Over two weeks had passed without a single reported break-in in northern Oland. But one morning the telephone rang in the police station. The call came from Stenvik on the west coast of the island; the man on the other end of the line spoke quietly, with a strong local dialect, and said that his name was John Hagman. She recognized the name-Hagman was one of Gerlof’s friends.
“I hear you’re looking for people who’ve been breaking into houses,” he said.
“We are,” said Tilda. “I was intending to call you…”
“Yes, Gerlof told me.”
“Have you seen anyone breaking in?”
“No.”
Hagman didn’t say any more. Tilda waited, then asked, “Have you perhaps seen any
“Yes. They’ve been here in the village.”
“Recently?”
“I don’t know… sometime in the fall. They appear to have been in several houses.”
“I’ll come down and take a look,” said Tilda. “How will I find you in the village?”
“I’m the only one here right now.”
Tilda got out of the police car on a gravel track in the middle of a row of closed-up summer cottages, a hundred yards or so above the sound. She looked around in the cold wind, and thought about her family. They came from Stenvik; they had somehow managed to survive in this stony landscape.
A short, elderly man in dark blue dungarees and a brown cap came over to the car.
“Hagman,” he said. He nodded briefly and pointed to a dark brown one-story house with wide windows. “There,” he said. “I noticed it had blown open. Same thing next door.”
One of the windows at the back of the house was ajar. When Tilda went closer, she could see that the frame was split and broken open near the catch.
There were no footprints on the veranda below the window. Tilda went over and pulled it wide open. The room inside was a mess, with clothes and tools just thrown on the stone floor.
“Have you got a key to this house, John?”
“No.”
“In that case I’ll climb in.”
Tilda grabbed hold of both sides of the frame with her gloved hands and hauled herself into the darkness inside.
She jumped down onto the floor of a small storeroom
and flicked a switch, but no light came on. The power was turned off.
The traces left by the thieves were clearly visible, however-all the storage boxes had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor. And when she moved through into the main room, she saw fragments of broken glass, just as in the vicarage at Hagelby.
Tilda went over for a closer look. Small pieces of wood lay among the glass, and it was a while before she realized it was a ship in a bottle that had been smashed on the floor.
A few minutes later she heaved herself back out through the window. Hagman was still standing on the grass.
“They’ve been in there,” she said, “and they’ve made a real mess… smashed things.”
She held out a clear plastic bag and showed him the bits of wood she had collected-the remains of the model ship.
“Is it one of Gerlof’s?”
Hagman looked sadly at the bits and nodded. “Gerlof has a cottage here in the village… he’s sold ships in bottles and model boats to plenty of the summer visitors.”
Tilda pushed the bag into her jacket pocket. “And you haven’t heard or seen anything at night from these cottages?”
Hagman shook his head.
“No unusual traffic in the area?”
“No,” said Hagman. “I mean, the owners go home to the city in August every year. In September there was a firm out here replacing some floors. But since then there hasn’t…”
Tilda looked at him. “A flooring company?”
“Yes… they worked in these houses for several days. But they made sure everything was properly locked up when they’d finished.”
“It wasn’t a plumbing firm?” said Tilda. “Kalmar Pipes and Welding?”
Hagman shook his head. “They were laying floors,” he said. “Young lads. Several of them.”
“Laying floors…” said Tilda.
She remembered the newly polished floor at the vicarage in Hagelby, and wondered if she’d found a pattern.
“Did you talk to them?”
“No.”
Tilda went around the other cottages nearby with Hagman, and made a note of which ones had broken window frames.
“We need to get in touch with the owners,” she said as they walked back toward the police car. “Have you got contact details for them, John?”
“For some of them, yes,” said Hagman. “Those who have decent manners.”
When Tilda got back to the station, she called a dozen or so owners of cottages on Oland or in the Kalmar area who had reported break-ins during the fall.
Four of the owners she managed to get hold of either had floors sanded or replaced in their summer cottages earlier in the year. They had used a local firm in northern Oland: Marnas Fine Flooring.
She also called the vicarage in Hagelby; the owners were now home from the hospital. Gunnar Edberg still had his hand in a cast, but he was feeling better. They had also used the firm in Marnas to lay a new floor.
“It went really well,” said Edberg. “They were here for five days early on in the summer… but we never saw them, we were in Norway at the time.”
“So you lent them the keys,” said Tilda, “even though you didn’t know who they were?”
“It’s a reliable firm,” said Edberg. “We know the owner, he lives in Marnas.”
“Have you got his number?”
Tilda had the bit between her teeth now, and she called the owner of Marnas Fine Flooring as soon as she finished talking to Gunnar Edberg. She quickly spelled out the purpose of her call: to find out the names of the men who had been working in northern Oland laying floors over the past year. She stressed that they weren’t suspected of any crime, and that the police would appreciate it if the owner didn’t mention her call to his employees.
No problem. The owner of the flooring company gave her two names, along with their addresses and ID numbers.
Both good men, he assured her. Decent, capable, and conscientious. Sometimes they worked together, sometimes separately-usually for residents of the island when they were away on holiday, and in summer cottages out of season when the owners had gone home. There was plenty of work.
Tilda thanked him and asked one last question: Could she have a list of the houses where Lindell and Jansson had worked during the summer and fall?
That information was held on a calendar on the company’s computer system, the owner told her. He would print out the pages and fax them over to her.
When she had hung up, Tilda switched on her own computer and checked out Lindell’s and Jansson’s ID numbers in the police database. Henrik Jansson had been arrested and fined for driving illegally in Borgholm seven years earlier-he had driven a car at the age of seventeen without a license. There was nothing else relating to either him or Lindell.
Then the fax machine whirred into action and the list of jobs carried out by Marnas Fine Flooring started churning out.
