The Darkest Room (7 page)

Becoming responsible for Livia had been a big step, he recalled. They both wanted children, but not quite yet. Katrine wanted to do things in the right order. They had intended to sell the apartment and buy a house outside the city in plenty of time before the first child came along.

He remembered how he and Katrine had sat at the kitchen table talking quietly about Livia for several hours.

“What are we going to do?” said Katrine.

“I’d love to take care of her,” Joakim had said. “I’m just not sure the timing is quite right.”

“It
isn’t
right,” Katrine had said crossly. “Far from it. But we’re stuck with it.”

In the end they had decided to say yes to Livia. They had bought the house anyway, and three years later Katrine had gotten pregnant. Gabriel had been planned, unlike Livia.

But just as Joakim had predicted, he had loved watching her grow up. Loved her bright voice, her energy and her curiosity.

Katrine
.

How must she be feeling right now? She had called to him inside his head, he had heard her.

Joakim changed gear and put his foot down. With the trailer behind the car he couldn’t drive to Öland at top speed, but almost.

The most important thing now was to get to the manor house on the island as quickly as possible—home to his wife and son. They needed to be together.

He could see Katrine’s bright face floating in the darkness in front of the car.

By eight o’clock
in the evening everything was quiet again around the lighthouses at Eel Point. Tilda Davidsson was standing in the big kitchen of the manor house.

The whole house was absolutely silent. Even the slight breeze from the sea had died away.

Tilda looked around and got the feeling she was in the wrong era. Apart from the modern kitchen equipment it was like traveling back to a household at the end of the nineteenth century. A wealthy household. The dining table was large and heavy, made of oak. On the shelves stood copper pans, porcelain from the East Indies, and hand-blown glass bottles. The walls and ceiling were painted white, but the cupboards and wooden cornices were pale blue.

Tilda would have loved to walk into a Carl Larsson kitchen like this every morning, instead of the little kitchenette in her rooms on the square in Marnäs.

She was completely alone in the house now. Hans Majner
and two other colleagues who had traveled from Borgholm up to the scene of the accident had left Eel Point at around seven. Her boss, Göte Holmblad, had come along with them to the scene, but had kept a low profile and left at five, almost at the same time as the ambulance.

The father of the family who lived at Eel Point, Joakim Westin, was due to arrive by car from Stockholm late that evening—and it had been obvious that Tilda was going to be the one to stay behind and wait for him. She was the only one who had offered, and her colleagues had quickly agreed.

It wasn’t because she was a woman, Tilda hoped, but because she was the youngest and had the shortest service record.

The evening shift was okay. The only thing she had needed to do all afternoon, apart from answering the radio and the telephone, was to stop a reporter from
Ölands-Posten
from approaching the scene of the accident with his camera. She had referred him to the duty press officer in Kalmar.

When the paramedics went down to the shore with their stretcher, she had followed them, stood out by the jetty and watched as they slowly lifted the body out of the water between the jetty and the northern lighthouse. The arms hung there lifeless, water pouring from the clothes. This was the fifth death Tilda had been involved in during her time with the police, but she would never get used to seeing lifeless bodies pulled out of the water or out of smashed-up cars.

It was also Tilda who had answered when Joakim Westin rang. It was really against police procedure to inform relatives of a death over the telephone, but it had gone okay. The news had been bad—the worst imaginable—but Westin’s voice had sounded calm and collected throughout the conversation. It was often better to hear bad news as quickly as possible.

Give both the victims and the relatives as much accurate information as possible, as quickly as possible
, she had learned from Martin at the Police Training Academy.

She left the kitchen and went into the house. There was a
faint smell of paint here. The room closest to the kitchen had new wallpaper and a newly polished floor and was warm and cozy, but when she went on along a corridor she could see rooms that were cold and dark, with no furniture. It made her think of condemned apartments she had been into shortly after she became a policewoman, apartments with no heating where people lived like rats.

The house at Eel Point wasn’t really a house Tilda would want to live in, particularly not at this time of year, in the winter. It was too big. And no doubt the coast was lovely when the sun was shining, but in the evening the desolation was complete. Marnäs, with its single shopping street, felt like a densely populated metropolis in comparison to the emptiness of Eel Point.

She left the light on, went out into the glassed-in veranda, and opened the outside door.

A damp chill was drifting in off the sea. There was just one lamp outside, a single lightbulb covered with a cracked glass shade, casting a yellow glow over the cobblestones and rough tufts of grass in the inner courtyard.

Tilda stood in the shelter of the big barn’s stone wall, next to a pile of wet leaves, and took out her cell phone. She really wanted to hear another voice, but she hadn’t got around to ringing Martin this evening, and now it was several hours too late—he would already have gone home from work. Instead she called the number of the neighbors, the Carlsson family, and the mother picked up after two rings.

“How are they?” asked Tilda.

“I’ve just had a look at them and they’re both asleep,” said Maria Carlsson quietly. “They’re in our guest room.”

“That’s good,” said Tilda. “How long will you be up tonight? I was intending to come over with Joakim Westin, but I don’t think he’ll be back from Stockholm for three or four hours.”

“Just come over. Roger and I will stay up for as long as necessary.”

When Tilda had switched off her phone, she immediately felt lonely again.

It was eight-thirty now. She thought about going home to Marnäs to rest for an hour or so, but of course there was the risk that Westin or someone else might telephone here.

She went back into the house through the veranda.

This time she continued along the short corridor and stopped in the doorway of one of the bedrooms. This was a small, cozy room, like a bright chapel in a dark castle. The wallpaper was yellow with red stars, and along the walls sat a dozen or so cuddly toys on small wooden chairs.

This must be the daughter’s room.

Tilda went in cautiously and stood on the soft rug in the center of the room. She guessed that the parents had fixed up the children’s rooms first, so that their son and daughter would quickly feel at home in the manor house. She thought about the room she had grown up in, a small room she had shared with one of her brothers in a rented apartment in Kalmar. She had always longed for a bedroom of her own.

The bed in this room was short but wide, with a pale yellow coverlet and lots of fluffy cushions with cartoon figures on them: elephants and lions wearing nightcaps and lying in their own little beds.

Tilda sat down on the bed. It creaked slightly, but it was soft.

The house was still completely silent around her.

She leaned back, was received by the pile of cushions, and relaxed, her gaze fixed on the ceiling. If she let her thoughts run free, the white surface could become like a movie screen, showing pictures from her memory.

Tilda could see Martin on the ceiling, the way he had looked when he had slept beside her in bed for the last time. It had been in her old apartment in Växjö almost a month ago, and she hoped he would come over to visit her soon.

Nothing is as warm and cozy as a child’s bedroom.

She breathed out slowly and closed her eyes.

If you don’t come to me
,
then I’ll have to come to you …

Tilda sat up with a start, in the middle of a breath, with no idea where she was. But her father was with her, she could hear his voice.

She opened her eyes.

No, her father was dead, his car had gone off the road eleven years ago.

Tilda blinked, looked around, and realized she had been asleep.

She smelled the aroma of newly polished wood and saw a freshly painted ceiling above her, and realized that she was lying on a little bed in the manor house at Eel Point. And straight after that an unpleasant memory of running water flashed into her mind—the water pouring from the clothes on the body down by the shore.

She had fallen asleep in a child’s bedroom.

Tilda blinked away the sleep, glanced quickly at the clock and saw that it was ten past eleven. She had slept for over two hours and dreamed strange dreams about her father. He had been there with her, in the child’s bedroom.

She heard something and raised her head.

The house was no longer completely silent. She heard faint noises that rose and fell, as if someone—or more than one person—was talking.

It was the sound of low voices.

It sounded like muted mumbling. A group of people talking, quietly and intensely, somewhere outside the house.

Tilda got up silently from the bed, with the feeling that she was eavesdropping.

She held her breath so that she could hear better, and took a couple of silent steps toward the door, out of the bedroom, and listened again.

Perhaps it was just the wind between the buildings?

She went out onto the veranda again—and just when she
thought she could distinguish the voices clearly through the glass, they suddenly fell silent.

Everything was dark and still between the large buildings of the manor.

The next moment a bright light swept through the rooms—the headlights of a car.

She heard the faint sound of an engine approaching and realized that Joakim Westin had arrived back at Eel Point.

Tilda took a final glance back into the house to make sure everything looked as it should. She thought about the sounds she had heard and had a vague feeling of having done something forbidden—despite the fact that waiting for the owner inside the warm house had seemed like the obvious thing to do. Then she pulled on her boots and went out into the darkness again.

As she stepped outside, the car with its trailer was just swinging around to stop in the turning area.

The driver switched off the engine and got out. Joakim Westin. A tall, slim man aged about thirty-five, dressed in jeans and a winter jacket. Tilda could barely make out his face in the darkness, but she thought he was looking at her with a grim expression. His movements as he left the car were rapid and tense.

He closed the car door and came over to her.

“Hi,” he said. He nodded, but without extending his hand.

“Hi.” She nodded too. “Tilda Davidsson, local police … We spoke earlier.”

She wished she had been wearing her police uniform, not civilian clothes. It would have felt more appropriate on this dark night.

“Is there only you here?” said Westin.

“Yes. My colleagues have left,” said Tilda. “And the ambulance.”

There was silence. Westin just stood there, somehow indecisive, and she couldn’t think of a single decent question to ask.

“Livia,” said Westin eventually, gazing up at the lit windows of the house. “Is she … is she not here?”

“She’s being taken care of,” said Tilda. “They’ve taken her to Kalmar.”

“What happened?” asked Westin, looking at her. “Where did it happen?”

“By the shore … next to the lighthouses.”

“Did she go out to the lighthouses?”

“No, or rather … we don’t know yet.”

Westin’s eyes were flicking between Tilda and the house.

“And Katrine and Gabriel? Are they still at the neighbors’?”

Tilda nodded. “They’ve fallen asleep, I rang and checked a while ago.”

“Is that the place over there?” said Westin, looking toward the lights in the southwest. “The farm?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going over there.”

“I can drive you,” said Tilda. “We can—”

“No thank you. I need to walk.”

He walked past her, clambered over a stone wall, and strode off into the darkness.

The bereaved should never be left alone
, Tilda had learned during her training, and she quickly set off after him. It was hardly appropriate to try to lighten the situation with questions about his journey from Stockholm or other small talk, so she just walked in silence across the field toward the lights in the distance.

They should have brought a flashlight or lantern; it was pitch black out here. But Westin seemed able to find his way.

Tilda thought he had forgotten she was behind him, but suddenly he turned his head and said quietly, “Careful … there’s barbed wire here.”

He led them around the fence and closer to the road. Tilda could hear the faint rushing of the sea to the east. It sounded almost like whispering, and it made her remember the sounds back at the house. The quiet voices through the walls.

“Does anyone else live in the manor house?” she asked.

“No,” said Westin tersely.

He didn’t ask what she meant, and Tilda didn’t say any more.

After a few hundred yards they came up onto a gravel track that led them straight to the farm. They walked past some kind of silo and a row of parked tractors. Tilda could smell manure, and she heard the sound of faint lowing from a dark barn on the other side of the farmyard.

They arrived at the Carlsson family house. A black cat walked down the steps and slunk off around the corner, and Westin asked quietly, “Who found her … was it Katrine?”

“No,” said Tilda. “I think it was one of the staff from the preschool.”

Joakim Westin turned his head and gave her a long look, as if he didn’t understand what she was talking about.

Tilda realized later that she should have stopped on the steps and talked more to him then. Instead she took two more steps up to the door and tapped gently on one of the panes of glass.

After a minute or so a blonde woman dressed in a skirt and sweater came and opened the door. It was Maria Carlsson.

“Come in,” she said. “I’ll go and wake them up.”

“You can let Gabriel sleep,” said Joakim.

Maria Carlsson nodded and turned away, and they both followed her slowly through the hallway. They stopped just inside the door of the large room, which was a combination of a dining room and TV room. Candles had been lit in the windows, and quiet flute music was playing on the stereo.