Echoes From the Dead (49 page)

Julia shook her head again, but there was no strength in the movement.

“Someone who helped out,” Gerlof went on. “Who helped Gunnar Ljunger and Martin Malm get the coffin to Oland, and who was there when it was opened and examined… Someone who could convince everyone that Nils’s body had come home. A reliable young policeman.”

Gerlof turned his head and looked toward the door.

Julia turned.

Lennart was back. He’d opened the door of Gerlof’s room without her noticing. He came in as if everything were perfectly normal.

“That was my boss on the phone again,” he told them.

“They’ve finished their investigations up in Marnas now, so I can get back to work when I…”

Lennart stopped, seeing their grim expressions.

“Has something happened?” he asked.

“We were talking … about the sandal, Lennart,” said Gerlof.

“Jens’s sandal.”

“The sandal?”

“The one you borrowed from me,” said Gerlof. “Did you ever get a reply from your forensic technicians over on the mainland?

Did they find anything on it?”

Lennart shook his head. “No,” he said. “No traces … They didn’t find anything.”

“You said you’d sent it,” said Julia, looking at him.

“You did send it, didn’t you?” said Gerlof. “I’m sure we can check … that they got it?”

“I don’t know … maybe,” said Lennart.

He was looking at Gerlof the whole time, but there was no anger in his eyes. No emotions at all. His face was pale, and he slowly lifted his hands and placed them on the back of the chair.

“One thing I was wondering about, Lennart…” said Gerlof.

“When did you actually meet Gunnar Ljunger for the first time?”

Lennart looked down at his hands. “I don’t remember,” he said.

“Don’t you?”

“It must have been … ‘61 or ‘62.” His spoke in a monotone.

“In the summer, when I’d just joined the police in Marnas. He’d had a breakin at his restaurant in Langvik… and I went to take a statement. We started talking.”

“About Nils Kant?”

Lennart nodded. He wouldn’t look at Julia.

“Among other things,” he said. “Ljunger knew… He’d found out I was the son of the district superintendent who’d been shot. A few weeks later he called me. He asked me to come and see him again. He wanted to know if I was interested in trying to find Kant, to entice him back home, so we could bring him to justice for what he’d done to my father …”

Lennart stopped speaking.

“What did you say to him?”

“I said I was interested,” replied Lennart. “I would help him, and he would help me. It was a business arrangement.”

Gerlof nodded slowly. “Did it come to an end a few days ago?” he said quietly. “At Marnas police station? Were you afraid he’d start telling your colleagues things about you? Who was actually holding the gun, Lennart… the one Gunnar Ljunger was shot with?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“A business arrangement,” said Julia quietly.

She looked out of the window. She could see the twilight out there, but this time, she wasn’t thinking of the twilight.

She was thinking about the fact that Martin Malm had got money for new ships.

And that Gunnar Ljunger had acquired lots of cheap land to sell at a high price.

And that Lennart Henriksson, the man she had come to believe she was in love with, had finally got his revenge on Nils Kant.

All at the price of her son’s life.

“It was just an arrangement,” Lennart told them. “I would help Ljunger and Martin Malm with certain things … And they would help me.”

“So you met in the fog on the alvar… that day,” said Gerlof.

“Ljunger called me that morning and said they were going to the memorial cairn,” said Lennart. “We were to meet there. But I was delayed, and by the time I got there everything had gone terribly wrong… Martin Malm was lying on the ground, covered in blood. Kant had hit him with a shovel. Malm never really recovered … He had his first brain hemorrhage just a few days later.”

“And my Jens?” said Julia in a low voice.

“It was an accident, Julia. I didn’t see him…” said Lennart, his voice thick; he still wouldn’t look at her. “When Kant was dead, we found … we found the little body underneath the car.

He didn’t… have time to get away when I ran over Kant…”

He fell silent.

“Where did you bury him?” asked Gerlof.

“He’s down in the churchyard, in Kant’s grave.” Lennart was speaking like someone forced to recall a terrible dream. “We took the boy’s body and Kant’s up there in the darkness. We put a bell on the church gate so we’d hear if anybody came along, and lifted the turf. We put the earth on a tarpaulin. Then we dug half the night. Martin Malm, Ljunger, and me. All three of us … we dug and dug. It was dreadful.”

Julia squeezed her eyes shut.

By a stone wall, she thought. My Jens is buried by the stone wall surrounding Mamas churchyard, murdered by a man filled with hatred just as Lambert had said.

She took a deep breath.

“But before you buried Jens,” she said, her eyes closed and her voice faint, “you came down to Stenvik that evening and helped look for him. You led the search for the boy you’d killed… my son … And then you drove around pretending to search on the alvar, so you could get rid of any traces you’d left behind.”

“But it hasn’t been easy,” he said quietly, still not looking at her. “I just want to say that, Julia, it hasn’t been easy keeping quiet. This autumn, when you came back… I really wanted to help you. I tried … I wanted to forget everything that happened twenty years ago. I wanted you to forget too.” He stopped, then added, “I really thought it was going to work.”

“So Nils Kant is really lying in his coffin,” said Gerlof.

Lennart nodded. “I haven’t spoken to Gunnar Ljunger for many years. Not about this … I had no idea what he was intending to do to you, Gerlof.”

He let go of the back of the chair and turned slowly around; once again he looked just as exhausted as the first time she’d seen him, at the quarry, the day she found the body of Ernst Adolfsson.

Perhaps even more exhausted.

“One thing I can say… shooting Ljunger felt better than taking revenge on Nils Kant,” he said.

Lennart opened the door and left the room.

Gerlof breathed out in the silence of his hospital room.

He looked at his daughter. “I’m … sorry, Julia,” he whispered.

“So terribly sorry.”

She nodded and met his gaze, tears pouring down her face.

At that moment Julia felt she could see what Jens would have looked like as an adult. She could see it in Gerlof’s face.

They would have been very much alike, grandfather and grandson. Jens would have had big, slightly sad eyes, thoughtful furrows in his broad forehead, and a wise, understanding gaze that could see both darkness and light in the world.

“I love you, Dad.”

She took Gerlof’s hand and held it tightly.

It was the first real spring day, a day of sunshine and warmth and flowers and birds, when the sky above Oland seemed to rise like a pale blue sheet in the wind. A day when life seemed to be full of possibilities again, however old you were.

For Bengt Nyberg, the local reporter, spring had always felt like the real start of the new year on Olandwhen it condescended to turn up. He was happy to spend as much time outdoors as possible on days like this.

Bengt had a lot of vacation time due him. He could have

taken days off to go walking in the spring warmth, listening to the nightingale’s carefree song out on the alvar, where the last pools of water formed by the melting snow were just drying up in the sunbut he wanted on this particular day to work.

Bengt closed his eyes for a few seconds in the sunshine, then opened them and looked across toward Marnas church on the other side of the stone wall.

When the grave had been opened up last winter, there had

been plenty of curious, uninvited spectators by the churchyard, a veritable sea of people kept at a distance by the police barriers.

At the funeral this Thursday there were only a few, and they had been asked by the priest to remain on the other side of the wall.

So Bengt was standing there with his notepad as the only

reporter, and beside him a young photographer was stomping around, sent from the head office in Borgholm, despite the fact that Bengt had said he could take the pictures himself. But this was a big story, something they might be able to sell to the nationals, and in that case of course Bengt’s simple camera and quick shots wouldn’t do.

The photographer they’d sent hadn’t been working there

long; he was a young lad from Smaland, called Jens just like the little boy, and presumably he regarded OlandsPosten as the first steppingstone in his careera career that was bound to lead to one of the evening papers in Stockholm in a few years. He was ambitious, but boring. When he wasn’t taking pictures, he talked constantly about celebrities he wanted to take sneaky shots of, or horses he wanted to win money on, and Bengt wasn’t remotely interested in either topic.

Jens was restless. As soon as the journalists had been directed to a spot outside the wall by the churchwarden, the young photographer started to look for a better vantage point, his camera poised.

“I think I can get into the churchyard,” he said to Bengt, looking eagerly over the stone wall. “If I just creep along …”

Bengt shook his head and didn’t move.

“Stay where you are,” he said quietly. “It’ll be fine here.”

So the two men stood outside the wall waiting in the sunshine, and after a while the funeral cortege came out of the church. Jens’s automatic camera began to whir.

Julia Davidsson, the mother, walked along the path behind the priest, her face calm and her body very still. Beside her was Gerlof, the grandfather. Both were dressed in black. Behind them came a tall man about the same age as Julia, wearing a black coat.

“Who’s that?” whispered Jens when he had lowered the

camera.

“The boy’s father,” answered Bengt.

Julia Davidsson was holding on to her father’s arm, and the old man leaned on her all the way over to the grave, which lay south of the church tower. They stood side by side as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Gerlof bent his head; Julia threw a white rose on top of the coffin.

This felt pretty good, in Bengt’s opinion. So many terrible things had happened around here in just six months: Ernst Adolfsson’s terrible death in the quarry at Stenvik last autumn, Gunnar Ljunger’s violent end at the police station just two weeks later, and the discovery of the second sandal belonging to the boy, found by the police in Ljunger’s office safe at the hotel in Langvika little shoe that matched the one Martin Malm, the late shipowner, had sent to Gerlof.

It had seemed as if the case was closed, but suddenly Lennart Henriksson had demanded a new police investigation of how Ljunger’s death had occurred, which had led to the policeman being charged with the murder of Gunnar Ljunger and with the manslaughter of Jens Davidsson.

Finally, Nils Kant’s grave had been opened up one cold, gray winter’s day.

The police technicians had erected a sceneofcrime tent over the grave, like a little church made of white fabric beside the big church, and had worked there quietly for several days, occasionally seeking warmth inside the heated porch. During the exhumation they had found not only Nils’s body in the coffin but also the remains of another man, still unidentified, who was presumably a Swedish national who had lived in South America for many years.

The rumor was that he had been killed there.

Hidden in a hollow beneath Nils Kant’s coffin, the police had also found a third body, much smaller than the other two. And with that the case had finally been solved.

The evening papers and national radio and TV reporters had swarmed to Marnas to follow the whole thing. It had been a hectic time for a local reporter at the center of eventsbut Bengt had found it difficult to maintain a journalistic distance from what was going on, and had often felt a piercing sadness while he was filing his reports. He had known Lennart Henriksson for several decades: there was nothing to rejoice over in this drama.

But now the sun was shining; it was a kind of Oland New Year.

After more than twenty years in the ground, a little boy could finally be buried properly.

When the short ceremony at the graveside was over, Julia and Gerlof Davidsson began to move slowly back toward the church, followed by Jens’s father, Michael.

Julia and Gerlof weren’t talking to each other, as far as Bengt could see from the other side of the wall. He hadn’t seen them speak at all during the whole ceremony. But he still had a strong feeling that they were as close as two family members can possibly beand he even felt a slight pang of envy.

“That’s that, then,” said the photographer, lowering his camera.

“Are we done?”

Bengt took one last look at the faces of Julia and Gerlof accepting nowand realized the fog he’d glimpsed in them once had at long last lifted.

“We are,” said Bengt. “We can go home now.”

He hadn’t written a single word on his notepad, and would probably just write a brief piece to go with the picture in the paper.

That would have to do. But if anyone were to ask him later what the little boy’s funeral had been like, Bengt Nyberg would be able to reply that it had felt bright and dignified and peaceful, likewell, like a kind of conclusion.

The End.

Acknowledgments

Echoes from the Dead is set mainly at some point in the mid1990s on the beautiful island of Olandbut an Oland which to some extent exists only in the author’s imagination. Neither the characters nor the businesses in the story are based on reallife individuals or companies, and many places are also invented.

For all the stories and memories they shared with me from

their eventful lives, I am grateful to my grandfather, sea captain Ellert Gerlofsson, and his brother, the hairdresser and diver Egon Gerlofsson. For historical facts I would like to thank Stellan Johansson, a sea captain in Bohuslan; Kristian Wedel, a journalist in Gothenburg; and Lars Oscarsson, an attorney in Jonkoping.