The Darkest Room (13 page)

“So she seemed perfectly normal before she died?”

“More or less,” said Joakim Westin, looking down into his coffee cup. “A bit tired and low, maybe … Katrine was finding it quite hard to be alone while I was working in Stockholm.”

Silence fell again.

“May I use your bathroom?” said Tilda.

Westin nodded. “Out through the porch and it’s to the right along the corridor.”

Tilda left the kitchen. She found her way easily; after all, she had been in the house before.

The smell of paint had almost gone from the porch and corridors now, and the house felt a little more lived in.

In the corridor leading to the bedrooms a painting had been hung up recently. It was an oil painting depicting a grayish-white landscape—it looked like northern Öland in the winter. A snowstorm was swirling over the island, blurring all the contours. Tilda couldn’t remember having seen the island depicted in such a dark, forbidding way before, and remained standing in front of the picture for a while before she went on to the bathroom.

It was small but warm, tiled from floor to ceiling, with a thick blue rug on the floor and an old-fashioned bathtub standing on four lion’s paws made of cast iron. When she had finished, she went back into the corridor and past the closed doors leading to the children’s rooms. She stopped at the next bedroom along; the door was half open.

A quick look?

Tilda poked her head in and glimpsed a small room with a big double bed. There was a small bureau next to the bed, with a framed photograph of Katrine Westin, waving from a window.

Then Tilda saw the clothes.

A dozen or so hangers with women’s clothes on them were hung around the bedroom walls like pictures. Sweaters, pants, tops, blouses.

The double bed had been neatly made, and a white nightgown lay tidily folded on one pillow—as if it had been placed there in the expectation that the woman who owned it would come and put it on when darkness fell.

Tilda looked at the strange collection of clothes for a long time, then backed out of the bedroom.

On the way back to the kitchen she heard the inspector’s voice:

“Well, time we were getting back to our duties.”

Göte Holmblad had finished his coffee and got up from the table.

The atmosphere in the room seemed less tense now. Joakim Westin stood up and glanced briefly at both Tilda and Holmblad.

“Fine,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

“No problem,” said Holmblad, and added, “Of course you are at liberty to pursue this matter, I want you to know that, but of course we would very much appreciate it if …”

Westin shook his head. “I won’t be taking it any further. …

It’s over.”

He accompanied them into the hallway. Out on the steps he shook hands with both officers.

“Thanks for the coffee,” said Tilda.

Dusk had fallen, and there was a smell of burning leaves in the air. Down by the shore the lighthouse was flashing.

“Our constant companion,” said Westin, nodding toward the light.

“Do you have to take care of the lighthouses in any way?” asked Holmblad.

“No, they’re automated.”

“I heard the stones they used to build them were taken from an old abandoned chapel,” said Tilda, pointing toward the forest in the north. “It was somewhere down by the point.”

It felt as if she were showing off and trying to play the tourist guide, but Westin was actually listening.

“Who told you that?”

“Gerlof,” said Tilda, and explained: “He’s my grandfather’s brother over in Marnäs; he knows quite a bit about Eel Point. If you want to know more, I can ask him …”

“Sure,” said Westin. “Tell him he’s welcome to come over for coffee sometime.”

When they were back
in the car, Tilda looked over at the big house. She thought about all those silent rooms. Then she thought about the clothes hanging on the walls in the bedroom.

“He’s not feeling too good,” she said.

“Of course he isn’t,” said Holmblad. “He’s grieving, after all.”

“I wonder how the children are doing?”

“Small children forget pretty quickly,” said Holmblad.

He pulled out onto the coast road heading for Marnäs and glanced over at Tilda.

“Those questions you asked in the kitchen were a little … unexpected, Davidsson. Did you have something in particular in mind?”

“No … it was really just a way of making contact with him.”

“Well, maybe it worked.”

“We could probably have asked him a lot more.”

“Oh?”

“I think he had things to tell us.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” said Tilda. “Maybe … family secrets.”

“Everybody has secrets,” said Holmblad. “Suicide or accident? That’s the question … but it’s not our job to investigate.”

“But we could look for traces,” said Tilda, “quite impartially.”

“Traces of what?”

“Well … of someone else at the scene.”

“The only traces that were found were of the dead woman,” said Holmblad. “Besides which, Westin was the last person to see his wife. He said that, after all. In which case, if we’re going to look for a murderer, we need to start with him.”

“I was thinking, if I have time to …”

“You’re not going to have any time, Davidsson,” Holmblad
went on. “Local police officers are always short of time. You’ll be visiting schools, picking up drunks, stopping the graffiti, investigating break-ins, patrolling the streets of Marnäs, and keeping an eye on the traffic on the roads outside town. And you’ll also be sending reports to Borgholm.”

Tilda thought for a moment.

“In other words,” she said, “if there’s any time left after all that, I can knock on doors in the properties around Eel Point and look for witnesses to Katrine Westin’s death. That would be okay, wouldn’t it?”

Holmblad looked out through the windshield, without a smile.

“I suspect I’ve got a future inspector sitting next to me,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Tilda, “but I’m not looking for promotion.”

“That’s what they all say.” Holmblad sighed, as if he were contemplating his own career choices. “Do what you want,” he said eventually. “As I said, you’re responsible for organizing your own time, Davidsson, but if you find anything you must hand it over to the experts. The important thing is that you report all activities to Borgholm.”

“I love paperwork,” said Tilda.

When the abyss suddenly opens up, Katrine—what do you do then? Stay where you are, or jump?

At the end of the 1950s, I was sitting on a train in northern Öland next to an old woman on her way to Borgholm. Her name was Ebba Lind; she was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, and when she heard that I lived at Eel Point, she told me a story about the manor house. It was about what happened the day before she went up into the loft with a knife and carved her brother’s name and dates into a plank in the wall:
PETTER LIND
1885–1900.

—
MIRJA RAMBE

WINTER 1900

It is the first year
of the new century. There is not a breath of wind on this sunny Wednesday, the last in January, but Eel Point is completely cut off from the outside world.

The blizzard moved in across Öland the previous week, and for twelve hours the entire coast was covered in snow. Now the wind has died away, but the temperature outside is minus fifteen degrees. The road has disappeared under great mounds of snow several feet deep, and the families at the manor have received neither mail nor visitors for six days. The animals still have plenty of fodder in the barn, but there aren’t many potatoes left and as usual there isn’t much wood.

Brother and sister Petter and Ebba Lind have gone out to chop up blocks of ice, which will be buried in the food cellar at the manor to keep the food cool when the spring comes. They clambered over the white ramparts of ice and snow down by the shore at Eel Point after breakfast. The sun was just coming up, shining over an unbroken sea of ice covered in snow. They went past the last island at about nine o’clock,
out into a sparkling world of great expanses of snow and sunbeams.

They are walking on the water now, just as Jesus did. The snow that covers the ice crunches beneath their boots.

Petter is fifteen, two years older than Ebba. He leads the way, but stops and looks back from time to time.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” says Ebba.

“Are you warm enough?”

She nods, almost too out of breath to talk.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see southern Gotland out there?” she asks.

Petter shakes his head. “I think it’s too flat … and a bit too far away.”

After another half hour or so they can finally see open water beyond the ice. The crests of the waves glitter in the sun, but the sea is coal black.

There are many birds out here. Flocks of long-tailed ducks have gathered out at sea, and closer to the ice a pair of swans are swimming. A sea eagle is circling above the line dividing the water and the ice. Ebba thinks it is watching something, perhaps the ducks—but suddenly the eagle swoops and soars upward again with something slender and black in its talons. She shouts to Petter:

“Look at that!”

Eels, there are lots and lots of shiny eels wriggling on the ice. Hundreds of eels that have crawled up out of the sea and can’t get back. Petter hurries over to them and puts his ice saw down in the snow.

“We’ll catch some,” he calls, bending down and opening his rucksack. The eels slither away from him, try to wriggle away, but he follows them and grabs hold of one. Then he picks up more, half a dozen, and his rucksack comes to life and starts writhing around as the eels wind themselves around one another trying to find a way out.

Ebba moves further north and starts to collect some eels
of her own. She picks them up by their flat tails to avoid their sharp little teeth, but they are slimy and difficult to get hold of. But there is plenty of meat on them; every female weighs several pounds.

She pushes two into her rucksack and chases a third, which she also manages to catch eventually.

The air has grown colder. She looks up and sees that the feathery cirrus clouds have drifted west from the horizon and settled like a veil over the sun. Lower, darker rain clouds have followed them, and the wind has gotten up once again.

Ebba has not noticed that the wind has increased, but now she hears the sound of breaking waves out in the open sea.

“Petter!” she shouts. “Petter, we have to go back!”

He is over a hundred yards away among the eels on the ice, and doesn’t seem to hear her.

The waves are getting higher and higher, they are beginning to swirl in across the white edge, making the ice cover slowly begin to rise and fall. Ebba can feel it swaying.

She lets go of the eel she has caught and begins to run toward Petter. But then she hears a terrible sound. Cracks like thunder—not from the clouds in the sky, but from the ice beneath her feet.

It is the deep roar that comes when the waves and the wind make the ice cover break apart.

“Petter!” she shouts again, more afraid than ever.

He has stopped catching eels now and turned around. But he is still almost a hundred yards away from her.

Then Ebba hears a sharp explosion like a shot from a cannon very close by, and she sees the ice opening up. A black crack has appeared in all that whiteness, a dozen or so yards closer inland.

The water is pushing the ice apart. The crack is widening rapidly.

Instinctively Ebba forgets everything else and begins to run. When she stops at the crack, it is almost three feet wide, and it is growing all the time.

Ebba cannot swim, and is afraid of water. She looks at the crack and turns around in despair.

Petter is on his way to her; he is running with his hand over his rucksack but is still more than fifty steps away. He waves toward the land.

“Jump, Ebba!”

She leaps, straight over the black water.

She just manages to land on the far edge of the ice, stumbles and rolls over.

Petter is left alone on the big ice floe. He reaches the edge just thirty seconds or so after Ebba, but by now the crack is several yards wide. He stops and hesitates, and it grows even wider.

The brother and sister stare at each other in terror. Petter shakes his head and points toward the shore.

“You have to fetch help, Ebba! They need to get a boat out!”

Ebba nods and turns away. She races off across the ice.

The wind and the waves continue to break up the ice, and the cracks pursue her. Twice new abysses open up in front of her, but she manages to leap across.

She turns around and sees Petter one last time. He is standing alone on a gigantic ice floe beyond a black gulf that is growing all the time.

Then she has to start running again. The thundering roar as the ice breaks up echoes along the coastline.

Ebba runs and runs with the increasing wind at her back, and now finally she can see the manor between the lighthouses—her home. But the big estate is just a little dark red clump on the land; she is still far out on the ice. She prays to God, for Petter and for herself, and prays to Him to forgive them for going so far out.

She leaps across a fresh crack, slips, but carries on running.

Eventually she reaches the ramparts of ice at the edge of the sea. She gets down on all fours and scrambles over them, sniveling and sobbing. She’s safe now.

Ebba gets up and looks back. The horizon has disappeared behind a veil of fog.

The ice floes have gone too. They have drifted east, off toward Finland and Russia.

Ebba carries on up the shore, sobbing. She knows she must hurry back to the house now and get the lighthouse keepers to put out to sea in their boats. But where are they to look for Petter?

The last of her strength gives out, and she falls to her knees in the snow.

Up on the hill the house at Eel Point looks down on her. The roof of the manor house is white with snow, but the windows are as black as coal.

As black as holes in the ice, or as black as angry eyes. Ebba imagines that God has eyes like that.