All this time he had wanted to stand in front of all those involved in the drama, to explain exactly what had happened, then point out who had done it, who had killed Nils Kant and little Jens. Great excitement, murmuring voices throughout the room. The murderer would break down and confess; everyone else would be amazed at the truth. Applause.
“You just want to feel important,” Julia had once said to him. And she was probably right. That’s probably what all this was about, feeling important. Not old and forgotten and half dead.
But he was almost dead now. Life was light and warmth, and now that the sun had gone down, the warmth was dwindling away. Gerlof’s feet were like blocks of ice in his shoes; his fingers had lost all feeling. The cold was crippling, but also strangely relaxing — almost pleasant.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds. In his mind’s eye he could see Gunnar Ljunger driving off in his big car. He had thrown out Gerlof’s coat and briefcase to lay a false trail, Gerlof presumed. For those who eventually found them, everything would be perfectly clear: a senile old man had got off the bus and lost his way, wandered off in the wrong direction, and in his confused state had taken his outdoor clothes off. In the end he’d frozen to death by the shore when darkness came.
It wasn’t enough for Ljunger to take Gerlof’s life; he had to make him look like an old idiot too.
He inhaled the cold air in short, panting breaths. When did the body give up and stop working? Wasn’t it when the temperature of the blood dropped below eighty degrees?
He ought to do something, perhaps go down to the shore and try to scratch a message in the sand before he died: GUNNAR LJUNGER — MURDERER, in big letters that the rain wouldn’t be able to obliterate. But he didn’t have the strength.
This was like falling overboard from a ship out at sea, just as cold and wet and lonely. Gerlof had never really learned to swim, and falling into the water far out at sea had always been one of his fears.
He thought about Ella. He’d always believed that he would somehow sense her presence when he was close to death, but he felt nothing.
Then he thought about Julia. Had she left Borgholm yet? Perhaps she was driving past at this very moment in Lennart’s police car, up on the main road. He hoped Ljunger would leave her in peace.
I never stand when I can sit, and never sit when I can lie down. That was a quotation Gerlof had read somewhere, but right now he couldn’t remember where.
His legs gave way. Gerlof began to slip slowly downward, his back scraping painfully against the bark of the tree.
Beneath the leafless crown of the apple tree, he slid down, his legs buckling, and he knew he would never be able to get up again.
It would be a big mistake to sit down and close his eyes under the apple tree, Gerlof knew that. Once he’d sat down, sooner or later he would want to lie down on the ground and close his eyes and drift into the darkness.
Going to sleep would be an even bigger mistake.
But in the end Gerlof gave up, and slid slowly down onto the grass.
He’d just sit down and close his eyes, just for a little while.
Öland, September 1972
Gunnar has an iron pick and two shovels in the trunk of the Volvo. He lifts out the tools, gives one shovel to Martin, then looks at Nils.
“Okay,” he says. “Where are we going?”
Nils stands there in the cold, looking around him in the fog on the alvar. He picks up the familiar scent of grass and herbs and poor soil, and he sees juniper bushes and rocks and faintly marked pathways, just as it was in his youth — but he doesn’t know where he is. All his landmarks have disappeared in the fog.
“We’re going to the memorial cairn,” he says quietly.
“I know that, you said that last night,” says Gunnar irritably. “But where exactly is it?”
“Here... somewhere near here.”
Nils looks around again, and begins to walk away from the Volvo.
Martin, who has hardly said a word all the way here, quickly catches up with him. He had lit a fresh cigarette as soon as he got out of the car, and he’s sucking on it now, his lips thin and tense. Gunnar joins them and walks alongside him.
Nils slows down, as if he were in no hurry. He wants both men in front of him, so he can keep an eye on them.
The fog is thicker than Nils can ever remember; actually, all he can recall is constant sunshine on the alvar when he used to go walking out here as a teenager. Now it feels as if he’s walking along the seabed in a pocket of air. He stops. Ten yards away the landscape has already been obliterated, the only color is grayish white, and every sound is muted. He is wearing only a thin sweater, a dark leather jacket, and jeans, and he’s freezing in the chilly air.
“Are you coming, Nils?”
Gunnar has stopped, too, and turned round. He’s just a big gray shape ahead of Nils, the outlines blurred like a charcoal drawing. His expression is difficult to read and impossible to interpret.
“We don’t want to lose you,” Gunnar says, but before Nils has caught up with him, he turns and sets off again, without waiting, striding out across the cowering grass.
Twilight is slowly falling across the alvar. It will be late before Nils gets home to his mother. Does she know he’s coming today?
Nils walks past a flat stone with uneven edges in the grass; it’s almost like a triangle, and all at once he recognizes it. Now he knows where he is.
“It’s more to the left,” he says.
Gunnar changes direction without saying a word.
Nils thinks he can hear a faint sound in the fog; he stops again and listens. A car on the village road? He listens hard, but hears nothing more.
They’re close now, but when Gunnar and Martin finally stop at a fairly big mound of grass, Nils still doesn’t think they’ve arrived. He can’t see the stones of the cairn anywhere.
“Here it is,” says Gunnar tersely.
“No,” says Nils.
“Yes.”
Gunnar kicks at the grass a few times, revealing the edge of a stone.
Only then does Nils realize that the memorial cairn doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been forgotten. No traveler has placed a stone on it to honor the dead for decades, and the yellow grass of the alvar has swallowed it.
Nils thinks about the last time he was here, when he hid the treasure. He was so young then, young and almost proud of having shot the soldiers out on the alvar.
Nothing has been right since then. Everything has gone wrong.
Nils points. “Here... somewhere here,” he says. “Dig here.”
He looks at Martin, standing there with the shovel in his hand, fumbling as he tries to get yet another cigarette into his mouth. Why is he so nervous?
“Get digging,” says Nils. “If you want the treasure.”
He steps aside and walks round to the other side of the cairn. Behind him he can hear a shovel being driven into the ground. The digging begins.
Nils gazes out into the fog, but nothing is moving. Everything is silent.
Behind him Martin has begun to dig a deep trench in the ground. His shovel has already struck several rocks, which Gunnar has had to remove with the pick, and he is red in the face. He is breathing heavily and looking nastily at Nils.
“There’s nothing down here,” he snarls. “Just rocks.”
“There must be,” says Nils, looking down into the hole. “This is where I hid it.”
But the hole is empty, he can see that — just as Martin says.
“Give me that,” says Nils crossly, reaching for the other shovel.
Then he begins to dig himself, with rapid, deep thrusts.
After a minute or so he sees the flat slabs of limestone he took off the cairn so long ago — the slabs he placed around the metal box to protect it.