‘Yes, Miss Fors, he must have been hungry. Perhaps the gypsies were fed up with him? Perhaps the smart folk at the manor had grown tired of paying? But what do I know? Things like that were impossible to find out, not as easy as nowadays.’
‘Things like?’
‘Paternity, maternity.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘Then Kalle disappeared, didn’t come back for many years. There were rumours that he’d gone to sea, was in prison, terrible things. Murder, rape, child abuse. No one really knew. But he hadn’t been to sea, or I would have known.’
‘How?’
‘I did my years in the merchant navy during the war. I know a sailor when I see one. And Cornerhouse-Kalle was no sailor.’
‘What was he, then?’
‘More than anything, he was a womaniser. And a drinker.’
‘When did he come back here?’
‘It must have been some time in the mid-fifties. For a while he worked as a mechanic in the factory garage, but that didn’t last long, then he got some short-term farm work. As long as he was sober, he did the work of two men, so they put up with him.’
‘Put up with what?’
‘With the women and the drink. There can’t have been many working women, maids or farmer’s wives who didn’t know Cornerhouse-Kalle. He was king of the dance floor at the People’s Park. What he couldn’t get into his head about numbers and letters, he made up for with his body. He had cloven hooves when he danced. He could turn on the charm like the devil. He took whatever he wanted.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Ah, that was probably his secret, Miss Fors. The secret that made him irresistible to women. He looked like a beast of prey in human form, he was physical appetite made flesh. Broad, coarse, dark, close-set eyes and a jaw that seemed chiselled from marble.’
Gottfrid Karlsson falls silent, as if to allow the image of coarse masculinity to sink in to young Miss Fors.
‘Men are no longer made like that, Miss Fors. Even if there are still a number of
‘Why “Cornerhouse”?’
Gottfrid puts his liver-spotted, withered hands on the chair’s armrests.
‘It must have been at the end of the fifties, or early sixties. I was working as a foreman at Cloetta then. Kalle had somehow come into a sum of money and bought a plot with an old red wooden cottage on it, down by Wester’s, just a few hundred metres from here, by the bend, next to the tunnel under the main road, on what today is called Anders vag. The tunnel didn’t exist then, and where the road is now used to be a meadow. I put in an offer on the house myself, so I know. It was a large amount of money in those days. There had been a robbery at a bank in Stockholm, and there were rumours that that was where Kalle’s money came from.
‘He had met a woman by then, Bengt’s mother, Elisabeth Teodorsson, a woman so rooted in the soil that she seemed utterly unshakable, as if she would outlive the earth itself. But of course that didn’t happen.’
Then the old man in front of her sighs and closes his eyes.
The flow of words seems to have stopped.
Perhaps the effort of digging through his memories has made him tired? Or has the story itself made him tired? Then his eyes open and the light in the foggy pupils is bright.
‘From the moment he bought the house he was known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Before that everyone knew who Kalle was, but now he got an extra name. I think that house was the start of the end for him; he wasn’t made for what you might call ordered circumstances.’
‘And then Bengt was born?’
‘Yes, 1961, I remember, but by the time he was born Cornerhouse-Kalle was behind bars.’
Gottfrid Karlsson closes his eyes again.
‘Are you tired?’
‘No, not at all, Miss Fors. I haven’t finished what I have to tell you yet.’
On her way out Malin stops at the nurses’ office.
Sister Hermansson is sitting on the bench by the wall, writing up figures on some sort of diagram.
She looks up. ‘Well?’
‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘It was good.’
‘Did you learn anything new?’
‘In a way.’
‘All those courses Gottfrid Karlsson took at the university after he retired have made him rather peculiar. So he may well have put ideas in your head. I presume he told you about the courses?’
‘No,’ Malin replies, ‘actually he didn’t.’
