Blackwater (9 page)

The water enveloped the slim body of the canoe. As he dipped the paddle in and took a stroke, it seemed to him that muscles were trembling under the skin of the water.

Christ, how fast it goes. A puff of wind brought the smell of resin and grass, and the water smelt of water as the paddle broke it up.

as Grandmother used to read. All those things in that old head. Listen to the soughing in the trees. She had been to Östersund twice in her life, but never further.

Suppose people were forced to travel like the eel to mate. In an involuntary eternal arabesque. Go to Sargasso. The wide Sargasso Sea. Go to Sargasso.

He was sitting like innards inside the shiny shell. He had always felt at one with a canoe. Torsten went fishing with as many as thirty nets in October storms howling with ice and mist, and he said it was a bloody silly craft. But had he ever dared get into one? That tower of muscle? That great lump of fat?

He had to think. The lake narrowed down towards the Röbäck and the headland thrust out its arm. The canoe glided the last bit, the blade of the paddle dripping. As he was about to pull the canoe up on the grass, it occurred to him they would find it down there below the sawmill in Röbäck. Gudrun would chase around asking of course.

He must have decided then. He grabbed the canoe and shoved it with full force out into the water, flinging the paddle after it, regretting it almost at once. The canoe would dance down to the sawmill and lie banging against the stones. That was stupid, but it was done now.

He ought to have realised there wouldn’t be many cars about just after four in the morning. The sun had deceived him. He sat down on the roadside grass. All he could hear was the roar of the stream, like a train, or a gigantic toilet permanently flushing. He could hardly hear the birds, which was why he was surprised when a car came along at last. He leapt into road with the pail and thrust out his thumb. It was a woman in a white Saab. She braked so the gravel spurted.

‘Going to Norway?’

She said it. He just nodded, but at the same moment thought about Oula Laras on his scooter. He and his family lived in Langvasslien.

He had to put the pail on the floor in the back. She didn’t even ask what was in it. She hadn’t said much yet, but he thought she talked like the Finns who used to come and do clearing work for Torsten. There were chocolate wrappers and rubbish all over the car and a plastic container of duty-free liquor on the back seat.

‘God, it’s beautiful here,’ she said, as the road ran along Blackwater. ‘I’ve never been this way before. I usually go via Östersund and Trondheim.’

When they got into the village, everything seemed silent and sleeping, but then he spotted Vidart’s old Duett on its way down towards Tangen. He crouched down so he wouldn’t be seen.

‘Oh, dear, dear,’ said the woman. She had a harsh laugh, not exactly jolly. She sounded sarcastic and he felt uncertain beside her.

‘Good,’ she said, as they crossed the border. ‘That’s enough of Sweden. Quite enough. Or are you Swedish?’

Of course, she hadn’t heard him say much. He shook his head.

‘Norwegian?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not that either, actually.’ And it was true. It might be true. Everything was giving way. He felt something new coming on, something other than being stuck in his room. But he had no money on him. As long as I get through the weekend, he thought. It was an ordinary Saturday here. Or wasn’t it? As soon as the weekend was over, he could get some clearing work. Or planting, anyhow.

When they banged on the door, it was almost half past four in the morning. Birger hadn’t slept and his head began to ache the moment he raised it from the pillow. He got out of bed with some caution. When he opened the door and the morning air poured in, he realised the smell of frying was still there in a cold and musty blend of tobacco smoke. Roland Fjellström, who owned the camping site, was standing outside saying something had happened up by the Lobber.

Åke Vemdal pulled on his trousers and set off towards the office. Birger stood with his forehead against the windowpane. His face felt swollen. He would be able to sleep now.

The deep, narrow bay between the Tangen and the crown lands was bright and a low cloud was caught on the mountain ridge on the other side, torn by the spruce tops and floating like milk in the water. The sun was coming from the wrong direction, the unusual light making him feel strange and exposed. He saw some goldeneye rising, streaks trembling in the water behind them. Far away, the water was moving. Then he saw it was a boat. Dark.

It was being rowed evenly at at good speed along the east shore, towards the Tangen. He stood there for a long time watching it and he knew he could sleep soundly now, at last. But perhaps he ought to make some coffee for Åke.

Someone was rowing with an otter board, the board visible far out on the left, the long line with its small lines and hooks a silvery thread between the boat and the board. What a nerve! But if you were fishing that way, it was a good idea to do it before five in the morning on Midsummer Day when the site was sunk in a heavy, hungover sleep.

He could see the otter board dancing on. There was only one man in the boat and he must have been holding the line round his forefinger as he rowed. What he would do if he got a bite was hard to imagine.

The man stopped rowing and the boat glided on with the force of the last strokes, then slowed down. The man was pouring water on to the rowlocks. The oars had probably been creaking. Birger couldn’t hear it, but he heard footsteps in the gravel outside. Åke Vemdal was running back.

The otter board sagged and swung crosswise. With a soft jerk, the oarsman got up speed again to keep it at a distance. It was Björne Brandberg. Birger could see him now. Clever old boy, too. Making the most of it while the others slept, slack and dry-mouthed. And he must have the line between his teeth.

Åke flung open the door.

‘Come on, you too,’ he said. ‘We’re going up to the Strömgren homestead.’

She was wearing a blue denim skirt smeared with blood down the sides, the hem wet and dirty. Her hair was fair and fell quite a long way down her back. Both she and the little girl were exhausted. The child had plaits that had come undone and her swollen, battered face made him at once hostile to the mother. He hadn’t believed a word of what she had said, it was all so unbelievably insane. Out with a six-year-old on the marshlands up towards Starhill in the middle of the night. In a long skirt.

But when he examined the child, he saw the swellings on her face had been caused by insect bites. Oriana heated some milk for her and tucked her up on a sofa in the bedroom. The mother was sitting bolt upright on a kitchen chair, staring at the blank television screen.

They really needed Henry Strömgren with them to find the place, but Åke did not want to leave Oriana alone with the girl’s mother, so he asked Henry to keep an eye on her. She was not to leave, and she was not to go anywhere near any kind of weapon. No knives on the table. He had phoned for reinforcements. But it would be an hour or two before they got to Blackwater and up there.

Åke and Birger set off down to the Lobber and found the place after some wandering about. There was a tent and it lay on the ground just as she had said, slashed to pieces and soaked in blood that had begun to dry. The canvas was moulded round the two bodies. One body lay half over the other. Everything was quite still.

They carefully turned back the canvas and had to loosen the light metal pegs in one or two places to be able to lift it. But Åke wanted them to touch the tent as little as possible.

The sunlight flooded a head of long hair. It had been dark and curly, but was now sticky with blood and there were feathers stuck to it. There were feathers everywhere, stuck in patches of dried blood. The sleeping bags had been slashed to shreds and the feathers poured out of them whenever the canvas was touched. Fine down floated away on the mountain breeze.

A face. Lips drawn back. The upper lip had dried over the teeth. A young woman. She lay underneath. Perhaps the man, lying half over her, had tried to protect her from the knife. He was fair. At the back of his neck was a cake of coagulated blood.

Birger put two fingers where the pulse in the neck had once throbbed. He found the woman’s neck under the tangled hair and feathers. Her flesh was still and colder than his fingertips.

‘Just leave them where they are,’ said Åke. ‘The technical boys are on their way.’

They had pulled a bit of the canvas aside to reveal a transistor radio. A hand that must be the man’s looked as if it had stiffened as it reached for the handle. Beside it was a pair of rolled-up socks, fluffy with down, a large unopened bar of chocolate and a whole lot of small polished stones which looked like uneven beads. She must have been wearing a necklace. The face had a pallor that had already begun to turn grey.

‘Sit over there,’ said Åke, pointing at a fallen birch. The top of it was green and dipping its first leaves in the water. They were already eaten by larvae, which disgusted him. The water was racing along in a web of many sounds, rustling, murmuring and tinkling. Sometimes someone seemed to be talking in a monotonous voice out of the water.

He watched Åke crawling round the tent and moving the blue canvas with a very light hand. A bird of prey called above them, as if complaining. Birger felt cold.

‘Maybe you should go on up there,’ said Åke. ‘Those two are both in shock.’

‘No, for Christ’s sake.’

‘He won’t come back now.’

‘You don’t know.’

No, they were beyond what was knowable, and the morning chill paralysed his thoughts as well as his movements. His mind was blank, no guess or speculation as long as he sat there. Listening to the racing, transparent water which had nothing to say. It just talked. The web of sounds woke an echo in his mind and his mind made it chatter. But for a moment he thought he was listening to what had happened there, that it had been engraved in the bright night and was being reproduced by the waves and the whirlpools in the water. And that he nevertheless could not distinguish anything more than chattering and small cries. Sometimes it sounded like mewing.

I don’t know where Barbro is, he thought. I didn’t even ask. Some kind of demonstration against the uranium mining on Bear Mountain. They were going to camp, she had said.

But where?

They were standing over by the sink. They had put her striped yellow rucksack up on the work surface and one of them was removing the contents, putting the items down one by one after thoroughly inspecting them.

He was the chief of police, stationed at Byvången. The other man was a doctor. They had just returned from the place by the river. The knees of the police chief’s trousers were wet. He asked her what her name was.

‘You saw that on my driving licence.’

He ignored her reply and went on to ask when she was born and where she lived. On one of Dan’s letters, now lying on the work surface, it said Annie Raft, Karlbergsgatan 121. She wished he had been satisfied with that.

‘I was born in 1941, on 21 October. And I was on my way up to Nilsbodarna. I’m going to live there.’

Silence fell. She was expecting the next question. Have you rented it from the Brandbergs for the summer? But perhaps they didn’t know who owned the cottage. She hadn’t known, either, twelve hours ago. Then it would somehow have been easier to answer. But the question didn’t come. Instead he said:

‘You’ve stated you were on your way
from
Nirsbuan.’

That was the first time he had used the word ‘stated’. The odd thing was that she couldn’t remember saying anything at all, but she must have done. Otherwise Henry Strömgren wouldn’t have phoned for them.

‘I had been to Nirsbuan,’ she said. She found it difficult to pronounce the name and regretted having used it. The conversation was full of traps, not really a conversation at all. She hadn’t slept for twenty-six hours. I’ll say it exactly as it is, she thought. I’ll say I had been up by the outfield buildings, by the cabin. In the cabin. No, I shan’t say cabin. The cottage? I was on my way away from there because it was empty. I needn’t say what I saw. That’s of no importance.

But the police chief asked her what her profession was.

‘I’m a teacher.’

When he said nothing, she felt he didn’t believe her.

‘I was trained at the teacher training college in Stockholm. And I went to the College of Music.’

‘Where are you employed?’

His questions were precise. This one was impossible to answer. She had a sudden attack of faintness and asked if she could rest for a while.

‘Where are you employed?’ he said.

‘I’ve given it up. I was at Mälarvåg Further Education College. I taught Swedish and music. As well as literature. That’s a separate subject. I stopped working there in the spring. Though I ran a summer course in choral singing. For two weeks. So I couldn’t get away until now. Dan had gone on ahead.’

She was saying too much. She ought not to accommodate them. They were solid in their system, dressed in their sports trousers with pockets on the thighs. Quasi-military garb. Deadly assured. But they were both unshaven. That made it more difficult to see them as Dan would have seen them.

‘Dan Ulander,’ said the police chief. Either he knew Dan or he had seen the name on the back of the envelope. ‘Where is he now?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He was supposed to meet us. He didn’t come. Then I thought he was up there. So I walked there.’

‘You walked there.’

He had a map among his papers, took it out and looked at it.

‘How old is the child?’ the other man said. He’s beginning to put on weight, she thought. A fat doctor. She said Mia was six.

‘You walked with a six-year-old up to Nirsbuan last night? And back again?’

That was it. She couldn’t deny it. She might have said she hadn’t known how far it was. But they knew she had a map. The rucksack lay on the draining board and everything she had put into it was lined up on the stainless-steel surface. As they had taken the things out, they had asked her whether she had a knife. That had made her think about survival. Knife, matches, groundsheet, a box of pastilles, the letter from Dan, a pack of tampons, the parcel of sandwiches, Mia’s Ken and Barbie dolls and their nylon clothes and tiny shoes. Annie’s red wallet was also there. They had examined her driving licence and placed it next to the wallet. When they had first arrived, the police chief had asked Oriana to stay in the kitchen for a while. Then he had told Annie to take off her denim jacket and he had gone through the pockets while the doctor felt her body under her jersey and skirt. A professional fumbling. She had been made to take off her boots. But she had neither taken in anything of what was happening nor reacted when they had searched her rucksack. Only now did she understand the question about a knife.