Blackwater (46 page)

He ought to have pretended that it was good, or at least reasonable, for Mia and her grandmother to go to Åland. But he was caught in the process of grinding disintegration, and tried to convince her it was something else she wanted, not just to look after her grandmother.

It was all fairly simple, he realised that afterwards. She wanted to be left in peace for a while. But he couldn’t leave her in peace. He wanted everything to be all right. They would sleep together, talk about the child, walk in the mountains, go fishing, take photographs – he wanted it all to be normal again now, once and for all.

Just because of that, he made her say things that should never have been said. He wanted to talk about the baby and she didn’t. She said it wasn’t certain there would be a baby. He ought to have left it at that, but he was scared and blurted out:

‘You won’t have a miscarriage now, that’s not likely, so what do you mean?’

She never said it. But her tone of voice was cold and conclusive when she told him that she had no intention of making the same mistake her mother had made.

‘I know what I’m doing. I wanted to be pregnant and I became pregnant. But I’ve no intention of raising a child on my own. That’s a wretched existence.’

That could have been an assurance that they would stay together. But he wasn’t sure. She packed her belongings and emptied the fridge. They hadn’t eaten and she did not ask him whether he wanted anything. They had arrived in separate cars, meaning to take a whole lot of Annie’s things to Östersund. Now Mia left the cardboard boxes in the kitchen and maintained that she was going to see her grandmother.

He drove ahead of her towards town. He thought they had agreed to stop and rest at her usual places, but as he turned off into a forest track north of Lersjövik, she drove past him and disappeared round the bend. It was absurd, so childish, he found it hard to grasp that it was also serious and alarming. That his only hope now was that thick, thick blood. The mother substances. A soup that eventually would be sufficiently strong and murky to stop her putting a clinical end to everything.

He had seen a great many dead people over the years. And he had also seen relatives beside their dead. Some caressed them, but most observed a rigid decorum, sitting upright on a chair, waiting out the minutes – seldom a matter of more than minutes. A wake was just as unthinkable as breast-feeding a child for years.

Someone collapsing and weeping or screaming was unusual. Most people knew themselves, and if they sensed that they would not be able to bear it, they declined.

Annie had sat with two fingers on the dead baby’s cold skin. She had put the tips of her fingers where the chest sloped down towards the armpit. He had not understood why.

She had driven in her own car from Blackwater. Mia had had to stay behind with Aagot. Annie’s suitcase had been packed and ready for a week or two, and she had intended to go to Östersund maternity hospital. At Offerberg she was taken by surprise when the waters broke. She had had no idea the course of events could be so much swifter the second time she gave birth.

She drove from Offerberg to Byvången, stopping each time a pain overcame her. In Tuvallen she had to take a taxi. She arrived in Byvången pale, angry and already becoming exhausted. It was a quick delivery. After all these years, Birger could still remember his encouraging cries to her. But memory had distorted them, at first they had been hearty, then gradually cynical and inappropriate. The ironic twist had of course been totally impersonal – inhuman. He was not cynical. He had wished her well and had thought everything would be all right.

The baby was not born, it came out. The umbilical cord had twisted tightly round its throat and strangled it.

He couldn’t remember if he had tried to comfort her at the delivery table. He must have done. However wretched he had felt, there were words and sentences he always used. On the other hand, he remembered going in to see her an hour or so later. That was when she had asked to see the baby.

He had been very uneasy, not least because she had shown no emotion. She was pale and not really communicating, just making sure she had her own way. He hadn’t been able to think of any way of refusing.

The baby was female, a large well-formed foetus. She had never opened her eyes. Her skin was bluish and covered with glistening foetal fat. He had wiped her as clean as he could and wrapped her in a large white towel without covering her. He left the door of the treatment room open and in person went to fetch Annie Raft, manoeuvering the bed with some difficulty; he was not used to the task. But he hadn’t wanted the assistants to have anything to do with it and had waited until the evening when only the receptiÖnist on duty and the night nurse were in the building.

His idea had been that she could glimpse the child through the door and decline in time if she felt she couldn’t bear it. But she had him push the bed right in and asked him to move it closer. Finally, she had put the forefinger and middle finger of her right hand on the cold, blue skin and held them there for a long spell. It looked like when two fingers are laid on the Bible to take an oath. In his mind, he always thought about this incident, which he didn’t understand, as the time when he saw her swearing on the child.

He himself could not have borne to see Annie. But he had had to. And, he thought afterwards, ‘bear’ is an empty word. Just a kind of exclamation. You bear it. You put two fingers on what has happened and feel it.

Birger Torbjörnsson lived in a yellow brick building in the square in Byvången. The police station and the chemist’s were next door – with the venetian blinds down. It was Sunday and the supermarket across the square was closed. Birger was so pleased to see him when he arrived, Johan was ashamed.

The flat had three rooms. The living room was overfurnished. Johan recognised the pale grey-blue sofa from the old house, and the tapestries on the wall behind it. But there were bizarre elements in the subdued décor. He remembered Birger had lived with a woman who was a vet. She had probably rebelled. But Barbro Lund’s sobriety still dominated, although transferred to a rented apartment, dusty and broken up by colourful cretonne. He had a feeling Birger seldom used the living room. It smelt unaired.

A half-open door in the hall led into a room where he kept his skis, hunting rifle, boots and fishing rods, as well as the winter tyres for his car. Presumably anything of value got stolen from the basement storerooms. He had a desk in his bedroom, overflowing with papers and files, a locked medicine cupboard on the wall and his medical bag jammed on the bookshelf. Johan wondered why he kept a stethoscope and stainless-steel bowls on the shelves. Did he have private patients? The room was rather grubby for a surgery, but the medical utensils and the carelessly made bed reminded Johan of the vets’ surgery in the community centre in Langvasslien. Saddie was lying on her sheepskin in the middle of the floor. She raised her head and wagged her tail a couple of times.

They ended up in the bedroom-cum-workroom because that was where Birger finally found the whisky. Johan thought it a good sign that he didn’t seem to know where to find it, or possibly a bad sign that he kept it by his bed.

He was easy to talk to. His questions were straight to the point – much as if he were noting down medical symptoms – and he didn’t rush to draw conclusions from what he was told. But when he did, he saw no reason to discuss them.

‘Girls who are pregnant,’ he said, ‘young women having their first baby, often have these sudden attacks. It’s no more peculiar than the fact that they often get wind or throw up. At first it’s nice to expect a sweet little baby doll. They fuss around and arrange things and everything seems all right. But then the backlash comes. Presumably more often than they say. Most of them just probably seem a bit sulky for a while. But Mia is lashing out now. She’s under great strain. They wonder what the hell they’ve done. What they’ve let themselves in for. Mostly they say nothing. But those who manage to spit it out say ugly things. They may also be frightened. But it’ll work out.’

‘It doesn’t always. Sometimes things don’t go the way you expect. They go off the rails. And it hurts.’

‘Yes,’ said Birger. ‘Sometimes it hurts.’

He was tilting his glass backwards and forwards and looking down at the grubby rag rug. He was over sixty and looked as if a long life had wound him up. He worked like a clock. Occasionally a stab of pain would double him up, his eyes closing and his mouth opening. Then he went on, saying what he usually said. Even changing his shirt. And eating. His familiarity with solitude and loneliness and a disciplined, dull, industrious life helped him plod on.

‘You look scared,’ he said.

‘Yes, though I’m not usually,’ said Johan. ‘That night many years ago, that Midsummer, I was then. Though I haven’t thought about it all that much since. But now it’s come back and I recognise it. Sort of like remembering an accident or some injury when the same thing nearly happens again. Though you’d forgotten.’

‘What were you afraid of that night?’

‘I don’t know. That it would all go wrong. It was just this feeling that things weren’t working out as expected, or as they usually do. But badly. Really badly.’

‘What were you up to that evening?’

‘I went fishing.’

‘The police thought you’d run away to Norway.’

‘I took the moped up to Alda’s first, to get some bait. But my brothers caught up with me.’

‘And beat you up?’

‘No. Pekka’s rather complex and he’d thought up something better. They let me down Alda’s well. It wasn’t all that bad, because there was very little water in it. But I was down there several hours before I figured out how to get out. Then I didn’t want to go back home. I hadn’t decided anything, but just ran. I never saw Annie Raft on the path. I didn’t hear about her seeing someone until long after, but then I realised it was me she had seen. So did Gudrun and the brothers, and Torsten. They lied and said I’d already gone off in the evening, and that I had taken the moped. But I walked to Nirsbuan and slept an hour or two there. Then I paddled down to the Röbäck and got a lift. That was about five in the morning.

‘It’s odd that the man who gave you a lift said nothing to the police.’

‘It was a woman. A Finn. No, a woman from Finland. She was damned fussy about that.’

‘Fancy you remembering that.’

‘I spent several days with her.’

Birger looked up.

‘Having a bit of hanky-panky, were you?’

Johan laughed. That was unexpected and he needed it, he thought, with everything so bloody awful at the moment.

‘You could say so,’ he said. ‘Though not exactly idyllic. She was quite a tough nut. I hurt myself, actually broke something in my foot and she gave me quinine powder and some vodka and made me walk on it. A long way.’

‘That was an odd mixture.’

He had got up and put his glass down on the desk. For a long spell he stayed there with his back to Johan, almost as if looking out over the asphalted square below. But there was nothing there to see.

‘Are you sure it was that? Quinine powder?’

‘Yes, I thought it sounded horrible. There was a Red Indian on the bag.’

‘And Koskenkorva?’

‘Yes.’

‘Quinine powder and Koskenkorva. That’s what Sabine Vestdijk was given for her period pains.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘That was her name. The young Dutch girl who was killed in the tent together with a man with no trousers. A man whom no one has identified and no one has missed. He tried to buy painkillers for her at the chemist’s in Byvången, but couldn’t. Then she was given that quinine powder and Koskenkorva vodka. By someone. The bottle was found there, and the packet of powders. Where did your tough Finnish woman come from?’

‘I thought she came off the Finland ferry.’

‘At five in the morning?’

‘I never asked. But she’d also been to the chemist’s in Byvången.’

‘Did she tell you that?’

‘No.’

He was suddenly horribly embarrassed, as if he were sixteen again and having to confess to rummaging in her handbag.

‘She had a paper bag from the chemist’s,’ he said. ‘With the receipt still in it. She’d bought some condoms.’

‘Sounds as if she’d hoped she would meet you.’

‘We never used them. She never said we should be careful or anything like that. I thought she was on the pill. So I couldn’t make out why she bought those condoms.’

‘You were an innocent lamb.’

‘Yeah, you could say so.’

‘I expect she had had someone else in mind. Someone she thought she needed to protect herself from.’

‘You mean from infection?’

Was it that simple? He was a doctor and naturally thought along those lines.

‘Who then? There was a man up there, but she wasn’t together with him. The packet of condoms was unopened. Who was she thinking of?’

‘Sagittarius,’ said Birger.

Johan didn’t know what her name was, but she had called the hunting lodge Trollevolden. There was a cave nearby and a river ran alongside the cottage he had stayed in. He remembered the murmur of it all day and night.

‘Anyhow, the house belonged to her family.’

‘Although she was a Finn?’

‘From Finland.’

‘This trouserless man had a telephone number hidden at the bottom of his bag. It was to some place on the coast, to the north. A shop. Was there a telephone in the house?’

‘There was nothing. Not even electricity. No road, either.’

‘Did you see a shop anywhere near?’

‘I didn’t see anything. Only a large, dark house. A dog run and an ice house. They were derelict, but the main house wasn’t. Just rather shabby. I think it must have been a big family, because there were an awful lot of beds. Bunk beds.’

‘We’ll find it,’ said Birger. ‘That can’t be difficult. Then we can get hold of the Finnish woman’s name.’

His way of finding it was the way almost everything was accomplished in the villages. You turned to someone you knew. Or to someone who was the son of, or acquainted with, or only a son-in-law of someone you knew. In this case, it was an insurance official in Stockholm who had been head of the police in Byvången. He had been removed from the case of the event by the river Lobber and had taken that so badly, he had resigned. But he had a large cardboard box full of photocopied material from the case, an arrangement greatly approved of by Birger, though it was totally against all regulations, of course. Åke Vemdal had hoped to be able to puzzle out the answer at his kitchen table and triumph over all those who had snubbed him. He hadn’t done so.