‘Lots of them used to carry Swedish papers and maps around in their pockets... They were homesick all the time, but they just couldn’t afford a ticket home.’
‘Yes, it was very difficult for those who couldn’t settle in the USA. Endless hard labour. Particularly forestry work — that was crazy, really dangerous.’
‘That’s right — I’ve seen old lumberjacks who’ve lost both arms and legs...’
At the end of the gathering, Bill Carlson gave Gerlof some folded sheets of paper. ‘This is the information you wanted from the House of Emigrants.’
‘Thank you.’
It was a typed list of names and dates. At first, Gerlof was a little confused, but then he remembered that Bill’s cousin had amused himself by collecting the names of local emigrants from the church records. He noticed that it contained names only from the island’s northern parishes, and only from the last hundred years, but it was enough.
He ran his finger down the list, and stopped abruptly:
They had left in May 1931, according to the records. There were a number of later emigrants from both the forties and fifties, when Swedes no longer went by ship to ‘America’, but flew to the ‘USA’, but Aron and Sven must have been among the last of the main wave of emigrants.
The name Aron had caught Gerlof’s attention. It was the name Jonas Kloss had heard on the ship, of course. But the name of the place also rang a bell.
Aron from Rödtorp?
Suddenly, he remembered, and leaned eagerly towards Bilclass="underline" ‘I recognize this one,’ he said, pointing to the name. ‘I think Aron from Rödtorp was a boy I worked with for a little while, up in the churchyard in Marnäs... He talked about going to America at the time, and the following year I heard that they’d actually gone, he and his father. But I don’t know how they got on over there.’
Bill looked at the list. ‘1931... So they went after the Great Depression. It wasn’t a good time for new Americans; there was so much unemployment, among other things. I should think it was pretty tough for them.’
‘Indeed,’ Gerlof said.
He looked at the group of elderly Swedish-Americans and wondered if Aron Fredh had ever come back home.
The Homecomer
When the Homecomer went back to the arms dealer on the eastern side of the island, he went by car, alone. He parked about fifty metres from Wall’s cottage and waited for a little while, watching and listening. But there wasn’t a soul in sight.
The sun was low in the sky behind the car, making the grassy shore glow bright green, with the deep blue water beyond. It was idyllic, yet something didn’t feel right.
He opened the car door and heard the geese cackling nervously down by the shoreline. Otherwise, all was quiet. He got out and took in the expanse of the Baltic Sea, with Gotland beyond the horizon. And the faded red cottage in the foreground.
‘Hello?’ he called out.
But no one came to the door this evening.
As he approached, he could see that it was ajar. Slowly, he pulled it open a little further and shouted again. ‘Hello? Anyone there?’
The geese cackled once more, but that was the only response.
No, this didn’t feel right. The Homecomer moved more stealthily. He took a quick look around the rooms on the ground floor, but soon realized that Einar Wall wasn’t at home. So why was the door open? That didn’t tally with Wall’s caution on his previous visit.
The skiff floating on the water didn’t look right either. The Homecomer noticed it when he stepped outside. It looked as if there was someone in it.
He walked towards it. The wooden boat had been up on the grass the last time he was here, but now it was in the water, with no mooring rope.
It wasn’t a person in the boat but large, brown birds perched on the gunwale. Their weight was making the skiff bob up and down.
Not geese, but birds of prey, with ravens and jackdaws circling around them.
The Homecomer stopped at the water’s edge. The birds flapped their huge wings nervously but didn’t fly away.
He realized they were sea eagles — enormous birds with powerful hooked beaks, leaning down from the gunwale to peck at something in the bottom of the skiff. As the ravens came closer, the sea eagles raised their heads like snakes, then resumed their pecking.
They were eating something. Lumps of meat, presumably.
One of them had got hold of something white and was pulling it upwards, and the Homecomer saw that it was a hand. A lifeless human hand. The bird opened its beak, and the hand fell back into the boat.
The Homecomer stood motionless beneath the vast expanse of the sky for a few seconds, then he waded into the water, yelling at the birds and eventually scaring them off. By that time, he had almost reached the gunwale and could see into the boat.
Einar Wall was lying there on his back, flat out on the narrow wooden planks with an almost empty bottle of Explorer vodka beside him.
The Homecomer recognized parts of the arms dealer’s clothes, but nothing else.
There was nothing else to recognize.
The eagles’ beaks had done their work, and Wall’s face was no longer there.
The Homecomer let go of the gunwale and backed away. He had seen dead bodies before; he was used to it. He made his way back to the shore and stood there with wet shoes, staring at the skiff.
Finally, when he had pulled himself together, he went into the house to try to find what he had come for. The cottage was a treasure chest now.
Wall had boasted that the police had been there, searching for guns, but had found nothing.
The Homecomer set to work, and he had better luck. Guns were his forte; he knew what they weighed; he could almost smell them. Methodically, he went through every piece of furniture in every room, and when he checked a rectangular dowry chest upstairs and saw that it contained old blankets, the weight made him suspicious.
It was too heavy.
The guns weren’t among the blankets; they were right down at the bottom, hidden under a false base.
The first was an old long-barrelled Husqvarna with five boxes of Gyttorp cartridges. The ammunition looked good, but the rifle itself was worn.
The second was a modern Beretta. Beautiful.
The Homecomer held the guns up to the window and studied them one at a time; he liked a weapon that fired well, with reliable ammunition that killed the quarry quickly, if the marksman did his job.
Guns on the island had been very poor when he was a boy and had led to many accidents. In those days, a number of old hunters were still trying to shoot seabirds with muzzle-loading firearms and worse; it often took three or four shots before the bird was dead.
The Homecomer had never needed more than one shot to kill something or someone, not even when he was a boy. The ability to kill instantly was partly about having a good weapon and being stone-cold sober, but it was mostly about remaining calm and having a steady hand.
He carried both guns downstairs. He ought to leave right now, but there was a bunch of keys hanging in the kitchen. Padlock keys.
He picked them up and went out to the boathouse. Many boathouses on the island were secured with nothing more than a piece of rope, but Wall’s was furnished with a steel bar and a sturdy padlock. Had the police checked out here?
After some trouble, the Homecomer found the right key and opened up.
The stale smell of seaweed rushed towards him. He could see why; the place was full of fishing nets, hanging from poles attached to the ceiling.