Blackwater (47 page)

He usually went shooting up in Blackwater in the autumn, with the same team as Birger. He used to have a spell of fishing in June as well, and they occasionally met in Stockholm. Vemdal would book a table in the restaurant at Solvalla racecourse and they would spend a fortune on the meal – damned cheap at the price since you get such a good view from there – and laid bets on the horses. At first they had talked about the case every time they met, but now they hadn’t spoken of it for a long time.

Vemdal didn’t want to give them the telephone number Sagittarius had hidden at the bottom of his bag. He was going to phone himself.

‘I’m surprised he was home,’ said Johan. ‘It’s the holidays.’

‘He’s a loss adjuster. There are lots of burglaries these days. And he’s his own boss in the evenings. A bachelor. But not like me. He’s a confirmed one. You can have ladies anywhere, he says. In sailing boats. In politics. But not in kitchens and plumbed areas. They regress there.’

He fell silent.

‘Though not Annie,’ he said seriously, after a while. ‘She didn’t spend much time in the kitchen, for that matter. Would you like some food? Have you had anything to eat? You must phone Mia. You two mustn’t mess things up.’

A tourist hostel. They found out on Monday morning. It was still called Trollevolden, but was owned by the Norwegian Tourist Association. People who went to the mountains or went fishing could stay the night there. It had been a simple unstaffed establishment eighteen years ago and the tourist association had in fact owned it since the end of the war. Earlier it had been a hunting lodge and had belonged to a businessman from Trondheim.

Johan felt as if he were still the gullible sixteen-year-old who had hidden away in what she had called the grouse shed. She had made it all up. Or, as Birger expressed it, ‘she talked a lot of bullshit, the lying cow’.

The number – it had been changed but Vemdal tracked it down – was to a village shop on the coast north of Brønnøysund. They knew all about Trollevolden there.

But that didn’t produce a name. It was unlikely there would be lists of names – if they had kept records at all. If there were, that that would be police business. Vemdal advised them to go to the police.

‘Nothing’s happened over all these years,’ said Birger. ‘But then you come. Annie saw you and recognised you, amazingly enough. She was so frightened she rang me up although it was not yet five in the morning. According to the investigation, she took the gun with her because she had had a fright and was scared of meeting that – man. You, that is. But she didn’t say anything to Mia about it. Does that sound reasonable?’

‘It sounds as if she wasn’t really sure.’

‘I’ve already told you the cartridges were still there. If she had a box of cartridges, then what happened to it? She did quite a lot that morning. She was up at Gudrun Brandberg’s and agreed with her that they should go and look for morels. Then she went down to Anna Starr’s in Tangen. Anna’s place is quite isolated, so Annie would’ve had the gun with her, if she was that scared. But she didn’t.’

‘What did she do at Anna Starr’s?’

‘It’s rather odd. Hardly serious. I mean, if she was frightened, then it was a peculiar enterprise. She was asking about a
ufo
. Or some phenomenon in the sky they had thought was a
ufo
. She wanted know exactly where it had come down. Something bright and dazzling crashed out of the sky outside Tangen a few years ago. You can see the place from the exercise track, halfway between the far headland and the little island with spruces on it. The next day, six old biddies, members of the sewing bee, went round the village asking who else had seen it. They had all seen it together. They’d been standing in the Neanders’ window, looking out like snow-white angels – Westlund saw them. Whatever was dazzling and flashing hurtled through the night down into the water and vanished. They even dragged the place later on. The women got a couple of men to do it from a boat, but they found only the usual scrap iron people had dumped. Actually a whole lot of people in the village had seen it and everyone gave roughly the same description: that it was like a firework display and hurtled straight down into the water, which was as black as ink that evening. That was late autumn. There was ice below the store, though it was thin. But further out where the lake is rougher, the water was open and that’s where it disappeared.

‘She talked to Anna about it and then appears to have forgotten about Gudrun and the morel picking. Anyhow, she drove on up on her own, first to Aron and Lisa Kronlund. She used to leave Saddie with them when she was going somewhere and couldn’t take her along. So that means she was going to be away from the car for quite a while, as otherwise Saddie just used to stay in the car when she was walking in terrain that was too difficult for the old dog with her bad hips.’

‘Did she say where she was going?’

‘Not to Lisa and Aron. But she met their granddaughter – she was there for the weekend. She told her she was going down Memory Lane.’

‘That sounds rather solemn.’

‘She went towards the Lobber. Her memories from there were not particularly pleasant. As far as I know, she had never been there since it happened. Then we don’t know any more.’

Then he leant over the table and at first Johan thought he was sneezing. But it was a sob. He had started weeping, snuffling loudly. A moment ago, he had sounded quite matter-of-fact. He had come into the dusty living room where Johan was sleeping, with a cup of coffee for him. He was sitting on the bed, so close that Johan now thought he ought to put his arm round him. But he didn’t know how to set about it. The deep, shuddering sobs were the only sound in the room and Birger’s face was red and swollen. He pushed away his cup, dropped forwards over the table and wept even more violently, his bowed, powerful back shaking, strings of what looked like snot trickling down on the table.

Saddie struggled up from her place under the coffee table and padded out of the room, cowering as she went. He had frightened her.

Finally Birger managed to get up and go out into the hall, fumbling as if he couldn’t see. Johan clumsily followed him and made sure he found the bathroom. Then he went back and sat at the low table, listening to him pulling at the toilet paper and blowing his nose over and over again. At last it was quiet, but almost ten minutes passed before he came out.

‘You must go to the police,’ he said. ‘They can get further with that Finnish woman.’

But Johan didn’t want to, though he found it difficult to explain why. Birger might think he was afraid they would suspect him, but it was nothing as concrete as that. He thought if he did something now, then anything could happen. Just think what he had released merely by letting himself be seen through a window.

Or would it have happened anyhow? There was something ambiguous about Annie Raft’s actions that morning. He didn’t know what sort of person she was and didn’t dare ask Birger for fear he would start weeping again. Had she acted rationally or had she been acting on obscure impulses she was unable to explain even to herself?

Mia, who was so sensible, had shown him sides of herself he hadn’t known about. She had behaved erratically, almost maliciously. Late the previous night, Birger had said that women sometimes showed faces that were difficult to keep your eyes on. Which women?

‘They don’t look you in the eye,’ said Birger, whisky-blurred. ‘If they turn their backs on you, you may see nothing but air.
Niente
.’

Now it was morning and once again Birger thought Mia had behaved normally and predictably. In her condition, it meant nothing more than wind and morning sickness.

But what if it were fatal?

Johan had phoned and talked to her. Her voice had been dull. She was sulking. Grandmother did not want to go to Åland. But Mia was going to Stockholm to see her all the same. Then she would come to Langvasslien.

It sounded normal. She had calmed down just as Birger had predicted. But Birger hadn’t considered that the decision rested with her. What part of her was it that decided? Scarcely a year ago, she had met a man she had taken to be a Norwegian driver in a dog-sled race in Duved. She thought his Siberians were beautiful with their light-blue eyes and intelligent faces and she also found him personally appetising – that was what she said. As good as a strawberry ice cream to lick – and God knows, she had licked. But what was it within her that had decided he should be the father of her child? Or that he would not be allowed to?

He busied himself with forecasts. He was tracking the movements of water-laden clouds driven by the winds. They usually came from the west out of the misty or surging and sunny Atlantic and moved on an easterly course. But they could swing at an angle of ninety degrees. That kind of thing happened. Usually he knew if they were going to be difficult to judge, but there were some he got wrong from the very beginning. They made him feel superfluous. Not powerless or inadequate with all his assembled data. But superfluous. Unnecessary. Then it rained on his face and he wondered about it in a way that could not in any way be called scientific.

When it came to choosing where Annie was to be buried, anywhere but Röbäck churchyard had been out of the question. Even old Henny said, in her deep, cultivated voice, that that was where Annie belonged.

In his funeral oration, the minister evoked a picture of Annie in the forest. He meant well; his intention was that they should see Annie walking in a fresh spring forest, a younger and healthier Saddie at her heels. She belonged there, said the minister. Annie would not have agreed with him.

She had once said to Birger, ‘You’re not the only one who has walked with me here in the forest or up to the mountain and said this is where I belong. They all think I move quickly here and find my way. I appear to be at home where they themselves feel lost or even terrified.

‘It’s true I walk in the forest every day and I am the only woman here who goes walking outside the berry-picking season. And who dares to walk alone. But that doesn’t make me feel at home in the forest. I think the timber company’s men or the Brandberg men on their road-making machines feel much more at home.’

I walk here as Rousseau did in the woods of St Germain, dazed by fantasies, scents and visions of beauty. The point is, my visions are the opposite of the civilisation I live in. I’m seeking an alternative. Per-Ola Brandberg isn’t doing that as he drives his tractor. His visions are not in opposition to the society he lives in. Not even when he disturbs a hare or notices the cloudberries have started to ripen.

Naturally, in time I feel more and more at home in what is alien, just as Per-Ola feels at home in the resources he is abusing. But it is my fantasies that make me feel at home, and they are reinforced by the wildness and scents of the forest. Per-Ola benefits from roughly the same things. But he wouldn’t call them wild.

We are two children of our time and dependent on each other, at least I am on him. Without the felling, the village would be uninhabited and I wouldn’t be able to live alone here to have my visions and fantasies. That would be going native and is something quite different. That’s what Björne Brandberg has done and he seems to be lost. He doesn’t even drink any longer.

You know, quite a few bachelors and lumberjacks have ended up like him in a cabin or a surplus company hut. They begin to find people difficult and listen more and more in towards the forest. The solitude has a powerful influence on them. They become dependent. I don’t really know what kind of experiences they have. What they tell you is often about the wee folk who help them when they’re exhausted, and ferns that cure their backaches and allow them to sleep, sometimes too soundly. Nowadays all that’s told knowingly, not really naïvely. But it must be a matter of words put to experiences – which they are.

Björne has simply done an about-turn in time and gone backwards into the olden days, as he calls it. In the olden days people did such and such. In the olden days they thought, saw, understood.

But what they understood was how to live in their own time and the loner in the cabin doesn’t understand that.

They rattle off that jingle at country fairs. Not Björne, of course, because he never goes to them. But he too denies tuberculosis and incest and abuse and near-starvation and ignorance – he even denies aching joints, although the damp of his cabin gives them to him.

The difference between the loner in his cabin and me is that I always go back to school on Monday morning. I know my attempts at finding an alternative are imperfect, and that my job is to teach schoolchildren to think.

It was the dog days, in the compost, in the newspapers. Something swelled and ran. The flies became intrusive. The newspapers reported murders and perverted sadists. The arts pages stank of rotting flesh, as if from the fridge of a mass murderer.

Birger didn’t read about it, but he dreamt of it at night. He was being chased, he saw someone cut to pieces before his eyes, and he was acting mentally ill to escape the same fate.

He woke, got up and drank some milk. He spread some crisp-bread and heard it crackling and crunching between his teeth in the silent grey morning. He thought about that time, about the tent and the bodies. He didn’t usually do that.

Nor had Annie. At any rate, she hadn’t talked about it. He remembered once when they had been watching the news on television, a report from some republic that had recently been part of the Soviet Union. Two men lay on the back of a lorry, dead, their throats cut, one with his mouth wide open so you could see all his top teeth. Birger and Annie had been eating when the report started. After the two corpses on the lorry, a young man came on and said other men had cut his father’s arms and legs off and slit open his belly, letting the intestines well out, and all this had happened while his father was still alive, the son looking on. Another report eventually came on and Birger started eating again. Annie had long since gone.