The Darkest Room (6 page)

No one in the collective had shown any kind of staying power or respect for the house, and the neighbors in the houses around them had fought for many years to get rid of them. When Joakim and Katrine finally took it on, the house was dilapidated and the garden almost completely overgrown—but both of them had tackled the renovation of the Apple House with the same energy as they had devoted to their first shared apartment, on Rörstrandsgatan, where a crazy eighty-two-year-old had lived with her seven cats.

Joakim had been working as a craft teacher and had devoted himself to the house in the evenings and on weekends; Katrine had still been working part-time as an art teacher, and had spent the rest of the time on the house.

They had celebrated Livia’s second birthday along with Ethel and Ingrid in a chaotic mess of ripped-up floorboards, tins of paint, rolls of wallpaper, and various power tools—with only cold water because the hot water system had broken down that same weekend.

By the time Livia turned three, however, they had been able to have a proper old-fashioned children’s party on newly stripped wooden floors, with walls that had been smoothed down and papered, and staircases and banisters that had been repaired and oiled. And when Gabriel celebrated his first birthday, the house had been more or less finished.

These days the place looked like a turn-of-the-century house again, and could be handed over in good order, apart from the leaves in the garden and the lawn that needed mowing. It was waiting for its new owners, the Stenbergs, a couple in their thirties with no children, who both worked in the city center but wanted to live on the outskirts.

Joakim pulled up by the gravel driveway and reversed so that the trailer ended up by the garage. Then he got out and took a look around.

Everything was quiet. The only neighbors whose house was in sight were the Hesslins, Lisa and Michael, and they had become good friends with Katrine and Joakim—but there were no cars in their driveway this afternoon. They had repainted their house last summer, this time in yellow. When the magazine
Beautiful Homes had
done a feature about it the previous year, it had been white.

Joakim turned to look over at the wooden gate and the gravel path leading to the Apple House.

His thoughts turned involuntarily to Ethel. Almost a year had passed, but he could still remember her calling out.

Beside the fence a narrow track led through a grove of trees. No one had seen Ethel walking down the track that evening, but it was the shortest route down to the water.

He started to walk up to the house, and looked up at the white façade. The luster was still there, and he remembered all those long brushstrokes when he had gone over it with linseed oil two summers ago.

He unlocked the door, opened it up, and walked in. When he had closed the door behind him, he stopped again.

He had cleaned up over the last few weeks in preparation for the move, and the floors still looked free of dust. All the furniture, rugs, and pictures from the hallway and the rooms were gone—but the memories remained. There were so many of them. For more than three years he and Katrine had put their souls into this house.

You could have heard a pin drop in the rooms around Joakim, but inside his head he could hear all the hammering and sawing. He took off his shoes and moved into the hallway, where a faint smell of cleaning fluid still hung in the air.

He wandered through the rooms, perhaps for the very last time. Upstairs he stopped in the doorway of one of the two guest bedrooms for a few seconds. A small room, with just one window. Plain white wallpaper and an empty floor. Ethel had slept here when she was living with them.

Some of their things were still down in the cellar, those there hadn’t been room for on the moving van. Joakim went down the narrow, steep staircase and started gathering them together: an armchair, a few chairs, a couple of mattresses, a small ladder, and a dusty birdcage—a souvenir of William the budgerigar, who had died several years ago. They hadn’t managed to finish cleaning properly down here, but one of their vacuum cleaners was still there. He plugged it in and quickly vacuumed the painted cement floor, then wiped down the cupboards and ledges.

The house was empty and clean.

Then he collected up the cleaning equipment—the vacuum
cleaner, buckets, cleaning fluid and cloths—and placed them at the foot of the cellar stairs.

In the carpentry workshop on the left, many of his spare tools were still hanging. Joakim started packing them into a cardboard box. Hammers, files, pliers, drills, squares, screwdrivers. Modern screwdrivers might be better, but they weren’t as solid as the old-fashioned ones.

Brushes, handsaws, spirit level, folding rule …

Joakim was holding a plane in his hand when he suddenly heard the front door opening on the floor above. He straightened up and listened.

“Hello?” came a woman’s voice. “Kim?”

It was Katrine, and she sounded anxious. He heard her close the front door behind her and walk into the hallway.

“Down here!” he shouted. “In the cellar!”

He listened, but there was no reply.

He took a step toward the cellar stairs, still listening. When everything remained deathly silent up above, he quickly went upstairs, realizing at the same time how improbable it was that he would see Katrine standing there in the hallway.

And of course she wasn’t there. The hallway was just as empty as when he had come into the house half an hour before. And the front door was closed.

He went over and tried the handle. It was unlocked.

“Hello?” he shouted into the house.

No reply.

Joakim spent the next ten minutes going through the entire house, room by room—despite the fact that he knew he wasn’t going to find Katrine anywhere. It was impossible, she was still on Öland.

Why would she have taken her car and driven after him all the way to Stockholm, without even calling him first?

He’d misheard. He must have misheard.

Joakim looked at the clock. Ten past four. It was almost dark outside the window.

He took out his cell phone and keyed in the number for Eel Point. Katrine should have picked up Livia and Gabriel and be back home by now.

The phone rang out six times, seven, eight. No reply.

He rang her cell phone. No reply.

Joakim tried not to worry as he packed the last of his tools and carried them out to the trailer along with the furniture. But when everything was done and he’d turned out all the lights in the house and locked up, he took out his cell phone again and rang a local number.

“Westin.”

His mother, Ingrid, always sounded worried when she answered the phone, Joakim thought.

“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”

“Hi there, Joakim. Are you in Stockholm now?”

“Yes, but …”

“When will you be here?”

He heard the pleasure in her voice when she realized it was him, and just as clearly the disappointment when he explained that he couldn’t come over and see her this evening.

“But why not? Has something happened?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I just think it’s safer if I drive back to Öland tonight. I’ve got our Rambe painting with me in the trunk and a load of tools in the trailer. I don’t want to leave them out overnight.”

“I see,” said Ingrid quietly.

“Mom … has Katrine called you today?”

“Today? No.”

“Good,” he said quickly. “I was just wondering.”

“So when are you coming to see me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We live on Öland now, Mom.”

As soon as they’d hung up, he rang Eel Point.

Still no reply. It was half past four. He started the engine and pulled out onto the street.

The last thing Joakim did before he headed south was to hand in the keys of the Apple House at the real estate office.
Now he and Katrine were no longer property owners in Stockholm.

The rush-hour traffic heading for the suburbs was in full swing when he hit the freeway, and it took him forty-five minutes to get out of the city. By the time the traffic finally thinned out it was quarter to six, and Joakim pulled into a parking lot in Södertälje to call Katrine one more time.

The phone rang four times, then it was picked up.

“Tilda Davidsson.”

It was a woman’s voice—but he didn’t recognize the name.

“Hello?” said Joakim.

He must have keyed in the wrong number.

“Who’s calling?” said the woman.

“This is Joakim Westin,” he said slowly. “I live in the manor house at Eel Point.”

“I see.”

She didn’t say anything else.

“Is my wife there, or my children?” asked Joakim.

A pause at the other end of the phone.

“No.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m a police officer,” said the woman. “I’d like you to—”

“Where’s my wife?” said Joakim quickly.

Another pause.

“Where are you, Joakim? Are you here on the island?”

The policewoman sounded young and slightly tense, and he didn’t have much confidence in her.

“I’m in Stockholm,” he said. “Or rather on the way out … I’m outside Södertälje.”

“So you’re on your way down to Öland?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been to pick up the last of our stuff from our house in Stockholm.” He wanted to sound clear and lucid and make the policewoman start answering questions. “Can you tell me what’s happened? Have any of—”

“No,” she interrupted him. “I can’t say anything. But it would be best if you got here as quickly as possible.”

“Is it—”

“Watch your speed,” said the policewoman, breaking off the conversation.

Joakim sat there with the silent cell phone to his ear, staring out at the empty parking lot. Cars with their headlights on and lone drivers whizzed past him out on the freeway.

He put the car in gear, pulled out onto the road, and carried on heading south, doing twelve miles above the speed limit. But when he began to see pictures in his head of Katrine and the children waving to him outside the house at Eel Point, he pulled off the road and stopped the car again.

The phone rang only three times on this occasion.

“Davidsson.”

Joakim didn’t bother saying hello or introducing himself.

“Has there been an accident?” he asked.

The policewoman didn’t speak.

“You have to tell me,” Joakim went on.

“Are you still driving?” asked the woman.

“Not right now.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone for a few seconds, then came her reply:

“There’s been an accident. A drowning.”

“A … a death?” said Joakim.

The policewoman was once again silent for a few seconds. Then she replied, sounding as if she were reciting a formula she’d learned by heart:

“We never give out that kind of information over the telephone.”

The little cell phone in Joakim’s hand seemed to weigh two hundred pounds; the muscles in his right arm were trembling as he held it.

“Possibly. But this time you have to,” he said slowly. “I want a name. If someone in my family has drowned, you have to give me the name. Otherwise I’ll just keep on calling.”

Silence at the other end of the phone.

“Just a moment.”

The woman disappeared again; it felt to Joakim as if several minutes passed. He shivered in the car. Then there was a scraping noise on the phone.

“I have a name now,” said the woman quietly.

“Whose?”

The policewoman’s voice was mechanical, as if she were reading out loud.

“The victim’s name is Livia Westin.”

Joakim held his breath and bowed his head. As soon as he had heard the name, he wanted to get away from this moment, away from this evening.

The victim
.

“Hello?” said the policewoman.

Joakim closed his eyes. He wanted to put his hands over his ears and silence every sound.

“Joakim?”

“I’m here,” he said. “I heard the name.”

“Good, so we can—”

“I have one more question,” he interrupted her. “Where are Katrine and Gabriel?”

“They’re with the neighbors, over at the farm.”

“Okay, I’m on my way. I’m setting off now. Just tell … tell Katrine I’m on my way.”

“We’ll be here all evening,” said the policewoman. “Someone will meet you.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want us to send for a priest? I can—”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “We’ll sort things out.”

Joakim switched off his phone, started the car, and pulled quickly out onto the road again.

He didn’t want to spend any more time talking to some policewoman or priest, he just wanted to get to Katrine right now.

She was with the neighbors, the policewoman had said. That must be the big farm to the southwest of Eel Point,
whose cows grazed on the meadows down by the shore—but he didn’t have the telephone number, and right now he couldn’t even remember the name of the family who lived there. Evidently Katrine must have had some kind of contact with them. But why hadn’t she called him herself? Was she in shock?

Suddenly Joakim realized he was sitting there thinking about the wrong person.

He could no longer see anything. The tears started pouring down his cheeks, and he had to pull over to the side of the road, switch on his hazard lights, and rest his forehead on the steering wheel.

He closed his eyes.

Livia was gone. She had sat behind him in the car listening to music this morning, and now she was gone.

He sniveled and looked out through the windshield. The road was dark.

Joakim thought about Eel Point, and about wells.

She must have fallen down a well. Wasn’t there a well lid in the inner courtyard?

Old wells with cracked lids—why hadn’t he checked to see if there were any around the place? Livia and Gabriel had run about wherever they wanted between the buildings; he ought to have talked to Katrine about the risks.

Too late now.

He coughed and started up the Volvo. He wouldn’t stop again.

Katrine was waiting.

When he was back out on the road, he could see her face before him. It had all started when they met while they were viewing the same apartment. Then Livia had come along.