Thomas laughed.
“Really? Have you got one in your car?”
Margit pretended not to hear and kept on looking.
Thomas glanced at her. “Try the door pocket instead.”
Margit fished out a well-thumbed wad of pages edged in red and held together with a paper clip. “You’ve torn out the map section from the Yellow Pages!” she said, shaking her head.
“Pernilla took the A–Z when we split up. I’m going to buy a new one as soon as I get around to it. Stop complaining. That works perfectly well. What do you want it for?”
Margit didn’t answer. She ran a hand through her short, spiky hair as she studied the index of street names. When she found what she was looking for, she turned to the relevant page and placed her finger on the map. “Stop the car and I’ll show you.”
“What?”
“Stop the car. You can’t drive and look at the same time. You’re a police officer. You have to obey the law.”
Thomas looked at her dubiously, then gave in and pulled over at the nearest bus stop. There was no point in arguing with her.
“What have you come up with?”
“Look at the map.” Margit held out the page that showed the area of Stockholm around Skeppsbron. “If you go straight on from Skeppsbron, where do you end up?”
Thomas thought about it. He pictured the Grand Hotel, the ferries to the archipelago, and Skeppsbron. If you walked across Skeppsbron, where would you end up? “Gamla Stan—the old town? Slussen?”
He shrugged and looked at Margit.
“Keep going. You live in Stockholm, don’t you? Where’s your local knowledge? If you carry on past Slussen and walk along the water, where will you end up?”
“Stadsgården, down at the bottom of Fjällgatan.”
“Exactly. And what will you find there?”
Suddenly it hit him. “The terminal for the ferries to and from Finland!”
“Bingo, Einstein!”
Thomas smiled sheepishly. He ought to have worked that out for himself. Margit was sharp.
“If you’re on the run from the law—or from someone you work for who isn’t too happy with you—and you want to disappear for a while, and aren’t the type to hop on a plane to Brazil, where do you go?”
“To Finland, on the ferry.” Thomas could have kicked himself. It was such a simple explanation.
“And if someone follows you and pushes you overboard as you’re taking a last look at your home on Sandhamn,” Margit went on, “what are you going to look like?”
“Bruised and battered, with broken bones that will be discovered postmortem.”
“Exactly. If you fall from the top deck of a ship that size, it’s like jumping off a tall building. The surface of the water is rock hard when you fall from a real height.”
Thomas nodded.
“And where are you likely to be found?”
“On the beach at Trouville, a few days later.”
“Exactly.”
“We need to speak to the staff at the departure terminal. And we need to see their passenger lists for the crossings between the Sunday when Almhult arrived in Stockholm and the Thursday when he was found.”
“Correct.”
“Presumably we now know how Jonny Almhult lost his life.”
“Correct.”
With a triumphant smile Margit sank back into the warm car seat.
Thomas felt like a schoolboy having his homework corrected.
TUESDAY, THE FOURTH WEEK
CHAPTER 46
There was a thick mist lying in the Sandhamn Gap. Between Telegrafholmen in the north and Sandön in the south lay a sound that formed the natural passage into Sandhamn from the mainland. The sound was extremely deep, but barely sixty yards across at its narrowest point. It was only just wide enough for the ships that passed during the day.
The fog had rolled in overnight, transforming the beautiful evening sky of the previous day to a billowing mass of cloud. When Nora woke she could hear the faint sound of the foghorn at Revengegrundet lighthouse in the distance, a sure sign of poor visibility. Its mournful echo gave sailors a fixed point by which to navigate. Each lighthouse used the first letter of its name in Morse code as its signal. A for Almagrundet, R for Revengegrundet, and so on, helping those at sea to find their way if they had gone astray in the fog.
Ever since Nora had gotten lost many years ago in an evening mist just off Sandhamn, she had held a deep respect for the weather. She had been heading over to Skanskobb, a little island opposite the Trouville jetty that was the finish line for some of the sailing races. It was only about one nautical mile from the Yacht Club marina, if that. She was supposed to be helping out for a few hours in the Round Gotland Race, a major annual event.
In spite of the fact that she knew the waters around Sandhamn like the back of her hand and had sailed out to Skanskobb countless times in the past, she missed the island completely and suddenly saw a lighthouse looming ahead of her. She had passed Skanskobb and was about to crash into Svängen, the caisson lighthouse to the south of Korsö. If she hadn’t ended up there, she could well have carried on out into the Baltic. After that she had never underestimated the difficulty of navigating in fog.
Nora looked at the digital clock. The red numbers told her it was six fifteen. Too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. She had slept poorly over the past few nights. The atmosphere at home was still tense, though not quite as bad as it had been.
After a great deal of thought, she had decided to go to the meeting at the recruitment agency the following day. She had concluded that there was no point in discussing the matter with Henrik again; it would be better to have the meeting before she brought it up once more.
She slid out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a top, along with a pair of old sailing boots she’d had since she was a teenager. The rubber had begun to crack up the sides, but they were easy to slip into. Then she put on an old sailing jacket that someone had once left behind and grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl.
The air was fresh, and a fine damp mist immediately covered her face. The silence was absolute, every sound deadened by the thick fog. She couldn’t even hear the cry of a single gull. When she looked out over the sea, she couldn’t see a thing.
The familiar contours of the islands off Sandhamn had been swallowed up by the gray dampness. Beyond the edge of the jetty the world became nothing but mist, a ghostly horizon with neither a beginning nor an end. Nora pulled up her hood and pushed her hands deep into her pockets, then strode off across the sand and into the forest.
The soft moss and heather combined to form a springy mat that gave as she walked. Only her footprints in the drifts of pine needles covering the path bore witness to her progress. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
There wasn’t a soul in sight.
Total peace and quiet.
After a long walk through the forest she emerged on the northwestern side of the island. There were only a few isolated houses, set in large tracts of land covered in pine trees and blueberry bushes. This was in sharp contrast to the tiny plots in the village, where most of the space was given over to flower beds.