Blackwater (10 page)

‘Have you no photograph of Dan Ulander on you?’

She replied that there was none. He wouldn’t be photographed.

‘What do you mean? Doesn’t he go to a photographer, or won’t he allow anyone to take photgraphs of him?’

‘I don’t know.’

She considered that to be the only sensible answer she had given that morning.

‘You were at Nirsbuan. And were you frightened?’

That statement was unexpected. She didn’t know where he had got it from. Had she said so herself? Or had Mia? Mia couldn’t have realised she had been frightened, could she? She had been on the other side of the cottage.

‘Tell me why you were frightened?’

She told him she had seen a foot. She now had more control over herself. The attacks of dizziness that were a kind of second-long faint, or nodding off, were coming less frequently. She wouldn’t say too much. So she just said she had seen a foot when she had looked through the window.

‘And that frightened you?’

‘It was pulled away. I knocked on the window and it was pulled back.’

‘Did you recognise the foot?’

She didn’t want that question. She had already thought about it. A couple of months earlier she had told Dan she would recognise him even if she saw nothing but a little patch of his skin. A strand of his hair would be enough, or the nail of his little finger. She would recognise the smell of his body among other bodies in a dark room.

‘Yes, I recognised his foot,’ she said now. ‘Dan’s.’

‘Do you live with this man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you live with him when you worked at Mälarvåg College?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you live?’

‘We lived there.’

‘What was his job?’

‘He didn’t have a job.’

‘He lived with you but didn’t work?’

‘We didn’t live together,’ she said, her voice thinner now, ending in a whimper.

‘You said you lived together.’

‘Yes. We were together. We were to live together here.’

‘What are you going to live on?’

‘I’m going to teach. And he’s going to work.’

She foresaw the next question, so added:

‘I’m to teach the children at the Starhill commune.’

‘You’ve stated you don’t belong to the Starhill commune,’ he said. There was that word again: she had stated.

‘Who would I have said that to?’ she said and was prepared for what he would answer: I’m the one asking questions here. But he said almost in a friendly way:

‘The bus driver.’

The police had tracked down the bus driver and woken him. Something really had happened. But she no longer knew what she had said when she came into this house. She must have talked about what she had seen. But what had she seen?

Two people were dead. They had told her that when they had come back from the river. Knifed.

The kitchen in the glaring sunlight so early in the morning was a peculiar place. Its triviality hid false or genuine depths, impossible to tell, as if in a dream. This was where the Strömgrens led their warm, tobacco-smelling lives, of which she knew nothing. The place didn’t smell of goat. They had a shower and left their clothes in a bedroom next to the bathroom. They were goat farmers in different conditions from those of the Starhill people. She had deciphered their life despite her exhaustion. The television set in the kitchen. The advocado-green refrigerator. Green cowpat-patterned wallpaper. Henry and Oriana put out no signals of their origins or aspirations. But she had immediately realised they were kind people.

‘What was the time when you arrived at Nirsbuan?’

‘Two, maybe. Or just before.’

‘Can you remember a moment when you definitely looked at the time during your walk?’

‘By the river. No, by the cottage. Before we left there.’

‘What did your watch say then?’

‘Past two.’

‘Then you’d seen the tent just before?’

‘Yes. It was upright. Nothing had happened there then.’

She heard dogs barking outside and the sound of cars. The one who was a policeman looked as if he hadn’t noticed. He had propped his chin lightly in his left hand, the forefinger and thumb forming a fork. He had light bluish-grey eyes which held hers firmly. She was his route into all this raw mist and blood, but she wriggled away. You can’t look another person straight in the eye that long if you haven’t practised it, she thought. And yet he appeared slightly preoccupied. Or tired. She had to look away after a while.

‘You walked to Nirsbuan and when you got there, what did you do then?’

‘Looked in. I looked in through the kitchen window. And then through the window round the back.’

‘You didn’t knock on the door?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

It had been barred and had a large padlock hanging from it. She didn’t want to say that. Then they would make out that Dan had broken in. While she had been walking all that way with Mia during the night, everything she had done had seemed to her necessary and obvious. Now it seemed confused. Impossible to explain.

For the rest of her life, she was to preserve the memory of that walk. But how much of it would she have remembered if he had not forced her to describe it over and over again in that warm kitchen? There must be tangled events, illogical or utterly insane actions in all lives. To forget. They refused to allow her to forget. They forced her to bind them together into a pattern. But it was a false pattern.

She felt ashamed. They made her feel ashamed. The doctor’s questions were the worst, and he didn’t ask many. He only asked about Mia. And then the police chief.

‘This man. The man you were going to live with, he didn’t show up. Had you arranged for him to come and meet you off the bus?’

‘That’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘But he didn’t come.’

‘No.’

‘How long did you wait?’

What could she answer? Then she remembered the television film and said that it had begun when she went up to Ola and his wife.

‘Had you any idea why he hadn’t appeared?’

‘Yes, I thought he had forgotten it was Midsummer Eve. Or that he thought I had meant the old, the real Midsummer Eve. He was lying there asleep. So that must have been it.’

‘But why do you think he drew back his foot when you tapped on the window?’

‘How would I know that?’

‘You know him.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did you run away? Why didn’t you try to get into the cottage?’

She said nothing.

‘What were you afraid of?’ he said.

Yes, what had she been afraid of? She no longer knew. It had all shattered. A greater terror had wiped it out.

‘Why did you walk back?’

‘I don’t really know. Everything was . . . creepy.’

‘Did you think he had someone else there? Another girl?’

Neither of them had any expression any longer. Not even features.

‘Did he?’ Their faces were nothing but two discs of pale, moist flesh. They said nothing. They were looking attentively at her. But she held out and did not reply.

The policeman got up. He was red-eyed and looked tired, but the other man seemed sleepier, his mouth occasionally dropping open and his eyelids drooping. He had pale, creased eyelids. He pulled himself together and followed the policeman out of the kitchen. A little later, Oriana Strömgren came down from the top floor, where she and Henry had been banished with the children.

She looked swiftly sideways several times at Annie as she made the coffee. When it was ready, it was a pale brown, slightly sour drink. She offered Annie thin crispbread with soft goat’s cheese on it. Annie ate it at the time, but was never again able to eat that cheese. Mia went on eating it, not connecting it with what had happened.

Mia was asleep in Oriana and Henry’s bedroom. No one had said they had to stay at the Strömgrens’. Annie didn’t even know if she was allowed to leave the kitchen. She had no car to get down into the village. She could decide nothing.

Now and again she dozed off as she sat there on the kitchen bench, and Oriana said she should go to bed. But she wanted to stay up. She didn’t want to go to bed. She thought if she fell asleep and slid away from this event that was no longer an event, she would wake up to something irretrievable.

Eventually a policeman in a grey overall with badges and reflectors on it came in. She was to go with him down to the river. A question of identification, he said.

‘But it can’t possibly be anyone I know!’

He didn’t reply, just stood with the kitchen door open until she joined him. The doctor and the chief of police were waiting outside. There were lots of people and cars now, dogs barking incessantly. She said she couldn’t look at the bodies in the tent. That was impossible.

‘We must request you to,’ said the police chief. He said he had to ask but he didn’t ask. He had gone through her belongings and the other man had fumbled over her body with his hands.

‘We want to know if you know one of them.’

‘Why should I? Why just the one?’

‘We think we may know who the girl is,’ he said. ‘We want you to look at the boy.’

She vomited on the way down. They waited patiently, the doctor even holding her up. But then they hustled her on to continue along the path that disappeared into the wet of the marsh. She was weeping as she approached the river, the men pushing and shoving her.

‘It won’t take long, it won’t take long,’ said Birger, whose name she did not know then.

‘I know it’s not Dan!’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then it’ll be quick.’

The tent canvas was lifted off. They were lying side by side on their backs. But they were stiff and the bodies had not been properly straightened out, knees and elbows bent, fingers splayed. The girl’s back was hunched, her head apparently raised from the plastic sheeting and stiffened like that. She had a wound with brownish black edges on her cheek. It looked like a mouth, another mouth, and it was open.

It was not Dan. They were two alien, whitish-grey, dried-up faces with sticky hair all round them. And there were more men round the tent. They had rolls of plastic strips and kept moving the camera tripod and light metal cases around. There were feathers everywhere. Unruly white down. Behind her clenched teeth lay the taste of vomit, acrid and pungent.

They drove her down to the village. She said she wanted to wait for Dan and they took her to the camping site. She was given a cabin to creep into with Mia, a cabin lined with red wood and with a small veranda. It looked like a playhouse. There was only one window; it was dark inside and smelt of tobacco smoke and old blankets.

It was late morning. She was not really sure what the time was and couldn’t find the energy to look. They both fell asleep curled up together on the lower bunk. When she woke there were faces at the window.

The site was crowded with people. Cars drove up to the office and the people who got out were handsomely dressed, but Annie could see no faces, only eyes. She and Mia finally had to leave their hiding place because Mia was hungry. Annie felt sick. They went into Roland Fjellström’s office and he gave them sausage and a bag of instant macaroni. He had black hair and brilliant blue eyes. She saw nothing but his low hairline and thought he looked as if he had come from the planet of the apes. She couldn’t make him out at all, and perhaps it was the same with all the other masks of faces – she could make nothing of them, seeing nothing but their glances crawling over her own rigid face.

Word had leaked out that she had seen someone on the path up there and they knew she had told the police it was a foreigner. They thought he was the murderer and she believed that herself. Yet she hesitated to say what he looked like because that was so poisoned. He looked like a Vietnamese. She hesitated so long, it never got said. She couldn’t stand the camping site any longer, and when Mia had finished her sausage and macaroni, she took her small hand and they walked up the road. Cars slowed down and people stared at them through the windows. She had thought Dan would find them more easily if they walked on the road. He must be coming.

In the end, she realised they couldn’t go on wandering up and down in the village. They had read the posters on the notice board by the store several times. Bingo at Vika Parish Hall. Midsummer party in Kvæbakken. Cream porridge, a Norwegian delicacy. Buy your boots at Fiskbua, Three Towers brand – bargain prices! Midsummer service at Björnstubacken. White flour – special offer.

she didn’t want to go back to the site. she had seen two houses on a hillside and mia had asked why it said
cottage
on a notice when you could see perfectly well it was a cottage.

It never occurred to her that the only vacant cottage in the village might perhaps not be the best one. She just went up the slope with Mia and asked an elderly woman in the house at the top whether they could rent the cottage by the road. It cost thirty kronor a night.

She couldn’t remember what Aagot Fagerli looked like when they came out of her house, only that she had given her thirty kronor. They fetched the rucksack from the camping site and set off for the cottage, but the police caught up with them. She was not to leave the site without telling them. She showed them the cottage and she was driven in a police car to Ola’s garage by Fiskebuan so that she could fetch her luggage.

Once they were left alone, she locked the door on the inside. It had a simple skeleton key with an e-shaped bit, so the lock wouldn’t give them much protection. The entrance hall was lined with pale-green boarding and bright-blue wallpaper; behind a door steep stairs led up to the attic. She went up to look and found it contained preserving jars, old clothes and rolled-up rugs. Otherwise it was empty.

The cottage was flooded with daylight and you could see right through it from the windows. Quite a big kitchen with pine walls and bright-blue wallpaper. Windows in three walls. The bedroom had no door, only an opening with old and beautifully shaped moulding. It too was light and visible from all the windows. There were two large cupboards in the kitchen and when Annie opened the yellow hardboard doors, she saw there were Swedish woollen blankets on shelves in one of them, and hard feather pillows with striped pillowcases. The other one was empty apart from some ancient hangers. There was an iron stove, rusty on top, a long kitchen work surface covered with self-adhesive plastic patterned like tiles, white with small blue windmills. There was a table by one of the windows and two wooden chairs. In the bedroom was a bed with a green bedspread patterned with irregular small rectangles and black and yellow lines. This had been audaciously modern in the 1950s.