks at Martin again.

“You’re lying,” he says, taking another step forward.

“Me?I was the one that got you home!” snarls Martin angrily.

“Gunnar and I organized everything. We brought you home, on

my ship. As far as I’m concerned, you could have stayed where you were.”

“I still don’t know you,” says Nils, thinking: My treasure. My Stenvik.

“Really?” Martin lights a cigarette. “I couldn’t give a fuck whether you know me or not.”

“Put the shovel down, Nils,” says Gunnar.

He’s still behind Nils, and way too close.

Martin is too close too. Suddenly he raises the shovel.

Nils senses that Martin is planning to strike him with the shaft, but it’s too late. Nils has a shovel too, and he’s already lifted it.

He’s holding the shaft with both hands, and he swings it just as hard as he swung the oar at LassJan thirty years ago. The old rage wells up; all patience is swept away. He has waited and waited.

“It’s mine!” he screams, and the man in front of him suddenly blurs.

Martin moves, but he doesn’t have time to duck. The shovel

strikes Martin on the left shoulder, keeps moving and slices into the skin beneath his ear.

Martin staggers, howling, and Nils strikes again, this time at Martin’s forehead.

“No!”

Martin roars, spins around, and falls, right onto the cairn.

Nils lifts the shovel again, and this time he is aiming for

Martin’s unprotected face.

“Stop it!” roars Gunnar.

At Nils’s feet, Martin raises his arms. Blood is pouring down his face; he is waiting for the killing blow.

But Nils can’t strike him.

“Stop, Nils!”

A hand has gripped the shovel’s shaft. Gunnar is holding the spade, and he pulls it so hard that Nils lets go.

“That’s enough!” Gunnar says loudly. “There was absolutely

no need for this at all! What happened, Martin?”

“Fucking… hell,” whispers Martin, his voice thick and his

arms still raised protectively above his head. “Do it, Gunnar! Don’t wait until…Just do it!”

“It’s too soon,” says Gunnar.

“I’m going now,” says Nils. He takes a step backward.

“Fuck the plan … We need to do it,” says Martin. “He’s fucking crazy, that one …”

He tries to get up, but the blood is pouring from his nose and from the gash in his forehead.

“Someone has taken the treasure … you or someone else,”

says Nils, staring unblinkingly at Gunnar. “So the deal’s off.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m going home now. Home to Stenvik.”

“Okay …” Gunnar sighs wearily. “No more deals, then. We

might as well finish it here.”

“I want to go,” says Nils.

“No.”

“Yes. I’m going now.”

“You’re not leaving,” says Gunnar. “It was never the plan that you should leave this place. Don’t you realize that? You’re staying here.”

“No. I’m going,” says Nils. “It doesn’t end here.”

“It does, actually… after all, you’re already dead.”

Gunnar slowly lifts the heavy pick, looking around in the fog as if he wants to make sure nobody can see what’s happening.

“You can’t go home,” he tells Nils. “You’re dead. You’re buried up in Marnas churchyard.”

Gerlof was shivvering and dead people were showing themselves to him.

They were making noises too. The bones of a warrior who

fell in some longforgotten Bronze Age battle were rattling down on the shorehe closed his eyes to avoid seeing the ghost dancing down there, but he could clearly hear the rattling.

When he opened his eyes he saw his friend Ernst Adolfsson

walking around in circles in the meadow looking for stones in the grass, his body spattered with blood.

And when Gerlof looked out to sea, Death himself was sailing by in the twilight, straight into the wind, aboard an old wooden ship with black sails.

The worst thing of all was when his wife, Ella, sitting beneath the apple tree in her nightgown, looked at him with a sad and serious expression and asked him to give up the struggle. And Gerlof closed his eyes and really wanted to give up and go with her aboard the black ship; he wanted to fall asleep and escape the rain and the cold, to stop worrying and just pretend he was in bed in his room at the home in Marnas. He didn’t know why he was trying to stay awake. Dying was taking a long time, and that bothered him.

The rattling continued down on the shore, and Gerlof slowly

turned his head and opened his eyes.

The horizon, the line between sea and sky, had completely

disappeared in the darkness.

But was it really old bones rattling down there? Or something else? Was there a living human being somewhere nearby?

Somewhere within his numb body a faint spark still flickered, a faint echo of the will to live. It was like hoisting a mainsail in a strong wind, Gerloff thoughtdifficult, but not impossible. He counted: One, two, three, then he pulled himself up to his knees, using the old apple tree for support.

Heaveho, heaveho, he thought, placing his right foot on the

ground.

Then he had to rest for a few minutes. He stayed completely

still, apart from the trembling in his knees, before he made the final lurch into a standing position, like a weight lifter.

Heaveho, heaveho.

It worked. He managed to get up, with one hand clutching

the tree and the other gripping his cane.

The mainsail was hoisted, now the ship could begin moving