She pushes the wheelchair across the grass. The ground is damp, but the wheels are large and the chair makes slow but steady progress. They pass through the last gate and set out across the alvar.
Vendela is walking with her brother beneath the immense blue sky, heading for the strip of water in the distance. Between the huge lakes on the alvar, with the setting sun at her back. Making straight for the motionless juniper bushes.
‘Nearly there,’ she says.
She can see the elf stone; she leans forward and tenses her leg muscles to get up some speed over the last few hundred metres.
But then they come to a sudden halt. She has got too close to one of the meltwater lakes, where the grass is soaking wet and the soil is loose and muddy. The wheelchair is listing to the right. The big wheels have been sucked down into the mud, and they are stuck.
Jan-Erik remains sitting in the chair at first, but as Vendela heaves and tugs with no success, he lifts himself out of the seat and stands beside her. Vendela hopes he will start walking, but he doesn’t move. He smiles as he watches her struggling with the wheelchair.
She gives up and leaves it where it is. Once more she holds out her arms and picks up her brother, even though there is hardly any strength left in her own legs.
They set off again, heading for the circle of juniper bushes.
She hauls Jan-Erik the last few metres to the elf stone, little by little. While she is tense and sweating, the body she is holding is completely relaxed – he is resting his chin on her shoulder again.
They make their way in among the juniper bushes where the ground is dry and hard, and Vendela makes one last desperate effort to get Jan-Erik to the stone. He places his feet on the grass and walks the last few steps.
At last he is sitting with his back against the rough block.
Vendela looks at the top, and sees that all the hollows in the stone are empty.
The elves have been here, very recently.
She reaches into her pocket and feels the silver chain between her fingers. The last piece of her mother’s jewellery. She places it in one of the hollows.
She breathes out. Then she sinks down on the grass next to her brother between the juniper bushes.
The wind soughs gently. They sit in silence side by side, and Vendela waits. Eventually the birds stop singing around them, one by one, and it grows colder and darker.
Nothing happens. No one comes. Jan-Erik doesn’t move, but Vendela begins to shiver in her thin dress.
In the end, when the night has come and the air is bitterly cold, she cannot sit there any longer. She gets up and looks at her brother. ‘Jan-Erik, we have to go … we need to fetch some food and warmer clothes.’
He smiles and holds up his arms, but she shakes her head. ‘I can’t. You’ll have to walk.’
But he merely looks at her, and remains sitting by the stone.
Vendela starts to back away. She turns around. ‘Wait here, Jan-Erik. I’ll be back.’
52
The Krona grammar school in Kalmar was a collection of reddish-brown buildings extending over half a block. Per arrived there on his way back from Malmo about half an hour before lunchtime, while lessons were still going on. He walked down long, empty corridors and up a flight of stairs to the main office.
In the first room he found a young woman who was hardly likely to have been working there fifteen years earlier, but when she saw him she immediately asked, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Maybe,’ said Per. ‘I’m looking for a former pupil; I think she attended this school in the early eighties.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘That’s what I don’t know. But I do have a picture of her …’
He showed her the photograph of the blonde girl Gerlof Davidsson had found in
‘I’ve inherited an old cottage on Oland,’ he went on, ‘and this picture was in a cupboard with a diary and some letters and other papers. I’d really like to find her and return them.’
He looked at the woman to see if the series of lies was working. She looked closely at the picture and asked, ‘So what makes you think she attended this school?’
‘Because … because there were other pictures of her with a school jumper from here.’
The last part was true, because Gerlof had spotted a jumper from the Krona school in the background of one of the pictures in
‘OK,’ said the woman, ‘it’s probably best if you speak to one of our Maths teachers, Karl Harju. He’s been here since the seventies.’
She got up and escorted Per down the stairs to the empty corridors again, and led him to a classroom with the door closed. ‘You can wait here, it’s almost lunchtime.’
Per waited five minutes, then the door flew open and a motley collection of teenagers came pouring out, laughing and talking in loud voices as they disappeared down the corridor. He watched them go and realized that his own children would be just like that in only a few years.
A middle-aged man in a green cardigan was in the classroom, calmly wiping equations off the board; Per went and stood in the doorway. ‘Karl Harju?’
‘That would be me,’ said the man in a Finland-Swedish accent.
‘I wondered if you might be able to help me with something …’
He walked in and ran through the same mixture of truth and lies once again, and held out the picture from the magazine.
‘Do you recognize her?’ he said. ‘I think she might have studied maths and sciences.’
The teacher looked at the picture with a frown. He nodded. ‘I think her name was Lisa,’ he said. ‘Wait here.’
He got up and left the room, and after almost ten minutes he returned with a folder. ‘They weren’t on the computer system in those days,’ he said. ‘We ought to enter their details now, but …’
He opened the folder and took out a sheet of paper, and Per saw that it was an old class list.
‘Yes, Lisa,’ said the teacher. ‘Lisa Wegner; she was a bit quiet, but she was a nice girl, and very pretty – well, you can see that from the picture. There was a group of girls in that class who were good friends – Lisa, Petra Blomberg, Ulrica Ternman and Madeleine Frick.’
Per could see that there were addresses and telephone numbers on the list, but of course they were fifteen years old.
‘Could I possibly make a note of those?’
‘I’ll do you a photocopy,’ said the teacher.
He handed the copy over to Per and asked, ‘Do you happen to know what became of Lisa? It looks as though this photo has been cut out of a magazine …’
‘Yes, it’s from a monthly magazine,’ said Per. ‘So I expect she was a model, a photographic model, for a little while.’
‘Well I never,’ said Karl Harju. ‘As a teacher I’m always interested to hear what becomes of our charges in later life.’
Per went back to the woman in the school office and asked if he could borrow the local telephone directory. He found only one of the names of the four girls who had been friends at the school: there was an Ulrica Ternman in the area. The address was in Randhult, a village somewhere to the south of the town.
He made a note of the number, went back to his car and called it on his mobile.
