Let The Old Dreams Die Part 25

'Were there other people who saw him?'

'You'd have to ask Karin about that.'

'Sorry,' said Karin, pouring more wine into my gla.s.s by way of compensation. 'It's an ongoing investigation and I can't...you understand.'

'But I mean it's...what is it...five years ago?'

'It's an ongoing investigation.'

And that was the end of that. For the time being.

This was an unusually striking example, because it was to do with a professional code of conduct, but I noticed that in general terms there were clear delineations with both of them when it came to boundaries. What they were prepared to say and what they were not prepared to say, particularly in matters to do with their relations.h.i.+p. During the twenty-three years of our friends.h.i.+p I never asked a question about their s.e.x life, for example. The way they touched one another, the looks and the s.n.a.t.c.hed kisses indicated that they probably had quite an active one, but I instinctively knew it wasn't something they wished to discuss with other people.

I have never met a couple with such integrity, such closeness as those two. They comprised their own little universe. I won't deny that I sometimes felt quite sad in their company, especially if we'd had a few gla.s.ses of wine. We would sit there having a lovely time, chatting and laughing, but I was the one who had to get up and go home alone at some point. However much we all liked each other, I was on the outside.

They weren't perfect by any means. More than once I thought that part of the reason they valued my company was that they wanted a witness. Someone who would gaze appreciatively at their love and confer the seal of approval. They lapped it up like cats when I said something about how terrific they were together, what a miracle it was that two people...and so on. A kind of vanity. Look how wonderful we are together.

But that's just a footnote. The love was there, and it was a great and true love, and even love can be permitted a certain amount of conceit, after all.

The years pa.s.sed and we grew closer. They didn't spend much time with other people; they seemed perfectly content in each other's company, and I think I can say with confidence that I was the only one they let into their life to any extent.

In 1994 Karin retired. I apologise if that comes as something of a shock, but I felt the same when I found out about the age difference between them. Stefan was born in 1945, which meant he was a year younger than me, while Karin was born in 1929. My initial impression was that there were perhaps seven or eight years between them. But in fact it was sixteen. The combination of her bright eyes and long blonde hair had misled me, coupled with the fact that Stefan had something of the old man about him.

So Karin retired while Stefan carried on travelling around on the trains, princ.i.p.ally the route from Stockholm to Oslo and back. As I said I worked mainly evenings and nights, so I had quite a bit of spare time during the day. Karin and I weren't quite as easy with each other when it was just the two of us as Stefan and I were, but after a year or so and a number of shared coffee breaks, we had reached a level with which we were both comfortable.

In fact it was while we were having coffee one day that she told me the Oskar Eriksson case was still occupying her mind, in spite of the fact that it was no longer her job. Perhaps because she had retired she felt able to disclose a little more.

'It's not true at all,' she said. 'The official version, it's not true at all.'

'What do you mean?' I asked tentatively, anxious not to break the atmosphere that had led her to bring up the subject.

'First of all, there was blood on the ceiling in the swimming pool. On the ceiling. And it was directly above the water. Five metres above the water. Given the way it had spurted, someone would have had to climb up a ladder to splash it on the ceiling. A ladder that was standing in the actual pool. The blood came from the victim whose head was torn off.'

'Chopped off, you mean?'

'No. Torn off. And you can't imagine the strength it would take to do that. Try pulling apart a Christmas ham with your bare hands-and you don't even have a skeleton to contend with in that case. You know the old custom of executing people by getting horses to pull them apart?'

'Yes.'

'That's just a form of torture. Horses aren't capable of pulling off even an arm or a leg. You have to help out by chopping. And that's horses.'

'Which are very strong animals.'

'Yes. Elephants can do it. But not horses. And most definitely not people.'

'So what did happen, then?'

Karin sat without speaking for a long time, gazing out of the window as if she was trying to use X-ray vision to penetrate the buildings that prevented her from looking into the boarded-up swimming pool four hundred metres away.

'There was a blow, a cut,' she said eventually. 'Which allowed the tearing-off process to begin, so to speak. But it wasn't done by a knife. We also found another victim, an elderly man, in an apartment...' The latter remarks were made mostly to herself, and she blinked a couple of times as if she were waking up. She looked at me. 'Oskar Eriksson. You saw him once, didn't you?'

'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 ma.s.sacre 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 p.i.s.sing 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 h.e.l.l 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 superst.i.tion.

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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 osternas on Rdmanso.

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 bombsh.e.l.l: they were planning to move to osternas. 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 a.s.sume 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 Rdmanso 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sing 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 bypa.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.p.a.ce 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-s.h.i.+rt, 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-s.h.i.+rt 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.

'I just wanted to tell you that the operation went extremely well. No complications, and I think I can promise that your wife will experience a considerable improvement in her quality of life once she gets through the rehabilitation stage.'

I put my arm around Stefan's shoulders, but his mouth was hanging open and he didn't seem to understand what he had been told.

'It went...well?'

'As I said, it went extremely well. The blood vessels we took from your wife's leg to replace those that were damaged were of a surprisingly high quality for a woman of her age. In all probability her heart will work much better in a couple of months than it did before.' The doctor held up a warning finger. 'But the smoking. The smoking...'

Stefan leapt to his feet and looked as if he might be on the point of giving the doctor a hug, but he came to his senses and merely grabbed his upper arms.

'She's not going to so much as look at a cigarette packet from now on, and neither am I! Thank you, doctor! Thank you! Thank you!'

The doctor gave a brief nod and said, 'She's in the recovery room at the moment, but you can see her in a couple of hours. We'll be keeping her in for a few days.'

'You can keep her for a month as long as she gets better.'

'She's going to be fine.'

The doctor's predictions were correct. Two days after the operation Karin was allowed to go home, and after only three weeks she was able to go for walks in a way that had been impossible for her for years. It wasn't so much the weakness of her heart as the pain from the scars on her legs that prevented her from going even further, but after another month those too had healed.

Walking became a new pa.s.sion for both of them. Karin started walking with Nordic poles, Stefan beside her. Sometimes he would read aloud from a poetry anthology as they walked. Both of them gave up smoking, apart from the odd evening on the veranda when they might smoke one cigarette each if for some reason the atmosphere was particularly festive.