The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (43 page)

‘So I heard,’ Gerlof said. ‘She used to give talks and read to the residents. But she hasn’t been here this year.’

‘No, she stopped coming. After the accident.’

‘When Greta fell?’

‘Yes. When she died in the bathroom.’

‘And the door was locked,’ Gerlof said.

‘Yes, Greta was very particular about locking the bathroom door. So that nobody could poke their head in.’ Wall had a brief coughing fit. ‘But Veronica Kloss was in there, too. She came out. I saw her running past my door.’

‘Did you?’

‘I did. And that’s what I told Aron Fredh, too.’

Gerlof thought for a moment. ‘Was your son Einar here at the same time as Aron?’

‘Once, yes. They had a chat.’

‘About the Kloss family?’

‘About all kinds of things … Einar was furious with Kent Kloss – he was always trying to beat down the price of the meat and fish Einar supplied.’

Gerlof realized that something had begun here in Ulf Wall’s room; it had started with a chance meeting between an arms dealer and a man who had come home. Two angry men with a common enemy.

‘So do you think they might have done business together?’

‘Very likely,’ Wall said. ‘But Einar didn’t say anything to me about it.’

Gerlof couldn’t stay on his feet any longer, and he was too polite to sit down on the bed, so he thanked Ulf Wall and left the room.

He paused in the corridor and looked at the room next door, where Greta Fredh had lived. He knocked on the door; no one answered, but he’d got into the habit of simply walking in, so he did the same again.

The old woman who had taken over the room was sitting there; she looked quite alarmed.

‘Good afternoon.’ Gerlof was slightly embarrassed at intruding like this, but he smiled and waved to show that he wasn’t a threat.

He looked around; so this was where Aron’s sister, Greta, had lived, and where she had died. In the bathroom, after a fall.

And the bathroom door had been locked – both Ulf Wall and the care assistant had said the same. It would have been impossible for anyone to push her over.

Gerlof was just about to leave when he noticed the mat in the hallway. He had one exactly the same – plastic.

And then he realized how it could have happened.

Veronica Kloss. Nice, kind Veronica, who came to the home to give talks. Who got involved with the residents, went to see them in their rooms, read to them. Last summer, until Greta Fredh was dead.

Gerlof turned and went out into the corridor.

‘Hello?’ he called out. There was no response, so he raised his voice like the former sea captain he was. ‘Hello! Anyone there?’

A young woman appeared. She wasn’t the care assistant he had spoken to before, but they were similar. ‘What’s happened?’

‘This room,’ Gerlof said, pointing with his stick. ‘You need to cordon it off and call the police.’

The girl looked bewildered. ‘Sorry?’

Gerlof tried to look as authoritative as possible and to sound utterly sure of himself. ‘This is a crime scene. Greta Fredh was murdered in that room.’

On Saturday, the sky was grey above Villa Kloss. There wasn’t a breath of wind along the coast, but darker clouds were gathering over the mainland. It felt as if there was a storm on the way.

Jonas worked hard all day, brushing oil into Veronica’s decking, and at quarter past seven in the evening he finished the very last section. His aunt had already paid him, and he had put the envelope containing the money under his pillow, along with his wages from Uncle Kent.

Jonas narrowed his eyes and glanced up at the sun as he put away the brush and the tin of oil. He didn’t want to think about sandpaper, wood oil or decking ever again. He was thinking about the money now, and the fact that he and his father were going home. Veronica had promised to drive them tomorrow after lunch.

Mats had already left; he had caught the bus to Kalmar on the main road this morning.

Jonas cycled over to the Davidsson family’s cottage to say goodbye, as was the custom when someone was leaving the island to go home. Kristoffer was there, along with his mum and dad, but Gerlof had moved back to the residential home in Marnäs.

Jonas rode home in the sunset, feeling a little disappointed; he was sorry not to have seen Gerlof one last time.

The summer was almost over but it was still mild, and Jonas left the door of his chalet open when he went to bed, to let in the night air. Needless to say, it was almost as warm as the air inside the room.

He looked at his watch one last time: nearly ten o’clock. The garden was darker than usual, because someone had turned off the lights around the pool and down by the drive. But the alarm was switched on; Jonas could see the green flashing diodes.

He slid down in his bed, the sound of the crickets filling his ears. He didn’t think he would miss their loud chirping when he got back to town, although it was actually quite calming, a kind of rhythmic chomping from some invisible machine out there in the grass.

Suddenly, the crickets fell silent. Not for long, just a brief pause as if the needle on a record player had been lifted for a few seconds. And then they gradually resumed their song.

Was there someone out there? An animal? Or a person? Jonas listened for a while, but the crickets had returned to their usual rhythm.

He turned over, lay on his back. Through the white curtain, he could see the round moon suspended above the rocks and the Sound. Perhaps it was the full moon that was making the crickets sound so peculiar.

The bed was warm, but the sheets were lovely and cool. Outside, he could hear low voices; it sounded as if his father had come home from his last shift at the restaurant and was saying goodnight to Casper and Urban.

There had been no sign of Uncle Kent all day. Which was fine.

Jonas closed his eyes.

After a while, the voices fell quiet, then he heard footsteps and muted thuds from the other chalets as Casper and Urban went to bed, then there was silence.

The room seemed to get darker. Jonas slowly slipped away into the shadows of the summer night, as if a sooty grey fog had crept in under the door and wrapped itself around him. But he was tired, so very tired, and there was no danger here. No cairn ghost.

Only a guardian angel.

An angel was standing by his bed, tall and still. The angel placed a hand over his face, and whispered that everything was all right.

Sleep, just sleep.

The angel’s soft white hand was still there. And that was fine, everything was peaceful. Jonas sank deeper and deeper, down towards the bottom of the sea.

A little part of him knew that this was wrong, that is was dangerous to sink this deep, but by that time he couldn’t do anything about it.

The three guest chalets stood side by side towards the back of the extensive plot that made up Villa Kloss. When the sun had gone down and the chalets were in darkness, there was no light here.

There was an alarm, but Aron knew the code, of course.

Silently, he opened the door of the chalet on the left. The room smelled of chloroform, thanks to the bottle he had found in Einar Wall’s boathouse.

There was a boy lying in the bed inside. A white handkerchief soaked in chloroform had been placed over his face, so he was fast asleep. A deep sleep beneath a white mask.

Good.

Aron picked him up. The boy’s breathing was calm and even as he was carried out of the chalet, across the grass and over to the far end of the garden, where a low wall ran alongside a narrow dirt track.

Aron stepped over the wall and on to the track. His car was parked a short distance away in the darkness. Keeping one arm around the boy’s back, he opened the boot and gently placed the thin body inside.

Then he closed the boot and turned around to visit the boy in the next chalet.

There ought to be room for two boys in the boot, and the third one could go on the back seat. There was no danger of suffocation – they wouldn’t be going far.

It was eleven thirty now.

In an hour, Aron would be back here on the coast for his final encounter with the Kloss family.

Aron carries on seeing Ludmila, when she is not away because of her work. He misses her, of course, but he is more balanced now, a middle-aged man quietly working for the KGB. He has a new car, a white Volga.

It is slightly easier to travel now. The Soviet Union has opened up, slowly and cautiously, after the death of Stalin, and no one comes knocking late at night any more. Political dissidents are interrogated and imprisoned, but there are no longer any quotas involving thousands of class enemies. Aron’s gun remains in its holster.

There are, of course, memories of the past, among both the hunters and the hunted, but no one talks about them. There is an old Soviet saying: ‘Let he who mentions the past lose an eye.’ People may no longer believe in a future paradise, but they want peace and quiet.

Mila continues to work as a nurse, but one particular job has made her ill. In the autumn of 1960, she travelled south, was away for several months and returned with fear in her eyes and a terrible cough. She has been coughing ever since, a dreadful rasping that is worst at night. And when she does manage to get to sleep, she sometimes wakes up with a start, screaming.

Aron doesn’t ask any questions. Either Mila doesn’t want to tell him what happened, or she’s not allowed to, and that’s fine. He has secrets of his own.

They get engaged in May 1961 and marry the following year. Not in God’s name, but in the name of the state – a dignified, low-key ceremony at the Central Registry Office.

Aron and Mila can now move in together, but Vlad’s tiny apartment is not suitable. A recently renovated two-room apartment is waiting for them on Petrovka Street.

Aron never thought he would be someone’s husband but, at the age of forty-three, that is exactly what has happened. He just wishes that his mother and his sister, Greta, could see him now.

In time, they have a child, a daughter who is born in 1972, when Mila is thirty-eight years old. She is a much-longed-for baby, because Mila has had two miscarriages. Aron wonders if this is related to her illness.

The night before the child is due, Mila finally tells him what happened twelve years earlier. She tells him about the mass grave in the desert steppes that no one was allowed to talk about.

She even had to help with the digging. ‘Everyone had to dig,’ she says.

‘A mass grave?’ he asks. ‘Who’s buried there?’

‘The engineers.’

And Mila tells him about the rocket launch on the great plain to the east of the Aral Sea, in October 1960. The night when her lungs were destroyed.

‘I was at the hospital, several kilometres away, but we still felt the impact of the shockwave. At first, we thought it was the rocket lifting off, as planned, but that wasn’t the case … We had no idea how badly prepared everything was, how those in charge ignored safety regulations in order to stick to the timetable.’

Things had become more and more hectic before lift-off, with the generals hassling the engineers. It was late at night, everyone was tired. So in the end it went wrong, very badly wrong. A short circuit in the system meant that the second-stage engines fired too early, detonating the fuel tanks below the first-stage engines while the launch pad was still crowded with people.

‘The rocket started up without warning,’ Mila says. ‘It began spewing flames in all directions, then the fuel tanks exploded. A burning cloud billowed up into the night sky, and the whole launch pad was covered in fire … It annihilated those who were standing nearby and rolled like a burning wave towards those standing further away. They couldn’t escape.’

Mila had been spared the sight of the firestorm, when many of those trying to run away got caught on the barbed-wire fence surrounding the area and turned into living torches.

But she saw everything afterwards. Everything.

‘I went with one of the first fire engines to the scene of the accident to see what I could do for the injured on the spot and to arrange transportation to our hospital. We worked for several days among the smoking wreckage of the rocket and bodies charred beyond recognition. But we weren’t allowed to say a word about the accident afterwards. Not a word. All the dead were hidden in a mass grave.’

Mila falls silent, then starts coughing. She coughs for a long time.

Aron sits by her bed, attempting to comfort her, but she shakes her head. ‘It’s indescribable … You wouldn’t understand, you’ve spent your whole life sitting behind a desk … Have you ever seen a dead person, Vlad?’

At first, Aron doesn’t say anything, but then he begins to speak. ‘I haven’t spent all my time sitting behind a desk. And I have seen people die.’

‘Have you?’

Aron nods. He could spend several days telling Mila about the ‘black work’ he used to do, but instead he chooses to tell her about what happened one cold spring after Vlad had accompanied Major Karrek to Moscow. It was April 1940; Poland had fallen and it was the year before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

‘I was a soldier and I was given a special task,’ Aron says. ‘It began with a train journey away from the biting winds of the city, travelling inland with an NKVD commando of trusted men from the prisons in Moscow and Leningrad, handpicked by Major Karrek. He was my commanding officer, and had a great deal of power. He led a unit that reported directly to Stalin.

‘“We will be working in the darkness,” Karrek explained to us. “Black work.”

‘No one on the train told us where we were going, and we knew we weren’t allowed to ask questions.

‘The railway line was newly laid. It stopped somewhere between Leningrad and Moscow, in a huge, gloomy forest.

‘We got off the train and were transported further into the forest in trucks; eventually we arrived at a very basic barracks next to an extensive prison camp. I had seen high fences before, but behind this fence I could hear foreign languages which I think were German and Polish – even though we were definitely still in the Soviet Union.