‘Vendela?’
No response.
The boy was still standing a couple of metres away, watching with interest as Per attempted to revive her. It wasn’t working.
He straightened up. He had his mobile with him, but an ambulance would never find its way out here. He looked at the boy. ‘We have to help Vendela... she’s ill,’ he said. ‘Do you know if there’s a road near here?’
The boy nodded and turned away. Per bent down, managed to get his arms under Vendela’s back and picked her up. Her body was thin and limp; he could carry her.
They left the stone and headed eastwards in silence, with the sun at their backs. The boy was still carrying the wooden box, but after fifty metres he stopped by a particular juniper bush and pushed it in beneath the lowest branches.
‘This is my hiding place,’ he said.
Per nodded and noticed that there were some magazines tucked under the bush as well. Only comics, thank goodness.
‘Come on,’ he said.
His arms were beginning to ache, and he kept on walking so that he wouldn’t lose the rhythm. The boy caught up with him and led the way eastwards through the undergrowth.
After a few hundred metres he became aware of a swishing sound. He recognized the sound of a car driving past, and realized they were close to the main road — much closer than he had thought.
As the trees and bushes thinned out, he saw a pair of headlights flickering past only fifty metres away. He staggered on with Vendela in his arms; he didn’t know how much longer he could go on carrying her.
‘Vendela?’
She was still breathing and opened her eyes for a few seconds, but didn’t seem to recognize him. She mumbled something in response, then she was gone again.
He took a firmer hold of her body and carried her the last few metres to the road.
There were no cars in sight, but there was a bus stop about a hundred metres away. He made his way there and laid her down on the wooden bench in the shelter before taking out his mobile and calling the emergency services. He explained what had happened, but when he had finished the call and looked up, he was alone with Vendela.
The boy had disappeared.
It took half an hour for the ambulance to reach the bus stop, and in the meantime Per tried to keep Vendela warm and to bring her round. He wrapped his tracksuit top around her, and by the time the ambulance finally pulled in by the bus stop she had opened her eyes and kept them open for several minutes before closing them again. Her breathing was faint but steady in the chill evening air.
The paramedics came over with their emergency kit and bent over Vendela; they took off her jacket and checked her blood pressure. Per stepped back.
‘We’ll be taking her to Kalmar,’ one of them said.
Vendela had become a patient, Per realized, just like Nilla.
‘Is she going to be all right?’
‘I’m sure she is. Are you her husband?’
‘No... just a friend. I’ll try to get hold of him.’
Ten minutes later the ambulance set off towards the bridge leading to the mainland, and Per breathed a sigh of relief.
He took Vendela’s padded jacket with him as he headed back down the gravel track and then along the path leading out on to the alvar.
At the end of the path the boy was waiting for him. He had pulled his wooden box out of the bushes and was sitting on it.
Per stopped by the juniper bushes. ‘They’ve taken her to hospital in the ambulance... Thanks for your help.’
The boy didn’t reply. It was almost twilight on the alvar, so Per asked, ‘Are you OK to find your way home?’
The boy nodded.
‘Good.’ Per was about to go on his way when something occurred to him, and he asked, ‘What’s the box for?’
The boy didn’t say anything at first. He seemed to be thinking it over, then he decided he could trust Per.
‘I’ll show you.’
He got to his feet and picked up the box. It had no bottom, and hidden in the grass underneath it was an old rusty biscuit tin. The boy removed the lid and showed Per what was inside.
‘I need the box to reach the top of the stone,’ he said. ‘There’s nearly always something new up there.’
Per saw that the tin was half full of coins and small pieces of silver jewellery.
And on top lay a shiny wedding ring.
66
That evening Gerlof was sitting in his garden with a blanket over his legs. He thought he could hear the sound of distant sirens from the main road. Ambulance, fire engine or police?
Probably an ambulance. Somebody at the home in Marnäs who had had a heart attack, perhaps? No doubt he would read about it in the paper sooner or later.
He had gone back to his chair out on the lawn after dinner, and didn’t want to go inside. It was Walpurgis Night, after all, the high point of spring, the night when every student in Sweden went out to welcome in the month of May. You couldn’t just sit indoors.
The sky was beginning to grow darker, and a breeze rustled through the tree tops above him. The birds around the garden fell silent, one by one. When the sun had gone down it would be a cold evening; there might even be a touch of frost during the night. It wasn’t really the weather to be sitting outside; he would go in soon and watch the news on TV.
Gerlof refused to ponder on riddles and mysteries these days, as he had told Per Mörner, but the ideas came anyway. He had been incurably fixated on puzzling out mysteries since childhood, and now he was sitting here with the diary thinking about Ella’s changeling, who must have been Henry Fors’s son.
But where had he gone? He had been running north towards the sea when Ella saw him that last evening, but what had happened when he reached Henry at the edge of the quarry?
A quarrel, followed by a killing? Or an accident? In which case, if the boy was dead, he was probably buried beneath one of the piles of reject stone.
If Gerlof’s legs had been healthy and ten years younger, he would have got up out of his chair that very minute and gone straight to the quarry to start searching. But his body was too old and stiff, and after all he wasn’t absolutely certain that Henry had hidden his son’s body there.
And where would he search, given the amount of reject stone there was?
Gerlof suddenly realized he was longer fixated on his own death; he hadn’t really thought about his forthcoming demise since Easter. He had been too busy. Ella’s diaries had helped him in that respect. Or perhaps it was the new neighbours and their problems that had made him forget his own.
He shivered in his chair, despite the blanket. It had grown noticeably colder as the evening drew in, and he got to his feet.
He could hear the sound of a car on the village road. More and more cars had been passing along there in the last few weeks, most of them driving far too fast for the narrow road — but this one sounded as if it were moving very slowly. He heard it brake and stop, but the engine kept on running, strangely enough.
Gerlof was expecting to see a visitor at the garden gate, but no one appeared.
He waited for a few more minutes, then made his way towards the sound of the engine, leaning on his stick for support. He felt slightly wobbly on the grass, but kept his balance.
When he reached the gate he saw a car had stopped on the road; a man in a cap was sitting behind the wheel holding something in his hand.
Gerlof didn’t recognize him. An early tourist? He grabbed hold of the gatepost and stood there just a few metres from the road, but the man didn’t appear to have noticed him. In the end Gerlof cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Do you need any help?’
He hadn’t shouted loudly, but the man turned his head and caught sight of him. He looked surprised, almost caught out somehow.