Perhaps rather too quickly. Gerlof waved away a fly, keeping his eyes fixed on the boy. ‘You seem a little tense, Jonas. Is everything all right?’
‘Not really.’
‘What’s the matter?’
Jonas took a deep breath. He had to say something about his fears, so he decided to reveal one of them. ‘The cairn. It’s haunted.’
‘Oh?’ Gerlof didn’t sound in the least bit afraid.
‘I’ve seen the ghost. It actually came out of the cairn.’
‘Did it?’ Gerlof smiled at him. ‘I heard there was a dragon living in there. Twelve metres long from nose to tail, and bright green.’
Jonas didn’t smile back. He was too old for fairy tales, and knew that dragons didn’t exist. There were other things to be frightened of, but not dragons.
Gerlof’s smile disappeared. He leaned more heavily on his stick and got to his feet. ‘Come with me, Jonas. We’re going for a little walk.’
He set off slowly but resolutely, with Jonas close behind.
At the far end of the garden a small path led through the undergrowth and into a meadow. They followed the path for some thirty metres, then Gerlof stopped.
‘Look over there, Jonas.’
Jonas turned his head and saw a square tower of sun-bleached wood in a clearing not far away. He knew what it was — a windmill. There was another one behind the restaurant, but that one was red and looked almost new. This one was derelict, with unpainted walls and wind-damaged sails.
‘You mean the windmill?’
‘No. Over there.’
Gerlof was pointing to the right of the windmill with his stick. Jonas looked, and saw a pile of round stones lying half hidden in the long grass.
‘You see that? Those stones are the cairn... The real cairn, which was raised over some dead chieftain back in the Bronze Age.’
‘The real cairn?’
‘Yes. Your ancestors Edvard, Sigfrid and Gilbert Kloss dug out the cairn in the twenties. They thought there was ancient treasure under the stones. I don’t know if they found anything, but while they were digging they decided the cairn would look better on the ridge, in front of their land... More “National Romantic”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s something that was fashionable in those days... People liked to worship ancient monuments. So the brothers fetched an ox cart and transported several loads of boulders to the ridge and shifted half the cairn.’
Jonas didn’t say anything, he just listened.
‘So the new cairn opposite Villa Kloss isn’t a grave,’ Gerlof went on. ‘Haven’t you noticed the old bunker set into the rock?’
‘I’ve seen the door,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s down in the dip.’
‘Exactly. But do you think the army engineers would have been allowed to build a bunker under the cairn, if it was a real ancient monument?’
Jonas shook his head.
‘They wouldn’t,’ Gerlof stressed. ‘But because it’s not a real cairn, it was fine.’ He glanced over at the stones again, and added, ‘If there’s anyone who ought to be afraid of the ghost, it’s me... When I was little, I was told that if you walked past here, invisible arms would reach out and grab you, and squeeze the air out of your lungs.’
‘Are you scared?’ Jonas said quietly.
Gerlof shook his head. ‘I think there’s an explanation for most things that seem frightening. In the old days, people used to hear ghosts screaming out on the alvar at night, but it was just hungry fox cubs, sitting in their dens and calling for food.’
Jonas felt a bit better now. Gerlof had an answer for everything.
They walked back to the garden. Jonas checked the legs of his trousers to make sure he hadn’t picked up any ticks from the grass, but he couldn’t see any.
Gerlof sat down and closed his eyes, as if the conversation was over. But Jonas hadn’t finished. ‘I’ve seen someone standing by the cairn. Several times.’
Gerlof opened his eyes. ‘I believe you, Jonas. But that was a real person. A tourist, perhaps.’
‘But he was like you... really, really old. And he just disappeared.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He had grey hair and a white beard. He was dressed in dark clothes. Just like the man in the wheelhouse.’
Gerlof peered up at him. ‘Are you all right, Jonas?’
The boy shook his head.
‘I know you have horrible memories,’ Gerlof said. ‘You’ve had a terrible experience. Something dreadful happened to me one summer, when I was fifteen years old. I saw a man have a heart attack and die right in front of me. But everything passes — that’s the only consolation. We get older, and happy memories push away the horrible ones.’
Jonas wondered when he would find those happy memories.
Gerlof
Gerlof’s grandsons and Jonas Kloss had cycled off to the sweet shop, and Gerlof had gone indoors to avoid the mosquitoes’ evening assembly.
He gathered up some empty glasses the boys had left on the coffee table, then flopped down in the armchair next to the telephone. He was very tired.
He was getting nowhere. Not with Peter Mayer’s death, at any rate.
And the elderly American? What could he do to track him down? He picked up his notebook, licked his finger and started to leaf through the pages. He read through what he had written during his lunch with the Swedish-Americans, and over coffee with the gravedigger’s daughter, paying close attention to every detail.
Speculation about Sven and Aron Fredh from Rödtorp. A question jotted down: ‘Whereabouts in the USA did Aron end up?’ But the line below was blank because, apart from the postcard before their departure, Sonja and her father had never heard from their relatives again.
‘I just hope they had a better life in the USA,’ Sonja had said. ‘The place they lived in at Rödtorp was just dreadful — little more than a grey shack...’
He thought for a little while, then called Sonja. She answered quickly, but sounded stressed.
‘You obviously haven’t left yet,’ Gerlof said.
‘No, the bus to the airport leaves in a couple of hours.’
He got straight down to business.
‘Sonja, I’ve been thinking about something you said when we came over for coffee... You said the Fredh family lived in a grey shack on the coast, at a place called Rödtorp.’
‘That’s right. Astrid Fredh had been given the tenancy of the croft by the Kloss family. It was deep in the forest, where the Ölandic Resort is now.’ Sonja paused, then added, ‘The Kloss family knocked it down, and I don’t suppose anyone remembers the name these days. All the old names are disappearing, one by one...’
‘You’re right,’ Gerlof agreed. ‘But why was the place called “Rödtorp”, which suggests it was red, if it was actually grey?’
Sonja responded with a dry laugh. ‘It had nothing to do with the colour of the paint. It was the way Sven used to talk when he was working in the mills that led people to come up with that name.’
‘And what did he talk about?’
‘How can I put it...? He was an agitator. He used to go on at length about the blessings of socialism. That was what Sven believed in... He had become a committed socialist during his military service in Kalmar during the First World War. When he came to Öland and became a farmhand and worked in the flour mills, he became even more passionate about his views. Some say he became a communist in the end.’
‘So he talked about politics in the mills and on the farms?’
‘Yes, I think he liked to spell out chapter and verse, so to speak. But there was a lot more politics in the air in the thirties than there is now; there were both communist and Nazi summer rallies here on the island. There was trouble from time to time; they used to tear down each other’s flags. And the Kloss brothers wouldn’t tolerate any political talk. Sven quarrelled with them, too.’