Kitabı oku: «The Stonecutter», sayfa 2

With determined steps Lilian ascended the last steps to the top floor, taking the tray to the guest room. That was where she installed Stig when he was sick. It wouldn’t do to have him moaning and groaning in the bedroom. If she was to take care of him properly, she had to get a good night’s sleep.

‘Dear?’ She cautiously pushed open the door. ‘Wake up now, I’m bringing you a little something. It’s your favourite: chicken soup.’

Stig wanly returned her smile. ‘I’m not hungry, maybe later,’ he said weakly.

‘Nonsense, you’ll never get well if you don’t eat properly. Come on, sit up a little and I’ll feed you.’

She helped him up to a half-sitting position and then sank down on the edge of the bed. As if he were a child, she fed him soup, wiping off any dribbles at the corners of his mouth.

‘See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? I know exactly what my darling needs, and if you just eat properly you’ll be back on your feet in no time, you’ll see.’

Once again the same weak smile in reply. Lilian helped him lie back down and pulled the blanket over his legs.

‘The doctor?’

‘But, sweetie, have you entirely forgotten? It’s Niclas who’s the doctor now, so we have our very own doctor right here in the house. I’m sure he’ll look in on you this evening. He just had to go over his diagnosis again, he said, and consult with a colleague in Uddevalla. It will all work out very soon, you’ll see.’

Lilian fussily tucked in her patient one last time and took the tray with the empty soup bowl. She headed for the stairs, shaking her head. Now she had to be a nurse as well, on top of everything else that needed her attention.

She heard a knock at the front door and hurried downstairs.

Patrik’s hand struck the door with a sharp rap. Around them the wind had come up quickly to gale force. Droplets of rain were landing on them, not from above but from behind, as the stormy gusts whipped up a fine mist from the ground. The sky had turned dark, its light-grey hue streaked with darker grey clouds, and the dirty brown of the sea was far from its summery blue sparkle, with whitecaps now scudding along. There were white geese on the sea, as Patrik’s mother used to say.

The door opened and both Patrik and Martin took deep breaths in order to summon extra reserves of strength. The woman standing before them was a head shorter than Patrik and very, very thin. She had short hair curled in a permanent wave and tinted to an indeterminate brown shade. Her eyebrows were a bit too severely plucked and had been replaced by a couple of lines drawn with a kohl pencil, which gave her a slightly comical look. But there was nothing funny about the situation they were now facing.

‘Hello, we’re from the police. We’re looking for Charlotte Klinga.’

‘She’s my daughter. What is this regarding?’

Her voice was a bit too shrill to be pleasant. Patrik had heard enough about Charlotte’s mother from Erica to know how trying it must be to listen to her all day long. But such trivial matters were about to lose any importance.

‘We’d appreciate it if you could tell her that we’d like to talk to her.’

‘Of course, but what’s this all about?’

Patrik insisted. ‘We would like to speak with your daughter first. If you wouldn’t mind —’ He was interrupted by footsteps on the stairs, and a second later he saw Charlotte’s familiar face appear in the doorway.

‘Well, hi, Patrik! How nice to see you! What are you doing here?’

All at once an expression of concern settled on her face. ‘Has something happened to Erica? I spoke to her recently and she sounded all right, I thought …’

Patrik held up his hand. Martin stood silently at his side with his eyes fixed on a knothole on the floor. He usually loved his job, but at the moment he was cursing the day he’d decided to become a cop.

‘May we come in?’

‘Now you’re making me nervous, Patrik. What’s happened?’ A thought struck her. ‘Is it Niclas, did he have an accident in the car, or something?’

‘Let’s go inside first.’

Since neither Charlotte nor her mother seemed capable of budging from the spot, Patrik took charge and led them into the kitchen with Martin bringing up the rear. He noted absently that they hadn’t taken off their shoes and were surely leaving wet footprints behind. But a little mud wouldn’t make much difference now.

He motioned to Charlotte and Lilian to take a seat across from them at the kitchen table, and they silently obeyed. Patrik and Martin sat down across from them.

‘I’m sorry, Charlotte, but I have …’ he hesitated, ‘terrible news for you.’ The words lurched stiffly out of his mouth. His choice of words already felt wrong, but was there any right way to say what he had to say?

‘An hour ago a lobsterman found a little girl drowned. I’m so, so sorry, Charlotte …’ Then he found himself incapable of going on. Even though the words were in his mind, they were so horrific that they refused to come out. But he didn’t need to say any more.

Charlotte gasped for breath with a wheezing, guttural sound. She grabbed the tabletop with both hands, as if to hold herself upright, and stared with empty eyes at Patrik. In the silence of the kitchen that single wheezing gasp seemed louder than a scream. Patrik swallowed to hold back the tears and keep his voice steady.

‘It must be a mistake. It couldn’t be Sara!’ Lilian looked wildly back and forth between Patrik and Martin, but Patrik only shook his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, ‘but I just saw the girl and there’s no doubt that it’s Sara.’

‘But she said she was just going over to Frida’s to play. I saw her heading that way. There must be some mistake. I’m sure she’s over there playing.’ As if in a trance Lilian got up and went over to the telephone on the wall. She checked the address book hanging next to it and briskly punched in the numbers.

‘Hello, Veronika, it’s Lilian. Listen, is Sara over there?’ She listened for a second and then dropped the receiver so it hung from the cord, swaying back and forth.

‘She hasn’t been there.’ She sat down heavily at the table and stared helplessly at the police officers facing her.

The shriek came out of nowhere, and both Patrik and Martin jumped. Charlotte was screaming, motionless, with eyes that didn’t seem to see. It was a loud, primitive, piercing sound. The raw pain that pitilessly forced out the scream gave both officers gooseflesh.

Lilian threw herself at her daughter, trying to put her arms round her, but Charlotte brusquely batted her away.

Patrik tried to talk over the scream. ‘We’ve tried to get hold of Niclas, but he wasn’t at the clinic. We left him a message to come home as soon as he can. And the pastor is on his way.’ He directed his words more to Lilian than to Charlotte, who was now beyond their reach. Patrik knew that he’d handled the situation terribly. He should have made sure that a doctor was present to administer a sedative if needed. Unfortunately the only doctor in Fjällbacka was the girl’s father, and they hadn’t been able to get hold of him. He turned to Martin.

‘Ring the clinic on your mobile and see if you can get the nurse over here at once. And ask her to bring a sedative.’

Martin did as he asked, relieved to have an excuse to leave the kitchen for a moment. Ten minutes later Aina Lundby came in without knocking. She gave Charlotte a pill to calm her down, and then with Patrik’s help led her into the living room, so she could lie down on the sofa.

‘Shouldn’t I be given a sedative too?’ asked Lilian. ‘I’ve always had bad nerves, and something like this …’

The district nurse, who looked to be about the same age as Lilian, merely snorted and continued tucking a blanket round Charlotte with maternal care as she lay there, teeth chattering as if she were freezing.

‘You’ll survive without it,’ she said, gathering up her things.

Patrik turned to Lilian and said softly, ‘We’ll probably have to talk to the mother of the friend Sara was going to visit. Which house is it?’

‘The blue one just up the street,’ said Lilian without looking him in the eyes.

By the time the pastor knocked on the door a few minutes later, Patrik felt that he and Martin had done all they could. They left the house which had been plunged into grief with their news and got into their car in the driveway. But Patrik didn’t start the engine.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Martin.

‘Bloody hell indeed,’ said Patrik.

Kaj Wiberg peered out of the kitchen window facing the Florins’ driveway.

‘I wonder what the old cow’s up to now?’ he muttered petulantly.

‘What?’ his wife Monica called from the living room.

He turned halfway in her direction and shouted back, ‘There’s a police car parked outside the Florins’. I bloody well bet there’s some mischief going on. I’ve been saddled with that old woman as a neighbour to pay for my sins.’

Monica came into the kitchen with a worried look. ‘You really think it’s about us? We haven’t done anything.’ She was combing her smooth, blonde page-boy but stopped with the comb in mid-air to peer out of the window.

Kaj snorted. ‘Try to tell her that. No, just wait till the small claims court agrees with me about the balcony. Then she’ll be standing there with egg on her face. I hope it’ll cost her a bundle to tear it down.’

‘Yes, but do you think we’re really doing the right thing, Kaj? I mean, it only sticks over a few centimetres into our property, and it’s not really bothering us. And now poor Stig is sick in bed and everything.’

‘Sick, oh yeah, thanks a lot. I’d be sick too if I had to live with that damn bitch. What’s right is right. If they build a balcony that infringes on our property, they’re either going to have to pay or tear the bleeding thing down. They forced us to cut down our tree, didn’t they? Our fine old birch tree, reduced to firewood, just because Lilian Florin thought it was blocking her view of the sea. Or am I wrong? Did I miss something here?’ He turned spitefully towards his wife, incensed by the memory of all the injustices that had been done to them in the ten years they had been the Florins’ neighbours.

‘No, Kaj, you’re quite right.’ Monica looked down, well aware that retreat was the best defence when her husband got in this mood. For him Lilian Florin was like a red flag to a bull, and it was no use talking to him about common sense and reason when her name came up. Though Monica had to admit that it wasn’t only Kaj’s fault there had been so much trouble. Lilian wasn’t easy to take, and if she’d only left them in peace it never would have come to this. Instead she had dragged them through one court appearance after another, for everything from incorrectly drawn property lines, a path that went through the lot behind her house, a garden shed that she claimed stood too close to her property, and not least the fine old birch tree they’d been forced to cut down a couple of years ago. And it had all started when they began building the house they lived in now. Kaj had just sold his office supply business for several million kronor, and they had decided to take early retirement, sell the house in Göteborg, and settle down in Fjällbacka where they had always spent their summers. But they certainly hadn’t found much peace. Lilian had voiced a thousand objections to the new construction. She had organized petitions and collected complaints to try and put obstacles in their way. When she failed to stop them, she’d begun to quarrel with them about everything imaginable. Exacerbated by Kaj’s volatile temperament, the feud between the neighbours had escalated beyond all common sense. The balcony that the Florins had built was only the latest bone of contention in the battle. The fact that it looked as though the Wibergs would win had given Kaj the high ground, and he was happy to exploit it.

Kaj whispered excitedly as he stood peering out behind the curtain. ‘Now two guys are coming out of the house and getting in the police car. Just you wait, now they’re going to come knock on our door any minute. Well, whatever it’s about, I’m going to tell them the facts. And Lilian Florin isn’t the only one who can file a police report. Didn’t she stand there screaming insults over the hedge a couple of days ago, saying she’d make sure I got what I deserved? Illegal intimidation, I think that’s what it’s called. She could go to jail for that …’ Kaj licked his lips in anticipation and prepared for the coming battle.

Monica sighed and went back to the easy chair in the living room. She picked up a women’s magazine and began to read. She no longer had the energy to care.

‘We might as well drive over and talk to the friend and her mother, don’t you think? As long as we’re here.’

‘All right,’ said Patrik with a sigh, backing out the driveway. They didn’t really need to take the car since it was only a few houses up the street to the right, but he didn’t want to block the Florins’ drive with Sara’s father on his way home.

Looking solemn, they knocked on the door of the blue house, which was only three houses away. A girl about the same age as Sara opened the door.

‘Hello, are you Frida?’ asked Martin in a friendly voice. She nodded in reply and stepped aside to let them in. They stood awkwardly in the hall for a moment as Frida observed them from under her fringe. Ill at ease, Patrik finally said, ‘Is your mother at home?’

The girl still didn’t say a word but ran a little way down the hall and turned left into a room that Patrik guessed was the kitchen. He heard a low murmur and then a dark-haired woman in her thirties came out to meet them. Her eyes flitted nervously and she gave the two men standing in her hall an inquisitive look. Patrik saw that she didn’t know who they were.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Karlgren. We’re from the police,’ said Martin, apparently thinking the same thing. ‘May we have a word with you? In private?’ He gave Frida a meaningful glance. Her mother blanched, drawing her own conclusions about why they didn’t think what they had to say was suitable for her daughter’s ears.

‘Frida, go up and play in your room.’

‘But Mamma —’ the girl protested.

‘No arguments. Go up to your room and stay there until I call you.’

The girl looked as if she had a mind to object again, but a hint of steel in her mother’s voice told her that this was one of those battles she was not going to win. Sullenly Frida dragged herself up the stairs, casting a few hopeful glances back at the adults to see whether they might relent. No one moved until she reached the top of the stairs and the door to her room slammed behind her.

‘We can sit in the kitchen.’

Veronika Karlgren led them into a big, cosy kitchen, where apparently she’d been making lunch.

They shook hands politely and introduced themselves, then sat down at the kitchen table. Frida’s mother took some cups out of the cupboard, poured coffee, and put some biscuits on a plate. Patrik saw that her hands were shaking as she did so, and he realized that she was trying to postpone the inevitable, what they had come to tell her. But finally there was no putting it off any longer, and she sat down heavily on a chair across from them.

‘Something has happened to Sara, hasn’t it? Why else would Lilian ring and then hang up like that?’

Patrik and Martin sat in silence a few seconds too long, since both hoped the other would start. Their silence was a form of confirmation that made tears well up in Veronika’s eyes.

Patrik cleared his throat. ‘Yes, unfortunately we have to inform you that Sara was found drowned this morning.’

Veronika gasped but said nothing.

Patrik went on, ‘It seems to have been an accident, but we’re making inquiries to see whether we can determine exactly how it happened.’ He looked at Martin, who sat ready with his pen and notebook.

‘According to Lilian Florin, Sara was supposed to come over here and play with your daughter Frida today. Was that something the girls had planned? It is Monday, after all, so why weren’t they in school?’

Veronika was staring at the tabletop. ‘They were both ill this weekend, so Charlotte and I decided to keep them home from school, but we thought it was okay if they played together. Sara was supposed to come over sometime before noon.’

‘But she never arrived?’

‘No, she never did.’ Veronika said no more, and Patrik had to keep asking questions to get more information.

‘Didn’t you wonder why she never showed up? Why didn’t you ring and ask where she was?’

Veronika hesitated. ‘Sara was a little … what should I say? … different. She more or less did whatever she liked. Quite often she wouldn’t come over as agreed because she suddenly decided she felt like doing something else. The girls sometimes quarrelled because of that, I think, but I didn’t want to get involved. From what I’ve heard, Sara suffered from one of those problems with all the initials, so it wouldn’t be good to make matters worse …’ She sat there shredding a paper napkin to bits. A little pile of white paper was growing on the table before her.

Martin looked up from his notebook with a frown. ‘A problem with all the initials? What do you mean by that?’

‘You know, one of those things that every other child seems to have these days: ADHD, DAMP, MBD, and whatever else they’re called.’

‘Why do you think something was wrong with Sara?’

She shrugged. ‘People talked. And I thought it fit quite well. Sara could be utterly impossible to deal with, so either she was suffering from some problem or else she hadn’t been brought up right.’ She cringed as she heard herself talking about a dead girl that way, and quickly looked down. With even greater frenzy she resumed tearing up the napkin, and soon there was nothing left of it.

‘So you never saw Sara at all this morning? And never heard from her by phone either?’

Veronika shook her head.

‘And you’re sure the same is true for Frida?’

‘Yes, she’s been at home with me the whole time, so if she had talked to Sara I would have known. And she was a bit peeved that Sara never showed up, so I’m quite sure they didn’t talk to each other.’

‘Well then, I don’t suppose we have much more to ask you.’

With a voice that quavered a bit Veronika asked, ‘How is Charlotte doing?’

‘As can be expected under the circumstances,’ was the only answer Patrik could give her.

In Veronika’s eyes he saw the abyss open that all mothers must experience when for an instant they picture their own child a victim of an accident. And he also saw the relief that this time it was someone else’s child and not her own. He couldn’t reproach her for feeling that way. His own thoughts had all too often shifted to Maja in the past hour. Visions of her limp and lifeless body had forced their way in and made his heart skip a few beats. He too was grateful that it was someone else’s child and not his own. The feeling may not have been honourable, but it was human.

STRÖMSTAD 1923

He made a practised judgement of where the stone would be easiest to cleave and then brought the hammer down on the chisel. Quite rightly, the granite split precisely where he had calculated it would. Experience had taught him well over the years, but natural talent was also a large part of it. You either had it or you didn’t.

Anders Andersson had loved the stone since he had first come to work at the quarry as a small boy, and the stone loved him. But it was a profession that took its toll on a man. The granite dust bothered his lungs more and more with each passing year, and the chips that flew from the stone could ruin a man’s eyesight in a day, or cloud his vision over time. In the cold of winter it was impossible to do a proper job wearing gloves, so his fingers would freeze until they felt like they would fall off. In the summer he would sweat profusely in the broiling heat. And yet there was nothing else he would rather do. Whether he was cutting the four-inch cubic paving stones called ‘two-örings’ used to construct roads, or had the privilege of working on something more advanced, he loved every laborious and painful minute. He knew this was the work he was born to do. His back already ached at the age of twenty-eight, and he coughed interminably at the least dampness, but when he focused all his energy on the task before him, his ailments were forgotten and he would feel only the angular hardness of the stone beneath his fingers.

Granite was the most beautiful stone he knew. He had come to the province of Bohuslän from Blekinge, as so many stonecutters had done over the years. The granite in Blekinge was considerably more difficult to work with than in the regions near the Norwegian border. Consequently the cutters from Blekinge enjoyed great respect thanks to the skill they had acquired by working with less tractable material. Three years he had been here, attracted by the granite right from the start. There was something about the pink colour against the grey, and the ingenuity it took to cleave the stone correctly, that appealed to him. Sometimes he talked to the stone as he worked, cajoling it if it was an unusually difficult piece, or caressing it lovingly if it was easy to work and soft like a woman.

Not that he lacked offers from the genuine article. Like the other unmarried cutters he’d had his amusements when the occasion presented itself, but no woman had attracted him so that his heart leaped in his breast. He’d learned to accept that. He got along fine on his own. He was also well-liked by the other lads in his crew, so he was often invited home for a meal prepared by a woman’s hand. And he had the stone. It was both more beautiful and more faithful than most of the women he had encountered. He and the stone had a good partnership.

‘Hey, Andersson, can you come over here for a moment?’

Anders interrupted his work on the big block and turned round. It was the foreman calling him, and as always he felt a mixture of anticipation and alarm. If the foreman wanted something from you, it was either good news or bad. Either an offer of more work, or notification that you could go home from the quarry with your cap in hand. In fact, Anders believed more in the former alternative. He knew that he was skilled at his profession, and there were probably others who would get the boot before him if the workforce were cut back. On the other hand, logic did not always win out. Politics and power struggles had sent home many a good stonecutter, so nothing was ever guaranteed. His strong involvement in the trade-union movement also made him vulnerable when the boss had to get rid of people. Politically active cutters were not appreciated.

He cast a final glance at the stone block before he went to see the foreman. It was piecework, and every interruption in his work meant lost income. For this particular job he was getting two öre per paving stone, hence the name ‘two-örings’. He would have to work hard to make up for lost time if the foreman was long-winded.

‘Good day, Larsson,’ said Anders, bowing with his cap in hand. The foreman was a stern believer in protocol. Failing to show him the respect he felt he deserved had proven to be reason enough for dismissal.

‘Good day, Andersson,’ muttered the rotund man, tugging on his moustache.

Anders waited tensely for what would come.

‘Well, it’s like this. We’ve got an order for a big memorial stone from France. It’s going to be a statue, so we thought we’d have you cut the stone.’

His heart hammered with joy, but he also felt a stab of fright. It was a great opportunity to be given the responsibility to cut the raw material for a statue. It could pay a great deal more than the usual work, and it was both more fun and more challenging. But at the same time it was an enormous risk. He would be responsible until the statue was shipped off, and if anything went wrong he wouldn’t be paid a single öre for all the work he had done. There was a legend about a cutter who had been given two statues to cut, and just as he was in the final stages of the work he made a wrong cut and ruined them both. It was said that he’d been so despondent that he took his own life, leaving behind a widow and seven children. But those were the conditions. There was nothing he could do about it, and the opportunity was too good to pass up.

Anders spat in his hand and held it out to the foreman, who did the same so that their hands were united in a firm handshake. It was a deal. Anders would be in charge of the work on the memorial stone. It worried him a bit what the others at the quarry would say. There were many men who had considerably more years on the job than he did. Some would undoubtedly complain that the commission should have gone to one of them, especially since unlike him they had families to support. They would have viewed the extra money as a welcome windfall with winter coming on. At the same time they all knew that Anders was the most skilled stonecutter of them all, even as young as he was. That consensus would dampen most of the backbiting. Besides, Anders would choose some of them to work with him, and he had previously shown that he could wisely weigh the pros and cons of who was most skilled and who was in greatest need of extra income.

‘Come down to the office tomorrow and we’ll discuss the details,’ said the foreman, twirling his moustache. ‘The architect won’t be coming until sometime towards spring, but we’ve received the plans and can begin the rough cut.’

Anders pulled a face. It would probably take a couple of hours to go over the drawings, and that meant even more time away from the job he was currently working on. He was going to need every öre now, because the terms stated that the work on the memorial stone would be paid for at the end, when everything was completed. That meant that he would have to get used to longer work-days, since he would have to try and make time to cut paving stones on the side. But the involuntary interruption of his work wasn’t the only reason that he was displeased about going down to the office. Somehow that place always made him feel uncomfortable. The people who worked there had such soft white hands, and they moved so gingerly in their elegant office attire, while he felt like a crude oaf. And even though he always did a thorough job of washing up, he couldn’t help the fact that the dirt worked its way into his skin. But what had to be done had to be done. He would have to drag himself down there and look over the drawings; then he could go back to the quarry, where he felt at home.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow then,’ said the foreman, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. ‘At seven. Don’t be late,’ he admonished, and Anders merely nodded. There was no risk of that. He didn’t often get a chance like this.

With a new spring in his step he went back to the stone he was working on. The happiness he was feeling made him cleave the stone like butter. Life was good.