The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin

Author:Johan Theorin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery And Suspense Fiction, Mystery, Widowers, Ghost, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Espionage, Öland (Sweden), Bereavement, Fiction, Mystery fiction, Women Sleuths, ŠOland (Sweden), Suspense, Swedish (Language) Contemporary Fiction, Thriller, 'Oland (Sweden)
ISBN: 9780385342223
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-09-29T03:42:54.022000+00:00

On Monday morning he drove the children into Marnäs, then started sanding down, painting, and wallpapering the penultimate bedroom still to be renovated on the ground floor. As he worked he listened for noises, but heard nothing.

It took five hours, including a short lunch break, to finish three of the walls. At around two o’clock he stopped for the day and made some coffee.

He went out onto the veranda with his coffee cup, breathed in the cold air and saw that the sun had already gone down behind the outbuilding.

The inner courtyard lay in darkness, but Joakim could see that the door to the barn was half open. Hadn’t he closed it on Friday, before the Hesslins arrived?

He pulled on a jacket and opened the outside door.

It was twenty steps over to the barn. When he got there, Joakim pushed the huge door open wide and stepped into the darkness. The old black switch was in the middle of the shorter wall. When he turned it on, two small bulbs spread a pale yellow light across the stone floor, the empty stalls, and feeding troughs.

Everything was silent. It didn’t look as if any rats had moved in, despite the cold.

Every time he came in here, he discovered something new, and now he noticed that the floor inside the door looked as if it had been freshly swept. Katrine had mentioned something about the fact that she had been cleaning the barn when they were discussing the various buildings in the fall.

Joakim looked over toward the wooden steps up to the hayloft and thought about the last time he had been up there, with Mirja Rambe. He would like to see the wall she had shown him again, the memorial to the dead.

Just a quick look.

When he got up there, he could see the rays of the sun again. It was just above the roof of the outbuilding, shining in through the small panes on the southern side of the barn.

Joakim moved slowly across the floor, picking his way among all the trash.

Finally he was standing in front of the far wall. In the glow of the yellow winter sun the names carved in the wood stood out sharply, their contours filled with shadows.

And on a plank almost at the very bottom were Katrine’s name and dates.

His Katrine. Joakim read the name over and over again.

The gaps between the boards were narrow and pitch black, but as he stood beside the broad planks he had a sense of darkness behind them. He suddenly got the idea that this was not in fact the outside wall of the barn he was standing next to.

Despite its being almost time to go and pick up Livia and Gabriel, he quickly went outside again. He took a few steps away from the barn and counted the small windows on the upper floor. One, two, three, four, five. Then he went up into the loft again.

There were four windows, high up below the roof. The last one must be on the other side of the wall.

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