Gerlof agreed, and followed Jonas and Tilda out into the shimmering heat.
‘Do you come here every summer, Jonas?’ Tilda asked when they were settled under the parasol.
‘No. Last summer we stayed at home with Mum. Because Dad...’ He fell silent and looked at Gerlof.
‘And where does your mum live?’ Tilda went on.
‘Huskvarna.’
Gerlof sat quietly and let Tilda do the talking. First of all, they chatted about video games and football stickers, which it seemed Tilda knew quite a lot about. After a few moments, she leaned forward. ‘I believe you saw something terrible last night...’
Jonas nodded.
‘Would you like to tell me about it?’
‘OK.’
They sat there listening for twenty minutes. Gerlof heard the same story from Jonas Kloss all over again — the same dark ship in the Sound, the same dead seamen, the same man with the axe and the elderly man called Aron — and because it matched his first account so perfectly, Gerlof became more and more convinced that it was true.
Afterwards, Tilda and Gerlof stayed in the garden and let Jonas go back indoors.
‘Your interrogation produced the same result as mine,’ Gerlof said.
‘That wasn’t an interrogation,’ Tilda quickly corrected him. ‘You have to be very careful when you question minors — we have specially trained officers for that. We were just having a chat.’
‘So are you going to look into this?’
‘Look into what, Gerlof? If the county police are going to send out officers to start knocking on doors and questioning witnesses, there has to be a crime scene. And as far as we know, there isn’t one.’
Gerlof unfolded the drawing he had brought from the boathouse.
‘There’s this. I drew it this morning, with Jonas’s help. He says this is the ship he was on. It’s not from Öland.’
Tilda looked at the sketch.
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s too big. It looks like a smallish cargo ship, probably around ninety feet, from the period between the wars. It could be an old cement ship from Degerhamn, but none of them is called Elia.’
‘OK, but in that case, where is it? I drove a little way along the coast road before I came here, and there were no ships in the Sound.’
‘It’s moved on. The boy said it had engines... I heard a ship last night, heading north, and I saw the backwash. It could have left the Sound and carried on into the Baltic.’ Gerlof paused for a moment, then added, ‘Unless it’s sunk. Or been scuttled.’
‘All right, you win.’ Tilda gave him back the drawing. ‘I can ask the coastguard to keep an eye open, but if no ship turns up we don’t have much to work on. Just a little boy.’
‘A frightened boy. His whole body was shaking when he stumbled into my boathouse. He’d seen something truly horrific.’
‘Ghosts on a ghost ship,’ Tilda said.
‘Seeing ghosts isn’t the same as saying they exist,’ Gerlof insisted. ‘But I could tell you a story...’
Tilda smiled wearily. ‘One of your ghost stories?’
Gerlof wagged a finger at her. ‘Just you listen to me. This is true. It’s something that happened to me back in the fifties, when we were carrying stone to Stockholm. We sailed along the coast virtually every week — it was pure routine. But one hot summer’s day we stopped in Oskarshamn to unload a cargo of machine oil. There was a fishing boat moored beside us at the quayside; she looked completely seaworthy but seemed to be deserted. There was no sign of anyone on board. But at sea it’s a tradition to call on your neighbours, so when we’d finished unloading I went over to see where the crew were, thinking they might be asleep or something.’
He glanced over to the west, where the water was just visible through the trees.
‘So I knocked on the wheelhouse door, but there was no response. No one was there. I could have gone back to my own ship, but I had a strange feeling. So I walked around the deck and saw that the cargo hatch was partly open. I looked down into the darkness, and they were just lying there. Two fishermen side by side in the hold.’
‘Murdered?’
‘That’s what I thought at first, so I climbed down. They were dead, but there wasn’t a mark on them — just a kind of blue tinge to their faces. That was when I guessed what had happened, and I tried to turn around to climb back up out of the hold. That’s the last thing I remember before I woke up on deck, with John yelling at me. Somehow I had managed to crawl up the ladder before I passed out. I felt terrible... you could say I was one of the living dead by that stage.’
‘So there was poison gas in the hold of this fishing boat?’
Gerlof shook his head. ‘No, just fish... but it was the fish that had killed them. The fishermen had been cleaning their catch below deck, and the guts had started to rot in the summer heat, producing hydrogen sulphide. It had consumed all the oxygen, suffocating them.’
‘Does it happen very often?’
‘Not on modern fishing boats. They have refrigeration equipment and ice to keep the fish fresh. But it used to happen sometimes in the past, in the summer. And on an old ship with fish in the hold, the kind of ship Jonas might have been on last night... it could happen. He said the deck stank of fish, so the men he saw could have been poisoned by hydrogen sulphide.’
Tilda thought about what he had said. ‘So we’re talking about a fatal accident?’ she said.
‘It could have been an accident,’ Gerlof conceded. ‘But I wonder... You have to be in an enclosed space in order to suffocate. And why would they all be below at the same time, on a ship so near to the coast? It’s as if someone forced the crew below deck, then locked them in.’
Tilda didn’t say anything for a moment, then she took out her mobile and moved a short distance away. Gerlof heard her speaking quietly to someone. After a few minutes she was back.
‘I’ve spoken to the coastguard; they had no reports of ships off Öland last night.’
‘What did you say to them?’
‘I just said that a member of the public had seen a ship that appeared to be adrift off the coast near Stenvik. They’re not going to launch a major search, but they did promise to keep an eye open.’
Gerlof picked up his stick and accompanied Tilda to her car.
‘Is this important to you?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ Gerlof said, then he thought for a second and went on, ‘But someone has to listen to young people. When I was a boy I heard the sound of knocking from inside a coffin up in the churchyard, but my father just laughed when I came home and told him about it. And that’s why I never laugh, whatever strange tales I might hear.’ He looked at Tilda. ‘How are you getting on with your ghosts up at the lighthouses, by the way?’
‘They’re on holiday,’ she said tersely. ‘Just like I shall be, very soon.’
She got in the car and drove off.
There’s nothing more I can do, Gerlof thought as he went back to sit in the garden. The birds were singing, the sun was blazing down. But he couldn’t stop going over what Jonas had told him.
A ghost ship in the Sound, with an elderly American on board.
And a younger man from Africa?
The Homecomer
On sunny summer days Öland’s beaches were crowded; there were more tourists than the Homecomer had ever seen, which was a good thing. He could simply walk around like one of them, an old man in shorts and a red T-shirt and sunglasses.
He could also visit the burial cairn in Stenvik without anyone asking what he was doing there. It was an ancient monument, after all, open to everyone. So he parked the Ford he had bought in Stockholm among all the other cars down by the mailboxes in Stenvik, then headed south.