Echoes From the Dead (26 page)

And at the same time, I know goblins and trolls don’t exist.”

“They don’t appear so often nowadays, at any rate,” said Julia.

“No,” said Gerlof slowly, “and it’s probably the same with

Nils Kant. Nobody talks about him, nobody sees him. The police have got him down as being dead, and he’s buried in Marnas churchyard with a gravestone anybody can go and look at. And yet there are still certain people in northern Oland who believe Nils Kant is still alive. At least among those who are old enough to remember him.”

“What do you think?” asked Julia again.

“I think it would be a good thing if all the strange things surrounding Nils Kant could be sorted out,” said Gerlof.

“I’d rather find my son.” Julia said it quietly. “That’s why I came here.”

“I know,” said Gerlof. “But there might be a connection between the two stories.”

“Nils Kant and Jens?”

Gerlof nodded. “I already know they are connected to some

extent, in fact. Through Martin Malm.”

“But how?”

“Malm had Jens’s sandal,” said Gerlof. “And it was one of

Malm Freight’s ships that brought Nils Kant’s coffin home to Sweden.”

“Was it? How do you know that?”

“It’s no secret. I was down at the harbor myself when the

ship with the coffin came in. An undertaker in Marnas took care of it.”

Julia gave this some thought as they were approaching Marnas.

She braked and turned.

“But we didn’t get to speak to the person who sent the sandal today,” she pointed out.

“No, but you did see his house,” said Gerlof. “Martin was

bad today, but sooner or later we’ll be able to speak to him. Next week, maybe.”

“I can’t stay here just for that,” said Julia sharply. “I have to get back to Gothenburg.”

“So you say,” said Gerlof. “When are you leaving?”

“I don’t know. Soon … tomorrow, maybe.”

“Tomorrow’s the funeral in Marnas church,” said Gerlof.

“Eleven o’clock.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to go,” said Julia, turning into the entrance to the home. “I didn’t even know Ernst, after all. His death is tragic and I’ll never forget the morning I found him… but I didn’t know him.”

“Try to come anyway,” said Gerlof, opening the car door.

Julia got out to help him. She carried the bag of liquor and his briefcase.

“Thank you,” said Gerlof, leaning on his cane. “My legs are

much better now.”

“See you soon,” said Julia when she’d walked him as far as the elevator. “Thanks for today.”

She watched Gerlof open the elevator door and step in without falling over.

Then she returned to the car and turned out onto the road

again, heading east. She decided to buy some groceries in Marnas before she went down to the boathouse.

It was slowly beginning to grow dusk now; it was twenty past four. Normal people, people who had jobs, were no doubt on their way home from work.

But some people hadn’t gone home yet. As she drove past the

little police station in Marnas, she could see there was a light on inside.

Julia stopped at the grocery store and bought milk and bread and something to put on it. She didn’t have much money left in her account, and there was over a week left until her next benefit payment.

When she came out of the store, she noticed the light in the windows of the police station again. She thought about Lennart Henriksson, and about what Astrid had told her about him.

Lennart too had been affected by a great tragedy in his life.

Julia stopped, looking at the light in the windows. She put the food in the trunk of the Ford and locked it. Then she crossed the road and knocked on the door of the police station.

“i always blamed my mother, said Julia. “She fell asleep that afternoon and left him by himself.”

She blinked the tears away and went on:

“I’ve blamed my father even more … because he went down

to the sea to mend his nets. If Gerlof had been at home, Jens would never have left the houseJens loved his grandfather.”

Julia sniffled and sighed.

“I’ve blamed them for many years,” she said, “but it was actually my fault. I leftjens and went to Kalmar to meet a man. Although I knew it was a waste of time. He didn’t even turn up.” She stopped speaking, then she said, softly, “It was Michael… Jens’s father.

We’d split up and he was living in Skane, but he’d talked about catching the train and coming up to see me … I’d thought we might be able to try again, but he wasn’t interested.” She sniffled again. “So of course Michael was absolutely no help either when Jens disappeared, he was still in Malmo … But the main person who was to blame was me.”

Lennart sat in silence on the opposite side of the table, listeninghe was a good listener, thought Juliaand letting her talk.

Now he said:

“It was nobody’s fault, Julia. It was simply, as we say in the police … a series of unfortunate circumstances.”

“Yes,” said Julia. “If it was an accident.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lennart.

“I mean … unless Jens went outside and met somebody who

took him away.”

“But who?” said Lennart. “Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Julia. “A madman? You know more than

I do about these things, you’re a policeman.”

Lennart shook his head. “Such a person would need to be disturbed … extremely disturbed. And they would almost certainly have come into contact with the police already for other violent crimes. There was nobody like that on Oland at the time. Believe me, we looked for suspects… We knocked on doors, we went through our records.”

“I know,” said Julia. “You did what you could.”

“Our assumption was that Jens went down to the water,”

said Lennart. “It’s only a few hundred yards, and it would have been easy to get lost in the fog that day. Many people who have drowned in Kalmar Sound have disappeared forever, both before and since …” He stopped. “It must be difficult for you to talk about this, and I don’t want to …”

“It’s fine,” said Julia quietly. She thought for a moment, then added, “I didn’t think it would be a good thing to come here in the autumn and face it all again, but it has been. I’ve started to get over Jens … and I know he isn’t coming back.” She made an effort to sound absolutely certain: “I have to move on.”

It was Tuesday evening in Marnas. Julia had intended to call in briefly to see Lennart in the police station, but she was still there. And Lennart had obviously been about to finish work for the day, turn off the computer, and go home, but he’d stayed.

“So you’re not on duty tonight?” Julia had asked.

“I am, but not until later,” said Lennart. “I’m on the building committee and we’ve got a meeting tonight, but not until half past seven.”

Julia wanted to ask what political party he represented, but there was always the risk that she wouldn’t like the answer. Then she wanted to ask if he was married, but she might not like that answer either.

“We could order a pizza from Moby Dick,” said Lennart.

“Would you like one?”

“That would be nice,” said Julia.

There was a kitchen in the office at the police station. Although the offices were impersonal, there was a certain level of home comfort in the kitchen in the form of curtains, red rag rugs on the floor, and even a couple of pictures on the walls. A spotlessly clean coffee machine stood on the equally spotless counter. There was a low table with armchairs in one corner, and when the pizzas topped with ham had been delivered from the bar down by the harbor, Lennart and Julia ate them there.

As they were eating they began to talkand their conversation centered on sorrow and loss.

Afterward Julia couldn’t remember which of them had first

started to make things so personal, but she assumed it was her.

“I have to move on,” said Julia. “If Jens disappeared in the sound, I have to accept it. It’s happened before, as you say.”

She added after a pause, “It’s just that he was afraid of the water, he didn’t even like playing on the shore. So I’ve sometimes thought he went the other way, out onto the alvar. I know how it sounds, but… Gerlof thinks the same.”

“We looked on the alvar too,” said Lennart quietly. “We

looked everywhere over the next weeks.”

“I know, and I’ve been trying to remember … Did we meet

at the time?” asked Julia. “You and I, did we meet?”

The police officers who had turned up and asked questions

when Jens disappeared were just a nameless row of faces to her.

They had asked their questions, she had answered, frantically at first, and then numbly. Who they were had been irrelevant, just as long as they found Jens.

Much later she had realized that some of their questions had focused on the possibility that she herselffor some unknown reason, insanity perhapshad killed her own son and hidden his body.

Lennart shook his head.

“You and I never met… at least, we never spoke,” he replied.

“Other officers were responsible for the contact with you and your family, and as I said, I was one of those leading the search. I assembled volunteers down in Stenvik who spent the entire evening searching along the shore, and I drove round in my patrol car, all along the roads around Stenvik and out on the alvar. But we didn’t find him . .

He stopped speaking, and sighed.

“Those were terrible days,” he went on, “particularly as

I’d … I’d been involved with something similar before, in my private life. My father had …”

He stopped again.

“I know something about that, Lennart,” said Julia gently.

“Astrid Linder told me what happened to your father …”

Lennart nodded. “It’s no secret,” he said.

“She told me about Nils Kant,” said Julia. “How old were you when … when it happened?”

“Eight. I was eight years old,” said Lennart, his eyes fixed on the floor. “I’d started school in Marnas. It was almost the end of term, a beautiful, sunny day. I was happy … looking forward to the summer holidays. Then a rumor started going round among the pupilsthere had been a shooting on the train to Borgholm, somebody from Marnas had been shot… but nobody knew anything definite. It wasn’t until I got home that I found out. My mother was at home and her sisters were there. They sat there in silence for a long time, but in the end my mother told me what had happened …”

Lennart stopped, lost in the past. In his eyes Julia thought she could see the shocked, unhappy eightyearold he had been that day.

“Are policemen not allowed to cry?” she asked tentatively.

“Oh yes,” said Lennart quietly, “but I suppose we’re better

at keeping the lid on our feelings.” He went on: “Nils Kant… I didn’t even know who he was. He was more than ten years older than me, and we’d never met, although we lived just a few kilometers from each other. And suddenly he’d shot my father dead.”

There was silence once again.

“What did you think of him afterward, then?” asked Julia

eventually. “I mean, I can understand it if you hated him …”

She was thinking of herself, the number of times she’d wondered how she would react if she ever met Jens’s murderer. She still didn’t know what she would do.

Lennart looked out of the window through the darkness at the back of the police station.

“Yes, I hated Nils Kant,” he said. “Deeply and intensely. But I was afraid of him too … Particularly at night, when I couldn’t sleep. I was terrified he’d come back to Oland and kill me and my mother too.” He paused. “It took a long time before those feelings went away.”

“Some people say he’s still alive,” said Julia quietly. “Have you heard that?”

Lennart looked at her. “Who’s still alive?”

“Nils Kant.”

“Alive?” said Lennart. “That’s impossible.”

“No. I don’t believe it either…”

“Kant is not alive,” said Lennart, cutting into his pizza. “Who says he is?”

“I don’t believe it either,” repeated Julia quickly. “But Gerlof has been talking about him ever since I got here … It feels as if he’s trying to get me to believe that Nils Kant is behind Jens’s disappearance.

That Jens met Kant that day. Although he must have

been dead for ten years by then.”

“He died in 1963,” said Lennart. “The coffin arrived in

Borgholm harbor that autumn.” He set down his knife and

fork. “And I don’t know if it would be a good idea if this came out… but the coffin was opened up by the police in Borgholm.

Very discreetly, for some reason, perhaps out of fear or respect for Vera Kant, I mean, she did have a lot of money and she owned a considerable amount of land … but it was opened.”

“And there was a body in it?”

Lennart nodded. “I saw it,” he said in a low voice, adding,

“This isn’t exactly official either, but when the coffin came ashore …”

“From one of Malm Freight’s ships,” Julia interposed.

“That’s right. Is it Gerlof who’s filled you in on all this background stuff?” he asked, then went on without waiting for her reply: “I’d just started as a police constable in Marnas, after a couple of years in Vaxjo, and I asked if I could go down to Borgholm to be there when they opened up Kant’s coffin. Of course, my reasons were entirely personal, nothing to do with the police, but my colleagues understood. The coffin was in one of the sheds down by the harbor, waiting for the undertaker. It was a wooden box that was nailed shut, with documents and stamps from some Swedish consulate in South America.” He paused. “One of the older constables broke open the lid. And it was Nils Kant’s body lying in there, partly dried out and covered in furry black mold. A doctor from the hospital in Borgholm was there and confirmed that he’d drowned in salt water. He’d obviously been in the water for quite some time, because the fish had started …”

Lennart’s expression had become absent as he was telling the story, but suddenly he looked down at the table and seemed to remember that they were eating pizza.

“Sorry about all the details,” he said quickly.

“It’s fine,” said Julia. “But how did you know it was Kant?