“I was going for lunch, but come in for a minute.”
He stepped aside to let Julia in.
The room inside looked older than the newspaper office she’d just visited, but it was clean and neat with plants on the windowsill, and there was no smell of stale cigarette smoke. There was just one desk, facing the door, with all the paperwork in tidy piles. A computer, a fax machine, and a telephone were neatly arranged. Above a shelf full of files was a poster with a drawing of a telephone, advertising the police narcotics helpline. On another wall was a big map of northern Öland.
“Nice office,” said Julia.
Lennart Henriksson liked everything neat and tidy, and that pleased her.
“Do you think so?” asked Lennart. “It’s been here for over thirty years.”
“Are you the only one who works here?”
“At the moment, yes. In the summer there are usually more of us, but at this time of year it’s just me. There are more and more cutbacks all the time.” He looked around the room with a gloomy expression, and added, “We’ll see how long this place is allowed to stay open.”
“Is it going to close?”
“Maybe. The big bosses are always talking about it, to save money,” said Lennart. “Everything should be consolidated in Borgholm, according to them; that will be the best and cheapest arrangement. But I hope I can stay here until I retire in a few years.” He looked at Julia. “Have you had lunch?”
“No.”
Julia shook her head, thought about it, and realized she was actually quite hungry.
“Shall we eat together?” said Lennart.
“Yes... okay.”
She couldn’t come up with any reason for saying no.
“Great. We’ll go over to Moby Dick... I’ll just shut down the computer and put the answering machine on.”
Five minutes later Julia was back by the little harbor, together with Lennart. They went into the best restaurant in Marnäs — both the best and only one in the village, he’d explained.
The décor inside was inspired by the sea, with shipping charts and fishing nets and old, cracked wooden oars hanging on the dark wood-paneled walls. Half the tables were occupied by customers eating lunch, and the room was filled with the low hum of conversation and the sound of dishes clattering in the kitchen. A few curious faces turned toward Julia as she walked in, but Lennart went first as if to protect her and chose a table by the window set slightly apart, with a view over the Baltic.
When had Julia last eaten in a restaurant? She couldn’t remember. It felt very strange to sit down at a table in a room full of strangers, but she made an effort to breathe calmly and to meet Lennart’s gaze across the table.
“Good afternoon. Welcome.”
A man with a huge belly, his shirtsleeves rolled up, came over and handed them two leather-bound menus.
“Hi, Kent,” said Lennart, taking the menus.
“And what would you like to drink on a beautiful day like today?”
“I’ll have a light beer,” said Lennart.
“Iced water, please,” said Julia.
Her first impulse was of course to order red wine, preferably a whole carafe, but she suppressed it. She was going to get through this sober. It wasn’t dangerous, people had lunch in restaurants all over the world every single day.
“Today’s special is lasagna,” said Kent.
“Fine by me,” said Lennart.
“Me too.”
Julia nodded and caught a glimpse of a broad tattoo, dark green and blurred with age, on Kent’s upper arm just beneath the sleeve as he reached over for the menus. It looked like letters in some kind of frame. A name? The name of a ship?
“Salad and coffee are included in the price,” he said, disappearing into the kitchen.
Lennart got up to fetch some salad, and Julia went with him.
“Lennart!” a man’s voice called out from the other side of the room as they were on their way back to the table. “Lennart!”
The police officer sighed quietly.
“Back in a minute,” he told Julia in a low voice, turning toward the man who had called him; he was an elderly man with a red, shiny face, wearing some kind of blue farm overalls. Julia sat down at their table and watched the man gesturing wildly, telling Lennart something with a determined expression on his face. Lennart gave him some kind of answer, quietly and briefly, and the man started waving his arms about again.
Lennart came back to the table after a few minutes and had just sat down when Kent arrived with two plates full of bubbling hot lasagna.
Lennart sighed again. “Sorry about that,” he said to Julia.
“It’s fine.”
“He’s had a break-in in his barn and somebody’s taken a petrol container,” he went on. “When you’re a country policeman, you’re always on duty, you never have any problems deciding what to do in your spare time. Anyway, let’s eat.”
He bent over the lasagna.
Julia started eating too. She was suddenly hungry now and the lasagna was good, with plenty of meat.
As his plate gradually emptied, Lennart took a sip of his beer and leaned back.
“So you’re here visiting your dad?” he asked. “Not to lie in the sun and swim?”
Julia smiled and shook her head. “No,” she said, “although Öland is lovely in the autumn too.”
“Gerlof seems well,” remarked Lennart. “Except for the rheumatism.”
“Yes... He has Sjögren’s syndrome. It’s some kind of rheumatic pain in the joints that comes and goes. But there’s nothing wrong with his mind. And he can still build ships in bottles.”
“Yes, they’re quite beautiful... I’ve kept meaning to order one for the police station, but I’ve never got round to it.”
There was a silence again. Lennart emptied his glass and asked quietly:
“And what about you, Julia? Are you all right now?”
“Oh yes...” said Julia quickly. It was a lie to some extent, one she was accustomed to telling, but then she realized Lennart might genuinely be interested, and asked, “You mean... after yesterday?”
“Well, yes,” said Lennart, “partly that. But I was thinking about what happened a long time ago as well... over twenty years ago.”
“Oh,” said Julia.
Lennart knew about it. Of course he did, what had she been thinking? He’d been a police officer here for thirty years, he’d told her that. And just like Astrid, he’d dared to bring up the forbidden topic, calmly and cautiously — a topic her sister had long ago grown tired of, and which several of Julia’s relatives had never dared to mention.
“Were you... involved?” she asked quietly.
Lennart looked down at the table, hesitating, as if the question had evoked unpleasant memories.
“Yes, I was involved in the search,” he said at last. “I was one of the first officers on the scene down in Stenvik... I sent people out in search parties along the shore. We were out there all evening; the search was called off an hour or so after midnight. When a child disappears, nobody wants to give up looking...”
Julia remembered Astrid Linder saying almost the same thing, and she looked down at the table. She had no intention of starting to cry, not in front of a police officer.
“Sorry,” she said to Lennart a second later, as the tears came.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” said Lennart. “I’ve cried too, sometimes.”
His voice was low and calm, like the still surface of a pool. Julia blinked and concentrated on his serious face in order to keep her gaze clear. She wanted to say something, anything.
“Gerlof,” she said, clearing her throat, “doesn’t believe that Jens, my son... he doesn’t believe he drowned.”
Lennart looked at her.
“I see” was all he said.
“He’s... he’s found a shoe,” said Julia. “A little sandal, a boy’s sandal. Like the one Jens had on when he...”