Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
Since Eva had put an end to their brief relationship during a dinner at the harbor restaurant in Herrvik four years earlier, their interactions had been strictly professional. With the exception of some unexpected spontaneous necking at a crime-scene investigation in Levide a couple of years ago. But that was an isolated incident. He assumed that these were things that could happen with a former lover as a colleague.
When Fredrik returned to work six months ago all his feelings for Eva were gone. True, the memories were still there: their passionate encounters for a couple of intensely shimmering spring months, the crash with Ninni, the time in exile in Johan’s house in Nore where Eva had spent a few nights with him before she suddenly broke it off. But he felt nothing. She was like any other colleague. That was strange. That is, purely intellectually he felt it was strange, but because the feelings were lacking it was not something he gave much thought to.
But a few months later he had suddenly felt a strong attraction when he caught sight of her at a table in the café. It came over him like a wave of heat from nowhere. But the most bewildering thing was that the next time he saw her he was completely indifferent again. No wave of warmth, no desire. And it had gone on like that ever since. On, off, on, off. It was not that he didn’t feel a little crazy on those occasions when it was on, as if he was a container for emotions without proper anchorage that could float up to the surface completely by chance. He tried to ignore those attacks of attraction as much as possible. Actually, he had wanted to ask his doctor about it, but it never happened. The threshold was a bit too high. He had never mentioned his infidelity to her. Perhaps it would have been easier if the doctor had been a man.
He looked at Eva, met the light blue gaze under the sun-bleached eyebrows. Nothing happened inside him. This was evidently one of the calm days. His emotions were dormant.
“Have you had a chance to look at the photo?” he asked.
“Yes, there are some fingerprints, but there were no hits.”
He looked disappointed, but he had not really expected anything else.
“It’s a shame they threw out that turd.” She grinned. “It doesn’t get better than that.”
“No,” Fredrik said, laughing, and then stupidly wondered what his colleagues would think if they saw him standing and laughing with Eva Karlén in the corridor. “No, I guess they were in a hurry there.”
Eva smiled and looked down at the floor for a moment. She was very good-looking, there was no denying it, even when viewing it from a somewhat neutral perspective.
“Nothing else?” he said.
“The hole was made with a pencil, but that’s hardly any help to you.”
“No, not directly.”
“It’s a nasty thing in any event,” said Eva. “I would sleep with a shotgun under the bed, if I had one.”
* * *
Fredrik came up to his office. Standing by the desk, he picked up the phone and tried calling the last tenants again, the Kvarnbäck couple from Gothenburg. This time he got an answer. From Thomas Kvarnbäck.
Fredrik introduced himself and explained why he was calling. There was silence on the other end.
“Hello?” said Fredrik.
“Yes, I don’t really understand,” said the man.
“You rented a house on Fårö,” said Fredrik. He tugged copies of the rental documents out of a plastic folder on the desk. “From the sixteenth to the twenty-first of August.”
“Uh,” came out of the phone. Then more firmly: “We rented a house in Spain, two weeks.”
The man seemed confused. Perhaps he had Alzheimer’s, or suffered from some other form of dementia. True, he was only sixty-seven, but it could happen early in certain cases.
“Spain?” said Fredrik.
“Yes. Where are you calling from?” asked Thomas Kvarnbäck. “I didn’t really get that.”
If you suffered from Alzheimer’s you could do strange things without really meaning to. Fredrik recalled when Sven Wollter played a man suffering from Alzheimer’s. He peed in a flower pot in a restaurant. But it was only a film, of course.
Fredrik did his introduction again, clearly and a little more expansively.
“The homeowners have had a number of problems connected with these rentals, and that’s why I am contacting all the renters,” he concluded.
“Then you must have mixed things up somehow,” said Thomas Kvarnbäck. A hint of a laugh was bubbling behind his words. “Is it the same travel agency?”
“No,” said Fredrik, “this was booked through GotlandsResor. They only book houses on Gotland. It says Inger Kvarnbäck on the contract. That is your wife, I assume?” he said, although he knew that perfectly well.
He thought it was unnecessary to reveal that he had checked up on them.
“Yes, it is,” said Thomas Kvarnbäck, “but she was with me in Spain.”
“I see,” said Fredrik. “She couldn’t have helped a relative or acquaintance make a booking, and then her name ended up on the contract by mistake?”
“No, I have a hard time imagining that.”
“Is Inger there?”
“Yes, she’s at home.”
“May I speak with her?”
“Yes, of course, if you think that will make you any wiser.”
Thomas Kvarnbäck called to his wife without first taking the receiver from his mouth. Fredrik had to hold the phone away from his ear to spare his eardrums.
After some crackling from the speaker and some explanations at the other end, he had Inger Kvarnbäck on the line. Fredrik went through the whole procedure one more time, now with some additions.
“I don’t understand this at all. We rented a house in Spain for two weeks together with our youngest daughter and her family. We came home yesterday. We haven’t been to Gotland in I don’t know how long. It must have been in the seventies.”
“So you can’t think of any explanation that your name ended up on the rental contract for the house on Fårö?” said Fredrik.
“No,” said Inger, pausing. “No, how could that have happened?”
“You didn’t book a trip earlier that you canceled?”
“No, no,” she said firmly. “We discussed various different alternatives before we decided on Spain, but Gotland never came up.”
The possibilities seemed undeniably exhausted. And he thought that Inger and Thomas sounded trustworthy. As far as he could judge they were not lying. They had not been in Gotland. The only thing he could think was that they booked the house for someone else, a child or a sibling, and now they were trying to protect that person. But that was farfetched. It was more likely that someone had made use of their names.
“There must have been some misunderstanding,” he said. “I apologize for troubling you.”
“Don’t worry, it’s no problem,” said Inger.
Fredrik sat down, dialed the number to GotlandsResor, and asked for Maj-Lis Eriksson, who he had spoken with the day before. She remembered him. He asked a few questions about the booking procedures.
The majority of GotlandsResor’s customers made the reservations themselves on the Internet, but there was still about 30 percent who booked by phone.
“Or else they call to ask questions and then complete the booking on the Internet. Many want that personal contact. I guess it feels more secure. Maybe they want to be certain that we exist,” Maj-Lis concluded with a little laugh.
“How does it work, do you check the identity of the ones who rent in any way?”
“The person whose name is on the contract has to provide their civil registration number, but we can’t ask for any identification or the like because the bookings are done via the Internet or by phone. So we don’t really do any checking. But they pay by credit card so that becomes a kind of identity control.”
“And if they don’t pay by credit card,” said Fredrik, “then you have to send out an invoice.”
“Yes, then we do that.”
He asked her to see how Inger Kvarnbäck’s bill was paid.
“It was paid by PlusGirot.”
“Then she must have received an invoice,” he thought out loud.
“Yes, as I said, we e-mail it if someone does not want to pay by credit card.”
“E-mail? You don’t mail the invoices?”
“No, only if the customer doesn’t have an e-mail address.”
Fredrik peered down at the contract he had in front of him: [email protected].
Of course. Anyone at all could create a Gmail address without giving out their real identity.
“Okay, I follow you there,” he said. “Can you see if a transfer was made or if it was paid directly at a bank?”
“Not here on the computer, but I can get that information if you want.”
“It would be really nice if you could do that.”
“But I can’t do it right now. I have to call the accounting firm.”
“I understand. When do you think?”
“Have to see, it’s already three o’clock. If I get hold of them it can happen in ten minutes, otherwise tomorrow. I’ll do what I can.”
“Excellent, thanks so much for your help.”
Fredrik gave her his cell phone number in case he had left for the day by the time she produced the information.
He put down the receiver and stood up. He would be extremely surprised if it was possible to produce a sender from the payment. That is, someone besides the borrowed address to the Kvarnbäcks. Someone had chosen to hide behind Prinsgatan 8 in Gothenburg. Why that particular address? Did it mean that the actual tenant was also in Gothenburg? Or was it Alma or Elisabet Vogler, and they made a completely random selection from the Swedish phone directory?
They had coffee after eating in the little bower in front of the entry. It was a mild evening; the sunlight was fast disappearing, and the shadows of the fruit trees in the high grass reached almost all the way up to the gable.
The taste of strong coffee, and strong alcohol, lingered in Malin’s mouth. Henrik had a weakness for odd, local types of liquor that he dragged home from his travels, but which unfailingly lost their charm as soon as they were put in the liquor cabinet on Fårö. Metaxa, Raki, Vietnamese coconut schnapps. Now, in any event, they had decided to drink from those bottles in small, two-centiliter portions in the middle of the week to get rid of them. And that way it was even a little bit fun.
Henrik gathered up the coffee cups and glasses and carried them all into the kitchen. He started doing the dishes while Malin checked on Axel and Ellen in the living room. They were sitting quietly and stock-still in front of the TV, close to the screen on the shaggy IKEA rug. Axel had his thumb in his mouth and was leaning his head against his sister’s arm.
Malin slipped down next to them. When she felt their warmth and the odor of children, tears suddenly started running down her cheeks. It was not because they were so sweet or because she loved them so much. She was crying because she could not escape the feeling that everything was so unbelievably fragile and somewhere also the feeling that everything was not as it should be.
She could not explain it any better to herself. Did it really need to be explained? Nothing had been as it should be since they came home from vacation and Malin stepped through the front door with Axel in her arms.
She did her best to hold back so that they wouldn’t notice she was crying. Luckily the animated film had a firm hold on their attention. The characters on the TV screen were blurry through her tears. She didn’t like herself when she was like this. Anxious and full of emotions. That wasn’t her. She was the efficient, courageous one. The one who started her own profitable café in Stockholm and then risked taking the leap to a small island in the Baltic and, without really understanding how it happened, was supporting herself as a food blogger.
Exactly. The thought reminded her. She had to post a recipe.
She carefully dried her tears behind the backs of the children and gave them a hard squeeze before she stood up. They rocked absently without taking their eyes from the screen as she pressed herself against them.
* * *
Malin uploaded a recipe for truffle mayonnaise and French fries that she had swiped at an American restaurant forum and adapted for Swedish households. Creative reuse. Then she wrote an entry about pears, that they were better suited in flan than on a cheese tray, and a lyrical outburst about the Greve Moltke pear tree they had in the garden. It went quickly. She was probably the only one who would think it sounded strained. The readers didn’t know, of course, that someone had been in their house busy symbolically poking eyes out.
When she was through blogging she took off on the Internet and completely lost track of time. It was only when Ellen came in and asked whether they shouldn’t go to bed that she realized what time it was. She had spent over an hour reading about various alarms. Axel was asleep on the floor in front of the TV. Henrik was talking on the phone in the kitchen and had not noticed anything.
When Malin came down again after putting the kids to bed, Henrik was sitting on the couch looking at the news. They went from screen to screen, it struck her. The TV, the computer, the cell phone, and then the TV again.
“Do you mind if I turn it off?” she said, reaching for the remote control.
“Not at all,” said Henrik with a yawn.
She turned off the TV and nervously brushed her hair back with both hands.
“I think we should install an alarm.”
“Is it because I’m going to Barcelona?” said Henrik.
“No, that’s not why,” she said. “I’ve really thought through this. We can’t just sit here. We have to do something.”
“The police are doing something.”
“I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are sitting on a little island seventy miles and one slow car ferry from Visby. It takes an hour to get here.”
“I see, okay,” he said tiredly. “But how would an alarm help us?”
“A modern alarm, that doesn’t even cost all that much, can tell us whether anyone has been inside the house while we were away. It can warn us if someone is trying to get in while we’re at home. Besides, it works as a fire alarm and signals water leaks. Well, that’s not the main thing, of course, but I mean if we were going to install one anyway.”
“That sounds advanced,” said Henrik, and she understood that he was thinking what it would cost.