Blackwater (52 page)

‘Well?’

She hadn’t forgotten her question. She sat down at the desk, which left him nowhere to sit except the leather armchair opposite. He sat down like a examination candidate.

‘I found your book,’ he said. ‘
The Myth of the Traveller
.’

‘Oh, Christ, you’ve changed social class and got yourself academic qualifications and instincts.’

Intimacy, he thought. Here it is. In this dusty room. Had he tried to tell himself it was possible to approach another person by being nice? Here she was, eighteen years later, not beautiful even then, making demands on his membranes and exposed skin. He had no desire at all to lie to her, and said:

‘I found the book by sheer chance. But I have got a university degree, that’s true. I’m a meteorologist.’

‘What do you really want?’

‘I didn’t know it was you. I was looking for the girl.’

‘Here she is. She’s fifty-nine now.’

He calculated in his head and saw her noticing.

‘I was forty-one,’ she said, smiling broadly. He disliked the discoloration of her teeth by tobacco, and they were longer than he remembered. The gums had receded upwards, and her eyelids sagged heavily into deep yellow folds. She wants to frighten, he thought. He went on counting in his head, for he felt he had been swept into a labyrinthine game in which he was confronted with stereotyped figures demanding passwords. There sat the Witch with the lovely feet. A few days ago he had met the Dirty Old Man. At the time when he was most enthusiastically climbing on to the women at Starhill, he had been no older than I am now, Johan thought. Had Mia also calculated in her head?

‘You took a sixteen-year-old with you to your Trollevolden.’

‘Don’t act innocent and seduced, Johan. You rubbed me raw inside.

She leant back in her chair and peered at him. The chair rocked slightly.

‘Jukka, Jukka,’ she said. ‘You were as keen as a hunting hound. No childish flesh between us, oh no. Brutal, you were. A truly fine, clean animal.’ Her Finnish accent was still marked.

‘Then you no doubt returned to a regular life?’

He found that difficult to deny and she laughed.

‘Swedish youth fed on soft cheese and social benefits have their excesses in the playground. Howling at rock concerts when the play leaders shout fuck fuck fuck and asshole. But twenty years ago you really did drive a thumb with Norwegian margarine up my arsehole, and you had learnt that at the movies, my friend.’

‘Trollevolden, by the way, belonged to the Tourist Association,’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘You said it belonged to your family.’

‘My grandfather was a merchant in Trondheim. Timber, fish, shipping – anything that could be traded. Every autumn he went north to shoot. He built the hunting lodge in 1905. Life on a grand scale, really. Five hundred grouse was nothing unusual. Whole drifts of hares. Salmon. Bears. You could call it excess. Not like twenty thousand orienteerers subjecting game to days of death struggle without even noticing it. But right in it – with blood on your boots and gun smoke and skins turned inside out.’

She got up and left the room. Johan didn’t know what to expect. Was she going to come back with photographs? He vaguely remembered some photos of shoots. When he heard her returning, he could also hear a clinking.

‘Whisky or vodka?’

‘Whisky, please.’

‘His daughter, who was of a less flamboyant kind, met a Finn, an engineer.’ She went straight on with her story. ‘That was in a seaside resort on the island of Sylt. She moved to Finland when they married, and had two children. Me and my brother. When the Winter War started, we were evacuated to Grandfather. They hadn’t reckoned on the Germans attacking Norway a few months later. I went to Amalie Clink’s School for Girls in Trondheim, a very fine private school. Her name was really Lock, but we called her Amalie Clink. She had a little briefcase that used to clink inside. Port.

‘Just imagine,’ she said. ‘Amalie Clink even had a port-wine nose. A real old-fashioned, coarse-pored, reddish-blue number. In that friendly little face.’

She raised her glass of transparent vodka to him.

‘But you’ve been careful,’ he said. ‘Only clear spirits.’

‘Johan, you don’t like it that things have gone well for me although I’ve drunk vodka and smoked cigarettes.’

‘Have things gone well for you?’

‘I’ve got a professorship. I’m a member of learned societies. I’m fit and never find life dull. Does that annoy you?’

When he didn’t answer, she went on:

‘During the war, the whole school went on an outing to Trollevolden. On the day after the end of term. First by train, then horse and cart up to the house. It wasn’t so overgrown in those days, you see, and you could get there by horse and cart. Grandfather was magnificent. Right in the middle of the grey old war, we had cream cakes and strawberries and eggnog and charlotte russe, if you know what that is. There were maids and enamelled jugs of thick yellow cream. Pale veal steak with cream sauce. You don’t know what veal is, Johan, the kind you could get before the war. Fattened calf, box-calf, fed on cow’s milk and tender as your sweet little prick. It was unforgettable – a childishly bright and easily digested extravagance. But it was Grandfather’s last gesture; his business was failing, partly because he refused to cooperate with the Germans and partly because shipping was at low ebb. When he died, his fortune had gone. Trollevolden remained, but wasn’t worth much. My mother was dead. She died of pneumonia during the last month of the Winter War. My brother and I gave Trollevolden to the Tourist Association so that at least the house would be more or less maintained. In the 1950s, the preservation of unique interiors was not a priority. But it was forgotten, fortunately. It was so remote. Anyone walking and wanting to stay the night was given the key at the store in the village. People were decent in those days. It got shabby, but never ruined inside. There’s a warden there now. Lockable shutters. Tourist Association fittings. My brother and I have stopped going there.’

‘Was that your brother, the streaky man?’

‘Yes. I wasn’t keen on him seeing you close to. I was slightly embarrassed by your youth. I hadn’t reckoned on his being there. Only the girls. And they were to leave after a day or two.’

‘Were they tourists?’

‘Goodness, no. They were Amalie Clink’s former pupils. Aged about forty, all of them. They were celebrating their thirtieth anniversary up there. In memory of that party in the middle of the war. We even made charlotte russe, but I don’t think you got any of that.’

‘I haven’t come here to listen to all this,’ said Johan.

‘No, but it really does interest you, doesn’t it?’

‘I want to know more about John Larue.’

‘That’s someone I don’t know.’

‘You met him at the chemist’s or in the store in a small village called Byvången. You gave him the telephone number to the store in the village near Trollevolden. I think you’d thought he was going there.’

‘Oh, dear me. A pick-up, do you mean?’

‘Yes, you bought condoms as well.’

She really did look surprised then and had to take another cigarette. She extracted one out of a black lacquered box decorated in old-fashioned Russian red and gold.

‘How did you recognise me today, Johan?’

‘Your feet,’ he said, then thought that was tactless of him. But did she mind?

‘Ah, yes, we’ve always got something unspoilt, haven’t we? I’ve actually always looked after my feet. They appear in a novel. A romanticised autobiography by an elderly Finnish writer.’

She went on talking away, her speech academically articulate. Not for a moment was she going to let him get any closer to her, and yet there was an intimacy between them. It wasn’t – I know what you think. But – I feel what you feel. Like one flayed body hot against another.

‘I want to talk about John Larue,’ said Johan. ‘You had no use for those condoms. Not one. I’ve been wondering about it, and this is what I think happened. You met Larue in the chemist’s and heard about his troubles with his girlfriend and her period pains. He was good-looking. You wanted to take him with you. But you realised you would have to protect yourself if you were going to be with him.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘Birger Torbjörnsson thought that one up. I think you wanted to lure Larue with you at once. But he was too decent. True, he didn’t know the girl he was travelling with very well. He had only recently met her in Gothenburg. They had been to a rock concert together. You gave him Finnish vodka and quinine powder for the girl. You bought a notebook and wrote down the number of the shop in it. They had taken a room at the guesthouse in Byvången. I think you did, too. You counted on the girl falling asleep once she had dulled the pain. Then John Larue was to come into your room and have a little foretaste of the delights awaiting him in Trollevolden.’

‘The way you put it, Johan. Foretaste of delights. Oh, my goodness.’

‘But I don’t think he came. Perhaps she was suspicious and surprised him on his way to you.’

‘Why not in flagrante?’ said the woman he still thought of as Ylja.

‘Because the condom pack was unopened. I think you stayed in that dismal guesthouse for a whole day in the hope that he would come back and go with you. He must have left that possibility open. But he didn’t come. He went to Blackwater and then on up towards the mountain. You lay in your bed at the guesthouse and realised he wasn’t coming in to you that night, either. I think you were really fed up by then.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Then John Larue and his girl were stabbed to death in a tent.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said.

‘Tell me what has, then.’

‘I was exhausted and had a murderous headache. Couldn’t sleep. That’s what happened. I got up, dumped some money on the counter and left. It wasn’t even four in the morning. An hour or so later I spotted you.’

‘You must tell the Swedish police.’

She laughed, but without smiling. She had dropped ash on her chest and brushed it off the black-and-white dress with a hand that was unchanged. But the fingers were swollen and the engraved doctorate ring was sunk deep into the flesh.

‘I shan’t be telling the police or anyone else anything. I have a good life and a respectable position. I have no intention of making a fool of myself either as a pining spinster or a randy old woman.’

‘Then I’ll tell them.’

‘No, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll tell them nothing. For then they’ll come here and question me, and I’ll tell them that I met that boy Johan Brandberg as I was driving from Byvången early on Midsummer morning. He was standing at the roadside, his thumb out and blood on his shirt.’

Although he shook his head, she poured him out some more whisky.

‘Have a drink,’ she said, almost with affection. ‘The night is long.’

Annie had said there was something about the Brandberg sons, something lumpish and rank. No woman failed to notice it, she said, even when just passing them in the post office.

She had never known the fifth son. He was fine-limbed and tall. When he was younger, he had been very slender. He didn’t look well now. Dehydrated, Birger thought. He needs fluids. What the hell has he been up to?

Those lumpish sons had all been there when Torsten Brandberg was questioned about the assault on Harry Vidart. He remembered them as pretty drunk and grinning. A drunk and confused state. It was not inconceivable that things had gone really wrong for one of them later on that night. The police had questioned them many times. Birger had asked Vemdal again, and he had dug the old information about them out of that cardboard box.

Pekka was the most likely, judging by the way he had behaved after that event by the water. He had spent an incredible amount on drink – money he had earned on the oil rigs. He had badly beaten up a rival. That was in Sollentuna, but talk about it had reached Blackwater. He had once managed to scrape together a home with leather furniture and a stereo and had moved in with a very beautiful woman. She had thrown him out and he got none of the contents of the house. The reason was that he had been off sick and had been drinking heavily after an accident with a crane. A man had fallen from the platform and had been killed. Pekka couldn’t work after that. He turned dizzy up there. During the last shoot he had been so drunk, they had had to take his rifle away. He was still working as a labourer down south but never on a crane. He was signing on now.

Per-Ola had been the one to take his rifle away from him, the new leader, the one who had so stubbornly stayed in Blackwater and had now built a house in Tangen. The square plot was a replica of any in a residential area in Frösö or in the suburbs of Östersund. He had grown heavier and middle-aged, but he still had his strength and swiftness. He. was fair, or rather colourless, nowadays, his eyes small and close-set, his scalp clearly visible. Birger remembered one of the old men in the team shaking his head when they heard that Per-Ola had been chosen as Torsten’s successor. Nothing except that shake of the head. Birger didn’t know what that meant.

Väine was the one who most resembled Per-Ola. He was fair and had the hard, gnarled body of a forestry worker. He had married young, a Norwegian woman who became pregnant. That hadn’t lasted long. Now he had a boy who used to come some weekends; Gudrun looked after him. Väine was often away working. He had a caravan which he lived in when felling. He was said to be a demon for work.

Björne was on a disability pension. Annie had liked him. He helped her with firewood and some other things. She had said he was amusing to talk to. He had started living by himself after he had cleared a parcel of forest, rather like Väine. But he stayed. Annie had thought it was some kind of protest against modern times.

For his part, Birger had never regarded these cabin loners as rebels. He thought they really belonged in the past and that their deprivation was primarily sexual. There were no women for them any longer, since they couldn’t bring themselves to change their way of life. They didn’t shower. They got too drunk and snuff juice dribbled out of the corners of their mouths. Their shirts were stiff with elk blood and engine oil. They always carried knives and their sexual signalling system was so primitive, it was taken as a joke. Birger had prescribed far too much Antabuse for Björne over the years, which was why he no longer drank so much. Birger was at a loss as to what to do about his prescriptions.