Part 26 (2/2)

And that was when I was given the final piece of the information available on Oskar Eriksson. Stefan went back to what he had told me at the hospital, about the two children holding hands, which in turn had become the beginning of Stefan and Karin's story.

'But that wasn't quite all. The girl was about to kill me.' He stole a glance at his wife. 'According to Karin.'

'It's just a theory,' she said. 'Which very few people would subscribe to.'

'Anyway,' said Stefan. 'The children were sitting on the trunk rubbing their hands against each other's. I was on my way over to say something, since the girl was so inadequately dressed, and then... she turned to face me.'

Stefan grimaced with pain and clicked the morphine pump a couple of times; he took a deep breath and slowly let it out again, closing his eyes. A couple of minutes pa.s.sed without anyone saying anything; the only sound was the lapping of the waves on the sh.o.r.e and the faint ticking of the infra-red heater. I had started to think he wasn't going to say any more when Stefan exhaled once again and went on: 'So. I know this sounds strange. She was a child of perhaps twelve, thirteen, but when our eyes met I felt two things, as clear as a revelation: firstly that she intended to kill me, and secondly that she was capable of doing so. Because I had disturbed them. When she jumped off the trunk and I saw that she had a knife in her hand, the feeling didn't exactly diminish. We were standing a couple of metres apart. I looked at her and the boy, saw what they were up to. The girl looked as if she was on the point of hurling herself at me when the guard shouted that my train had arrived. I think that saved me. I backed away, and she stayed where she was with the knife in her hand.'

Stefan lit a cigarette and sighed with pleasure as he inhaled deeply. He looked at the cigarette and shook his head. 'Being able to smoke again. It's almost worth it.'

Karin thumped him on the shoulder. 'Don't say that, silly.'

'So what were they up to?' I asked. 'The children?'

Stefan ran his index finger down his palm.

'She'd cut her hand. So that it bled. He'd done the same. They were sitting there mixing their blood. That was why they were holding hands like that. And that's why Karin has her theory. Which isn't exactly popular with the police.'

'We know so little, we human beings,' said Karin. 'We know almost nothing.'

We gazed out over the sea and considered this while Stefan sucked on his cigarette. When he had stubbed it out he said, 'Do you know what the worst thing is? It's not the fact that I'm going to die. It's all the dreams I had. Which have to die. Which will never be fulfilled. On the other hand...' Stefan looked at Karin's hand, which was resting on the table. 'On the other hand there are so many that have been fulfilled. So perhaps it doesn't really matter.'

I don't remember what else was said that evening, but it was to be the last time I saw Stefan and Karin. At that stage Stefan's condition had been critical but stable, and the doctors believed he had at least a few months left, so when we said goodbye there was nothing to suggest that it would be forever.

But something intervened.

When I rang on the Monday a couple of weeks later, no one answered the phone. When there was no answer the following day either, I started to worry. On the Wednesday I received a card with a Stockholm postmark. It was a picture of Arlanda airport, and on the back it said, 'Let the old dreams die. We are dreaming new ones. Thank you for everything, dearest friend. Stefan and Karin.'

I turned the postcard over and over, but I was none the wiser. Arlanda? Let the old dreams...had they gone abroad? Was there some new treatment available elsewhere? It seemed highly unlikely. After all, that was why I had taken the news so hard; I knew as well as they did that pancreatic cancer was untreatable. Anywhere.

I was free on the Sat.u.r.day and caught the bus to osternas. I had a spare key to their house and permission to use the place whenever they were away. However, I still felt uncomfortable as I unlocked the front door and called out, 'h.e.l.lo? Anyone home?' As if I were barging into something private. But I had to find out.

The house had recently been cleaned, and a faint smell of detergent lingered in the wooden floor. There wasn't a sound, and it was obvious that no one was at home. But still I crept through the hallway as if I were afraid of disturbing some delicate balance.

The fridge had been emptied and the water heater switched off. No radiators were on, and it was quite cold inside the house. When I opened Stefan's wardrobe to borrow a sweater, I saw that quite a lot of his clothes were missing. They had gone away, that much was clear. I pulled on a yellow woollen cardigan with big b.u.t.tons that Stefan loathed; he had kept it only because I used to borrow it when we were sitting on the veranda.

I went through the house and found more signs of a well-organised but definitive departure. The few photograph alb.u.ms they owned were gone, along with a number of favourite alb.u.ms from the CD rack. Eventually I found myself standing outside Karin's study. If the answer wasn't in there, then there was no answer to be found. I cautiously opened the door.

Yes, I might as well admit it. With every door I opened I was afraid I would find the two of them in a deathly embrace, in the best-case scenario achieved with an overdose of Stefan's morphine, in the worst-case with more obvious means.

But there were no beautiful corpses in Karin's study either. There was, however, a printout of a receipt, along with an envelope containing a photograph. Both were neatly laid out on the desk, as if they had been placed there so that I would find them.

The receipt was for plane tickets. Two one-way tickets to Barcelona, four days earlier. So far so good. They had gone to Spain. The photograph, however, made no sense at all. It showed a group of people who were presumably a family. Mother, father and two children standing on a street at night, brightly lit by the camera's flashbulb. The signs around them were in Spanish and Catalan, so it wasn't a great stretch to a.s.sume they were in Barcelona.

I looked at the envelope. It had been sent by the National Police Board a week earlier, and was addressed to Karin. Right down in the bottom corner someone had written 'Something for you, maybe?' and drawn a smiley. When I looked inside the envelope again I found a short letter from someone who lived in Blackeberg and had known Oskar Eriksson very well. He apologised for wasting police time, said the whole thing was completely crazy of course, but he asked them to look carefully at the enclosed photograph.

I did as the letter asked, and took a closer look at the picture. I thought I knew what he meant, but looked around on the desk for a magnifying gla.s.s. Instead I found an enlargement of the relevant part of the picture, which Karin had presumably printed out herself.

There was no doubt. Once I had seen the enlargement, it was as clear as day on the first picture too. To one side behind the family were two people who happened to have been caught in the camera flash. One was Oskar Eriksson, and the other was a slender girl with long, black hair. In spite of the fact that the photograph must have been taken immediately after his disappearance, Oskar had changed his hairstyle; it was cut short in a way that was more fas.h.i.+onable among young people today.

I remembered him as a chubby child, but the boy in the picture was considerably slimmer, and as he had been caught on the run, so to speak, he actually looked quite athletic. I looked at the enlargement again, and Stefan's story about what had happened in Karlstad came back to me. There was something vaguely menacing about the way the two children were moving behind the smiling, unsuspecting family. Like predators.

Then I spotted something that made me gasp. The father of the family was holding a mobile phone, and not just any mobile phone, but an iPhone. How long had they been around? A year? Two years?

I turned the photograph over and read the words in the bottom right-hand corner.

Barcelona, September 2008.

The photograph had been taken barely a month ago.

I sat at Karin's desk for a long time, looking from the receipt for the plane tickets to the photograph of Oskar Eriksson and the girl with black hair, moving through the night. And I thought about how the end can be encapsulated in the beginning, and I thought about Stefan and Karin, my dearest friends.

It's been two years now. I haven't heard if they're alive, but nor have I heard that they're dead.

Let the old dreams die. We are dreaming new ones.

I hope they found what they were looking for.

To hold you while the music plays.

I want you to understand something. Are you listening? Yes. I want you to understand...it's important to me that you understand...I'm not doing this because I enjoy it. Can you understand that? I'm not going to enjoy this. This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you.

You're laughing. Yes, OK.

But you understand...the whole point is that it will hurt me too. That's the whole point. Can you understand that?

Of course you're not as au fait with these matters as I am. But if you were. If you had devoted an entire lifetime. To trying to...grasp. These issues. Then I think...

Did everything work out OK with the money?

Good.

I mean, it hasn't been all that easy for me to...stage this, as you perhaps realise. Neither when it comes to you, nor to those who will be here in ten minutes. You don't exactly belong to...my normal circle of friends, if I can put it that way. It's dead, incidentally.

My normal circle of friends. Is dead. Nothing strange about that. It's time. Of those who attended the seminary with me, only I and one other are still alive.

The seminary. That's where you train. That's what it's called. The seminary for priests.

I don't want you to drink any more now.

Good.

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