Sail of Stone (27 page)

“When can you have a complete report ready?” asked Winter.

“About what?”

Still the same voice, clinical and analytical.

“I was thinking first and foremost of the cause of death.”

“This afternoon, I think.”

“Thanks.”

“Everything else will be in the reports tomorrow, I hope. Everything we know, that is. It’s not so much. But the case, if we can call it that, sure seems to be clear.”

Winter had expected Craig to say “open and shut” about the case, but he didn’t say it. For that matter, it wouldn’t have been consistent with his image.

“But the rental car is still missing, then?”

“Yes. We spoke with the people at Budget; it was rented for two weeks, and it so happens that the time wasn’t up until yesterday. They filed a report of a possible theft with us, and that meant that we, well, took a little extra notice about this … the disappearance, the missing-person bulletin. Along with the witnesses from Fort Augustus, of course.”

Winter could hear a change of nuance in Craig’s voice, as though he might feel that he needed to justify his actions. That it had taken longer than it should have to start the search for Osvald. But Winter had no such
views. He was aware of the assumptions and the reality. It couldn’t have been the first time a stranger had wandered around Loch Ness.

“Shouldn’t the rental car be somewhere nearby?” said Winter. “In the city there, Fort Augustus.”

“It should,” said Craig. “That bothers me. But if it had been in the same place for a few days, it was probably stolen. There are lots of cars and lots of car thieves around Loch Ness.”

“I understand,” said Winter.

“We have a bulletin out on the car, of course,” said Craig. “It will probably be found somewhere in the area, cannibalized, as usual.” He paused. “Naked, as we say.”

“The dead man,” said Winter. “How long had he been lying there?”

“The doctor said forty-eight hours the last time I spoke with him, within six hours either way.”

“Could he have been moved to where he was found?” asked Winter. “Could he have died somewhere else?”

“No,” said Craig. “We’re quite certain that he got to the place where he died on his own.”

“Then the question is why,” said Winter.

“Isn’t it always?” said Craig.

“Yes. The big question.”

“Steve told me that we would end up there sooner or later if I talked to you,” said Craig.

“Steve? Steve Macdonald? You know him?”

“Yes. We worked together for a while in Croydon. He put in a good word for me when I was trying to get the position as chief inspector up here.” Craig paused. Winter heard something that could have been a short laugh, dry as sand. “I don’t know if I should thank him or not.”

There was a drop of warmth in Craig’s voice. Winter couldn’t help but smile. He had gotten a lesson in Englishness. Craig wasn’t the one who’d started this conversation with talk about their mutual friends. It was also a question of being professional, of course.

“What do the witnesses say?” asked Winter.

“Well, what I said before, more or less. He had acted confused, as though he didn’t really know where he was. He had said things … it seemed like he was asking questions; that was the impression one person had gotten from him. And the pub owner. He had repeated something
that sounded like the same thing, if I can say so. But it wasn’t possible to hear what it was.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? It wasn’t in English, or Scottish. I assume he was speaking Swedish, but that’s not our everyday language in Fort Augustus.” Craig paused again, briefly. “Of course this is old Viking land, but I don’t think people remember the Nordic language.”

Old Norse, thought Winter. There are many Nordic words in Scotland, words for places, other things.

“So he walked around speaking to people in Swedish,” said Winter. “He wasn’t just talking to himself? You said yourself that he seemed to be confused.”

“Well, we haven’t really asked in detail, but the witnesses have said that he spoke to them as though he were asking something.”

“Mmhmm.”

“I can’t help you there. I can certainly press them a little more about how he spoke to them and whether he might have been asking questions, but I can hardly get farther than that, can I?”

“No.”

“If worse comes to worst you’ll have to come here and test Swedish words on people,” said Craig. “I’ve heard that there aren’t so many.”

W
ill you tell the next of kin?” Craig had said, and Winter had said yes. That was part of his job, a much too large part. There was no practice for it in the police training, and entirely too much experience of it later.

He called Johanna Osvald’s cell but only got her voice mail in his ear. This wasn’t something you could tell someone on voice mail.

He looked at the clock and looked up the timetable for the southern archipelago. He looked at the clock again. He would make the 10:20
Skarven
if he drove too fast on Oscarsleden.

Winter stood on the deck with the wind in his hair. Someone was fishing on the cliffs just behind the harbor. He had gotten a bite, or was about to: the gulls were wheeling in their own circles, screaming encouragingly to the man, who was wearing a wide cap for protection against the bird shit that sometimes fell like snow from the sky.

The
Skarven
moved out. No café on board. Few passengers were going out to the islands at this time of day, and at this time of year. Two months earlier there wouldn’t have been room for him on board; the archipelago boats swerved out like overloaded passenger junks in the Yellow River, brown limbs everywhere, children, strollers. Last summer he and Elsa and Angela had planned to go to Vrångö but fled the boat when they got to Brännö Rödsten. Too many people, like a sun-and-sea-and-salt-and-sand madness that seized the people of the city when the sun was at its warmest.

Madness. Winter tried to brush his hair out of his eyes and thought of something Erik Osvald had said when they met out on Donsö.

“There’s nothing wrong with mad cow disease,” he had said. He saw everything from the professional perspective of a fisherman: “We like to see one of those crazy cows on TV at regular intervals!”

Skarven
went directly to Köpstadsö. There had been a strong wind
out on the open sea during the journey over, as though the weather had changed. Winter could see black clouds in the west now, on their way up from the other side of the earth.

On the water down there, Erik Osvald and his three crew members were engaged in the eternal, anxious search for fish, the attempt to bring up the maximum legal amount.

There is a higher power, Erik Osvald had said, besides the Norwegian Coast Guard! It was a joke, but there was gravity to it. A higher power. If there isn’t, everything is so meaningless, he had said.

This life changes you, twenty-five years on the North Sea, all year round, all day long. It’s freedom. It’s loneliness.

It’s an old-fashioned way to live.

But we Swedish fishermen are still out one week and then home one week. The Swedes are almost the only ones who use that system, and it means that we earn less than the Danes and the Scots and the Norwegians.

And the past. He had spoken about the past: My dad went out Monday morning and came home on Saturday morning.

A life at sea until he became tired and stayed on land and listened to the weather reports when his son was out there.

Axel Osvald, if it was Axel Osvald that Craig’s men had found; if it was him, his death had been strange and tragic, strangely tragic, alone and naked next to a pitiful little lake next to another, larger lake in a mountainous inland, miles from the sea.

What had he been doing there? How had he ended up there? How had his thoughts wandered while he himself wandered up slopes and rough terrain? Winter had not been to Fort Augustus, but he could imagine what it looked like.

The sea was calm between Styrsö Skäret and Donsö. Winter couldn’t see Osvald’s modern trawler, the blue
Magdalena.
They were out for a new week, west of Stavanger and east of Aberdeen, hunting for whitefish. In six days they would put in at Hanstholm and go home in the afternoon with invoices in hand. But Erik Osvald would come home before that, and he, Winter, was the one who was coming with the information that would make the fisherman return home. Or how would it happen? Would a helicopter pick him up? Or would he set course for Scotland and Moray Firth and the harbor entrance to Inverness right away? Go
through the canal in the city, the river Ness, and down into Loch Ness and down to Fort Augustus? No, not with that monster of a trawler. And no, because his father was lying and waiting in a refrigerated room in Inverness. His son could anchor in the harbor.

Skarven
lay still, and Winter went ashore. The time was as the timetable had predicted: 10:55. The quay was empty. There were a few older trawlers out along the edge, and Winter wondered whether any of them had belonged to Axel Osvald. Or maybe had even existed in John Osvald’s time.

John Osvald both existed and didn’t exist. He had the unique phantom quality that people get when they disappear and are never found; their souls get no peace, and those who survive them don’t either.

But if he were alive? If John Osvald were alive? Those who still existed, those who were here … could you call them the surviving relatives, then? Was Johanna Osvald a surviving relative?

Winter asked a woman outside the store for directions to the school. She answered and pointed, a crooked movement.

He walked along a narrow street without sidewalks and could smell the sea, and he listened to the peculiar silence that is created by lots of space in every direction. The wind had disappeared in here, as though it didn’t exist. The clouds had disappeared; the sky was completely blue. He felt warmth on his face.

There were many children on the playground, more than he’d expected. He heard shouts but no words. A soccer ball rolled his way and he sent it back. It flew over the goal and the fence behind it and disappeared into the crevice of a cliff.

“Aaah-oh,” said a boy who looked like a short fisherman.

The other children looked at Winter and then at the cliffs. He understood. He went out again and around the playground and he climbed down into the crevice. The ball wasn’t there. He dug around through grass and other strange plants, maybe seaweed. To the right was a hole, like a cave. He peeked in but didn’t see anything. He started to crawl. He felt the ball before he saw it, and he wiggled himself backward and his suit stretched at the seams, protesting. Winter got up with the ball in his hands, a triumphant gesture. All the children were standing in a line up there, and they applauded. Winter threw the ball up and the little
fisherman took it. He and all the others turned around when they heard a female voice:

“And
what
are you all doing here? The bell rang, didn’t you hear it?”

Winter saw her come up to the edge of the cliffs and look down.

“Oh … hi.”

“Hi,” said Johanna Osvald, giggling.

Winter couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t want to, not with the message he had brought.

“Is it really him?” she asked. They were sitting in a little workroom that was Johanna’s. A large Mac stood on the desk, an older version, gray. There were papers all over, and binders. More paper than in Winter’s office in the Palace. Through the window he could see the cliffs where he’d dug up the ball. She must have seen him, too, or the children who had lined up to study the fool from the mainland down there. An interruption in archipelago life.

Children’s drawings hung on the walls on both sides of the window. For a split second he thought of what it must be like to spend all your days with children but not have any of your own. Maybe it was a relief to come home; a silence to keep and to tend to.

Winter had told her as soon as there was a fitting opportunity. He had chosen his words carefully.

“It could be a mistake,” she said now.

He nodded but said nothing.

“You believe it too?”

“I don’t know anything, Johanna, no more than I’ve told you. But my colleague in Inverness also found a photograph …”

“Yes, I heard that, but how easy is it to recognize people in photographs? To compare a photo with … with a … a dead person …,” she said, and hid her face in her hands.

Winter looked at his own hands. What should I do with them? Should I hold her?

He leaned forward and touched her arm, which was bare. She shivered and he got up, took a cardigan that was hanging on the desk chair, and placed it over her shoulders.

Photographs. Dead people. He had seen enough of both for a lifetime. She was absolutely right. There were no similarities between the living
and the dead. Eyes that could see; eyes that couldn’t see. A superficial likeness, yes, but no
likeness.
Everything he had seen, a living face, a young girl, a young boy, a smile from a shelf in a home that was suddenly shattered by an incident that could never be described. The silence that would be there forever. A shallow silence. Nothing to keep and to tend. The same face, but without life. I can’t stand it, he thought every time he stood there. This is the last time.

There was always another last time.

It was for a lifetime; he had seen enough. An eternity. No. Life didn’t belong to eternity, it was death that was eternity; life was the pause between the quiet eternities. For many, it was a short pause; he knew because he had been there, just after eternity had taken over.

And the photographs of the dead. There were always photographs of the dead on his desk. What a fucking job, photographs of dead people on your desk, broken cheekbones, empty eye holes, mouths like mine shafts. Choke marks like tattoos across the throat.

And the pictures of those who were completely still, untouched. They looked like they had fallen asleep. Pictures like that were often the worst.

He placed them all under other pictures, of houses, roads, vehicles, cliff crevices, whatever the fuck else, or under papers filled with words, because words were not as gruesome at a distance, not from a yard away.