Inspector Sven-Erik Stålnacke woke up at half past four in the morning.
Bloody cat, was his first thought.
It was usually his cat Manne who woke him up around this time. The cat would leap up from the floor, landing with a surprisingly heavy thud on Sven-Erik’s stomach. If Sven-Erik just grunted and turned on his side, Manne would stalk up and down the side of Sven-Erik’s body like a mountain climber on top of a high ridge. Sometimes the cat would let out a terrible wail, which meant that he either wanted food, or to be let out. Usually both. Straightaway.
Sometimes Sven-Erik tried refusing to get up, muttered “it’s the middle of the night you stupid bloody cat,” and wrapped himself in the bedclothes. Then the promenade up and down his body was carried out with the claws extended further and further each time. In the end Manne would scratch Sven-Erik’s head.
Pushing the cat onto the floor or shutting him out of the bedroom didn’t really help. Then Manne started on the soft furnishings and curtains with all his might.
“That cat’s too bloody crafty,” Sven-Erik always said. “He knows I’ll put him outside when he does that. And that’s exactly what he wanted all along.”
He was a man who commanded respect. Strong upper arms, broad hands. Something in his face and bearing bore witness to years of dealing with most things, human misery, fired-up troublemakers. And he found pleasure in being ruled by a cat.
But this morning it wasn’t Manne who’d woken him. He woke up anyway. Out of habit. Maybe because he was missing that stripy young man who constantly terrorized him with his demands and whims.
He sat up heavily on the edge of the bed. He wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. This was the fourth night the bloody cat had been missing. He’d gone missing before for one night, occasionally two. That was nothing to worry about. But four.
He went downstairs and opened the outside door. The night was like gray wool, on the way toward the day. He gave a long whistle, went into the kitchen, fetched a tin of cat food and stood on the steps banging the tin with a spoon. No cat. In the end he had to give up, he was getting cold in just his underpants.
That’s the way it is, he thought. That’s the price of freedom. The risk of getting run over or taken by the fox. Sooner or later.
He spooned coffee into the percolator.
Still, it’s better that way, he thought. Better than Manne getting weak and ill, and having to be taken to the vet. That would have been bloody awful.
The percolator got going with a gurgle, and Sven-Erik went up to the bedroom to get dressed.
Maybe Manne had made himself at home somewhere else. That had happened before. He’d come home after two or three days and hadn’t been the least bit hungry. Obviously well fed and well rested. It was probably some old dear who’d felt sorry for him and taken him in. Some pensioner who had nothing else to do but cook him salmon and give him the cream off the top of the milk.
Sven-Erik was suddenly filled with an unreasoning anger against this unknown individual who took in and adopted a cat that didn’t belong to the person in question. Didn’t this person realize that there was somebody worrying and wondering where the cat had gone? You could tell Manne wasn’t homeless, with his shiny coat and affectionate ways. He’d get him a collar. Should have done it a long time ago. It was just that he was afraid he’d get caught up somewhere. That’s what had stopped him, the thought of Manne caught in some undergrowth starving to death, or hanging in a tree.
He ate a good breakfast. The first few years after Hjördis had left him, breakfast had usually consisted of a cup of coffee, drunk standing up. But he’d mended his ways since then. He shoveled down spoonfuls of low fat yogurt and muesli without really tasting it. The percolator had fallen silent, and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the kitchen.
He’d taken over Manne from his daughter when she moved to Luleå. He should never have done it. He realized that now. It was nothing but bloody trouble, that’s all it was, bloody trouble.
Anna-Maria Mella was sitting at the kitchen table with her morning coffee. It was seven o’clock. Jenny, Petter and Marcus were still asleep. Gustav was awake. He was bouncing around in the bedroom upstairs, clambering all over Robert.
In front of her on the table lay a copy of the horrific drawing of the hanged Mildred. Rebecka Martinsson had made copies of a number of papers as well, but Anna-Maria didn’t understand a bloody word. She hated numbers and maths and that sort of thing.
“Morning!”
Her son Marcus ambled into the kitchen. Dressed! He opened the door of the refrigerator. Marcus was sixteen.
“So,” said Anna-Maria, looking at the clock. “Is there a fire upstairs, or something?”
He grinned. Picked up milk and cereal and sat down opposite Anna-Maria.
“I’ve got an exam,” he said, spooning down milk and cornflakes. “You can’t just jump out of bed and dash in at the last minute. You have to prime your body.”
“Who are you?” said Anna-Maria. “And what have you done with my son?”
It’s Hanna, she thought. God bless her.
Hanna was Marcus’ girlfriend. Her keen attitude toward schoolwork was catching.
“Cool,” said Marcus, sliding the drawing of Mildred toward him. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” answered Anna-Maria, taking the drawing off him and turning it upside down.
“No, seriously. Let me have a look!”
He took the picture back.
“What does this mean?” he said, pointing at the grave mound visible behind the dangling body.
“Well, maybe that she’s going to die and be buried.”
“Yes, but what does it mean? Can’t you see it?”
Anna-Maria looked at the picture.
“No.”
“It’s a symbol,” said Marcus.
“It’s a grave mound with a cross on top.”
“Look! The outlines are twice as thick as in the rest of the picture. And the cross carries on down into the ground and ends in a hook.”
Anna-Maria looked. He was right.
She got up and shuffled the papers together. Resisted the urge to give her son a kiss, ruffled his hair instead.
“Good luck in the exam,” she said.
In the car she rang Sven-Erik.
“Yes,” he said when he’d fetched his copy of the picture. “It’s a cross that goes through a semicircle and ends in a hook.”
“We need to find out what it means. Who’ll know the answer to something like that?”
“What did they say at the lab?”
“They’ll probably get the picture today. If there are clear prints they’ll get them off this afternoon, otherwise it takes longer.”
“There must be some professor of religion who knows about the symbol,” said Sven-Erik thoughtfully.
“You’re a clever boy!” said Anna-Maria. “Fred Olsson can sort somebody out, then we can fax it to them. Go and get dressed and I’ll pick you up.”
“Oh yes?”
“You can come to Poikkijärvi with me. I want to talk to Rebecka Martinsson, if she’s still there.”
Anna-Maria pointed her light red Ford Escort in the direction of Poikkijärvi. Sven-Erik sat beside her, pushing his foot down to the floor in a reflex action. Why did she always have to drive like a boy racer?
“Rebecka Martinsson gave me copies too,” she said. “I don’t understand any of it. I mean, it’s something financial, but…”
“Shouldn’t we ask the economic crimes team to have a look at it?”
“They’re always so busy. You ask a question, and you get the answer a month later. It’s just as well to ask her. I mean, she’s already seen it. And she knows why she gave it to us.”
“Is this really a good idea?”
“Have you got a better idea?”
“But will she really want to get dragged into all this?”
Anna-Maria shook her plait impatiently.
“She was the one who gave me the copies and the letters! And she’s not going to get dragged into anything. How long can it take? Ten minutes of her holiday.”
Anna-Maria braked sharply and turned left on to Jukkasjärvivägen, accelerated up to ninety, braked again and turned right down toward Poikkijärvi. Sven-Erik clung to the door handle, thinking that maybe he should have taken a travel sickness pill; from there his thoughts turned spontaneously to the cat, who hated travelling by car.
“Manne’s disappeared,” he said, gazing out at the pine trees, sparkling in the sunshine as they swept by.
“Oh no,” said Anna-Maria. “How long’s he been gone?”
“Four days. He’s never been away this long.”
“He’ll come back,” she said. “It’s still warm out, it’s natural for him to want to be outside.”
“No,” said Sven-Erik firmly. “He’s been run over. I’ll never see that cat again.”
He longed for her to contradict him. To protest and reassure. He would stick to his conviction that the cat was gone for good. So he could express a little of his anxiety and sorrow. So she could give him a little hope and consolation. But she changed the subject.
“We won’t drive all the way up,” she said. “I don’t think she wants to attract attention.”
“What’s she actually doing here?” asked Sven-Erik.
“No idea.”
Anna-Maria was on the point of saying she didn’t think Rebecka was all that well, but she didn’t. Sven-Erik was bound to insist they cancel the visit. He was always softer than she was when it came to that sort of thing. Maybe it was because she had children living at home. Most of her protective instincts and consideration for others were used up at home.
Rebecka Martinsson opened the door of her chalet. When she saw Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik, two deep grooves appeared between her eyebrows.
Anna-Maria was standing in front, something eager in her eyes, a setter who’d picked up a scent. Sven-Erik behind, Rebecka hadn’t seen him since she’d been in the hospital almost two years ago. The thick hair growing around his ears had turned from dark gray to silver. The moustache still like a dead rodent beneath his nose. He looked more embarrassed, seemed to realize they weren’t welcome.
Even if you did save my life, thought Rebecka.
Fleeting thoughts flowed through her mind. Like silk scarves through a magician’s hand. Sven-Erik by the side of her hospital bed: “We went into his apartment and realized we had to find you. The girls are okay.”
I remember best what happened before and after, thought Rebecka. Before and after. I ought to ask Sven-Erik really. What it looked like when they arrived at the cottage. He can tell me about the blood and the bodies.
You want him to tell you you did the right thing, said a voice inside her. That it was self-defense. That you had no choice. Just ask, he’s bound to say what you want to hear.
They sat down in the little cottage. Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria on Rebecka’s bed. Rebecka on the only chair. On the little radiator hung a T-shirt, a pair of tights and a pair of panties over the “ei saa peittää” sticker.
Rebecka glanced anxiously at the wet clothes. But what could she do? Bundle up the wet panties and chuck them under the bed? Or out through the window, maybe?
“Well?” she said tersely, couldn’t manage politeness.
“It’s about the photocopies you gave me,” Anna-Maria explained. “There are some things I don’t understand.”
Rebecka clasped her knees.
But why? she thought. Why do we have to remember? Wallow in it all, go over things over and over again? What do we gain from that? Who can guarantee that it will help? That we won’t just drown in the darkness?
“The thing is…” she said.
She spoke very quietly. Sven-Erik looked at her slender fingers around her knees.
“… I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she went on. “I gave you the photocopies and the letters. I got them by committing a crime. If that comes out, it’ll cost me my job. Besides which, people round here don’t know who I am. I mean, they know my name. But they don’t know I was involved in what happened out in Jiekajärvi.”
“Please,” begged Anna-Maria, staying where she was as if her bottom was welded to the bed, although Sven-Erik had made a move to get up. “A woman’s been murdered. If anybody asks what we were doing here, tell them we were looking for a missing dog.”
Rebecka looked at her.
“Good plan,” she said slowly. “Two plainclothes detectives looking for a missing dog. Time for the police authorities to look at how their resources are used.”
“It might be my dog,” said Anna-Maria, slightly abashed.
Nobody spoke for a little while. Sven-Erik felt as if he were about to die of embarrassment, perched on the edge of the bed.
“Let’s have a look, then,” said Rebecka in the end, reaching out for the folder.
“It’s this,” said Anna-Maria, taking a sheet of paper out of the folder and pointing.
“It’s an extract from somebody’s accounts,” said Rebecka. “This entry’s been marked with a highlighter pen.”
Rebecka pointed at a figure in a column headed 1930.
“Nineteen thirty is a current account, a check account. It’s been credited with one hundred and seventy-nine thousand kronor from account seventy-six ten. It’s down as additional staff costs. But here in the margin somebody’s written in pencil ‘Training?’ ”
Rebecka pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
“What about this, then?” asked Anna-Maria. “ ‘Ver,’ what does that mean?”
“Verified, authenticated. Could be an invoice or something else to show what the costs consisted of. It seems to me as if she was wondering about this particular cost, that’s why I took it.”
“What company is it, then?” Anna-Maria wondered.
Rebecka shrugged her shoulders. Then she pointed at the top right-hand corner of the page.
“The number of the organization begins with eighty-one. That means it must be a foundation.”
Sven-Erik shook his head.
“Jukkasjärvi church nature conservancy foundation,” said Anna-Maria after a second or two. “A foundation she set up.”
“She was wondering about that particular expenditure for training,” said Rebecka.
Silence fell once again. Sven-Erik swatted at a fly that kept wanting to land on him.
“She seems to have got on quite a lot of people’s nerves,” said Rebecka.
Anna-Maria smiled mirthlessly.
“I was talking to one of them yesterday,” she said. “He hated Mildred Nilsson because his ex-wife stayed at her house with the children after she’d left him.”
She told Rebecka about the decapitated kittens.
“And we can’t do a thing,” she concluded. “Those farm cats don’t have any financial value, so it isn’t criminal damage. Presumably they didn’t have time to suffer, so it isn’t cruelty to animals. You just feel so powerless. As if you might be more useful selling fruit and vegetables in the supermarket. I don’t know, do you feel like that as well?”
Rebecka smiled wryly.
“It’s very rare I have anything to do with criminal cases,” she said evasively. “And when I do, it’s financial crime. But yes, this business of being on the side of the suspect… Sometimes I do feel a sort of revulsion toward myself. When you’re representing somebody who really has no conscience whatsoever. You keep repeating ‘everybody is entitled to a defense’ like a kind of mantra against the…”
She didn’t actually say self-contempt, but allowed a shrug of her shoulders to finish the sentence.
Anna-Maria had noticed that Rebecka Martinsson often shrugged her shoulders. Shaking off unwelcome thoughts, perhaps, a way of interrupting a difficult train of thought. Or maybe she was like Marcus. His constant shrugs were a way of marking the distance between him and the rest of the world.
“You’ve never thought about changing sides, then?” asked Sven-Erik. “They’re always looking for public prosecutors, people don’t stay up here.”
Rebecka’s smile was rather strained.
“Of course,” said Sven-Erik, obviously feeling like a complete idiot, “you must earn three times as much as a prosecutor.”
“It’s not that,” said Rebecka. “I’m not actually working at the moment, so the future is…”
She shrugged her shoulders again.
“But you told me you were up here with your job,” said Anna-Maria.
“Yes, I’m working a bit now and again. And when one of the partners was coming up here, I wanted to come along.”
She’s off sick, Anna-Maria realized.
Sven-Erik gave her a lightning glance, he’d understood as well.
Rebecka stood up, indicating that the conversation was at an end. They said good-bye.
When Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria had gone just a few paces, they heard Rebecka Martinsson’s voice behind them.
“Threatening behavior,” she said.
They turned around. Rebecka was standing on the cottage’s little veranda, her hand resting on one of the posts that supported the roof, leaning against it slightly.
She looks so young, thought Anna-Maria. Two years ago she was one of those real career girls. She’d seemed so super-slim and super-expensive, her long dark hair beautifully cut, not just chopped off like Anna-Maria’s. Now Rebecka’s hair was longer. And just chopped off. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. No makeup. Her hip bones stuck out where they met the waistband of her jeans, and her tired but stubbornly upright posture as she leaned against the post made Anna-Maria think about the kind of grown-up children she sometimes met through her job. Coping with impossible circumstances, taking care of their alcoholic or mentally ill parents, looking after their brothers and sisters, keeping the facade up as far as possible, lying to the police and social services.
“The man with the kittens,” Rebecka went on. “It’s threatening behavior. It appears that his action was intended to frighten his ex-wife. According to the law, a threat doesn’t actually have to be spelled out. And she was frightened, I presume. It might be harassment of a female. Depending on what else he’s done, there could be grounds for an injunction to stop him going anywhere near her.”
As Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria were walking along the road on the way back to the car, they met a lion yellow Merc. In it sat Lars-Gunnar and Nalle Vinsa. Lars-Gunnar gave them a long look. Sven-Erik raised his hand in a wave, after all it wasn’t that many years since Lars-Gunnar had retired.
“Of course,” said Sven-Erik, gazing after the car as it disappeared in the direction of Micke’s bar. “He lives down here in the village, I wonder how things are going with that lad of his.”
Bertil Stensson was holding a lunchtime service in Kiruna church. Once every two weeks the townspeople could receive the Eucharist during their lunch break. About twenty people were gathered in the small chapel.
Stefan Wikström was sitting in the seat nearest the aisle on the fifth row, wishing he hadn’t turned up.
A memory popped into his head. His father, also a parish priest, at home on the kitchen sofa. Stefan beside him, maybe ten years old. The boy babbling on, he’s holding something, something he wants to show his father, he can’t remember what it was now. His father with the newspaper held up in front of his face like the veil in the temple. And suddenly the boy begins to cry. Then his mother’s pleading voice behind him: you could at least listen to him for a while, he’s been waiting for you all day. Out of the corner of his eye Stefan can see she’s wearing her apron. It must be dinnertime. His father lowers the paper, annoyed at the interruption to his reading, the only restful time of the day before dinner, feeling injured at the accusation in her voice.
Stefan’s father had been dead for many years. His poor mother too. But that was exactly how the priest was making him feel now. Like that annoying child in need of attention.
Stefan had tried to avoid going to the lunchtime service. A voice inside him had said quite clearly: “Don’t go!” But still he went. He’d persuaded himself it was for Bertil Stensson’s sake, not because he was in need of the Eucharist.
He’d thought things would get easier when Mildred was gone, but on the contrary, everything was more difficult. Much more difficult.
It’s like the prodigal son, he thought.
He’d been the dutiful, conscientious son, the one who stayed at home. He’d done so much for Bertil over the years: taken boring funerals, boring services in hospitals and old people’s homes, relieved the parish priest of paperwork-Bertil was useless when it came to administration-unlocked the church for the youngsters on a Friday night.
Bertil Stensson was vain. He’d taken over all the work involving the ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi. Any weddings or christenings in the ice hotel were his. He also bagged any event that had even the slightest chance of ending up in the local press, like the crisis group set up after the road accident when seven young people on a ski trip lost their lives, or specially arranged services for the Sami district court. In between all this, he was very fond of his free time. And it was Stefan who made all this possible, who covered up for him and took over.
Mildred Nilsson had been like the prodigal son. Or more accurately: like the prodigal son must have been while he was still living at home. Before restlessness took him away to foreign lands. Troublesome and difficult, he must have got on his father’s nerves, just like Mildred.
Everybody believed Stefan had been the one who really couldn’t stand Mildred. But they were wrong, it was just that Bertil had been more adept at hiding his dislike.
Things had been different then, when she was alive. Everything the woman touched was surrounded by trouble and arguments. And Bertil had been pleased to have Stefan, grateful for the son who stayed at home. Stefan could see in his mind’s eye how Bertil would come into his room at the parish hall. He had a particular way with him, a code that meant: you are my chosen one. He would appear in the doorway, owl-like with his thick, silvery hair and his stocky body, his reading glasses either perched crookedly on top of his head or on the end of his nose. Stefan would look up from his papers. Bertil would glance almost imperceptibly over his shoulder, sidle in and close the door behind him. Then he would sink down into Stefan’s armchair with a sigh of relief. And a smile.
Something clicked inside Stefan every time. More often than not Bertil didn’t want anything in particular, he might want to talk about a few minor matters, but he gave the impression that he wanted a bit of peace for a little while. Everybody ran to Bertil, Bertil sneaked off to Stefan.
But after Mildred’s death, things had changed. She was no longer there, like a rough seam chafing in the priest’s shoe. Now it was Stefan’s dutiful conscientiousness that seemed to chafe. Nowadays Bertil often said: “I’m sure we don’t need to be quite so formal,” and “I’m sure God will allow us to be practical,” words he’d adopted from Mildred.
And when Bertil talked about Mildred it was in such glowing terms that Stefan felt physically sick from all the lies.
And Bertil had stopped visiting Stefan in his office. Stefan sat there, incapable of getting anything done, agonizing, waiting.
Sometimes the priest walked past the open door. But now the code had changed, the signals were different: rapid footsteps, a glance through the wide-open door, a nod, a quick smile. In-a-hurry-how’s-things, that meant. And before Stefan had even managed to return the smile, the priest had disappeared.
Before he’d always known where the priest was, nowadays he had no idea. The office staff asked about Bertil and looked strangely at Stefan when he forced a smile and shook his head.
It was impossible to conquer Mildred now she was dead. In that foreign land she had become her father’s favorite child.
The service was almost over. They sang a concluding hymn and departed in the peace of God.
Stefan should have left now. Gone straight out and just gone home. But he couldn’t help it, his feet made a beeline for Bertil.
Bertil was chatting to a member of the congregation, gave Stefan a sideways glance, didn’t let him into the conversation, Stefan could wait.
Everything was wrong nowadays. If Bertil had just acknowledged him, Stefan could have thanked him briefly for the service and left. Now it seemed as if he had something in particular on his mind. He was forced to come up with something.
At long last the parishioner left. Stefan felt obliged to explain his presence.
“I felt I needed to take communion,” he said to Bertil.
Bertil nodded. The churchwarden carried out the wine and the wafer, gave the priest a look. Stefan trailed after Bertil and the churchwarden to the sacristy, joined in the prayer over the bread and wine without being asked.
“Have you heard anything from that firm?” he asked when the prayer was over. “About the wolf foundation and so on?”
Bertil removed his chasuble, alb and stole.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps we won’t dissolve it after all. I haven’t decided yet.”
The churchwarden was taking all the time in the world to pour the wine into the piscina and place the wafers in the ciborium. Stefan ground his teeth.
“I thought we were agreed that the church couldn’t have a foundation like that,” he said quietly.
Besides which it’s the church council’s decision, not just yours, he thought.
“Well, yes, but for the time being it exists anyway,” said the priest, and Stefan could clearly hear the impatience beneath the mild voice. “Whether I think we should pay for protection for the wolf or spend the money on training is something we can take up later in the autumn.”
“And the hunting lease?”
Bertil was smiling broadly now.
“Now now, that’s not something for you and I to stand here arguing about. That’s a decision for the church council when the time comes.”
He patted Stefan on the shoulder and left.
“Say hello to Kristin!” he said, without turning round.
Stefan had a lump in his throat. He looked down at his hands, the long, stiff fingers. Real piano fingers, his mother used to say when she was alive. Toward the end, when she was sitting in her apartment in the care home and mixing him up with his father more often than not, all this talk about his fingers used to upset him. She would hold on to his hands and order the nurses to look at his hands: just look at these hands, completely unmarked by physical work. Piano fingers, desk hands.
Say hello to Kristin.
If he dared to start looking at things as they really were, marrying her had been the biggest mistake of his life.
Stefan could actually feel himself hardening inside. Hardening toward Bertil, toward his wife.
I’ve carried them long enough, he thought. It has to end.
His mother must have realized about Kristin. What he’d fallen for was her resemblance to his mother. The slightly doll-like appearance, the graceful manner, the good taste.
But his mother had definitely realized. “So personal,” his mother had said about Kristin’s home the first time she visited her son’s girlfriend, “very pleasant.” That was when he was studying in Uppsala. Pleasant and personal, two good words to use when you couldn’t say beautiful or tasteful without lying. And he remembered his mother’s amused smile when Kristin showed off her arrangement of dried everlasting flowers and roses.
No, Kristin was a child who had a mediocre talent for imitating and copying. She’d never become the kind of priest’s wife his mother had been. And what a shock he’d had the first time he went to messy Mildred’s house. All her colleagues and their families had been invited to Mildred’s for a Christmas drink. It had been an interesting collection of people: the priests and their families, Mildred herself, her husband with his beard and apron, pretending to be under the thumb, and the three women who had temporarily sought refuge in the priest’s house at Poikkijärvi. One of the women had two children who must have had every kind of behavioral difficulty in the book.
But Mildred’s home had been like a Carl Larsson painting. The same light touch, warm and welcoming without being over the top, the same tasteful simplicity as in Stefan’s childhood home. Stefan couldn’t see how it fitted in with Mildred’s personality. Is this her home? he’d thought. He’d been expecting bohemian chaos, with piles of newspaper cuttings on storage shelves and oriental cushions and rugs.
He remembered Kristin afterward: “Why don’t we live in the priest’s house in Poikkijärvi?” she’d wondered. “It’s bigger, it would be better for us, we’ve got children after all.”
No doubt his mother had seen that the fragile side of Kristin that attracted Stefan wasn’t just fragile, but broken. Something cracked and sharp that Stefan would hurt himself on sooner or later.
He was suddenly seized by an upsurge of bitterness toward his mother.
Why didn’t she say anything? he thought. She should have warned me.
And Mildred. Mildred who’d used poor Kristin.
He remembered that day at the beginning of May when she came in waving that letter.
He tried to push Mildred out of his mind. But she was just as insistent now as she had been then. Pushing. Just like then.
“Right,” says Mildred, bursting into Stefan’s office.
It’s May 5. In less than two months she’ll be dead. But now she’s more than alive. Her cheeks and her nose are as red as freshly waxed apples. She kicks the door shut behind her.
“No, sit down!” she says to Bertil, who’s trying to escape from the armchair. “I want to talk to both of you.”
Talk to, what kind of introduction is that. That alone tells you everything about what she could be like.
“I’ve been thinking about this business with the wolf,” she begins.
Bertil’s leg crosses over the other leg. His arms fold themselves across his chest. Stefan leans back in his chair. Away from her. They feel criticized and told off before she’s even managed to say what’s on her mind.
“The church leases its land to Poikkijärvi hunting club for a thousand kronor a year,” she goes on. “The lease runs for seven years, and is automatically renewed if it isn’t cancelled. This has been the case since 1957. The parish priest at the time lived in the priest’s house in Poikkijärvi. And he liked to hunt.”
“But what has that got to do with…” Bertil begins.
“Let me finish! True, anybody can join the club, but it’s the board and the elite hunting team who actually make use of the leased land. And since the number in the elite team is set in the statutes at twenty, no new members are allowed in. In practice it’s only when somebody dies that the board elects a new member. And every single person on the board is a member of the team. So it’s the same bunch of old men there as well. In the last thirteen years, not one new member has joined.”
She breaks off and looks Stefan straight in the eye.
“Except for you, of course. When Elis Wiss left the team voluntarily, you were elected-that must have been six years ago?”
Stefan doesn’t reply, it’s the way she says “voluntarily.” On the inside he’s white with rage. Mildred goes on:
“According to the statutes, only the hunting team is allowed to hunt with shotguns, so therefore the team has commandeered all elk hunting. As far as other hunting is concerned, suitable members can buy a one day license, but the kill must be divided up between active members of the club, and surprise surprise, it’s the board members who make the decision as to how that division takes place. But this is what I’m thinking. Both the mining company, LKAB, and Yngve Bergqvist are interested in the lease, LKAB for its employees and Yngve for tourists. That would mean we could increase the fee significantly. And I’m talking about big money here; it would allow us to look at a sensible approach to forestry. I mean, seriously, what does Torbjörn Ylitalo actually do? Runs errands for the team! We’re even providing that bunch of old farts with a free employee.”
Torbjörn Ylitalo is the forestry officer in the church. He’s one of the twenty members of the elite team, and the chairman of the hunting club. Stefan is conscious of the fact that much of Torbjörn’s working day is spent planning hunts with Lars-Gunnar who is the team leader, maintaining the church’s hunting lodges and watchtowers and clearing tracks.
“So,” Mildred concludes. “We’ll have money to manage the forest properly, but above all money to protect the wolf. The church can donate the lease to the foundation. The Nature Conservancy Foundation has tagged her, but we need more money to monitor her.”
“I can’t see why you’re taking this up with me and Stefan,” Bertil breaks in, his voice very calm; “Surely any changes to the lease are a matter for the church council?”
“You know what,” says Mildred, “I think this is a matter for the whole church community.”
The room falls silent. Bertil nods once. Stefan becomes aware of an ache in his left shoulder, pain working its way up the back of his neck.
They understand precisely what she means. They can see exactly how this discussion will look if it’s carried out within the whole community and, of course, in the press. The bunch of old men hunting for free on church land, and on top of that claiming the animals they haven’t even killed themselves.
Stefan is a member of the hunting team, he won’t escape.
But the parish priest has his own reasons for keeping well in with the hunting team. They keep his freezer well filled. Bertil can always show off, offering his guests elk steak and game birds. And there’s no doubt the team members have done other things to compensate the priest for his silent approval of their empire. Bertil’s log cabin, for example. The team built it and they maintain it.
Stefan thinks about his place on the team. No, he feels it. As if it were a warm, smooth pebble in his pocket. That’s what it is, his secret mascot. He can still remember when he got the place. Bertil’s arm around his shoulders as he was introduced to Torbjörn Ylitalo. “Stefan hunts,” the priest had said, “he’d be really pleased if he got a place on the team.” And Torbjörn, the feudal lord in the church’s forest kingdom, nodded, not allowing even a hint of displeasure to cross his face. Two months later Elis Wiss had given up his place on the team. After forty-three years. Stefan was elected as one of the twenty.
“It isn’t fair,” says Mildred.
The priest gets up from Stefan’s armchair.
“I’m prepared to discuss this when you’re somewhat calmer,” he says to Mildred.
And he leaves. Leaves Stefan with her.
“How’s that supposed to work?” Mildred says to Stefan. “As soon as I start thinking about this I’m anything but calm.”
Then she gives him a big smile.
Stefan looks at her in surprise. What’s she grinning at? Doesn’t she understand that she’s just made her position completely and totally impossible? That she’s just delivered an unequivocal declaration of war? It’s as if inside this extremely intelligent woman (and he has to admit that she is), there lives a retarded babbling idiot. What’s he supposed to do now? He can’t rush out of the room, it’s his room. He stays in his seat, irresolute.
Then suddenly she looks at him with a serious expression, opens her handbag and takes out three envelopes, which she holds out to him. It’s his wife’s handwriting.
He stands up and takes the letters. He has stomach cramps. Kristin. Kristin! He knows what kind of letters they are without reading them. He slumps back onto his chair.
“The tone of two of them is quite unpleasant,” says Mildred.
Yes, he can imagine. It isn’t the first time. This is what Kristin usually does. With slight variations, it’s always the same. He’s been through this twice already. They move to somewhere new. Kristin runs the children’s choir and Sunday school, a sweet little songbird singing the praises of the new place to the skies. But when the first flush of love, that’s the only thing he can call it, has passed, her discontent begins to show. Real and imagined injustices which she collects like bookmarks in an album. A period of headaches, visits to the doctor and accusations hurled at Stefan, who doesn’t take her concerns seriously. Then something goes seriously wrong between her and some employee or member of the church community. And soon she’s off on a crusade all over the district. In the last place it turned into a real circus in the end, with the union dragged in and an employee in the parish offices who wanted their nervous breakdown classified as a work-related injury. And Kristin, who just felt that she’d been unjustly accused. And finally the unavoidable move. The first time it was with one child, the second time with three. The eldest boy is at high school now, it’s a critical time.
“I’ve got two more in the same vein,” says Mildred.
When she’s gone, Stefan sits there with the letters in his right hand.
She’s snared him like a ptarmigan, he thinks, and he doesn’t even know whether he means Mildred or his wife.
Rebecka Martinsson’s boss Måns Wenngren was sitting on his office chair, creaking. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it made a really irritating grating noise when you raised or lowered it. He thought about Rebecka Martinsson. Then he stopped thinking about her.
He actually had loads to do. Calls to make, e-mails to answer. Customers and clients to entertain. His junior associates had begun placing papers and yellow Post-it notes on his chair so that he’d see them. But it was only an hour until lunch, so he might as well put everything off for a bit longer.
He always said he was a restless soul. He could almost hear his ex-wife Madelene saying: “Well, it sounds better than moody, unfaithful and running away from yourself.” But restless was true as well. A sense of unease had already got its claws into him in the cradle. His mother used to tell people how he’d screamed all night for the first year. “He calmed down a bit when he learned to walk. For a while.”
His brother, three years older than Måns, never tired of telling the story of how they’d sold Christmas trees one year. One of the family’s tenants had offered Måns and his brother a part-time job selling the trees. They were only kids, Måns had only just started school. But he could already count and add up, his brother said. Especially when it came to money.
And so they’d sold trees. Two little lads, seven and ten. “And Måns earned loads more money than the rest of us,” his brother would say. “We just couldn’t understand it, he was only getting four kronor per tree in commission, the same as everybody else. But while the rest of us were just standing around shivering and waiting for five o’clock to come, Måns was running about chatting to everybody as they looked at the trees. And if somebody thought a tree was too tall, he offered to chop the top off then and there. Nobody could resist, a nipper with a saw nearly as tall as he was. And this is the best bit: he took the top part that he’d sawed off, chopped off the branches and bound them together into big bundles, then sold them for five kronor apiece! And those five kronor went straight into his own pocket. The tenant-what the hell was his name, was it Mårtensson-was absolutely livid. But what could he do?”
His brother would pause at this point in the story and raise his eyebrows in a gesture that said all there was to say about the tenant’s powerlessness in the face of the landowner’s crafty son. “A businessman,” he would conclude, “always a businessman.”
Even when he was middle-aged, Måns was still defending himself against the label. “The law isn’t the same thing as business,” he said.
“Of course it bloody is,” his brother used to reply. “Of course it is.”
His brother had spent his early adult life abroad doing God knows what, and in the end he’d come back to Sweden, done a degree in social sciences, and was now in charge of the benefits office in Kalmar.
Anyway, Måns had gradually stopped defending himself. And why did you always have to apologize for success?
“That’s right,” he’d reply nowadays, “business and money in the bank.” And then he’d tell him about the latest car he’d bought, or some smart deal on the stock market, or just about his new cell phone.
Måns could read all about his brother’s hatred in his sister-in-law’s eyes.
Måns just didn’t get it. His brother had kept his marriage together. The children came to visit.
No, he thought, getting up from the creaky chair, I’m going to do it now.
Maria Taube chirruped a “bye then” into the telephone and hung up. Bloody clients, ringing up and churning out questions that were so vague and general it was impossible to answer them. It took half an hour just to try and work out what they wanted.
There was a knock on her door, and before she had time to answer Måns appeared.
Didn’t you learn anything at Lundsberg? she thought crossly. Like waiting for “come in,” for example?
As if he’d read the thought behind her smile, he said:
“Have you got a minute?”
When did anybody last say no to that question? thought Maria, waving at the chair and switching off her incoming calls.
He closed the door behind him. A bad sign. She tried desperately to think of something she’d overlooked or forgotten, some client who had a reason to be dissatisfied. She couldn’t come up with anything. That was the worst thing about this job. She could cope with the stress and the hierarchy and the overtime, but there was that black abyss that sometimes opened up right beneath your feet. Like the mistake Rebecka had made. So damned easy, to lose a few million.
Måns sat down and looked around, his fingers beating a tattoo on his thigh.
“Nice view,” he said with a grin.
Outside the window loomed the grubby brown facade of the building next door. Maria laughed politely, but didn’t speak.
Come on, out with it, she thought.
“How’s…”
Måns finished off the question with a vague gesture in the direction of the piles of paper on her desk.
“Fine,” she replied, and stopped herself from launching into details of something she was working on.
He doesn’t want to know, she told herself.
“So… have you heard anything from Rebecka?”
Maria Taube’s shoulders dropped a centimeter.
“Yes.”
“I heard from Torsten that she was staying up there for a bit.”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
Maria hesitated.
“I don’t really know.”
“Don’t be so bloody difficult, Taube. I know it was your idea for her to go up there. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it was such a brilliant idea. And now I want to know how she’s doing.”
He paused.
“She does work here after all,” he said in the end.
“You ask her then,” said Maria.
“It’s not that easy. The last time I tried she made a hell of a scene, if you remember.”
Maria thought about Rebecka, rowing away from the firm’s party. She was crazy.
“I can’t talk to you about Rebecka, you know that. She’d be bloody livid.”
“And what about me?” asked Måns.
Maria Taube smiled sweetly.
“You’re always bloody livid anyway,” she said.
Måns grinned, perked up by the insult.
“I remember when you started working for me,” he said. “Nice and sweet. Did as you were told.”
“I know,” she said. “What this place does to people…”
Rebecka Martinsson and Nalle turned up outside Sivving Fjällborg’s door like two casual laborers. He greeted them as if he’d been expecting them and invited them down to the boiler room. Bella was lying in a wooden box on a bed of rag rugs, sleeping with the puppies in a heap under her stomach. She just opened one eye and thumped her tail in greeting when the visitors came in.
At around one o’clock she’d called at Nalle’s house and rung the doorbell. Nalle’s father Lars-Gunnar had opened the door. A big man, filling the doorway. She’d stood out on the porch feeling like a five-year-old asking her friend’s parents if her friend can come out to play.
Sivving put the coffee on and got out thick mugs with a pattern of big flowers in yellow, orange and brown. He put some bread in a basket and took margarine and sausage out of the refrigerator.
It was cool down in the cellar. The smell of dog and fresh coffee blended with faint traces of earth and concrete. The autumn sun shone down through the narrow window below the ceiling.
Sivving looked at Rebecka. She must have found some clothes stored at her grandmother’s. He recognized the black anorak with the white snowflakes on it. He wondered if she knew it had belonged to her mother. Probably not.
And it was unlikely that anybody would have told her how much she looked like her mother. The same long, dark brown hair and distinctive eyebrows. Square-shaped eyes, the iris an indefinable light sandy color with a dark ring.
The puppies woke up. Big paws and ears, tumbling playfully, tails like little propellers against the side of the box. Rebecka and Nalle sat down on the floor and shared their sandwiches with them as Sivving cleared away.
“Nothing else smells quite this good,” said Rebecka, inhaling deeply with her nose pressed against a puppy’s ear.
“That particular one isn’t spoken for yet,” said Sivving. “Want to stake your claim?”
The puppy was chewing on Rebecka’s hand with needle sharp teeth. His coat was chocolate brown, the hair so soft and short it felt like silky skin. His back paws had been dipped in white.
She put him back in the box and stood up.
“I can’t. I’ll wait outside.”
She’d been on the point of saying she worked too hard to have a dog.
Rebecka and Sivving were lifting potatoes. Sivving went in front pulling off the tops with his good hand. Rebecka followed with the hoe.
“Just dig and hoe,” said Sivving, “that’s great. Otherwise I was going to ask Lena, she’s coming up at the weekend with the boys.”
Lena was his daughter.
“I’m happy to do it,” said Rebecka.
She pushed the hoe back and forth; it was easy to work in the sandy soil. Then she picked up the almond potatoes that had come away from the tops and remained in the ground.
Nalle was running around on the lawn with an old bird’s wing on a string, playing with the puppies. From time to time Rebecka and Sivving straightened their backs and looked across at them. You had to smile. Nalle with his hand holding the string high up in the air, yelling and shouting, his knees pumping up and down as he ran. The puppies chasing after him, full of the excitement of the chase. Bella was lying on her side on the grass, enjoying the warmth of the autumn sunshine. Lifted her head from time to time to snap at an annoying horsefly or to check on the little ones.
I’m just not normal, thought Rebecka. I can’t cope with being around my work colleagues who are the same age as me, but with an old man and somebody who’s retarded I feel as if I can be myself.
“I remember when I was little,” she said. “When the adults had lifted the potatoes, you always lit a fire out on the field in the evening. And we were allowed to bake the potatoes that were left behind.”
“Charred black on the outside, reasonably well cooked just inside the skin, and raw on the inside. Oh, I remember. And what you looked like when you came in later. Covered in soot and soil from top to toe.”
Rebecka smiled at the memory. They had learned to respect fire, the children weren’t really allowed to be responsible for a fire on their own, but the evening after potato picking was an exception. Then the fire belonged to them. There was Rebecka, her cousins, and Sivving’s Mats and Lena. They used to sit there in the darkness of the autumn evening, gazing into the flames. Poking at it with sticks. Feeling just like Red Indians in a boys’ adventure story.
They wouldn’t go in to Grandmother until ten or eleven o’clock- it was practically the middle of the night. Happy and filthy. The adults had taken a sauna much earlier, and were sitting around drinking and chatting. Grandmother and Uncle Affe’s wife Inga-Lill and Sivving’s wife Maj-Lis drinking tea, Sivving and Uncle Affe with a Tuborg. She remembered the picture of the old men on the label. “Hvergang.”
She and the other children had had the sense to stay in the hallway rather than trailing half the potato field into the kitchen.
“My, here come the Hottentots,” Sivving would laugh. “I can’t tell how many there are, because the hall is as dark as a mine shaft and their skin is as black as coal. Come on, let’s see you laugh so we can count the rows of teeth!”
They used to laugh. Take towels from Grandmother. Run down to the sauna by the river and get themselves clean in the fading heat.
Torbjörn Ylitalo, the chairman of Poikkijärvi hunting club, was out in his yard sawing wood when Anna-Maria Mella arrived. She stopped the car and got out. His back was toward her. His red ear protectors meant that he hadn’t heard her. She took the opportunity to have a little look around in peace.
Well-looked-after geraniums in the window behind checked curtains. Presumably married, then. Tidy flower beds. Not a single fallen leaf on the lawn. The fence beautifully painted Falun red, with white tips.
Anna-Maria thought about her own fence, covered in patches of algae, and the paint flaking off the southern gable in great lumps.
We must paint it next summer, she thought.
But wasn’t that just what she’d thought last autumn?
Torbjörn Ylitalo’s chainsaw bit through the wood with a piercing shriek. When he threw the last piece to one side and bent down to pick up a fresh meter-long piece, Anna-Maria shouted to attract his attention.
He turned around, took off his ear protectors and switched off the saw. Torbjörn Ylitalo was in his sixties. A bit rough, but somehow well groomed. The remaining hair on his head was just like his beard, gray and well cut. When he had taken off his goggles, he opened his shiny blue work jacket and took out a pair of flexible, rimless Sven-Göran Eriksson glasses which he fixed firmly on his big lumpy nose. Sunburned and weather-beaten above the white neck. His earlobes were two big flaps of skin, but Anna-Maria noticed that the razor had been over them as well.
Not like Sven-Erik, she thought.
Sometimes there were clumps of hair like witches’ brooms growing out of his ears.
They sat down in the kitchen. Anna-Maria accepted the offer of a cup of coffee when Torbjörn Ylitalo said he was having one himself anyway.
He measured coffee into the machine and rummaged ineffectually in the freezer, seemed relieved when Anna-Maria said she didn’t want anything to eat.
“Are you on holiday before the elk hunting season starts?” asked Anna-Maria.
“No, but I’ve got very flexible working hours, you know.”
“Mmm, you’re the forestry officer for the church.”
“That’s right.”
“Chairman of the hunting club, and a member of the hunting team.”
He nodded.
They chatted for a while about hunting and gathering berries.
Anna-Maria took a notepad and pen out of the inside pocket of her jacket, which she’d kept on. She placed them on the table in front of her.
“As I said outside, this is about Mildred Nilsson. You and she didn’t get on, according to what I’ve heard.”
Torbjörn Ylitalo looked at her. He wasn’t smiling, he hadn’t smiled once so far. He took a sip of his coffee without hurrying, placed the cup on the saucer and asked:
“Who told you that?”
“Was it true?”
“What can I say, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she sowed a lot of discord and bitterness in this village.”
“In what way?”
“I’ll be honest with you: she hated men. I really believe she wanted the women in the village to leave their men. And there isn’t much you can do in that situation.”
“Are you married?”
“Tick the yes box!”
“Did she try to get your wife to leave you?”
“No, not her. But there were others.”
“So exactly what did you and Mildred fall out about?”
“Well, it was this bloody stupid idea of having a quota system in the hunting team. Top-up?”
Anna-Maria shook her head.
“You know, every other member a woman. She thought that should be a condition if the lease was to be renewed.”
“And you thought that was a bad idea.”
A little more energy crept into his almost leisurely way of speaking.
“Well, there wasn’t really anybody who thought it was a good idea, apart from her. And I certainly don’t hate women, but I do think people should compete for places on the board of a company, or for parliament, or for that matter for our little hunting team, on equal terms. It really would be inequality if you got a place just because you were a woman. And how would you gain any respect? And besides- what’s wrong with letting the men do the hunting? Sometimes I think hunting is our last outpost. Leave us to do at least that in peace. I didn’t bloody well insist on joining her women’s Bible group.”
“So you fell out about that, you and Mildred?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say we fell out-she knew what I thought.”
“Magnus Lindmark said you’d have liked to put your shotgun in her mouth.”
Anna-Maria wondered for a moment whether she should have told him that. Then again, it would serve the bastard who chopped the heads off the kittens bloody well right.
Torbjörn Ylitalo didn’t seem bothered. He even smiled slightly for the first time. A tired, almost imperceptible smile.
“That’s probably more to do with Magnus’ own feelings,” he said. “But Magnus didn’t kill her. And neither did I.”
Anna-Maria didn’t answer.
“If I’d killed her, I would have shot her and buried her deep in some bog,” he said.
“Did you know she wanted to cancel the lease?”
“Yes, but nobody on the church council was on her side, so it didn’t mean a thing.”
Torbjörn Ylitalo stood up.
“Well, if there’s nothing else, I really need to get on with the wood.”
Anna-Maria got up. She watched him place their cups on the draining board.
Then he took the coffee pot and placed it in the refrigerator, the coffee still warm.
She didn’t comment. And they parted amicably out in the yard.
Anna-Maria drove away from Torbjörn Ylitalo. She wanted to go and see Erik Nilsson again. Ask if he knew who’d sent the drawing to his wife.
She parked the car outside the gates to the priest’s house. The mailbox was overflowing with newspapers and letters, the lid jammed open. Soon it would be raining into the box. Bills, junk mail and newspapers would turn into one great big papier-mâché lump. Anna-Maria had seen overflowing mailboxes like this before. The neighbors ring, the mailbox looks like that, the police go in, and there’s death in the house. One way or another.
She took a deep breath. She’d try the door first of all. If the priest’s husband was lying in there, it might well be unlocked. If it was locked she’d look in through the windows on the ground floor.
She went up onto the porch. It was decorated with pretty white carved wood, white wicker chairs and big blue glazed pots, the contents of which had dried to a solid cement containing the brown, withered remains of summer flowers.
Just as she touched the door handle, it was pressed downward and the door opened from the inside. Anna-Maria didn’t scream. Her expression probably didn’t even change. But inside she jumped. Her stomach tied itself in knots.
A woman came out onto the porch, almost collided with Anna-Maria, and gave a little scream of fear.
She was around forty, wide-open dark brown eyes with long, thick eyelashes. Not much taller than Anna-Maria, so quite short. But she was slimmer, more fine-boned. The hand that flew up to her breast had long, slender fingers, the wrist was small.
“Oh,” she smiled.
Anna-Maria Mella introduced herself.
“I’m looking for Erik Nilsson.”
“Ah,” said the woman. “He’s… he isn’t here.”
Her voice faded away.
“He’s moved away,” she said. “I mean, the house belongs to the church. Nobody actually forced him to go, but… I’m sorry, my name’s Kristin Wikström.”
She extended the delicate hand toward Anna-Maria. Then she seemed embarrassed, as if she felt the need to explain her presence.
“My husband, Stefan Wikström, is going to move in here now Mildred’s… Well, not just him. Me and the children too, of course.”
She gave a short laugh.
“Erik Nilsson hasn’t moved his furniture or his belongings and we don’t know where he is and… well, I came here to see how much there was to do.”
“So you don’t know where Erik Nilsson’s staying?”
Kristin Wikström shook her head.
“What about your husband?” asked Anna-Maria.
“He doesn’t know either.”
“No, but I’m wondering: where’s he at the moment?”
Small furrows appeared above Kristin Wikström’s upper lip.
“What do you want with him?”
“Just a few questions.”
Kristin Wikström shook her head slowly, her expression troubled.
“I’d really prefer it if he were left in peace,” she said. “He’s had a very difficult summer. No holiday. The police around all the time. Journalists, they even ring at night, you know, and we daren’t unplug the phone because my mother’s old and ill, what if she were trying to ring us? And we’re all afraid that it was some lunatic who… You daren’t let the children out on their own. I’m worried about Stefan all the time.”
But she didn’t mention the grief over a lost colleague, Anna-Maria noted coldly.
“Is he at home?” she asked mercilessly.
Kristin Wikström sighed. Looked at Anna-Maria as if she were a child who’d disappointed her. Disappointed her a great deal.
“I don’t actually know,” she said. “I’m not the kind of woman who has to keep tabs on my husband all the time.”
“Then I’ll try the priest’s house in Jukkasjärvi first, and if he’s not there I’ll go into town,” said Anna-Maria, resisting the urge to roll her eyes to heaven.
Kristin Wikström remains standing on the porch of the priest’s house in Poikkijärvi. She watches the departing red Ford Escort. She didn’t like that woman detective. She doesn’t like anyone. No, that isn’t true, of course. She loves Stefan. And the children. She loves her family.
In her head she has a film projector. She doesn’t think it’s very common. Sometimes it just shows rubbish. But now she is going to close her eyes and watch a film she likes very much. The autumn sun warms her face. It’s still late summer, it’s hard to believe this is Kiruna, when it’s as warm as this. It fits in very well. Because the film is from last spring.
The spring sun is shining in through the window and warming her face. The colors are muted. The picture is in soft focus, so it looks as if she has a halo around her hair. She is sitting on a chair in the kitchen. Stefan is sitting on the chair next to her. He is leaning forward, his head on her lap. Her hands are caressing his hair. She says: ssh. He is weeping. “Mildred,” he says. “I can’t cope much longer.” All he wants is peace and quiet. Peace at work. Peace at home. But with Mildred spreading her poison through the congregation… She strokes his soft hair. It’s a sacred moment. Stefan is so strong. He never seeks consolation from her. She enjoys being needed by him. Something makes her look up. In the doorway stands their eldest son Benjamin. What a mess he looks, with his long hair and his tight black ripped jeans. He stares at his parents. Doesn’t say a word. But his eyes look completely crazy. She indicates with her eyebrows that he should disappear. She knows Stefan won’t want the children to see him like this.
The film ends. Kristin grabs hold of the banister. This will be her and Stefan’s house. If Mildred’s husband thinks he can just leave all the furniture behind, and that nobody will dare to move it out, then he’s wrong. As she walks toward the car, she allows the film in her head to run once more. This time she edits out her son Benjamin.
Anna-Maria drove into the yard of the priest’s house at Jukkasjärvi. She rang the bell, but nobody answered.
When she turned, a boy was walking toward the house. He was about the same age as Marcus, maybe fifteen. His hair was long and dyed deep black. Beneath his eyes was a black, sooty line of kohl. He was wearing a scruffy black leather jacket and tight black trousers with huge holes in the knees.
“Hi!” shouted Anna-Maria. “Do you live here? I’m looking for Stefan Wikström, do you know if…”
She didn’t get any further. The boy stared at her. Then he turned on his heel and ran. Ran off along the road. For a moment Anna-Maria considered running after him, but then she came to her senses. What for?
She got in the car and drove toward the town. Kept an eye open for the boy dressed in black as she was driving through the village, but there was no sign of him.
Could he have been one of the priest’s children? Or was it somebody who’d maybe been thinking of breaking in? Who was surprised because there was somebody there?
Something else was tapping her on the head as well.
Stefan Wikström’s wife. She was called Kristin Wikström.
Kristin. She recognized that name.
Then she remembered. Pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. Reached out for the pile of letters to Mildred that Fred Olsson had sorted out and thought might be of interest.
Two of them were signed “Kristin.”
Anna-Maria glanced through them. One was dated in March, and was neatly handwritten:
Leave us in peace. We want peace and quiet. My husband needs a peaceful working life. Do you want me to beg on my knees? I’m on my knees. And I’m begging: Leave us in peace.
The second was dated just a month later. It was obviously written by the same person, but the handwriting was all over the place, the downward strokes of the letter g were long, and some words had been scribbled out:
Perhaps you think we don’t KNOW. But everybody knows it wasn’t just chance that you went for the job in Kiruna just one year after my husband had taken up his post here in town. But I can ASSURE you, we KNOW. You are working with groups and organizations whose SOLE aim is to work against him. You are poisoning wells with your HATRED. You shall drink that HATRED yourself!
Now what do I do? thought Anna-Maria. Go back and get her up against a wall?
She rang Sven-Erik Stålnacke on her cell phone.
“Let’s talk to her husband instead,” he suggested. “I was on the way to the parish offices in any case to pick up the books of that wolf foundation.”
Stefan Wikström sighed heavily, sitting behind his desk. Sven-Erik Stålnacke had settled himself in the armchair. Anna-Maria was leaning against the door with her arms folded.
Sometimes she was just so… unprofessional, thought Sven-Erik, looking at Anna-Maria.
He really should have dealt with this little runt himself, that would have been better. Anna-Maria didn’t like him, and couldn’t hide the fact. Of course, Sven-Erik had read about the quarrel between Mildred and this priest, but they were here to work.
“Yes, I know about the letters,” said the priest.
His left elbow was resting on the desk, his forehead supported by his thumb and fingertips.
“My wife… she… sometimes she’s not well. I don’t mean she’s mentally ill, but she’s a bit unstable at times. She’s not really like this.”
Neither Sven-Erik Stålnacke nor Anna-Maria Mella spoke.
“Sometimes she sees ghosts in broad daylight. But she wouldn’t… you can’t think she…?”
He lifted his head and banged the desk with the palm of his hand.
“If that’s what you think, it’s completely ridiculous. My God, Mildred had a hundred enemies.”
“Including you?” asked Anna-Maria.
“Certainly not! Am I a suspect as well? Mildred and I disagreed on some professional matters, that’s true, but to think that either I or poor Kristin would have anything to do with her murder…”
“That isn’t what we said,” interjected Sven-Erik.
He frowned in a way that made Anna-Maria keep quiet and listen.
“What did Mildred say about these letters?” asked Sven-Erik.
“She told me she’d received them.”
“Why do you think she kept them?”
“I don’t know, I mean, I even keep all the Christmas cards I get.”
“Did anybody else know about them?”
“No, and I’d be grateful if we could keep it that way.”
“So Mildred didn’t tell anybody else.”
“No, not as far as I know.”
“Did that make you feel grateful?”
Stefan Wikström blinked.
“What?”
He almost burst out laughing. Grateful. Was he supposed to have felt grateful to Mildred? The idea was just bizarre. But what could he say? He couldn’t tell them anything. Mildred still had him trapped in a cage. And she’d made his wife into the padlock. And expected gratitude.
In the middle of May he’d gone crawling to Mildred and asked her for the letters. He joined her as she walked along Skolgatan on the way down to the hospital. She was going to visit somebody. It was the worst time of the year. Not at home in Lund, of course. But in Kiruna it was. The streets were full of gravel and all kinds of crap that appeared as the snow melted. Nothing green. Just dirt, rubbish and great drifts of gravel.
Stefan had spoken to his wife on the telephone. She was staying with her mother in Katrineholm with the youngest children. Her voice sounded more cheerful. Stefan looks at Mildred. She seems cheerful too. Turns her face up to the sun and sometimes takes deep, pleasurable breaths. It must be a blessing to have no sense of beauty. That must mean your mood isn’t affected by dirt and gravel.
It’s very odd, he thinks, not without some bitterness, that Kristin feels happier and draws strength from being away from him for a while. That isn’t really what he thinks marriage should be about, you should gain strength from each other and support each other. He accepted long ago that she wasn’t the support he’d hoped for. But now it’s beginning to feel as if she doesn’t think he’s enough for her either. “Oh, just a bit longer,” she answers evasively when he wonders how long she’s going to be away.
Mildred doesn’t want to give him the letters.
“You could smash my life to bits at any moment,” he says to her with a twisted smile.
She looks at him steadily.
“Then you must get used to trusting me,” she says.
He looks at her sideways. As they walk along side by side, it’s obvious how small she is. Her front teeth really are unnaturally narrow. She looks exactly like a shrew.
“I’m thinking of raising the question of the hunting lease for Poikkijärvi hunting club with the church council. The lease expires at Christmas. If we lease the rights to somebody who can pay…”
He can’t believe his ears.
“So that’s the way things are,” he says, surprised at how calm he sounds. “You’re threatening me! If I vote for the lease to stay with the club, you’ll tell everybody about Kristin. That stinks, Mildred. You’re really showing your true colors now.”
He can feel his mouth, living a life of its own. It contorts into a grimace, close to tears.
If Kristin can just get some rest, she’ll get back on track. But if this business with the letters comes out… he knows she won’t be able to cope. He can already hear her accusing people of talking about her behind her back. She’ll have even more enemies. Soon she’ll be waging war on several fronts simultaneously. And then they’ll go under.
“No,” says Mildred. “I’m not threatening you. I’ll keep quiet whatever happens. I just wish you could…”
“Feel grateful?”
“… accommodate me in this one matter.”
“Go against my conscience?”
And now she flares up. Shows her real self.
“Oh, come on! It’s hardly that, is it? A question of conscience?”
Sven-Erik Stålnacke repeats his question.
“Did you feel grateful about the letters? Bearing in mind that you weren’t exactly the best of friends, it was generous of her not to tell anybody about the letters.”
“Yes,” Stefan ground out after a while.
“Hmm,” said Sven-Erik. Anna-Maria’s back moved away from the door.
“One more thing,” said Sven-Erik. “The wolf foundation’s books. Are they kept here?”
Stefan Wikström’s irises moved uneasily across the whites of his eyes like goldfish in a bowl.
“What?”
“The books for the wolf foundation. Are they here?”
“Yes.”
“We’d like to have a look at them.”
“Don’t you need some sort of warrant from the prosecutor to do that?”
Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik glanced at each other. Sven-Erik stood up.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I just need to go to the bathroom. Where…?”
“To the left, out through the office door, then immediately left again.”
Sven-Erik disappeared.
Anna-Maria took out the drawing of the hanged Mildred.
“Somebody sent this to Mildred Nilsson. Have you seen it before?”
Stefan Wikström took it from her. His hand was steady.
“No,” he said.
He handed the drawing back to her.
“You haven’t received anything similar?”
“No.”
“And you’ve no idea who might have sent it? She never mentioned it?”
“Mildred and I didn’t confide in each other.”
“Maybe you could make me a list of people you think she might have talked to. I mean people who worked in the church or here in the parish hall.”
Anna-Maria watched him as he was writing. She hoped Sven-Erik would do what he had to do out there as quickly as possible.
“Have you got children?” she asked.
“Yes. Three boys.”
“What age is the oldest?”
“Fifteen.”
“What does he look like? Is he like you?”
Stefan Wikström’s voice suddenly acquired a slight drawl.
“Impossible to tell. You can’t tell what he looks like underneath all the hair dye and makeup. He’s… going through a phase.”
He looked up and smiled. Anna-Maria realized the fatherly smile, the deliberate pause and the word “phase” were something he used as a matter of routine when he talked about his son.
Stefan Wikström’s smile suddenly disappeared.
“Why are you asking about Benjamin?” he asked.
Anna-Maria took the list out of his hand.
“Thank you for your help,” she said, and left.
Sven-Erik Stålnacke went straight from Stefan Wikström’s room into the parish office. There were three women in there. One of them was watering the plants on the windowsills, the other two were sitting at their computers. Sven-Erik went over to one of them and introduced himself. She was about the same age as him, around sixty, shiny nose and a pleasant expression.
“We’d like to have a look at the books for the wolf foundation,” he said.
“Okay.”
She went over to one of the bookshelves and came back with a folder that had next to nothing in it. Sven-Erik looked at her quizzically. Accounts ought to consist of great heaps of paper, invoices, columns and calculations.
“Is that all there is?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes,” she said. “There aren’t that many transactions, it’s mostly credits.”
“I’ll just borrow this for a while.”
She smiled.
“Keep it, it’s only printouts and photocopies. I’ll get some new ones off the computer.”
“Er,” said Sven-Erik, lowering his voice. “I’d like to ask you about something, could we just…”
He nodded in the direction of the empty stairwell.
The woman followed him out.
“There’s an invoice to do with training costs,” said Sven-Erik. “Quite a large sum…”
“Yes,” said the woman. “I know the one you mean.”
She thought for a little while, as if she were gathering herself.
“It wasn’t right,” she said. “Mildred was very angry. Stefan and his family went on holiday to the USA at the end of May on the foundation’s money.”
“How come?”
“He and Mildred and Bertil were all independent signatories for the foundation, so there was no problem. He probably thought nobody would notice, or he might have done it to annoy her, how should I know.”
“What happened?”
The woman looked at him.
“Nothing,” she said. “I suppose they drew a line under it. And Mildred said he’d visited Yellowstone where there’s a wolf project going on, so as far as I know there wasn’t any trouble about it.”
Sven-Erik thanked her and she went back to her computer. He wondered whether he should go back to Stefan’s office and ask about the trip. But there was no hurry; they could talk to him about it the following day. He instinctively felt he needed to think it over for a while. And in the meantime there was no point in frightening people.
“His face didn’t change at all,” Anna-Maria said to Sven-Erik in the car. “When I showed Stefan Wikström the drawing, his expression didn’t alter. Either he has no feelings, or he was too busy hiding what he felt. You know how it is, you’re so hell-bent on appearing calm that you forget you still ought to pretend to react in some way.”
Sven-Erik mumbled something.
“He should at least have been slightly interested,” said Anna-Maria. “Had a look at it. That’s how I’d have reacted. Got upset, if it was somebody I cared about. Or slightly disturbed if I didn’t know her, or actually disliked her. I’d have looked at it for a while.”
He didn’t actually answer my last question, she thought later. When I asked if he had any idea who might have sent it? He just said he and Mildred didn’t confide in each other.
Stefan Wikström went out into the office. He felt slightly queasy. He ought to go home and have dinner.
The girls in the office looked at him curiously.
“They were just asking routine questions about Mildred,” he said.
They nodded, but he could see they were still wondering. What an expression. Routine questions.
“Did they talk to you?” he asked.
The woman who’d spoken to Sven-Erik answered.
“Yes, the tall man wanted the wolf foundation’s accounts.”
Stefan went rigid.
“But you didn’t give them to him? They’ve no right to…”
“Of course I did! There’s nothing secret in them, is there?”
She looked at him sharply. He could feel the others’ eyes on him as well. He turned on his heel and went quickly back into his room.
The parish priest could say what he liked. Stefan needed to speak to him now. He rang Bertil on his cell phone.
Bertil was in his car. His voice broke up from time to time.
Stefan told him the police had been there. And that they’d taken the foundation’s accounts away with them.
Bertil didn’t seem particularly bothered. Stefan said that as they were both on the board of the foundation, nothing that was actually illegal had taken place, but even so.
“If this gets out you know how it’ll sound. They’ll have us down as embezzlers.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said the parish priest calmly. “Look, I’ve got to park, talk to you later.”
From his calm tone, Stefan understood that Bertil wouldn’t stand by him if the trip to the USA came out. He would never admit that they’d both talked it over and agreed. “There’s plenty of money just lying there in the foundation’s account,” Bertil himself had said. And they’d discussed some kind of developmental trip. They were on the board of a nature conservancy foundation, but knew nothing about wolves. And so it had been decided that Stefan would take a trip to Yellowstone. And somehow Kristin and the younger boys had ended up going too, that’s how he’d got them back from Katrineholm.
It was understood that neither of them was going to tell Mildred that the money came from the foundation. But of course somebody in the office had to go running to her with the story.
She’d confronted him when he got back from the trip. He’d calmly explained the necessity of having someone on the board with some degree of knowledge. He was the most appropriate person, as a hunter and somebody who knew the ways of the forest. He could gain a respect and understanding that Mildred would never achieve if she tried for a thousand years.
He’d been expecting an outburst of rage. Some small hidden part of him was almost looking forward to it. Anticipating with pleasure the red evidence of her loss of control against the deep blue background of his own assured calm.
Instead she had leaned against his desk. Heavily, in a way that made him think for a moment that she might have some secret illness, something to do with her kidneys or her heart. She’d turned her face toward him. White beneath the early spring suntan. The eyes two black circles. An absurd cuddly toy with button eyes that’s come alive and begun to speak, and is suddenly very frightening.
“When I speak to the church council about the hunting permit at the end of the year, you’re to lie low, do you understand?” she said. “Otherwise we’ll let the police sort out whether this was right or wrong.”
He’d tried to say that she was making herself look ridiculous.
“Your choice,” she said. “I’ve no intention of pandering to you forever.”
He’d gazed at her in amazement. When had she pandered to him? She was like a bundle of nettles.
Stefan thought about the parish priest. He thought about his wife. He thought about Mildred. He thought about the looks the office staff had given him. Suddenly it felt as if he’d lost control of his breathing. He was panting like a dog in a car. He must try to calm down.
I can get out of this, he thought. What’s the matter with me?
Even when he was a boy he’d gravitated toward companions who oppressed and exploited him. He had to run errands and give them his sweets. Later on he had to slash tires and throw stones to prove the priest’s son wasn’t a coward. And now he’s an adult seeking out people and situations where he ends up being treated like dirt.
He reached for the telephone. Just one call.
Lisa Stöckel is sitting on the steps of her gingerbread house. The drugged-up pastry-chef’s tour de force, as Mimmi calls it. She’ll be going down to the bar soon. She eats there every day now. Mimmi doesn’t seem to think it’s strange. In her kitchen Lisa now has only a bowl, a spoon and a tin opener for the dog food. The dogs are wandering about outside by the fence. Sniffing and pissing on the currant bushes. She almost thinks they look slightly quizzical when she doesn’t shout at them.
Piss wherever you want, she thinks with a half-smile.
The hardness of the human heart is a remarkable thing. It’s like the soles of your feet in summer. You can walk on pinecones and on gravel. But if the heel cracks, it goes deep.
Hardness has always been her strength. Now it’s her weakness. She tries to find the words to say to Mimmi, but it’s hopeless. Everything that needs saying should have been said long ago, and now it’s too late.
And what would she have said then? The truth? Hardly. She remembers when Mimmi was sixteen. She and Tommy had already been divorced for many years. He drank his way through the weekends. It was lucky he was such a good tiler. As long as he had a job, he stuck to beer from Monday to Thursday. Mimmi was worried. Obviously. Thought Lisa ought to talk to him. Asked: “Don’t you care about Daddy?” Lisa had answered yes. It was a lie. And she was the one who’d decided there was to be no more lying. But Mimmi was Mimmi. Lisa didn’t give a shit about Tommy. Another time, Mimmi had asked: “Why did you actually marry Daddy?” Lisa had realized she didn’t have a clue. It was a staggering discovery. She hadn’t managed to remember what she’d thought or felt during the time when they started going out, went to bed together, got engaged, when he put his ring on her finger. And then Mimmi came along. She’d been such a wonderful child. And at the same time the bond that would always link Lisa with Tommy. She’d worried about her maternal instinct. How is a mother supposed to feel about her child? She didn’t know. “I could die for her,” she’d sometimes thought as she stood watching Mimmi sleep. But it meant nothing. It was like promising people trips abroad if you won millions on the lottery. Easier to die for your child in theory than to sit and read to them for quarter of an hour. The sleeping child made her feel sick with longing and pangs of conscience. But when Mimmi was awake, with her small hands grabbing at Lisa’s face and up her sleeves searching for skin and closeness, it made Lisa’s flesh crawl.
Getting out of the marriage had felt like an impossible task. And when she finally did it, she was surprised at how easy it was. All she had to do was pack and move out. The tears and the screaming were like oil on water.
Things are never complicated with the dogs. They don’t care about her awkwardness. They are totally honest and relentlessly cheerful.
Like Nalle. Lisa has to smile when she thinks of him. She can see it in his new friend Rebecka Martinsson. When Lisa saw her for the first time last Tuesday evening, she was wearing that calf-length coat and the shiny scarf, definitely real silk. A stuck-up top-notch secretary, or whatever she was. And there was something about her, a microsecond’s hesitation perhaps. As if she always had to think before she spoke, made a gesture or even smiled. Nalle doesn’t bother about things like that. He goes marching into people’s hearts without taking his shoes off. One day with Nalle, and Rebecka Martinsson was walking around in an anorak from the seventies, her hair tied back with a rubber band, the sort that pulls out half your hair when you take it off.
And he doesn’t know how to lie. Every other Thursday Mimmi serves afternoon tea at the bar. It’s become one of those events that the ladies from town travel out to Poikkijärvi for. Freshly baked scones with jam, a wide variety of cakes. The previous Thursday Mimmi had shouted angrily: “Who’s taken a bite out of my cakes?” Nalle, who’d been sitting there having a snack of a sandwich and a glass of milk, had immediately shot his hand up in the air and confessed: “Me!”
Blessed Nalle, thinks Lisa.
The very words Mildred used a thousand times.
Mildred. When Lisa’s hardness cracked, Mildred poured in. Lisa was totally contaminated.
It’s only three months since they lay on the kitchen sofa. They often ended up there, because the dogs had taken over the beds, and Mildred used to beg “don’t push them off, can’t you see how cozy they are?”
Mildred is always really busy at the beginning of June. End of term services in schools, confirmations, playgroups breaking up for the summer, church youth groups finishing off and lots of weddings. Lisa is lying on her left side, leaning on her elbow. She is holding a cigarette in her right hand. Mildred is asleep, or she might be awake, or more likely somewhere in between the two. Her back is covered in hairs, a soft down all along the length of her spine. It’s like a special gift, the fact that Lisa who is so fond of dogs has a lover whose back is like a puppy’s tummy. Or perhaps a wolf’s stomach.
“What is it with you and that wolf?” asks Lisa.
Mildred has had a real wolf spring. She got ninety seconds on the evening news program, talking about wolves. There was a concert, with the proceeds going to the wolf foundation. She’s even preached a sermon about the she-wolf.
Mildred turns onto her back. She takes the cigarette from Lisa. Lisa doodles on Mildred’s stomach with her finger.
“Well,” she says, and it’s obvious she’s making a real effort to answer the question. “There’s something about wolves and women. We’re alike. I look at that she-wolf and she reminds me of what we were created for. Wolves are incredibly patient. Just imagine, they can live in polar regions where it’s minus fifty degrees, and in the desert where it’s plus fifty. They’re territorial, their boundaries are set in stone. And they roam for miles, completely free. They help each other within the pack, they’re loyal, they love their cubs more than anything. They’re like us.”
“You haven’t got any cubs,” says Lisa, regretting it almost immediately, but Mildred isn’t offended.
“I’ve got you lot,” she laughs.
“They’re brave enough to stay in one place when it’s necessary,” Mildred continues her sermon, “they’re brave enough to move on when they have to, they’re not afraid to fight and attack if need be. And they’re… alive. And happy.”
She tries to blow smoke rings while she thinks about it.
“It’s to do with my faith,” she says. “The whole of the Bible is full of men with a major task to do, a task that comes before everything, wife, children and… well, everything. There’s Abraham and Jesus and… my father followed in their footsteps in his work as a priest, you know. My mother was responsible for where we lived, visits to the dentist, Christmas cards. But for me Jesus is the one who allows women to start thinking, to move on if they have to, to be like a she-wolf. And when I’m starting to feel bitter and weepy, he says to me: Come on, be happy instead.”
Lisa carries on doodling on Mildred’s stomach, her index finger traces a path across her breasts and her hip bones.
“You know they hate her, don’t you?” she says.
“Who?” asks Mildred.
“The men in the village,” says Lisa. “The ones on the hunting team. Torbjörn Ylitalo. At the beginning of the eighties he was convicted of hunting crimes. He shot a wolf down in Dalarna. That’s where his wife comes from.”
Mildred sits bolt upright.
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not joking. He should really have lost his gun license. But Lars-Gunnar is a policeman, and you know how it is. And it’s the police authorities who decide these things, and he used his contacts, and… Where are you going?”
Mildred has shot up off the kitchen sofa. The dogs come rushing in. They think they’re going out. She doesn’t take any notice of them. Pulls on her clothes.
“Where are you going?” asks Lisa again.
“Those bloody old men,” says Mildred furiously. “How could you? How could you have known about this all along and not said anything?”
Lisa sits up. She’s always known. After all, she was married to Tommy and Tommy was a friend of Torbjörn Ylitalo. She looks at Mildred, who fails to fasten her wristwatch and pushes it into her pocket instead.
“They hunt for free,” snaps Mildred. “The church gives them everything, they won’t let a single bloody person in, least of all women. But the women, they work and sort things out and have to wait for their reward in heaven. I’m so bloody tired of it. It really does send out a message about how the church regards men and women, but enough is damned well enough!”
“My God, you can swear!”
Mildred turns to Lisa.
“You ought to try it,” she says.
Magnus Lindmark was standing by his kitchen window in the dusk. He hadn’t switched on the lights. Every contour, every object both inside and outside had become blurred, begun to dissolve, disappearing into the darkness.
However, he could still see Lars-Gunnar Vinsa, the leader of the hunting team, and Torbjörn Ylitalo, the chairman of the hunting club, walking up the road toward Magnus’ house. He hid behind the curtain. What the hell did they want? And why weren’t they driving? Had they parked a little way off and walked the last part? Why? He had a really bad feeling about this.
Whatever they wanted, he was bloody well going to tell them he didn’t have time. Unlike those two, he did actually have a job. Well, okay, Torbjörn Ylitalo was a forester, but he didn’t do any bloody work, nobody could pretend he did.
Magnus Lindmark didn’t often get visitors nowadays, not since Anki and the boys left. He used to think it was a pain in the ass, all her relatives and the boys’ friends coming round. And it wasn’t his style to pretend and smile sweetly. So in the end her sisters and friends used to clear off when he got home. That had suited him down to the ground. He couldn’t do with people sitting around rabbiting for hours. Hadn’t they got anything else to do?
They were on the porch now, knocking on the door. Magnus’ car was in the yard, so he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t home.
Torbjörn Ylitalo and Lars-Gunnar Vinsa came in without waiting for Magnus to open the door. They were standing in the kitchen.
Torbjörn Ylitalo switched the light on.
Lars-Gunnar looked around. Suddenly Magnus realized what his kitchen looked like.
“It’s a bit… I’ve had a lot…” he said.
The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and old milk cartons. Two bags crammed full of empty stinking cans by the door. Clothes he’d just dropped on the floor on his way into the shower, he should have chucked them in the laundry room. The table covered in junk mail, letters, old newspapers and a bowl of yogurt, the yogurt dried up and cracked. On the worktop next to the microwave lay a boat engine in bits; he was going to fix it sometime.
Magnus asked, but neither of them wanted coffee. Nor a beer. Magnus himself opened a Pilsner, his fifth of the evening.
Torbjörn got straight down to business.
“What have you been saying to the police?” he asked.
“What the fuck do you mean?”
Torbjörn Ylitalo’s eyes narrowed. Lars-Gunnar’s stance became somehow heavier.
“Let’s not be stupid, Magnus,” said Torbjörn. “You told them I wanted to shoot the priest.”
“Crap! That cow of a detective’s full of crap, she…”
He didn’t get any further. Lars-Gunnar had taken a step forward and hit him with a blow that was like having your ears boxed by a grizzly.
“Don’t you stand there lying to us!”
Magnus blinked and raised his hand to his burning cheek.
“What the fuck,” he whimpered.
“I’ve stuck up for you,” said Lars-Gunnar. “You’re a bloody loser, I’ve always thought so. But for your father’s sake we’ve let you into the team. And we’ve let you stay, despite your bloody antics.”
A hint of defiance flared in Magnus.
“Oh, so you’re a better person than me, are you? You’re superior in some way, are you?”
Now it was Torbjörn’s turn to give him a thump in the chest. Magnus staggered backwards, cannoning into the worktop with the back of his thighs.
“Right, now you just listen!”
“I’ve put up with you,” Lars-Gunnar went on. “Going out shooting at road signs with your new gun, you and your pals. That bloody fight in the hunting lodge a couple of years ago. You can’t hold your drink. But you carry on boozing and do such stupid bloody things.”
“What the fuck, the fight, that wasn’t me, that was Jimmy’s cousin, he…”
A new thump in the chest from Torbjörn. Magnus dropped the can of beer. It lay there, the beer trickling out onto the floor.
Lars-Gunnar wiped the sweat from his brow. It was running past his eyebrows and down his cheeks.
“And those bloody kittens…”
“Yes, for fuck’s sake,” Torbjörn chipped in.
Magnus managed a foolish, drunken giggle.
“What the fuck, a few cats…”
Lars-Gunnar punched him in the face. Clenched fist. Right on the nose. It felt as if his face had split open. Warm blood poured down over his mouth.
“Come on then!” roared Lars-Gunnar. “Here, come on, here!”
He pointed at his own chin.
“Come on! Here! Now you’ve got the chance to fight a real man. You cowardly little bastard, tormenting women. You’re a fucking disgrace. Come on!”
He beckoned Magnus toward him with both hands. Stuck his chin out to entice him.
Magnus was holding his right hand under his bleeding nose, the blood was running up his shirtsleeve. He waved Lars-Gunnar away with his left hand.
Suddenly Lars-Gunnar leaned heavily on the kitchen table.
“I’m going outside,” he said to Torbjörn Ylitalo. “Before I do something I might regret.”
Before he went out through the door, he turned around.
“You can report me if you want,” he said. “I don’t care. That’s just what I’d expect from you.”
“But you’re not going to do that,” said Torbjörn Ylitalo when Lars-Gunnar had gone. “And you’re going to keep your mouth shut about anything to do with me and the hunting team. Have you got that?”
Magnus nodded.
“If I hear you’ve been opening your big mouth again, I personally will make sure you regret it. Understand?”
Magnus nodded again. He was tilting his face upward in an effort to stop the blood pouring out of his nose. It ran back into his throat instead, tasted like iron.
“The hunting permit will be renewed at the end of the year,” Torbjörn went on. “If there’s a lot of talk or trouble… well, who knows. Nothing’s certain in this world. You’ve got your place in the team, but only if you behave yourself.”
There was silence for a little while.
“Right then, make sure you put some ice on that,” said Torbjörn eventually.
Then he left as well.
Lars-Gunnar Vinsa was sitting out on the steps, his head in his hands.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Torbjörn.
“Fuck,” said Lars-Gunnar. “But my father used to hit my mother, you know. So it just makes me furious… I should have killed him, my father, I mean. When I’d finished my police training and moved back here, I tried to get her to divorce him. But back then, in the sixties, you had to talk to the priest first. And the bastard persuaded her to stay with the old man.”
Torbjörn Ylitalo gazed out across the overgrown meadow bordering on to Magnus’ property.
“Come on,” he said.
Lars-Gunnar got up with some difficulty.
He was thinking about that priest. His bald, shiny pate. His neck, like a pile of sausages. Fuck. His mother, sitting there with her best coat on. Her bag on her knee. Lars-Gunnar sitting beside her to keep her company. The priest, a little smile on his face. As if it were some bloody joke. “Old lady,” the priest had said to her. His mother had just turned fifty. She would live for more than thirty years. “Will you not be reconciled with your husband instead?” Afterward she’d been very quiet. “That’s it, it’s all sorted,” Lars-Gunnar had said. “You’ve spoken to the priest, now you can get a divorce.” But his mother had shaken her head. “It’s easier now you youngsters have left home,” she’d replied. “How would he manage without me?”
Magnus Lindmark watched the two men disappear down the road. He opened the freezer and rummaged about. Took out a plastic bag of frozen mince, lay down on the living room sofa with a fresh can of beer, placed the frozen mince on his nose and switched on the TV. There was some documentary about dwarves, poor bastards.
Rebecka Martinsson is buying a packed meal from Mimmi. She is on her way down to Kurravaara. She might stay there tonight. When Nalle was there, it felt fine. Now she’s going to try it on her own. She’s going to have a sauna and swim in the river. She knows how it will feel. Cold water, sharp stones beneath her feet. The sharp intake of breath when you jump in, quick strokes as you swim out. And that inexplicable feeling of being at one with yourself at different ages. She’s bathed there, swum there as a six-year-old, a ten-year-old, a teenager, right up until she moved away from the town. The same big stones, the same shoreline. The same chilly autumn evening air, pouring like a river of air over the river of water. It’s like a Russian doll with all the little dolls safely inside, so that you can screw the top part and the bottom part back together, knowing that even the tiniest is safe and sound inside.
Then she’ll eat alone in the kitchen and watch television. She can have the radio on while she washes up. Maybe Sivving will come over when he sees the light.
“So you were off on an adventure with Nalle today?”
It’s Micke who’s asking, the bar owner. He’s got kind eyes. They don’t really go with his muscular, tattooed arms, his beard and his earring.
“Yes,” she replies.
“Cool. He and Mildred were often out and about together.”
“Yes,” she says.
I’ve done something for her, she thinks.
Mimmi has arrived with Rebecka’s food.
“Tomorrow evening,” says Micke, “do you fancy working here for a few hours? It’s Saturday, everybody’s back from their holidays, the schools have gone back, it’ll be packed in here. Fifty kronor an hour, eight till one, plus tips.”
Rebecka looks at him in amazement.
“Sure,” she says, trying not to look too pleased. “Why not?”
She drives away. Feels full of mischief.