The Quarry (48 page)

Gerlof refused to ponder on riddles and mysteries these days, as he had told Per Mörner, but the ideas came anyway. He had been incurably fixated on puzzling out mysteries since childhood, and now he was sitting here with the diary thinking about Ella’s changeling, who must have been Henry Fors’s son.

But where had he gone? He had been running north towards the sea when Ella saw him that last evening, but what had happened when he reached Henry at the edge of the quarry?

A quarrel, followed by a killing? Or an accident? In which case, if the boy was dead, he was probably buried beneath one of the piles of reject stone.

If Gerlof’s legs had been healthy and ten years younger, he would have got up out of his chair that very minute and gone straight to the quarry to start searching. But his body was too old and stiff, and after all he wasn’t absolutely certain that Henry had hidden his son’s body there.

And where would he search, given the amount of reject stone there was?

Gerlof suddenly realized he was longer fixated on his own death; he hadn’t really thought about his forthcoming demise since Easter. He had been too busy. Ella’s diaries had helped him in that respect. Or perhaps it was the new neighbours and their problems that had made him forget his own.

He shivered in his chair, despite the blanket. It had grown noticeably colder as the evening drew in, and he got to his feet.

He could hear the sound of a car on the village road. More and more cars had been passing along there in the last few weeks, most of them driving far too fast for the narrow road – but this one sounded as if it were moving very slowly. He heard it brake and stop, but the engine kept on running, strangely enough.

Gerlof was expecting to see a visitor at the garden gate, but no one appeared.

He waited for a few more minutes, then made his way towards the sound of the engine, leaning on his stick for support. He felt slightly wobbly on the grass, but kept his balance.

When he reached the gate he saw a car had stopped on the road; a man in a cap was sitting behind the wheel holding something in his hand.

Gerlof didn’t recognize him. An early tourist? He grabbed hold of the gatepost and stood there just a few metres from the road, but the man didn’t appear to have noticed him. In the end Gerlof cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Do you need any help?’

He hadn’t shouted loudly, but the man turned his head and caught sight of him. He looked surprised, almost caught out somehow.

Gerlof suddenly saw that the object the man was holding was a plastic bottle. A litre bottle containing some kind of red liquid, which he was mixing with a fluid from a smaller glass container. There were strings of some sort attached to the bottle.

‘Are you lost?’ he called out.

The driver shook his head, then put down the bottle and grabbed the wheel with his left hand. Gerlof saw something glint on his wrist.

The man quickly put the car in gear with his right hand, and it moved away.

Gerlof stayed where he was, watching it disappear in the direction of the sea. It slowed down when it reached the coast road and turned right, heading north towards the quarry.

He let go of the gatepost, leaned on his stick and managed to turn around without falling over. He headed back towards his chair, but stopped a few metres away and thought about what the man in the car might have been up to.

He wasn’t happy about what he had just seen. In fact, the situation was so bad that the evening seemed to have grown even colder.

He set off again, but towards the cottage this time. He managed to haul himself up the steps with the help of the iron railing, and went into the living room. He could still remember the telephone number for Ernst’s cottage, and keyed it in with a trembling finger.

The phone rang out twelve times, but neither Per Mörner nor anyone else answered.

Gerlof put the phone down. He blinked and assessed the situation.

Eighty-three years old, with rheumatism and hearing difficulties. And the first butterflies he had seen this year had been a yellow one and a black one.

Things could go well, or they could just as easily go very badly.

Gerlof didn’t know if he could manage it, but he just had to get himself over to the quarry to see if Per needed any help.

As Per made his way back towards the coast, the shadows across the alvar were even longer than before. The sun hovered in front of him like a gold disc in a narrow blue strip between the clouds and the horizon.

He was very tired. The last thing he had done up by the road was to call Max Larsson and explain that he had found Vendela unconscious out on the alvar, but that she had come round and was on her way to the hospital in Kalmar. After that he had set off home, heading west.

Less than fourteen hours to go.

He thought about it when he got back to the spot where he had come across Vendela and the boy keeping watch beside her – back by the dense thicket of juniper bushes and the big rock in the centre.

The elf stone.

He had lingered for a while. This was where he and Vendela had sat a few evenings earlier, exchanging secrets. He had told her things about himself and his father that he hadn’t told anyone else, and she had told him that she was the one who wrote most of Max’s books.

Max has nothing against being well known, but I prefer to remain invisible
, Vendela had said.

Per had remained by the stone for a few minutes looking at the empty hollows in its surface. Then he had taken out his wallet and placed a note in one of them, with a few coins on top.

Wishful thinking.

He knew what he was doing, but he couldn’t help seeing Nilla’s face in his mind’s eye as he let go of the coins. He couldn’t help making a wish as he stood there by the stone – offering money and praying for a miracle.

He heard a rustling noise from somewhere in the bushes.

He looked around, suddenly afraid that he was being watched. And he was. A pointed, russet-coloured face was staring at him. At first he thought it was a dog with big ears, but then he realized it was a fox. It stood stock still for a few seconds, then it wheeled around and disappeared.

Per set off again, walking away from the stone.

The sun had almost set by the time he got back to Stenvik. There was a breeze blowing off the sea, and he could hear distant sounds from the southern end of the village. Laughter and cheerful shouts. People had begun to gather down on the shore to light the bonfire and to celebrate the end of winter and the coming of spring.

He was just too tired to go down there. He walked up the path to the cottage, took out his keys and unlocked the door. The smell of Vendela lingered in her jacket as he hung it up in the hallway. He went into the kitchen and put some water on to make vegetable soup before driving to see Nilla.

The note he had found in Hans Bremer’s kitchen was still lying by the phone, and he glanced over at it as he chopped some carrots. He looked at the last name: Danielle, whose real name had been Jessika Björk, as it turned out.

Jessika and Hans Bremer had been in touch, despite the fact that she hadn’t worked for him for many years. Why? And why had someone murdered them?

The water was boiling. He added a stock cube, some herbs and the vegetables, and when the soup was ready he ate it at the kitchen table, still pondering.

Arsonists almost always operate on their own patch
, Gerlof had said.

Jerry and Bremer knew the studio in Ryd better than anyone else. But neither of them could have rigged up and set off the incendiary devices in the house. Jerry was too old and too ill, and Bremer had been lying upstairs with his hands tied behind his back.

Per pushed his soup bowl to one side and looked over at the window. The sun had gone down by now, but a bright light suddenly fell across the cottage.

A dark-coloured car was driving along the coast road.

Was it a Ford?

He reached for the phone just as the car braked and turned off into the shadows by the quarry. It moved slowly down the track with its lights on, and stopped on the gravel at the bottom. Then it just stayed there.

Per picked up the phone and keyed in a number on the mainland.

A man’s voice answered: ‘Ulf.’

‘Could I speak to Ulrica, please?’

‘Who’s calling?’

‘Per Mörner.’

‘I’ll just check …’

There was a noise at the other end of the phone, and at the same time he saw the car door open down in the quarry. He heard Ulrica Ternman’s voice in his ear: ‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s Per Mörner again. Do you remember me?’

There was a brief silence before she answered quietly, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘I know,’ Per said quickly, ‘but I’ve just got one quick question.’

‘About what?’ said Ulrica Ternman, still speaking very quietly.

‘I was just wondering what Hans Bremer looked like.’

‘Bremer? I suppose he was … quite ordinary. He looked a bit like you, actually.’

‘Oh? But he was older than me, I presume?’

‘Younger.’

‘Much younger?’

‘I thought he was old at the time, but then I was a teenager … I suppose he would have been about thirty.’

‘Thirty?’

The driver was getting out of the car now. Per couldn’t see his face; it was too far away, and he was wearing a cap. The man looked around the quarry, glanced over at the houses, then got back in the car. He seemed to be waiting for something.

‘If Hans Bremer was thirty when you saw him in the studio,’ Per went on, ‘then he would have been about forty-five when he died in the fire. But that can’t be right. Hans Bremer had a younger sister, and she’s older than me.’

‘Oh? I really have to go now.’

‘Wait, Ulrica … I just want to say one thing. I’ve just worked it out: the director who took pictures of you and your friends
wasn’t
Hans Bremer.’

‘He said that was his name.’

‘Yes,’ said Per. ‘But if there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s that
nobody
in the sex industry uses their own name. Everybody wants to be anonymous, don’t they? Even my father changed his name, from Gerhard Mörner to Jerry Morner.’

She didn’t respond, so he carried on, ‘Someone had simply borrowed Hans Bremer’s name, paid him money so that they could call themselves Hans Bremer and avoid dirtying their own name.’

‘So I’m dirty, is that what you’re saying?’ snapped Ulrica Ternman.

‘No, I didn’t mean—’

But she had already hung up.

Per sighed and looked at the phone, but didn’t call back. He glanced down at the car in the quarry one last time. Then he left the kitchen.

On his way into the hallway he saw the old axe lying in the bedroom, and went to pick it up. He pulled on his jacket and went out into the cold once more. He walked along the side of the cottage with the axe in his right hand, but suddenly he thought he could hear someone wheezing in the shadows.

‘Jerry?’

He turned his head quickly, but of course it was just his imagination. There was no sign of anyone by the cottage.

The car was still parked down in the quarry. It was seventy or eighty metres away from him, between two heaps of stone. It was a Ford, but if it was the same car that had killed Jerry, there were no traces of the collision. The bodywork looked as if it had been recently cleaned.

Per thought he knew why the driver was still sitting in the car; he was waiting for darkness to fall.

The trolls come out at night
, he thought.

He stopped at the top of the rock face and heard the sound of the engine being switched off. Silence fell, then the window opened and the driver stuck his head out. ‘Hello?’ he shouted.

‘Hello,’ said Per.

‘Is this Stenvik?’ The voice sounded lost.

‘It is!’ replied Per, gripping the axe more firmly.

The driver’s door opened again, and the man stepped out on to the gravel. ‘Are you Per Mörner?’ he called out.

‘I am. Who are you?’

‘Thomas Fall from Malmö!’ the man replied. He held out a large object that he was carrying. ‘I just came to drop this off on the way to Stockholm. You did say you wanted it …’

Per nodded. ‘Excellent, that’s great. But you took a bit of a wrong turning, Thomas.’

‘Did I? But you said you lived by the quarry.’

‘Right idea, wrong track.’ Per pointed over his shoulder towards the cottage. ‘We live above the quarry, up there.’

‘OK … Well, anyway, this is Bremer’s briefcase!’

Per pointed at the steps and shouted, ‘I’ll come down!’

He made his way cautiously down the wobbly blocks of stone to the gravel at the bottom. It was a few degrees colder here in the quarry, as usual.

The car was still in the same place with its headlights on. They dazzled Per, and turned Thomas Fall into a black figure in a cap, walking towards him with a briefcase in his left hand and a bunch of keys in his right. He was rattling the keys nervously, but he was holding out the briefcase. ‘Here it is.’