“Have you ever been inside Kant’s house?” she asked. “Did the police ever look for Jens in there?”
Lennart shook his head. “Why would we have looked in there?”
“I don’t know... it’s just that I’ve been trying to work out where Jens could have gone. Perhaps if he didn’t go down to the sea, and he didn’t go out onto the alvar, he might have gone into one of the neighbors’ houses. And Vera Kant’s house is only a couple of hundred yards from our cottage...”
“Why would he have gone in there?” said Lennart. “And why would he have stayed?”
“I don’t know. If he’d gone in and fallen, or...” said Julia, thinking, Who knows, perhaps Vera Kant was just as crazy as her son.
Maybe you went in there, Jens, and Vera locked the door behind you.
“I know it’s a long shot... but would you take a look in there? With me?”
“Take a look... You mean go inside Kant’s house?”
“Just a quick look, before I go back to Gothenburg tomorrow,” Julia went on, her eyes holding his dubious gaze. She wanted to tell him about the light she’d seen inside the house, but decided against it in case she’d been imagining things. “I mean, it can’t be breaking and entering if the house is empty, can it?” she asked. “And you must be able to go in anywhere you want to, as a police officer?”
Lennart shook his head. “There are very strict regulations. As the only policeman in a country posting, I’ve been able to improvise a little bit, but—”
“But nobody’s going to see us,” Julia interrupted him. “Stenvik is practically empty, and the houses all around Vera Kant’s are summer cottages. Nobody lives nearby.”
Lennart looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go to this meeting,” he said.
At least he hadn’t said no to her suggestion, thought Julia. “And after that?”
“You mean you want to go in there tonight?”
Julia nodded.
“We’ll see,” said Lennart. “These meetings can drag on a bit. I can phone you if it finishes early. Have you got a cell phone?”
“Yes, ring me.”
There were a couple of pencils on the kitchen table, and Julia tore off a piece of the pizza box and wrote down her number. Lennart tucked it in his breast pocket and stood up.
“Don’t do anything on your own,” he said, looking down at her.
“No, I won’t,” she promised.
“Vera Kant’s house looked as if it was about to fall down last time I went past.”
“I know. I won’t go in there on my own.”
But if Jens was there, all alone in the darkness — would he ever forgive her if she didn’t go and look for him?
The streets of Marnäs were completely empty when they emerged from the station. The shops were dark, and only the kiosk over in the square was open. The damp air felt almost as if it were starting to freeze.
Lennart switched off the light and locked the station door behind them.
“So you’re going back to Stenvik now?” he asked.
Julia nodded. “But we might meet up later?”
“Maybe.”
Julia thought of something else.
“Lennart,” she said, “did you find out anything about the sandal? The one Gerlof gave you?”
“No, unfortunately,” he said. “Not yet. I sent it to Linköping, to the national forensic lab there, but I haven’t had a reply yet. These things take time. I’ll give them a ring next week. But perhaps we shouldn’t hope for too much. I mean, so much time has passed, and we’re not even sure it’s the right—”
“I know... It might not even be his shoe,” said Julia quickly.
Lennart nodded. “Take care, Julia.”
He held out his hand, which seemed like a rather impersonal way to say goodbye after everything they’d revealed about themselves that night. But Julia wasn’t much of a one for hugging either, and she took his hand.
“Bye, then. Thanks for the pizza.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll phone you after the meeting.”
His gaze lingered on her face for a moment longer, in the way you can interpret however you like afterward. Then he turned away.
Julia crossed the street to her car. She drove slowly out of the center of Marnäs, past the residential home, where Gerlof was perhaps sitting and drinking his evening coffee, past the dark church and the graveyard.
Was Lennart Henriksson married or a bachelor? Julia didn’t know, and hadn’t dared to ask.
On the way down to Stenvik she pondered over whether she had revealed too much about herself and her feelings of guilt. But it had been good to talk and to get some perspective on this remarkable day in Borgholm, when Gerlof had shared his new theories: that the man who’d murdered Jens was lying there ill in a luxury villa in Borgholm, and that Nils Kant, who’d murdered District Superintendent Henriksson all those years ago, might be alive and working as a car salesman in the same town. It was difficult to know if her father was teasing her or not.
No. He wouldn’t joke about these things. But she didn’t feel that his ideas were moving them forward, somehow.
Might as well go home.
She decided to go back to Gothenburg the following day. First she would go to Ernst Adolfsson’s funeral, then she’d say goodbye to Gerlof and Astrid — and in the afternoon she’d drive home and try to live a better life than before. Drink less wine, swallow fewer pills. Get back to work as soon as possible. Stop clinging to the past and brooding over riddles that could never be solved. Live a normal life and try to look to the future. Then she could come back and visit Gerlof — and perhaps Lennart too — in the spring.
The first houses in Stenvik appeared, and she slowed. At Gerlof’s cottage she stopped the car, got out in the darkness and opened the gate, then drove in. She would spend this last night in her room at the cottage, she decided. She would sleep close to all the good and bad memories for one last time.
Inside, she switched on some lights. Then she left the cottage and went down to the boathouse to collect her toothbrush and everything else she’d left down there — including the bottles of wine she’d brought with her from Gothenburg, and never opened.
She was very aware of Vera Kant’s house in the darkness on her left as she walked along the village road, but she didn’t turn her head. She merely glanced in passing at the lights in Astrid Linder’s house and in John Hagman’s to the south before she went down to the boathouse.
When she’d collected all her belongings, she caught sight of the old paraffin lamp hanging in the window; after a second’s hesitation, she unhooked it and took it up to the cottage with her. To be on the safe side.
On the way back she did look up at Vera’s house behind the tall hawthorn hedges: big and black. There were no lights to be seen at the windows now.
“We never looked in there,” Lennart had said.
And why should the police have gone in? Vera Kant was hardly suspected of having abducted Jens.
But if Nils Kant had hidden himself in there in secret, if Vera had been protecting him... If Jens had gone out onto the village road in the fog and down toward the sea, and stopped at Vera Kant’s gate and opened it and gone in...
No, it was impossible.
Julia kept walking. She went back inside the summer cottage, into the warmth, and switched on the lamps in every room. She took one of the bottles of wine out of her bag, and since this was her last evening on Öland, she opened it in the kitchen and filled a glass. When she’d drunk that, standing by the kitchen counter, she quickly refilled the glass. She took it into the living room.
The alcohol spread through her body.
But — just a quick look. If Lennart’s meeting up in Marnäs finished early, and if he phoned... she’d ask him again if he’d come down. Did he really not want to take a look inside the house where his father’s murderer had grown up? Just a quick look?