Tilda looked around and got the feeling she was in the wrong era. Apart from the modern kitchen equipment it was like traveling back to a household at the end of the nineteenth century. A wealthy household. The dining table was large and heavy, made of oak. On the shelves stood copper pans, porcelain from the East Indies, and hand-blown glass bottles. The walls and ceiling were painted white, but the cupboards and wooden cornices were pale blue.
Tilda would have loved to walk into a Carl Larsson kitchen like this every morning, instead of the little kitchenette in her rooms on the square in Marnäs.
She was completely alone in the house now. Hans Majner
and two other colleagues who had traveled from Borgholm up to the scene of the accident had left Eel Point at around seven. Her boss, Göte Holmblad, had come along with them to the scene, but had kept a low profile and left at five, almost at the same time as the ambulance.
The father of the family who lived at Eel Point, Joakim Westin, was due to arrive by car from Stockholm late that evening-and it had been obvious that Tilda was going to be the one to stay behind and wait for him. She was the only one who had offered, and her colleagues had quickly agreed.
It wasn’t because she was a woman, Tilda hoped, but because she was the youngest and had the shortest service record.
The evening shift was okay. The only thing she had needed to do all afternoon, apart from answering the radio and the telephone, was to stop a reporter from Ölands-Posten from approaching the scene of the accident with his camera. She had referred him to the duty press officer in Kalmar.
When the paramedics went down to the shore with their stretcher, she had followed them, stood out by the jetty and watched as they slowly lifted the body out of the water between the jetty and the northern lighthouse. The arms hung there lifeless, water pouring from the clothes. This was the fifth death Tilda had been involved in during her time with the police, but she would never get used to seeing lifeless bodies pulled out of the water or out of smashed-up cars.
It was also Tilda who had answered when Joakim Westin rang. It was really against police procedure to inform relatives of a death over the telephone, but it had gone okay. The news had been bad-the worst imaginable-but Westin’s voice had sounded calm and collected throughout the conversation. It was often better to hear bad news as quickly as possible.
Give both the victims and the relatives as much accurate information as possible, as quickly as possible, she had learned from Martin at the Police Training Academy.
She left the kitchen and went into the house. There was a
faint smell of paint here. The room closest to the kitchen had new wallpaper and a newly polished floor and was warm and cozy, but when she went on along a corridor she could see rooms that were cold and dark, with no furniture. It made her think of condemned apartments she had been into shortly after she became a policewoman, apartments with no heating where people lived like rats.
The house at Eel Point wasn’t really a house Tilda would want to live in, particularly not at this time of year, in the winter. It was too big. And no doubt the coast was lovely when the sun was shining, but in the evening the desolation was complete. Marnäs, with its single shopping street, felt like a densely populated metropolis in comparison to the emptiness of Eel Point.
She left the light on, went out into the glassed-in veranda, and opened the outside door.
A damp chill was drifting in off the sea. There was just one lamp outside, a single lightbulb covered with a cracked glass shade, casting a yellow glow over the cobblestones and rough tufts of grass in the inner courtyard.
Tilda stood in the shelter of the big barn’s stone wall, next to a pile of wet leaves, and took out her cell phone. She really wanted to hear another voice, but she hadn’t got around to ringing Martin this evening, and now it was several hours too late-he would already have gone home from work. Instead she called the number of the neighbors, the Carlsson family, and the mother picked up after two rings.
“How are they?” asked Tilda.
“I’ve just had a look at them and they’re both asleep,” said Maria Carlsson quietly. “They’re in our guest room.”
“That’s good,” said Tilda. “How long will you be up tonight? I was intending to come over with Joakim Westin, but I don’t think he’ll be back from Stockholm for three or four hours.”
“Just come over. Roger and I will stay up for as long as necessary.”
When Tilda had switched off her phone, she immediately felt lonely again.
It was eight-thirty now. She thought about going home to Marnäs to rest for an hour or so, but of course there was the risk that Westin or someone else might telephone here.
She went back into the house through the veranda.
This time she continued along the short corridor and stopped in the doorway of one of the bedrooms. This was a small, cozy room, like a bright chapel in a dark castle. The wallpaper was yellow with red stars, and along the walls sat a dozen or so cuddly toys on small wooden chairs.
This must be the daughter’s room.
Tilda went in cautiously and stood on the soft rug in the center of the room. She guessed that the parents had fixed up the children’s rooms first, so that their son and daughter would quickly feel at home in the manor house. She thought about the room she had grown up in, a small room she had shared with one of her brothers in a rented apartment in Kalmar. She had always longed for a bedroom of her own.
The bed in this room was short but wide, with a pale yellow coverlet and lots of fluffy cushions with cartoon figures on them: elephants and lions wearing nightcaps and lying in their own little beds.
Tilda sat down on the bed. It creaked slightly, but it was soft.
The house was still completely silent around her.
She leaned back, was received by the pile of cushions, and relaxed, her gaze fixed on the ceiling. If she let her thoughts run free, the white surface could become like a movie screen, showing pictures from her memory.
Tilda could see Martin on the ceiling, the way he had looked when he had slept beside her in bed for the last time. It had been in her old apartment in Växjö almost a month ago, and she hoped he would come over to visit her soon.
Nothing is as warm and cozy as a child’s bedroom.
She breathed out slowly and closed her eyes.
If you don’t come to me, then I’ll have to come to you…
Tilda sat up with a start, in the middle of a breath, with no idea where she was. But her father was with her, she could hear his voice.
She opened her eyes.
No, her father was dead, his car had gone off the road eleven years ago.
Tilda blinked, looked around, and realized she had been asleep.
She smelled the aroma of newly polished wood and saw a freshly painted ceiling above her, and realized that she was lying on a little bed in the manor house at Eel Point. And straight after that an unpleasant memory of running water flashed into her mind-the water pouring from the clothes on the body down by the shore.
She had fallen asleep in a child’s bedroom.
Tilda blinked away the sleep, glanced quickly at the clock and saw that it was ten past eleven. She had slept for over two hours and dreamed strange dreams about her father. He had been there with her, in the child’s bedroom.
She heard something and raised her head.
The house was no longer completely silent. She heard faint noises that rose and fell, as if someone-or more than one person-was talking.
It was the sound of low voices.
It sounded like muted mumbling. A group of people talking, quietly and intensely, somewhere outside the house.
Tilda got up silently from the bed, with the feeling that she was eavesdropping.
She held her breath so that she could hear better, and took a couple of silent steps toward the door, out of the bedroom, and listened again.