Nils nods.
Fritiof pokes the body between them with his shoe.
“We’ll drag it back out again now, just a few yards, cut the face up a bit and anchor it to the bottom... then we’ll let the fish do their job. After that, nobody will be able to tell the difference between you.” He nods toward Borrachon’s little bag by the fire. “Don’t forget to take his passport. You might not get into Mexico otherwise.”
“And afterwards,” says Nils, “you’ll come back here?”
“Yes. You stay in Mexico City, and I’ll come back here in a week or so. I’ll haul the body onto the beach and get rid of any traces, then I’ll drive back down to Limón and start asking people if anyone has seen my Swedish friend Nils. It’s probably best if someone else comes and finds the corpse, but otherwise I’ll have to do it.”
Nils starts to get undressed. “We’ll swap clothes, then.”
Fritiof looks at him. “Anything else?” he says. “Have you forgotten anything?”
Nils pulls off his shirt in the darkness. “Like what?”
Fritiof points silently at Nils’s left hand, at his two bent fingers. Then he bends down and grabs hold of Borrachon’s arm, straightens it out so that the left hand is lying in the sand, and stamps down hard on the ring finger and the middle finger with the heel of his shoe. Harder and harder, until a quiet crack is heard in the darkness.
“There,” says Fritiof, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and tying the broken fingers to the palm at a crooked angle. “You’ll soon be twins.”
Nils just looks at him. This man, Fritiof, is ahead of him all the time when it comes to planning. How does he intend this to finish?
Nils pushes his unease to one side.
“Take off his trousers,” he says. “I’ll dry them over the fire. Then he can have mine instead, and my wallet.”
All he wants to do now is go home. If he can just get back to Stenvik, all this will have a happy ending.
Then it won’t matter that he’s in hell.
27
“We’re old men after all, both of us,” said Gerlof to Martin Malm. “And we’ve got time to think. And I’ve been thinking a great deal lately...”
He met Martin’s gaze. They were still sitting opposite each other in the dark drawing room, where the TV was now showing pictures of Fred Flintstone hacking rocks out of the mountainside.
Gerlof still had the book with the photo from Ramneby in his hand.
“Your freight company wasn’t that big when this picture was taken,” he said. “I know that, because mine was just as small. You had a few sailing ships that carried cargo, stone, and timber and all kinds of goods across our own little Baltic Sea, just like the rest of us. But then three or four years later you bought your first steamship and started sailing to Europe and across the Atlantic. The rest of us limped along with our sailing ships for a little while longer, until the regulations about minimum crew numbers and maximum loads became too much for us. We couldn’t get the banks to lend us any money for bigger ships; you were the only one who invested in modern tonnage at exactly the right time.” He was still looking at Malm. “But where did you get the money from, Martin? You had just as little money of your own as any other skipper at that time, and the banks must have been just as miserly with you as they were with the rest of us.”
Martin’s jaw tensed, but he said nothing.
“Did it come from August Kant, Martin?” asked Gerlof. “From the owner of the sawmill at Ramneby?”
Martin stared at Gerlof, and his head jerked.
“No? But I think it did.”
Gerlof reached into his briefcase again, then grabbed his cane and got up. He walked slowly around the television and over to Martin.
“I think you got paid for bringing home a murderer from South America, Martin. Nils Kant, who’d murdered a policeman... August’s nephew.”
Martin moved his head back and forth. He opened his mouth again.
“Ee-ra,” he said. “Ee-ra A-ant.”
“Vera Kant,” said Gerlof. He was beginning to understand Martin a little now. “Nils’s mother. No doubt she wanted her son home as well. But it was her brother August who paid, wasn’t it? First he paid you to bring home a body in a coffin to Öland, which was buried up in Marnäs so that everybody would believe Nils Kant was dead. Then you brought Nils home several years later, more discreetly.”
He stood in front of Martin, who had to twist his neck in order to look up at him.
“Nils came home, sometime toward the end of the sixties, and hid somewhere here on Öland. He didn’t need to hide particularly carefully, because nobody would recognize him after twenty-five years. I’m sure he was able to visit his mother sometimes, and go walking out on the alvar.”
Gerlof looked down at the man in the wheelchair.
“I think Nils was walking around out there one foggy September day, when he met a little boy who had got lost in the fog. My grandson, Jens.”
Martin Malm said nothing.
“And then something went wrong,” Gerlof went on quietly. “Something happened and Nils got scared. I don’t believe Nils Kant was as evil and as crazy as some people maintain. He was just scared and impulsive, and he could be violent sometimes. And that’s why Jens died.” Gerlof sighed. “And then... you probably know better than anyone. I think Nils came and asked you for help. Together you buried my grandson’s body somewhere out on the alvar. But you kept one thing.”
He brought out the object he had taken from his briefcase. It was the brown envelope with Malm Freight’s logo torn off, the one Gerlof had received in the mail.
“You kept one of Jens’s sandals. You sent it to me a couple of months ago, in this envelope. Why did you do that, Martin? Did you want to make your confession?”
Malm looked at the envelope, and his chin moved again.
“Unn-er’s a-zee.”
Gerlof nodded without understanding what the other man meant. He sat down slowly to get his breath back, and gave Martin one last long look.
“Did you kill Nils, Martin?”
Gerlof’s final question received no answer, of course, so he answered it himself:
“I think you did... I think Nils had become too dangerous for you. And I think he was the one who gave you that scar on your forehead. But I can’t prove that either, of course.”
He leaned forward and wearily pushed the book and the envelope back in his old briefcase. It had been hard work, this performance, and he was exhausted.
On a bookshelf along one wall, framed family photographs were arranged, and Gerlof could see smiling youngsters on several of them.
“Our children, Martin...” he said. “We have to expect that they will forget about us. We want our children to remember all the good things we did in spite of everything, but that isn’t always the way things turn out.”
Gerlof was so tired now, just saying whatever came into his head. Martin Malm too seemed to have lost all his strength. Over in his wheelchair, he was neither moving nor attempting to say anything else.
The air in the drawing room seemed to have been completely used up, and the room felt darker than it had been. Gerlof got up slowly.
“It’s time I was on the move, Martin,” he said. “Look after yourself... I might be back.”
He thought the last sentence sounded threatening, and that was his intention, to a certain extent.
The door to the hallway opened before he got there. Ann-Britt Malm’s pale face appeared.
Gerlof smiled wearily at her.
“We’ve had our little chat,” he told her.
It was actually only Gerlof who had done any chatting, and he hadn’t received one single clear answer.
He walked past Martin Malm’s wife, and she closed the drawing room door behind them.