“Why is there no light?”
“I expect it’ll come on when it gets dark,” said Katrine.
“Does that one never come on?” asked Joakim, leaning back to look up at the north tower.
“I don’t think so,” said Katrine. “It hasn’t done since we’ve been here.”
When they reached the point where the breakwater divided, Livia chose the left path, toward her mother’s lighthouse.
“Careful, Livia,” said Joakim, looking down into the black water below the stone track.
It might only be five or six feet deep, but he still didn’t like the shadows and the chill down there. He was a decent swimmer, but he had never been the type to leap eagerly into the waves in summer, not even on really hot days.
Katrine had reached the island and walked over to the water’s edge. She looked in both directions along the coastline. To the north, only empty beaches and clumps of trees were visible; to the south, meadows and in the distance a few small boathouses.
“Not a soul in sight,” she said. “I thought we might see a few neighboring houses, at least.”
“There are too many little islands and headlands in the way,” said Joakim. He pointed to the north shore with his free hand. “Look over there. Have you seen that?”
It was the wreck of a ship, lying on the stony strip of shore half a mile or so away-so old that all that was left was a battered hull made of sun-bleached planks of wood. Long ago the ship had drifted toward the shore in a winter storm; it had been hurled high up onto the shore, where it had remained. The wreck lay to starboard among the stones, and Joakim thought the framework sticking up looked like a giant’s rib cage.
“The wreck, yes,” said Katrine.
“Didn’t they see the beams from the lighthouses?” said Joakim.
“I think the lighthouses just don’t help sometimes… not in a storm,” said Katrine. “Livia and I went over to the wreck a few weeks ago. We were looking for some nice pieces of wood, but everything had been taken.”
The entrance to the lighthouse was a stone archway some three feet deep, leading to a sturdy door of thick steel, very rusty and with only a few traces of the original white color. There was no keyhole, just a crossbar with a rusty padlock, and when Joakim got hold of the side of the door and pulled, it didn’t move an inch.
“I saw a bunch of old keys in one of the kitchen cupboards,” he said. “We’ll have to try them out sometime.”
“Otherwise we can contact the Maritime Board,” said Katrine.
Joakim nodded and took a step away from the door. The lighthouses weren’t part of the deal, after all.
“Don’t the lighthouses belong to us, Mommy?” said Livia as they made their way back to the shore.
She sounded disappointed.
“Well, yes,” said Katrine. “Kind of. But we don’t have to look after them, do we, Kim?”
She smiled at Joakim, and he nodded.
“The house will be quite enough.”
Katrine had turned over in the double bed while Joakim was with Livia, and as he crept beneath the covers she reached out for him in her sleep. He breathed in the scent of her, and closed his eyes.
All of this, only this.
It felt as if they had drawn a line under life in the city. Stockholm had shrunk to a gray mark on the horizon, and the memories of searching for Ethel had faded away.
Peace.
Then he heard the faint whimpering from Livia’s room again, and held his breath.
“Mom-mee?”
Her drawn-out cries echoing through the house were louder this time. Joakim breathed out with a tired sigh.
Beside him Katrine raised her head and listened.
“What?” she said groggily.
“Mom-mee?” Livia called again.
Katrine sat up. Unlike Joakim, she could go from deep sleep to wide awake in a couple of seconds.
“I’ve already tried,” said Joakim quietly. “I thought she’d gone back to sleep, but…”
“I’ll go.”
Katrine got out of bed without hesitating, slid her feet into her slippers, and quickly pulled on her dressing gown.
“Mommy?”
“I’m coming, brat,” she muttered.
This wasn’t good, thought Joakim. It wasn’t good that Livia wanted to sleep with her mother beside her every night. But it was a habit that had started the previous year, when Livia had begun to have disturbed nights-perhaps because of Ethel. She found it difficult to fall asleep, and only slept calmly with Katrine lying beside her in her bed. So far they hadn’t managed to get Livia to spend a whole night on her own.
“See you, lover boy,” said Katrine, slipping out of the room.
The duties of a parent. Joakim lay there in bed; there was no longer a sound from Livia’s room. Katrine had taken over the responsibility, and he relaxed and closed his eyes. Slowly he felt sleep stealing over him once more.
All was silent in the manor house.
His life in the country had begun.
2
The ship inside the bottle was a little work of art, in Henrik’s opinion: a three-masted frigate with sails made out of scraps of white fabric, almost six inches long and carved from a single piece of wood. Each sail had ropes made of black thread, knotted and secured to small blocks of balsa wood. With the masts down, the ship had been carefully inserted into the old bottle using steel thread and tweezers, then pressed down into a sea of blue-colored putty. Then the masts had been raised and the sails unfurled with the help of bent sock needles. Finally the bottle had been fastened with a sealed cork.
The ship in the bottle must have taken several weeks to make, but the Serelius brothers destroyed it in a couple of seconds.
Tommy Serelius swept the bottle off the bookshelf, the glass exploding into tiny shards on the new parquet flooring of the cottage. The ship itself survived the fall, but bounced
across the floor for a couple of yards before it was stopped by little brother Freddy’s boot. He shone his flashlight on it with curiosity for a few seconds, then lifted his foot and smashed the ship to pieces with three hard stamps.
“Teamwork!” crowed Freddy.
“I hate things like that, fucking handicraft stuff,” said Tommy, scratching his cheek and kicking the remains of the ship across the floor.
Henrik, the third man in the cottage, emerged from one of the bedrooms where he had been searching for anything of value in the closets. He saw what was left of the ship and shook his head.
“Don’t smash anything else up, okay?” he said quietly.
Tommy and Freddy liked the sound of breaking glass, of splintering wood-Henrik had realized that the first night they worked together, when they broke into half a dozen closed-up cottages south of Byxelkrok. The brothers liked smashing things; on the way north Tommy had run over a black-and-white cat that was standing by the side of the road, its eyes glittering. There was a dull thud from the right-hand tire as the van drove over the cat, and the next second the brothers were laughing out loud.
Henrik never broke anything; he removed the windows carefully so they could get into the cottages. But once the brothers had clambered in, they turned into vandals. They upended cocktail cabinets and hurled glass and china to the floor. They also smashed mirrors, but hand-blown vases from Småland survived, because they could be sold.
At least they weren’t targeting the residents of the island. From the start Henrik had decided to select only houses owned by those who lived on the mainland.
Henrik wasn’t keen on the Serelius brothers, but he was stuck with them-like a couple of relatives who come to call one evening and then refuse to leave.
But Tommy and Freddy weren’t from the island, and were neither his friends nor his relatives. They were friends of Morgan Berglund.
They had rung the doorbell of Henrik’s little apartment in Borgholm at the end of September, at around ten o’clock when he was just thinking of going to bed. He had opened the door to find two men of about his own age standing outside, broad-shouldered and with more or less shaven heads. They had nodded and walked into the hallway without asking permission. They stank of sweat and oil and dirty car seats, and the stench spread through the apartment.