“Shall we call it a night?” said Tommy when he had closed the back door of the van.
“Yes… I don’t think there’s anything else.”
Henrik went back to the house briefly anyway, to close the window. He picked up a couple of small pieces of shale from the ground and pushed them into the gaps in the wooden frame to hold the window in place.
“Come on,” shouted Tommy behind him.
The brothers thought it was a waste of time, closing the place up after a break-in. But Henrik knew it could be months before anyone came to the cottage, and with the window open the rain and snow would destroy the décor.
Tommy started the engine as Henrik climbed into the passenger seat. Then he lifted off a section of the door panel and reached inside. Wrapped in small pieces of paper towels was ice-crystal meth.
“Want another?” said Tommy.
“No. I’ve had enough.”
The brothers had brought the ice with them from the Continent, both to sell and for personal use. The crystals were like a kick up the backside, but if Henrik took more than one hit per night, he started quivering like a flagpole, and found it difficult to think logically. The thoughts thudded around in his head, and he couldn’t get to sleep.
He wasn’t a junkie, after all-but nor was he boring. One hit was fine.
Tommy and Freddy didn’t seem to have the same problem, or else they were planning to stay awake all night when they got back to Kalmar. They stuffed the crystals in their mouths, paper and all, and washed the whole lot down with water from a plastic bottle on the back seat. Then Tommy put his foot down. He swung the van around the house and out onto the empty village road.
Henrik looked at his watch-it was almost twelve-thirty.
“Okay, let’s go to the boathouse,” he said.
Up by the main highway Tommy stopped obediently at the stop sign, despite the fact that the road was completely clear, then turned south.
“Turn off here,” said Henrik after ten minutes, when the sign for Enslunda appeared.
There were no other cars or people around. The gravel track ended at the boathouses, and Tommy backed the van up as close as possible.
It was as dark as a cave down here by the sea, but up in the north the lighthouse at Eel Point was flashing.
Henrik opened the van door and heard the rushing of the waves. The sound drifted in from the coal-black sea. It made him think of his grandfather. He had actually died here, six years ago. Algot had been eighty-five years old and suffering from heart disease, but he had still crawled out of bed and taken a cab out here one windy winter’s day. The driver had dropped him off on the road, and soon after that he must have had a major heart attack. But Algot had managed to
get to his boathouse, and he had been found dead just by the door.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Tommy as they were unloading the stolen goods by the beam of the flashlights. “A suggestion. Listen up and tell me what you think.”
“What?”
Tommy didn’t reply. He just reached into the van and pulled something out. It looked like a large black woolen cap.
“We found this in Copenhagen,” he said.
Then he held the black fabric up to the flashlight, and Henrik could see that it wasn’t a cap. It was the kind of hood robbers wear, a balaclava, with holes for the eyes and the mouth.
“My suggestion is that we put these on next time,” said Tommy, “and move on from the summer cottages.”
“Move on? Move on to what?”
“Houses that aren’t empty.”
There was silence for a few moments in the shadows by the shore.
“Sure,” said Freddy.
Henrik looked at the hood without saying anything. He was thinking.
“I know… the risks increase,” said Tommy. “But so do the gains. We’ll never find cash or jewelry in the summer cottages… only in houses where people live all year round.” He dropped the hood back in the van and went on: “Of course we need to check with Aleister that everything’s okay. And we need to choose safe houses that are a bit out of the way, with no alarms.”
“And no dogs,” said Freddy.
“Correct. No bloody dogs either. And nobody will recognize us with the hoods on,” said Tommy, looking at Henrik. “So what do you think, then?”
“I don’t know.”
It wasn’t really about the money-Henrik had a good
trade these days-it was mostly the excitement he was after. It chased away the tedium of everyday life.
“Freddy and I will go solo, then,” said Tommy. “It’ll bring in more money, so that’s no problem.”
Henrik shook his head quickly. There might not be many more outings with Tommy and Freddy, but he wanted to decide for himself when to stop.
He thought about the ship in the bottle, smashed to pieces on the floor earlier that evening, and said, “I’m in… if we take it easy. And nobody gets hurt.”
“Who would we hurt?” said Tommy.
“The house owners.”
“They’ll be asleep, for fuck’s sake… and if anybody wakes up we’ll just speak English. Then they’ll think we’re foreigners.”
Henrik nodded, not completely convinced. He pulled the tarpaulin over the stolen items and fastened the padlock on the boathouse door.
They jumped into the van and set off south across the island, back toward Borgholm.
After twenty minutes they were in town, where rows of streetlamps drove away the October darkness. But the sidewalks were just as empty as the country roads. Tommy slowed down and pulled in by the apartment block where Henrik lived.
“Good,” he said. “In a week, then? Tuesday night next week?”
“Sure… but I’ll probably go out there before then.”
“You like living out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Henrik nodded.
“Okay,” said Tommy, “but don’t start trying to do any deals of your own with the stuff. We’ll find a buyer in Kalmar.”
“Fine,” said Henrik, closing the door of the van.
He walked toward the dark doorway and looked at his
watch. Half past one. It was pretty early despite everything, and he would be able to sleep in his lonely bed for five hours before the alarm woke him for his ordinary job.
He thought about all the houses on the island where people lay sleeping. Settled.
He’d get out if anything happened. If anyone woke up when they broke in, he’d just get out of there. The brothers and their fucking spirit in the glass could fend for themselves.
3
Tilda Davidsson was sitting with her bag containing the tape recorder in a corridor at the residential home for the elderly in Marnäs, outside the room of her relative Gerlof Davidsson. She wasn’t alone; on a sofa further down the corridor two small white-haired ladies had sat down, perhaps waiting for afternoon coffee.
The women were talking nonstop, and Tilda found herself listening to their quiet conversation.
It was conducted in a discontented, troubled tone, like a long series of drawn-out sighs.
“They’re always on the move, flying all over the place,” said the woman closest to Tilda. “One trip abroad after another. The further away, the better.”
“You’re absolutely right, they certainly don’t begrudge themselves anything these days,” said the other woman, “indeed they don’t…”
“And the money they spend… when they’re buying
things for themselves,” said the first one. “I rang my youngest daughter last week and she told me she and her husband were buying another new car. ‘But you’ve got a lovely car,’ I said. ‘Yes, but everybody else in our street has changed their car this year,’ she said.”
“That’s all they do, buy, buy, buy, all the time.”
“That’s right. And they don’t keep in touch, either.”
“No they don’t…My son never rings, not even on my birthday. It’s always me who rings him, and then he never has time to chat. He’s always on his way somewhere, or there’s something he wants to watch on TV.”