Blackwater. Part 29

They ended up in the bedroom-c.u.m-workroom because that was where Birger finally found the whisky. Johan thought it a good sign that he didn't seem to know where to find it, or possibly a bad sign that he kept it by his bed.

He was easy to talk to. His questions were straight to the point much as if he were noting down medical symptoms and he didn't rush to draw conclusions from what he was told. But when he did, he saw no reason to discuss them.

'Girls who are pregnant,' he said, 'young women having their first baby, often have these sudden attacks. It's no more peculiar than the fact that they often get wind or throw up. At first it's nice to expect a sweet little baby doll. They fuss around and arrange things and everything seems all right. But then the backlash comes. Presumably more often than they say. Most of them just probably seem a bit sulky for a while. But Mia is lashing out now. She's under great strain. They wonder what the h.e.l.l they've done. What they've let themselves in for. Mostly they say nothing. But those who manage to spit it out say ugly things. They may also be frightened. But it'll work out.'

'It doesn't always. Sometimes things don't go the way you expect. They go off the rails. And it hurts.'

'Yes,' said Birger. 'Sometimes it hurts.'

He was tilting his gla.s.s backwards and forwards and looking down at the grubby rag rug. He was over sixty and looked as if a long life had wound him up. He worked like a clock. Occasionally a stab of pain would double him up, his eyes closing and his mouth opening. Then he went on, saying what he usually said. Even changing his shirt. And eating. His familiarity with solitude and loneliness and a disciplined, dull, industrious life helped him plod on.

'You look scared,' he said.

'Yes, though I'm not usually,' said Johan. 'That night many years ago, that Midsummer, I was then. Though I haven't thought about it all that much since. But now it's come back and I recognise it. Sort of like remembering an accident or some injury when the same thing nearly happens again. Though you'd forgotten.'

'What were you afraid of that night?'

'I don't know. That it would all go wrong. It was just this feeling that things weren't working out as expected, or as they usually do. But badly. Really badly.'

'What were you up to that evening?'

'I went fishing.'

'The police thought you'd run away to Norway.'

'I took the moped up to Alda's first, to get some bait. But my brothers caught up with me.'

'And beat you up?'

'No. Pekka's rather complex and he'd thought up something better. They let me down Alda's well. It wasn't all that bad, because there was very little water in it. But I was down there several hours before I figured out how to get out. Then I didn't want to go back home. I hadn't decided anything, but just ran. I never saw Annie Raft on the path. I didn't hear about her seeing someone until long after, but then I realised it was me she had seen. So did Gudrun and the brothers, and Torsten. They lied and said I'd already gone off in the evening, and that I had taken the moped. But I walked to Nirsbuan and slept an hour or two there. Then I paddled down to the Roback and got a lift. That was about five in the morning.

'It's odd that the man who gave you a lift said nothing to the police.'

'It was a woman. A Finn. No, a woman from Finland. She was d.a.m.ned fussy about that.'

'Fancy you remembering that.'

'I spent several days with her.'

Birger looked up.

'Having a bit of hanky-panky, were you?'

Johan laughed. That was unexpected and he needed it, he thought, with everything so b.l.o.o.d.y awful at the moment.

'You could say so,' he said. 'Though not exactly idyllic. She was quite a tough nut. I hurt myself, actually broke something in my foot and she gave me quinine powder and some vodka and made me walk on it. A long way.'

'That was an odd mixture.'

He had got up and put his gla.s.s down on the desk. For a long spell he stayed there with his back to Johan, almost as if looking out over the asphalted square below. But there was nothing there to see.

'Are you sure it was that? Quinine powder?'

'Yes, I thought it sounded horrible. There was a Red Indian on the bag.'

'And Koskenkorva?'

'Yes.'

'Quinine powder and Koskenkorva. That's what Sabine Vestdijk was given for her period pains.'

'Who's that?'

'That was her name. The young Dutch girl who was killed in the tent together with a man with no trousers. A man whom no one has identified and no one has missed. He tried to buy painkillers for her at the chemist's in Byvngen, but couldn't. Then she was given that quinine powder and Koskenkorva vodka. By someone. The bottle was found there, and the packet of powders. Where did your tough Finnish woman come from?'

'I thought she came off the Finland ferry.'

'At five in the morning?'

'I never asked. But she'd also been to the chemist's in Byvngen.'

'Did she tell you that?'

'No.'

He was suddenly horribly embarra.s.sed, as if he were sixteen again and having to confess to rummaging in her handbag.

'She had a paper bag from the chemist's,' he said. 'With the receipt still in it. She'd bought some condoms.'

'Sounds as if she'd hoped she would meet you.'

'We never used them. She never said we should be careful or anything like that. I thought she was on the pill. So I couldn't make out why she bought those condoms.'

'You were an innocent lamb.'

'Yeah, you could say so.'

'I expect she had had someone else in mind. Someone she thought she needed to protect herself from.'

'You mean from infection?'

Was it that simple? He was a doctor and naturally thought along those lines.

'Who then? There was a man up there, but she wasn't together with him. The packet of condoms was unopened. Who was she thinking of?'

'Sagittarius,' said Birger.

Johan didn't know what her name was, but she had called the hunting lodge Trollevolden. There was a cave nearby and a river ran alongside the cottage he had stayed in. He remembered the murmur of it all day and night.

'Anyhow, the house belonged to her family.'

'Although she was a Finn?'

'From Finland.'

'This trouserless man had a telephone number hidden at the bottom of his bag. It was to some place on the coast, to the north. A shop. Was there a telephone in the house?'

'There was nothing. Not even electricity. No road, either.'

'Did you see a shop anywhere near?'

'I didn't see anything. Only a large, dark house. A dog run and an ice house. They were derelict, but the main house wasn't. Just rather shabby. I think it must have been a big family, because there were an awful lot of beds. Bunk beds.'

'We'll find it,' said Birger. 'That can't be difficult. Then we can get hold of the Finnish woman's name.'

His way of finding it was the way almost everything was accomplished in the villages. You turned to someone you knew. Or to someone who was the son of, or acquainted with, or only a son-in-law of someone you knew. In this case, it was an insurance official in Stockholm who had been head of the police in Byvngen. He had been removed from the case of the event by the river Lobber and had taken that so badly, he had resigned. But he had a large cardboard box full of photocopied material from the case, an arrangement greatly approved of by Birger, though it was totally against all regulations, of course. ke Vemdal had hoped to be able to puzzle out the answer at his kitchen table and triumph over all those who had snubbed him. He hadn't done so.

He usually went shooting up in Blackwater in the autumn, with the same team as Birger. He used to have a spell of fishing in June as well, and they occasionally met in Stockholm. Vemdal would book a table in the restaurant at Solvalla racecourse and they would spend a fortune on the meal d.a.m.ned cheap at the price since you get such a good view from there and laid bets on the horses. At first they had talked about the case every time they met, but now they hadn't spoken of it for a long time.

Vemdal didn't want to give them the telephone number Sagittarius had hidden at the bottom of his bag. He was going to phone himself.

'I'm surprised he was home,' said Johan. 'It's the holidays.'

'He's a loss adjuster. There are lots of burglaries these days. And he's his own boss in the evenings. A bachelor. But not like me. He's a confirmed one. You can have ladies anywhere, he says. In sailing boats. In politics. But not in kitchens and plumbed areas. They regress there.'

He fell silent.

'Though not Annie,' he said seriously, after a while. 'She didn't spend much time in the kitchen, for that matter. Would you like some food? Have you had anything to eat? You must phone Mia. You two mustn't mess things up.'

A tourist hostel. They found out on Monday morning. It was still called Trollevolden, but was owned by the Norwegian Tourist a.s.sociation. People who went to the mountains or went fishing could stay the night there. It had been a simple unstaffed establishment eighteen years ago and the tourist a.s.sociation had in fact owned it since the end of the war. Earlier it had been a hunting lodge and had belonged to a businessman from Trondheim.

Johan felt as if he were still the gullible sixteen-year-old who had hidden away in what she had called the grouse shed. She had made it all up. Or, as Birger expressed it, 'she talked a lot of bulls.h.i.t, the lying cow'.

The number it had been changed but Vemdal tracked it down was to a village shop on the coast north of Brnnysund. They knew all about Trollevolden there.

But that didn't produce a name. It was unlikely there would be lists of names if they had kept records at all. If there were, that that would be police business. Vemdal advised them to go to the police.

'Nothing's happened over all these years,' said Birger. 'But then you come. Annie saw you and recognised you, amazingly enough. She was so frightened she rang me up although it was not yet five in the morning. According to the investigation, she took the gun with her because she had had a fright and was scared of meeting that man. You, that is. But she didn't say anything to Mia about it. Does that sound reasonable?'

'It sounds as if she wasn't really sure.'

'I've already told you the cartridges were still there. If she had a box of cartridges, then what happened to it? She did quite a lot that morning. She was up at Gudrun Brandberg's and agreed with her that they should go and look for morels. Then she went down to Anna Starr's in Tangen. Anna's place is quite isolated, so Annie would've had the gun with her, if she was that scared. But she didn't.'

'What did she do at Anna Starr's?'

'It's rather odd. Hardly serious. I mean, if she was frightened, then it was a peculiar enterprise. She was asking about a ufo. Or some phenomenon in the sky they had thought was a ufo. She wanted know exactly where it had come down. Something bright and dazzling crashed out of the sky outside Tangen a few years ago. You can see the place from the exercise track, halfway between the far headland and the little island with spruces on it. The next day, six old biddies, members of the sewing bee, went round the village asking who else had seen it. They had all seen it together. They'd been standing in the Neanders' window, looking out like snow-white angels Westlund saw them. Whatever was dazzling and flashing hurtled through the night down into the water and vanished. They even dragged the place later on. The women got a couple of men to do it from a boat, but they found only the usual sc.r.a.p iron people had dumped. Actually a whole lot of people in the village had seen it and everyone gave roughly the same description: that it was like a firework display and hurtled straight down into the water, which was as black as ink that evening. That was late autumn. There was ice below the store, though it was thin. But further out where the lake is rougher, the water was open and that's where it disappeared.

'She talked to Anna about it and then appears to have forgotten about Gudrun and the morel picking. Anyhow, she drove on up on her own, first to Aron and Lisa Kronlund. She used to leave Saddie with them when she was going somewhere and couldn't take her along. So that means she was going to be away from the car for quite a while, as otherwise Saddie just used to stay in the car when she was walking in terrain that was too difficult for the old dog with her bad hips.'

'Did she say where she was going?'

'Not to Lisa and Aron. But she met their granddaughter she was there for the weekend. She told her she was going down Memory Lane.'

'That sounds rather solemn.'

'She went towards the Lobber. Her memories from there were not particularly pleasant. As far as I know, she had never been there since it happened. Then we don't know any more.'

Then he leant over the table and at first Johan thought he was sneezing. But it was a sob. He had started weeping, snuffling loudly. A moment ago, he had sounded quite matter-of-fact. He had come into the dusty living room where Johan was sleeping, with a cup of coffee for him. He was sitting on the bed, so close that Johan now thought he ought to put his arm round him. But he didn't know how to set about it. The deep, shuddering sobs were the only sound in the room and Birger's face was red and swollen. He pushed away his cup, dropped forwards over the table and wept even more violently, his bowed, powerful back shaking, strings of what looked like snot trickling down on the table.

Saddie struggled up from her place under the coffee table and padded out of the room, cowering as she went. He had frightened her.

Finally Birger managed to get up and go out into the hall, fumbling as if he couldn't see. Johan clumsily followed him and made sure he found the bathroom. Then he went back and sat at the low table, listening to him pulling at the toilet paper and blowing his nose over and over again. At last it was quiet, but almost ten minutes pa.s.sed before he came out.

'You must go to the police,' he said. 'They can get further with that Finnish woman.'

But Johan didn't want to, though he found it difficult to explain why. Birger might think he was afraid they would suspect him, but it was nothing as concrete as that. He thought if he did something now, then anything could happen. Just think what he had released merely by letting himself be seen through a window.

Or would it have happened anyhow? There was something ambiguous about Annie Raft's actions that morning. He didn't know what sort of person she was and didn't dare ask Birger for fear he would start weeping again. Had she acted rationally or had she been acting on obscure impulses she was unable to explain even to herself?

Mia, who was so sensible, had shown him sides of herself he hadn't known about. She had behaved erratically, almost maliciously. Late the previous night, Birger had said that women sometimes showed faces that were difficult to keep your eyes on. Which women?

'They don't look you in the eye,' said Birger, whisky-blurred. 'If they turn their backs on you, you may see nothing but air. Niente.'

Now it was morning and once again Birger thought Mia had behaved normally and predictably. In her condition, it meant nothing more than wind and morning sickness.

But what if it were fatal?

Johan had phoned and talked to her. Her voice had been dull. She was sulking. Grandmother did not want to go to land. But Mia was going to Stockholm to see her all the same. Then she would come to Langva.s.slien.

It sounded normal. She had calmed down just as Birger had predicted. But Birger hadn't considered that the decision rested with her. What part of her was it that decided? Scarcely a year ago, she had met a man she had taken to be a Norwegian driver in a dog-sled race in Duved. She thought his Siberians were beautiful with their light-blue eyes and intelligent faces and she also found him personally appetising that was what she said. As good as a strawberry ice cream to lick and G.o.d knows, she had licked. But what was it within her that had decided he should be the father of her child? Or that he would not be allowed to?

He busied himself with forecasts. He was tracking the movements of water-laden clouds driven by the winds. They usually came from the west out of the misty or surging and sunny Atlantic and moved on an easterly course. But they could swing at an angle of ninety degrees. That kind of thing happened. Usually he knew if they were going to be difficult to judge, but there were some he got wrong from the very beginning. They made him feel superfluous. Not powerless or inadequate with all his a.s.sembled data. But superfluous. Unnecessary. Then it rained on his face and he wondered about it in a way that could not in any way be called scientific.

When it came to choosing where Annie was to be buried, anywhere but Roback churchyard had been out of the question. Even old Henny said, in her deep, cultivated voice, that that was where Annie belonged.

In his funeral oration, the minister evoked a picture of Annie in the forest. He meant well; his intention was that they should see Annie walking in a fresh spring forest, a younger and healthier Saddie at her heels. She belonged there, said the minister. Annie would not have agreed with him.

She had once said to Birger, 'You're not the only one who has walked with me here in the forest or up to the mountain and said this is where I belong. They all think I move quickly here and find my way. I appear to be at home where they themselves feel lost or even terrified.

'It's true I walk in the forest every day and I am the only woman here who goes walking outside the berry-picking season. And who dares to walk alone. But that doesn't make me feel at home in the forest. I think the timber company's men or the Brandberg men on their road-making machines feel much more at home.'

I walk here as Rousseau did in the woods of St Germain, dazed by fantasies, scents and visions of beauty. The point is, my visions are the opposite of the civilisation I live in. I'm seeking an alternative. Per-Ola Brandberg isn't doing that as he drives his tractor. His visions are not in opposition to the society he lives in. Not even when he disturbs a hare or notices the cloudberries have started to ripen.

Naturally, in time I feel more and more at home in what is alien, just as Per-Ola feels at home in the resources he is abusing. But it is my fantasies that make me feel at home, and they are reinforced by the wildness and scents of the forest. Per-Ola benefits from roughly the same things. But he wouldn't call them wild.

We are two children of our time and dependent on each other, at least I am on him. Without the felling, the village would be uninhabited and I wouldn't be able to live alone here to have my visions and fantasies. That would be going native and is something quite different. That's what Bjorne Brandberg has done and he seems to be lost. He doesn't even drink any longer.

You know, quite a few bachelors and lumberjacks have ended up like him in a cabin or a surplus company hut. They begin to find people difficult and listen more and more in towards the forest. The solitude has a powerful influence on them. They become dependent. I don't really know what kind of experiences they have. What they tell you is often about the wee folk who help them when they're exhausted, and ferns that cure their backaches and allow them to sleep, sometimes too soundly. Nowadays all that's told knowingly, not really naively. But it must be a matter of words put to experiences which they are.