A few minutes later they reached the yellow sign for Eel Point, and Holmblad turned off onto the winding gravel track.
They could see the lighthouses now, and the red buildings. This time Tilda was able to see the lighthouse keepers’ estate in daylight, even if gray cloud cover was hiding the sun.
Holmblad pulled up in front of the house and turned off the engine.
“Remember,” he said, “you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
Tilda nodded. Bottom of the heap-so keep quiet. Just like when she was little, at the dining table with her two older brothers.
In daylight the house at Eel Point seemed more appealing, thought Tilda, but it was still much too big for her to like the idea of living there.
Holmblad knocked on the glass pane in the kitchen door; the door opened after a minute or so.
“Good afternoon,” said Holmblad. “Here we are.”
Joakim Westin’s face had become even more gray, Tilda thought. She knew he was thirty-four, but he looked like a fifty-year-old. His eyes were dark and tired. He simply nodded at Holmblad and didn’t even acknowledge Tilda. Not even with a glance.
“Come in.”
Westin disappeared into the darkness, and they followed him. Everything was neat and clean, no dust bunnies, but when Tilda looked around it was as if a gray film had settled over everything.
“Coffee?” asked Westin.
“Thank you, that would be good,” said Holmblad.
Westin went over to the coffeemaker.
“Are you on your own here now… you and the children?” asked Holmblad. “No relatives?”
“My mother has been staying with us,” said Westin, “but she’s gone back home to Stockholm.”
There was a silence. Holmblad adjusted his uniform.
“We’d very much like to start by expressing our regrets… and saying that this sort of thing simply shouldn’t happen,” he said. “The procedures with regard to informing relatives about a death fell down somewhat in this case.”
“You’ve got that right,” said Westin.
“Yes, we do regret what happened. But…”
“I thought it was my daughter,” said Westin.
“I’m sorry?”
“I thought my daughter had drowned. I thought that for several hours, all the way from Stockholm to Oland. And the only consolation… it wasn’t much of a consolation, but the only consolation was that my wife, Katrine, would be
there when I arrived, and she would be feeling even worse than me. Then at least I would be able to try and console her, for the rest of our lives.” Westin paused, then went on very quietly: “We would have each other, at least.”
He fell silent, gazing out of the window.
“As I said, our sincere regrets,” said Holmblad. “But it’s happened now… and we have to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. To a relative of someone else, I mean.”
Westin hardly seemed to be listening. He was studying his hands as Holmblad stopped speaking, then he asked, “How’s the investigation going?”
“The investigation?”
“The police investigation. Into my wife’s death.”
“There is no investigation,” said the inspector quickly. “We carry out investigations or preliminary investigations only when a crime is suspected, and in this case there are no grounds for suspicion.”
Westin looked up from the table. “So what happened was nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Well, of course it wasn’t exactly normal,” said Holmblad, “but…”
Westin took a deep breath and continued: “My wife said goodbye to me outside the house that morning. Then she went inside and scraped windows. Then she made herself some lunch, and after that she went down to the shore. And then she walked right to the end of the jetty and jumped into the water. Does that seem normal to you?”
“Nobody’s saying it was suicide,” said Holmblad. “But as I said, there are no grounds to suspect any kind of crime. For example, if she’d had a couple of glasses of wine with her lunch and then walked along stones that were slippery…”
“Do you see any bottles around here?” Westin interrupted him.
Tilda looked around. There were in fact no bottles of wine in the kitchen.
“Katrine didn’t drink,” Westin went on. “She didn’t drink alcohol. You could have checked that out with a blood test.”
“Yes, but…”
“I don’t drink either. There is no alcohol here at all.”
“May I ask why?” said Holmblad. “Are you religious?”
Joakim looked at him, as if the questions were insolent. And perhaps they were, thought Tilda.
“We have seen what drink and drugs can do,” he said eventually. “We don’t want that kind of stuff in our house.”
“I understand,” said Holmblad.
There was silence in the big kitchen. Tilda looked out of the window toward the lighthouses and the sea. She thought about Gerlof, about his constant curiosity.
“Did your wife have any enemies?” she asked suddenly.
From the corner of her eye Tilda could see Holmblad looking at her as if she had suddenly appeared out of nowhere at the kitchen table.
Joakim Westin also seemed surprised by the question. Not annoyed, just surprised.
“No,” he said. “Neither of us has any enemies.”
But Tilda thought he seemed hesitant, as if there were more to say.
“So she hadn’t been threatened by anyone here on the island?”
Westin shook his head. “Not as far as I know… Katrine has been living here alone with the children over the past few months. I’ve only come down from Stockholm on the weekends. But she hasn’t mentioned anything like that.”
“So she seemed perfectly normal before she died?”
“More or less,” said Joakim Westin, looking down into his coffee cup. “A bit tired and low, maybe… Katrine was finding it quite hard to be alone while I was working in Stockholm.”
Silence fell again.
“May I use your bathroom?” said Tilda.
Westin nodded. “Out through the porch and it’s to the right along the corridor.”
Tilda left the kitchen. She found her way easily; after all, she had been in the house before.
The smell of paint had almost gone from the porch and corridors now, and the house felt a little more lived in.
In the corridor leading to the bedrooms a painting had been hung up recently. It was an oil painting depicting a grayish-white landscape-it looked like northern Oland in the winter. A snowstorm was swirling over the island, blurring all the contours. Tilda couldn’t remember having seen the island depicted in such a dark, forbidding way before, and remained standing in front of the picture for a while before she went on to the bathroom.
It was small but warm, tiled from floor to ceiling, with a thick blue rug on the floor and an old-fashioned bathtub standing on four lion’s paws made of cast iron. When she had finished, she went back into the corridor and past the closed doors leading to the children’s rooms. She stopped at the next bedroom along; the door was half open.
A quick look?
Tilda poked her head in and glimpsed a small room with a big double bed. There was a small bureau next to the bed, with a framed photograph of Katrine Westin, waving from a window.
Then Tilda saw the clothes.
