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week, then? Tuesday night next week?”
    “Sure … but I’ll probably go out there before then.”
    “You like living out here in the middle of nowhere?”
    Henrik nodded.
    “Okay,” said Tommy, “but don’t start trying to do any deals of your own with the stuff. We’ll find a buyer in Kalmar.”
    “Fine,” said Henrik, closing the door of the van.
    He walked toward the dark doorway and looked at hiswatch. Half past one. It was pretty early despite everything, and he would be able to sleep in his lonely bed for five hours before the alarm woke him for his ordinary job.
    He thought about all the houses on the island where people lay sleeping. Settled.
    He’d get out if anything happened. If anyone woke up when they broke in, he’d just get out of there. The brothers and their fucking spirit in the glass could fend for themselves.

3
    Tilda Davidsson was sitting with her bag containing the tape recorder in a corridor at the residential home for the elderly in Marnäs, outside the room of her relative Gerlof Davidsson. She wasn’t alone; on a sofa further down the corridor two small white-haired ladies had sat down, perhaps waiting for afternoon coffee.
    The women were talking nonstop, and Tilda found herself listening to their quiet conversation.
    It was conducted in a discontented, troubled tone, like a long series of drawn-out sighs.
    “They’re always on the move, flying all over the place,” said the woman closest to Tilda. “One trip abroad after another. The further away, the better.”
    “You’re absolutely right, they certainly don’t begrudge themselves anything these days,” said the other woman, “indeed they don’t …”
    “And the money they spend … when they’re buyingthings for themselves,” said the first one. “I rang my youngest daughter last week and she told me she and her husband were buying another new car. ‘But you’ve got a lovely car,’ I said. ‘Yes, but everybody else in our street has changed their car this year,’ she said.”
    “That’s all they do, buy, buy, buy, all the time.”
    “That’s right. And they don’t keep in touch, either.”
    “No they don’t …My son
never
rings, not even on my birthday. It’s always me who rings him, and then he never has time to chat. He’s always on his way somewhere, or there’s something he wants to watch on TV.”
    “And that’s another thing—they’re always buying television sets, and they have to be the size of a house these days. …”
    “And new refrigerators.”
    “And stoves.”
    Tilda didn’t get to hear any more, because the door to Gerlof’s room opened.
    Gerlof’s long back was slightly bent and his legs were shaking just a little—but he was smiling at Tilda like an old man without a care in the world, and she thought he looked more alert today than when she had seen him the previous winter.
    Gerlof, who was born in 1915, had celebrated his eightieth birthday in the summer cottage down in Stenvik. Both his daughters had been there, his eldest daughter, Lena, with her husband and children, and her younger sister, Julia, with her new husband and his three children. That day Gerlof’s rheumatism had meant that he had to sit in the same armchair all afternoon. But now he was standing in the doorway leaning on his stick, wearing a waistcoat and dark gray gabardine trousers.
    “Okay, the weather forecast has finished,” he said quietly.
    “Great.”
    Tilda got up. She had had to wait before going into Gerlof’s room, because he had to listen to the weather forecast.Tilda didn’t really understand why it was so important—he was hardly likely to be going out in this cold—but presumably keeping an eye on the wind and the weather was a routine left over from his days as captain of a cargo ship on the Baltic.
    “Come in, come in.”
    He shook hands with her just inside the door—Gerlof wasn’t the kind of person who hugged people. Tilda had never even seen him pat anyone on the