“And the road?”
“Gone,” said Joakim. “There’s just snow.”
“In the old days it used to take at least a week to get through to some properties after a blizzard,” said Gerlof. “But it’s quicker these days.”
“We’ll be fine,” said Joakim. “I did as you said and bought plenty of tinned stuff.”
“Good. Are you and the children alone now?”
“No, we still have one guest here. We did have several visitors, but they’ve gone…It’s been quite a difficult Christmas.”
“I know,” said Gerlof. “Tilda called me this morning from the hospital. She’d been catching burglars out at your place.”
“They came here to steal paintings,” said Joakim. “Torun Rambe’s paintings… They’d got it into their heads that they were here somewhere.”
“Oh?”
“But we only have one painting here. Almost all the others were destroyed, but not by Torun or her daughter Mirja. It was a fisherman who threw them in the sea.”
“When was that?”
“Winter 1962.”
“Sixty-two,” said Gerlof. “That was the year my brother Ragnar froze to death on the coast.”
“Ragnar Davidsson… was he your brother?” said Joakim.
“My older brother.”
“I don’t think he froze to death,” said Joakim. “I think he was poisoned.”
Then he told Gerlof what he had read in Mirja Rambe’s book about her last night at Eel Point, and about the eel fisherman who set off into the storm. Gerlof listened without asking any questions.
“It sounds as if Ragnar drank wood alcohol,” was all he said. “It’s supposed to taste like ordinary schnapps, but of course it makes you ill. It kills you, in fact.”
“I suppose Mirja saw it as some kind of fair punishment,” said Joakim.
“But did he really destroy the paintings?” said Gerlof. “I’m just wondering. If my brother got hold of something, he kept it… he was too mean to destroy things.”
Joakim was silent. He was thinking.
“There was something else, before I forget,” said Gerlof. “I’ve recorded something for you.”
“Recorded?”
“I’ve been sitting here doing some thinking,” said Gerlof. “It’s a tape with a few ideas about what happened at Eel Point… you’ll get it when they start delivering the mail again.”
Half an hour after Gerlof had hung up, the police called from Kalmar to say they would be coming to collect the suspect from Eel Point-if Joakim could just find them a piece of flat, open ground near the house where a helicopter could land.
“We’ve got plenty of flat ground around here,” said Joakim.
Then he went out and shoveled a square in the field behind the house, hacking away the ice so that a black cross in the frozen ground marked the spot. When he heard a throbbing sound in the southwest, he went in and interrupted Freddy’s viewing.
“Are those your cars?” Joakim asked as they were waiting out in the field. He pointed to a couple of curved mounds of snow on the road down to Eel Point. A few blunt metal corners were protruding from the drifts.
Freddy nodded. “And a boat,” he said.
“Stolen?”
“Yeah.”
Then the helicopter swept in over the field and it was impossible to talk anymore. It hovered for a moment, whirling white clouds up from the ground, before landing in the center of the cross.
Two police officers wearing helmets and dark jumpsuits climbed out and came over to them. Freddy went along with them, without making any kind of protest.
“Are you all okay here now?” shouted one of the police officers.
Joakim simply nodded. Freddy waved, and he waved back briefly.
When the helicopter had vanished in the direction of the
mainland, Joakim plowed back through the snow, over toward the road and the two snow-covered vehicles.
He brushed away the snow from the sides of the largest of them, a van. Then he peered inside.
Someone was sitting in there, motionless.
Joakim seized the handle and opened the door.
It was a man, curled up as if he had desperately tried to preserve the warmth in the driver’s seat.
Joakim didn’t need to feel the man’s pulse to realize he was dead.
The key was in the ignition and it was switched on. The engine must have been ticking over until it stopped sometime during the night, and the cold began to creep back into the van again.
Joakim closed the door gently. Then he went back to the house to call the police and tell them the last burglar had been found.
43
The wind stayed away and the sun kept on shining over Eel Point for the next few days.
The snow didn’t start to thaw, but now and again a piece of the white edging hanging from the roofs came loose and fell soundlessly into the drifts on the ground. The garden birds were back outside the kitchen window, and on the morning of the twenty-sixth the isolation from the outside world was broken when a truck with a huge plow in front of it drove over from Marnas. It kept going in a straight line out along the coast road, but looked as if it were rolling along through a white sea.
When he got out the blower and starting blowing away the snow leading from the house, Joakim’s goal was to reach the plowed main road in an hour. It took more than two hours, but after that they could get out easily once again.
Joakim put new batteries in his flashlight, went out onto the veranda steps and over to the barn.
The staircase leading to the loft was black and in pieces after the fire, but there was no sign of any smoke anywhere.
He looked over toward the other end of the barn. He hesitated, but then went over and crawled in under the false wall.
Inside the hidden room he switched on the flashlight and listened for sounds from the upper floor, but there was nothing. Then he climbed up the ladder.
Pale sunlight filtered in through the cracks in the wall as he pulled himself up into the prayer room.
Everything was quiet. The letters and mementos still lay on the old wooden benches, but no one was sitting there.
He started to move along the rows. When he reached the front, he saw that both the Christmas present for Katrine and Ethel’s jacket were still there.
But the parcel had been opened. The tape had been pulled away and the paper folded to one side.
Joakim left the parcel where it was; he didn’t dare look to see if the green tunic was gone.
Instead he picked up Ethel’s denim jacket for the first time-and suddenly his fingers felt a small, flat object sliding around inside the fabric.
Joakim had placed the denim jacket in a plastic bag when Inspector Gote Holmblad arrived in his own car, two days after Christmas.
By this time an ambulance and a breakdown truck had already been to Eel Point and taken away the body of the last suspect. The crime scene team had also been there, digging for bullets in the snow. On the local radio news, Tommy had been reported as one of two deaths at the house during the snowstorm, although he wasn’t mentioned by name. The storm over northern Oland was already being referred to as “the Christmas blizzard,” and
