The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (18 page)

It was all coming back to him now.

‘Yes, that’s where he was. The man from the ship, he was sitting in a little kiosk, and he sold us our tickets.’

‘Good,’ Gerlof said again. ‘And I managed to find a name … There was only one young man who worked in the cinema that summer, so I think we can identify him.’

He paused and leaned forward. ‘But if I tell you, will you promise not to tell anyone else?’

Jonas didn’t look too sure, but he agreed.

‘His name is Peter, Peter Mayer. But he’s known as Pecka. Do you recognize that name?’

Jonas shook his head. ‘The man on the ship didn’t tell me his name.’

‘No, of course not. But I looked in the phone book this morning, and there’s a Peter Mayer who lives up in Marnäs.’

Jonas stiffened. There was a sudden chill in the evening air. ‘So he lives here … on the island?’

‘Yes, if that’s him. But there’s nothing to worry about, Jonas. He doesn’t know who you are.’

Nevertheless, Jonas’s heart was pounding. Marnäs wasn’t far away; you could cycle there in half an hour. Casper went there on his moped virtually every day. And the man with the axe lived there.

‘We just need to find out more about him,’ Gerlof went on. ‘You said he mentioned an old man, an American?’

‘Aron,’ Jonas said.

‘Aron,’ Gerlof repeated thoughtfully.

Jonas wanted to tell Gerlof about the figure he had seen by the cairn the previous day, the figure that reminded him of the man on the ghost ship – but now he was no longer sure whether he might have imagined it.

They sat in silence for a moment, then Gerlof looked down at his notebook.

‘Right, Jonas. I’ll try to find the American, too. If he exists.’

Tilda’s phone was still engaged. Gerlof had things to tell her, but he hung up. He knew that it wasn’t against the law for a private individual to look into things, but he thought it was time to let her know what he had found out about Peter Mayer. And the mysterious Swedish-American.

Gerlof thought about the period of mass emigration from Sweden to the United States, the great exodus from Sweden that had lasted from the 1840s into the 1920s and beyond.

These days, as the summer residences in Stenvik kept on getting bigger and bigger, and all the shiny, expensive cars zoomed along the coast road, it was easy to forget how poor this area had been a hundred years ago. Poverty had reigned throughout the whole of Sweden – a remote country in the north without any great wealth. Hunger and lack of work had driven a fifth of the population overseas, mainly to America.

Öland and America were linked by all those journeys – first of all, the journey to the new country, then the journey home. Most of those who returned were poverty-stricken; the odd one had made it and was rich.

Gerlof didn’t know of any emigrants who were still alive, so he picked up the phone again and called someone who might just have the answer. Bill Carlson in Långvik was the only elderly American he knew; Bill was an interested descendant of genuine emigrants from the island.

A young Swedish relative answered, but he quickly called Bill in from the veranda.

‘Yeah?’

‘Hello Bill, it’s Gerlof Davidsson.’

There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone, then an enthusiastic ‘Gerlof! Hello-o! How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘How’s your little boat?’

‘Well, we’re working on her …’ He cleared his throat and went on. ‘Bill, I need your help with something. I’m looking for an American.’

‘An American?’

‘Yes. I think he’s on Öland at the moment, but I don’t know where.’

‘Good luck with that. There are more of us than you might think in the summer. I was in the grocery store here in Långvik yesterday, and I met a whole bunch of kids from Washington who—’

‘This is an old man,’ Gerlof broke in. ‘A Swedish-American who might be called Aron. He comes from northern Öland, I think – at least, he seems to be familiar with the coast around here. And I think he’s interested in ships.’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells. Anything else?’

‘No … but he seems a bit of a dubious character.’

Bill laughed quietly. ‘You mean he’s a criminal?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know him.’

‘There were all kinds of emigrants,’ Bill said. ‘Have you heard of Oskar Lundin from Degerhamn?’

‘No, who was he?’

‘An old Swedish-American from Chicago … I met him one summer many years ago, and he claimed he’d been a driver for the Mafia back in the thirties. For Al Capone. Lundin said he used to drive Capone to meetings, until he was arrested and locked up in Alcatraz.’

‘Is he still alive, this Lundin?’

‘No, he’s every bit as dead as Capone. Most of those who came home are dead now.’

Gerlof sighed. ‘You’re absolutely right.’

‘But some are still alive,’ Bill said. ‘We’re meeting up for lunch on Friday.’

‘Who’s meeting up for lunch?’

‘Those who’ve come home to northern Öland … Those of us who are left. There’s always an annual get-together for all Swedish-Americans at the Borgholm Hotel, just after midsummer.’

‘And does everyone come along?’

‘Who knows?’ Bill said. ‘But I’ve got something I can show you, if you want more names. It’s taken from the church registers – it’s a list of everyone who emigrated from Öland during the twentieth century. My cousin has been to the House of the Emigrants in Gothenburg to do some research; he got the list from their archive.’

‘That would be very useful,’ Gerlof said. ‘And this lunch …’

‘It’s usually very good. You’re welcome to come with me.’

‘Really? I’d love to, but I’m not a Swedish-American, Bill. I’ve never even been to America.’

‘Don’t you have any emigrants in the family?’

‘Well, yes… my grandfather’s two brothers. They set off across the sea in the early 1900s. One ended up in Boston and became quite wealthy; the other is supposed to have died on the street in Chicago. That’s the closest I can get.’

‘In that case, you can be an honorary homecomer,’ Bill said.

‘Thank you.’

‘People won’t ask you many questions anyway. They’ll just go on and on, like windmills. All they want to do is talk about their own stories and adventures.’

‘Then I’m happy to listen,’ Gerlof said.

Everyone seemed to be carrying around their own little telephones these days. Everyone except the Homecomer. He had to rely on the public kiosks that still stood in the squares and picnic areas on the island, and he was standing in one of those kiosks right now.

He keyed in a number, and a hoarse male voice answered, sounding suspicious.

‘Hello?’

‘Wall?’

‘Yes …’

‘Do you know who this is?’

‘Yes …’

The arms dealer’s voice was slurred, as if he had been drinking all day.

‘I’d like to do some more business with you,’ the Homecomer said.

‘We need to sort out the last lot first,’ Wall said. ‘What the hell did you do with the ship?’

The Homecomer was silent.

‘Nothing that can be undone,’ he said eventually.

‘Exactly. Pecka called me yesterday; he was really shaken up. He told me you sank her.’

‘Yes. We had no choice … There was poison gas on board.’

Wall didn’t speak; the Homecomer heard him swigging something at the other end of the line, then he said, ‘So you want to come here and do some more business?’

‘Yes. And I’ve got money now.’

‘Tomorrow evening,’ Wall said.

The Homecomer put the phone down. He thought about the bunker not far from Villa Kloss, then about a man he had once met, a man who had made rocks fly through the air.

‘We have to be prepared to make sacrifices,’ Sven says. ‘You do understand that, don’t you?’

Aron looks at his sore hands and says nothing. Sven’s hands are in just as bad a state as his own. The skin is cracked, the nails are coming away from the flesh, there are cuts along almost every finger. They’re actually quite lucky, because some of the other workers have already lost a couple of fingers. It’s the mud and the rocks that destroy the hands, the sticky mud that hides beneath the grass, keeping the rocks firmly in place. The workers stab at the ground with their spades, trying to gain some leverage, but the clay and the rocks refuse to give way.

Life in the new country consists only of sleep and work.

Every night they sleep in a kind of hut with twenty other men, or perhaps more, on beds that are not beds. Sven’s is made up of three empty boxes, while Aron’s slightly shorter one is a few planks of wood balanced on two sawhorses.

Every day is full of digging, from morning till night. Sven, Aron and the other immigrants are building a canal through the forests, or perhaps a wide ditch. Aron doesn’t really know which, he just keeps digging. There are poles in the ground to show where they have to dig, a straight line leading towards the mountains on the horizon, and Aron doesn’t think about the eventual goal. He just keeps toiling away with his spade, but over and over again it gets stuck in the unforgiving ground. He tugs, he pulls, he sobs. He digs and digs.

Winter turns to spring, and they carry on digging.

One day when the snow has melted, the work suddenly gets easier. An energetic man in a black cap arrives from the direction of the railway, pushing a cart containing some wooden boxes. He greets the workers with a cheery wave, and when he hears that some of them are Swedish he raises his hat to them.

‘
Ruotsi!
’ he says, using the Finnish name for Sweden before continuing in Swedish. ‘I come from Esbo in Finland, but I became a mining engineer and wanted to get out and see the world. This is a fantastic country, isn’t it?’

Sven nods, but Aron just stands there.

The man looks around. ‘Any stubborn rocks you want to get rid of?’

‘Definitely,’ Sven says.

There are always huge rocks. Some of the older workers point out several waiting up ahead.

‘Excellent, in that case allow me to demonstrate a little magic trick!’ the man from Esbo says, lifting the first wooden box off the cart.

Aron helps him to carry the rest, and watches as he takes fat sticks wrapped in oiled paper out of the boxes.

‘Ammonal!’ he shouts, gathering the men around the nearest rock. He picks up the sticks. ‘These are my boys, and they’re going to work together … Put them on the opposite side of the rock from the direction you want it to go in, bury them deep in the ground so they have something to kick against and press the detonator against the fuse. But slowly! You have to treat these boys as tenderly as if they were your very own cock!’

The men burst into raucous laughter, then fall silent. They all watch with tense anticipation as the man borrows a pickaxe and makes a row of holes for the dynamite underneath the rock. He shows them in which direction to point the sticks, and how to pack them tightly in order to achieve the best possible effect.

Then the man lights a metre length of black fuse wire and, when it begins to spark and crackle, he makes everyone move back. A long way back.

The ground shakes. A cloud of smoke and fire erupts, and the rock is hurled in the air. It’s like magic! The men cheer and the man raises his cap once more.

‘Ammonal! Dynamite is the future!’

The man from Esbo teaches them how to blow up rocks, but he soon moves on, and it’s back to the spades. Aron almost wishes he had never met the mining engineer, never found out that something called dynamite even existed. He doesn’t want to know that there are balls of fire that can move mountains, when all he has is a spade.

As the days grow warmer, the mud dries out and digging becomes easier. But then the mosquitoes arrive; the air is filled with them in early summer. Clouds of mosquitoes sweep in across the forest, whining around Aron’s ears, crawling up inside his sleeves, or biting right through the fabric of his shirt. His face swells up, his skin itches and throbs from all the bites. The mosquitoes get in his eyes and his nose, even in his mouth, where they taste sweet, like blood.

Sven makes them each a hat of birch bark to protect them from both the mosquitoes and the sun. And then he picks up his spade and carries on digging.

‘We mustn’t give up,’ he says. ‘After all, this is what we wanted, isn’t it?’

Aron doesn’t say anything.

He never wanted to dig in the new country; he wanted to be a sheriff.

When they are given soup during their short break in the middle of the day, hundreds of mosquitoes land on the warm liquid, at first swimming and then slowly, helplessly, sinking. Aron crushes them with his spoon and shovels the lot down. He chews ferociously, with his eyes shut; he wants to murder the mosquitoes. Murder every last one.

Jonas was back at Villa Kloss. He wasn’t going to think right now, at least not about Peter Mayer. He was going to work.

He fetched the sander and plugged it into the socket on Uncle Kent’s decking. Then he switched it on and carried on sanding, one plank at a time. Slow and steady, just as his father had taught him. Every scrap of grey had to be removed from the wood, leaving it pale and fresh. Only then would he be able to start brushing in the oil.

Jonas worked on his knees, his forehead shiny with sweat. The sun was burning down and he really didn’t want to think about it – but that name kept echoing through his mind.
Peter. Peter Mayer. Mayer. Peter.
He knew he couldn’t talk to anyone, but the name Gerlof had given him just wouldn’t go away. The man on the ship, the man who had killed people with an axe.

Peter Mayer. Sold the tickets for
The Lion King.
Lives in Marnäs.

‘How’s it going, Jonas?’ His father had slid open the glass door and was looking down at him. ‘Are you getting on OK?’

Jonas nodded.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

Jonas didn’t know what to say. He tried to smile, but his father must have seen something in his expression. He stepped outside.

‘Are you missing Mum?’

‘A bit … But it’s all right.’

Jonas carried on sanding.

‘So what is it, then?’ his father said.