Let the Old Dreams Die (31 page)

‘Several times. He used to travel on the subway like everybody else.’

‘But there was one night…’

I had told Stefan and Karin about the incident several years ago when we had been chatting in general terms about the massacre in the swimming pool. I had been sitting by the ticket barrier at two o’clock in the morning reading Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
when Oskar Eriksson came up from the subway. Some drunk over by the door was singing a song about Fritiof Andersson, and the boy…I told the story again.

‘It was as if a great feeling of happiness suddenly came over him as he stood there. I had been on the point of asking if he was OK, what such a young lad was doing out so late at night, but as he stood there with the drunk singing, it was as if…he started to smile with his whole face and then he
rushed
out of the building as if he was in a tremendous hurry to get to whatever was making him so happy. And then the drunk started pissing in a rubbish bin and—’

‘So what was it? What made him so happy?’

‘No idea. And I wouldn’t have given it a thought if he hadn’t hit the headlines a couple of weeks later.’

‘What could make a twelve-year-old boy so happy?’

‘I don’t know. I was pretty gloomy at that age. Are you still working on this?’

‘I think I always will be.’

During the years that followed Karin would occasionally let slip some further snippet of information. For example, Oskar Eriksson had lived next door to the person who took him away from the swimming pool, and there was also evidence which indicated that Oskar had been in this person’s apartment on at least one occasion.

Some of the odd characters Karin had questioned at the time, the ones who still hung out in the Chinese restaurant or pizzeria as they had done in those days, had said that the dead man who was found in the apartment next door to Oskar had been looking for a child, a youngster who he insisted had killed his best friend. Who was in fact the same man who had been cut out of the ice down below the hospital with a tremendous amount of commotion.

It was a hell of a mess, and the more Karin dug around and puzzled over the case, the more connections she found to other unsolved and inexplicable murders and in the end, just before she retired, she had put forward the only theory that made all the pieces fit: ‘What if it really was a vampire?’

The Chief of Police had tilted his head to one side and asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I say. That the perpetrator really was a creature with supernatural strength, a creature that needs to drink blood in order to survive. It’s the only thing that makes everything fit.’

‘I still don’t understand what you mean.’

Karin had given up at that point. Of course she didn’t believe in the existence of vampires any more than anyone else did, it was just that…it would explain everything. On the other hand, there were plenty of unsolved cases that could be neatly tied up if you just accepted the idea of a supernatural perpetrator. Police
work didn’t sit well with superstition.

During Karin’s final weeks at work she began to think that the counterargument was weak. The reason why so many complex cases could be solved if a mythological figure was the perpetrator could simply be because
that was exactly what had happened
.

She didn’t breathe a word of this to her colleagues or her superiors. However, the Chief of Police had a certain amount of trouble keeping things to himself, and when Karin retired she thought she sensed an air of relief through the celebratory drinks and speeches at the thought of getting rid of somebody who had gone a bit soft in the head in her old age, and sure enough some bastard made a comment about making sure she ate plenty of garlic.

During her last few years at work she had been allowed to spend time on the Oskar Eriksson case only as a concession. When she retired it was regarded as done and dusted, something of a hobby for Karin and nothing more. She would still ring her former colleagues from time to time just to check if anything new had come in, but it never had. The case was dead. Or so everyone thought.

My friendship with Stefan and Karin took a new direction in 1998, when Stefan’s father died. At the age of seventy-eight he had gone out in his skiff to lay nets, fallen in the water and been unable to get out. Stefan inherited a cosy house and a summer cottage in Östernäs on Rådmansö.

The summer cottage had been available to rent for next to nothing, and Stefan and Karin decided to sell it. The cottage was in a very pretty spot up on the cliffs overlooking a cove, and the bidding went mad. Stefan ended up with just under three million kronor.

They told me all this during one of our evenings on the balcony, and then they dropped a bombshell: they were planning to move to Östernäs. I muttered something about Stefan’s job and the difficulty of commuting, but they had worked it all out and come to the
conclusion that the inheritance and Karin’s pension would be enough to keep them afloat for as long as they wanted to stay afloat.

That same autumn I helped them load up the removal van. Then I stood at my window and watched them drive away, feeling as if an era of my life was at an end. Of course we had parted with promises to meet up often, it was only a hundred kilometres after all, there was always a place for me to stay and so on. It was a nice thought, but nothing would be the same from now on.

However, my worst fears came to nothing. Their open invitation really was exactly that, and about once a month I would go over to visit them, staying overnight and travelling back the next day. Sometimes, particularly in the summer, I thought it wasn’t too bad having friends with a veranda overlooking the sea where you could sit drinking wine and chatting into the small hours. It could have been worse. I could have had no friends at all.

Their apartment on Holbergsgatan was taken over by a man from Norrland who had a big dog. I assume he was from Norrland, because that’s what his dialect sounded like when he talked to the dog, which he did quite often. He never spoke to me, nor I to him.

By the time Stefan and Karin had been living on Rådmansö for a couple of years, everything was more or less chugging along as it had always done, by which I mean as it had done before they moved to Blackeberg in 1987. In 2000 I was fifty-six years old, and as I worked my way through
In Search of Lost Time
once more, it struck me that the title of the book doesn’t chime with my perception of time at all.

Time neither flies nor flows nor crawls along. Time stands completely still. We are the ones who move around time, like the apes around the monolith in the film
2001
. Time is black, hard and immovable. We circle around it, and eventually we are sucked into it. I don’t really know what I mean, but that’s how it feels, and you
may or may not believe this, but it’s an uplifting feeling.

Speaking of
2001
, I celebrated the millennium with Stefan and Karin. The much-vaunted computer chaos didn’t happen, and time gazed blindly at us as we entered a new millennium. Age had begun to take its toll on Karin. She suffered from dizzy spells, and the least exertion wore her out. When she fetched champagne from the cellar she had to sit down and recover for a long time before she was able to come out onto the veranda with us to drink a toast as fireworks lit up the winter sky.

In spite of the fact that I fear neither time nor the ageing process—as befits a stoic—it was somewhat painful to see the change in Karin. To me she had always been the very picture of how to grow old attractively, and it cut me to the heart to see her leaning against the oven or bending over the table to recover after doing something as simple as putting more wood on the fire.

If Stefan found it painful too, he never showed it. He would take over some task as if in passing when Karin faltered, and would put his arm around her waist as if in fun, supporting her without making a fuss about it. I left with a good feeling in my heart in spite of everything.

Oh, that heart.

A month later Stefan rang to tell me that Karin had suffered a heart attack. They had spent three days at the hospital in Danderyd, and Karin was due to have an operation a couple of hours later. The coronary arteries were severely affected by atherosclerosis and she needed a major bypass, which was by no means guaranteed to succeed.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, not guaranteed to succeed?’

Stefan took a deep breath, and I could tell he was forcing himself not to cry. ‘There’s a risk that she could die. If the operation fails, then…Karin will die.’

‘Do you want me to come?’

‘Yes. Please.’

I made a few calls and called in a couple of favours to cover my shift that evening and the next, if it should prove necessary. Then I took the subway. As I sat alone in a block of four seats I felt empty-handed. At first I thought it was because I hadn’t got a present with me, but when I changed at Central Station and took the red line I realised the feeling went deeper than that.

I was empty-handed because I had nothing with me that could help or save Karin. I
should
have had something. Stefan had called me, and I had immediately rushed to his rescue. I should be the one who came along with the solution, the one who made everything all right. And I had nothing. Nothing. My own impotence made my lungs ache.

I found my way through the immense hospital complex and found Stefan sitting alone in a waiting room on the third floor. A green linoleum floor with metal-framed chairs and tables dotted around. Our fate is determined in rooms that must be easy to clean. Stefan was slumped over the arm of a two-seater sofa. When I sat down beside him I could see that his skin was grey and his hands were shaking.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he whispered.

I rubbed his back and took his hand, which was dry and unnaturally hot. We sat like that and after a minute or so Stefan started to stroke the back of my hand with the fingers of his other hand. I don’t think he was aware of what he was doing, or whose hand he was holding, because he suddenly stiffened in mid-movement, squeezed my hand and then let go of it.

‘That’s how Karin and I met,’ he said. ‘We were holding hands.’

There was a faint hint of something more cheerful in Stefan’s voice, and I tried to play along. ‘People usually hold hands
after
they’ve met.’

‘Yes. But that’s how it was. It happened when we were holding hands.’

‘Tell me.’

Stefan straightened up, and the ghost of a smile flitted across his lips.

‘It was during the investigation. Into the Oskar Eriksson case. The police called me in, and Karin was conducting the interview. I think I can say that as soon as I sat down in that room, opposite this woman, I…’

Stefan’s gaze wandered to some closed double doors at the end of the corridor, and I sensed that somewhere behind those doors the doctors were trying to save the life of the woman he was talking about.

‘I had information, you see. That’s what she wanted, and I was under no illusions about anything else. Or…I don’t know. Karin has said that she felt something too when I walked into the room. But it wasn’t until we held hands that it…blossomed.’

‘I still don’t understand. Why were you holding hands? It’s not usually part of a police interview, as far as I know.’

Stefan gave a snort and a little of the greyness in his skin disappeared; there was a slight pinkness in his cheeks.

‘No, sorry. I’ll have to tell you the story. The story I told Karin at the time.’

Stefan had punched the boy’s ticket and wondered about his luggage, but hadn’t given the matter any more thought because the boy had told him he would have help later on. Stefan had finished his shift in Karlstad and spent an hour or so in the staffroom at the station while he waited for the train back to Stockholm.

Fifteen minutes before the train was due he went for a stroll around the station to get some air in his lungs in the chilly November evening before spending several hours in the stale air on the train.

That’s when he spotted the boy again. Next to the station there
was a small grove, an open space surrounded by deciduous shrubs where people could wait for the train in the summer. The grove was illuminated by a single floodlight, and Stefan saw Oskar Eriksson sitting on the trunk he had had with him on the train. A girl with black hair was sitting beside him.

‘And of course I reacted because the girl was only wearing a T-shirt, even though it was well below freezing. The boy, Oskar, was fully dressed in a jacket and everything. But they were sitting side by side on that trunk. And they were holding hands. Like this.’

Stefan held up his right hand, then gently took my left wrist and raised my hand to his, weaving our fingers together and rubbing our palms together before letting go.

‘It was when I was telling Karin about the children sitting there holding hands. She didn’t understand what I meant. So I had to show her, just as I showed you. And that was when it happened. As we sat there with our hands joined just like the children, that was when… we looked into each other’s eyes and that was when…it started.’

Stefan’s voice had grown weaker and weaker, and as he uttered the final words he collapsed and began to weep. He bent over his knees, the sobs tearing his body apart as he whispered, ‘Karin, Karin, Karin. My darling, darling Karin, please don’t die…’

My hands were empty, and all I could do with them was to stroke his back as he continued to whisper his prayer beneath the cold, indifferent fluorescent light. There should be storm-lashed rocks or the hall of the Mountain King. But our lives are weighed in cold, white light, and is it even possible to imagine that anyone hears our prayers?

The doors at the end of the corridor opened and a man of about our age dressed in a white T-shirt and green scrubs came towards us. Stefan didn’t see him, and I tried to read the man’s expression to work out what Stefan could expect. It was completely neutral, and I couldn’t prepare myself one way or the other.

The man nodded to me and said, ‘Larsson? Stefan Larsson?’

Stefan gave a start and turned his tear-stained face to the man, who smiled at long last.