If Per hadn’t been feeling so bad, he would have laughed.
Making up his own answers was much quicker, too — in just a few hours he had done three days’ work. And his fear of Markus Lukas had begun to subside.
Afterwards he went into Jerry’s bedroom and looked around. His father hadn’t been there for long and had left few traces, not even his smell. A pair of scruffy flannel trousers was draped over the back of a chair, and Jerry’s briefcase was still lying on the bed.
Per went over and opened it. He had hoped there might be something important inside, but he found nothing but some pills for high blood pressure and two small spring-loaded hand grippers that Jerry had been given to help rebuild his strength after the stroke.
And the old copy of Babylon, of course.
He opened the magazine and looked at the photo sequences. But he wasn’t studying the young girls, just the man referred to in the caption as Markus Lukas, the man who never showed his face. In the pictures he looked about thirty; the magazine was twelve years old, so Markus Lukas must be in his forties now.
Per looked at the back of the man’s head and tried to imagine Markus Lukas behind the wheel of a car. Was this the man who had killed his father?
Suddenly he saw something he hadn’t noticed before: there was an arm sticking out in one of the pictures. It was pointing at the naked couple on the bed, and it was wearing two wristwatches. One gold, and one stainless steel.
It was Jerry’s arm. Per looked at it for a long time.
The telephone rang twice on Monday evening. The first call was from a reporter on an evening paper who had somehow found out that Jerry was dead and that Per was his son. He’d heard that Jerry had died in a car accident ‘in mysterious circumstances’, and asked a long series of questions, but Per refused to give him any answers.
‘Ring the police,’ was his only response.
‘Are you intending to take over?’ asked the reporter. ‘Are you going to run his porn empire from now on?’
‘There is no empire,’ said Per, and put the phone down.
The second call was from Marika.
‘How are you feeling, Per?’
It sounded as if she really wanted to know.
He sighed. ‘Oh, you know.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been spending much time with Nilla... Things will get better.’
Marika made no comment on that. ‘I’ve got some news,’ she said.
‘Good news or bad news?’
‘Good,’ she said, but she didn’t sound particularly optimistic. ‘A vascular surgeon from Lund has been in touch, a friend of Dr Stenhammar. Apparently he’s prepared to operate around Nilla’s aorta. He thinks it’s “a challenge”, so he wants to make an attempt.’
An attempt, thought Per, feeling a heavy, icy clump in his stomach.
‘Good,’ he said.
‘He can’t make any promises. Stenhammar said that several times.’
In some African countries children die like flies, thought Per. Like flies. It will be nothing more than a notice in the paper.
‘Are you worried?’
‘Of course I am, Marika.’
‘So am I, but, I mean, I’ve got Georg... Do you want Jesper to come and stay with you for a while?’
‘No,’ Per said quietly. ‘It’s best if he stays with you.’
He glanced at his reflection in the dark kitchen window, at his tired, frightened eyes, and he knew that Jesper couldn’t come back to the cottage. Not until the troll had been slain.
46
Summer is on its way, thought Gerlof. With all the flowers — wood anemones, poppies and butterfly orchids. And soon it would be lilac time.
It was a fresh, mild spring day, with just a week left until May. The thin soil on the island was moist but dried quickly in the sun, and Gerlof could smell in the air that all the stagnant water in the bogs and marshes around the village had begun to evaporate. Over the course of just a couple of weeks his lawn had gone from yellow to pale green, and had begun to thicken and flourish.
Spring was almost over for this year. In just a few weeks it would be summer — early summer, at least.
‘Spring on Öland arrives with a bang and doesn’t last for long,’ as someone had written. But Gerlof was grateful that he had been able to sit here and watch it come and go from his front-row seat, out here on the lawn, and not from behind triple-glazed windows at the home in Marnäs.
Everything was quiet and peaceful. He had put out a chair for visitors, but no one had appeared over the past few days. John Hagman was down at his son’s in Borgholm helping him redecorate the kitchen, and Astrid Linder wasn’t back from Spain yet. The whole of Stenvik had felt somehow empty this week, but Gerlof had seen Per Mörner’s old car turn down the track leading to the quarry.
Gerlof hoped he would come over. He wasn’t all that keen on the rich folk on the other side of the road, but he enjoyed talking to Per.
As Gerlof was sitting in his chair out on the lawn an hour or so later, Per actually turned up and pushed the gate open.
But his neighbour looked tired this Wednesday morning. He made his way slowly across the grass and with a brief greeting sat down.
‘How are things?’ Gerlof asked.
‘Not so good.’
‘Has something happened?’
Per looked down at the grass. ‘My father’s dead... He died in hospital on Sunday night.’
‘What happened?’
‘He got hit by a car.’
‘Hit by a car?’
‘A hit-and-run, in Kalmar.’
‘An accident?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Per sighed. ‘It was a hit-and-run, but Jerry must have known the driver, because he persuaded my father to go with him to a deserted road. Then he just mowed him down and took off.’
‘And who did it?’
‘Who wanted to kill him? I don’t know... A few things have happened recently, his studio burnt down a few weeks ago. It was deliberate, an arson attack.’
Gerlof nodded. ‘So he wasn’t popular?’
‘Not particularly. Not even with me... I’ve often pretended I didn’t have a father, especially when I was younger.’ He smiled wryly. ‘And now I don’t.’
‘Did he have any other children?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Do you miss him?’
Per seemed to consider the question. ‘The priest asked me that today when we were talking about the funeral. I didn’t know what to say. It was quite difficult to love Jerry, but I wanted him to love me... It was important, for some reason.’
The garden was silent.
‘My mother loved him,’ Per went on quietly. ‘Or maybe she didn’t... but it was important to her that I kept in touch with Jerry. She wanted me to write and ring several times a year, when it was his birthday and so on. Jerry never contacted me... but after he’d had the stroke I obviously came in quite handy. He started calling me then.’
‘This profession of his,’ said Gerlof. ‘Photographing men and women without any clothes on. Did it make him rich?’
Per looked down at his hands. ‘In the past, I think... not lately. But the money used to come rolling in.’
‘Money,’ said Gerlof. ‘It can, as St Paul wrote, make people do evil things...’
Per shook his head. ‘I think it’s all gone. Jerry had a great talent for raking money in, but he was just as good at getting rid of it. He hasn’t had anything to do with magazines for several years, since before he had the stroke. In the end he couldn’t even afford to run a car.’
‘Jerry Morner,’ said Gerlof. ‘Was that his real name?’
‘No, his name was Gerhard Mörner... But he decided he needed a new name when he started directing porn films. They all seem to do the same thing in the porn industry.’