Echoes From the Dead (19 page)

but you’d hardly call them mourners. The police were there too, but they were standing further away, almost by the church door.”

“They probably wanted to see that Kant went into the ground, once and for all,” said Gerlof.

“True.” Axelsson nodded. “And that’s everybody who was

there, I think, except for Pastor Fridlund.”

“At least he was getting paid.”

Gerlof polished away at the ship’s little hull for a few minutes.

Then he took a deep breath and said:

“What you said about Vera Kant smiling at the graveside, it

does make you wonder about what was in the coffin …”

Axelsson looked down at his puzzle and picked up another

piece.

“Are you going to ask me if it felt strangely light when we

were carrying it, Gerlof?” he said. “I’ve been asked that question several times over the years.”

“Well, people do talk about it sometimes … the fact that Kant’s coffin might have been empty. You’ve heard that too, surely?”

“You can stop wondering, because it wasn’t,” said Axelsson.

“There were four of us carrying it, both before and after the service, and we definitely needed that many. It was bloody heavy.”

Gerlof felt as if he were questioning the old gravedigger’s integrity, but he had to persist: “Some people say there might have been just stones in the

coffin, or sandbags,” he said quietly.

“I’ve heard that rumor,” replied Axelsson. “I didn’t look

inside myself, but somebody must have… when it arrived here on the ferry.”

“I’ve heard that nobody opened it,” said Gerlof. “It was sealed, and nobody had the nerve or the authority to break it open. Do you know if anybody opened it?”

“No …” said Axelsson. “I just remember vaguely that there was some kind of death certificate from South America that came with the coffin on one of Malm’s cargo ships. Somebody down at the truck depot in Borgholm who knew a bit of Spanish had read it… Nils Kant had drowned, it said, and he’d been in the water for a long time before they pulled him out. So I imagine the body didn’t look too good.”

“Perhaps people were afraid Vera Kant would start making

trouble,” said Gerlof. “I suppose they just wanted to bury Kant and move on.”

Axelsson looked at Gerlof, then shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t ask me,” he said, placing another piece of a water lily in the pond on Monet’s painting. “I just put him in the ground; I did my job and I went home.”

“I know that, Torsten.”

Axelsson placed another piece in the jigsaw, looked at the

result for a while and then at the clock on the wall. He got up slowly.

“Coffee time,” he said. But before he left the room, he stopped and turned his head.

“What do you think, Gerlof?” he said. “Is Nils Kant lying in his coffin?”

“I’m sure he is,” answered Gerlof quietly, without looking at the old gravedigger.

By the time Gerlof had returned to his room, it was already after seven and there was only half an hour left until coffee time. Routine, everything followed a routine at the senior citizens’ home.

But the conversation with Torsten Axelsson in the cellar had been useful, thought Gerlof. Useful. Perhaps he might have been a bit too talkative and insistent toward the end, attracting quizzical looks from Axelsson as a result.

No doubt the gossip had already started in the corridors of

the home about Gerlofs remarkable interest in Nils Kant. It might even spread outside the walls of the home, but so be it. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it: to stir the ants’ nest and maybe make things happen?

He sat down heavily on the bed and picked up that day’s

copy of OlandsPosten from the bedside table. He hadn’t had time to read the paper that morning, or rather he hadn’t had the inclination.

The

death in Stenvik was the big news story on the front page,

and there was one of Bengt Nyberg’s photographs of the quarry with an arrow to indicate exactly where the accident had happened.

It

was an accident, according to the police in Borgholm. Ernst

Adolfsson had been trying to move a stone statue at the edge of the cliff; the old man had tripped and fallen, and ended up with the huge block of stone on top of him. No crime was suspected.

Gerlof read only the beginning of Bengt Nyberg’s article, then leafed through the paper until he found news of less personal significance: a building project that was running well overtime in Langvik, a barn fire outside Lottorp, and the eightyoneyearold suffering from senile dementia who had left his home in southern Oland a few days earlier to go for a walk, and who was still missing without a trace on the alvar. He was bound to be found, but not alive.

Gerlof folded up the paper and placed it back on the table,

then caught sight of Ernst’s wallet. He’d put it aside when he got back from Stenvik. Now he picked it up, opened it, and looked at all the cash inside and an even thicker bundle of receipts. He left the money in the wallet, but he slowly went through the receipts.

Most of them related to small purchases from food stores in

Marnas or Langvik, or were handwritten receipts from Ernst’s own sales of sculpture last summer.

Gerlof was looking for later receipts, ideally from the same day the sculpture of Marnas church tower fell on Ernst. He didn’t find any.

Almost at the bottom of the pile he found something else: a

little yellow entrance ticket for a museum. Ramneby Wood Museum was printed on the ticket, along with a little drawing of planks of wood in a stack, and a date stamp in black ink: Sept. 13.

He left the ticket on the bedside table. He fastened the rest of the receipts together with a paper clip and pushed them into the desk drawer. Then he sat down at the desk, reached for his notebook, and opened it at the first clean page. He picked up a pencil, thought for a little while, then made two notes: VERA KANT WAS SMILING WHEN NILS’s COFFIN WAS BURIED.

And:

ERNST VISITED THE KANT FAMILY’S SAWMILL IN RAMNEBY.

Then he placed the museum ticket in the book, closed it, and settled down to wait for his coffee. Routine, everything was just routine when you got old.

Julia didn’t even remember drinking the first glass of wine. She’d seen Astrid pour it out in front of her at the table in Astrid’s kitchen, seen the red liquid swirling around in the glass and had reached out her hand in anticipationthen suddenly the glass was standing empty on the table. She had the taste of wine in her mouth and a warming dose of alcohol spreading through her body, and the feeling that she had become reacquainted with an old, dear friend.

Outside Astrid’s kitchen window the sun was going down,

and Julia’s legs were aching after a long bike ride along the coast.

“Would you like another glass?” asked Astrid.

“Yes, please,” said Julia, as calmly and evenly as she could manage. “That was lovely.”

She would of course have drunk the wine even if it had tasted of vinegar.

She tried to drink the second glass much more slowly. She

took just a couple of sips, then placed it back on the table and breathed out.

“Difficult day?” asked Astrid.

“Quite difficult,” said Julia.

But in fact nothing much had happened.

She’d cycled north along the coast to the neighboring village of Langvik and had lunch there. And after that she’d been told by an old egg seller on a little farm that her son Jens had been murdered.

Not just dead and buried long agomurdered.

“Quite a difficult day,” said Julia again, and emptied her second glass of wine.

The sky had been clear and full of stars the previous evening as Julia got ready for another night alone in the boathouse.

The stars felt like her only friends here by the deserted shore.

The moon dangled like a splinter of graywhite bone in the east, but Julia had stood down on the coalblack shore looking at the stars for half an hour before she went up to the boathouse. From there she could see another reassuring light: the outside light at Astrid’s house on the opposite side of the road. The lights of the inhabited houses to the north and south along the coast were distant and almost as faint as the glow of the stars, but Astrid’s brightly burning light showed that there were other people out there in the darkness.

Julia had fallen asleep, unusually quickly and calmly, and had woken up feeling rested eight hours later to the sound of the waves moving back and forth on the shore, almost in time with her own breathing.

The rocky landscape was peaceful, and she had opened the

door and looked at the waves without thinking of fragments of bone.

She went up to Gerlof’s cottage to wash and make some

breakfast, and when she took a walk around the yard afterward she found an old bike behind the toolshed. Julia assumed it was Lena’s. It was rusty and needed oiling, but there was plenty of air left in the tires.

That was when she had decided to cycle northward to Langvik

for lunch. In Langvik she would try to find an old man called Lambert, and apologize for having hit him many years earlier.

The coast road to the north was dusty and stony and full of deep holes, but it was possible to cycle along it. And the landscape was just as beautiful as it had always been, with the alvar on the right and the glittering water a few yards below the edge of the cliff on the left. Julia avoided looking over toward the far end of the quarry when she cycled past; she didn’t want to know if the pools of blood were still there.

After that her cycling trip was pure enjoyment, with the sun on one side and the wind at her back.

Langvik was five kilometers north of Stenvik, but it was bigger, and a completely different kind of village. There was a proper area for swimming with a sandy beach, a marina for pleasure boats, several bigger apartment houses in the center, and developments of summer cottages both at the north and south end of the village.

plots FOR sale it said on a sign by the side of the road.

Building was still going on in Langvik: fences and markers and newly laid gravel tracks ran out onto the alvar, coming to an end among huge pallets of tiles encased in plastic and piles of treated timber.

There was also a harbor hotel, of course, running the length of the sandy beach and three stories high, with a big restaurant.

Julia ate her lunch of pasta in the restaurant with a vague

feeling of nostalgia. She had danced here at the beginning of the sixties. The hotel had been smaller when Julia was a teenager, cycling there from Stenvik with her friends, but it had felt quite grand even then. There had been a big wooden veranda above the beach, and that was where they’d danced till midnight. American and English rock music, interwoven with the sound of the waves out in the darkness in the gaps between records. The smell of sweat, aftershave, and cigarettes. Julia had drunk her first glass of wine here in Langvik, and sometimes she’d had a lift home on a puttering moped late at night. Full speed through the darkness, no helmet, with a deep conviction that life could only get more and more fantastic.

The veranda was gone now, and the hotel had been enlarged,

with bright, spacious conference rooms and its own swimming

pool.

After lunch Julia had started to read the book Gerlof had

given her, the one with the title Oland Crimes. In the chapter entitled “The Murderer Who Got Away,” she had read about Nils Kant and what he had done one summer’s day in 1945 out on the alvar, and what happened after that: So who were the two men in uniform that Nils Kant executed

in cold blood that beautiful day out on the alvar?

They were presumably German soldiers who had managed

to get across the Baltic, fleeing the terrible battles in Kurzeme on the west coast of Latvia during the final phase of World War II.

The Germans in Kurzeme were surrounded by the Red Army,

and the only way to escape was to set off across the water in some kind of floating craft. The risks were great, and yet both soldiers and civilians chose to attempt to flee to Sweden from the Baltic lands at that time.

Nobody knows for certain, however. The two dead soldiers

carried no documents or passports which could identify them, and their grave bore no names.

But they had left several traces. What Kant didn’t know

when he left the two bodies lying out on the alvar was that a little greenpainted motorboat with a Russian nameplate had been found abandoned in an inlet a kilometer or so south of

Mamas that same morning.

In the open boat, partly filled with water, were two German

military helmets, dozens of rusty tins of food, a chamber pot, a broken oar, and a little tin containing Dr. Theodor Morell’s medical powder for Russian lice, produced in Berlin exclusively for soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Dr. Morell was Hitler’s own physician.

The

discovery of the boat attracted attentionas does anything

unusual that drifts ashore along the Oland coastand thus

many people in Mamas knew before Kant did that there were

strangers in the area. Some of them even set out to search, armed or unarmed.

Nils Kant had not buried the soldiers he had killed, or even covered their bodies. Corpses out on the alvar quickly attract scavengers, and the noise small animals and birds make as they squabble over their spoils can be seen and heard far and wide.

It was therefore only a matter of time before somebody

searching out on the alvar found the dead soldiers.

When the waitress came to clear the table, Julia closed the book and looked pensively out over the deserted beach below the hotel.

The story of Nils Kant was interesting, but he was dead and

buried, and she still didn’t know why Gerlof thought it was so important for her to read about him.

“Can I pay you now?” said Julia to the waitress.

“Yes, of course. That’ll be fortytwo kronor.”

The waitress was young, probably not even twenty yet, and