Echoes From the Dead

30

Gerlof sat in silence in the passenger seat beside Gunnar Ljunger, his back rigid as they headed out into the wilderness south of Marnäs. The conversation he had tried to start had foundered, because Ljunger didn’t answer him. All Gerlof could do was to go along with him, trying to unbutton his overcoat and struggle out of it, because the heat inside the car was positively tropical. Perhaps there was some way to regulate the air vents on the passenger side himself, but he didn’t know how. Everything seemed to be controlled electronically, and if Gunnar knew he was increasingly uncomfortable, he made no attempt to help him.

They were near the east coast of the island now. The car was driving slowly along a two-foot-high embankment, several yards wide, running through the flat landscape. Gerlof recognized where he was. This was where the railway had crossed the alvar, before the national rail company closed it down.

He looked at his watch. It was almost five o’clock.

“I think I’ll have to get back now, Gunnar,” he said quietly. “They’ll soon be starting to wonder where I am at the home in Marnäs.”

“Maybe,” Ljunger said, nodding, “but they’re hardly likely to start looking for you out here, are they?”

The threat was so blatant that Gerlof turned away from him and started tugging at the door handle.

The Jaguar wasn’t moving at a great speed and he would have been able to throw himself out, he might even have managed to avoid breaking any bones and made his way back to the main road before dark — but it was impossible to open the passenger door. Ljunger had locked it using some kind of remote control device.

“Gunnar, I want to get out,” he said, trying to sound decisive, like the sea captain he had once been.

“Soon,” said Ljunger, driving on.

They crossed an old rusty cattle grid between two stone walls, and beyond it the Baltic finally appeared. The sea looked gray and cold.

“Why are you doing this, Gunnar?” asked Gerlof.

“Actually, it was quite unplanned,” said Ljunger. “I was following the bus from Borgholm, and I saw you get off at the southern turning for Stenvik. All I had to do was head straight to the northern turning, drive through the village, then pick you up.” Ljunger slowed down even more, and turned to face him. “What were you doing at Martin Malm’s today, Gerlof?”

Gerlof felt as if he’d been found out. He took his time before answering.

“At Martin’s?” he said. “What do you mean?”

“You and John Hagman,” said Ljunger. “You went in and John waited outside.”

“Yes. Martin and I had a bit of a chat... We’re both old sailors, after all,” said Gerlof, and added: “How do you know about that?”

“Ann-Britt Malm called me on my cell phone while you were sitting there talking over old times with Martin,” said Ljunger. “She was worried about all these visits Martin keeps getting from old sea captains... first Ernst Adolfsson, and now you. Twice in the last few weeks, apparently. It’s been pretty busy at Martin’s house.”

“So you and Ann-Britt are good friends,” said Gerlof wearily.

Ljunger nodded. “Martin and I are former business associates, but you don’t get much of a conversation with him these days,” he said. “Ann-Britt looks after his affairs, and she usually asks me for advice.”

Gerlof leaned back in his seat. Might as well stop pretending the sun was shining now. He couldn’t see anything out the window but darkness and blowing rain.

“Associates,” he said. “You worked together for quite some time, didn’t you? Ever since the fifties?”

He reached into his briefcase and took out the book about Malm Freight again.

“I showed Martin this picture,” he said, “and I’ve looked at it many times... but it took a long time before I saw what was really there.”

“Oh yes?” said Gunnar, swerving around a clump of low-growing trees. They must be near the sea, Gerlof thought. “But now you have? Seen what’s really there?”

Gerlof nodded. “There are two powerful men on the quayside in Ramneby: August Kant, the factory owner, and Martin Malm, the captain of a cargo ship, standing in a group of young sawmill workers. And August’s hand appears to be resting on Martin’s shoulder in a friendly gesture. But it isn’t August Kant’s hand. It belongs to the man standing behind Martin Malm on the quayside. I only noticed it a little while ago, on the bus.”

“A picture speaks more than a thousand words,” said Ljunger, braking. “Isn’t that what they say?”

The eastern shore of the island was now in front of them, on the far side of a grassy meadow that had turned yellow. The rain was falling over both land and water, a cold rain that really wanted to be snow.

“And the man standing behind Martin Malm is a sawmill worker called Gunnar Johansson. Who later changed his name,” said Gerlof. “Isn’t that right?”

“Not quite, I was a foreman at the mill at the time,” said Ljunger. “But it’s true, I did change my name to Ljunger when I came to Öland.”

He switched off the engine and everything went very quiet. The only sound was the wind and the rain.

“That picture should never have been included in the book,” said Ljunger. “It was Ann-Britt who put it in, I didn’t even know about it until after the book had been printed. But only you and Ernst Adolfsson recognized me. Ernst remembered me from school...”

“He grew up in Ramneby,” said Gerlof. “For me it wasn’t that easy to recognize you. But one thing I am wondering...”

He knew he was close to the end now; Ljunger would kill him, just as he had murdered Ernst.

“... I’m wondering, you were a foreman at the sawmill and you must have heard the stories about August Kant’s terrible nephew Nils. Was that when you got the idea to...”

“I actually met him,” Ljunger broke in.

“Who?” said Gerlof. “Nils Kant?”

“Nils, yes.” Ljunger nodded. “I’d started as an errand boy at the sawmill after the war, and Nils came there, he’d escaped from Öland on the run from the police. He was creeping around in the bushes when he spotted me on the road. He told me to go and speak to August Kant. And I did, but the boss didn’t want to know a thing about his killer nephew. He shoved five one-hundred-krona notes at me to give to Nils, to get rid of him. I pocketed two of them and gave Nils three.” Ljunger was smiling at the memory. “Then I lived like a king on the money for the rest of the summer.”

“So you realized early on that there was money to be made out of Nils Kant,” said Gerlof, looking out through the windshield at the rain.

“Yes,” said Ljunger, “but not exactly how much there was to be made. I had no idea. I thought I might get a few thousand and a free trip across the Atlantic to fetch Nils, maybe, when all the fuss had died down. That was what I suggested to August, once he’d made me foreman at the mill, but the old man turned me down flat. He wasn’t in the least interested in bringing the black sheep of the family home to Sweden.”

He lifted his hand and pressed a button next to the steering wheel, and there was a click in the door beside Gerlof.

“It’s open now,” he said. “Get out.”

Gerlof stayed where he was.

“But you didn’t give up,” he said, looking at Ljunger. “When August said no, you contacted Nils’s mother, Vera Kant, in Stenvik. You made her the same offer. And she said yes, didn’t she?”

Gunnar Ljunger sighed, as if he had a particularly stubborn child sitting next to him. He gazed out through the windshield at the coastal landscape.

“It was Vera who made me discover this beautiful island,” he said. “I came here for the first time in the summer of ’58. I took the ferry across to Stora Rör, then the train north. They were in the process of closing down the railway at that time, and seafaring on Öland was coming to an end too. I suppose many people thought Öland was dying... but I heard people on the train talking about a bridge that might be built. A long bridge, so that people could get off the island when they wanted to. And so that people from the mainland could come here.”

“The rich people from the mainland,” said Gerlof.

“Exactly.” Ljunger took a deep breath. “And then I came up here to northern Öland and discovered the sunshine and all the beaches where you could swim. Plenty of sunshine and water, but hardly any tourists. So I’d been doing some thinking, even before I knocked on the door of Vera Kant’s house in Stenvik.” He sighed. “Vera was sitting there in her big house, all alone and longing for her son. I started talking to her.”

“Lonely and unhappy,” said Gerlof. “But extremely rich.”

“Not as rich as you might think,” said Ljunger. “The quarry was well on the way to closing, and her brother had claimed the family sawmill in Småland.”

“She was rich in land,” said Gerlof wearily. “Land along the coast... beach land.”

He wondered how he was going to die. Did Ljunger have some kind of weapon with him? Or was he going to pick up one of the millions of stones on Öland and simply smash Gerlof’s skull, more or less as he had done with Ernst?

“Vera had a great deal of land, yes,” said Ljunger. “I don’t think anybody in Stenvik actually realized how much land that old woman owned, both north and south of Stenvik. Of course it was worthless as long as she didn’t do anything with it, but the right person would be able to take it over and sell it to people from the mainland... In the fifties there were only a few summer cottages up here, but I knew there’d be a demand for plenty more — and hotels and restaurants too. And when the bridge was built, the prices would skyrocket.”

“So you got Långvik from Vera,” said Gerlof.

“I got nothing.” Ljunger shook his head. “I bought all her land, perfectly legally. At a very low price, of course, and with money I’d borrowed from Vera, but it’s all documented and perfectly legal.”

“And Martin Malm borrowed money from her for bigger ships.”

“Exactly. We’d met when Martin was transporting timber to Ramneby,” said Ljunger, nodding. “I needed reliable people to work with... somebody who would bring Nils’s coffin home from overseas, and later Nils himself. Of course it was going to have to be some time before Nils could come home, because the minute he did, Vera would stop giving me land. I realized that, naturally.”

He smiled at Gerlof with satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

Ljunger opened the driver’s door.

Gerlof looked out through the windshield. He saw a desolate meadow leading to the shore, with the wind and rain pressing the grass down to the darkened ground.

“What’s here?” he asked.

“Not much,” said Ljunger, getting out of the car. “You’ll see.”