The boy didn’t say anything at first. He seemed to be thinking it over, then he decided he could trust Per.
‘I’ll show you.’
He got to his feet and picked up the box. It had no bottom, and hidden in the grass underneath it was an old rusty biscuit tin. The boy removed the lid and showed Per what was inside.
‘I need the box to reach the top of the stone,’ he said. ‘There’s nearly always something new up there.’
Per saw that the tin was half full of coins and small pieces of silver jewellery.
And on top lay a shiny wedding ring.
66
That evening Gerlof was sitting in his garden with a blanket over his legs. He thought he could hear the sound of distant sirens from the main road. Ambulance, fire engine or police?
Probably an ambulance. Somebody at the home in Marnas who had had a heart attack, perhaps? No doubt he would read about it in the paper sooner or later.
He had gone back to his chair out on the lawn after dinner, and didn’t want to go inside. It was Walpurgis Night, after all, the high point of spring, the night when every student in Sweden went out to welcome in the month of May. You couldn’t just sit indoors.
The sky was beginning to grow darker, and a breeze rustled through the tree tops above him. The birds around the garden fell silent, one by one. When the sun had gone down it would be a cold evening; there might even be a touch of frost during the night. It wasn’t really the weather to be sitting outside; he would go in soon and watch the news on TV.
Gerlof refused to ponder on riddles and mysteries these days, as he had told Per Morner, but the ideas came anyway. He had been incurably fixated on puzzling out mysteries since childhood, and now he was sitting here with the diary thinking about Ella’s changeling, who must have been Henry Fors’s son.
But where had he gone? He had been running north towards the sea when Ella saw him that last evening, but what had happened when he reached Henry at the edge of the quarry?
A quarrel, followed by a killing? Or an accident? In which case, if the boy was dead, he was probably buried beneath one of the piles of reject stone.
If Gerlof’s legs had been healthy and ten years younger, he would have got up out of his chair that very minute and gone straight to the quarry to start searching. But his body was too old and stiff, and after all he wasn’t absolutely certain that Henry had hidden his son’s body there.
And where would he search, given the amount of reject stone there was?
Gerlof suddenly realized he was longer fixated on his own death; he hadn’t really thought about his forthcoming demise since Easter. He had been too busy. Ella’s diaries had helped him in that respect. Or perhaps it was the new neighbours and their problems that had made him forget his own.
He shivered in his chair, despite the blanket. It had grown noticeably colder as the evening drew in, and he got to his feet.
He could hear the sound of a car on the village road. More and more cars had been passing along there in the last few weeks, most of them driving far too fast for the narrow road – but this one sounded as if it were moving very slowly. He heard it brake and stop, but the engine kept on running, strangely enough.
Gerlof was expecting to see a visitor at the garden gate, but no one appeared.
He waited for a few more minutes, then made his way towards the sound of the engine, leaning on his stick for support. He felt slightly wobbly on the grass, but kept his balance.
When he reached the gate he saw a car had stopped on the road; a man in a cap was sitting behind the wheel holding something in his hand.
Gerlof didn’t recognize him. An early tourist? He grabbed hold of the gatepost and stood there just a few metres from the road, but the man didn’t appear to have noticed him. In the end Gerlof cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Do you need any help?’
He hadn’t shouted loudly, but the man turned his head and caught sight of him. He looked surprised, almost caught out somehow.
Gerlof suddenly saw that the object the man was holding was a plastic bottle. A litre bottle containing some kind of red liquid, which he was mixing with a fluid from a smaller glass container. There were strings of some sort attached to the bottle.
‘Are you lost?’ he called out.
The driver shook his head, then put down the bottle and grabbed the wheel with his left hand. Gerlof saw something glint on his wrist.
The man quickly put the car in gear with his right hand, and it moved away.
Gerlof stayed where he was, watching it disappear in the direction of the sea. It slowed down when it reached the coast road and turned right, heading north towards the quarry.
He let go of the gatepost, leaned on his stick and managed to turn around without falling over. He headed back towards his chair, but stopped a few metres away and thought about what the man in the car might have been up to.
He wasn’t happy about what he had just seen. In fact, the situation was so bad that the evening seemed to have grown even colder.
He set off again, but towards the cottage this time. He managed to haul himself up the steps with the help of the iron railing, and went into the living room. He could still remember the telephone number for Ernst’s cottage, and keyed it in with a trembling finger.
The phone rang out twelve times, but neither Per Morner nor anyone else answered.
Gerlof put the phone down. He blinked and assessed the situation.
Eighty-three years old, with rheumatism and hearing difficulties. And the first butterflies he had seen this year had been a yellow one and a black one.
Things could go well, or they could just as easily go very badly.
Gerlof didn’t know if he could manage it, but he just had to get himself over to the quarry to see if Per needed any help.
67
As Per made his way back towards the coast, the shadows across the alvar were even longer than before. The sun hovered in front of him like a gold disc in a narrow blue strip between the clouds and the horizon.
He was very tired. The last thing he had done up by the road was to call Max Larsson and explain that he had found Vendela unconscious out on the alvar, but that she had come round and was on her way to the hospital in Kalmar. After that he had set off home, heading west.
Less than fourteen hours to go.
He thought about it when he got back to the spot where he had come across Vendela and the boy keeping watch beside her – back by the dense thicket of juniper bushes and the big rock in the centre.
The elf stone.
He had lingered for a while. This was where he and Vendela had sat a few evenings earlier, exchanging secrets. He had told her things about himself and his father that he hadn’t told anyone else, and she had told him that she was the one who wrote most of Max’s books.
Per had remained by the stone for a few minutes looking at the empty hollows in its surface. Then he had taken out his wallet and placed a note in one of them, with a few coins on top.
Wishful thinking.
He knew what he was doing, but he couldn’t help seeing Nilla’s face in his mind’s eye as he let go of the coins. He couldn’t help making a wish as he stood there by the stone – offering money and praying for a
