Blackwater. Part 6

'Yes. It was upright. Nothing had happened there then.'

She heard dogs barking outside and the sound of cars. The one who was a policeman looked as if he hadn't noticed. He had propped his chin lightly in his left hand, the forefinger and thumb forming a fork. He had light bluish-grey eyes which held hers firmly. She was his route into all this raw mist and blood, but she wriggled away. You can't look another person straight in the eye that long if you haven't practised it, she thought. And yet he appeared slightly preoccupied. Or tired. She had to look away after a while.

'You walked to Nirsbuan and when you got there, what did you do then?'

'Looked in. I looked in through the kitchen window. And then through the window round the back.'

'You didn't knock on the door?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

It had been barred and had a large padlock hanging from it. She didn't want to say that. Then they would make out that Dan had broken in. While she had been walking all that way with Mia during the night, everything she had done had seemed to her necessary and obvious. Now it seemed confused. Impossible to explain.

For the rest of her life, she was to preserve the memory of that walk. But how much of it would she have remembered if he had not forced her to describe it over and over again in that warm kitchen? There must be tangled events, illogical or utterly insane actions in all lives. To forget. They refused to allow her to forget. They forced her to bind them together into a pattern. But it was a false pattern.

She felt ashamed. They made her feel ashamed. The doctor's questions were the worst, and he didn't ask many. He only asked about Mia. And then the police chief.

'This man. The man you were going to live with, he didn't show up. Had you arranged for him to come and meet you off the bus?'

'That's fairly obvious, isn't it?' she said.

'But he didn't come.'

'No.'

'How long did you wait?'

What could she answer? Then she remembered the television film and said that it had begun when she went up to Ola and his wife.

'Had you any idea why he hadn't appeared?'

'Yes, I thought he had forgotten it was Midsummer Eve. Or that he thought I had meant the old, the real Midsummer Eve. He was lying there asleep. So that must have been it.'

'But why do you think he drew back his foot when you tapped on the window?'

'How would I know that?'

'You know him.'

'I don't know.'

'Why did you run away? Why didn't you try to get into the cottage?'

She said nothing.

'What were you afraid of?' he said.

Yes, what had she been afraid of? She no longer knew. It had all shattered. A greater terror had wiped it out.

'Why did you walk back?'

'I don't really know. Everything was . . . creepy.'

'Did you think he had someone else there? Another girl?'

Neither of them had any expression any longer. Not even features.

'Did he?' Their faces were nothing but two discs of pale, moist flesh. They said nothing. They were looking attentively at her. But she held out and did not reply.

The policeman got up. He was red-eyed and looked tired, but the other man seemed sleepier, his mouth occasionally dropping open and his eyelids drooping. He had pale, creased eyelids. He pulled himself together and followed the policeman out of the kitchen. A little later, Oriana Stromgren came down from the top floor, where she and Henry had been banished with the children.

She looked swiftly sideways several times at Annie as she made the coffee. When it was ready, it was a pale brown, slightly sour drink. She offered Annie thin crispbread with soft goat's cheese on it. Annie ate it at the time, but was never again able to eat that cheese. Mia went on eating it, not connecting it with what had happened.

Mia was asleep in Oriana and Henry's bedroom. No one had said they had to stay at the Stromgrens'. Annie didn't even know if she was allowed to leave the kitchen. She had no car to get down into the village. She could decide nothing.

Now and again she dozed off as she sat there on the kitchen bench, and Oriana said she should go to bed. But she wanted to stay up. She didn't want to go to bed. She thought if she fell asleep and slid away from this event that was no longer an event, she would wake up to something irretrievable.

Eventually a policeman in a grey overall with badges and reflectors on it came in. She was to go with him down to the river. A question of identification, he said.

'But it can't possibly be anyone I know!'

He didn't reply, just stood with the kitchen door open until she joined him. The doctor and the chief of police were waiting outside. There were lots of people and cars now, dogs barking incessantly. She said she couldn't look at the bodies in the tent. That was impossible.

'We must request you to,' said the police chief. He said he had to ask but he didn't ask. He had gone through her belongings and the other man had fumbled over her body with his hands.

'We want to know if you know one of them.'

'Why should I? Why just the one?'

'We think we may know who the girl is,' he said. 'We want you to look at the boy.'

She vomited on the way down. They waited patiently, the doctor even holding her up. But then they hustled her on to continue along the path that disappeared into the wet of the marsh. She was weeping as she approached the river, the men pushing and shoving her.

'It won't take long, it won't take long,' said Birger, whose name she did not know then.

'I know it's not Dan!'

'Good,' he said. 'Then it'll be quick.'

The tent canvas was lifted off. They were lying side by side on their backs. But they were stiff and the bodies had not been properly straightened out, knees and elbows bent, fingers splayed. The girl's back was hunched, her head apparently raised from the plastic sheeting and stiffened like that. She had a wound with brownish black edges on her cheek. It looked like a mouth, another mouth, and it was open.

It was not Dan. They were two alien, whitish-grey, dried-up faces with sticky hair all round them. And there were more men round the tent. They had rolls of plastic strips and kept moving the camera tripod and light metal cases around. There were feathers everywhere. Unruly white down. Behind her clenched teeth lay the taste of vomit, acrid and pungent.

They drove her down to the village. She said she wanted to wait for Dan and they took her to the camping site. She was given a cabin to creep into with Mia, a cabin lined with red wood and with a small veranda. It looked like a playhouse. There was only one window; it was dark inside and smelt of tobacco smoke and old blankets.

It was late morning. She was not really sure what the time was and couldn't find the energy to look. They both fell asleep curled up together on the lower bunk. When she woke there were faces at the window.

The site was crowded with people. Cars drove up to the office and the people who got out were handsomely dressed, but Annie could see no faces, only eyes. She and Mia finally had to leave their hiding place because Mia was hungry. Annie felt sick. They went into Roland Fjellstrom's office and he gave them sausage and a bag of instant macaroni. He had black hair and brilliant blue eyes. She saw nothing but his low hairline and thought he looked as if he had come from the planet of the apes. She couldn't make him out at all, and perhaps it was the same with all the other masks of faces she could make nothing of them, seeing nothing but their glances crawling over her own rigid face.

Word had leaked out that she had seen someone on the path up there and they knew she had told the police it was a foreigner. They thought he was the murderer and she believed that herself. Yet she hesitated to say what he looked like because that was so poisoned. He looked like a Vietnamese. She hesitated so long, it never got said. She couldn't stand the camping site any longer, and when Mia had finished her sausage and macaroni, she took her small hand and they walked up the road. Cars slowed down and people stared at them through the windows. She had thought Dan would find them more easily if they walked on the road. He must be coming.

In the end, she realised they couldn't go on wandering up and down in the village. They had read the posters on the notice board by the store several times. Bingo at Vika Parish Hall. Midsummer party in Kvaebakken. Cream porridge, a Norwegian delicacy. Buy your boots at Fiskbua, Three Towers brand bargain prices! Midsummer service at Bjornstubacken. White flour special offer.

she didn't want to go back to the site. she had seen two houses on a hillside and mia had asked why it said cottage on a notice when you could see perfectly well it was a cottage.

It never occurred to her that the only vacant cottage in the village might perhaps not be the best one. She just went up the slope with Mia and asked an elderly woman in the house at the top whether they could rent the cottage by the road. It cost thirty kronor a night.

She couldn't remember what Aagot f.a.gerli looked like when they came out of her house, only that she had given her thirty kronor. They fetched the rucksack from the camping site and set off for the cottage, but the police caught up with them. She was not to leave the site without telling them. She showed them the cottage and she was driven in a police car to Ola's garage by Fiskebuan so that she could fetch her luggage.

Once they were left alone, she locked the door on the inside. It had a simple skeleton key with an e-shaped bit, so the lock wouldn't give them much protection. The entrance hall was lined with pale-green boarding and bright-blue wallpaper; behind a door steep stairs led up to the attic. She went up to look and found it contained preserving jars, old clothes and rolled-up rugs. Otherwise it was empty.

The cottage was flooded with daylight and you could see right through it from the windows. Quite a big kitchen with pine walls and bright-blue wallpaper. Windows in three walls. The bedroom had no door, only an opening with old and beautifully shaped moulding. It too was light and visible from all the windows. There were two large cupboards in the kitchen and when Annie opened the yellow hardboard doors, she saw there were Swedish woollen blankets on shelves in one of them, and hard feather pillows with striped pillowcases. The other one was empty apart from some ancient hangers. There was an iron stove, rusty on top, a long kitchen work surface covered with self-adhesive plastic patterned like tiles, white with small blue windmills. There was a table by one of the windows and two wooden chairs. In the bedroom was a bed with a green bedspread patterned with irregular small rectangles and black and yellow lines. This had been audaciously modern in the 1950s.

Mia sat in silence in the kitchen on an iron bed with a flock mattress and when Annie saw her face she thought: What have I done?

'There are people around in the area,' ke Vemdal said. 'We must get those two out.'

He had spread the map out on Oriana's kitchen table and told Birger he could go down to the camping site if he liked. More police had come from ostersund. The forensic squad, too. So he needn't stay.

'We must cover all movements in the area. Check lists of those leaving it.'

He had begun to use the same language as the technical chief, whose squad was now installed in Henry's barn. The man kept holding up a finger and saying, 'Yes, sir! Eyes right!' whenever he wanted to make a correction.

'Barbro's still there,' said Birger.

He was not allowed to go and look for her. The police had taken over. He had asked to see the lists, but Vemdal said not many people had come out and they had been noted down. Three. They had been questioned when Birger and he had been down by the river with Annie Raft. None of them had been anywhere near the place where the tent was, or the ford.

Birger's memory was silent, as if a lid had closed over his ears. A wide stony riverbed glazed by thin water, mobile, silent.

ke thought he knew who the dead girl was. They had found a pa.s.sport made out to Sabine Vestdijk, thirty-three years old, studying. Or student. ke was not certain of the exact meaning of etudiante. The red Renault parked up at the homestead had an NL badge with the owner's name on it and the name was the same as that in the pa.s.sport. The girl's appearance matched the pa.s.sport photograph. There was a tent in the car.

Two things were unclear; the man's ident.i.ty and the tent. Why had they had two tents in such a small car?

Birger was hardly listening. He was thinking that Barbro must still be out there somewhere. The other demonstrators had come shambling back with their rucksacks an hour or two before the church service. They had come from Byvngen in a minibus which had stopped at a timber-loading bay about a kilometre from the Stromgren homestead. Most of them were teachers. A couple of elderly women, silver-haired and in old-fashioned outdoor clothes. He recognised them from the Peace and Freedom movement and from Amnesty. Barbro used to hold their group meetings at home.

The commune from Roback came in an old Volkswagen bus. They brought with them the Starhill people, who had stayed overnight with them so that the children would not have to walk the long way down from Starhill in the morning. They were wearing Inca caps, patterned jerseys, pointed Lapp shoes and had leather backpacks. They had left their placards on the bus after they had been told there would be no service at Bjornstubacken. But the police brought with them two placards they had found up there.

URANIUM PROSPECTING BEGUN.

TAKE A MIDSUMMER WALK!.

EXPOSE LOCAL AUTHORITY LIES!.

Birger had seen a great many variations of the texts on Barbro's drawing board. Midsummer walk with us. See with your own eyes. The authorities are lying about the uranium. The council is not telling the truth. Come and see it on Bear Mountain.

He had asked what they would see. Stakes, she had replied. You could hardly walk on Bear Mountain at Midsummer, for the snow had not yet melted. But she had explained that a great many people would come to the open-air service. That was the only opportunity they had. Some people would go on up with them and the others would at least see the placards.

The two men Vemdal had sent up the path had seen neither the doctor's wife nor any tent. The demonstrators didn't know where she was. They hadn't even known she was coming up the evening before. Birger had thought the whole group was going.

I hardly asked her anything, he thought. And why don't the other demonstrators know anything? He reckoned they had answered evasively when he questioned them, or else they were lying outright.

The hours were long, a long, dazzlingly sunny day, full of voices and the tramp of feet, starting cars and barking dogs. The feeling would not leave him. Fear. Guilty conscience. Whatever it was. Whatever was inside him was hurting, anyhow, a fierce and lasting pain. A kind of force. He wished he could scream in the way that pale woman in the denim skirt had. For there were people left in the area. Barbro Torstensson and Dan Ulander. Perhaps others they knew nothing about.

'Who is Dan Ulander?' he asked Vemdal.

'One of the demonstrators.'

Vemdal was short of staff. He was considering the local riflemen, in case there was a maniac on the loose out there. Birger watched him bending over the outspread maps. They wanted to turn it into a military operation in the area.

A maniac. That too was a name for a kind of force. You had to have names for things. There was something they called the Area.

What area? Where did it end? On the map it looked like lichen in faint shades of green, yellow and brown. But there were mountain peaks and marshlands. Right up to Multhogen. There was a road there, but miles upon miles of roadless countryside in between. Heathland, swamps, peaks.

Some of the demonstrators were still outside. Inquisitive people had come up from the village, several carloads. One or two had seen the Dutch car outside Fiskebuan on Midsummer Eve.

'We'll cordon it off,' said ke Vemdal. 'Close it off down in the village and make sure all this lot go away.'

They were called inquisitive. But why had they really come? When Birger was a boy, it had been wartime and everything had been bad. Even the toilet paper had been thin. Thin and shiny, often tearing. He had never been able to resist smelling his finger when that happened. They were sticky and smelt bad. But you wanted to feel all the same.

It was wrong to say these people were inquisitive. They wanted to feel. Henry and Oriana's children's faces could be seen in the top windows. They were inquisitive. Henry had lugged the television up there and pulled the antenna in through the window. But they preferred to see what was going on down in the yard. And the dogs barked all day long, barking themselves hoa.r.s.e.

Lill-Ola Lennartsson came up in a police car. He was wearing a brown plush tracksuit. Lill-Ola had been a Swedish champion athlete when he still lived in Byvngen. His clothing looked implausible until Birger remembered Ola sold all kinds of leisure wear in his shop, playsuits and slippers made of reindeer and rabbit skin. The tracksuit was tight round his thin b.u.t.tocks, revealing that this former long-distance runner was beginning to lose his a.r.s.e.

ke wanted Birger to go with him into Henry's barn, but Lill-Ola was looking very shaky. That was when Birger realised that it had been wrong to make the woman in the denim skirt go down to the river to view the corpses. That had been cruel and done in a hurry. It could have waited. I ought to take a look at her, he thought.

The legs of the tracksuit were wide at the bottom and flapped round Ola's ankles as he went up the barn steps, his shoulders hunched up and his head thrust forward. He stood in the same way as he looked down at the bodies. They looked older now. Greyer. One was on the back of the pick-up. Ola nodded.

'That was the girl. She came into the shop.'

They showed him the man's corpse lying on a police stretcher on the floor.

'Never seen him before.'

'Was she on her own in the shop?'

Yes, she had been alone and she had said nothing about a man. Vemdal asked him to look carefully at the man. He coped well with it and didn't hurry. Birger looked away. Clothes and objects they had found in the collapsed tent were lying on an old baking table in sealed plastic bags. He could see the beads that had been among the feathers. They had found the thread and put it into the same bag. It was white, but a few centimetres had been stained brown by the blood. Small objects that weren't at all obvious in a tent: beads, a hairslide, a notebook with signs of the zodiac on the cover: Sagittarius. They had no meaning now, nothing immediately obvious, anyway.

A faint twittering was coming from the table. He went closer and saw it was a small cage with a brown rat inside it. He retched. The rat twirled round once, then sat dead still, looking out with black eyes like gla.s.s beads.

Ola had finished. He was quite certain, he said. He recognised the girl, but not the man. He had never seen him before. Now he wanted to leave. But he had coped well. When they got out on the steps, he said the girl had bought some fishing gear from him lines and a couple of small spinners. And she had borrowed his tent.

'Well, hired,' he added. 'She had a d.a.m.ned great camping tent with her. I happened to see it when we went out to the car to look at her rods to see what size lines she wanted. They couldn't have put up a tent like that by the Lobber.'

'Why was she going there in particular?'

He didn't know. He had sold her a fishing licence and given her the usual map.