Tilda left the kitchen. She found her way easily; after all, she had been in the house before.
The smell of paint had almost gone from the porch and corridors now, and the house felt a little more lived in.
In the corridor leading to the bedrooms a painting had been hung up recently. It was an oil painting depicting a grayish-white landscape-it looked like northern Öland in the winter. A snowstorm was swirling over the island, blurring all the contours. Tilda couldn’t remember having seen the island depicted in such a dark, forbidding way before, and remained standing in front of the picture for a while before she went on to the bathroom.
It was small but warm, tiled from floor to ceiling, with a thick blue rug on the floor and an old-fashioned bathtub standing on four lion’s paws made of cast iron. When she had finished, she went back into the corridor and past the closed doors leading to the children’s rooms. She stopped at the next bedroom along; the door was half open.
A quick look?
Tilda poked her head in and glimpsed a small room with a big double bed. There was a small bureau next to the bed, with a framed photograph of Katrine Westin, waving from a window.
Then Tilda saw the clothes.
A dozen or so hangers with women’s clothes on them were hung around the bedroom walls like pictures. Sweaters, pants, tops, blouses.
The double bed had been neatly made, and a white nightgown lay tidily folded on one pillow-as if it had been placed there in the expectation that the woman who owned it would come and put it on when darkness fell.
Tilda looked at the strange collection of clothes for a long time, then backed out of the bedroom.
On the way back to the kitchen she heard the inspector’s voice:
“Well, time we were getting back to our duties.”
Göte Holmblad had finished his coffee and got up from the table.
The atmosphere in the room seemed less tense now. Joakim Westin stood up and glanced briefly at both Tilda and Holmblad.
“Fine,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”
“No problem,” said Holmblad, and added, “Of course you are at liberty to pursue this matter, I want you to know that, but of course we would very much appreciate it if…”
Westin shook his head. “I won’t be taking it any further…
It’s over.”
He accompanied them into the hallway. Out on the steps he shook hands with both officers.
“Thanks for the coffee,” said Tilda.
Dusk had fallen, and there was a smell of burning leaves in the air. Down by the shore the lighthouse was flashing.
“Our constant companion,” said Westin, nodding toward the light.
“Do you have to take care of the lighthouses in any way?” asked Holmblad.
“No, they’re automated.”
“I heard the stones they used to build them were taken from an old abandoned chapel,” said Tilda, pointing toward the forest in the north. “It was somewhere down by the point.”
It felt as if she were showing off and trying to play the tourist guide, but Westin was actually listening.
“Who told you that?”
“Gerlof,” said Tilda, and explained: “He’s my grandfather’s brother over in Marnäs; he knows quite a bit about Eel Point. If you want to know more, I can ask him…”
“Sure,” said Westin. “Tell him he’s welcome to come over for coffee sometime.”
When they were back in the car, Tilda looked over at the big house. She thought about all those silent rooms. Then she thought about the clothes hanging on the walls in the bedroom.
“He’s not feeling too good,” she said.
“Of course he isn’t,” said Holmblad. “He’s grieving, after all.”
“I wonder how the children are doing?”
“Small children forget pretty quickly,” said Holmblad.
He pulled out onto the coast road heading for Marnäs and glanced over at Tilda.
“Those questions you asked in the kitchen were a little… unexpected, Davidsson. Did you have something in particular in mind?”
“No… it was really just a way of making contact with him.”
“Well, maybe it worked.”
“We could probably have asked him a lot more.”
“Oh?”
“I think he had things to tell us.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” said Tilda. “Maybe… family secrets.”
“Everybody has secrets,” said Holmblad. “Suicide or accident? That’s the question… but it’s not our job to investigate.”
“But we could look for traces,” said Tilda, “quite impartially.”
“Traces of what?”
“Well… of someone else at the scene.”
“The only traces that were found were of the dead woman,” said Holmblad. “Besides which, Westin was the last person to see his wife. He said that, after all. In which case, if we’re going to look for a murderer, we need to start with him.”
“I was thinking, if I have time to…”
“You’re not going to have any time, Davidsson,” Holmblad
went on. “Local police officers are always short of time. You’ll be visiting schools, picking up drunks, stopping the graffiti, investigating break-ins, patrolling the streets of Marnäs, and keeping an eye on the traffic on the roads outside town. And you’ll also be sending reports to Borgholm.”
Tilda thought for a moment.
“In other words,” she said, “if there’s any time left after all that, I can knock on doors in the properties around Eel Point and look for witnesses to Katrine Westin’s death. That would be okay, wouldn’t it?”
Holmblad looked out through the windshield, without a smile.
“I suspect I’ve got a future inspector sitting next to me,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Tilda, “but I’m not looking for promotion.”
“That’s what they all say.” Holmblad sighed, as if he were contemplating his own career choices. “Do what you want,” he said eventually. “As I said, you’re responsible for organizing your own time, Davidsson, but if you find anything you must hand it over to the experts. The important thing is that you report all activities to Borgholm.”
“I love paperwork,” said Tilda.
When the abyss suddenly opens up, Katrine-what do you do then? Stay where you are, or jump?
At the end of the 1950s, I was sitting on a train in northern Öland next to an old woman on her way to Borgholm. Her name was Ebba Lind; she was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, and when she heard that I lived at Eel Point, she told me a story about the manor house. It was about what happened the day before she went up into the loft with a knife and carved her brother’s name and dates into a plank in the walclass="underline" PETTER LIND 1885-1900.
– MIRJA RAMBE
WINTER 1900
It is the first year of the new century. There is not a breath of wind on this sunny Wednesday, the last in January, but Eel Point is completely cut off from the outside world.
The blizzard moved in across Öland the previous week, and for twelve hours the entire coast was covered in snow. Now the wind has died away, but the temperature outside is minus fifteen degrees. The road has disappeared under great mounds of snow several feet deep, and the families at the manor have received neither mail nor visitors for six days. The animals still have plenty of fodder in the barn, but there aren’t many potatoes left and as usual there isn’t much wood.
Brother and sister Petter and Ebba Lind have gone out to chop up blocks of ice, which will be buried in the food cellar at the manor to keep the food cool when the spring comes. They clambered over the white ramparts of ice and snow down by the shore at Eel Point after breakfast. The sun was just coming up, shining over an unbroken sea of ice covered in snow. They went past the last island at about nine o’clock,
out into a sparkling world of great expanses of snow and sunbeams.
They are walking on the water now, just as Jesus did. The snow that covers the ice crunches beneath their boots.