The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (20 page)

He moved through the shadowy crowd, but Kent was wearing a pale windcheater and was easy to see. Jonas watched as he ran across the street, heading west. Away from the shops and houses. Jonas could just make out another figure, his shaven head shining.

Jonas ran after them, as third man.

Soon there was no one else around. Jonas passed the last building, then the last streetlamp, and carried on into the darkness.

It was cold here, and pitch black until his eyes adjusted. Jonas blinked and saw grey shadows up ahead.

Uncle Kent was passing the church. Peter Mayer stopped by the roadside, looked around, then disappeared into the birch forest.

Kent leapt across the verge and followed him.

When Jonas reached the same spot, he saw a path leading through the trees, so he, too, leapt over the verge and on to the path.

The deep-green darkness of the forest closed around him with a faint soughing. But he could hear other sounds among the trees: the cracking of twigs. The birches surrounded him like grey pillars; he zigzagged between them and increased his speed.

Suddenly, the forest fell away, and Jonas found himself in a meadow, or an unploughed field. It was covered in grass and illuminated by a cracked light up in the sky – the white moon, which was almost full.

He saw two figures moving in the moonlight, one pursuing the other. They were on the far side of the field, where the forest began again, and both quarry and hunter disappeared among the trees.

Jonas followed them, and found another path. He was tired now, but scared and excited at the same time. Tonight, he wasn’t alone, as he had been on the ship. His father wasn’t far behind, and Uncle Kent was somewhere in the forest.

He carried on along the path, hearing crashing noises in the undergrowth. And now there was also a swishing, like the wind. It was the sound of cars driving past on the main road between Borgholm and the villages to the north.

Jonas listened and kept his eyes on the path so that he wouldn’t get lost.

All of a sudden, he heard a shout; it sounded like Uncle Kent.

He stopped.

Another shout, louder this time.

Then a screech, but not from a human being – he was sure it was car tyres on tarmac.

The sound ended abruptly, then there was silence for a few seconds. Then more shouting, a confusion of voices in the darkness, and car doors opening and closing.

Jonas stood motionless on the path, listening hard.

More cracking and creaking, and heavy breathing. Someone was coming towards him.

A shadow loomed out of the darkness.

‘JK? Are you there?’

Uncle Kent.

‘Yes, I just wanted to see if—’

But Kent interrupted him sharply: ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

Jonas didn’t know what to say.

Uncle Kent strode past him, puffing and panting.

‘Did … did you catch up with him?’ Jonas asked.

But Kent didn’t reply, he just walked across the field and took the path leading back to Marnäs.

Jonas had no option but to turn around and follow him. He still didn’t know what to say, but eventually he caught up with Kent among the birch trees and said, ‘So you didn’t catch him?’

‘No,’ Kent snapped. ‘He’s gone.’

He kept on walking.

At long last they emerged from the forest, jumped over the verge and were back on the road.

In the light of the streetlamps, Jonas noticed that Uncle Kent had acquired a twitch just below his left eye, as if a little muscle there were conducting an exercise session all by itself.

Kent stopped again, turning his full attention on Jonas. ‘Did you see anything back there?’

‘Like what?’

Uncle Kent took a deep breath and set off again. They continued in silence until they heard a shout: ‘Hello?’

It was Jonas’s father. He was waiting for them just past the church, with the car parked at the side of the road.

‘What happened?’ he said.

Kent went up to him, very close, and spoke so quietly that Jonas could barely hear him. ‘There was a car.’

‘A car?’

Uncle Kent nodded. ‘It was heading straight for Mayer.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kent said. ‘I don’t think things went too well.’ Niklas looked worried, but didn’t ask any more questions.

They all got in the car and let out a long breath in the silence. Niklas started the engine. ‘OK … Let’s go home.’

Once they were on the main road, Jonas noticed lights to the south. A short distance away, perhaps a hundred metres, several cars had stopped, and there were people standing around them. He saw flashing blue lights and people in high-visibility jackets moving about on the road.

Niklas indicated left, but Kent shook his head. ‘Not that way. Turn right and we’ll go via Långvik. The coast road is better tonight.’ Niklas turned right.

Jonas looked back. He realized that there must have been a serious accident, but now they wouldn’t be able to see what had happened. If anyone was hurt.

The flashing blue lights disappeared into the distance.

After a kilometre or so, Niklas turned off the main road and on to a narrower track leading to the coast.

Kent leaned back. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘I expect we’ll find out what happened from the news … We’re not going to talk about this.’

‘As usual,’ Niklas said.

Jonas didn’t say anything; he just sat quietly in the back, looking out of the window. They were surrounded by darkness now.

But what did Uncle Kent mean? Were they not going to talk about it to the other members of the family? Or to the police?

Just as Gerlof was getting ready for bed that night, he heard about a fatal accident in northern Öland. It was on the local radio news at midnight:

‘And so to Öland. A twenty-four-year-old man was killed earlier this evening on the B136 just outside Marnäs. The initial police report suggests that he stepped out in front of a car heading south. The victim was taken by ambulance to Kalmar, where he was pronounced dead. The driver, a man in his fifties, is suffering from severe shock …’

The newsreader didn’t name the dead man, and Gerlof’s only reaction was the same as usual: the Department of Transport ought to lower the speed limit on that road. It was wide and straight all the way down to Borgholm, tempting many to drive far too fast. Perhaps he would write a letter to the paper. Suggest they turn it back into a dirt track.

He switched off the radio, then he turned off the light. Tomorrow he would be travelling on that very road, in order to attend a nostalgic lunch in Borgholm.

The next day, he found himself sitting at a long table with a group of men and women of his own age, people who had returned home, experience etched on their faces. They were swapping emigration stories, and Gerlof didn’t want to be left out:

‘My father had a cousin in Böda whose brother emigrated to America. One evening, when this cousin was just about to go to bed, the room was suddenly filled with the smell of death. Both he and his wife were aware of the same appalling stench. Eventually, they managed to get to sleep, but at dawn the cousin woke up and thought he saw his brother standing by the bedroom window – and he realized that his brother over in America was dead.’

He fell silent. A few people around the table laughed at the story, as if it were funny.

Nine men and two women had gathered for the Swedish-Americans’ lunch at the Borgholm Hotel and were enjoying fried halibut with tomato compote.

Gerlof had arrived after a short walk around the town which had once been his home port as the skipper of a cargo ship. These days, he didn’t recognize a single face on the streets, which were packed with tourists.

He had stopped down by the quayside for a little while, remembering the forest of masts that had once dominated the skyline. These days, the jetties were lined with countless modern plastic boats but the harbour itself looked run-down, with gaping holes in the brickwork and huge cracks in the quays themselves.

At least the historic hotel was well maintained, and Gerlof loved the light, airy restaurant. The food was excellent, and the floor was made of polished limestone, which one of his ancestors might have hewn out long ago. Beautiful.

However, he spent most of his time looking at his lunch companions. They spoke in a mixture of English and Swedish; they all seemed to understand both languages. A round of Swedish schnapps was ordered, and their stories quickly grew more bizarre.

‘The food here is good, but when I used to go fishing in Alaska we’d catch halibut weighing two hundred kilos …’

Ingemar Grandin had come all the way from San Pablo, California. One of the ladies was called Nordlof and came from New Haven, Connecticut. Others were from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Boston.

It turned out that only three of them had actually emigrated from Sweden. Their parents had taken them to America when they were only children; the rest had been born in the USA, but their parents were originally from Öland.

None of them looked as if they had driven Al Capone around the streets of Chicago, Gerlof thought, or hijacked a fishing boat.

They moved on to the local patisserie for coffee and cakes, and suddenly the stories took on a more sorrowful tone. Perhaps the schnapps was kicking in. They were no longer talking about how big the new country had been but how hard life had often been for the immigrants.

‘Lots of them used to carry Swedish papers and maps around in their pockets … They were homesick all the time, but they just couldn’t afford a ticket home.’

‘Yes, it was very difficult for those who couldn’t settle in the USA. Endless hard labour. Particularly forestry work – that was crazy, really dangerous.’

‘That’s right – I’ve seen old lumberjacks who’ve lost both arms and legs …’

At the end of the gathering, Bill Carlson gave Gerlof some folded sheets of paper. ‘This is the information you wanted from the House of Emigrants.’

‘Thank you.’

It was a typed list of names and dates. At first, Gerlof was a little confused, but then he remembered that Bill’s cousin had amused himself by collecting the names of local emigrants from the church records. He noticed that it contained names only from the island’s northern parishes, and only from the last hundred years, but it was enough.

He ran his finger down the list, and stopped abruptly:

Aron Fredh, b. 1918, Rödtorp, Alböke parish
Sven Fredh, b. 1894, Rödtorp, Alböke parish

They had left in May 1931, according to the records. There were a number of later emigrants from both the forties and fifties, when Swedes no longer went by ship to ‘America’, but flew to the ‘USA’, but Aron and Sven must have been among the last of the main wave of emigrants.

The name Aron had caught Gerlof’s attention. It was the name Jonas Kloss had heard on the ship, of course. But the name of the place also rang a bell.

Aron from Rödtorp?

Suddenly, he remembered, and leaned eagerly towards Bill: ‘I recognize this one,’ he said, pointing to the name. ‘I think Aron from Rödtorp was a boy I worked with for a little while, up in the churchyard in Marnäs … He talked about going to America at the time, and the following year I heard that they’d actually gone, he and his father. But I don’t know how they got on over there.’

Bill looked at the list. ‘1931 … So they went after the Great Depression. It wasn’t a good time for new Americans; there was so much unemployment, among other things. I should think it was pretty tough for them.’

‘Indeed,’ Gerlof said.

He looked at the group of elderly Swedish-Americans and wondered if Aron Fredh had ever come back home.

When the Homecomer went back to the arms dealer on the eastern side of the island, he went by car, alone. He parked about fifty metres from Wall’s cottage and waited for a little while, watching and listening. But there wasn’t a soul in sight.

The sun was low in the sky behind the car, making the grassy shore glow bright green, with the deep blue water beyond. It was idyllic, yet something didn’t feel right.

He opened the car door and heard the geese cackling nervously down by the shoreline. Otherwise, all was quiet. He got out and took in the expanse of the Baltic Sea, with Gotland beyond the horizon. And the faded red cottage in the foreground.

‘Hello?’ he called out.

But no one came to the door this evening.

As he approached, he could see that it was ajar. Slowly, he pulled it open a little further and shouted again. ‘Hello? Anyone there?’

The geese cackled once more, but that was the only response.

No, this didn’t feel right. The Homecomer moved more stealthily. He took a quick look around the rooms on the ground floor, but soon realized that Einar Wall wasn’t at home. So why was the door open? That didn’t tally with Wall’s caution on his previous visit.

The skiff floating on the water didn’t look right either. The Homecomer noticed it when he stepped outside. It looked as if there was someone in it.

He walked towards it. The wooden boat had been up on the grass the last time he was here, but now it was in the water, with no mooring rope.

It wasn’t a person in the boat but large, brown birds perched on the gunwale. Their weight was making the skiff bob up and down.

Not geese, but birds of prey, with ravens and jackdaws circling around them.

The Homecomer stopped at the water’s edge. The birds flapped their huge wings nervously but didn’t fly away.

He realized they were sea eagles – enormous birds with powerful hooked beaks, leaning down from the gunwale to peck at something in the bottom of the skiff. As the ravens came closer, the sea eagles raised their heads like snakes, then resumed their pecking.

They were eating something. Lumps of meat, presumably.

One of them had got hold of something white and was pulling it upwards, and the Homecomer saw that it was a hand. A lifeless human hand. The bird opened its beak, and the hand fell back into the boat.

The Homecomer stood motionless beneath the vast expanse of the sky for a few seconds, then he waded into the water, yelling at the birds and eventually scaring them off. By that time, he had almost reached the gunwale and could see into the boat.