The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (47 page)

Paulina got in.

Lisa could see by the interior light that the old man was sitting at the wheel. Aron Fredh. He smiled wearily at Paulina as she sat down beside him and gently stroked his cheek.

The car swung across the coast road. It drove past the restaurant and disappeared into the night.

Lisa was left alone by the campsite, where people had begun to emerge from their tents and caravans to gaze up at the damaged ridge to the south, murmuring to each other in their confusion.

She opened her right hand; Paulina had given her something as she was leaving. It was a thick roll of notes. Swedish banknotes.

She closed her hand around it and thought about Silas, her father. Silas would want this money. Silas needed this money. And that need would never end.

But she was tired of giving her father money to feed his drug habit.

She slipped the roll of notes into her pocket and set off. Slowly at first, then faster. She went to her caravan and packed up her clothes, her records and her guitar, then she did what Paulina had told her to do – left the island. She wanted to get home before the police turned up.

Aron stopped the car on the way to the main road, and he and Paulina changed places. He looked back, down towards the inlet.

Everything was in darkness. His head was pounding after the explosion, but at least his hearing seemed to be intact.

‘The cairn the Kloss family built is gone now,’ he said in Russian. ‘And their home and their boathouse. All gone … We’ve done what we came to do.’

Paulina looked at him. ‘I thought you were dead, Papa. You were so close to the bunker, and I …’

‘I always survive,’ Aron said tersely.

Paulina nodded. ‘And what about him?’

‘Him’, that was all she said. Aron had managed to meet up with his daughter in secret a few times over the summer, but Paulina had never mentioned Kent or Veronica Kloss by name.

‘He’s gone,’ Aron said.

‘But she survived,’ Paulina said. ‘She was down in the launch, waiting for him to bring down your body. He was going to shoot you … that’s what they’d planned.’

‘She survived? Veronica Kloss?’

‘Yes. I heard the engine afterwards … the boat was moving away.’

She started the car and set off. Not south towards the mainland, but north, where there was no bridge. Towards the furthest point of the island.

They didn’t meet any other cars, and when the road narrowed and the pine forest began Paulina turned on to a dirt track leading through the trees and switched off the headlights. It was almost two o’clock. Aron was exhausted, and every bone in his body was aching.

Paulina had cleared out her caravan and put her bags in the back seat earlier that evening. She opened one, took out two blankets and reclined the seats. They settled down in the darkness, and silence fell inside the car.

‘We couldn’t let the children come to any harm,’ Paulina said after a while. ‘You do understand that, don’t you, Papa?’

Aron didn’t respond at first. It had been his daughter’s idea to remove the boys from Villa Kloss before the cairn was blown up. She had crept in and placed cloths soaked in chloroform over their faces once they had fallen asleep, and she had given Aron the alarm code.

‘I know,’ he said eventually.

The children, he thought. As Vlad, he had harmed many young people in the thirties. Eighteen-year-olds, seventeen-year-olds, perhaps even younger. He had interrogated them, beaten them, sent them off to the camps without turning a hair. Or he had made them orphans.

‘What did you do with them?’ Paulina asked.

‘Who?’

‘The Kloss children.’

Aron closed his eyes and lay back. ‘I took them across the island and locked them in a boathouse.’

Paulina nodded. ‘We’ll phone someone in the morning and let them know,’ she said, then added, ‘My friend made it, too.’

‘What friend?’

‘Her name is Lisa.’

Silence fell once more; the forest was peaceful. After a few minutes, Aron could hear his daughter’s calm, even breathing, but he couldn’t get to sleep himself; his body was still throbbing and aching.

He must have dropped off eventually, because the sun was in his face when he opened his eyes, its rays shining between the tree trunks. Another glorious summer’s day. Paulina shifted slightly beside him, but she was still asleep.

Aron blinked in the bright light, surprised that he had woken up. Slowly, he began to unbutton his shirt.

Before long, his daughter woke behind the wheel. They exchanged a few quiet words, then she started the car and they continued their journey north across the island.

In Byxelkrok, they saw the sea again, and stopped at the harbour hotel for a cup of coffee. The waitress barely glanced at them.

The police might well be looking for them in the south; there might be patrol cars all over Borgholm; they might even have closed the bridge – but here in the north, no one was interested in them.

There was a telephone kiosk down by the harbour in Byxelkrok; Paulina drove up to it and looked at her father. ‘Are you going to call her now, Papa, and tell her where the children are?’

Aron nodded and got out of the car. He ambled over to the kiosk, picked up the receiver and held it to his ear, but he didn’t make the call.

Instead, he turned his back on Paulina and opened his jacket with his free hand. There was a small tear in the fabric, stained dark red, but the wound was no longer bleeding. Not much, anyway.

It had taken several hours after the explosion for him to realize what had happened, but when he woke at dawn Aron had known that the throbbing in his belly wasn’t normal. Silently, in order to avoid waking his daughter, he had unbuttoned his shirt and discovered a small, narrow wound in his right side.

Kent Kloss hadn’t missed with his first shot after all.

He had a first-aid box in the car, and had dressed the wound with adhesive tape and a clean bandage to stop the bleeding, but his guts were hurting, and when he pressed with his fingers he could feel a piece of lead inside him.

Aron had been shot, for the first time in his life. It was almost funny, but he had to keep it to himself.

Paulina mustn’t find out.

He put down the phone and slowly made his way back to the car. ‘All done,’ he said.

Paulina started the car and they continued northwards, heading for the last outpost: the harbour in Nabbelund and the ferry to Gotland.

‘What did you do with the guns?’ she asked.

Aron jerked his head towards a bag on the back seat. It had been filled with sticks of dynamite earlier on, but now it was almost empty.

‘They’re in there,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop them over the side once we’re far enough out.’

The Grankulla Bay inlet was surrounded by spits of land and low islets covered in dense forest, almost like a lagoon. Laange Erik, the tall white lighthouse, warned ships of shallow waters off the northern tip of the island.

Fortunately, the ferry to Gotland had made its way safely to the quayside and was ready for departure. Aron and Paulina left the old Ford in the car park and walked along the jetty. Aron felt the wind coming off the Baltic on his face. They went aboard; Paulina had booked their tickets all the way home. The ferry would take them to Visby; from there, it was a short flight to Stockholm, then on to Moscow.

Going home.

But of course this wasn’t how Aron had expected it to end; he had intended to die on Öland, in the croft by the shore.

There was a cafeteria on the ferry, a small shop and a passenger lounge equipped with tables and chairs. They chose seats over in a corner, where no one could hear them.

Aron sat down carefully; his stomach was hurting. He looked out of the window to the south, as if he could see Stenvik and all the damage he had caused there.

Then he sighed and said to his daughter, ‘I am a cleanser.’

Paulina was silent for a moment, then she said, quietly but firmly, ‘Not any more. You’ve finished with all that, Papa.’

Aron looked at his hands. ‘Cleansing and purging, that’s all I was good at. It was the only thing I was praised for when I was young, so that’s what I’ve done all my life. Apart from meeting your mother and taking care of you.’

‘That was enough, Papa.’ Paulina reached across and stroked his cheek. ‘We’re going home now; we can rest and eat good food. We’re done with this country.’

She was efficient, as usual, focused, just as she had been when she had applied for the post with Kent Kloss – but Aron sensed a calmness in her after a stressful summer, and a kind of forgiveness, too.

He tried to relax. The quayside was empty now; everyone had either boarded the ferry or gone home. The Ford stood there abandoned; he had left it unlocked, with the keys in the ignition, so that anyone could take it if they felt like it.

Slowly, he got to his feet.

‘I’m hungry,’ he lied. ‘Can I get you something?’

Paulina shook her head. He patted her cheek, allowing his hand to linger a fraction longer. Then he walked out of the lounge.

One minute to departure.

It was time to decide; Aron made up his mind. He went over to the locker and took out his bag, then made a beeline for the gangplank. He jumped ashore only seconds before it was removed.

A young sailor was standing on the quay, holding the last hawser. He looked at Aron in surprise.

‘Changed your mind?’

Aron nodded. His stomach wasn’t hurting quite so much now that he no longer needed to hide the pain. The sun was beginning to warm the air, and he was hardly shivering at all.

The sailor threw the rope on board, and the ferry began to pull away. The stretch of open water between the ship and the quayside quickly grew; soon it was too late to jump on to the deck, even if Aron had been young and fit.

He caught a last glimpse of Paulina’s dark hair through the window. Her head was bowed, and she didn’t see him.

The pain he was feeling now was the pain at the thought of never seeing his daughter again. But in her bag was the money Aron had taken from the safe on the
Ophelia
– over half a million kronor. She would have a good life without him.

Cumulus clouds were beginning to gather above the horizon in the west, grey and hammer-shaped, a forewarning of the bad weather to come in the autumn. A storm was on its way.

He turned his back on the water. There was plenty of time now. His daughter would be stuck on the ferry from Öland to Gotland for several hours.

Taking short steps, he made his way back to the car; he got in and let out a long breath. He threw his bag on the back seat and heard the guns inside clink together. As he thought about them he saw Veronica’s face before him, with that cool expression. He saw her walking around the sunlit lawns at the Ölandic Resort, just as composed and triumphant as Lenin’s widow.

Aron was dying. He didn’t know how many hours he had left – but Veronica Kloss was going to live on.

Was she?

No
, Vlad said inside his head.
No, she wasn’t.

He started the car and glanced over his shoulder at the bag containing the guns. Then he swung the car around and drove south.

For the second time that summer, Jonas woke up in a boathouse, confused and blinking. But this place had thick stone walls, and he wasn’t in a bed. He was lying on a pile of nets, fishing nets that were soft with age and stank of tar. The wind was howling around the boathouse, and he could hear the muted cry of gulls outside.

He realized that he wasn’t alone. Casper and Urban were over by the wall, wearing pyjamas; when he looked down, he saw that he was in his pyjamas, too.

His cousins seemed as drowsy as he was, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.

Jonas knew he had fallen asleep in the chalet, but he had vague memories of the night: a white angel by his bedside, a sweetish smell filling his nostrils. Then rough hands in the darkness.

He closed his eyes, dozed, waited. Someone had left bottles of water on a stool by the wall, and all three boys had a drink. A thin strip of light was visible through a narrow gap under the door, and eventually Urban got up. He pushed the wooden door with both hands, harder and harder, but it was sturdy and impossible to move. It must be secured from the outside somehow. Urban gave up and went back to his pile of nets.

The three of them sat in silence. Jonas had lots of questions, but no one had any answers. As the light outside grew stronger, Urban and Casper started talking to him.

They both had a headache. So did Jonas.

‘It must have been some kind of drug,’ Urban said quietly. ‘They knocked us out while we were asleep.’

‘I remember someone carrying me,’ Casper chipped in. ‘It was a man … an old man. But he was strong.’

The cairn ghost, Jonas thought.

They sat there in the semi-darkness for a long time. None of them had a watch. All they could do was wait. Jonas leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, listening to the wind and the birds.

Then he heard something else: the sound of a car engine nearby. He raised his head. ‘Can you hear something?’

Casper and Urban listened, looking worried.

‘Is it him?’ Casper whispered.

‘Dunno.’

The car drove right up to the boathouse, then the engine was switched off. They heard slow, heavy footsteps approaching through the grass.

The rattle of a padlock, the sound of an iron bar being removed. The door opened.

An old man stood there looking at them, his expression forbidding. Jonas recognized him; it was the man he had seen by the cairn.

Ten metres behind the man he could see a blue Ford.

The man had a black gun in his hand, pointing at the floor, but from the easy way he was holding it Jonas could tell he was used to it. The gun was a tool. He would take aim in a second if it became necessary.

‘Out you come,’ he said.

Jonas and Casper stood up and stepped out through the low doorway. The light was very bright outside; it felt like afternoon. Urban came out last, but the cairn ghost stopped him with his free hand, looking closely at him.