The Darkest Room

Too late now.

He coughed and started up the Volvo. He wouldn’t stop again.

Katrine was waiting.

When he was back out on the road, he could see her face before him. It had all started when they met while they were viewing the same apartment. Then Livia had come along.

Becoming responsible for Livia had been a big step, he recalled. They both wanted children, but not quite yet. Katrine wanted to do things in the right order. They had intended to sell the apartment and buy a house outside the city in plenty of time before the first child came along.

He remembered how he and Katrine had sat at the kitchen table talking quietly about Livia for several hours.

“What are we going to do?” said Katrine.

“I’d love to take care of her,” Joakim had said. “I’m just not sure the timing is quite right.”

“It isn’t right,” Katrine had said crossly. “Far from it. But we’re stuck with it.”

In the end they had decided to say yes to Livia. They had bought the house anyway, and three years later Katrine had gotten pregnant. Gabriel had been planned, unlike Livia.

But just as Joakim had predicted, he had loved watching her grow up. Loved her bright voice, her energy and her curiosity.

Katrine.

How must she be feeling right now? She had called to him inside his head, he had heard her.

Joakim changed gear and put his foot down. With the trailer behind the car he couldn’t drive to Oland at top speed, but almost.

The most important thing now was to get to the manor house on the island as quickly as possible-home to his wife and son. They needed to be together.

He could see Katrine’s bright face floating in the darkness in front of the car.

5

By eight o’clock in the evening everything was quiet again around the lighthouses at Eel Point. Tilda Davidsson was standing in the big kitchen of the manor house.

The whole house was absolutely silent. Even the slight breeze from the sea had died away.

Tilda looked around and got the feeling she was in the wrong era. Apart from the modern kitchen equipment it was like traveling back to a household at the end of the nineteenth century. A wealthy household. The dining table was large and heavy, made of oak. On the shelves stood copper pans, porcelain from the East Indies, and hand- blown glass bottles. The walls and ceiling were painted white, but the cupboards and wooden cornices were pale blue.

Tilda would have loved to walk into a Carl Larsson kitchen like this every morning, instead of the little kitchenette in her rooms on the square in Marnas.

She was completely alone in the house now. Hans Majner

and two other colleagues who had traveled from Borgholm up to the scene of the accident had left Eel Point at around seven. Her boss, Gote Holmblad, had come along with them to the scene, but had kept a low profile and left at five, almost at the same time as the ambulance.

The father of the family who lived at Eel Point, Joakim Westin, was due to arrive by car from Stockholm late that evening-and it had been obvious that Tilda was going to be the one to stay behind and wait for him. She was the only one who had offered, and her colleagues had quickly agreed.

It wasn’t because she was a woman, Tilda hoped, but because she was the youngest and had the shortest service record.

The evening shift was okay. The only thing she had needed to do all afternoon, apart from answering the radio and the telephone, was to stop a reporter from Olands-Posten from approaching the scene of the accident with his camera. She had referred him to the duty press officer in Kalmar.

When the paramedics went down to the shore with their stretcher, she had followed them, stood out by the jetty and watched as they slowly lifted the body out of the water between the jetty and the northern lighthouse. The arms hung there lifeless, water pouring from the clothes. This was the fifth death Tilda had been involved in during her time with the police, but she would never get used to seeing lifeless bodies pulled out of the water or out of smashed-up cars.

It was also Tilda who had answered when Joakim Westin rang. It was really against police procedure to inform relatives of a death over the telephone, but it had gone okay. The news had been bad-the worst imaginable-but Westin’s voice had sounded calm and collected throughout the conversation. It was often better to hear bad news as quickly as possible.

Give both the victims and the relatives as much accurate information as possible, as quickly as possible, she had learned from Martin at the Police Training Academy.

She left the kitchen and went into the house. There was a

faint smell of paint here. The room closest to the kitchen had new wallpaper and a newly polished floor and was warm and cozy, but when she went on along a corridor she could see rooms that were cold and dark, with no furniture. It made her think of condemned apartments she had been into shortly after she became a policewoman, apartments with no heating where people lived like rats.

The house at Eel Point wasn’t really a house Tilda would want to live in, particularly not at this time of year, in the winter. It was too big. And no doubt the coast was lovely when the sun was shining, but in the evening the desolation was complete. Marnas, with its single shopping street, felt like a densely populated metropolis in comparison to the emptiness of Eel Point.

She left the light on, went out into the glassed-in veranda, and opened the outside door.

A damp chill was drifting in off the sea. There was just one lamp outside, a single lightbulb covered with a cracked glass shade, casting a yellow glow over the cobblestones and rough tufts of grass in the inner courtyard.

Tilda stood in the shelter of the big barn’s stone wall, next to a pile of wet leaves, and took out her cell phone. She really wanted to hear another voice, but she hadn’t got around to ringing Martin this evening, and now it was several hours too late-he would already have gone home from work. Instead she called the number of the neighbors, the Carlsson family, and the mother picked up after two rings.

“How are they?” asked Tilda.

“I’ve just had a look at them and they’re both asleep,” said Maria Carlsson quietly. “They’re in our guest room.”

“That’s good,” said Tilda. “How long will you be up tonight? I was intending to come over with Joakim Westin, but I don’t think he’ll be back from Stockholm for three or four hours.”

“Just come over. Roger and I will stay up for as long as necessary.”

When Tilda had switched off her phone, she immediately felt lonely again.

It was eight-thirty now. She thought about going home to Marnas to rest for an hour or so, but of course there was the risk that Westin or someone else might telephone here.

She went back into the house through the veranda.

This time she continued along the short corridor and stopped in the doorway of one of the bedrooms. This was a small, cozy room, like a bright chapel in a dark castle. The wallpaper was yellow with red stars, and along the walls sat a dozen or so cuddly toys on small wooden chairs.

This must be the daughter’s room.

Tilda went in cautiously and stood on the soft rug in the center of the room. She guessed that the parents had fixed up the children’s rooms first, so that their son and daughter would quickly feel at home in the manor house. She thought about the room she had grown up in, a small room she had shared with one of her brothers in a rented apartment in Kalmar. She had always longed for a bedroom of her own.

The bed in this room was short but wide, with a pale yellow coverlet and lots of fluffy cushions with cartoon figures on them: elephants and lions wearing nightcaps and lying in their own little beds.