Sail of Stone

“No.”

“A little tiny one?”

She didn’t answer.

“Angela?”

“I don’t think I should,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I shouldn’t drink alcohol,” she said, leaning forward so he could see her face.

“Shouldn’t drink…,” he repeated.

“That’s all I’m going to say,” she said.

“You don’t need to say more,” he shouted, hopping up out of the bed and spilling several of the ridiculously expensive drops.

“When did you know?” he asked. They were both lying on the bed now. The window was still open. It was still Indian summer in Elgin, or maybe it should be called brittsommar in October. “It must have been pretty recently.”

Angela had a glass of mineral water in her hand. She drank it and placed the glass on the nightstand and gently bit her lower lip. She looked out through the window.

“What are you thinking about?” Winter asked.

“Still about what happened in Fort Augustus,” she said. “Between father and son.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Do you have any theories?”

Winter sat up. He could smell the scent of the river outside. The evening was making way for the night.

“I think Axel Osvald dreamed of his father his entire life. That’s only natural. And the circumstances were so dramatic. And this sense of loss got stronger and stronger.” He turned to Angela. “I think we’ll be able to find out much more about him now, from Erik, and from Johanna. Now that we know how we should ask. Why we should ask.”

“But the dad, John, he made contact?”

“He must have, at least once Axel was here,” said Winter. “And of course he also did indirectly, through Erik Osvald.”

“He also had his daughter call?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know what would happen?”

“When they met, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t know his son,” said Winter.

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t know him. He didn’t know who Axel was. He couldn’t anticipate that there might be an extreme passion, maybe an obsession.”

Winter changed position again where he was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Do you understand? Something could give way. Something could give way very easily. The fact that he took off his clothes had to do with his strong Christian beliefs, his own strong beliefs. It had to do with cleansing, something like that. He wandered on the mountain and prayed and took off his clothes bit by bit. A cleansing bath. On the beach, John Osvald said that his son was washing away his sins. John couldn’t do it himself.”

“Do you think the father told?” said Angela. “Told Axel?”

“Told him what?”

“Told what he had done. What had happened out at sea that time.” She pushed her hair away from one temple. “What his guilt consisted of. The extent of his crime.”

“Yes,” said Winter. “I think so. I think he told. And it ended in disaster.”

“Did Axel Osvald really commit suicide?”

“I don’t know,” said Winter. “But I think so. Suicide. Yes. Lying there naked was suicide.” He ran his hand through his hair. “But maybe in one way it was also murder.” He took his hand from his head. “I don’t know.”

“Will we ever find out?”

“How would we find out?” Winter asked.

“Through John Osvald,” said Angela.

“Maybe,” said Winter, but he didn’t think they ever would.

Later he thought about the sea again. A different sea, a different beach. This beach was on the other side of the North Sea, across from this city and this ancient landscape.

He carefully pushed Angela’s arm off of his chest and slid out of bed. Angela was snoring, but very lightly, a relic of her polyp period.

He poured a finger of whiskey into the glass and stood by the window, which was closed. He opened it a few inches. The air was still fresh out there, but now it was cold. It smelled like water. He saw the sea and that beach in his mind’s eye. He and Angela and Elsa were there, as well as another person he didn’t know yet, a small person. They were all digging in the sand, and then in the soft earth on the plot of land above them. There was dirt in his shovel. He pushed a wheelbarrow filled with sand. He laid stones. He pounded a hammer against a wall.

It was a new era of life.

A CONVERSATION WITH AKE EDWARDSON

You have been a university lecturer, journalist, and press officer for the United Nations. What led you to become an author of detective fiction?

It was the only kick left in my life, so I decided to give it a go around 1993. Now it’s been twenty-one books, roughly half of them crime novels, the rest “literary” fiction, some plays, too.

Who inspired the character of Erik Winter?

I was tired of the tired detective in mid-90s novels! I wanted somebody younger, more determined, possessed, on his way full throttle into the new millennium, without mayonnaise stains on a shabby jacket.

The name? It’s to show the complicated personality of Erik Winter: it’s from the albino American blues guitarist Johnny Winter and the black Dutch soccer player Aron Winter.

Sail of Stone, the sixth novel in the Erik Winter series, is now being published in English ten years after its Swedish publication. Do you think the story will be different for an American audience?

An American audience is just as smart as readers in the rest of the world, probably smarter, so there will be no problem. Note that I have only intelligent readers; there are other books for the rest. The themes in Sail of Stone deal with the shadows of the past, the Good War, and the sea; those themes are larger than life and the passage of a mere ten years, or a hundred, makes no difference.

Do you have any advice for English readers just beginning the series with this sixth book? Is there any essential back story a first-time reader should know?

Erik Winter started out in the first novel as one of those arrogant dudes born in the early sixties (I was born in the humble early fifties), and as such he was (in the first couple of novels) very good at his work but pretty lousy at everything else, including relationships. I wanted him to grow, to learn something from his life: to learn the art of living, which is the hardest thing. When you get the hang of it you’re pushing eighty.

So this is a Bildungsroman within the crime story; it’s the only way to make it interesting I think. And when it comes to Erik, in the earlier novels he has married his girl, he has become a father, and he has matured a bit. He’s on his way. He could almost be my friend in this one.

Why did you decide to set your novels in Gothenburg? This novel includes vivid descriptions of many towns along the Scottish coast as well; what drew you to set a large portion of the novel in Scotland? Did you visit the small villages Winter and Macdonald travel through?

Gothenburg is the second largest city in Sweden, with over one million inhabitants. It’s by far the most dynamic city in the north of Europe; Stockholm, for instance, is just a prettily made-up corpse, dead and shining.