A snowstorm was brewing. April in Kiruna. Martinsson woke up and all she could see through the window was the white, snow-laden wind howling around the house.
It was 5.30. She had just poured herself a cup of coffee when her mobile rang. She could see from the display that it was Maria Taube, her former colleague at Meijer & Ditzinger. They had both worked for Måns Wenngren before Martinsson had moved back to Kiruna.
Pressing “answer”, she gave a theatrical groan suggesting she was still half asleep.
“Oh dear!” Taube said. “I’m sorry! Did I wake you?”
Martinsson laughed.
“No, I was just teasing you. I’ve been up for some time.”
“I knew you would be. You’re a workaholic. It’s O.K. to ring you when everyone else is still asleep. But I thought that maybe the laid-back lifestyle of the northern Swedes we’re always hearing about might have rubbed off on you.”
“It has, but round here ladies of a certain age are up and about very early.”
“Yes, I know how it is – first one up gets a medal. My aunts are like that; they sit at the dinner table competing to see who’s been up longest. ‘I woke up at 5.00 and thought I might as well get up and clean the windows.’ ‘I woke up at 3.30, but thought I’d force myself to stay in bed, so I didn’t get up until 4.30.’”
“A bit like us, then,” Martinsson said, taking a sip of coffee. “Are you at work already?”
“I’m on my way. And walking. Listen.”
Martinsson could hear early birds singing.
“We’ve got a terrible snowstorm up here,” she said.
“You’re kidding! Down here all the cafés have set up their pavement extensions, and people are talking about how many tulips they’ve counted in their gardens in the country.”
“Have you managed to get to smell the tulips, my dear?”
“No, I haven’t, darling. I’m stuck in a rut, working myself to death and getting involved in destructive relationships.”
“Then you’d better climb out of your rut,” Martinsson said, sounding like a perky weather forecaster. “Your body can do other things; it’s your mind that’s getting in the way. Dare to do something different. Wear your watch on the other wrist. Have you tried walking backwards today?”
“You’re an agent of the dark forces, you know,” Taube said dejectedly. “I’ve actually read a book about mindfulness. It says that you’ve always got to be ‘with it’. I wonder if they’ve tried being ‘with it’ at Meijer & Ditzinger…”
“Is Måns being cruel and nasty?”
“Yes, he is in fact. Have you two had a row or something? He’s in such a bloody awful mood. He flew into a rage yesterday because I’d forgotten to put Alea Finance on the list of firms allowed to make late payments.”
“No, we haven’t actually had a row. But he’s annoyed with me.”
“Why? He’s not allowed to be annoyed with you. It’s your duty to keep him happy and well fed and satisfied, so that he couldn’t care less whether or not Alea Finance has to pay a late fee of five or six thousand. I mean, they have a turnover of two million. Not to mention the loss of prestige for M. & D. – I’ve heard the lecture before. Anyway, why is he annoyed with you?”
“He thinks I’ve been too reticent. And he doesn’t like me settling in up here. What does he expect? Am I supposed to move in with him until he gets fed up with me and starts running off to the pub with the lads and screwing the trainee lawyers?”
Taube said nothing.
“You know I’m right,” Martinsson said. “Some men and some dogs are just like that. It’s only when you look the other way and signal that you’re totally uninterested that they come running up to you wagging their tails.”
“But he’s in love with you,” Taube said tamely.
But she knew that Martinsson was right. It was good for Wenngren that Martinsson had moved up to… Nowheresville. He was the sort of man who finds it hard to cope with an intimate relationship. Both she and Martinsson had seen him lose interest in attractive and gifted women who had simply become too attached to him.
“If he weren’t like that,” Taube said, “would you consider moving back here?”
“I think it would make me ill,” Martinsson said, with no trace of humour in her voice.
“Stay there, then. You’ll just have to have a hot long-distance relationship. There’s nothing to beat a bit of longing for what you can’t have.”
“Yes,” Martinsson said.
Although I don’t actually long to be with him any more, she told herself. I like him. I like it when he’s here. It works well. I might sometimes miss the sex. I like sleeping in his arms. And now that he isn’t getting in touch, I obviously feel put out and scared of losing him. But I find it hard to cope with his restlessness after he’s been up here for more than three days. When I start feeling that I need to think up some way of stopping him getting into a bad mood. When he refuses to try to understand why I need to live here. And, now, when he’s sulking. And refusing to answer his mobile.
For a fleeting moment she wondered if she ought to ask Taube if she thought Wenngren had been with someone else. If there was a suitable candidate in the office.
But I’m damned if I shall, she thought. In the old days I’d have been awake half the night, conjuring up all sorts of images in my mind’s eye. But I don’t have the strength now. I refuse to do that.
“I’m at the office now,” Taube said, panting slightly. “Can you hear me walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift?”
Martinsson was about to say, “You should keep asking yourself: What would personal trainer and media star Blossom Tainton have done?” But she couldn’t keep the banter going any longer. They often spent ages on the phone joking like this. Presumably that was why both of them sometimes hesitated to ring – things simply got out of control.
“Thank you for calling,” she said instead, and meant it.
“I miss you,” Taube panted. “Can we meet up the next time you come to Stockholm? Presumably you won’t need to be on your back the entire time?”
“Who is it that always…”
“Yes, yes. I’ll ring. Love and kisses!” Taube said, and hung up.
Vera stood up and started barking.
Sivving Fjällborg’s heavy footsteps were approaching the house. Bella was already scratching away at the front door.
Martinsson let her in. Bella immediately ran to Vera’s food bowls in the kitchen. They were empty, but she licked them just to make sure, and growled at Vera, who held back at a respectful distance. When the bowls had been licked clean, they greeted each other and sparred playfully, ruffling the rag mats in the process.
“What foul weather!” Fjällborg grunted. “The bloody snow is coming at you from 90 degrees. Look at this!”
He removed snow from his shoulders, where it had formed icy clumps.
“Mmm,” Martinsson said. “Soon they’ll be singing ‘Sweet lovers love the spring’ in Stockholm.”
“Yes, yes,” Fjällborg said impatiently. “Then they’ll get beaten up in the streets as they make their way home from the May Day celebrations.”
He didn’t like Martinsson comparing Stockholm and Kiruna to Stockholm’s advantage. He was afraid of losing her to the metropolis again.
“Have you got a moment?” he said.
Martinsson adopted an apologetic expression and was about to explain that she had to go to work.
“I wasn’t going to ask you to clear away snow or anything like that,” Fjällborg said. “But there’s someone you ought to meet. For your own good. Or rather, for the good of Wilma Persson and Simon Kyrö.”
Martinsson felt depressed the moment she and Fjällborg walked through the door of the Fjällgården care home for the elderly. They brushed off as much snow as they could in the chicken-yellow stairwell, climbed the stairs and walked across the highly polished grey plastic floor tiles. The plush painted wallpaper and neat, practical pine furniture cried out INSTITUTION.
Two residents in wheelchairs were leaning forward over their breakfast in the kitchen. One of them was propped up with cushions to make sure he did not fall sideways. The other kept repeating “Yes, yes, yes!” in an increasingly loud voice until a carer placed a calming hand on his shoulder. Fjällborg and Martinsson hurried past, trying not to look.
Please spare me this, Martinsson said to herself. Spare me from ending up in a day room with worn-out, incontinent old folk. Spare me from needing to have my bottom wiped, from sitting parked in front of a television surrounded by staff with shrill voices and bad backs.
Fjällborg led the way as fast as he could along a corridor with doors either side leading into individual rooms. He also seemed far from happy with what he was seeing.
“The man we’re going to meet is called Karl-Åke Pantzare,” he said quietly. “My cousin used to know him. They saw a lot of each other when they were young. I know he was a member of a resistance group during the war, and I know my cousin was a member as well – but he’s dead now. It wasn’t something he talked about. This is Pantzare’s room.”
He stopped in front of a door. There was a photo of an elderly man and a nameplate that announced: “Bullet lives here”.
“Just a minute,” Fjällborg said, holding on to the rail running along the wall so that the old folk still able to walk had something to hang on to. “I need to pull myself together.”
He rubbed his hand over his face and took a deep breath.
“It’s so damned depressing,” he said to Martinsson. “Bloody hell! And this is one of the better places. All the girls who work here are really friendly and caring – there are homes that are much worse. But even so! Is this what we have to look forward to? Promise to shoot me before I get to this stage. Oh dear, I’m sorry…”
“It’s O.K.,” Martinsson said.
“I forget, I’m afraid. I know you had no choice but to shoot… Huh, it’s like talking about ropes in a house where a man’s hanged himself.”
“You don’t need to muzzle yourself. I understand.”
“I get so damned depressed,” Fjällborg said. “Please understand that I think about this even though I try hard not to. Especially with my arm and all that.”
He nodded towards his dysfunctional side. The one that could not keep up. The side whose hand could not be trusted, and kept dropping things.
“As long as I can…” Martinsson said.
“I know, I know.” Fjällborg waved a hand dismissively.
“And why must places like this always have such cheerful names?” he hissed. “Fjällgården, Mountain Lodge, Sunshine Hill, Rose Cottage.”
Martinsson could not help laughing.
“Woodland Glade,” she said.
“It sounds like a tract from the Baptists. Anyway, let’s go in. You should be aware that his short-term memory is pretty bad. But don’t be misled if he seems a bit confused. His long-term memory is fine.”
Fjällborg knocked on the door and they entered.
Karl-Åke Pantzare had white, neatly combed hair. His eyebrows and sideburns were bushy, with the stubbly, spiky hair typical of old men. He was wearing a shirt, pullover and tie. His trousers were immaculately clean and smartly pressed. It was obvious that earlier in his life he had been very good-looking. Martinsson checked his hands: his nails were clean and cut short.
Pantzare shook hands with both her and Fjällborg in a pleasant, friendly fashion. But behind his welcoming look was a trace of anxiety: had he ever met these people before? Ought he to recognize them?
Fjällborg hurried to allay his uncertainty.
“Sivving Fjällborg,” he said. “From Kurravaara. When I was a lad they used to call me Erik. Arvid Fjällborg is my cousin. Or was. He’s been dead for quite a few years now. And this is Rebecka Martinsson, the granddaughter of Albert and Theresia Martinsson. She’s from Kurravaara as well. But you haven’t met her before.”
Pantzare relaxed.
“Erik Fjällborg,” he said brightly. “Of course I remember you. But goodness me, you’ve aged a lot.”
He winked to show that he was teasing.
“Huh,” Fjällborg said, pretending to be offended. “I’m still a teenager.”
“Of course,” Pantzare said with a grin. “Teenager. That was a long time ago.”
Fjällborg and Martinsson accepted the offer of a coffee, and Fjällborg reminded Pantzare of a dramatic ice-fishing session with Fjällborg’s cousin and Pantzare on Jiekajaure.
“And Arvid used to tell me about how you cycled into town whenever there was a dance on a Saturday night. He said that the 13 kilometres from Kurra to Kirra was nothing, but if you met a nice bit of skirt from Kaalasluspa, that meant you had to cycle back with her first, and it was a long way home from there. And then of course he had to be up at 6.00 the next morning to do the milking. He sometimes fell asleep on the milking stool. Uncle Algot would be furious with him.”
The usual run-through of relatives they both knew followed. How a sister of Pantzare’s had rented a flat in Lahenperä. Fjällborg thought it was from the Utterströms, but Pantzare was able to inform him that it was in fact from the Holmqvists. How another of Fjällborg’s cousins, a brother of Arvid’s, and one of Pantzare’s brothers had been promising skiers, had even competed in races in Soppero and beaten outstanding Vittangi boys. They ran through who was ill. Who had died or moved to Kiruna, and, in those cases, who had taken over the childhood home.
Eventually Fjällborg decided that Pantzare was sufficiently relaxed and that it was time to come to the point. Without beating around the bush, he said that he had heard from his cousin that both he and Pantzare had been members of the resistance organization in Norbotten. He explained that Martinsson was a prosecutor, and that two young people who had been murdered had been diving in search of a German aeroplane in Lake Vittangijärvi.
“I’ll tell you straight, because I know it will go no further than these four walls, that there’s reason to assume that Isak Krekula from Piilijärvi and his haulage business were mixed up in it somehow.”
Pantzare’s face clouded over.
“Why have you come to see me?”
“Because we need help,” Fjällborg said. “I don’t know anybody else who is familiar with how things were in those days.”
“It’s best not to talk about that,” Pantzare said. “Arvid should never have told you. What can he have been thinking?”
Standing up, he took an old photograph album from a bookshelf.
“Have a look at this,” he said.
He produced a newspaper cutting that had been hidden among the pages of the album. It was dated five years earlier.
Pensioners Robbed and Murdered, ran the headline. The article described how a ninety-six-year-old man and his wife aged eighty-two had been murdered in their home just outside Boden. Martinsson glanced through it and was disgusted to read that the woman had been found with a pillow tied over her face. She had been beaten up, choked and strangled, and “violated” after she died.
Violated, Martinsson thought. What do they mean by that?
As if he had read her thoughts, Pantzare said, “They shoved a broken bottle up her pussy.”
Martinsson carried on reading. The man had been alive at 6.00 that morning when the district nurse had come to give his wife her insulin injection. He had been badly beaten, punched and kicked, and died later in hospital. According to the article, the police had conducted a door-to-door, but without success. As far as anybody knew, the couple had not kept significant sums of money or other valuables in their home.
“He was one of us,” Pantzare said. “I knew him. And no bloody way was this a robbery, I’m absolutely certain of that. They were neo-Nazis or some other gang of right-wing extremists who had discovered that he had been a member of the resistance. Nobody’s safe even though it was so long ago. Youngsters impress old Nazis by doing things like that. They made the old man watch while they beat his wife to death. Why would a robber want to violate her? They wanted to torture him. They’re still looking for us. And if they find us…”
A shake of the head completed the sentence.
Of course he’s scared, Martinsson thought. It’s easier to risk your life when you’re young, healthy and immortal than when you’re shut up in a place like this and all you can do is wait.
“We simply had to do something,” Pantzare said, as if he were talking to himself. “The Germans were sending ship after ship to Luleå – lots of them never recorded in the port registers. Many of them left again with cargoes of iron ore, of course. And provisions and equipment and weapons and soldiers. The official line was that the soldiers were going on leave. The hell they were! I watched S.S. units marching on and off those ships. They took trains up to Norway, or were transported to the Eastern front. We often considered sabotage, but that would have meant declaring war on our own country. After all it was Swedish customs officials and police officers and troops guarding the ports and depots, and supervising the transports. If we’d been an occupied country, the whole situation would have been different. The Germans had far more problems in occupied Norway, with the local resistance movements and the inhospitable terrain, than in comparatively flat and so-called neutral Sweden.”
“So what can you tell us about Isak Krekula and his haulage company?” Fjällborg said.
“I don’t know. I mean, there were so many haulage contractors. But I do know that one of the haulage firm owners up here informed for the Germans. At least one, that is. We didn’t know who it was, but we were told that it was a haulier. That put the wind up us, because a large part of our work was building up and servicing Kari.”
“What was that?” Martinsson said.
“The Norwegian resistance movement, X.U., had an intelligence base on Swedish territory, not far from Torneträsk. It was called Kari. The radio station there was called Brunhild. Kari passed information from ten substations in northern Norway to London. It was powered by a wind turbine, but it was located in a hollow so you couldn’t see it unless you came to within 15 metres of it.”
“Are you saying that there was an intelligence base in Sweden?”
“There were several. Sepal bases on Swedish territory were run with the support of the British secret service and the American O.S.S., which eventually became the C.I.A. They specialized in intelligence, sabotage and recruitment, and training in weapons, mine-laying and explosives.”
“It was thanks to those services that the British were able to sink the Terpitz,” Fjällborg said to Martinsson.
“Both the radio stations and the wind turbines had to be maintained,” Pantzare said, “and they needed provisions and equipment. We needed hauliers, and it was always a dodgy business initiating a new one, especially as we knew there was a haulier who was a German informer. My God, once a new driver – a lad from Råneå – and I were on our way to Pältsa. We had a cargo of sub-machine-guns. We took a short cut via the Kilpisjärvi road, which the Germans controlled, and they stopped us at a roadblock. The driver suddenly started talking in German to the officer in charge. I thought he was informing on me: I didn’t even know he could speak German, and I was about to leap out of the lorry and run for my life. But the German officer just laughed and let us through, after we’d given him a few packets of cigarettes. The lad had simply told him a joke. I gave him a telling off afterwards. He could have told me that he spoke German, after all! Although of course there were quite a few who could in those days. It was the first foreign language in Swedish schools. It had the same sort of status that English has now. Anyway, everything went well on that occasion.”
Pantzare fell silent. A hunted look flitted across his face.
“Were there occasions when things didn’t go so well?” Martinsson asked.
Pantzare reached for the photograph album and opened it at a particular page.
He pointed at a photograph that looked as if it had been taken in the 1940s. It was a full-length picture of a young man. He was leaning against a pine tree. It was summer. Sunlight was reflected in his curly blond hair. He was casually dressed in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and loose-fitting trousers with the cuffs turned up untidily. He gripped his upper arm with one hand, while the other held a pipe.
“Axel Viebke,” Pantzare said. “He was a member of the resistance group.”
Sighing deeply, he continued.
“Three Danish prisoners of war escaped from a German cargo ship moored in Luleå harbour. They ended up with us. Axel’s uncle owned a hut used at haymaking time to the east of Sävast. It was standing empty. He put them up there. They all died when the hut burned down. The newspapers called it an accident.”
“What do you think really happened?” Fjällborg said.
“I think they were executed. The Germans discovered they were there, and killed them. We never found out who had leaked the information.”
Pantzare grimaced.
Martinsson took the photograph album and turned a page.
There was a picture of Viebke and Pantzare standing on each side of a pretty woman in a flowered dress. She was very young. A nicely trimmed lock of hair hung down over one eye.
“Here you are again,” Martinsson said. “Who’s the girl?”
“Oh, just a bit of skirt,” Pantzare said, without looking at the photograph. “He had a weakness for the girls, did our Axel. He was always with a different one.”
Martinsson turned back to the photograph of Viebke by the pine tree. That page had been opened often; the edge was well-thumbed and darker than the others. The photographer’s shadow was visible.
He’s a charmer, she thought. He’s really posing. Lolling back against the pine trunk, pipe in hand.
“Were you the photographer?” she said.
“Yes,” Pantzare said, his voice sounding hoarse.
She looked round the room. Pantzare had no pictures of children hanging on the walls. There were no wedding photos among the framed ones on the bookshelf.
You did more than just like him, she thought, looking hard at Pantzare.
“He would have approved of you telling us about this,” she said. “That you continued to be brave.”
Pantzare nodded and his eyes glazed over.
“I don’t know all that much,” he said. “About the haulier in question, that is. The British said there was someone reporting to the Germans, and that we should watch our step. They were particularly concerned about the intelligence stations, of course. They called him the Fox. And there’s no doubt that Isak Krekula was on good terms with the Germans. He made lots of shipments for them, and it has always been the money that counted as far as he was concerned.”
“Pull yourself together!” Tore Krekula said.
He was standing in Hjalmar Krekula’s bedroom looking at his brother, who was in bed with the covers over his head.
“I know you’re awake. You’re not ill! That’s enough now!”
Tore opened the blinds with such force that it sounded as if the cords were going to snap. He wanted them to snap. It was snowing.
When Hjalmar had failed to turn up for work, his brother had taken the spare key and gone to his house. Not that a key was necessary. Nobody in the village locked their doors at night.
Hjalmar did not respond. Lay under the covers like a corpse. Tore was tempted to rip them off, but something held him back. He did not dare. The person lying there was unpredictable. It was as if a voice under the covers were saying: Give me an excuse, give me an excuse.
This was not the old Hjalmar who could be kicked around however you liked.
Tore felt helpless. This was an emotion he found difficult to handle. He was not used to people not doing as they were told. First that police bitch. Now Hjalmar.
And what could Tore threaten his brother with? He had always threatened Hjalmar.
He made an impatient tour of the house. Piles of dirty dishes. Empty crisp and biscuit packets. The kitchen smelled of stale slops. Big empty plastic bottles. Clothes on the floor. Underpants, yellow at the front, brown at the back.
He went back to the bedroom. Still no sign of movement.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said. “For fuck’s sake, what a mess this place is. What a pigsty. And you. You disgust me. Like a bloody big beached whale, rotting away. Ugh!”
Turning on his heel, he marched out.
Hjalmar heard the door bang closed behind him.
I can’t go on, he thought. There’s no way out.
There was an opened packet of cheese nibbles next to the bed. He took a few handfuls.
He heard a voice inside his head. His old schoolmaster, Fernström: “It’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do next.”
No, Fernström never understood.
He did not want to think about all that. But it made no difference what he wanted. Thoughts came flooding in like water through an open sluicegate.
Hjalmar Krekula is thirteen years old. On the radio Kennedy is debating with Nixon in the run-up to the presidential elections. Kennedy is a playboy; nobody thinks he is going to win. Hjalmar is not interested in politics. He is sitting in the classroom with his elbows on the varnished lid of his desk. His head is resting on his hands, his palms against his cheekbones. He and Herr Fernström are the only ones there. Once all the other children have gone home and the smell of wet wool and stables has disappeared along with them, the smell of school takes over. The smell of dusty books, the sour smell of the rag used to clean the blackboard. The smell of soft soap from the floor, and the peculiar smell of the old building.
Hjalmar Krekula can sense Herr Fernström occasionally looking up as he sits at his desk, correcting exercise books. Hjalmar avoids meeting his gaze. Instead, his eyes trace the wood grain of his desk lid. It resembles a woman lying down. To the right is an imaginary creature, or perhaps a ptarmigan: the mark where a twig branched off is an eye.
The headmaster, Herr Bergvall, enters the room. Herr Fernström closes the exercise book he has been marking and pushes it to one side.
Bergvall greets him.
“Well,” he says, “I’ve spoken to the doctors in Kiruna, and with Elis Sevä’s mother. His wound needed six stitches. His nose wasn’t broken, but he has concussion.”
He says nothing for a while, waiting for Hjalmar Krekula to react. Hjalmar does what he always does: says nothing, fixes his eyes on something else, on the wall chart featuring a map of Palestine, on the harmonium, on the pupils’ drawings pinned up on the wall. Tore had taken young Sevä’s bicycle. Sevä had told Tore to give him the bloody thing back. Tore had said, “Come on, I’m only borrowing it.” A fight had ensued. One of Tore’s mates had gone to fetch Hjalmar. Sevä had been furious, hitting out left, right and centre.
Herr Fernström looks at the headmaster and with a barely noticeable shake of the head indicates that there is no point in waiting for an answer from Hjalmar Krekula.
The headmaster’s face becomes somewhat flushed and he starts breathing heavily, provoked by Hjalmar’s silence. He says that this is bad, very bad. Assault and battery, that is what it is – hitting a schoolmate with a spanner: for God’s sake, there are laws against that, and those laws apply in school as well.
“He started it,” Hjalmar says, as usual.
The headmaster’s voice goes up a tone, and he says he thinks Krekula is lying to save his own skin. Says his friends might back up Krekula’s story to save their own skins.
“Herr Fernström tells me that Krekula is a talented mathematician,” the headmaster says.
Hjalmar Krekula says nothing, looks out of the window.
Now the headmaster loses his patience.
“Whatever good that will do him,” he says, “when he is failing virtually every other subject. Especially conduct and attitude.”
He repeats the last sentence.
“Especially conduct and attitude.”
Hjalmar Krekula turns to face the headmaster. Gives him a disdainful look.
The headmaster immediately starts to worry that he might have his windows smashed at home.
“Krekula must try to keep his impulses under control,” he says in a conciliatory tone.
And he adds that Krekula will have one-to-one tuition with the deputy head for two weeks. Get away from the classroom for a while. Have an opportunity to think things over.
Then the headmaster leaves.
Herr Fernström sighs. Hjalmar has the impression that the sigh is a reaction to the headmaster rather than to himself.
“Why do you get involved in fighting?” Herr Fernström says. “You’re not a fool. And you’re really gifted when it comes to maths. You ought to continue your education, Hjalmar. You have the chance to catch up in your other subjects. Then you could go on to high school.”
“Huh,” Hjalmar says.
“What do you mean, huh?”
“My father would never allow it. We have to work in the haulage business, me and Tore.”
“I’ll have a word with your father. It’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do next. Do you see that? If you stop fighting and…”
“I couldn’t give a toss,” Hjalmar says vehemently. “I’ve no desire to continue at school anyway. It’s better to get a job and earn some money. Can I go now?”
Herr Fernström sighs again. And this time the sigh is definitely aimed at Hjalmar Krekula.
“Yes, you can go,” he says. “Go away.”
But Fernström really does have a word with the old man. One day when Hjalmar comes home, Isak Krekula is bubbling over with rage. Kerttu continues making pancakes with a grim expression on her face while Isak lays down the law in the kitchen.
“I want you to be quite clear that I sent that schoolmaster of yours packing with a flea in his ear,” he bellows at Hjalmar. “I’ll be damned if a son of mine is going to become an anaemic calculating machine, and I made sure he understood that. Maths, eh? Who the devil do you think you are? Too posh to work in the transport business, is that it? Not good enough for your lordship? I’ll have you know that it’s the haulage business that has put food on your table for your entire life.”
He gasps for breath, as if his fury is well on the way to choking him, as if it were a pillow over his mouth.
“If it doesn’t suit you to help to take responsibility for your family, then you’re not welcome to stay here, is that clear? Work away at your maths if you like, but in that case you’ll have to look elsewhere for a place to live.”
Hjalmar wants to tell his father that he has no intention of going to high school. This is all something thought up by Herr Fernström. But he does not say a word. His fear of his father gets in the way of what he wants to say. But there is something else as well. A flash of insight.
The insight is that he really is good at maths. Even talented. Just as the headmaster said. He is a talented mathematician. Fernström told the headmaster, and Fernström drove all the way to Piilijärvi to tell his dad.
And when Isak Krekula yells, “Well, how’s it going to be?” Hjalmar does not reply. Isak gives him a box on the ear, two in fact, making his head spin and throb. Hjalmar has the feeling that he can become “an anaemic calculating machine”. And that is something way beyond the reach of the rest of the family, something that makes Isak froth at the mouth with rage.
Then Hjalmar goes to the lake to sit on the shore. Has to turn the cheek that has been smacked away from the autumn sun, to prevent it hurting even more.
He watches two ravens playing tag with a twig. One of them performs wild acrobatics with the twig in its beak, the other chases close behind it. They loop the loop, spin round on their own axes, dive down towards the water, then shoot back up again.
The one with the stick flies straight into the crown of a tree; it seems certain that it will collide with the trunk or a heavy branch and break its neck, but the next second it emerges on the other side – it has found its way through the network of branches like a black throwing knife. It sails out over the lake and gives a reckless “korrrp” – and drops the twig, of course. Both ravens circle above the water before they decide they cannot be bothered and fly off above the tops of the pine trees.
I land on the jetty next to Hjalmar. He’s thirteen years old, and his cheek is flaming red. Tears are streaming down his face, although he’s trying hard not to cry. And then comes the anger. It hits him with such force that he starts trembling. He hates Isak, who bawled and yelled so violently that spit was flying in all directions. He hates Kerttu, who simply turned her back on it all, as usual. He hates Herr Fernström – why the hell did he have to go and have a word with his father? Hjalmar didn’t ask him to. He has never even thought about going to high school. He’s had something taken away from him that he didn’t have in the first place. So why is he crying?
The fury inside him is like a red-hot poker. He stands up, has to struggle to stay on his feet. He goes looking for Tore, who is messing about with his Zündapp moped, fitting a bigger jet to the carburettor.
“Come on, there’s a job we need to do,” he says.
Herr Fernström’s black Volkswagen is parked in its usual place, a hundred metres from the school.
Hjalmar has brought a crowbar with him. He starts with the rear and front lights. Soon the glass is lying like heaps of diamonds on the tarmac. But that’s not enough: he still has so much anger pulsating inside him that needs to come out, out. He smashes the windscreen, the side windows, the back window. There is a loud bang as the panes splinter, the glass shoots out in all directions, and Tore takes a couple of paces backwards. Some children walk past.
“If you squeal on us, it’ll be your skulls next time,” Tore says, and they run off like startled mice.
Tore places one foot on the frame of a shattered side window and vaults up onto the roof, bounces up and down several times until it is completely dented and ruined, then jumps down onto the road via the bonnet.
It happens very quickly, all done within three minutes, and then it’s time to run.
“Come on,” Tore shouts, already on his moped, having driven some way off.
Hjalmar’s arms ache, and he feels sweaty. He’s calm now. He’ll never cry again.
Opening the car door, he searches through the briefcase on the front passenger seat. Tore is shouting away, worried in case some adult should turn up at the scene. There is no wallet, just three maths textbooks – Tekno’s Giant Arithmetic Book, Practical Arithmetic, Geometry Manual – and a paperback entitled Turning Points in Physics – A Series of Lectures Given at Oxford University. Hjalmar tucks them all inside his jacket – apart from the Giant Arithmetic Book, which is simply too big: he has to carry that under his arm.
I leave them to it. Soar up with the thermals. Up, up.
I shall start things moving with regard to Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula.
Martinsson is sitting in her office after the morning’s proceedings. They comprised cases of dangerous driving, G.B.H. and fraud. The documentation needs putting in order, and decisions must be made. She knows that if she knuckles down, it will take half an hour, no more. But she doesn’t feel like it; she is finding it hard to concentrate.
The snowy weather has passed over. Quickly. As it tends to do in the mountains. Just when it felt as if it would never cease. When the wind was raging and howling, and the sticky April snow was forcing its way inside people’s upturned collars, wet and icy. Suddenly, everything died down. The clouds blew away. The sky became light blue and cloudless.
Martinsson checks her mobile. Hopes her man will ring or text her. Outside the sun is shining down on the facades and roofs of buildings, onto all the newly fallen snow.
Two crows are sitting in the tree outside her window. They are calling to her, enticing her out. Although she has no awareness of that.
People don’t think about birds. Birds inspire them with big, ambitious thoughts, but people never ask themselves why this is the case. Never wonder how it is that twenty little birds in a birch tree at winter’s end, chirping and warbling, can open up people’s hearts and let happiness come flowing in. The barking of a dog doesn’t awaken such feelings.
Then Martinsson looks up into the sky and sees a skein of migrating birds: all those massive emotions take possession of her. Just as when a hundred crows gather to form a croaking choir on a summer’s evening. Or an owl cries dolefully, or a great northern diver appears on a summer’s night. Or a swallow arrives with a clatter to feed its squeaking fledglings in their nest under the eaves.
Nor do people ask themselves why it is that their interest in birds increases the older they get, the closer they come to death.
Ah well, people don’t know very much until they die.
The crows are cawing loudly, and Martinsson feels that she really must go out for a walk and make the most of the lovely weather. It occurs to her that it is a long time since she visited her grandmother’s grave. Good. She stands up.
A flock of ravens lands in the parking area at the front of Hjalmar’s house. Their beaks and feathers glisten in the sun.
My God, how big they are, Hjalmar thinks as he watches them through his window.
He has the feeling that they are staring straight at him. When he opens the front door, they shuffle to one side, but none of them flies away. They caw and croak quietly. He is not sure if he should think this is creepy or captivating. They stare at him.
I’ll pay a visit to Wilma’s grave, he thinks. Nobody could possibly think there was anything odd about that. I live in the village, after all.
Snow covers Kiruna cemetery. High drifts between the cleared graves and paths. It is almost like walking through a maze. Martinsson looks around. It takes her some time to get her bearings. The snow makes everything look different. Hardly anybody has had the time to clear the graves since this morning’s storm. They lie hidden beneath the snow. The sun is glistening on all the whiteness. The beech trees form imposing portals with their hanging branches, heavy with wet snow.
Martinsson usually reads the inscriptions on all the gravestones as she passes by them. She loves all the old-fashioned titles: small-holder, certificated forester, parish treasurer. And all the old names: Gideon, Eufemia, Lorentz.
The grave of her grandparents is hidden under the snow. It was buried even before the latest storm. Her conscience pricks as she goes to fetch a spade.
She starts digging. The newly fallen snow is light and easy to shift, but the snow underneath is wet, icy and as heavy as lead. The sun hurts her eyes but warms her back. It occurs to her that she never gets the feeling that her farmor is present when she comes here. No, she meets her farmor in other places. Without warning in the forest, or sometimes in her house. When she goes to the grave it’s more of an act of will, an attempt to make her thoughts and feelings home in on her farmor.
But I know you’d want me to keep things neat and tidy here, she thinks to her grandmother, and vows to become a better grave-keeper.
Now memories of her farmor start to surface. Martinsson is fifteen years old and riding her moped the 13 kilometres from Kiruna to Kurravaara, chugging up to the house on her Puch Dakota with her satchel over her shoulder. It’s almost the end of term, and in the autumn she’ll be starting grammar school. It’s 6.00 in the evening. Farmor is in the cowshed. Martinsson throws her jacket over the big cast-iron cauldron built into the wall. There is a grate underneath it. Farmor uses it to heat up water for the cows in winter. She sometimes uses the warm water to soften up dried birch sprigs so that the cows have birch leaves to eat together with soaked oats: Martinsson often helps her farmor tear the sodden leaves from the twigs. Farmor’s hands are always rough and covered in wounds. When Martinsson was a little girl she used to bathe in the cowshed cauldron every other Saturday. Short wooden planks were placed at the bottom so that she didn’t burn herself on the hot iron.
All those noises, Martinsson thinks as she stands by the grave. All those calming noises that I shall never hear again – cows chewing, milk spurting onto the sides of the pail as Farmor does the milking, chains rattling as the cows stretch to reach more hay, the buzzing of flies and the chattering of barn swallows. Farmor giving me strict instructions to go and change – you can’t mess around in the cowshed wearing your elegant school uniform. Me saying: “Who cares?” and turning my attention to brushing down Daisy.
Farmor never argued. Her strictness was only in her voice. My life with her was one of freedom.
Then she died alone. While I was in Uppsala, studying for my exams. But I’m not ready to think about that yet. There are so many things for which I can never forgive myself. And that is the worst one.
Martinsson is sweating, digging into the heavy snow with the spade, when a shadow falls over her. Someone is standing behind her. She turns round.
It’s Hjalmar.
He looks like a man on the run. A man who has been sleeping in his clothes in stairwells, a man who has been searching through rubbish bins and wastepaper baskets for bottles and tins with a deposit he can collect.
Martinsson is frightened at first. But then her heart becomes heavy and she feels sorry for him. He looks really awful. He’s going rapidly downhill.
She says nothing.
Hjalmar looks at Martinsson. He hadn’t expected to see that prosecutor here. He passed through the new part of the cemetery on his way to Wilma’s grave. All the new graves were free of snow, neat and tidy. The relatives must have been here the moment the sun came out. They had certainly spent their lunch breaks making sure everything looked presentable. Much loved and missed, it said on nearly all the stones. Hjalmar wondered vaguely what it would say on his own stone. Whether Tore’s wife Laura would look after the grave. She might well do, simply to stop people talking in the village. He paused for a few moments in front of a child’s grave. Calculated quickly on the basis of the inscribed dates how old Samuel had been when he died. Two years, three months and five days. There was an image of the boy on the top left-hand corner of the stone. Hjalmar had never seen anything like that before. Not that he visited the cemetery all that often. There was a wreath with a teddy bear in it, flowers and a lantern.
“Poor little lad,” he said, feeling a tug at his heart-strings. “Poor little lad.”
Then he couldn’t bring himself to stop at Wilma’s grave. Just walked past the temporary plastic nameplate on an aluminium peg: “Persson Wilma”. Gifts, flowers, a few flickering candles. He walked back through the old part of the cemetery wondering why the hell he had come, and then caught sight of the prosecutor.
He recognized her by her overcoat and long, dark hair. He didn’t know why he decided to walk towards her. He stopped a few metres short. She was frightened when she turned round. He could tell.
He wants to tell her she has nothing to be afraid of, but can’t produce a sound. Just stands there like an idiot. But that is what he’s been all his life. An idiot people are afraid of.
She says nothing. The fear disappears from her eyes and is replaced by something else. Something he finds it difficult to cope with. He’s not used to it. He’s not used to people being quiet. He’s usually the one who says nothing and lets the others do the talking, lets the others decide what to do.
“They can scatter my ashes to the winds,” he says eventually.
She nods.
“Have you come to visit the people you killed?” he asks after another pause.
He knows about that, of course. He’s read about her in the evening papers. And people talk.
“No,” she says. “I’ve come to visit my grandmother. And my grandfather.”
She nods towards the grave she is clearing.
Then it dawns on her what his question sounded like. There was an “also” there that he didn’t actually say. But it was there. Have you also come to visit the people you killed?
She turns her head and points. Adds in a calm voice: “The ones I killed are over there. And there. But Thomas Söderberg isn’t buried here.”
“You were acquitted,” he says.
“Yes,” she says. “They said it was self-defence.”
“How did you feel?”
He stresses the “you”. Looks her in the eye. Then looks down at the snow as if he were standing in front of the altar at church, showing due deference.
What does he want? Martinsson wonders.
“I don’t know,” she says hesitantly. “At first I didn’t feel anything much. I didn’t remember much either. But then things got worse. I couldn’t work. I tried to get a grip, but in the end I made a mistake that cost my firm lots of money and prestige – they had a good insurance policy, but still… Then I went on sick leave. I hung around the flat. Didn’t want to go out. Slept badly. Ate badly. The flat was in a terrible mess.”
“Yes,” he says.
They fall silent as someone else approaches. She nods as she walks past. Martinsson nods back. Hjalmar doesn’t seem to have noticed.
It occurs to Martinsson that he might be going to confess. What the hell should she do if that happens? Ask him to accompany her to the police station, of course. But what if he refuses? What if he confesses and then regrets having done so and kills her instead?
She looks him in the eye for a while. And she recalls one of Meijer & Ditzinger’s clients, a prostitute who owned a number of flats. She made no attempt to hide her profession, having commissioned the law firm to sort out a tax problem. Måns Wenngren had been drunk on one occasion when they had gone out for an afternoon drink, and quite irresponsibly had started asking her if she was ever afraid of her clients. He had been flirtatious, flattering, fascinated. Martinsson had been embarrassed, had looked down at the table. The woman had remained friendly but never wavered in her integrity – it was obvious that she was used to this kind of curiosity. She said no, she wasn’t afraid. She always looked new clients in the eye long and hard. “That way you know,” she had said, “if you need to be frightened or not. Everything you need to know about a person can be seen in his eyes.”
Martinsson looks Hjalmar in the eye long and hard. No, she doesn’t need to be afraid of him.
“You ended up in a psychiatric ward,” he says.
“Yes, in the end I did. I went out of my mind. It was when Lars-Gunnar Vinsa shot himself and his boy. I couldn’t cope with another death. It sort of opened all the doors I was trying to keep closed.”
Hjalmar finds it almost impossible to breathe. That’s exactly what it’s like, he wants to say. First Wilma and Simon. That had been bad enough, although he managed to cope. But then there was Hjörleifur Arnarson…
“Did you sink all the way down?” he says. “Did you hit rock bottom?”
“I suppose I did, yes. Although I don’t remember much of the worst part. I was so poorly.”
They gave me electric-shock treatment, she thinks. And they kept me under close supervision. I don’t want to talk about this.
They stand there, Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula. For him it is so difficult to ask questions. For her it is so difficult to answer. They battle their way forward through the conversation like two hikers in a blizzard. Heads bowed, struggling with the wind.
“I don’t remember,” she says. “I sometimes think that if you recall a situation in which you were really depressed, you feel all the sorrow flooding back when you think about it. And if you recall a situation in which you were really happy, the happiness comes back to you. But if your memory of a situation fills you with anxiety, the feelings you had don’t come back, no matter what. It’s as if your brain simply goes on strike. It’s not going to go back there. You can only remember what it was like. You can’t experience how it felt.”
Depressed? Hjalmar thinks. Sorrow? Happiness?
Neither of them speaks.
“What about you?” Rebecka says eventually. “Whom have you come to visit?”
“I thought I’d come and say hello to her.”
She realizes that it’s Wilma he’s talking about.
“Did you know her?” she says.
Yes, his mouth says, although no sound is produced. But he nods.
“What was she like?”
“She was O.K.,” he says, and adds with a wry smile: “She wasn’t very good at maths.”
Wilma is sitting at Anni’s kitchen table with her maths textbook open in front of her, tearing her hair in desperation. She has to read up on maths and Swedish in order to be able to apply to grammar school. Anni is at the sink washing up, watching Hjalmar Krekula through the window as he clears away the snow from the parking area in front of the house with his tractor. Anni is his aunt, after all.
The air turns blue as Wilma curses and swears over her maths book. God’s angels come out in goose pimples when they hear her.
“Hell, damnation, shit, fuck, cunt,” she says, snarling.
“Hey, calm down now,” Anni says disapprovingly.
“But I don’t want to,” Wilma says. “I’m thick, I can’t understand a thing. Bloody algebra shit-talk. ‘When we multiply a conjugate pair, the radical vanishes and we are left with a rational number.’ I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to ring Simon, and we can go out on the snow scooter.”
“Do that.”
“Aaaargh! But I really have to learn this stuff!”
“Don’t ring him, then.”
Anni sees that Hjalmar has almost finished. She puts the coffee pan on the stove. Five minutes later he sticks his head round the door and announces that it is all done. Anni will not let him go. She tells him she has only just put the coffee on. She and Wilma will not be able to drink it all themselves. And she has thawed out some buns as well.
He allows himself to be persuaded and sits down at the kitchen table. Keeps his jacket on, only unzipping it halfway as a sign that he does not intend to stay long.
He says nothing. He hardly ever does; people are used to it. Anni and Wilma take care of the talking, know better than to try to include him by asking lots of questions.
“I’m going to ring Simon,” Wilma says in the end, and goes out into the hall where the telephone stands on a little teak table with a stool beside it and a mirror behind.
Anni gets up to fetch a 50-krona note from an old cocoa tin standing on the edge of the cooker hood. It is part of the ritual: she will try to persuade Hjalmar to accept the money for clearing the snow. He always refuses, but in the end he usually takes a bag of buns, or some beef stew in a plastic jar. Or something of the sort. While Anni fumbles around in the cocoa tin, Hjalmar pulls over Wilma’s maths book. He glances quickly through the text, then in about a minute flat he solves nine algebraic equations, one after the other.
“Wow,” Anni says. “Fancy that, I’d almost forgotten. You were very good at maths when you were at school. Maybe you could help Wilma? Her maths is driving her up the wall.”
But Hjalmar has to leave. He zips up his jacket, grunts a thank you for the coffee and grabs the 50-krona note in order to avoid arguing.
That evening Wilma turns up at Hjalmar Krekula’s house. She has her maths book in her hand.
“You’re good at this stuff!” she says without preamble, marches into his kitchen and sits down at the table. “You’re a genius, after all.”
“Oh, I don’t know…” Hjalmar says, but is interrupted.
“You must teach me. I can’t understand a damned thing.”
“No, I can’t,” he says, and starts struggling for breath, but Wilma has already wriggled out of her jacket.
“Oh yes!” she says. “Yes you can!”
“Alright,” he says. “But I’m no schoolmistress.”
She looks at him entreatingly. She positively pleads with him. So he feels obliged to sit down beside her.
They slog away together for more than two hours. She shouts and moans as she usually does when things are not going well for her. To her surprise, he shouts as well. He slams his fist down on the table and says that for God’s sake she must stop gaping out of the window and concentrate on her maths book. Is she meditating? What the hell is she doing? And when she starts crying, worn out by second-order polynomials, he taps her awkwardly on the head and asks if she would like a soda. And so they drink Coca-Cola together.
In the end she understands how to solve “those bloody quadratic equations”.
They are both utterly exhausted. Washed out. Hjalmar warms up some Russian pasty, which they eat with ice cream.
“My God, but you’re a clever bastard,” she says. “Why are you driving lorries? You ought to be a professor.”
He laughs.
“Professor of class-nine maths!”
How could she possibly understand? Ever since he finished reading the maths books he stole from Herr Fernström’s car, he has been doing his sums. He has ordered books from university book-shops and antiquarian booksellers. In algebra he is busy with Lagrange’s theorem and groups of permutations. He has been taking correspondence courses for years, and not just in maths. Driven down to Stockholm in order to take the exams at Hermod’s Correspondence College. Pretended that he was going to Finland to do some shopping. Or to Luleå to collect an engine. When he was twenty-five he took the high-school leaving examination at Hermod’s. He drove out to his summer cottage the following weekend. He had bought a bottle of wine. Not that he was much of a drinker, and especially not of wine. But he sat there with a Duralex glass of red. It tasted foul. Hjalmar smiles at the memory.
They work for a bit longer, but eventually it is time for Wilma to go home. She puts on her jacket.
“Don’t tell anybody about this,” he says before she leaves. “You know. Not Tore… Not anybody. Don’t tell them I’m good at maths and all that.”
“Of course not,” she says with a smile.
She is already elsewhere in her thoughts. Presumably with Simon Kyrö. She thanks Hjalmar for his help, and leaves.
Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula are standing in the cemetery. Martinsson has the feeling that she is sitting in a boat and Hjalmar has fallen into the water. He’s clinging on to the rail, but she doesn’t have the strength to pull him into the boat. He will soon be dangerously close to hypothermia. He will lose his grip on the rail. He will sink. There’s nothing she can do.
“How are you?” she says.
She regrets it the moment she’s said it. She doesn’t want to know how he is. He’s not her responsibility.
“I’ve got heartburn or something,” he says, thumping his chest with his fist.
“Really?”
“I have to go,” he says. But he shows no sign of moving.
“I see.”
She has the dog in her car. She ought to go too.
“I can’t stop wondering what I should do,” he says. His face is twitching.
She looks away in the direction of the trees. Avoids looking him in the eye.
“When I felt at rock bottom, I used to go out for a walk in the country. Sometimes that helps.”
He trudges off.
Impotence weighs her down.
Martinsson arrived back at the police station at 2.15 in the afternoon. In the entrance she bumped into Anna-Maria Mella. Vera, overcome with joy, jumped up to greet Mella. Left wet paw marks on her jeans.
Mella’s eyes were shining and full of life. Her cheeks were red. Her hair seemed to be longing to be free; strands were working their way loose from her plait and looked as if they wanted to fly away.
“Have you heard?” she said. “We’ve had a report from the lab. There was blood from Hjörleifur Arnarson on Tore Krekula’s jacket.”
“Wow,” Martinsson said, feeling as if she had been jerked violently out of a dream. Her thoughts had been totally immersed in the meeting with Hjalmar Krekula at the cemetery. “What are you…”
“We’re going to arrest Tore Krekula, of course. We’re about to set off for his house right now.”
Mella paused. She looked guilty.
“I ought to have rung you. But you’ve been busy with proceedings all morning, haven’t you? Do you want to come with us and help nail him?”
Martinsson shook her head.
“Before you go,” she said, placing a hand on Mella’s arm to hold her back, “I was at the cemetery.”
Mella made a heroic effort to hide her impatience.
“And?” she said, pretending to be interested.
“Hjalmar Krekula was there as well. To visit Wilma’s grave. I think he was on the brink of… well, I don’t know what. He’s not well. I had the feeling he wanted to tell me something.”
Mella became a little more attentive.
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. It was mainly a feeling I had.”
“Don’t be angry,” Mella said, “but don’t you think your imagination might be running away with you? All this business might have triggered memories of your own experience. How you felt bad when you… you know.”
Martinsson could feel her emotions tying themselves in knots.
“That’s a possibility, of course,” she said stiffly.
“We can talk more about it when I get back,” Mella said. “But keep away from Hjalmar Krekula, O.K.? He’s a dangerous swine, remember that.”
Martinsson shook her head thoughtfully.
“He would never hurt me,” she said.
“Famous last words,” Mella said with a wry smile. “I’m serious, Rebecka. Suicide and homicide have a lot in common. We had a bloke last year who ran amok in his cottage out at Laxforsen, releasing first his wife and then his children aged seven and eleven from the sufferings of this world. Then he succeeded in taking his own life with an overdose of ordinary iron tablets. His kidneys and liver gave up the ghost. Mind you, it took more than two months for him to die. He was in hospital in Umeå with tubes wherever you looked, under arrest for murder.”
Neither of them spoke. Mella wanted to bite her tongue off. She thought about when Martinsson had shot those men at Jiekajärvi. The circumstances had been quite different, of course. And how she had lost the plot and wanted to kill herself. But those circumstances had also been quite different. Why was everything always so complicated? The ground around Martinsson was a minefield. Why the hell did she have to bump into her in the doorway?
Rantakyrö and Olsson came charging down the corridor. Greeting Martinsson hurriedly, they looked questioningly at Mella.
“Right, we’re off to pick up Tore Krekula,” Mella said. “I expect you’ll want to be present at the interrogation?”
Martinsson nodded and the pack raced out of the door, baying and howling, sniffing the ground.
She remained where she was, feeling left out.
Oh dear, she said to herself, how little and insignificant you are.
Vera suddenly started barking. Krister Eriksson had just parked his car and let out Tintin and Roy. His face lit up when he caught sight of Martinsson. He went over to her.
“I was looking for you,” he said with a smile so big that his pink skin seemed tightly stretched. “Do you think you could look after Tintin for a while? I’m going to put Roy through his paces, and Tintin is always so miserable when she’s left behind in the car.”
Vera stood submissively still, wagging her tail in a friendly greeting, as Tintin and Roy sniffed at her, under her stomach and around her rump.
“I’d love to,” Martinsson said.
“How are things?” he said. Martinsson had the feeling he could see right through her.
“Fine,” she lied.
She told him about Tore Krekula’s jacket, about how he was about to be arrested.
Eriksson said nothing, just stood there and waited. Looked sympathetically at her.
You’re a right one for standing there and waiting, Martinsson thought. Wait on.
She had no intention of telling him about Hjalmar Krekula and their meeting in the cemetery.
Then he smiled suddenly. Tapped her gently on the arm. As if he simply could not keep his hands off her.
“So long, then. I’ll collect her this evening.”
He instructed Tintin to stay with Martinsson, went back out to his car and drove off with Roy.
Laura Krekula took her time before opening the door. She eyed the police officers standing outside. Mella could not resist flashing her I.D.
She could see the fear in Laura Krekula’s eyes. Rantakyrö and Olsson were wearing their serious faces.
I don’t feel sorry for her, Mella thought. How on earth could she marry such an idiot?
“Here you are again,” Laura said in a weak voice.
“We’re looking for Tore,” Mella said.
“He’s at work,” his wife said. “You won’t find him at home in the middle of the day.”
“Is that his car parked over there?” Mella said.
“Yes, but he’s making a delivery to Luleå today and won’t be back home until late tonight,” his wife said.
“Is it O.K. if we take a look round the house? One of the drivers at the garage said Tore was at home.”
Laura Krekula stepped to one side and let them in.
They opened wardrobes. Checked the garage and laundry room. Laura remained in the hall. After five minutes, the police thanked her and left.
When they had driven off, Laura went upstairs. She collected the big, long, hexagonal spanner that fitted the hatch to the cold loft. Turning the spanner, she let the hatch fall open and unfolded the ladder.
Tore Krekula climbed down.
Walking past his wife, he bounded down the stairs to the ground floor.
Laura followed him. Said nothing. Watched him pull on his boots and jacket. He went into the kitchen wearing his outdoor clothes. Spread some butter on the side of the crispbread with the deepest holes and cut some slices of sausage which he laid on top.
“Don’t say a thing,” he said with his mouth full. “Not a word to your mother or your sister. Is that clear?”
Hjalmar is skiing through the forest. The afternoon sun is warming everything. There are big balls of new snow in the trees, but it has started to melt and drip. I’m sitting in the birch trees among all the watery pearls, watching him. Moving from tree to tree. Being weightless, I can perch on the thinnest of twigs. In winter they are black and the frost makes them straggly. Now they’ve assumed a violet tinge. The colour of spring. I run like a lynx up a pine trunk smelling of resin. The bark is golden brown, just like Anni’s ginger biscuits. The branches are dressed in her green cable-knit cardigan. I hide inside the cardigan. Lying in wait for Hjalmar.
It must be at least twenty years since he last went skiing. His boots and skis are much older than that. Old-fashioned, untarred, unwaxed skis with ancient mousetrap bindings. He can’t make them slide. He has to keep stopping in order to scrape away the snow clinging onto the bottoms. He sinks down into the snow even though he is trying to follow the scooter tracks. His ungreased, cracked leather boots are soon soaked through. His trousers as well.
His poles sink into the snow. Deep down, and it’s hard work pulling them out again. The discs get stuck. When he manages to pull them up again they look like cylinders, with 30 centimetres of snow clinging to the poles above the discs.
He thinks he’s making wretchedly slow progress, but he wouldn’t have been able to progress at all without skis. And if skis like these were good enough for his father and his friends, why shouldn’t they be good enough for him? Don’t forget that in the old days the Lapps used to roam far and wide through the forests with much worse equipment and only one pole.
Occasionally he looks up. Sees drops of water trembling hesitantly on the branches.
Sweat runs down his forehead and makes his eyes smart.
At last he comes to the shelter he and Tore built twenty years ago just south of Ripukkavaara.
Hjalmar sits down in the shelter and takes the thermos of coffee and box of sandwiches from his rucksack. The sun warms his face.
Taking the sandwiches out of the plastic box, he is overcome by exhaustion. He puts them down beside him.
The wind sighs soothingly in the crowns of the trees. Like Anni’s wooden spoon in a pot. The branches sway from side to side, offering no resistance. Allow themselves to be rocked to sleep. Not long ago Hjalmar thought the birdsong was hurting his ears. It sounded like knives being sharpened by rubbing against each other. But now it sounds quite different. A chirping and chirruping. A woodpecker is hammering at a tree trunk in the distance.
Hjalmar lies down on his side. Water drips from the roof of the shelter.
A sentence comes into his mind: “Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.” Where does it come from? Is it something he’s read in the Bible in his cottage at Saarisuanto?
Why should one have to worry about things that happened in the past? When his father held his head under the icy water. That was fifty years ago. He never thinks about it; why would he start now?
His eyes close. The snow sighs in the forest, made weary by the coming of spring. The sun is roasting hot. Hjalmar dozes off in the warmth of the shelter.
He is woken up by a presence. Opens his eyes and at first sees only a shadow blocking out the sun. Shaggy and black.
Like a shot he is wide awake. A bear.
It stands up on its hind legs in front of him. Hjalmar can make out more than the mere outline. Its snout, its fur. Its paws and claws. For three long seconds it stands still, staring him in the eye.
It’s curtains, Hjalmar thinks.
Three more seconds. During those three seconds, everything in Hjalmar comes to a standstill.
Well, this is it, he thinks about his own death.
God is looking at Hjalmar through the eye of the bear.
Then the bear turns round, flops down on all fours and ambles away.
Hjalmar’s heart starts pounding. It is the beating heart of life. It is the fingertips of the shaman on the skin of a drum. It is the rain on the tin roof of his cottage at Saarisuanto, an autumn evening when he’s lying in bed and the fire is crackling in the hearth.
His blood flows through his veins. It is the spring water starting to flow beneath the ice, forming rivulets under the snow, finding its way up into the trees, cascading over cliffs.
His breath floats in and out of his lungs. It is the wind that lifts up the rollicking raven, that whips the snow into whirling, sharp-edged spirals on the mountainside, that caresses the lake tenderly in the evening, and then lies down to rest and enables everything to become still and mirror-like.
My God, says Hjalmar in the absence of anybody else, anything else to turn to while he wallows in the feeling of deliverance that has overwhelmed him. Stay, stay with me.
But he knows this is a sensation that will not last. He sits still until it dies away.
Now he notices that his sandwiches are no longer there. They were what lured the bear to the shelter.
He skis home, feeling exhilarated.
Anything at all can happen now, he thinks. I’m free. The bear could have killed me. It could have been curtains.
He will search through the Bible in his cottage and see if he can find that line. “My heart within me is desolate.”
Anni looks completely transparent now. She’s been asleep on the kitchen sofa. I’m sitting next to her, looking at her chest. The muscles inside are so tired, there’s no strength left in them. Her breathing is shallow and fast. The spring sunshine pours in through the window and warms her legs. Then suddenly she opens her eyes.
“Shall we put the coffee on?” she says.
I realize that she’s talking to me, even though she can’t see me. Although she is far from certain that I’m there.
She sits up slowly: her left hand finds support behind her back while she holds onto the white-painted wooden back of the sofa with her right one. Then she needs to use both hands to move her legs closer to the edge of the sofa until they overlap it and she can lower them to the floor. Feet into her slippers, hand on the table to get some leverage. A little gasp reflecting effort and pain, and a there-we-go slides over her lips as she stands up.
She pours water into the pan, opens the coffee tin and transfers some spoonfuls into the pan.
“I thought we could fill up the thermos and drink our coffee on the steps outside. Now that the sun’s so warm.”
Then it takes half a year for her to get out the thermos flask, fill it with coffee, put on her jacket and shuffle out of the front door. Not to mention the difficulty she has in sitting down on the steps. Anni laughs.
“I have my mobile in my pocket. So I can ring for help if I can’t stand up again. I don’t suppose you’ll be able to help me.”
She pours out the coffee. It’s hot. She drinks slowly, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her nose and cheeks. For the first time since I died she is happy to think that she might live long enough to experience another summer. Tells herself she must take care not to fall, so that she doesn’t end up in hospital.
Three ravens land in the parking area in front of the house. At first they saunter around as if they owned the place. The sun makes their black feathers sparkle and gleam. They point their curved beaks in all directions, but don’t have much to say for themselves. I have the impression they are putting on an act. Pretending to be serious fellows. Dragging their wedge-shaped tails behind them like peacocks. If I were really sitting here with Anni, I would joke about it. We would try to work out where these important gentlemen came from. Anni would say straight away that they were three Laestadian preachers who’d come to convert us. I’d guess that they were the boss of Social Services, a headmaster and a district judge. “I’m done for now,” I’d say.
Anni pours herself a refill. She wraps her hands around the mug.
I would also like to wrap my hands around a mug of steaming-hot coffee. I want to be sitting here on the steps with Anni for real. I want Simon to drive up to the door. Oh, his smile when he sees me! As if someone had given him a marvellous present. I’m so full of desire that it’s painful. My hands are unable to touch anything.
When a car does in fact drive up, I almost believe it is him. But it’s Hjalmar. The ravens fly up into the trees.
Hjalmar switches off the engine and clambers awkwardly out of the car.
Now he’s standing in front of Anni, but can’t work out for the life of him how he’s going to come out with what he wants to say. At first it doesn’t matter. Anni does the talking.
“I’m sitting here speaking to the dead,” she says. “I must be going daft. But what else can I do? Soon there won’t be any living people left whom I know.”
She falls silent. Recalls an old aunt who always used to sit around complaining about how lonely she was. Remembers thinking what a pain it was to have to visit her. Now I sound exactly the same, she thinks. It’s enough to drive me up the wall.
“Are you going to the cottage?” she says, mainly to change the subject.
He nods.
“Anni,” he manages to say.
Only then does she become aware of the strange expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?” she says. “Is it Isak?”
Hjalmar shakes his head.
“But what’s the matter with my little boy? Poika, mikä sinulla on?”
He can’t help smiling at the way she still calls him her little boy.
She grasps the iron rail with her bird-like claws and manages to stand up.
Then he says it.
“Forgive me.”
That wasn’t much of a voice. You can tell how unaccustomed he is to using it. And how unaccustomed he is to that phrase. His voice is hoarse as it stumbles out of his mouth. As if it were written on a piece of paper that he’s had in his mouth for so long that it’s become all scrunched up.
The last time he said it must have been very long ago, when he’d been thrashed by Isak. And in those days it meant “Have mercy”.
“For what?” Anni says.
But she knows what for.
She looks at him and she knows.
He realizes that she knows.
“No!” she shouts so loudly that the ravens in the tree beat their wings together.
But they don’t fly away.
She clenches her bird’s claws and shakes them at Hjalmar. No, she will not forgive him.
“Why?” she shouts.
Her body might be skinny, but the air around her on the front steps is vibrant with powerful forces. She is a priestess with damnation in her clenched fist.
Hjalmar reaches out with one hand and leans awkwardly against his car. He holds the other hand against his heart.
“They were going to go diving, looking for an old aeroplane,” he says. “But Father heard about it. That was when he had his heart attack. You shouldn’t poke around in the past.”
He hears what that sounds like. As if he were defending himself. That would be wrong. But he doesn’t know what else to say.
“You?” Anni shouts. “On your own?”
He shakes his head.
“It’s not true,” Anni says.
Her voice has lost all of its strength. It’s as if she has an animal in her throat. And once the animal has bellowed out its lamentation, it turns on Hjalmar. Her eyes are blazing. The words tumble out in a rush of gurgling fury.
“Get away from here! You swine! Don’t ever, ever come here again. Did you hear me?”
Hjalmar gets into the car. He holds both hands in front of him like a bowl, and places his face in the bowl. He will go. But first he must pull himself together.
Then he drives away from Anni’s house, heading north. As soon as the lump in his throat has subsided, he will ring the police station. And ask to speak to that prosecutor, Rebecka Martinsson.
Isak Krekula is lying on his back in the little room off the kitchen. His feet are ice cold. He is freezing. The wall clock is ticking ponderously in the kitchen. Like a death machine. It first hung on the wall in his parents’ house. When they died it ended up with him and Kerttu. When he passes on, Laura will take it to her and Tore’s house: they will listen to it ticking and wait for their turn.
He shouts for Kerttu. Where the devil is the woman?
“Hey there! Get yourself in here, woman! Tule tänne!”
She turns up eventually. He moans and groans as she pulls the covers over his feet.
He has been shouting for her for ages. How come she has not heard him? Stupid cloth-eared bitch!
“I’ll put the coffee on,” Kerttu says, and goes back to the kitchen.
He continues fanning the flames of his anger. That woman has to come the moment he shouts for her. Can she not understand that? He is lying here helpless.
“Can you hear me?” he shouts. “Are you listening? Bloody whore.”
He adds the last comment in a somewhat quieter voice. He has always made such remarks without a second thought. He is the one who has paid for the food served up at mealtimes, and he has always been the boss in his own house. But what can you do when you are confined to bed like this? Dependent on others?
He closes his eyes, but he cannot sleep. He is freezing. He shouts to his wife, telling her to bring him another blanket. But nobody comes.
Inside his head it is August 1943. A hot day in late summer. He and Kerttu are in Luleå. They are standing outside the German military depot next to the cathedral in the town centre, talking to William Schörner, the S.S. man in charge of security. A fleet of lorries is being loaded with sacks, all marked with an eagle, as well as some exceptionally heavy wooden crates that need to be handled with care.
Schörner is always smartly dressed, clean-shaven, dignified. He does not even seem to sweat in the hot sun. The depot commander, Oberleutnant Walther Zindel, who is stationed in Luleå, sticks two fingers inside his collar and gives every appearance of being on the warm side. The only times Isak Krekula has seen Zindel raise an arm in a Hitler salute have been when Schörner has been in the vicinity.
It is plain that Sicherheitschef Schörner and depot manager Zindel are under pressure.
The tide has turned against the Germans. Everything is changed now. Sweden is accepting more and more Jewish refugees. Public opposition to the German trains passing through Sweden has increased during the spring and summer. The writer Vilhelm Moberg has published articles about these trains, claiming that they contain not only unarmed soldiers going on and coming back from leave but also soldiers armed with bayonets and pistols. At the end of July the Swedish government cancelled the transit agreement with Germany, and Swedish Railways will soon stop transporting German soldiers. People have started to hate Hitler. Four Swedes have been sentenced to death in Berlin for espionage. The Swedish submarine Ulven was sunk in April, and news is emerging of another Swedish submarine, Draken, coming under fire from the German transport vessel Altkirch. In July the Germans sank two Swedish fishing boats off the north-west coast of Jutland, and twelve Swedish fishermen died. People are furious when Berlin responds to the Swedish protests by claiming that the fishermen had been sabotaging German light buoys.
Both depot manager Zindel and Sicherheitschef Schörner have noticed that their reception in Luleå has become cooler. The atmosphere in the post office, in restaurants and everywhere else is different now. People avoid looking them in the eye. They receive fewer dinner invitations from local middle-class families. Zindel’s Swedish wife spends most of her time at home, alone.
When Krekula drove down to Luleå, he had in mind that it was time to renegotiate the fee he was being paid for his transport services. Now that Swedish Railways have terminated their arrangements, the Germans will be totally dependent on road-haulage companies to supply their troops in Finnish Lapland and northern Norway. Krekula is also feeling the effects of people’s objections to the way he is placing his lorries at the Germans’ disposal. He wants compensation.
But the moment he jumps down from his lorry outside the depot, he realizes that there will be no renegotiation. Sicherheitschef Schörner is in Luleå. Krekula prefers not to have dealings with him, but when Schörner is in Luleå, which is often, he takes charge of every detail. The last time he was due to pay Krekula, he snatched away the envelope containing the money just as the haulier was about to take it. Krekula was left standing there, holding his hand out and feeling silly.
“Isak,” Schörner had said. “A genuine Jewish name, nicht wahr? You’re not a Jew, are you?”
Krekula had assured Schörner that he was not.
“I can’t do business with Jews, you see.”
Again Krekula assured Schörner that he was not of Jewish ancestry.
Schörner had sat in silence for what seemed an age.
“Ah well,” he had said eventually, and handed over the envelope containing the money.
As if he was not entirely convinced.
Now Schörner is a sort of powder keg on legs. All the setbacks the Germans experience on the battlefield, all the indulgence displayed by Sweden towards the allies, everything seems to be conspiring to create a minefield around him. Last week, for instance, he heard that three Polish submarines were lurking in Lake Mälaren just off Mariefred, and nobody was doing anything about it – not even the German government. He is calm, and flirts with Kerttu as usual, but there is a field of energy surrounding him, just waiting to go off. He is ready to explode. In fact, he is longing to explode.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister has expressed his worry about terminating the transport arrangements this way: “The final blows of a wounded beast of prey can be devastating.” Schörner is that beast.
But Kerttu notices nothing. Isak Krekula watches stony-faced as she purrs and churrs in response to Schörner’s flattery. Her chestnut hair sweeps over one eye à la Rita Hayworth. She is wearing a summery blue dress with white dots. The skirt is bell-shaped, and the waist is high. Schörner tells her she must be careful, or one of these days someone will eat her up.
Schörner has a soft spot for Kerttu. She has done him a lot of favours in recent years. Passed on bits of information she has picked up here and there. Just over a year ago a German transport plane with a cargo of machine guns had to make an emergency landing somewhere in the forest several kilometres inland. Kerttu and Krekula were in Luleå, and Kerttu took the opportunity to go to the hairdresser’s. When she came out, she was able to tell Schörner exactly where the plane had come down: the wife of the forest owner had mentioned it while having her hair cut. The landowner had not reported his find to the police. Perhaps he had hoped to earn some money on the side. The pilot and all the passengers had died in the crash. On another occasion Kerttu was able to tell Schörner about a journalist who had taken photographs of railway waggons full of German weapons. That kind of thing. Important and trivial. That is how it is with Kerttu. People want to tell her things. They want her to look at them with her greenish-brown eyes. It lifts your soul when a beautiful young girl looks at you. Schörner usually writes down the information she gives him in a little notebook. It is bound in black leather, and he writes in it with a pencil. Then he puts the notebook away in his briefcase. If the information turns out to be correct and is of use to the Germans, Kerttu usually gets paid. The time she told him about the German transport plane, he gave her a thousand kronor. That is more money than her father Matti earns in a whole year.
So she has acquired a tidy little sum. And she has not wasted it. She lives with her parents and does not have to pay for board and lodging, and she has lent money to Krekula, who has in turn invested it in his haulage business. Krekula is paid well by the German army. He does not ask many questions, and he delivers the goods to their destinations.
Now Schörner takes Krekula and Kerttu to one side and asks if Krekula is prepared to lend Kerttu to him for a little job.
Kerttu pretends to be offended and asks Herr Schörner if he does not think he ought to be asking her instead of Krekula. She is not Krekula’s property, after all.
Schörner laughs and says that Kerttu is an adventuress. He knows that she will want to do it.
Krekula says that Kerttu will make up her own mind, but of course he is wondering what it is all about.
“Ah well,” Schörner says. “The thing is that three Danish prisoners of war have escaped from a German ship moored in Luleå harbour. I want them recaptured.”
He smiles, winks and offers them a cigarette.
Krekula realizes that, behind his smile, Schörner is furious. The resistance movement in Denmark has become properly organized during the summer, and the Germans have been having enormous problems with sabotage and other anti-German activities.
Schörner knows only too well that ruthlessness must be met with ruthlessness. An eye for an eye. In Norway the Germans have escalated the level of terror imposed on the civilian population, which is essential to keep people under control now that the 25th Panzer Division has withdrawn to France.
“Someone has hidden them,” Schörner says. “There is a resistance movement here in Sweden as well. And I have a pretty good idea that a particular young man probably knows where those Danes are. And that young man has a weakness. He’s very fond of attractive girls.”
And he tells them what he has in mind. Promises them generous payment.
Krekula’s head fills with images. He pictures Kerttu coming back from her little outing with bits of straw clinging to her back and her hair tousled. But it is a lot of money. And Kerttu says yes without so much as a glance in his direction. What can Krekula do about it? Nothing.
Krekula is eighty-five years old. Lying on his back in the little room, he says to himself – as he has been saying to himself ever since – I couldn’t have stopped her.
He shouts for her again. Says he is thirsty. That he is still freezing.
She appears in the doorway with a glass of water in her hand. When he turns to look at her, she empties the glass in a single swig.
“You’ve always revolted me,” she says. “You know that, don’t you?”
Even as she is saying it, the doorbell rings. The police are outside. That little fair-haired inspector Anna-Maria Mella. With two men standing at the bottom of the steps. Mella asks if Tore is in.
Kerttu Krekula realizes that this is serious. The police say nothing about a warrant. Nor do they need to. Kerttu is furious. Absolutely furious.
“Are you mad?” she yells. “Out of your minds? Why are you harassing us? What do you want him for?”
And she stands there screaming as if someone had stuck a stake through her body while the police enter the house and take a look around.
“My boy,” she screams. “My poor boy!”
And when the police have left, she slumps down at the kitchen table with her forehead resting on one arm. She puts her other arm over the top of her head.
Isak Krekula is lying in the little room, shouting. Who the devil was that, he wants to know. Who was it? She does not answer.
I’ve landed on all fours on Kerttu’s draining board. Standing like a cat on the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. I want to see this. Bloody Kerttu! There’s only the two of us in the kitchen. I accompany her to the open-air dance floor at Gültzauudden just outside Luleå. It’s 28 August, 1943.
There is a dance at Gültzauudden near Luleå. The Swingers are playing. “Sun Shines Brightly on Your Little Cottage”, “With You in My Arms”, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and other popular songs. The mosquitoes and horseflies join in the “Sjösala Waltz”, and the telephone wires sag under the weight of the swallows, sitting in a row as if at the front of the stalls.
The young men are wearing suits finished with French seams. The girls are in home-sewn outfits with stiffened bell skirts. Everyone is slim and willowy in these straitened times of food rationing.
Kerttu is not in a particularly good mood. She has come to the dance without a partner. And Schörner would not let her wear her best dress either.
“You mustn’t stand out too much,” he said. “You must look like an ordinary young lass. You come from… wherever it is you come from.”
“Piilijärvi,” she said.
“But you don’t have a fiancé, of course, and you’re staying with your cousin here in Luleå, and you’re looking for a job.”
She buys a bottle of soda and stands around at the edge of the dance floor. Two young lads come up and ask her for a dance, but she says, in a friendly way, “Maybe later,” explaining that she is waiting for her cousin. Drinking her soda slowly to make it last, she feels like a cross between a wallflower and an ice queen. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the man Schörner is trying to trap. Schörner had shown Kerttu a photograph of the lad. Axel Viebke.
Here comes Schörner. He has borrowed the depot manager’s Auto-Union Wanderer. Young boys hanging around the dance floor and sitting in the birch trees like a flock of thrushes gather round the smart-looking sports car.
Schörner, who has a quick eye for the leader of any flock, gives one boy a five-krona note to keep an eye on the car. He does not want it scratched. Or to find that some joker has dropped a sugar cube in the petrol tank.
Then he saunters over to the dance floor. He is in uniform. Those near him stiffen noticeably.
He buys a soda, but hardly touches it. Then he walks over to Kerttu and asks her for a dance.
“No thank you,” she says in a loud voice. “I don’t dance with Germans.”
Schörner’s face turns white and strained. Then he clicks his heels, marches over to the car and drives off.
Kerttu turns to look at Viebke. Stares hard at him. Gazes into his eyes. Then looks down. Then gazes back into his eyes.
He leaves his group of friends and walks over to her.
“Do you dance with boys from Vuollerim, then?” he says. She laughs, flashing her white teeth, and says yes, of course she does.
While they are dancing she tells him how she has moved to her cousin’s in Luleå while she looks for a job. Her cousin seems to have forgotten that they were going to meet at the dance and has not turned up. But that doesn’t matter as Viebke and Kerttu dance together all evening.
When the dance is over, he wants to walk her home. She says he can come part of the way. They go down to the riverbank. The leaves on the weeping birches will soon be turning yellow; it will not be long before summer is over. That is both sad and romantic.
Viebke says he admires the way she snubbed the German soldier who asked her for a dance. Who did he think he was, rolling up like that in his posh car!
“I hate the Germans,” she says.
She falls silent and gazes out over the river.
Viebke offers her a penny for her thoughts. She wonders if he has heard that three Danish prisoners of war have escaped from a ship in the harbour.
“I hope they’ll be alright,” she says. “Where will be safe for them?”
Viebke looks at her. She feels as if she is in a film. Like Ingrid Bergman.
“They’ll be alright,” he says, stroking her cheek.
“How can you be so sure?” she says with a smile.
And the smile has a trace of condescension in it. As if she thinks he is just a young lad at a dance who could not possibly know anything at all. Although in fact she is much younger than he is.
“I know,” he says. “Because I’m the one who’s hidden them.”
She bursts out laughing.
“You’d say anything to get yourself a kiss.”
“You can think whatever you like,” he says. “But it’s a fact.”
“Then I’d like to meet them,” Kerttu says.
Two days later she is sitting in Zindel’s Auto-Union Wanderer beside Sicherheitschef Schörner. Two German soldiers are in the back seat. Their rifles are lying on the floor.
It is a lovely late summer’s day. Haystacks stand in rows in the fields, and the scent of sun-warmed hay is lovely. In the meadows where the hay has been harvested, cows are grazing on the last of the late-summer grass. The car has to keep slowing down because farmers are out on the roads with their horses and carts. The rowan trees are laden with clumps of bright red berries. A father and his three daughters are on the way home from berry-picking in the woods. You can see from the way he is walking that the birch-bark rucksack on his back is heavy with fruit. The girls have small enamel buckets full of blueberries.
Kerttu and the Germans walk the last part of the way. The path runs through the forest and alongside some swampy meadows. Eventually they come to Viebke’s uncle’s hut, used by farm hands as a base at haymaking time. It is small and unpainted, but in the sunshine that day everything is beautiful. The hut gleams like silver in the middle of the clearing.
Schörner orders the others to keep quiet as he draws his pistol and approaches the hut.
It is only when he does this that Kerttu becomes vaguely aware that Viebke will feel that she has betrayed him. That had not occurred to her before. It had all been a sort of adventure.
Schörner and the other soldiers walk cautiously towards the hut. They go inside. After a short while they come out again.
“There’s nobody here,” Schörner says disapprovingly.
He looks accusingly at Kerttu.
She opens her mouth to defend herself. She was here only yesterday with Viebke and met the Danes. Nice chaps, all three of them.
At that very moment they hear voices not far away in the woods. Laughter. It is the Danes. Schörner and the others hurry back into the trees. Dragging Kerttu with him, he whispers that she should lie down and keep quiet.
Here they come, walking through the trees. Viebke and the Danes. He is so handsome with his curly hair and happy laugh. They have been fishing. Viebke is carrying a pike and three perch. He has threaded a switch of willow through their gills. He is holding a pipe in his other hand. The Danes are carrying fishing rods made of birch branches.
Kerttu’s spirits rise when she sees Viebke. Then her stomach ties itself in a knot.
Sonja on the switchboard transfers the incoming call to Martinsson’s mobile.
Martinsson has been out for a walk with the dogs. The afternoon sun is exuding warmth. Tintin and Vera are strutting around, exploring the parking area in front of the house. Vera is digging away eagerly at the woodpile, sending wet soil and moss flying in all directions. Some poor field mouse is no doubt sitting petrified underneath all the wood, its heart pounding, convinced that its end is nigh. Tintin waltzes off towards the paddock where the neighbour keeps his horses. They are used to dogs, and do not even condescend to glance at her. She finds a lovely pile of horse manure, guzzles down half of it, then rolls around in what is left. Martinsson decides not to intervene. She can put both dogs in the shower when they eventually come inside. Then they can lie in front of the fire to dry. She considers ringing Krister Eriksson and telling him how his pretty miss behaves the moment his back is turned. Joking about having made up her mind that she needs a holiday so that she can become a dog.
No sooner has she registered the thought than the phone rings. At first she thinks it is Eriksson sensing that she has been thinking about him, but then she realizes that it is the police switchboard. After Sonja tells her she has a call, Martinsson hears a man clearing his throat.
“Er, hi. It’s Hjalmar Krekula. I want to profess,” he says.
Then corrects himself.
“Confess.”
“I see,” she says.
Hell and damnation, she thinks. No tape recorder handy, nothing.
“It was me who killed them. Wilma Persson. And Simon Kyrö.”
There’s something wrong. Martinsson can feel it in her bones. She can hear that he is in his car. Where is he going?
Thoughts as quick as swimming vipers.
“O.K.,” she says calmly. “I’d like to record this. Can you come to the police station?”
Holding the receiver away from her face, she swallows. He must not hear that she is worried or afraid.
“No.”
“We can come to you. Are you at home?”
“No. This will have to do. I’ve said it now. So now you know.”
No, no. He must not hang up. She can see a little boy in front of her, his eyes red with crying.
“No, that won’t do,” she says. “How do I know that you’re telling the truth? People ring us to make confessions all the time.”
But he has already hung up.
“Shit, shit, shit!” she yells, making the dogs pause and look at her.
But as soon as they realize that she is not angry with them, they continue about their business. Vera has found a pine cone and laid it at Tintin’s feet. Backing off a few paces, she has crouched down. Come on, she is saying. Let’s have a game. See if you can grab it before I do. Tintin yawns demonstratively.
Martinsson tries to ring Anna-Maria Mella, but there is no answer. “Ring me right away,” she tells the answering machine.
She looks at the dogs. Vera has soil and clay on her legs and belly. Tintin has applied horse-shit perfume to her neck and behind her ears.
“Filthy swine,” she says to them. “Criminals. What the hell do I do now?”
The moment she says that, she knows. She must drive to his house. So that he does not. So that he does not. The dogs. She will have to take them with her. Despite the filthy state they are in.
“You’re coming with me,” she says to them.
But no. Nobody answers the door when she gets to Hjalmar’s place. Martinsson trudges all the way round the house through the wet snow, peering in through the windows. She knocks on them as well. But she decides that he is not at home. And his car is not there.
Anni Autio. Maybe she will know.
Nobody opens the door at Anni’s house either.
A flock of ravens is circling above the house, round and round.
What’s the matter with them? Martinsson wonders.
The door is unlocked, so she goes in.
Anni is lying on the kitchen sofa. Her eyes are closed.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Martinsson says.
Anni opens one eye.
“Yes, well… the door wasn’t locked, so… I’m looking for Hjalmar Krekula. You’re his aunt, aren’t you, Anni? Aren’t you? Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
She closes her eye again.
If I were him, Martinsson thinks, I’d run away to my cottage.
“Does he have a cottage somewhere?”
“If I tell you where it is, and I can draw you a map, will you leave me in peace? I don’t want to hear his name ever again. I don’t want to speak to anybody. Help me up. You’ll find pen and paper on the countertop, by the scales.”
What if I get there too late, Martinsson thinks as she drives like a madwoman along the E10 and then turns off along the Kuosanen road down to the River Kalix. What if he has shot himself? What if he is lying on the floor in a pool of blood? If the back of his head has been shot away? If he does not have any face left? That could be what is in store for me. It could be.
She tries to ring Mella again. Gets the answering machine again.
“I’m on my way to Hjalmar Krekula’s cottage,” she says. “He’s confessed to the murder of Wilma and Simon. And I have a nasty feeling… Don’t panic, there’s no danger. But ring me. If I can pick up, I will.”
Then she rings Krister Eriksson.
“Hi,” he says before she has a chance to say anything.
It is such a tender-sounding “hi”. It sounds happy over the fact that she has called him, and ever so intimate. It sounds like a “hi” the second before a man slides his hand under his lover’s hair and round the back of her head. He saw from the display that it was her, and so that is how he sounds.
She is thrown off balance. Feels warm from somewhere between her ribs down to her pelvis.
“How’s my little girl doing?” he says, and at first she does not realize that he is talking about Tintin.
She tells him that all is well and then mentions that Tintin felt the need to break away from her policing role and just be a dog for a while. So she has been rolling around in horse shit.
“That’s my girl,” Eriksson says, laughing proudly.
Then Martinsson tells him where she is going, and why.
“We searched his house last Tuesday,” she says. “I really don’t know how to explain this.”
Becoming serious, Eriksson says nothing. Does not tell her that in no circumstances must she go there alone.
“I saw an entirely different person when I looked right at him,” she says. “It was as if I should, well, not that I should help him, but that we shared similar problems, as it were. There was something in the atmosphere. I have to make a choice.”
She is fumbling for words to explain her feelings, but suddenly feels that she is just making a fool of herself.
“I understand,” he says.
“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” Martinsson says.
“You don’t need to. Just do what you feel is right. And look after Tintin.”
“I’d never allow anything to happen to her.”
“I know.”
A brief silence follows. There is a lot waiting to be expressed, but in the end he simply says, “Bye for now,” and hangs up.
Hjalmar Krekula’s cottage at Saarisuanto is built of brown-stained logs. The window frames and door are painted blue, and the two lots of steps leading up to the door have been fused together crudely. The roof is corrugated iron, but the chimneys are properly built in. Beautiful pine trees grow on the slope down to the riverbank. An old red-painted boathouse leans provocatively under the snow. It might survive one more summer, but that is far from certain. Not far from the cottage, at the very edge of the water, is the sauna. A circular iron chimney sticks up into the air. A wooden jetty has been beached: the half of it that has thawed peers out from the snow.
The barrier is up and the road has been ploughed, but not all the way to the cottage. Hjalmar’s car is parked where the road comes to an end. Martinsson has to walk along the snow-scooter tracks for the last bit. Someone has walked there before her. It must be him. Far from easy going – his feet have sunk into the snow after every third or fourth step.
Vera and Tintin are racing around like crazy, noses to the ground. There are spoors made by reindeer that have followed the scooter tracks to conserve energy. Ptarmigans have scuttled back and forth among the birches. At one point there are traces of an elk. It takes more than fifteen minutes to get to the cottage.
Martinsson knocks on the door. When she gets no response, she opens it.
The cottage consists of one large room. The kitchen area is just inside the door. On the wall to the left are old kitchen cabinets with sliding doors above a hotplate and countertop. Turned upside down on the countertop is an orange washing-up bowl, with a brush lying neatly by its side.
In front of the cabinets and countertop are a small dining table and three unmatched Windsor chairs, painted with several layers of thick paint, most recently cornflower-blue. A bit further into the room is a sofa. The knobbly ivory-coloured cushions, striped nougat, green and dark brown down the middle, are on the floor, leaning against the armrests, so that they will not become too damp and mouldy underneath.
A fire is burning in the hearth, but it has not yet dispersed the raw smell of damp.
Hjalmar is on the sofa. Instead of using one of the cushions, he is sitting directly on the hard wooden frame. He is still wearing his jacket and his fake fur peaked cap.
“What are you doing here?” he says.
“I don’t know,” Martinsson says, and remains standing. “I have two dogs outside who are scratching your front door to bits. Is it O.K. if I let them in? They’re absolutely filthy.”
“Yes, let ’em in.”
She opens the door. Vera almost overturns the table in her eagerness to greet Hjalmar. Tintin ignores him, tours the room sniffing every nook and cranny, and eventually lies down on her side in front of the open fire.
Hjalmar cannot resist stroking Vera, who takes this as a sign that she is welcome to jump up onto the sofa.
Martinsson says, “Vera!” in a stern voice, but Hjalmar gestures that it’s O.K. Vera, feeling that they are now ready to take their relationship a step further, clambers onto his lap. It is not easy to find enough room as his stomach is so big, but she eventually settles down and licks him heartily on the mouth.
“Steady on!” Hjalmar says, trying to sound stern.
But he immediately starts picking clumps of snow out of her fur. She likes that. She leans on him with all her weight and licks his mouth again.
“She’s just eaten a field mouse,” Martinsson says. “I thought you might like to know.”
“Oh, what the hell…” he says, and there is laughter in his voice.
“Not guilty,” Martinsson says. “I’m not the one who brought her up.”
“Is that so,” Hjalmar says. “Now then, old girl, that’s enough. Who did bring you up, then?”
Martinsson says nothing.
But then she thinks: no lies.
“She’s Hjörleifur Arnarson’s dog,” she says.
Hjalmar nods thoughtfully and strokes Vera’s ears.
“I never noticed that he had a dog,” he says. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“Maybe you could make it? I’m a bit busy here. There’s a packet in the cupboard.”
Martinsson starts to make coffee. Hjalmar has a percolator. She fills it with water and coffee. Next to the cooker is an open Bible. She reads the sentence that has been underlined.
“‘Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.’ Are you fond of the Psalms?”
“Not really, but I read them sometimes. The Bible’s the only book I have out here.”
Martinsson picks it up and thumbs through it. It is small and black, its delicate pages gilded along the edges. The print is so small that it is almost illegible.
“I know,” he says, as if he has read her thoughts. “I use a magnifying glass.”
The Bible feels pleasant and used in her hand. She admires the quality of the paper. Printed in 1928, and it has not even begun to turn yellow. She sniffs it. It smells good. Church, Farmor, another age.
“Do you read it?” he says.
“Sometimes,” she says. “I have nothing against the Bible. It’s the church that…”
“What do you read?”
“Oh, it depends. I like the Prophets. They are so sharp. I like the language they use. And they are so human. Jonah, for instance. He’s such a whinger. And unreliable. God says, ‘Go to Nineveh and preach the word.’ And Jonah prances off in the opposite direction. And in the end, when he’s been in the whale’s belly for three days, he prophesies the destruction of Nineveh. But then, when the people of Nineveh do penance, God changes his mind and decides not to destroy them after all. Huh, then Jonah is miserable as sin because he’d prophesied death and destruction, and thinks he has lost face when his prophesy turns out to be wrong.”
“The belly of a whale.”
“Yes, it’s interesting that he has to die before he can change. And even then he’s not a good, enlightened man, not a man changed for the rest of time, you could say. It’s just a journey he’s barely set out on. What do you read?”
She opens the Bible to the place marked by the lilac-coloured ribbon.
“Job,” she says, and checks the underlined extract. “‘O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past’.”
“Yes.”
Hjalmar nods like a Laestadian in a church pew.
A troubled man reading about a troubled man, Martinsson thinks.
“God seems to be just like my father – as angry as they bloody well come,” Hjalmar says, tickling Vera’s stomach.
He smiles to indicate that he is joking. Martinsson does not smile back.
Vera sighs with contentment. Tintin responds with a sigh from in front of the fire. This is how a dog’s life ought to be.
Martinsson continues reading to herself. “And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is moved out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man.”
She looks around the room. Hanging somewhat haphazardly on the walls, framed in yellowed pine boards, are all kinds of decorations. An unsigned oil painting of a windmill in an inlet at sunset; a Lappish knife and a badly carved wooden spoon; a faded stuffed squirrel on a tree branch; a clock made out of a copper frying pan, with the hands attached to the bottom. A vase on a window ledge contains a bunch of artificial flowers. And there are a few photographs pinned up as well.
“Let me show you my secret,” Hjalmar says without warning, and stands up. Vera jumps reluctantly onto the floor.
Pulling the rag mat to one side, Hjalmar removes a rectangular piece of linoleum. There is a loose floorboard underneath: lifting it up, he produces a packet. Three maths books are wrapped in a piece of red-and-white-striped oilcloth. There is also a plastic folder. Opening the packet, he places everything on the countertop in front of Martinsson.
She reads the titles out loud: Multi-dimensional Analysis, Discrete Mathematics, Mathematics Handbook.
“The same books as they read at the university,” Hjalmar says, not without pride.
Then he adds angrily, “I’m not an idiot, if that’s what you thought. Look in the folder; the proof’s all there.”
“I didn’t think anything in particular. Why have you hidden all this away under the floorboards?”
She leafs through the books.
“My father and my brother,” he says, with sorrow in his voice. “And Mother as well, come to that. There’d just be a bust-up.”
Martinsson opens the folder. It contains an Advanced Level Certificate of Education, from Hermod’s Correspondence College.
“I spent all my free time sitting here. At this very table. I struggled and studied. With the other subjects – I’ve always found maths very easy. I don’t have a problem with maths. The mark I got would have been good enough to get me into university, but…”
He remembers the summer of 1972. He was twenty-five years old. He spent the entire summer thinking seriously about telling his father and brother that he was going to stop working for the haulage business. He would apply for a study grant, go to university. He lay awake at night, rehearsing what he was going to say. Sometimes he would tell them that it was just a temporary thing, that he would return to the firm once he had got his degree. But sometimes he would tell them they could go to hell, that he would rather sleep rough than go back into the family firm. But in the end he said nothing at all.
“Ah well, it just didn’t come off,” he says to Martinsson.
She looks at him again. He is in pain. Something is breaking inside him. He has to sit down. The chair by the kitchen table is nearest.
The dogs are there like a shot. Both of them. They lick his hands.
“Bloody hell,” he says. “My life. Bloody hell. I’ve grown fat and I’ve worked. That has been my only…”
He nods in the direction of the maths books.
He presses his hand over his mouth, but he cannot prevent it – he starts sobbing loudly.
“Have you brought a tape recorder?” he says. “Is that why you’re here?”
“No,” she says.
And she looks, looks, looks. A witness to his sorrow. As it comes cascading out of him. She does not touch him. Vera places a paw on his knee. Tintin lies down at his feet.
Then she looks away. Hjalmar stands up and puts the books back under the floorboard. Martinsson notices a black-and-white photograph of a man and woman sitting outside a front door, at the top of some steps. Two boys are sitting on the bottom step. It must be Hjalmar and Tore Krekula and their parents. Isak and – what’s their mother’s name? Kerttu. There is something familiar about her, Martinsson thinks. She tries to remember if she had seen the same photograph when she had visited Anni Autio. Or when she was at Johannes Svarvare’s. No.
Then she remembers. It was in the album in Karl-Åke Pantzare’s room. She is the girl who was standing between Pantzare and his friend Viebke. Yes, it must be her.
Kerttu, she thinks.
And then it strikes her that Hjalmar and Tore Krekula are white-haired in the way that red-headed people become. Now she thinks about it, it is clear that they must have been red-haired, and they have very light-coloured skin.
The fox, Martinsson thinks. Didn’t Pantzare say that the British called the Germans’ informer the Fox? The Finnish for “fox” is kettu. Kettu. Kerttu.
I hover above Anni’s head as she makes her way to her sister’s with the aid of her kick-sledge. There’s a delay of at least five minutes before Kerttu opens the door. About two centimetres.
“What do you want?” she says in annoyance when she sees it’s Anni standing there.
“Was it you?” Anni says.
“What do you mean?”
“Come off it,” Anni says, her voice trembling with rage. “Hjalmar came to see me. He was on his way to his cottage. He told me that he… You put them up to it, didn’t you?”
“Have you lost your mind? Go home and lie down.”
“And Tore! He should have been given a good hiding ages ago.”
Kerttu tries to close the door, but Anni is furious.
“You…” she says, forcing her spindly arms in through the crack and grabbing hold of Kerttu’s dress. She pulls her sister out onto the top step.
“Come on, out with it,” she says, giving Kerttu a good shaking.
I’m sitting on the rail, laughing. This isn’t at all funny, in fact, but my God! It’s like watching two scraggy old hens fighting. Kerttu howls, “Let go of me!” But they don’t have enough strength to fight and talk at the same time. They pant and struggle for all they’re worth.
“Go on, Anni!” I shout. “Let her have it!”
But only the ravens can hear me. They are making a racket on the roof of the barn.
Anni holds on to Kerttu’s dress as hard as she can, shoving her against the iron rail, over and over again. Kerttu slaps Anni in the face. Anni starts crying. Not because of the pain in her cheek, but because she is hurting deep down inside. She hates Kerttu, and that hurts.
“Traitor,” she snarls. “You bloody…”
That’s as far as she gets because Kerttu gives her a head-butt. Anni loses her grip on her sister and falls down the steps.
With considerable difficulty she gets up on all fours. She’s sobbing loudly, out of frustration and sorrow.
“Go away,” Kerttu says, gasping for breath. “Go away before I set the dog on you.”
Anni crawls to her kick-sledge and struggles to her feet. Pushes the sledge ahead of her and hobbles along behind it. Crosses the parking area with difficulty, and comes out onto the road.
When she is out of sight, Kerttu goes back indoors. Tore is standing in the kitchen.
“Did you hear that?” she says.
He nods.
“Hjalmar has lost the plot. And Anni! I think everyone’s gone mad. He can ruin us. He doesn’t think. He doesn’t think about you and your family. About your life.”
She pauses and massages her sore back where it has been banged against the iron rail.
“He’s never been bothered about your life. We know that, of course.”
“Is he at his cottage?”
Kerttu nods.
“I’ll take your snow scooter and go out there,” Tore says.
“Your father won’t survive this,” Kerttu says, sitting down with difficulty at the kitchen table. She rests her head in the crook of her arm. It’s August 1943. In the clearing is a silver-coloured haymakers’ hut. She’s lying on her stomach in the trees. Viebke and the three Danish prisoners of war have disappeared into the hut. Sicherheitschef Schörner whispers into her ear.
“Go over to the hut and shout for them,” he says.
She shakes her head.
“Just go,” he says, “and everything will be O.K.”
So she does. Stands outside the hut and shouts for Viebke. She needs to shout his name twice.
He emerges onto the steps. He is surprised, and his face lights up in a smile. The three Danes come out as well.
Then Schörner and the other two soldiers step out of the trees. They are not in uniform, but the pistol in Schörner’s hand and the rifles the other two are carrying say all that needs to be said. In broken Swedish Schörner instructs Viebke and the Danes to place their hands behind their heads and kneel.
Kerttu looks down at the moss. She wants Viebke to think that she has somehow been forced to do this. She does not want him to think ill of her. But Schörner catches on to what she is thinking and will not allow that kind of deceit. He walks over to her, his pistol still aimed at Viebke, and caresses her cheek.
Kerttu cannot see the disgust in Viebke’s eyes, but she can feel it.
Schörner points his pistol at Viebke’s head and demands information about other members of his resistance group.
Viebke says he has no idea what Schörner is talking about, that he…
He gets no further before Schörner points the pistol away from Viebke’s head and pulls the trigger.
Two seconds pass, then one of the Danes falls over. Blood pours out of Viebke’s ear; the gun went off so close to it. The other two Germans exchange glances.
Kerttu has screamed. But now the forest is silent. Her legs are shaking. She looks down at her trembling knees. White parnassia and eyebright are blooming in the grass at her feet. After a short pause she hears the birds twittering in the trees once more, and the woodpigeons cooing.
She stares at the hair moss and stair-step moss and reindeer moss as Schörner kicks Viebke in the stomach and drags him towards the hut.
She stares fixedly at the spent flowers of the wild rosemary and juniper bushes while one of the German soldiers lifts Viebke up so that he is standing with his back to the hut. Schörner takes his captive’s sheath knife and stabs it through his hand so that Viebke is nailed to the silvery-white wall.
“Out with it!” Schörner shouts.
But Viebke does not say a word.
Kerttu can see his white face, so very white. She watches as he loses consciousness. Then she sees the lingon sprigs and blueberry sprigs and crowberry sprigs and bog bilberry.
And then… then Schörner curses in frustration, tries to bring Viebke round by removing the knife and punching him in the face. But Viebke remains unconscious.
Then Kerttu hears three shots, and thinks, This isn’t happening, this can’t be true. One of the German soldiers walks over to the car and comes back with a petrol can. When they drive off, the hut is burning like a parched fir tree.
Schörner hands Kerttu over to Isak Krekula and tells him that his fiancée has turned up trumps. Then he strokes Kerttu under her chin and says he knows he can trust her, and that she will get a handsome reward. She will have to be patient for a while, but Schörner will personally ensure that she is paid.
Krekula notices the spots of blood on Schörner’s face, and he has to tell Kerttu over and over again to get into his lorry. In the end one of the Germans lifts her in.
A few days later there is an article about the fire in the local paper, Norrbottenskuriren, saying that it had not been possible to identify the three men who died in the accident alongside Viebke. Kerttu notes that it is the only time she has not seen the newspaper on Krekula’s desk in the garage office. But he never says anything. Asks no questions. And she does not say anything either. It is a matter of forgetting, of carrying on.
She never receives payment. They never see Schörner again. In September depot manager Zindel informs them that there is a parcel for Kerttu in a transport plane from Narvik, which is due to land in Kurravaara.
But Krekula, Johannes Svarvare and three young lads from Kurravaara employed to assist with loading and unloading wait in vain for that aeroplane, all evening and half the night. And after that, the matter is never mentioned again. Krekula is informed that the transport plane has disappeared, and Kerttu has constant visions of it crashing somewhere in the forest, and someone finding it, and discovering a briefcase. A briefcase similar to Schörner’s black pigskin briefcase. And that in it are details of everything that she, Kerttu the Fox, did to help the German army. Every time berry-picking season comes, she is worried to death.
“Are you going to tell me?” Martinsson says to Hjalmar Krekula. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
She has made some coffee. Hjalmar has put his mug on the little table in front of the sofa. Vera is lying at his feet; Tintin has fallen asleep in front of the fire. Martinsson is finding it difficult to stop looking at the photograph of the Krekula family. She would like to go and fetch Pantzare’s photograph of the girl and Viebke in order to compare them. But she is sure it is her. It is Kerttu.
“Where to begin?” Hjalmar says. “We drove there. To the lake.”
“Who did?”
“Me…”
He hesitates. Then he takes a deep breath and says, “Me and Tore and Mother.”
It is October 9. Hjalmar Krekula is sitting in the back seat of Tore Krekula’s car. Tore is driving. Kerttu Krekula is in the passenger seat. She has been to see Anni Autio. Asked about Wilma. As one does. In passing. Anni said that Simon Kyrö had been by to collect Wilma that morning, and they had gone off on some adventure or other. They would be out all day. Anni did not know where they were going. But Kerttu knew. She went to the garage. Spoke to her boys.
“They’ll be at Vittangijärvi, that’s for sure. That’s where Svarvare thought they should start looking. We need to go there.”
That was all Kerttu said. Tore Krekula loaded the four-wheeler onto the trailer. Now they are driving along the Luonatti road. Gravel clatters against the underside of the chassis. Tore drives skilfully between the potholes.
Hjalmar thinks, What the hell are we doing?
Nobody speaks.
Hjalmar looks at Martinsson. He is searching for words.
“You know,” he says, “it didn’t happen like you might think it did. Nobody said, ‘We’ll kill them.’ It just happened.”
“Try to explain,” she says. “And drink your coffee. Before it gets cold.”
A tune plays in her pocket. She takes out her mobile. It is displaying Wenngren’s number.
Oh hell! she thinks.
“Answer it,” Hjalmar says. “I’m not bothered.”
“No,” Martinsson says. “Sorry, I should have switched it off.”
She lets the phone ring until Wenngren gives up, then turns it off.
“Sorry,” she says again. “Let’s hear it.”
“There’s not much to say. We got there. Mother cut the safety line. I fetched the door.”
“And you laid it over the hole in the ice?”
“Yes.”
They are driving through the forest in the four-wheeler. It is almost unbearably beautiful down by the lake. When they switch off the engine, it is totally silent. The sun is shining on the bare ice. It is glittering like a silver brooch in the middle of the forest.
And there is the hole in the ice. With a wooden cross over it.
They pause for a while and watch the bubbles of air plopping up through the hole.
“Give me the knife,” Kerttu says to Tore. He pulls it out of the sheath on his belt and hands it to her.
She says to Hjalmar: “Go and fetch a door from up there.”
She nods towards the farmhouse, which appears to be deserted. Hjalmar looks over at it. Kerttu becomes impatient.
“There’s bound to be a door to the outdoor toilet or something. Get a move on.”
He walks to the farmhouse, lifts the shed door off its hinges and carries it back to the frozen lake. When he gets to the hole in the ice, he sees that his mother has cut the line and removed the wooden cross.
“Put the door there,” she says, pointing at the hole.
He does as he is told. And when she tells him to stand on the door, that is what he does.
The light is dazzling. It is almost impossible to see. Hjalmar screws up his eyes and looks at the sky. Tore whistles a tune. A few minutes pass. Then someone appears beneath the ice. Scratches at the door. It is just someone. It could be anybody. Hjalmar does not think about Wilma and Simon.
Kerttu says nothing. Looks the other way. Hjalmar also looks away. Only Tore stares at the door with interest. It is as if he has suddenly come alive.
“What did Tore do?” Martinsson says.
“Nothing,” Hjalmar says. “It was me. I was the one who…”
The person beneath the ice swims away from the door. Tore, staring like a raptor at its prey, stops whistling.
“It’s her,” he says quietly. “She’s so little. It’s her.”
Hjalmar does not want to hear. It is not her. It is someone.
Now someone starts cutting a hole through the ice, stabbing and jabbing with a diving knife.
Tore seems amused.
“Bloody she-cat!” he says, seeming rather impressed. “She’s got spunk, you’ve got to give her that.”
He stands a couple of metres off and watches as the hole grows bigger and bigger. Eventually a hand sticks up through the ice.
Tore immediately runs over and grabs hold of it.
“Hi there, pleased to meet you!” he says, laughing as he pulls the hand back and forth.
He looks provocatively at Hjalmar. The same sort of look he used to give his brother when they were growing up. Stop me if you can, it says. Say something if you dare.
Hjalmar says nothing. He switches off his face, just as he always did. Lets Tore carry on.
Suddenly Tore is standing there with nothing but a diving glove in his hand. Someone has managed to shake off his grip.
“Oh, fuck!” he says in annoyance.
Then he sees someone swimming away beneath the ice. He runs behind, waving the diving glove.
“Wait!” he shouts, and starts laughing. “You’ve forgotten something! Hello!”
All the time he remains above the person swimming beneath the ice.
“Whore!” he shouts.
He sounds angry now. Keeping above her. Panting. He is not used to running. The ice is shiny and slippery, and she is swimming quite fast underneath it.
“Fucking Stockholm whore!”
She is back beneath the door now, scratching and hammering.
Then she swims off again. With Tore after her.
Then it is the end. She stops. So does Tore.
“Now,” he says, breathing heavily. “Now.”
He kneels down and presses his face against the ice.
“Let’s put an A.P.B. out on Tore Krekula,” Anna-Maria Mella says to Stålnacke, Rantakyrö and Olsson.
They have assembled at the police station.
“Inform the duty officers in Gällivare, Boden, Luleå, Kalix and Haparanda for starters. Fax a list of all the vehicles owned by the haulage company and by members of the Krekula family.”
Her mobile pings; there is a voicemail message. She dials the number and listens.
“Oh, shit!” she says.
Her colleagues raise their eyebrows.
“Rebecka has driven off to Piilijärvi to talk to Hjalmar Krekula. Apparently he called her to say he wants to confess.”
She dials Martinsson’s number. No answer.
“Bloody inconsiderate,” she says.
Her colleagues say nothing. Mella looks at Stålnacke. She can see that he is thinking about Regla. If there is anyone who is inconsiderate, it is Mella.
Suddenly she feels exhausted and miserable. She tries to steel herself for anything Stålnacke might say, but she feels vulnerable and defenceless, does not have the strength to clench her fists, roll up her sleeves, put her guard up.
I’ll resign, she thinks. I can’t take any more. I’ll have another child.
A few seconds pass, but an awful lot can happen in a few seconds. Mella looks at Stålnacke. Stålnacke looks at her. Finally he says, “That’s over and done with. Let’s go to Piilijärvi.”
The burden falls from Mella’s shoulders. Like melting snow from a roof in the spring.
“That’s over and done with.” He means Regla.
Hjalmar Krekula takes a sip of coffee. Holds the mug with both hands. Vera scratches demonstratively at his leg: he is not allowed to stop stroking her.
“I didn’t realize that it was her,” he says to Martinsson. “I just didn’t have the strength to think about it. She died there. I stood there.”
“But you’ve thought about her since?”
“Yes,” he says. “A lot.”
“How did she get into the river?”
“Mother said we ought to move her. She didn’t want Wilma’s body to be found there. The aeroplane, you know. People shouldn’t know about that. We pulled her out. We waited for him, but he never came up to the surface.”
Hjalmar closes his eyes. He relives the way they smashed up the door and threw the bits into the hole in the ice.
And we forgot the rucksacks, he thinks. You’re convinced you’re keeping a cool head, but in fact you’re not.
Wiping his face with his hand, he goes on.
“We took the four-wheel-drive into the forest. I was holding her in my lap. That’s when it started to feel unbearable. And that feeling never went away. If only I hadn’t held her in my lap. Then, maybe… I don’t know, I might have been able to forget. We put her in their car, where they’d left it near the track. I drove the car to Tervaskoski. The river still hadn’t frozen there. There was only just enough petrol. Tore drove our mother home. Then he drove our car out to where I was. We carried her as far as the rapids, then threw her in. Hid the car keys in the wheel arch.”
“Your mother,” Martinsson says to Hjalmar. “I believe she sold information to the Germans during the war.”
Hjalmar nods.
That could well be, he thinks. He recalls a dance he and his brother went to when they were teenagers. He remembers a lad about their own age giving them a scornful Hitler salute. The lad’s dad was a Communist. It ended up in one hell of a brawl. They did not stop fighting until someone yelled that the police were on their way.
He remembers his mother shouting from the bedroom when his brother lost his way in the forest: “This is the punishment.”
He remembers his father in the sauna. That was not all that long ago. After Johannes Svarvare had told them he had spoken to Wilma about the aeroplane. After Isak’s heart attack. After the killing.
The mood at home was troubled and the atmosphere heavy with everything that could not be said or referred to. Kerttu was wracked with pain. Worse than ever. She complained loudly about how difficult it was to look after her husband. Even so, he was better then. Last winter. One morning at the beginning of March, he was unable to get out of bed. The doctors said he probably had had a series of small heart attacks during the night. He had to stay in bed. But it was better last winter.
“He smells,” Kerttu says to Hjalmar.
She is sitting at the kitchen table wearing her best coat and shoes and with her handbag on her lap, waiting for Tore’s wife Laura to collect her and drive her into town. Kerttu has a doctor’s appointment. Such occasions are the only times she ever leaves the village, when she has to go to the doctors’s, as she puts it. With an extra ’s.
It is clear why she has become aware that her husband smells. She herself has just had a shower and sprayed herself with deodorant and is wearing clean underclothes.
Isak Krekula is out in the village. Walking around despite the serious heart attack he had last autumn. This is something the villagers do now and again – make the rounds. You pay a call on a few other residents, sit in their kitchens, drink coffee and exchange information about the latest goings-on. There are a few other villagers Isak can still visit. Johannes Svarvare, and one or two more. But he no longer talks to most of them. You can fall out with a lot of people during your life. A lot of people no longer want to see him. Business is business, Isak has always said, and there are folk who get angry and feel they have been cheated.
“I can tell you, he’s not easy to get on with, in case you two thought otherwise,” Kerttu says, including the absent Tore in the conversation.
Her voice sounds hard, flat.
“I can handle him, but you’ll have to make sure he cleans himself up. I’ve had more than enough.”
Tore’s wife arrives and sounds the car horn.
Hjalmar sighs. Is he meant to pick a quarrel with his father over this? What is he supposed to do? Tie his father up and hold him under the shower? Go over him with a scrubbing brush?
An hour and a half later, Isak Krekula returns from his rounds. Hjalmar is sitting at the kitchen table.
“I’ve started heating up the sauna,” he says. “Do you want to join me?”
On the table is a six-pack of strong beer.
Isak has no desire to take a sauna. He has been visiting someone who has served up something stronger than coffee, that much is obvious to his son. But Isak eyes the beer with interest.
Hjalmar handles his father skilfully. He does not nag him. Does not ask the same question twice. Gives the impression that it is all the same to him – in no circumstances must Isak catch on to the fact that Hjalmar has been set the task of making sure his father has a bath. Isak stands in the doorway and says nothing. Hjalmar picks up the beer and a towel – only one. Isak lets him pass. Hjalmar makes his way down to the sauna.
He puts the beers in a bucket full of snow, to keep them cold. He gives himself a good wash, then sits down in the sauna and pours water over the hot stones. There is a hissing and a spluttering, and the hot steam rises to the top bench, where he is sitting. His skin feels burning hot. He tries to ignore the fact that his stomach is resting on his thighs – it is disturbing to realize how fat he has become.
Instead, he thinks about how it has become obvious that the house is now the home of two elderly people. In the old days, whenever you started up the sauna there was always a dry smell of pine wood, Russian soap and the fire in the stove. Now when he pours water onto the stones, there is a smell of ingrained dirt – it is a long time since the benches were last given a good scrubbing.
He has almost forgotten his father when he hears the outside door slam. Bending over, he fishes a beer out of the bucket.
Isak comes in and clambers up to the top bench. Hjalmar hands his father a beer, which he swigs rapidly. Then takes another swallow.
There is not much of him left, Hjalmar thinks. A frail old body, thinning hair that is far too long, coarse skin covered in the pock-marks and blotches typical of old age. It does not seem very long since muscles rippled when Isak rolled up his sleeves, or since he could lift the tailboard on one of his lorries without assistance.
Wrath, Hjalmar thinks. Isak’s anger is just as strong as it ever was. It provides the backbone that keeps him upright. The anger he feels, knowing that the other villagers are whispering behind his back, the bastards, half of whom would’ve been unemployed if it hadn’t been for his haulage business; the anger directed at the tax authorities, those damned bloodsuckers, desk-bound wimps who have no idea what life is all about; the anger directed at local politicians, at insurance companies, at company directors, at the jerks in Stockholm, at the evening tabloids, at celebs (junkies, the lot of ’em), at the unemployed and shirkers on benefits – idle swine who malinger and cheat and live off the hard work of others; at everything he sees on the television – news bulletins, game shows, docu-soaps, why the hell should he pay for a licence to watch shit like that?; at whoever is responsible for the fruit in the supermarket at Skaulo, a pile of rotting crap surrounded by swarms of fucking fruit flies; at immigrants and gypsies; at academics – a gang of presumptuous poseurs with ramrods shoved up their arseholes.
At Hjalmar. When Hjalmar passed his thirteenth birthday, his father stopped beating him, reduced it to an occasional box on the ears or smack in the face. When Hjalmar celebrated his eighteenth birthday, his father stopped all that as well.
But his anger did not subside. All that changed was the way it was expressed. Isak’s body has grown weaker as he has become older. He can no longer lift a kitchen chair and smash it to pieces by bashing it against the wall. His voice is now the bearer of his anger. It has become shriller, squeakier. His choice of words is cruder. He searches for words at the very bottom of the dunghill. He wallows in sexual references and swearwords like a village dog in the body of a dead cow.
And now it is directed at Kerttu. It simply has to come out. All that wrath boiling and fermenting inside Isak.
“Huh, that fucking woman. So she’s gone swanning off to the doctor’s now, has she?” he says.
Steeling himself, Hjalmar takes a swig of beer.
“I suppose she has to find someone she can flash her boobs at,” Isak says, and fortifies himself with another swallow.
He goes on to argue that it is a good job there are folk around who get paid for gaping at naked old crones. So that nobody else has to look at their drooping dugs, their sagging bellies, their dried-up pussies. No, it’s better to feast your eyes on young women, isn’t that right, Hjallie? But then, for Christ’s sake, Hjallie hasn’t a clue about that.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever had one, have you? Eh?”
Hjalmar wants to say, “Pack it in now.” But he knows better.
Nevertheless Isak notices how distressed his son has become as a result of his ranting. That he has hit the nail on the head. With what he has said about Kerttu, and what he has said about his son’s naivety. The fact that Hjalmar has never had a woman. Isak cannot know for sure, but he keeps on at him.
“Not even a good screw with some dead-drunk tart?” he says.
That seems to have eased things for Isak. The pressure inside him is reduced when he tortures his son. Hjalmar looks down at his fat belly draped over his thighs.
“I don’t want to hear any more about Mother,” he says, pouring water over the stones so that the steam fizzles and splutters.
Isak pauses for a moment. His son does not usually have anything to say for himself. But the older man cannot hold back.
“You think,” he says, and the influence of the toddies he drank in the village and the strong beer in the sauna is making itself felt, “you seem to think that she’s a saint.”
Leaning back against the wall, he farts loudly.
“A saint in hell,” he says. “You should know. August ’43. The resistance hid Danish and Norwegian freedom fighters and Finnish deserters. She was bloody brilliant at getting people to talk. Sweet and young and innocent, you know what I’m saying. In those days. Some Danish resistance fighters had escaped from a German iron-ore freighter in Luleå harbour – they’d been working as slave labourers. Three of them. She went to a dance and persuaded a young man to tell her all about it. Everything. Made a bloody whore of herself, that’s what she did. They were in a hut in the forest. Things didn’t turn out well for them at all.”
Hjalmar is filled with horror and disgust. What? What is his father saying?
Isak turns to look at his son. Something resembling a smile creeps over his face. A grin. Hjalmar thinks he looks like a snake, a bug, something you find when you turn over a stone. His old-man’s teeth protrude provocatively. He does not have false teeth, but what he does have is enough to send shivers up your spine.
“What’s happened to Simon and Wilma?” Isak says.
Hjalmar shrugs.
Isak does not know. Nobody has told him. Of course he has his suspicions. The alcohol encourages him to ask. He is raving over having been excluded, shut out. He has been shrugged off, an old man who does not count. Someone who has to be protected. Someone who cannot be trusted. He is not allowed to know. He is not allowed to drive a car. Anger is gnawing away inside him like a parasite.
“She’ll burn in hell,” he says. “You probably think that’s what will happen to me. But she’ll be a few levels further down. So there.”
His tone of voice changes. He becomes self-absorbed.
“So there, so there,” he says over and over again.
Then he falls silent. Seems to regret having said too much.
“Huh,” he says petulantly. “It wasn’t all that hot in here. You didn’t make the fire hot enough. There’s still too much of a chill in the walls.”
He clambers down from the bench and goes out into the cooling room. Hjalmar can hear him splashing away in the wash basin. Then the outside door closes with a bang.
“What about Hjörleifur Arnarson?” Martinsson says. “What happened to him?”
“That was Tore,” Hjalmar says. “He hit him with a piece of firewood. We couldn’t risk him having seen something. We moved him. Knocked the kitchen stool over. Opened the cupboard and put one of the rucksacks inside it. It was supposed to look like an accident.” Closing his eyes, he recalls his brother telling him to hold up Hjörleifur’s blood-covered head so that it would not leave a trail on the floor when Tore dragged him along by his legs.
Thank you, God, Martinsson thinks. That means we can put Tore behind bars. The spots of blood on his jacket plus Hjalmar’s testimony. A watertight case.
“What are you intending to do now?” she says. “You’re not thinking of shooting yourself, I hope?”
“No.”
She starts talking more quickly.
“Because if you did…” she says, “I couldn’t cope. Not after Lars-Gunnar Vinsa. I was there when he shot himself and Nalle. He’d locked me in the cellar.”
“I know. I read about it. But I’m not going to.”
Looking down at his mug of coffee, he shakes his head.
“Mind you, I did think about it.”
He looks up at her.
“You told me to go out into the forest. And I did. Something happened that I can’t explain. A bear looked at me. It came really close.”
“And?”
“It was as if there was something bigger than me. And I don’t mean the bear. Afterwards I just knew that I had to confess. I had to get it all out of me. All the lies.”
She looks at him doubtfully.
“So why did you come out here?”
“I thought I’d better come here and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I don’t know. For whatever was going to happen. For everything that had to happen.”
Tore Krekula stops the snow scooter beside Hjalmar’s car. There is another car parked there as well. But smoke is only coming from Hjalmar’s chimney. So who is there with Hjalmar? Tore texts the Road Licensing Authorities, asking who owns a car with that registration number. The reply comes immediately. Rebecka Martinsson, Kurravaara. Prosecutor. Her being there is not a problem. He will finish her off. And then his brother.
The death of Hjalmar Krekula will have to look like suicide. Given the state he seems to be in at the moment, he might well kill himself anyway. Maybe he just needs a bit of persuasion. Tore will fix that. Hjalmar killed Wilma and Simon. And as for Hjörleifur, let’s see… Hjalmar borrowed Tore’s jacket… No, that’s no good: Hjalmar’s so bloody fat, he would never fit into his brother’s jacket. No, here we go: Tore was standing next to Hjörleifur, they were only going to talk to him – but suddenly, without warning, Hjalmar lashed out with the lump of firewood. A splash of blood landed on Tore’s jacket. Yes, that’ll do the trick. Hjalmar murders the prosecutor, then kills himself. Somehow. Tore will have to improvise a bit, but it will be alright. It will all turn out O.K. No problem.
That bloody Hjalmar! What the hell does he think he’s playing at? There’s not a grain of sense in that flabby skull of his. He lets himself crumble under pressure. But not Tore. He has a family to think about. Laura. His sons. Even if they are grown up now. And Mother and Father. Tore has been running the firm more or less on his own ever since he was fifteen. He has never had a week’s holiday in the whole of his adult life. He has worked and taken on more responsibility. Worked and taken on more responsibility. And for what? So that his brother can take it all away from him? No.
Tintin is the first to hear the scooter. She raises her head and listens. At which point Vera barks. Only then do Martinsson and Hjalmar hear the sound of an engine coming closer. Hjalmar gets up and looks out of the window.
“Bad news,” he says. “It’s my brother.”
Martinsson jumps up – but where can she go? Out the door? What would happen then?
“There’s no time for that,” Hjalmar says. “He’s here.”
Martinsson hears the snow scooter’s engine being switched off.
Now he’s getting off the scooter, she thinks. Now he’s going to come in.
Hjalmar turns to Martinsson and speaks. The words come tumbling out of his mouth faster than they have ever done in his life.
“Get into the bathroom,” he says. “Lock the door. There’s a window. Climb out. Run down to the river and across it. Stick to the scooter tracks. They’ll have frozen over and with luck will take your weight. It’s your only chance. I’ll try to slow him down. But I can only talk to him. I can’t lay a hand on him. I simply can’t lay a hand on Tore.”
The bathroom door locks from the inside. Martinsson fumbles with the hasp: she has to lift up the handle in order to thread the the hasp through the metal ring. The window is tiny, high up in the wall above the toilet. Martinsson stands on the toilet lid and releases the window catches. Using both hands, she opens the window. There are bottles of shampoo and detergent on the window ledge. She tosses them out into the snow. Then she grabs hold of the window frame and heaves herself up onto her elbows until she is hanging halfway out of the window. She wriggles through it until her hips are resting on the ledge. It is further up from the ground than she expected. She will have to do her best to avoid breaking her neck when she tumbles out.
This is going to be disastrous, she thinks, as she thrusts herself head first through the window.
At that same moment Tore Krekula flings open the door of the cottage.
“Where is she?” Tore says to his brother.
Hjalmar says nothing. Vera stands up and starts barking. As does Tintin.
“In there?” Tore says, nodding in the direction of the bathroom. Marching over to the door, he tugs at it.
“Come out of there!” he shouts, banging on the door so hard that it rattles against the frame.
“What the hell have you told her?” he says to his brother. “Tell me!”
“The truth,” Hjalmar says.
He is still sitting on the the sofa.
“The truth!” Tore says, mimicking his brother’s voice. “You thick, bloated arsehole!”
He kicks the bathroom door in. It flies open instantly. Thuds against the washbasin.
Tore peers inside. Empty. But the window is wide open.
Martinsson falls headlong out of the window. Lands on her back like a beetle. The snow is wet and soft, so she is unhurt; but it is nearly impossible to get up. She struggles in vain to stand.
Manages in the end. Her head is at the top of her body, and her feet at the bottom. But with every step, she sinks into the snow up to her waist. The river had seemed very close, but now it seems far, far away. She fights her way through the deep snow. Sinks down after every step. Her muscles tremble with the strain. The sun is broiling. Sweat pours off her. If only she can get as far as the snow-scooter tracks. The frost has hardened them. They will support her and she will be able to run across the river to the other side.
Tore looks out of the window. Down towards the river. Sees the prosecutor wading through the snow. She manages to crawl up onto the icy snow-scooter tracks, and is heading for the river. What is she thinking? That she can get away?
“Is the ice thick enough to take the scooter?” he says to his brother.
“No,” Hjalmar says.
The dogs are restless. They are running around in circles and howling.
Tore does not believe his brother.
“You’re lying,” he says.
He pulls on his gloves. He will drive after her and mow her down. She is dead. She is already as good as dead.
When he opens the door, Tintin sneaks out.
Martinsson runs along the scooter track towards the river. It is like a strip of shiny ice on top of the powdery snow. She is a reindeer calf on wobbly legs. The wolf is not far away. Her limbs are exhausted after wading through the deep snow. She finds it hard to stay on the track. Her temples are throbbing. Her strenuous efforts have produced a bitter taste in her mouth.
She hears the sound of an engine behind her, and looks round. It is Tore on the snow scooter.
He will run her down. She will die in the snow, her insides mashed to a pulp, blood pouring out of her nose and mouth. Run, run.
Tore drives down the slope towards the riverbank. He is standing up on the scooter. The engine is roaring. He is catching her up. It will not take long. Martinsson stops and turns to face him.
I’m not going to survive this, she thinks.
He is only ten metres away now. She shuts her eyes.
She thinks about her farmor. How she always smelled slightly of the cowshed and tobacco smoke. How she used to get up at the crack of dawn and light the fire in the kitchen stove. Martinsson would drink tea with honey and milk, and eat a cheese sandwich. Her farmor would drink coffee and smoke her hand-rolled cigarettes. Martinsson thinks about her father. How he and Farmor and Martinsson would sit at Farmor’s place stemming lingonberries. They each have a tray. Under one edge of the tray is a folded newspaper. The sound of the hard berries rolling across the tray and down towards the side, where the stemmed ones gather. Pulling off the stems and leaves, they nudge the trimmed berries so that they roll down the sloping tray. Martinsson finds spiders and other creepy-crawlies that must be rescued and released outdoors.
Then she hears the sound of the scooter sinking through the ice. The ice gives way with a crash. The engine bubbles away in the water, but finally falls silent. She hears Tore Krekula screaming.
When she opens her eyes only the rear end of the scooter is sticking out of the water. It is sinking rapidly. After a few seconds there is no trace left of it or of Tore. No sign at all. The ice crackles and sings as if glasses were floating in the water. Soon there is no trace left of the hole. A thick layer of slush covers the water where he sank. The ice seems to be rocking. A wave of terror flows over Martinsson.
She feels the ice beginning to sink beneath her feet. It becomes like a hammock. She sinks further and further. Although the ice does not crack and break, she is horrified to see how the hole she is standing in is filling with water. It comes up to her ankles, then her knees.
Tintin comes running towards her across the ice.
“Get away!” Martinsson shouts. “Be careful! Get away!”
But the dog comes closer and closer.
From his window Hjalmar sees his brother disappear through the snow-covered ice. Then he sees the dog struggling as far as the frozen scooter track and scrambling up onto it. Then it races off towards Martinsson.
“Oh God!” he says, and really does mean it as a prayer.
Martinsson is standing in the middle of the ice, as if she herself is frozen. She shouts at the dog, trying to make her turn back. It is as if the prosecutor is standing in a bowl.
Then the ice collapses beneath her feet. Hjalmar sees her flailing arms. The next second she has disappeared.
I am flying in circles above the river. Me and three ravens. Round and round. I see Hjalmar come out of his cottage. He closes the door behind him carefully, so that Vera cannot sneak out. Then he starts running. But he doesn’t run very fast. He’s running along the scooter tracks made by his brother, but they haven’t had time to freeze yet, and are soft and mushy. When he reaches the riverbank, he sinks up to his waist in the snow.
He is stuck. He can’t move. He struggles, but it is like being cast in concrete.
“Rebecka,” he shouts. “Rebecka! I’m stuck in the snow!”
I croak with the ravens. We land in the trees. Cut through the air with our loud, rasping, ominous-sounding cries.
The ice sinks. The water rises. Martinsson is getting wet.
She is up to her knees in water. Then she hears the crust of ice over the old snow-scooter tracks cracking. The next moment she is immersed.
Snow and ice fall over her. She gropes for the edge of the hole, searching for something she can hold on to. She hears Hjalmar shouting her name. He shouts that he is stuck in the snow.
The ice is thick, half a metre at least, but loose; it just keeps breaking. She is lying in a soup of ice and snow. Whenever she tries to grab onto the edge of the hole, the ice breaks and falls onto her in big chunks.
Tintin comes running over to the hole.
Hjalmar cannot see Martinsson; the edge of the hole is too high. But he can see the dog.
“The dog!” he shouts. “The dog’s coming after you!”
And then he sees the dog fall into the hole. The edges are not strong enough to support her.
He hears Martinsson yelling.
“Oh, hell!” she screeches.
And the dog is howling like a banshee. Screaming with fear. Then it falls silent. Is fully occupied with trying to stay alive. It is swimming for all it is worth and scratching at the edge of the hole, but the ice just crumbles away.
Martinsson gropes for the edge of the hole with one hand and grabs hold of Tintin’s fur with the other.
The current is strong; she can feel it trying to drag her legs under the ice. She cannot resist it; it is too strong. The cold is sucking her strength away.
She summons all the strength she can muster and kicks hard with both legs. At the same time she tries to lift Tintin up by her fur.
Tintin scrambles up. She claws her way onto the ice. And it holds her.
“Shout to the dog,” Martinsson yells to Hjalmar. “Shout to her!”
Hjalmar shouts, “Come on, girl! Over here! There’s a good girl!”
The dog makes her way over to him. Teetering with exhaustion the last few metres. Staggers up to Hjalmar. Collapses by his side.
“Have you got her?” Martinsson shouts.
Her legs are sliding under the ice. As if someone were pulling her feet.
“Have you got her?”
Hjalmar responds, sobbing.
“I’ve got her. She’s here with me.”
“Don’t let go of her,” Martinsson shouts.
“I’m holding on to her collar,” he shouts. “I won’t let go.”
Now she cannot shout to him any more. She has to… She has to… Try to resist.
Martinsson struggles in vain as her hips are pressed up against the edge of the hole and she finds herself almost lying on her back. She is well on the way to being dragged under the ice. Snow is tumbling over her face. She wipes it away, only now realizing how fiendishly cold she is.
She cannot resist any more. Her shoulders are under the edge of the ice. The current is tugging at her, pressing her body against its underside.
Then she hears Hjalmar starting to sing.
Hjalmar has a hold of Tintin’s collar. He is holding on to her with a grip of iron. She is shivering.
He tries once again to lift himself out of the snow, but it is impossible.
Martinsson shouts and asks if he has the dog. He tells her that he does.
He holds on to the dog and thinks yes, he has her. She is all he has just now. At least the dog is alive. It is going to live. It starts whimpering. It sounds as if it is crying. It lies down in the snow and whines.
And then Hjalmar also starts crying. He cries for Wilma. For Martinsson. He cries for his brother and for Hjörleifur. For himself. For all the fat stuck in the snow as if in a vice.
And then he starts singing.
It starts of its own accord. At first his voice is hoarse and unpractised, but then it becomes more forceful, stronger.
“I lay my sins on Jesus, the spotless lamb of God,” he sings. “He bears them all and frees us from the accursed load.”
It is several years since he heard that hymn. But the words come without any hesitation.
“I bring my guilt to Jesus, to wash my crimson stains white in his blood most precious, till not a spot remains.”
The early spring sunshine scorches the glittering white snow on top of the ice. There are no human beings for many kilometres around apart from Martinsson, in the hole in the ice, and Hjalmar, in the snow. The shadows lie blue in the scooter tracks and in the footprints where dogs and people have sunk down into the snow today.
Martinsson is lying in the water. Most of her body is under the ice. Over the edge round the hole she can see the tops of trees at the perimeter of the forest on the other side of the river. She did not manage to get that far. The firs have black trunks and are laden with cones near their tops.
The birches are spindly. In the south these slender-limbed trees will be blossoming now. Flowering magnolias and cherry trees will be gracing the parks like young girls in their best frocks. Here the birches are thin, but not in the least like young girls. Knobbly, straggly and bent like old crones, they stand at the edge of the forest looking out for spring.
It wasn’t really that far, Martinsson thinks apathetically as she gazes at the trees. I ought to have kept on running. I shouldn’t have stopped. That was stupid.
Hjalmar is singing his head off on the other bank. His voice is not all that unpleasant. “O guide me, call me, draw me, uphold me to the end; and then in heaven receive me, my saviour and my friend.” As he comes to the climax of the hymn, the ravens seem to want to join in. They caw and croak up in the trees.
Then Martinsson panics as the water comes up over her mouth, her nose.
And the next moment she has been sucked under the ice. Its underside is sharp and uneven. She glides helplessly along with the current through the black water. She rolls over, the back of her head hits against the ice, or maybe it is a stone. She does not know. Everything is black. Bump, bump.
Mella, Stålnacke, Olsson and Rantakyrö clamber out of Mella’s Ford Escort next to where Hjalmar’s and Martinsson’s cars are parked.
“I have a nasty feeling about this,” Stålnacke says, looking towards the forest where a wisp of smoke is coming from one of the chimneys.
“Me too,” Mella says.
She has her gun. So do her colleagues.
Then they hear someone screaming. The silence all around them makes the sound even more dreadful. It is a scream that does not seem to want to end. It is inhuman.
The police officers look at one another. Nobody can bring themselves to say anything.
Then they hear a man’s voice shouting, “Shut up! Stop screeching!”
They don’t hear anything else as they race for all they are worth along the old snow-scooter track. Rantakyrö, who is the youngest, is in the lead.
Martinsson glides along beneath the ice. There is no air. She struggles and scratches in vain.
The cold threatens to split open her skin. Her lungs are bursting.
Then she bumps against something with her knees and her back at the same time. She is stuck. She is stuck, crouching on all fours. The current has pushed her into the riverbank. She is on her hands and knees on ice-cold stones, with the sheet of ice above her back.
The ice is flexible. It has become thin and brittle in the shallows. She pushes through it and is able to stand up. Her lungs suck in fresh air. Then she starts bellowing. Screams and screams.
Hjalmar stops singing abruptly, and stares in shock at Martinsson, whose head and torso have shot up through the ice like an arrow.
She screams and screams until her voice cracks.
“That’s enough!” he shouts in the end. “Shut up! Stop screeching! Come and get the dog.”
Tintin is lying motionless by his side.
Then Martinsson starts to cry. She wades through the brittle ice and onto dry land, sobbing loudly. Hjalmar starts laughing. He laughs until his stomach aches. He has not laughed for many years – maybe just occasionally when there was something funny on the television. He can hardly breathe.
Martinsson walks up to the cottage to fetch a spade. She vomits twice on the way there.
When Mella and her colleagues reach the cottage, they see Martinsson and Hjalmar down by the riverbank. Hjalmar has sunk into the snow; they can only see the top half of his body. Martinsson is digging away the snow from around him. Her clothes are soaked through, as is her hair. Her coat has been flung on the ground. Blood is pouring from a wound in her head. Her hands are also bleeding, but Martinsson does not seem to notice. She is digging away frenetically. Hjalmar has started singing again. “He heals all my diseases, he doth my soul redeem. Hallelujah.” Snow is flying in all directions.
The police officers approach cautiously. Rantakyrö and Olsson put away their pistols.
“What’s happened?” Mella says.
Neither Hjalmar nor Martinsson answers.
Hjalmar is clinging to Tintin and singing away. Tintin is also soaked through. She is lying in the snow. Lifts her head, manages a wag of her tail.
“Rebecka,” Mella says. “Rebecka.”
When she does not get an answer, she walks over to Martinsson and takes hold of the spade.
“You must go inside, into the cottage…” she begins, but does not have the opportunity to say anything more.
Martinsson snatches the spade back and hits Mella over the head. Then she drops it and falls backwards into the snow.
Rebecka Martinsson is sitting on a kitchen chair in Hjalmar Krekula’s cottage. Someone has taken all her clothes off her, and she is wrapped in a blanket. The fire is burning vigorously in the stove. She has a police jacket round her shoulders. The whole of her body is vibrating with cold. In fact she is jumping up and down on the chair. Her teeth are chattering, rattling. Her hands and feet ache, as do her thighs and her bottom. A flour mill is grinding away inside her head.
She has a mug of warm water in front of her.
Sven-Erik Ståhlnacke is also sitting at the kitchen table. He occasionally presses a towel against her battered, blood-stained hands, and against her head and face.
“Have a drink,” he says.
She wants to drink, but doesn’t dare to. She feels that she will simply sick it back up immediately.
“Tintin?” she says.
“Krister has been to collect her.”
“Is she O.K.?”
“She’ll be alright. Come on now, have a drink.”
Mella comes in. She has her mobile in one hand. The other is pressing a snowball against her forehead.
“How is she?” she says.
“Everything’s fine,” Stålnacke says. “All quiet on the Western front.”
“I’ve got Måns on the phone,” Mella says to Martinsson. “Do you feel like talking to him? Are you up to it?”
Martinsson nods and reaches for the mobile, then drops it on the floor.
Mella has to hold it for her.
“Yes,” she croaks.
“Is there no limit to what you’ll do to draw attention to yourself?” Wenngren says.
“No,” she says with a laugh that comes over as a cough. “I’ll do anything at all.”
Then he turns serious.
“They tell me you were stuck in a hole in the ice. That you drifted under the ice and then managed to break through it and climb out.”
“Yes,” she says in her hoarse, rasping voice.
Then she says,“I must look a right bloody mess.”
Silence at the other end. She thinks she can hear him crying.
“Come up here,” she says. “Come up here, darling, and give me a big hug.”
“Yes,” he says. His voice sounds strained, then he clears his throat. “I’m in a taxi on my way to the airport.”
She hangs up.
“Let’s go,” Mella says to Stålnacke. “We’ll get Hjalmar’s confession on tape.”
“Where is he?” Martinsson says.
“He’s sitting on the steps outside the front door. We had to let him rest.”
“Hang on a minute.”
Martinsson goes down on all fours. Every movement is agonizing. But she manages it eventually. Sliding the rag rug to one side, she lifts up the lino and the floorboard, then produces the oilcloth package with the maths books and the Advanced Level Certificate of Education.
“What’s that?” Mella says.
Martinsson does not answer.
“What is it?” Mella says again, with irritation in her voice. But she falls silent when she notices Stålnacke’s expression.
Leave her alone, his eyes say.
Martinsson staggers out through the door. Hjalmar is sitting at the top of the steps.
Olsson and Rantakyrö are standing beside him. She puts the package on Hjalmar’s knee.
“Thank you,” he says.
The moment he says it, he realizes that he has not used that expression for a very long time.
“Thank you,” he says again. “That was kind of you, really kind.”
He taps the package with his hand.
Martinsson goes back indoors. Rantakyrö supports her discreetly with a hand under her elbow.
Anni has fallen asleep on the posh sofa in the drawing room. It is a puffed-up leather affair, not especially attractive. Much too big for the room. Hanging over the back of it are small white embroidered cloths, presumably to protect against the ill effects of someone sitting on the sofa with dirty hair or too much pomade.
I sit in the armchair and look at her. We never used this room. It feels unfamiliar. We always sat and talked in the kitchen. And when I was alive, the television was always on the upstairs landing, which was big enough to use as a room. The drawing room was only used for special occasions, for coffee after funerals or for christenings. Whenever the vicar came to visit, he was always served coffee in the best china in the drawing room.
It’s evening. The sun is going down. The atmosphere in the room is warm and conducive to an afternoon nap.
When I died, Anni asked Hjalmar to carry the television down to the drawing room. Now she often has a lie-down here. I assume she doesn’t have the strength to climb the stairs. She has a woollen blanket over her legs. It’s a rather fine blanket whose sole role used to be to hang decoratively over the armrest. It still shouldn’t really be used, and so Anni hasn’t unfolded it completely: it’s lying doubled over her legs. If I could, I would open the blanket out to cover her completely. Silly old Anni! What’s the point of not making full use of everything now?
I look around. Everything is so neat and tidy, but it’s not really Anni. It’s a collection of all the poshest and best things she possesses. The dark-stained bookcase has books – not all that many, mind you – in neat rows. Cheap ornaments, a hollow swan made of glass and containing a red fluid that rises up its neck when the pressure is high, a painted plate from Tenerife on a stand – Anni has never been there. Professionally taken photographs of relatives in dusty frames. There’s one of me when I was a child. I look like nothing on earth, with my hair newly washed; properly combed and electrically dried, it’s sticking to my forehead. I remember the dress I’m wearing: the seams chafed against my skin. The crotch of my tights was halfway down my thighs. How on earth did they get me into that outfit? Did they drug me?
Anni is so thin under her two cardigans. There’s nothing more than skin and bones left of her. But she’s still breathing. And now her eyelids are flickering. Her hands and legs start jerking like the limbs of a sleeping dog. She has a bruise on her cheek where Kerttu slapped her.
I’m sitting in her best armchair, trying to remember if I ever told her how much she meant to me. I want to thank her for loving me unconditionally. And I want to thank her for never restricting me – I could come and go like a pet cat, but she was always there to heat up a bowl of soup or make me a sandwich or two if I was hungry. Mother used to say that Anni spoilt me. It’s true. She did. I want to thank her for that. My mother was so different, with all her hang-ups: drama, tears, screams and curses one minute, red-eyed, emotional and guilt-ridden the next. “Please forgive me, my darling: you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Can you plea-plea-please forgive me?” In the end I became an ice-cold teenager. “Pass the sick bag,” I used to say when she became devastated and wet and tearful and hiccupy. Anni said, “Wilma can come and live with me. If she needs a bit of a break. And she can start revising her maths.” Mother thought I’d go mad out here in the sticks. “I did when I lived there,” she said. But she was wrong.
I’m sitting in Anni’s best armchair and thinking how much I loved her. I never told her, perhaps because I’m allergic to the word. Mother must have used it thousands of times, but she’s about as mature as a nestling. I ought to have told Anni, though. All those times when she sat on the kitchen sofa with her legs up, trying to reach her feet so that she could massage them: I ought to have massaged them for her. I ought to have brushed her hair. I ought to have helped her up the stairs every night. I never realized. I used to lie on my bed, listening to music.
I look at her more closely. The light is dim in the room, and I can’t see her chest moving. Is she breathing?
I hear a voice from the kitchen doorway saying, “Is that you, sitting there?” And when I turn round, there she is.
She looks exactly like she always did, but not at all like the Anni lying on the sofa.
“No,” she says with a smile when she catches on to my question. “I’m just asleep. I’m going to live for another sixteen years. But it’s time for you to go now. Don’t you think?”
Yes, says something inside me. And suddenly there we are, standing on the shore of the lake. It’s summer. The far shore doesn’t look at all like the other side of Piilijärvi. But the boat is Anni’s. It’s her old rowing boat, the one her cousin made for her ages ago. The water is gurgling beneath the bows, which smell of tar. The sun glitters like trolling-spoons in the ripples. Mosquitoes sing their hymns to summer as Anni unties the painter and holds onto the boat while I jump aboard and lay the oars in the rowlocks.
Anni pushes off, then jumps aboard as well. I do the rowing.
As I’m rowing, I see Hjalmar.
He’s standing in the prison chapel, singing away. He’s with seven other inmates. The prison chaplain is a thin-haired man in his forties. He’s quite good on the guitar, and they’re singing “Childhood Faith”, the religious song made famous by the north’s favourite singer, Lapp-Lisa. The sound echoes back and forth, to and from the melancholy walls. The chaplain is glad that Hjalmar has joined his group. Hjalmar is big and commands respect, and, as some of the other prisoners want to keep on his good side, they turn up for every Wednesday service. The chaplain can demonstrate the results of his prison activities to his own congregation, so everyone is happy. For it is surely marvellous that these criminals are allowed out on parole to attend Sunday service at the Philadelphia Pentecostal Church. They pay homage to Jesus. And are only too pleased to describe the miserable lives they led before they saw the light, so that the whole congregation is inspired.
Happiest of them all is Hjalmar. He has new maths books in his cell.
His fat cheeks are rose-pink. He enjoys singing, likes to belt out “Childhood faith, childhood faith, you are a golden bridge to heaven”.
He always jokes that he’s never going to appeal against his sentence.
I carry on rowing. Two ravens come flying over the tops of the pine trees. They circle above us. Round and round. I glance up at their long black outstretched pinions, their wedge-shaped tails. I hear the sound of their wings beating above our heads. Then they glide down and perch on the rail of the boat. Just as naturally as if they were taking seats they’d booked in advance. I wouldn’t be surprised if they each produced a little black suitcase from under their wings. Their feathers are shimmering like rainbows in the sun, their beaks are so full of strength, curved and sharp, with little moustaches near the base, and they have thick, feathery collars. One of them lunges at a horsefly that has accompanied them out over the water. They chat to each other with all their r-sounds; they seem to be saying, “Rave-rave-raven”. But then one of them suddenly sounds like a clucking cockerel, and the other one seems to burst out laughing. I don’t know what to think about these birds.
I carry on rowing. Dip the oars deep into the water. I enjoy feeling my body again. The sweat running down my back. The wood of the oars made smooth by many years of handling. The feeling in the muscles of my back and arms with each stroke, summoning up the strength, the effort, the tiredness, the recovery.
The sun is hot. The ravens open their beaks. They are silent now. I feel nothing but happiness. It wells up inside me like the sap in a birch tree.
The ravens cry and take off. They fly with powerful beats of their wings in the direction from which I came. Disappear through the sky.
I row. I am strong and as untameable as a river, and I row.
I press hard with my feet, and row with long, powerful strokes.
I’m coming, I think happily. I’m coming now.