Gerlof watched the policeman hurrying toward the door, and wondered if his daughter and Lennart Henriksson had some project on the go that he didn’t know about — but just a few seconds later a spoon was tapped tentatively against a coffee cup across the room. A chair scraped, and someone stood up.
Gerlof saw to his surprise that it was John Hagman. Both he and his son Anders looked equally uncomfortable in their black suits.
John cleared his throat, red in the face, his fingers scrabbling nervously at the sides of his black jacket. Then he began to speak:
“I...” he said. “I don’t usually do this sort of thing... not really... But I’d just like to say a few words about my friend and yours, Ernst Adolfsson, and the village of Stenvik. It will be a darker and lonelier place now that...”
An hour later Gerlof was back at the home in Marnäs — thanks to Astrid and Gösta — and could relax. He ate a late lunch, warmed up for him by Boel. On one of the tables in the empty dining room was that day’s edition of Ölands-Posten, and Gerlof noticed a headline on the front page: MISSING PENSIONER FOUND DEAD.
Even more bad news. The article was about the elderly man who had left his home in southern Öland a week or so earlier, and had now been found in a copse out on the alvar, frozen to death.
The police did not suspect any crime, the paper reported. The man was old and senile, and appeared to have got lost less than a kilometer from the village where he’d lived all his life.
Gerlof didn’t know the dead man, but he still felt the newspaper article was a bad omen.
For the rest of the afternoon he stayed in his room, and didn’t bother going for coffee. He didn’t come out until dinner, which consisted of Öland dumplings, badly seasoned and with far too little meat — not a bit like the delicious dumplings Ella used to make once a month or so — but Gerlof ate a couple anyway.
“Did you manage all right over in the church without me?” asked Marie as she was serving up his dumplings.
“No problem,” said Gerlof.
“So Ernst Adolfsson is in the ground now?” said Maja Nyman on the other side of the table.
Of course, Maja was from Stenvik, too, thought Gerlof, even if she hadn’t lived there for forty years.
He nodded. “Yes, Ernst is resting next to the church now.”
He picked up his fork and began to eat, grateful as ever that his teeth were good. And thank heavens Sjögren had finally settled down.
“Was it a nice coffin?” asked Maja.
“It was,” said Gerlof. “White-painted wood, polished and beautiful.”
“I’d like mahogany,” said Maja. “If it’s not too expensive... Otherwise I suppose it’ll be cheap wood and a cremation.”
Gerlof nodded again politely, took another bite of his dumplings, and was just about to say that cremation was definitely preferable, when somebody touched him on the shoulder. It was Boel.
“Telephone call, Gerlof,” she said quietly.
“In the middle of dinner?”
“Yes. It’s obviously important. It’s Lennart Henriksson... from the police.”
Gerlof felt a sudden icy chill in his stomach, a chill that woke Sjögren from his evening nap and made him seize Gerlof’s joints again. Stress always made his rheumatism worse.
“I’d better take it, then,” he said.
Julia? It was almost certainly about Julia, and it was almost certainly bad news. He struggled to his feet.
“You can use the telephone in the kitchen,” said Boel.
He made his way into the kitchen, leaning on his cane. There was a red plastic telephone on the wall, and Gerlof picked up the receiver.
“Davidsson,” he said.
“Gerlof... it’s Lennart.” His voice sounded extremely serious.
“Has something happened?” asked Gerlof, although he already knew the answer.
“Yes... It’s Julia. She hadn’t gone to Gothenburg.”
“Where is she?” Gerlof heard the wobble in his voice.
“Down in Borgholm,” said Lennart. “In the hospital.”
“Is it bad?”
“Pretty bad. But it could have been much worse. She’s knocked herself about a bit. They’re putting her in plaster at the hospital... I’ll go down there and pick her up tonight.”
“What happened?” said Gerlof. “What’s she done?”
Lennart hesitated, took a deep breath, then replied:
“She broke into Vera Kant’s house yesterday evening and fell down the stairs from the upper floor. She was a bit... well, she was very confused when I found her. She kept saying the house is occupied. That Nils Kant lives there.”
21
Julia was awakened from the warmth of sleep by a squeaking noise, and after a few seconds she remembered where she was: in Vera Kant’s big house in Stenvik.
She was shivering. The pain in her broken body had made her drowsy, and after a long night lying awake on the floor, she had closed her eyes and dreamed about that last summer with Jens, when the sun seemed to shine on Öland without interruption. When the autumn was far away.
She saw a dusty, dirty floor underneath her, and realized it was daylight.
The squeaking noise was coming from the outside door, which was being pushed open.
“Julia?” an echoing voice called out above her.
A pair of hands raised her head and pushed a rolled-up jacket or sweater under the back of her neck.
“Can you hear me? Julia, wake up!”
She turned her aching face up toward the ceiling. She could only use her left eye — the right one was swollen shut.
It was Lennart’s calm voice — she recognized it even before she saw that it really was him. He wasn’t wearing his uniform; he was in a black suit and shiny shoes. They were covered in dried mud from Vera Kant’s garden, but he didn’t seem to care about that.
“I can hear you,” she said.
“Good.” He didn’t sound annoyed, just tired. “Good morning, in that case.”
“I came in here and... fell down the stairs,” she went on faintly, lifting her head from the floor. “It was stupid.”
“Gerlof said you’d gone home,” said Lennart. “But I thought you might be here.”
Julia was lying on the veranda; that was as far as she’d managed to crawl during the night when she’d finally regained consciousness on the kitchen floor, among the remains of her cell phone and the broken lamp. The paraffin had leaked out and ignited, but the fire had gone out on the stone floor.
It had been impossible to stand, because somebody had driven a red-hot nail through her right foot. So she had begun to crawl laboriously toward the outside door, just to get out of the kitchen, and in the darkness out on the veranda she’d collapsed again. She could hear the wind blowing outside, and had no strength left to set off out into the night. She had collapsed by the door, constantly terrified that she might hear footsteps approaching from inside the house.
“Stupid,” Julia repeated quietly. “Stupid, stupid...”
“Don’t think about that now. I should have come over last night, but the meeting...” Lennart stopped speaking, and she felt his hands under her arms. He tried to lift her up, carefully. “Can you stand up?” he asked her.
She hoped he wouldn’t be able to tell she’d been drinking. The intoxication was still with her like a revolting aftertaste.
“I don’t know... I’ve broken something... some bones.”
“Are you sure?”
Julia nodded wearily. “I’m a nurse.”
And she was, in fact. And the diagnosis she had reached even before she’d started crawling out of the kitchen was a fractured wrist, broken collarbone, and possibly also a broken right foot.
The foot could of course just be very badly sprained, it was difficult to tell. Julia had had patients who’d been unable to put their weight on a sprained ankle for several weeks — while others had broken theirs and walked around almost normally afterward, assuming it would soon get better.