The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (11 page)

‘Perhaps he’d had enough of Kent Kloss,’ Gerlof said. ‘Anyway, you’ll be finishing work soon, won’t you?’

‘I’ve got less than two weeks to go,’ Tilda said. ‘My holiday starts on the sixteenth.’

‘Let’s hope things stay nice and quiet, then.’

‘Absolutely. I hope you have some peace and quiet, too.’

But Gerlof knew that things were never really quiet when there were teenagers around. He was going to be alone with them for the next five days, until Julia returned from Gothenburg.

Ulrik the audiologist came back to Stenvik the day after the midsummer weekend to make the final adjustments to Gerlof’s new hearing aid.

He seemed pleased.

‘Don’t forget to take it off when you go to bed,’ he said. ‘And turn it off at night to save the batteries.’

He switched on the device, looked up at the trees and the blue sky, and added, ‘I wouldn’t mind working in the country all the time.’

Ulrik was talking to himself, but to Gerlof it sounded as if someone was shouting in his ear. It was almost
too
loud. He could hear lots of other things, too: a chainsaw in a garden somewhere inland, a moped rattling along the coast road and the faint buzz of a light aircraft.

All at once the outside world was very close. It was as if a volume control in his ears had been slowly turned down over the course of several years and had suddenly been turned back to full strength.

‘I can hear
everything
,’ he said, blinking at Ulrik in astonishment. ‘Is that normal?’

‘How does your own voice sound? Is it echoing inside your head?’

‘A little bit.’

The audiologist clicked on his computer and the echo diminished.

‘I’m putting on four different programs,’ he explained. ‘That means you can adjust the hearing aid to suit you, depending on the context – whether you’re listening to the birds, chatting to someone, listening to the radio, or you just want to hear more distant sounds.’

‘You mean if I want to eavesdrop?’

Ulrik smiled. ‘In that case, you need to choose the setting for gossip.’

When Ulrik had gone, Gerlof remained sitting in the garden, amazed at all the sounds he could hear. He had regained a lost world.

An ear-splitting screech from the east almost made him jump, but it was only a lovesick cock pheasant wandering around the freshly mown meadow calling for hens.

Suddenly, Gerlof heard two voices from another direction, somewhere to the south. He turned his head but could see only trees behind him. The voices were coming through the forest, possibly from the coast road. Or from the shore? They sounded so close, but Gerlof had experienced this phenomenon before on Öland. Because the island was so flat, voices could sometimes be heard over a distance of several kilometres, if the wind was in the right direction.

He adjusted the hearing aid.

The eavesdropper’s setting, he thought, feeling slightly ashamed of himself.

The voices were much clearer now. A man and a woman were talking; Gerlof couldn’t hear what they were actually saying, but the man sounded calm, the woman more agitated. She was speaking much faster and louder; his responses were slow. It seemed like an intimate conversation between close friends. Friends, or lovers?

Gerlof tried to adjust the sound in his ear, improve his ability to eavesdrop, but he still couldn’t make out what they were saying. Were they speaking Swedish, or a different language?

Then the catch on the gate rattled and Gerlof saw that his grandchildren were back from the jetty. He sat up straight and quickly turned down the volume; their cheerful shouts were a little too much.

Mats looked around as if to make sure that no adults were listening, then leaned closer to Jonas and lowered his voice.

‘You can’t come to Kalmar with us. You do understand that?’

Jonas was sitting next to him on Uncle Kent’s leather sofa. He wanted to protest, have the courage to stand up to his older brother, but he said nothing.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t understand it at all.’

‘Because you’re too young for the film,’ Mats said. ‘You have to be over fifteen to see
Armageddon
.’

Jonas looked at him. He knew that the battle over the cinema trip was already lost, but he went on anyway: ‘I’ve seen films like that in Marnäs. The two of us have … All we had to do was walk in.’

Mats waved a fly away from his ear. ‘Yes, but this is different. They check on everybody in Kalmar. They’ve got security, they ask for ID. You don’t have any, which means you wouldn’t get in and you’d have to sit on a park bench waiting for the film to end. You’d be hanging around Kalmar on your own all evening … Is that what you want?’

Jonas shook his head. Mats was eighteen, Urban nineteen, and he knew they’d got together behind his back and chosen an American action movie with a 15+ certificate so that Casper could go with them but Jonas couldn’t.

‘You’ll get the money for the ticket anyway, that’s no problem,’ Mats said. ‘But Dad and Kent and Veronica will think you’re with us in Kalmar, so try and stay out of the way until we get back.’ He smiled. ‘Go and play with one of your little friends.’

Play? Jonas didn’t have any real friends in the village. All the boys were either older than him, or much younger. He wasn’t allowed to hang out with the older boys, and the younger ones were boring.

Hiding away inside Villa Kloss wasn’t an option, because the adults were having a party. If he could have disappeared without a trace for the evening, he would have done just that.

‘Hi there, you two!’

Their father came into the big room. Jonas thought he was looking at his two sons as if they were no more than recent acquaintances, in spite of the fact that they had seen him several times over the past few years.

‘So you’re off to the cinema in the big city tonight?’

Jonas didn’t say a word.

‘Are you catching the bus to Kalmar, Mats?’

‘Urban’s driving.’

‘OK. Stay off the beer, in that case.’

Mats looked up at the ceiling, then down at his father.

‘But I expect you’ll be having a few drinks at the party tonight, Dad? Knocking them back?’

‘No,’ Niklas said, but he couldn’t look his son in the eye. ‘Have you ever seen me drunk, Mats?’

‘Mum has. She says you were often drunk when you were married.’

Jonas stared at the floor, wondering where everyone else was. Please let Veronica come in …

Niklas looked at Mats.

‘That was a long time ago. Before you were born. In our first apartment. We had a few parties that got a bit out of hand. And Anita … Anita wasn’t always sober back then either. I could tell you a few tales about her.’

‘Don’t start badmouthing Mum.’

‘I’m just telling it like it was, Mats.’

Jonas got up, slowly and silently. If he moved very carefully, perhaps no one would notice him. Like a ghost, he drifted towards the glass door leading to the veranda; he was almost there when the call came.

‘Jonas?’

He stopped, turned around – and saw that Dad had found a smile somewhere and plastered it on.

‘Fancy a swim?’

The sky was blue and the air dry and warm outside, but Jonas still felt chilled to the bone. And alone, in spite of the fact that he was walking next to his father. There was no trip to the cinema in Kalmar to look forward to tonight, just loneliness.

They walked across the baking-hot coast road and out on to the ridge. Niklas didn’t speak until they were passing the burial cairn. He pointed to the stones and said, ‘People think there’s treasure buried beneath the cairn. You know it’s an ancient grave, don’t you?’

Jonas nodded. ‘We learned about the Bronze Age in school. It came between the Stone Age and the Iron Age.’

‘Exactly. So there’s a Bronze Age chieftain buried here, just like King Mysing in his burial mound in the south of the island. But you’re not scared, are you?’

‘Not me,’ Jonas said.

Not at the moment, anyway, he thought; not when the sun was shining and his dad was here. The cairn was completely harmless right now. But he didn’t like being out here in the evening, when it became a portal to another world, and the ghost came out and turned people into killer zombies.

His dad had said something, asked a question as they started down the stone steps leading to the water.

‘What?’ Jonas said.

‘Is Mum OK?’

‘Yes … I suppose so. She spends a lot of time working.’

‘Good,’ his dad said. ‘It’s good that she’s got a job.’

He looked as if he wanted to ask more questions about Mum, so Jonas hurried down the steps.

They could hear cheerful cries from the jetty further north, but the shore down below Villa Kloss was empty and red-hot. The waves lapped gently against the flat, greyish-white rocks. Niklas pointed to a row of thick poles extending a couple of hundred metres straight out into the water, just to the south of the bathing area.

‘I see the fishermen have laid their gill nets this year, too. There must be some eels left in the Sound …’

A limestone boathouse near the bottom of the steps housed the sun loungers and swimming gear belonging to the Kloss family. It was padlocked, but Casper had given Jonas the combination.

Casper’s rubber dinghy was in there, along with a couple of plastic oars, but the air had gone out of it over the winter, and it looked deflated and a bit pathetic. Casper hadn’t used it for several years. Jonas must have grown seven or eight centimetres since he last sat in it, and he was definitely heavier. He probably wouldn’t be able to use it after this summer, but he dragged it out into the sun anyway.

‘Are you going out in that?’ his father asked.

Jonas nodded.

‘Well, don’t go too far … I’ll help you blow it up.’

While his father was pumping more air into the dinghy, Jonas quickly pulled on his trunks. He just wanted to get out on to the water, follow the nets and see if any eels were moving around down there in the darkness.

He didn’t want to spend any more time talking to his father. If he did, then sooner or later he would ask him what he had done to end up in prison; all Jonas knew was that it was something bad. Something to do with money and the customs office. Something Dad didn’t want to talk about.

‘Dad fucked things up for the whole family,’ Mats had once said when they were alone. As if the fault lay not in what their father had done, but in the fact that he had got caught.

The summer evening seemed to be ageing, turning as grey as the Homecomer as the light vanished on the west coast of the island. The sun began to go down, and the day’s short shadows quickly grew longer. The horizon disappeared, and sea and sky became a darkening curtain in the west. The figures moving beneath the trees were almost invisible.

It was time.

Pecka and the Homecomer had entered the Ölandic’s private area through the north fence then made their way south through the forest. They had kept out of sight of the shore until they reached the dock. The car park in front of them was empty now; all the cars had left.

‘How are you feeling?’ the Homecomer asked.

‘Fine,’ Pecka said, but his eyes were darting all over the place, and he hadn’t said much all evening. Pecka had grown a lot quieter since the murder of the security guard, but he still obeyed orders.

They had remained hidden among the trees until the sun went down, but now they stepped out and moved towards the water. Towards the L-shaped quay and the ship on the outer side of the dock.

The Homecomer had spent so much time watching the ship over the past few days that he almost felt like a member of the crew. There were four men on board, all foreigners. Today there had been no loading or unloading, and all the indications were that the ship would set sail tomorrow morning. Tonight the crew were probably up at the hotel, celebrating. Happy and unsuspecting.

Time to get on board.

They made their way quickly towards the quayside, the Homecomer in front, with Pecka a few steps behind him.

Both were armed. Pecka didn’t want to carry a gun any more, but he was carrying a freshly sharpened axe. The Homecomer had the Walther hidden behind his back.

‘Here we go, then,’ he said.

‘OK,’ Pecka replied, pulling the balaclava over his head.

The Homecomer could feel his age in his legs but increased his speed.

Once they reached the quayside and everything was quiet, Pecka pressed a key on his mobile and allowed it to ring out twice, which was the signal to Rita to start up the launch, come around the point and board the ship from the other side. When they had finished, all three of them would make their escape in Rita’s boat. That was the plan.

But suddenly they heard a rumbling noise, disturbing the peaceful evening.

The Homecomer slowed down. At first he couldn’t work out what was going on, but then he realized that someone had just started up the ship’s engines. He heard Pecka behind him: ‘Fuck! We’ll have to forget the whole thing!’

The Homecomer shook his head and kept on going.

‘There are too many of them!’ Pecka yelled. ‘They’re all on board … they’re leaving tonight!’

But the Homecomer just kept on walking towards the ship, the gun hidden behind his back. He headed straight for the gangplank, knowing that Pecka was following him, in spite of his protests.

Yes, there were lights on the bridge – the crew were on board. The Homecomer spotted one man in the stern, a seaman who must have just come up on deck. He was in his fifties, dressed in blue overalls, and had started repairing a broken air vent with a piece of corrugated cardboard. He looked extremely bored.

The Homecomer was so close to the ship that he could read the name on the prow:
Elia
. The hull was dark, a mixture of rust and black paint.

He heard an angry buzzing through the throbbing of the engines. Rita had rounded the point in the little launch.

The seaman looked up and saw the two visitors. He stared at them with no trace of suspicion, merely surprise.

The Homecomer walked to the edge of the quay and said, ‘Good evening,’ in a calm, steady voice.