Henrik looked on in silence as Tommy unfolded the box and placed it on the table. Letters, words, and numbers were seared into the wood on the inside of the box. The entire alphabet was there, plus numbers from zero to ten and the words YES and NO. Then Tommy took a small glass out of his bag.
“I tried this out when I was a kid,” said Henrik. “The spirit in the glass, isn’t it?”
“Like fuck it is, this is serious.” Tommy placed the glass on the unfolded box. “This is a Ouija board.”
“A Ouija board?”
“That’s what it’s called,” said Tommy. “The wood is from the lid of an old coffin. Can you turn the lights down a little?”
Henrik smiled to himself, but went over to the light switch anyway.
All three sat around the table. Tommy placed his little finger on the glass and closed his eyes.
The room fell silent. He scratched his throat slowly and seemed to be listening for something.
“Who’s there?” he asked. “Is Aleister there?”
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then the glass began to move beneath Tommy’s finger.
Henrik had gone out to his grandfather’s boathouse the very next evening, at twilight, to get it ready.
The little wooden hut was painted red and stood in a meadow a dozen or so yards from the shore, close to two other small cottages owned by summer visitors; no one came near them after the middle of August. You could be left in peace here.
He had inherited the boathouse from his grandfather, Algot. When he was alive, they would both go out to sea several times every summer to put out nets, then spend the night in the boathouse and get up at five to check them.
Out here on the Baltic shore he missed those days, and thought it was sad that his grandfather was no longer around. Algot had carried on with his carpentry and little bits of building after his retirement, and had seemed perfectly content with his life right up until the last heart attack, despite the fact that he had left the island only a few times.
Henrik undid the padlock and peered into the darkness
inside. Everything looked more or less as it had done when his grandfather passed away six years earlier. Nets hung along the walls, the workbench was still standing on the floor, and the iron stove was rusting away in one corner. Camilla had wanted to clear everything out and paint the inside walls white, but Henrik thought it was just fine the way it was.
He cleared away oilcans, toolboxes, and other things that were on the wooden floor and spread out a tarpaulin ready for the stolen goods. Then he went out onto the jetty on the point and breathed in the smell of seaweed and brackish salt water. To the north he could see the twin lighthouses at Eel Point rising up out at sea.
Down below the jetty was his motorboat, an open launch, and when he looked down into it he could see that the floor was covered in rainwater. He climbed down into the boat and began baling out.
As he was working he thought back over what had happened the previous evening, when he and the Serelius brothers had sat down in the kitchen and held a séance. Or whatever it might have been.
The glass had moved constantly across the board, providing answers to every question-but of course it was Tommy himself who had been moving it. He had closed his eyes, but he must have been peeping to make sure the glass ended up in the right place.
At any rate, it had turned out that the spirit of Aleister wholeheartedly supported their plans to break into summer cottages. When Tommy asked about the village of Stenvik, which Henrik had suggested, the glass had moved to YES, and when he asked if there were valuable things in the cottages up there, he had been given the same answer: YES.
Finally Tommy had asked, “Aleister, what do you think… can the three of us trust one another?”
The little glass had remained still for a few seconds. Then it had slowly moved to NO.
Tommy gave a brief, hoarse laugh.
“That’s okay,” he said, looking at Henrik. “I don’t trust anybody.”
Four days later Henrik and the Serelius brothers had made their first trip north, to the cluster of summer cottages that Henrik had selected and Aleister had approved. There were only closed-up houses there, pitch black in the darkness.
Henrik and the brothers weren’t looking for small, expensive objects when they broke open a window and got into a cottage-they knew no summer visitors were stupid enough to leave cash, designer watches, or gold necklaces behind in their cottages over the winter. But certain things were too difficult to transport home from the country when the holiday was over: televisions, music systems, bottles of spirits, boxes of cigarettes, and golf clubs. And in the outbuildings there could be chain saws, cans of gas, and electric drills.
After Tommy and Freddy had smashed the ship in the bottle and Henrik had finished muttering about it, they split up and carried on searching for treasures.
Henrik carried on into the smaller rooms. The front of the house faced the rocky coastline and the sound, and through a picture window he could see the chalk-white half-moon suspended above the water. Stenvik was one of the small empty fishing villages on the west coast of the island.
Every room he went into met him with silence, but Henrik still had the feeling that the walls and the floor were watching him. For that reason he moved carefully, without making any mess.
“Hello? Henke?”
It was Tommy, and Henrik called back: “Where are you?”
“Here, just off the kitchen… it’s some kind of office.”
Henrik followed Tommy’s voice through the narrow
kitchen. He was standing by the wall in a windowless room, pointing with his gloved right hand.
“What do you think about this?”
He wasn’t smiling-Tommy hardly ever smiled-but he was looking up at the wall with the expression of someone who might have made a real find. A large wall clock was hanging there, made of dark wood with Roman numerals behind the glass covering the clock face.
Henrik nodded. “Yes… could be worth something. Is it old?”
“I think so,” said Tommy, opening the glass door. “If we’re lucky, it’ll be an antique. German or French.”
“It’s not ticking.”
“Probably needs winding up.” He closed the door and shouted, “Freddy!”
After a few seconds the younger brother came clomping into the kitchen.
“What?”
“Give me a hand with this,” said Tommy.
Freddy had the longest arms of the three of them. He unhooked the clock and lifted it down. Then Henrik helped to carry it.
“Come on, let’s get it outside,” said Tommy.
The van was parked close to the house, in the shadows at the back.
It had kalmar pipes & welding on the sides. Tommy had bought plastic letters and stuck them on himself. There was no such welding company in Kalmar, but driving around in a company van at night looked less suspicious than some anonymous old delivery van.
“They’re opening a police station in Marnäs next week,” said Henrik as they were lifting the clock out through the veranda window.
There was almost no wind tonight, but the air was fresh and cold.
“How do you know?” said Tommy.
“It was in the paper this morning.”
He heard Freddy’s hoarse laugh in the darkness.
“Oh, well, that’s it then,” said Tommy. “You might as well ring them and rat the two of us out, then you might get a reduced sentence.”
He dropped his lower lip, showing his teeth; that was his way of smiling.
Henrik smiled back in the darkness. There were thousands of summer cottages for the police to keep an eye on all over the island, besides which they usually worked only during the day.
They placed the clock in the back of the van, alongside the collapsible exercise bike, two large vases made of polished limestone, a video player, a small outboard motor, a computer and printer, and a television with stereo speakers that were already in there.