The Quarry (20 page)

The kingdom of the elves
.

But when she opens her eyes, everything has vanished.

She goes home to the farm and looks up at the middle window upstairs, in spite of the fact that she doesn’t really want to.

The Invalid’s room. As usual the window is dark and empty.

Vendela goes into the porch and continues straight through the kitchen into Henry’s bedroom, where unwashed clothes, invoices from wholesalers and letters from the authorities are lying all over the place. She has no money to offer the elves, but in a dark-brown cupboard next to her father’s bed is her mother’s jewellery box.

Henry won’t be home from the quarry for several hours, and of course the Invalid can’t disturb her either, so she kneels down in front of the cupboard and opens it.

The white jewellery box is on the bottom shelf. It is lined with green fabric, and contains brooches, necklaces, earrings and tiepins – perhaps twenty or thirty pieces in total, both old, inherited items and things that were bought after the war, everything that her mother and her family gathered over the years and left behind.

With her thumb and forefinger, Vendela carefully picks up a silver brooch with a polished red stone. Even here in the darkness the stone has a glow about it, almost like a ruby.

A ruby in Paris
, Vendela thinks.

She listens, but the house is silent. She takes the brooch and tucks it down her dress.

On her way home from school the next day, Vendela takes the brooch out of the inside pocket of her coat when she reaches the elf stone. She looks at the brooch, then at the empty hollows.

It’s funny, but she can’t think of anything to ask for. Not today. She is almost ten years old and there ought to be lots of things to wish for, but her head is completely empty.

A trip to Paris?

She mustn’t be greedy. In the end she just wishes for a trip to the mainland – to Kalmar. She hasn’t been there for almost two years.

She places the brooch in one of the hollows and runs home.

It is Saturday. For once the school is closed, because new stoves are being installed in the classrooms.

‘Hurry up with the cows this morning,’ her father says at breakfast. ‘And get changed when you come home.’

‘What for?’

‘We’re going to Kalmar on the train, and we’re going to stay overnight with your aunt.’

A coincidence? No, it was the elves.

But Vendela should have stopped wishing for things at that point.

Per was going to ring the police about the fire, but if the family was going to eat, he had to get some work done as well. So after breakfast, when he had settled his father on the patio, he shut himself in the kitchen with a list of numbers and his questionnaire. He placed his finger on the list and called the first number.

Three rings, then a male voice answered with his surname. The name matched the one on Per’s list, so he straightened up and took a deep breath in order to fill his voice with energy.

‘Good morning, my name is Per Mörner and I’m calling from Intereko; we’re involved in market research. I wonder if you have time to answer a few questions? It will only take a couple of minutes.’

(In fact it was more like ten minutes.)

‘What’s it about?’ said the man.

‘I’d just like to ask you some questions about a particular brand of soap. Do you use soap in your household?’

The man laughed. ‘Well, yes …’

‘Good,’ said Per. ‘I’m going to say the name of this soap, and I’d like you to tell me when you last saw it.’

He said the name, slowly and clearly.

‘I do recognize it,’ said the man. ‘I’ve seen adverts for it in town.’

‘Great,’ said Per. ‘Can you describe in three words what you felt when you saw these adverts?’

He was well under way now. Marika had looked amused last year – or scornful, Per thought – when he told her he was interviewing people over the phone. When they met they had both been working in marketing, but Marika had become a team leader while Per had decided to quit after their divorce. It was a decision he had arrived at gradually, partly because of Jerry. His father had been hungry for money and success, and he didn’t want to follow him down that road.

But interviewing was a job he could do wherever there was a telephone. It was all about checking what image a particular item had, finding out people’s dreams and hopes about the product, so that future sales and marketing campaigns could build on that knowledge.

By shortly after ten o’clock he had called twenty-five of the numbers on his list, and had got answers from fourteen of them. When he put down the phone after the last interview, it rang immediately.

‘Mörner.’

He couldn’t hear a voice, just a strange, echoing noise. It sounded as if someone was yelling in the background, a few metres from the phone, but it sounded metallic. Recorded.

‘Hello?’

No reply. The yelling continued.

Wrong number – or perhaps another telephone interviewer. Per hung up.

He carried on working through his list, but at about eleven o’clock he took a break to go and fetch the Kalmar newspaper from the mailbox. It was supposed to be a morning paper, but it arrived much later in Stenvik.

He walked back to the cottage, flicking through the news pages, and stopped dead when he saw the headline:

The badly burnt bodies of a woman in her thirties and a man in his sixties were found on Wednesday in a house outside Ryd, to the south of Växjö.

The property was completely destroyed in a fire on Sunday night, and an employee who was believed to be in the house was reported missing. The police searched the remains of the house and discovered a body which has been identified as that of the missing man. Another person was also discovered in a different part of the house, a younger woman who has yet to be identified.

The cause of the fire is not yet known, but after interviewing a witness, police believe it was started deliberately. A preliminary investigation into arson has begun.

Per folded up the paper and went back to the cottage. So he really had heard a woman screaming in the burning house, and no doubt the police would soon be in touch. He sat down in the kitchen and called them himself.

He rang the number for the station in Växjö and asked for the woman who had interviewed him after the fire, but she wasn’t at work and he was passed on to an inspector by the name of Lars Marklund, who demanded both Jerry and Per’s personal ID numbers before he said anything at all; even then he wasn’t particularly talkative.

‘This is a case of arson involving two deaths, and the preliminary investigation is ongoing. That’s all I can say.’

‘One of the dead is a woman, according to the paper,’ said Per. ‘Do you know who she was?’

‘Do
you
know who she was?’ asked the inspector.

‘No,’ Per said quickly.

The inspector didn’t say anything, so Per went on: ‘Do you have any suspects?’

‘I can’t comment on that.’

‘Is there any way I can help?’

‘Yes,’ said the officer. ‘You can tell me about the scene.’

‘The scene … Do you mean the house?’

‘Yes – our technicians have been wondering what the house was actually used for. There were several small bedrooms upstairs, and parts of the house were set out like a classroom, and a bar or a pub, and then there was some kind of prison cell …’

‘It was a film studio,’ said Per. ‘The guest rooms were for the actors who came to work there. Other rooms were set up for filming a variety of scenes. I was never involved, but according to my father they had every possible scenario.’

‘Oh, so they made films there,’ said the inspector. ‘Anything we might have heard of?’

Per sighed to himself before replying. ‘No. They made films that went straight to video, films that were made very quickly.’

‘Mysteries?’

‘No. They made … erotic films.’

It was like a production line
, he thought. Hans Bremer had worked fast as a director; Jerry had said that he sometimes made an entire full-length film in two days.

‘Erotic films … Do you mean porn?’

‘Exactly. They took male and female models out there and made porn films.’

Marklund paused.

‘I see,’ he said eventually. ‘Well, that isn’t necessarily illegal, as long as no minors are involved. Were they?’

‘No,’ Per said quickly, although he wasn’t absolutely certain. How old had Regina actually been?

‘So you were part of this … activity?’

‘No, not at all. But my father has told me a certain amount.’

‘Has he said anything about why his companion burnt down their studio?’ asked the inspector. ‘Or do you have any idea why he did it?’

The question revealed how the police were thinking. They believed Bremer was behind the fire.

‘No,’ said Per. ‘But I don’t think the business has been going all that well for the last few years. My father fell ill, and I think perhaps competition from abroad has increased in … in this particular industry. But that’s no reason to kill yourself, surely?’

‘You never know,’ said Marklund.

Per wondered whether to tell him about the figure he had seen on the edge of the forest, but decided to keep quiet. He’d already mentioned it in an interview; that would have to do.

He looked out of the window at the patio, where Jerry was fast asleep on a sun lounger. ‘Are you going to talk to my father?’

‘Not before Easter,’ said Marklund. ‘But we’ll be in touch.’

Per put down the phone. That was that.

If Jerry hadn’t been fully retired before this weekend, he had no choice now – his workplace was gone. Per would drive him back to his apartment after Easter, and he could live a peaceful life there. Sit in front of the TV and live on his pension. If he had one.

Per went out on to the patio. ‘I’ve just been speaking to the police, Jerry. They’ve found two bodies in your house … Hans Bremer and a woman. Did you see a woman there?’

Jerry looked up at him and shook his head.

Per sat down opposite him. ‘The police seem to think it was Bremer who set fire to the place,’ he said. ‘And that does seem like the logical explanation, doesn’t it?’

But Jerry was still shaking his head. Eventually his mouth formed just one word: ‘No.’

‘Yes, Jerry. They think he wanted to destroy the studio.’

His father appeared to abandon the attempt to speak. He bent down to his briefcase and opened the worn straps. He rooted through a pile of papers and pulled out a magazine. It was the same old copy of
Babylon
he had whipped out at the party.

‘I don’t want to look at that,’ said Per curtly.

But Jerry started flicking through the pages anyway, as if he were looking for something. Then he found a particular double-page spread, and held it up to Per. ‘Markus Lukas,’ he said.

Per sighed, he didn’t want to look. But he leaned forward anyway.

The pictures Jerry was holding up showed nothing more than yet another sex scene between a well-built man and a young blonde woman – the same scenario his father had published in one magazine after another over the years. The female model was lying underneath the man, but her face was turned away from him and towards the photographer, and the couple seemed to be making every effort to touch each other as little as possible. There could be no hint of love or tenderness.

‘Markus Lukas,’ said Jerry, pointing at the man.

‘OK, Markus Lukas. So that was the name of your male model?’

Jerry nodded.

Per contemplated the naked back of a muscular, broad-shouldered man aged between thirty and forty. He had thick, curly black hair, visible in one picture that showed the back of his head; most of the pictures revealed him only from the waist down.

He thought about the man who had been driving the car that spring day, with Per and Regina in the back seat. Jerry had called him ‘Markus Lukas’. Was this the same man?

‘You can’t see his face,’ said Per.

Jerry nodded, but pointed at the man again. His stiff mouth was working. ‘He … ang—’

‘Angry? Is he angry?’ said Per.

Jerry nodded.

‘Who is he angry with? You and Hans Bremer?’

Jerry looked away. ‘Cheated,’ he said.

‘That doesn’t surprise me … you and Bremer cheated him out of some money?’

Jerry shook his head, but said nothing more.

Per picked up the magazine and leafed through it. There were plenty of pictures of different girls, page after page of close-ups and full-length shots, but the male models with whom they were having sex were only partly visible in the photographs. The camera focused on the women; the men were completely anonymous.

‘Are there
no
pictures of Markus Lukas’s face?’ he asked.