The Shapeshifters (35 page)

‘There's no one here,' said Torbjörn. ‘You can tell from the grass that no one has driven here for a long time.'

It came to an end in front of two tall wrought-iron gates with an ornate pattern of welded feathers. A plastic-coated chain with a hefty padlock linked the gates together. The posts were made of stone capped with black steel. There were two yellow plastic signs that read UNAUTHORISED ENTRY PROHIBITED and BEWARE OF THE DOG.

‘If the dog is as old as the signs, then we don't have to worry,' said Gudrun, turning the wheel.

Next to the gates was an old storage shed. The red paint on the wooden panelling had worn away, exposing long strips of silvery-grey wood. It had two sets of double doors with hand-wrought iron hinges, held shut with steel bars. Gudrun drove up to the shed, reversed and parked with the rear of the Passat facing the gates.

‘Well, here we are then.'

Susso had not expected it to look quite so sealed off. It made her think. The gate and the signs were signals that could not be misunderstood. They were not welcome. There was little chance they would get any answers here.

She stayed where she was in the car.

‘What kind of people live here, anyway?' she said. ‘More Laestadians?'

‘Perfectly normal people,' Gudrun said, looking at the gates in the mirror.

‘Normal?' Susso said.

Gudrun nodded.

‘Signs like this are generally put up for good reason.'

There was a wind blowing up from the lake and a waft of sodden vegetation hit Susso. A smell of ditches. The clumps of reeds slumped behind the trees and were silent. The only sound came from the motorway in the distance. Susso had put a few printouts of the Vaikijaur man's face in a plastic folder, which she rolled up as she approached the gates.

Gudrun craned her neck and stood peering through the gates. She had turned up the collar of her jacket and pushed her hands into her pockets.

‘Is it there, do you think?'

They could see a white-rendered stone house with a semicircular extension at the edge of the forest a few hundred metres away. The facade was made darker by the shadows thrown onto it by the trees, making it look as if half the building was painted dark grey. All the windows of the extension had curtains that were shut. A house with closed eyes. Was this where he had run to?

Torbjörn slammed the car door and clicked open the lid of his snus tin.

After he had inserted a pouch of snus under his lip and shoved the tin back in his pocket he repeated his earlier remark, saying that there was no one here.

How could he know that? Susso stepped up to the fence connected to the gate posts. It was low enough for her to straddle the pointed slats and swing her legs over without difficulty. She then glared at her mother, who clumsily lifted one leg. Her long jacket got caught and Torbjörn came to help free her.

Susso walked purposefully towards the white house. She was holding the roll of photographs tightly. They were documents proving she had the right to be there, though she had no idea what she was actually going to say when they found someone. That made her nervous because this meeting must not go wrong. It was likely she would only have one chance.

Ringing on people's doors was something she did every day in her job, but approaching like this was something entirely different.

And then to start talking about trolls . . .

Naturally the word ‘troll' was not one she could use.

She was here about a person, a very unusual little person, but a person nonetheless. Possibly one mixed up in child abduction. A person wanted by the police. And she had a picture of him.

On the two visible sides of the house were many doors, all of them made of glass. She aimed for the nearest one. The door had a column on each side supporting a little balcony with an iron railing, and Susso thought it looked like the main entrance. There were stone steps up to the house and the railings were made of wood. It looked rather makeshift. She ran up the steps and knocked on the door. Two knocks followed by four in quick succession. The pane of glass rattled.

When no one opened she peered in.

There was a small console topped with marble. There were paintings but she could not make out what they were because of the reflection in the glass. An umbrella was hanging from the coat rack, along with a wooden hanger and a small shoehorn in light-green plastic, all on different hooks. It looked abandoned.

Gudrun and Torbjörn stood close together under the birch trees, watching her as she returned to them with her arms folded. She shook her head and walked past them.

The second building was a little further off.

The trail they followed wound behind a dense grove of tall spruce trees. Torbjörn walked behind Susso, muttering that he was sure there was no one out here on the headland. If there was, they would have seen a car.

‘They could have come by bus,' Susso said irritably.

She walked quickly, swiping at the yellow blades of grass with her rolled-up folder, looking down at the ground.

‘People who live like this don't travel by bus,' he said.

He was right, of course, but even so she walked on. The trail to the Vaikijaur man ended here, in this place. They had to find someone to talk to; they had travelled over three-quarters of the country to get here. She was about to say that when she came to a halt. She had caught sight of a small wooden sign in the grass to the side of the trail. BJÖRKUDDEN, it said. Just beyond it were three large rocks piled on top of each other. On the top rock someone had painted an ugly laughing face. The nose was covered with warts. Large ear lobes were weighed down by rings. In the grinning mouth a front tooth was missing. The hair was a cushion of moss.

‘Have a look at this,' she said. ‘Could this just be a coincidence?'

‘Well of course it is,' answered Torbjörn, looking up at the treetops to emphasise how little the stone troll interested him. ‘It's like a garden gnome,' he went on. ‘If we hadn't come here to ask about a troll, you would never have bothered about it.'

‘Mum,' Susso said, ‘do you think it's a coincidence?'

Gudrun stared at the stone troll. After a moment she shrugged her shoulders. ‘It's only a troll,' she said.

They carried on along the path, which was criss-crossed with roots. The fir trees were crowded together and their lower branches
were straggly. The ground underfoot was brown and covered in pine needles and old leaves.

Torbjörn asked if they thought it was illegal to defy no-entry notices.

‘We're only going to ask,' Susso said, taking a long step over a fallen branch. ‘Surely we're allowed to do that.'

The house that became visible through the trees had a red exterior with white corners, barge boards and window surrounds, and a steeply sloping roof. The roof tiles were patterned with grey-green lichen. There were so many mullioned panes of glass that the windows looked as if they were behind bars.

Susso walked closer and stood on her toes to look in but could only see curtains. They hung there, ghostly white, and a wooden seagull poked its long beak out from behind one of them as it gazed to the side. Brown fern fronds curled in the flower bed running parallel to the foundation's base of natural stone.

All they heard was the wind as it passed through the trees and bushes in a repeated combing movement. Stooping slightly, Susso moved forwards, preparing to make her excuses and bring out the photograph of the Vaikijaur man.

At the front-veranda steps she halted and glanced around the corner of the house. There a lawn sloped down towards a dilapidated fence made of wire netting, with old pasture land beyond and an outcropping of birches, juniper bushes and a few oaks. Sunlight radiated down between the branches, illuminating the frozen grass and turning the blades fuzzy in the light.

‘Hello!' she called.

She paused for a second or two before walking up the concrete steps to the front door. She knocked and peered in through the
faded cotton curtains, but there was nothing to see except an entrance hall with a worn and crumpled rag rug. There were more sea birds and some sparkling glass ornaments in the window.

Gudrun crept up beside her, keeping her hands in her pockets. It was obvious that no one was at home, and that had made her a little bolder.

‘Nobody here,' Susso said, and walked down the steps.

On a green-painted plinth stood a sundial in the form of a sphere of welded iron circles. The arrow had an oily brass shimmer and the fletchings splayed out like the tail of a salmon.

Behind the house she saw a rocky hillock where a pair of large oaks soared up, capturing sunlight in their branches. From the dry fragments of leaves came a gentle rustling sound.

Susso continued circling the house without any clear idea of what she was looking for. She was just not ready to leave. A feeling rising from deep within her tethered her to this place. There had to be something here. It was magnetic. She was prepared to break into the house to look for answers, but she knew her mother would oppose that idea.

She came to the back door and saw that someone had fastened a picture to an upstairs window with long strips of freezer tape. Susso stood on tiptoe and backed away, but she couldn't make out what the drawing portrayed, only that it was painted in green. In pastels, perhaps.

A child, she thought.

In the above-ground foundations, immediately below a windowsill, was an aperture big enough to take a whole foot. It was extraordinary. In front of the opening lay a couple of boulders. She bent forwards and tried to see inside, crouching down to get a closer look.

Inside she could see a few oak leaves that had shrivelled into small grey cylinders and beyond that only impenetrable darkness. Was it something to do with ventilation? But why have such a big hole? Fairly large animals could get in, surely?

After getting up, supporting herself against the wall, she checked the palm of her hand for signs of the red paint. It was clean. She took a last look at the hole and walked back.

Torbjörn was inspecting the sundial and holding up his watch, and as Susso walked towards them he grinned at her.

‘The time's right,' he said.

‘It's probably a summer cottage,' Susso said, and she twisted the arrow, making it squeak. ‘So we'll have to phone, I guess.'

‘Or else we find out where they live,' said Gudrun, pulling her jacket collar closed to keep out the wind.

‘And drive there?' Torbjörn said.

Gudrun nodded.

 

 

The shop was empty when Seved arrived. A woman was sitting behind the counter looking at a computer screen, and he knew it must be her. The sister. Cecilia Myrén.

He walked around outside a couple of times to summon up the courage to approach her. He had no idea what it would lead to, or whether he would be forced to break into her home later that night. Everything had to happen unobtrusively. With great care, Lennart had said.

From time to time Seved felt a twitching against his chest. It was the little lemmingshifter, changing position. It was in his inside pocket, directly over his heart. It could feel his heartbeats and presumably his nervousness. Did it have any thoughts about that?

Cecilia looked up the moment Seved entered the shop.

She was about forty-five. Her hair was shoulder length and tinted chestnut brown, and she had pushed her glasses up onto her head like a hairband. Her fingers were covered in silver rings and she wore bracelets on both wrists. She smiled as she greeted him.

Without introducing himself, Seved muttered that he was a journalist who wanted to write about Susso Myrén but could not get hold of her, so he wondered if she could help him track her down.

‘Well, that might be difficult. She's in Gränna.'

‘Gränna?'

She nodded.

‘What . . . what's she doing there?'

‘Buying peppermint rock. No, I don't know—it's got something to do with her website.'

Seved rubbed his hand gently against his chest. She seemed chatty enough. With a little luck he might not even need the little lemmingshifter's help. But he had better watch out and not go too fast. There was a risk she would back off.

‘Are you the only person working here?'

‘No, my mother works here, and Susso too, sometimes. And in summer during the busy season we take on extra staff. Mum is really retired but she can't just sit at home, that would drive her mad. So we all help out. I've got my pedicure business as well, of course. I do that part-time.'

She reached across the counter and picked up a business card from a transparent plastic holder. Cecilia's Pedicure Salon, it read. Seved nodded.

‘Perhaps your feet need looking at?'

He had started to shake his head, but then he suddenly changed his mind.

‘Why not?'

 

 

Susso had wandered off towards the pasture in protest. She was still not prepared to leave. There was something here, she was convinced of that. She
felt
it. There was a small gate in the fence but it served no purpose because the wire netting was sagging so low between the rotting fence posts that she could easily step over it.

She strolled around among the birch trees and the prickly juniper bushes, kicking the thick matted carpet of grass. Here and there the vegetation was hidden by a patch of snow that was slowly being eaten away.

She walked down towards the beach to get an overview of the lake, but a straggly wall of rushes blocked her way and the ground was boggy and coated with crackling shards of ice. She did not want to get wet feet.

Not far from the gate she had spotted a short jetty, so she turned back and walked quickly in that direction. She heard the tones of a ringing mobile coming from over by the house—her mother's ring tone, a rock song. Her gaze wandered over the tree-covered islands and the murky strips of forest rising up on the other side of the bay. Beyond that ridge was the motorway and Lake Vättern.