Open Grave: A Mystery (24 page)

In reality she wanted to get out of the house for a while, get some air and shake off the increasing feeling of discomfort of the past few days. Take the opportunity to steal a little extra time for herself now when the professor was taken care of. Perhaps walk a little in town, have a cup of coffee at Landings?

Birgitta smiled at her.
She is probably the only one besides Greta who is going to miss me,
thought Agnes, but despite that she could not rouse the old feeling of sympathy. Not even when Birgitta put her arm around her and insisted that she would really like to drive Agnes into town, that it was no trouble at all.

“I’ve made lunch,” said Agnes. “All you need to do is warm it up a little. The salad is in the refrigerator.”

As usual there was always duty to resort to when Birgitta got too affectionate. It amused her, because she knew that Birgitta always felt a little discomfort at being taken care of, above all in the presence of others. She preferred to present herself as equal with Agnes and became overly considerate.

Birgitta looked hurt. Liisa Lehtonen urged them on, the last few widths had to be put up. Agnes left the two of them, went upstairs to put on something warm and get her handbag.

She saw him immediately. He was raking leaves. Agnes could not help but smile. The associate professor’s leaf raking was legendary in the neighborhood. He had once explained to her how valuable leaves are, how they promoted growth. She believed him. His garden was the evidence.

As she approached he straightened up a little and Agnes was convinced that if he had been wearing a hat he would have raised it in a stylish gesture.

“Taking a walk?” he said in an inquisitive tone.

Agnes stopped. He came up to the fence.

“I just have a few errands. And it’s so nice to get out a little.”

They chatted awhile about this and that, commented on how terrifying earthquakes are—thousands of people had died somewhere in Asia the day before—but both carefully avoided mentioning anything about the professor.

“I’ve been thinking about the garden,” she said when they had both fallen silent. “It’s starting to look too dreary. Lundquist has had help and I exchanged a few words with the gardener. What do you think about him, can he be trusted? You can judge such things.”

“I definitely think so,” the associate professor testified. “He seems serious.”

“Do you know who he is? I thought he seemed so familiar.”

“No,” said the associate professor. “I’ve never met him before.”

“Perhaps he’s from along the coast?”

“No idea,” said the associate professor. “We’ve only talked a few times, but I immediately got the impression that he knows his business.”

“Hardworking too,” said Agnes in order to round off and conclude the question in a kind of harmony, something that she and the associate professor always seemed to achieve when they spoke.

The associate professor nodded and smiled. They parted and Agnes walked toward Norbyv
ä
gen to take the bus into town.

During the walk she decided to actually ask the gardener if he came from the coast. The decision revived her. True, the week had been full of gloomy thoughts but also involved a growing sense of energy. It was as if the professor’s awakening from his static existence meant that she too found new ways of thinking about old ideas. The statement, so shocking to the professor, that she was going to retire was not just a loosely tossed out thought but a manifestation of how a slumbering idea had taken firmer form.

Now the thought of leaving her position and moving back to the island did not seem quite as unreal. After fifty-five years she could not, like Anna, be accused of faithlessness if she left the Ohler house, could she?

The bus came and she got on. It was the calm driver, the one who always waited until she sat down before he started up again. She smiled at him.

Agnes felt uncommonly satisfied, as if her thoughts were freed after years of constraint. It felt as if she was sitting in bus number 811 en route to the rock at Tall-Anna’s. There she would get off, thank the driver for their final trip together, and start the laborious ascent.

Twenty-five

All the tools were at
the site, he would not be picking up any more material during the day and therefore he could leave the car at home. But the main reason he took the bicycle was that it was not a good idea to leave his car parked on the street in front of Lundquist’s house during the evening. The neighbors would surely wonder what the gardener was doing there so late.

To be on the safe side he took the bicycle with him to the back side of the house and pushed it in between a couple of bushes.

Now the only thing to do was wait for darkness. He sat in the same spot as before, in some bushes he had waited to prune. In his pockets he had a flashlight, rubber gloves, and a black garbage bag, running shoes on his feet. He was prepared. He smiled to himself, pleased at his own initiative.

He was also forced to hurry, because if he had understood Lundquist correctly he would be returning to Uppsala in three days. And then the opportunity disappeared to have the bushes as a base for excursions into enemy territory. That was how he perceived it: He was entering the enemy country.

The night before he had browsed in his mother’s diaries to refresh his memory and strengthen himself. He was not really clear what the purpose of a second break-in was, other than to search for the safe. For nostalgic reasons he wanted to see one like it again, but above all to investigate what it contained.

But this lack of structure did not worry him, it would sort itself out. Once inside the house a kind of dynamic would arise and decisions would stand out as obvious. The starting point was “injury.” Revenge, if you will. That was a word he was not unfamiliar with.

“Anna,” he whispered, “you should see me now.”

He was amused by the thought that she was observing him from her heaven. He was not convinced that his mother would be that enthusiastic about his idea. On the contrary, she would be terrified.

He thought something rustled and turned his head. His eyes fixed on the bicycle and he happened to think of his father. His father never got a driver’s license, but instead always bicycled to his job at Barn
ä
ngen’s soap factory in Alvik on the outskirts of Stockholm. For many years he was responsible for two old-fashioned machines that spit out small hotel soaps.

The rustling returned. He guessed that it was a blackbird and smiled to himself. Blackbird and him, two figures in the late evening.

*   *   *

Right after ten o’clock he
got up, massaged the stiff muscles in his thigh and peered out into the darkness. There were lights on in more windows than yesterday evening, but everything seemed equally calm. K
å
bo had settled down to rest.

The sound of a car was heard at a distance, perhaps as far as away as on Norbyv
ä
gen. The blue-hued light from the associate professor’s tower cast a ghost-like glow over the neighbor’s house and backyard.

Perhaps it was this, the Etosha tension—he could find no better way to put it—that was the driving force? Able to remain stock-still, listen, sniff like an animal in the wind, try to understand what was happening right then, patiently waiting out everything that could constitute a threat or obstacle, be the one who made the wisest decision, to strike or get away. Survive. He pushed aside the branches soundlessly and scouted one last time before he took off.

After a few seconds he was at the cellar entrance, opened the door enough that he could slink in and close it soundlessly behind him. He took a deep breath to free himself from the tension.

Once down in the cellar he let the flashlight play across the furniture and everything else that stood in an unorganized mess. He realized that it was the combined excess of generations that was down there. Much of it was probably old and useless while some was certainly antique and valuable. He withstood the impulse to start poking around—he had loved to stroll around at the market on Windhoek Platz to search for pearls in a sea of junk and scrap—and instead went immediately to the passage with all the boxes to check whether the keys were there.

He grinned as he picked up the key ring. Then he suddenly became thoughtful. The first time he broke into the cellar could be explained by curiosity, but now he was taking a step over a boundary that could not be explained away as an innocent visit.

“Well, what of it?” he mumbled, in an attempt to reinforce the feeling that he was morally superior to the owner of the house, that a break-in was a trifle in relation to the crimes that had been committed here earlier.

He sat down on an old armchair, turned off the flashlight, and prepared to wait. He had decided to make his way up into the house right after midnight.

It was pitch-black but that did not worry him. While others were afraid of the dark and saw various imagined dangers in the deep shadows, the deep night also constituted a shield for him.

Miss Elly had sometimes called him “the cat” for his capacity to smoothly move in darkness. He understood that it was a compliment. In reality it was one of the reasons that she loved him, that apparently he melted in unimpeded with the African reality.

With his thoughts in Africa he fell asleep and woke up with a start, for a moment unaware of where he was. He turned on the flashlight, looked at his watch, and discovered that he had slept for almost two hours.

The house was silent. The stairs creaked slightly. The tension increased with every step. It struck him that perhaps the door was locked but he exhaled when it opened without difficulty. He turned off the flashlight and peeked out. He had come up into the house under a stairway.

In the pale light from the street the details gradually emerged in what he understood was the hall. As long as he stayed on the ground floor he certainly did not need to be worried. He assumed that the bedrooms were one flight up. With cautious steps he opened the first door, one of four in the hall. A long passage stretched out ahead of him. He realized now that the house was considerably larger than he thought. He did not dare turn on the flashlight for fear that the light could be seen from outside.

After ten minutes he found the Hauptmann safe squeezed into a corner behind the last door in the corridor. In the middle of the room was a billiard table. There was a twinge of excitement when he saw that the safe was the same model as his uncle’s. Karsten remembered the numbers 51 so well, embossed in the middle of the trademark that decorated the sturdy door of the safe.

He took out the keys. He remembered the order, first the middle one, then the small key down to the left and finally the big one in the centrally located lock. It creaked as he turned the last key. Uncle Helmuth never would have tolerated such a racket, he thought.

After very slowly opening the door, careful not to create the slightest commotion, he turned on the flashlight and shone it into the safe. On the top shelf, where Helmuth stored the pictures of young black boys, a half dozen folders were stacked. As he reached out his hand to take out the top one a sound was suddenly heard from the top floor. He froze and instinctively turned off the flashlight.

The sound of steps was transmitted and Karsten Heller got the feeling that the ceiling was vibrating. He peeked upward. The sound decreased. He waited on tenterhooks. Was someone on their way down? Half a minute passed. A minute. He carefully wiped the sweat from his forehead. The odor of the rubber glove nauseated him. He suddenly regretted his outing.

Then came the reassuring explanation: a toilet flushed and there was a roar for several seconds in a pipe invisible to Karsten. He had to suppress a laugh of relief and turned on the flashlight again. He realized that either the professor or the housekeeper had relieved their bladder and now were on their way back to bed.

Close, he thought, but still not. He put the flashlight in his mouth to have both hands free and lifted down all the folders. He put them on the billiard table, retrieved a chair, and sat down.

The topmost folder was of no interest. He quickly browsed through the papers, a number of them yellow with age, and found that they all dealt with an association he had never heard of, the Gregorious Brothers. Probably a fraternal order.

The following folders were equally uninteresting. There were various documents from University Hospital, deeds of conveyance, contracts and so on.

He started to despair of finding anything exciting when from the sixth and final folder he pulled out a will. He quickly browsed through it and as good as immediately saw his mother’s maiden name. “Anna Andersson” it said, clear and obvious. He was forced to set the will aside a moment.

He took the flashlight out of his mouth, looked around and discovered a flower pot with a sadly neglected hibiscus, got up and spit out the saliva that had collected in his mouth.

What was he to believe? Perhaps it was another Anna Andersson? It was not exactly an uncommon name. There was only one way to find out, to read on, regardless of where it might lead.

He found the section again and read: “To Miss Anna Andersson, who was in service in the house for a few years in the nineteen forties, I bequest 100,000 (one hundred thousand) kronor.”

It was immediately clear to him that he would inherit from Professor von Ohler.

His surprise was no less when he read the continuation: “To Miss Greta Andersson I bequeath 200,000 (two hundred thousand) kronor. To Miss Agnes Andersson, number three in the group of sisters and whose time of service now exceeds fifty years, I bequest 300,000 (three hundred thousand) kronor.”

And right after that the parting shot: “Should I survive one or all of the misses Andersson, then the respective amounts return to the estate.”

Now the inheritance was not as obvious, but what surprised him the most was the word “now.” That meant reasonably that the woman he had seen working in the house was this Agnes Anderson, “number three in the group of sisters.” In other words, she was his aunt!