“Hell’s accursed shit!”
Inspector Krister Eriksson, dog handler, slammed the car door and cursed into the cold, dry winter air.
His black Alsatian bitch Tintin was sniffing around in the fresh snow in the police-station car park.
“Are you alright?” someone said behind him.
It was Martinsson, the prosecutor. Her long brown hair hung down beneath her woolly hat. She wore jeans, no make-up. Not in court today, then.
“It’s the car,” Eriksson said with a smile, embarrassed by his swearing. “It won’t start. They’ve found Wilma Persson, the girl who disappeared last autumn.”
Martinsson shook her head, not recognizing the name.
“She and her boyfriend disappeared at the beginning of October,” Eriksson said. “They were both only young. People thought they had gone off to do a winter dive, but nobody knew where.”
“Ah yes, I remember now,” Martinsson said. “So they’ve found them, have they?”
“Not them, just the girl. In the River Torne, upstream from Vittangi. It was a diving accident, just as people thought. Anna-Maria’s phoned and asked me to go up there with Tintin and see if there’s any trace of the boy.”
Inspector Anna-Maria Mella was Eriksson’s boss.
“How is Anna-Maria?” Martinsson said. “It’s ages since I spoke to her, even though we work in the same building.”
“She’s O.K., I think, but you know what it’s like with a house full of kids. She’s always on the go, like most people, I suppose.”
Martinsson was sure he was not telling the truth. All was not well with Mella, in fact.
“The atmosphere between her and her colleagues isn’t as good as it used to be,” he said. “Anyway, I told her that Tintin isn’t really working at the moment. Her puppies are due soon, but I can let her have a quick look round. I was thinking of taking the new dog as well. Let him have a sniff. It won’t do any harm. If we don’t find anything, they can send for another dog, but the nearest one is in Sundsvall, so that would take ages…”
He nodded towards the back of his car. There were two dog cages in the luggage space. In one of them was a chocolate-brown Alsatian.
“He’s lovely,” Martinsson said. “What’s his name?”
“Roy. Yes, he’s certainly handsome. It remains to be seen if he’s going to be any good as a police dog. I can’t let him out at the same time as Tintin. He chases after her and winds her up. And Tintin needs to take things easy until she whelps.”
Martinsson looked over at Tintin.
“She’s good, from what I’ve heard,” she said. “She found the vicar in Vuolusjärvi, and tracked down Inna Wattrang. Amazing.”
“Oh yes, she certainly is good,” Eriksson said, turning away to hide his proud smile. “I always compare them with my previous dog, Zack. It was a privilege to work with him. He taught me all I know. I just followed him. I was so young in those days, didn’t have a clue. But I’ve trained Tintin.”
The bitch looked up when she heard her name and came trotting over to them. Sat down next to the boot of Eriksson’s car as if to say, “Shall we get moving?”
“She knows we’re going out on a job,” Eriksson said. “She thinks it’s great fun.”
He turned to Tintin.
“It’s no good,” he said. “The car won’t start.”
The dog tilted her head to one side and seemed to think this over. Then she lay down in the snow with a resigned sigh.
“Why don’t you take my car?” Martinsson said.
It dawned on her that she was talking to Tintin, so she turned to face Eriksson.
“Sorry,” she said. “I expect you’ll be the one doing the driving. I don’t need my car today.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly…”
As she pressed the keys of her Audi A4 Avant into his hand, he kept asking whether she was sure she would not need the car that day. In any case, there was bound to be another solution. They could come and fetch him, for instance.
“Why can’t you just say thank you?” she said. “I’m going inside. Unless you need some help moving the dog cages. Just go! They’ll be waiting for you.”
He said he could manage the cages himself. So she left him to it, pausing in the doorway to give him a wave.
She had not even taken her jacket off when he knocked on the door of her office.
“It’s no good,” he said. “It’s an automatic. I can’t cope with them.”
She smiled.
That doesn’t happen very often, he thought.
Other women went around smiling all day long. Whether they were happy or not. But not this one. And she didn’t just smile with her mouth, oh no, you had to look deep into her eyes. A merry tune was playing at the very back of her eyes when she looked at him.
“What about Tintin?” she said.
“No, she’s used to a stick shift as well.”
“It’s dead easy, you just…”
“I know!” he said, interrupting her. “That’s what everyone says, but… It’s no good, I just can’t do it.”
Martinsson looked at him. He met her gaze without a trace of embarrassment or shyness. Held her gaze.
She knew he was a lone wolf.
And it’s not just because of how he looks, she thought.
Eriksson’s face was badly scarred by severe burns. A house fire when he was a teenager, she had heard. His skin was shiny with patches of pink, his ears two newly opened, crinkled birch leaves, no hair, no eyebrows or lashes, his nose just two holes in the middle of his face.
“I’ll drive you,” she said finally.
She expected him to protest. To start going on about how she was supposed to be at work. That she no doubt had all kinds of other things to do.
“Thank you,” he said, smiling mischievously to show that he had learnt his lesson.
It suddenly turned warm as they were driving. The sun’s hot breath. Melting snow dripped from spindly pine trees and from the branches of birches already taking on a violet tone. Patches of open water had begun to appear round the stones in the river. The ice was beginning to recede from the riverbanks. But the cold would return when night fell. It had not surrendered yet.
Martinsson and Eriksson followed the forest tracks north of the Torne. The police had marked the route with strips of red plastic tape. If they had not done so, it would have been virtually impossible to find the right place out here in the wild. There were tracks running off in all directions.
The barrier across the track leading to the summer cottages on the promontory at Pirttilahti was standing open. The site was covered with all kinds of huts and chalets made out of spare bits of timber, wooden cottages and several outside toilets. Everything appeared rather higgledy-piggledy; people seemed to have built wherever they could find room. There was also an old red-painted wooden hut on wheels with dark green window frames. It was propped up on railway sleepers, and there were flounced flowery curtains at the windows. It made Martinsson think of small, tired travelling circus troupes. Here and there lengths of wood had been nailed up between pine trees. Hanging from them were swings with greying ropes, or tatty fishing nets weighed down by fragments of ice that had not yet melted in the spring sunshine. Along the walls of the cottages were stacks of rotting wood, unlikely to be much good for burning. Lying all over the place were things that might come in handy one of these days: part of an old porch, a pretty but broken wooden gate leaning against a tree, stacks of timber only just adequately covered by tarpaulins, piles of old bricks and paving stones, grindstones, a street lamp, an old tractor, rolls of fibreglass insulation, an iron bed.
And lots of rowing boats in among the trees. Upside down and covered in snow. Made of wood and plastic, in varying states of repair.
By the side of a permanent landing pier was a floating jetty that had been dragged up onto the riverbank. The police and forensic teams were gathered there.
“What a place!” Martinsson said with delight, switching off the engine.
Tintin and Roy immediately started howling and barking with excitement.
“Some of us can’t wait to start work,” Eriksson said, laughing.
They got out of the car quickly.
Inspector Mella came over to them.
“What a row!” she said with a chuckle.
“They just go mad, they’re so desperate to get to work,” Eriksson said. “I don’t want to shush them up as I want this to be a positive experience. But I’m not at all sure that it’s good for Tintin. She shouldn’t get this excited in her condition. She needs to get to work, then she’ll calm down. Where do you want us to search?”
Mella looked over towards the river.
“The forensic team have just arrived. They’re working down by the jetty, but I thought you and Tintin could check along the riverbank. The girl was out diving with her boyfriend, so he must be here somewhere. Maybe his body has floated ashore nearby, who knows? It would be helpful if you could search a little way upstream and downstream from here, and then we can go up to the rapids. Some people dive in the rapids to retrieve lost fishing tackle – a decent Rapala can set you back 150 kronor after all. So they go looking for a few of those… As I said, I’ve no idea. But young people are always short of money. Such a tragic accident. A damned shame if ever there was one. They had the whole of their lives to look forward to. It would be nice for the relatives if we could find both of them.”
Eriksson nodded.
“Tintin can make a start,” he said. “But she’s not going to walk 3 kilometres. I’ll take Roy out later.”
“O.K. Maybe we can let her search the promontory here, and then up by the rapids. It’s open water there, and we can cross over to the far side later. I’ve got some officers out looking for the car, but they’re keeping away from the riverbank. A hundred metres, I told them.”
Eriksson nodded his approval. Letting Tintin out of the car, he strapped her into her work coat.
She stopped barking and scuttled excitedly around his legs; he had to disentangle himself from the lead.
When he had disappeared, being dragged down towards the promontory by an excited, whimpering Alsatian, Mella turned to Martinsson.
“What brought you out here?”
“I’m just the chauffeur,” Martinsson said. “Krister’s car wouldn’t start.”
They eyed each other for a long moment. Then both said at the same time, “How are things?”
Mella answered first. “Fine, just fine.” Martinsson looked her over. Inspector Mella was short, barely 1.5 metres tall. But it had never registered with Martinsson that Mella was small. Until now. The inspector was almost swallowed up by her black leather jacket. Her long, light blonde hair hung down her back in a thick plait as usual. It struck Martinsson that she had seen very little of Mella recently – for the last year or so, in fact. Time really did fly. It was obvious from Mella’s eyes that things were not fine at all. Just over a year ago, she and her colleague Sven-Erik Stålnacke had been involved in a gunfight; both of them had been forced to shoot to kill. Mella had been responsible for getting them into that situation. She hadn’t wanted to wait for back-up.
Of course Stålnacke’s angry, Martinsson thought. No doubt he feels bad, thinks it was all her fault.
And he’s right, really, she reasoned. Mella had put both her own life and his at risk. There had been a wild horse in this mother of four. But now that horse’s spirit had been crushed.
“I’m fine,” Martinsson replied to Mella’s question.
Mella looked hard at Martinsson. She did seem to be in good shape. A hell of a lot better than she had been. Still thin, but not nearly so pale and wretched. She was doing a good job as district prosecutor. Had some kind of relationship with her old boss from Stockholm. Not that he was much to write home about. One of those well-heeled types who sail through life, getting by on charm and good looks. He drank too much, anybody could see that. But if he made Martinsson feel good, so be it…
One of the forensic officers shouted to Mella. They were going to take the body away. Did Mella want to see it before they did? Shouting “I’m coming,” she turned back to Martinsson.
“I want to have a look at her,” she said. “It will feel better, somehow, if I’ve seen her when I talk to her next-of-kin. They usually want to view the deceased, to reassure themselves that it really is their relative we’ve found. So it’s good to know what state the body is in. I can well imagine. She’s been in the water since last autumn.”
Mella suddenly bit her tongue. For Christ’s sake, she shouldn’t be babbling on about dead bodies to Martinsson. Martinsson had killed in self-defence. Three men. Smashed the skull of one and shot the other two. She had been on sick leave for a long time. Nearly two years later, when Lars-Gunnar Vinsa killed his son and took his own life, it had all been too much for her. Martinsson had ended up in a psychiatric ward.
“I’m O.K.,” Martinsson said, as if she had read Mella’s mind. “May I have a look as well?”
The skin on the girl’s face was white and bloated from the water. One hand was without its diving glove, and there was next to nothing left of it. The flesh had come away and exposed the bones. The little finger and thumb were missing. So was her nose. Most of her lips too.
“That’s what happens,” one of the forensic officers said. “When they’ve been in the water for a long time. The skin tears easily and peels away, and then they drift around and bump into things. That causes noses and ears and such-like to fall off. Pike might have been nibbling at her as well. We’ll have to see how she holds together when the pathologist cuts away her diving suit. Will Pohjanen be doing the post-mortem?”
Mella nodded, keeping an eye on Martinsson, who was staring at the girl’s battered hand as if transfixed.
A little way off, Inspector Sven-Erik Stålnacke pulled up in his Volvo, got out and shouted to Mella.
“We’ve found the kids’ car. Over by the rapids.”
He walked towards them. Gingerly, legs wide apart so as not to slip, just as they all were doing.
“It was parked in the felling area,” he said. “A hundred and fifty metres from the rapids. They must have driven as far as they could over the rough ground so they wouldn’t have to carry their heavy diving gear.”
He rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully.
“Then of course it was covered in snow during the winter. They’re digging it out now. That’s what we thought was so odd when they disappeared last autumn – the fact that nobody had seen their car. But it’s obvious now. If it was in the forest, completely covered in snow… Not even people riding snow scooters along the riverbank would have noticed it. The lad did well to drive it that far, though. The trees have all been felled down towards the rapids, but the area’s full of big stones and stumps.”
Martinsson seemed to snap out of her trance, standing there in front of the girl.
“She might have been the one driving,” she said, nodding towards the body. “According to the statistics, women are better drivers than men.”
She gave Stålnacke a knowing smile.
Normally, he would have responded with a snort, making his greying scrubbing brush of a moustache stick straight out. He would have said that statistics were lies, damned lies, and then asked where Martinsson got her ideas from. He would have had a self-satisfied giggle while Martinsson and Mella rolled their eyes.
But all he said was: “You may be right.”
He asked Mella what she wanted them to do with the car.
Oh dear, Martinsson thought. Things really are frosty between the pair of them.
“There’s no reason to suspect a crime,” Mella said. “If we can get hold of a spare key, someone can drive it back to town.”
“Well, we can try, I suppose,” Stålnacke said doubtfully. “If we can get it onto the road, that is.”
“I’m only asking you to try,” Mella said, a splinter of ice in her voice.
Stålnacke turned on his heel and walked away just as Eriksson was returning.
“Oh,” Mella said, disappointed. “I’d hoped to hear her barking.”
“No, she didn’t find anything. I’ll take a walk with Roy, but I don’t think the boy is here.”
“What do you mean?” Mella said.
Eriksson shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll take a walk with Roy, and we’ll see.”
Patting Tintin, he told her what a good job she had done. Opening the boot of Martinsson’s car, he allowed the dogs to change places. Roy could not believe his luck. He danced the dance of the happy tracker dog, in the end not knowing what to do with all the joy in his body. So he sat down and gave a huge yawn.
Tintin was not happy with the changeover. She barked away in desperation. Was that little nothing going to go out with the boss and have fun while she, the alpha bitch, was shut up in the car? Unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.
Her barking penetrated the bodywork of the car as she spun round and round in her cage.
“Not good,” Eriksson said, as he watched her through the rear window. “She’s not supposed to get stressed in her condition. I’m sorry, Anna-Maria, but this is no good.”
“Should I put her on her lead and take her for a walk?” Mella said. “Maybe if she’s outside…”
“That would only make things worse.”
“I could take her back to town with me,” Martinsson said. “Do you think that would calm her down?”
Eriksson looked at her. Now that the sun was out, she had taken off her woolly hat. Her hair was slightly tousled. Those sand-coloured eyes. That mouth. He wanted to kiss that mouth. She had a scar running from her upper lip to her nose, from the time Lars-Gunnar Vinsa had thrown her down the cellar steps. A lot of people thought it was ugly, felt sorry for her, went on about how pretty she had been before. But he liked the scar. It made her look vulnerable.
Desire coursed through his body like a jet of hot water. Her beneath him on all fours. One hand sifting through her hair. The other gripping her hip. Or she’s sitting astride him. His hands cupping her breasts. He whispers her name. A strand of her hair is sticking to her face, wet with perspiration. Or she’s on her back beneath him. Her knees drawn up. He thrusts into her. Slowly now.
“Don’t you think?” she said again. “She can wait in my office. Nobody will mind. You can fetch her when you’ve finished.”
“Yes, why not,” he said, averting his eyes in case she saw through him. “That would be fine.”
Mella and Stålnacke were standing by the car that had been discovered near the river, a Peugeot 305.
“I found the key,” Stålnacke said. “It occurred to me that they’d probably done the same as people who go berry-picking. They don’t want to take the car key with them, because if you drop it and lose it in the forest you have a hell of a job getting home. Way out here in the wild. I usually hide mine inside the back bumper. They’d hidden theirs on top of one of the tyres, under the wheel arch.”
“Really?” Mella said patiently.
“Anyway, I thought I’d try and drive it out onto the road before the snow melts too much in the heat – there are a hell of a lot of stones and rocks, and…”
Mella glanced involuntarily at the clock on her mobile. Stålnacke hurried to get to the point.
“When I turned the key, the car started right away, no problem.”
“Really?”
“But…”
He raised a finger to emphasize that they had reached the point he wanted to talk to her about.
“… but it ran out of petrol after only a few seconds. So there was only a drop in the tank. I thought you’d want to know that.”
“Really?”
“So they’d have been stuck. They’d never have made it back to Piilijärvi. The nearest petrol station is in Vittangi.”
Mella made a sort of humming noise to indicate surprise.
“It’s strange, don’t you think?” Stålnacke said. “I mean, they weren’t stupid, were they? How did they think they were going to get home?”
“I’ve no idea,” Mella said with a shrug.
“Oh well,” Stålnacke said, obviously irritated by the fact that she did not share his puzzlement over the empty petrol tank. “I just thought you might be interested.”
“Of course.” Mella made an effort. “Maybe someone siphoned off the petrol while the car was standing here during the winter. Someone on a snow scooter, perhaps?”
“There aren’t any scratches on the cap to the petrol tank. Mind you, if I could find the key, no doubt anybody else could have as well. I still think it’s odd, though.”
“Everything O.K.?”
Eriksson knocked on the open door of Martinsson’s office. He remained standing in the doorway. This time he took a good look round the place. The desk was piled high with legal documents. A cardboard box full of material having to do with some environmental investigation occupied the visitor’s chair. It was obvious that she was working her socks off. But he had known that already. Everyone in the police station knew it. When she had taken up her post in Kiruna, she had set lawsuits in motion at such a rate that the local solicitors complained. And God help any police officer who submitted inadequate preliminary-investigation documents – she would chase them up, thrust instructions detailing what needed to be done into their hands, then phone and nag them until they did what she wanted them to do.
Martinsson looked up from the file on a drink-driving case.
“No problems at all. How did it go out there? Did you find him?”
“No. What have you done with Tintin?”
“She’s here,” Martinsson said, rolling back her desk chair. “Under my desk.”
“What?” Eriksson said. His face was one big smile as he bent over to investigate. “Now look here, old girl; did it take just one afternoon for you to forget your boss? You’re supposed to jump up and dance out to greet me the moment you hear my footsteps in the corridor.”
When Eriksson bent down and started talking to her, Tintin got up and walked over to him, her tail wagging.
“Just look at her,” he said. “Now she’s ashamed because she didn’t show me the respect I deserve.”
Martinsson smiled at Tintin, who was arching her back submissively, wagging her tail excitedly and trying to lick her master on the mouth. Then she suddenly seemed to remember Martinsson. She hurried back, sat down beside Martinsson’s chair and placed her paw on the woman’s knee. Then she scurried back to Eriksson again.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Eriksson said. “Amazing! She stayed under your desk even as I was approaching. And now this. She’s giving you the highest possible marks. She’s normally very loyal to her master. This is most unusual.”
“I like dogs,” Martinsson said.
She looked him in the eye. Did not avert her gaze. He returned the look.
“Lots of people like dogs,” he said. “But dogs obviously like you. Are you thinking of getting one?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But the dogs I have in mind are those I played with as a child. It’s difficult to find intelligent hunting dogs now. Mind you, I don’t hunt myself. I want a dog that runs loose around the village during the winter, but that’s not allowed any more. That’s how it was when I was a girl. They knew everything that was going on. And hunted mice in the stubble-fields.”
“One like her, in other words?” he said, nodding towards Tintin. “Wouldn’t that be the right dog for you?”
“Of course. She’s lovely.”
Several long seconds passed. Tintin sat between them, looking first at one, then the other.
“Anyway,” Martinsson said eventually, “you didn’t find him.”
“No, but I knew we wouldn’t from the start.”
“How could you know that? What do you mean?”
Eriksson looked out of the window. Sunshine and a light blue sky, softening up the icy crust on the snow. Icicles hung in pretty rows dripping from gutters. The trees were suffering the pains of spring.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that I sometimes get a feeling. Sometimes I know the dog is about to find something even before it starts barking. Or that we aren’t going to find anything, as on this occasion. It’s when I feel… how shall I put it?… maybe open is the right word. A human being is something special. There’s more to us than we realize. And Mother Earth is more than just a lump of dead rock. She’s also alive. If there’s a dead body lying somewhere in the countryside, you can feel it when you reach the place. The trees know, and vibrate with the knowledge. The stones know. The grass. They create an atmosphere. And we can perceive it if we just…”
He shrugged as a way of finishing the sentence.
“Like people do when they are dowsing for water,” Martinsson said, feeling that this sounded awkward. “They don’t really need a divining rod. They simply know that the water is there.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Something like that, perhaps.”
He gave her a searching look, suspected that there was something she wanted to tell him.
“What’s on your mind?” he said.
“The girl they found,” Martinsson said. “I had a dream about her.”
“Really?”
“It was nothing much. Anyway, I have to go home now. Need a lift?”
“No, but thanks all the same. A mate of mine’s coming to help me with the car. So you saw Wilma, did you?”
“I dreamt about her.”
“What did she want, do you think?”
“It was a dream,” Martinsson said again. “Don’t they say that all the people in your dreams are really yourself?”
Eriksson smiled.
“Cheerio,” was all he said.
And off he went, with the dog.
Mella drove down to Piilijärvi, some 60 kilometres south-east of Kiruna. The snow had melted from the road. All that was left was an icy ridge in the middle. Mella needed to inform Anni Autio, Wilma Persson’s great-grandmother, that the girl had been found, and that she was dead. It would have been helpful to have Stålnacke with her, but that was out of the question. He could not forgive her for what had happened during the shooting in Regla.
“And what the hell am I supposed to do about that?” Mella said aloud to herself. “He’ll be retiring soon, so he won’t have to put up with me much longer. He can stay at home with Airi and her cats.”
But it nagged at her. She was used to laughing and joking with her colleagues. It had always been such fun, going to work. But now…
“Not much bloody fun at all!” she said to herself as she turned off onto the narrow, winding road leading from the E10 to the village.
And things were not getting any better. She rarely asked the others if they fancied lunch somewhere as a group. Often she just drove home and forced down some yoghourt and muesli on her own. She had started ringing her husband from work. In the middle of the day. To talk about nothing at all. Or she would invent errands: “Did you remember Gustav’s extra pair of gloves when you took him to nursery?” “Can you pick up some shopping on the way home?”
Anni Autio lived in a pink Eternit-clad house in the middle of the village, by the lake. The wooden steps up to the front door were stained brown, carefully looked after, and generously sanded to prevent falls. The handrail was black-painted iron. A handwritten note inside a plastic pocket, attached to the front door with a drawing pin, read:
“RING
And WAIT.
It takes ages for me to get to the door.
I AM at home.”
Mella rang the bell. And waited. A few ravens were frolicking in the thermals above the lake. Black and majestic against the blue sky. Their cries filled the air. One of them was wheeling round and round in concentric circles. Without a care in the world.
Mella waited. Could feel every nerve in her body itching to hurry back to her car and drive away. Anything to avoid coming face to face with another person’s sorrow.
A cat came strolling across the parking area, caught sight of Mella and quickened its pace. Stålnacke was a cat person. Mella’s thoughts turned back to him. He was good at this kind of thing. Telling people what they least wanted to hear. Hugging and consoling them.
Damn him, she thought.
“Damn,” she said out loud, in an attempt to banish her depressing thoughts.
At that same moment the door opened. A thin, stooped woman in her eighties was clinging on to the handle with both hands. Her white hair hung down her back in a string-like plait. She was wearing a simple blue dress buttoned up to her neck and a man’s cardigan. Her legs were encased in thick nylon stockings, and her pointed shoes were made of reindeer skin.
“Sorry,” Mella said. “I was lost in my thoughts.”
“Never mind,” the woman said in a friendly tone. “I’m pleased that you’re still here. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t have the patience to wait, despite the note I pinned to the door. I struggle this far only to see them driving away. I’m always tempted to shoot them. I look forward to a nice little chat, then find myself cheated. Mind you, the Jehovah’s Witnesses always wait.”
She laughed.
“I’m not so particular nowadays. They’re welcome to stay for a chat. But you’re not religious, are you? Are you selling raffle tickets?”
“Anna-Maria Mella, Kiruna police,” Mella said, showing her I.D. “Are you Anni Autio?”
The smile disappeared from the woman’s face.
“You’ve found Wilma,” she said.
Anni Autio supported herself against the walls and held on to strategically placed chairs as she shuffled to the kitchen. Mella took off her winter boots and left them in the vestibule, which was almost completely filled by a large, humming freezer. She accepted Anni’s offer of coffee. The kitchen gave the impression of having been untouched since the 1950s. The tap shook and the pipes shuddered as Anni filled the coffee pan. The conifer-green cupboards reached all the way to the ceiling. The walls were crammed with photographs, poems by Edith Södergran and Nils Ferlin, children’s watercolours now so faded that it was impossible to see what they were meant to represent, miniature prints of birds, framed pages torn out of old flower books.
“We haven’t managed to find her mother,” Mella said. “According to the electoral register, Wilma lived with you, and the police report on her disappearance names you as next of kin. She was your granddaughter…”
“My great-granddaughter, in fact.”
Anni hunched over the stove as she waited for the water to boil. Listening to Mella’s account of how Wilma had been found, she occasionally lifted the saucepan lid with an embroidered pot-holder.
“Tell me if there’s anything I can do,” Mella said. Anni made a dismissive gesture.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked when she had finished pouring out the coffee.“I know it’s dicing with death, but I was eighty last January, and I’ve always smoked. Some people look after their health… But life isn’t fair.”
Tapping her cigarette against the glass jar she used as an ashtray, she said again, “Life isn’t fair.”
She wiped her nose and cheeks with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Cry as much as you like,” Mella said, just as Stålnacke used to do.
“She was only seventeen,” Anni said with a sob. “She was too young. And I’m too old to have to live through all this.”
She looked angrily at Mella.
“I’m totally fed up,” she said. “It’s bad enough outliving nearly everyone my own age. But when you start outliving the youngsters, well…”
“How come she lived with you?” Mella asked, mainly to have something to say.
“She used to live in Huddinge with her mother, my granddaughter. Went to grammar school, but was having trouble getting through all the work. She insisted on taking a break and coming up here to live with me. She moved in last Christmas. She worked for Marta Andersson at the campsite. And then she met Simon. He’s a relative of Kyrö who lives in the red wooden cottage over there…”
She gestured towards the building.
“Simon thought the world of Wilma.”
She stared hard at Mella.
“I’ve never been as close to anyone as I was to Wilma. Not to my daughters. Certainly not to my sister. Mind you, here in the village nobody has much time for anybody else. But Wilma gave me a feeling of freedom, I don’t know how to explain it. My sister Kerttu, for instance – she’s always been better off than me. She married Isak Krekula. He runs the haulage firm.”
“I recognize the name,” Mella said.
“Anyway, none of them have exactly been pals with the police. It’s his sons who run the firm nowadays, of course. That Kerttu is always annoying me. All she wants to talk about is money and business and what big shots her boys keep meeting. But Wilma used to say, ‘Take no notice. If money and that sort of stuff make her feel good, then fine. You don’t need to be any less happy on her account.’ Huh, I know it sounds simple and straightforward – but last summer… I’d never felt so liberated and so young. You can think whatever you like, Ann-Britt, but…”
“Anna-Maria.”
“But she was my best friend. An eighty-year-old and a teenager. She didn’t treat me like a useless pensioner.”
It is the middle of August. Blueberry time. Simon Kyrö is driving along a forest track. Wilma Persson is in the passenger seat. Anni Autio is in the back, her walker beside her. This is the place they were looking for. Blueberries and lingonberries growing right by the track. Anni wriggles out of the car unaided. Simon lifts out her walker and her basket. It is a lovely day. The sun is shining, and the heat is squeezing threads of attractive scent from the forest.
“I haven’t been here for years,” Anni says.
Simon gives her a worried look. Of course not. How on earth could she have negotiated any kind of rough terrain with her walker?
“Would you like us to come with you?” he says. “I can carry your basket.”
“Just leave her,” Wilma says, and Anni emits a loud expletive in Tornedalen Finnish, shooing him away as if his interpolation were a fly buzzing around her. Wilma knows. Anni needs to be alone in the silence. If she finds it impossible to move around and does not manage to pick a single blueberry, that will not matter. She can sit down on a rock and just be herself.
“We’ll come back and collect you in three hours,” Wilma says.
Then she turns to Simon with a cheeky smile.
“I know how you and I can figure out how to spend the time.”
Simon’s face turns as red as a beetroot.
“Stop it,” he says, glancing over at Anni.
Wilma laughs.
“Anni’s nearly eighty. She’s given birth to five children. Do you think she’s forgotten what people can get up to when they’re on their own?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Anni says. “But stop embarrassing him.”
“Make sure you don’t die while we’re away,” Wilma says chirpily before she and Simon get back into the car and drive off.
They do not go far. The car stops. Wilma sticks her head out of the window and shouts so loudly that her voice echoes through the forest, “Mind you, if you do die, it’s a fantastic day and place for it.”
It was 5.30 in the afternoon when Mella entered the autopsy unit of Kiruna’s hospital.
“Huh, you again?” was her sardonic greeting from the pathologist Lars Pohjanen.
His thin body always looked frozen inside his crumpled green autopsy coat.
Mella’s mood improved immediately – here was someone who still pulled her leg just as in the old days.
“I assumed that you just couldn’t wait to see me again,” she said, giving him a 100-watt smile.
He chuckled, though it sounded as if he was simply clearing his throat.
Wilma Persson was lying naked on the stainless-steel autopsy table. Pohjanen had cut away her diving suit and underclothes. Her skin was greyish-white and looked bleached. Next to her was an ashtray full of Pohjanen’s cigarette butts. Mella made no comment – she was neither his mother nor his boss.
“I’ve just been talking to her great-grandmother,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’d be able to tell me what happened.”
Pohjanen shook his head.
“I haven’t opened her up yet,” he said. “She’s a bit of a mess, as you can see, but all this damage happened after she died.”
He pointed to Wilma’s face, her missing nose and lips.
“Why is her hair all over the floor?” Mella said.
“Water rots the roots, so the hair becomes very loose.”
Holding up Wilma’s hands, he contemplated them through narrowed eyes. The little finger and thumb of her right hand were missing.
“I noticed something odd about her hands,” he said, clearing his throat. “She’s lost a lot of nails, but not all of them. Take a look at her right hand – oops! I have to be careful, the skin detaches itself from her fingers before you know where you are. As you can see, the little finger and thumb are missing from the right hand, but the middle and ring fingers are still there. Compare that with the other hand…”
He held up both hands, and Mella leaned forward somewhat reluctantly to take a close look.
“The nails on her left hand, the ones she has left, are varnished black and neatly filed – they’re in quite good shape, don’t you think? But the nails on the middle and ring fingers of her right hand are broken, and the varnish is almost scraped away.”
“What does that imply?” Mella said.
Pohjanen shrugged.
“Difficult to say. But I scraped the underside of the nails. Come and see what I found.”
He laid Wilma’s hands down with care, then led Mella to his workbench. On it were five sealed test tubes labelled “right middle”, “right ring”, “left thumb”, “left middle”, “left index”. In each of the tubes was a flat wooden toothpick.
“Under both the nails on her right hand there were flakes of green paint. That doesn’t necessarily mean it had anything to do with the accident – she might have been scraping window frames, or painting, or something of the sort. Most people are right-handed.”
Mella nodded and glanced at her watch. Dinner at 6.00, Robert had said. Time to go home.
A quarter of an hour later, Pohjanen was standing once more with Wilma’s hand in his. He was taking her fingerprints. This was something he always did when identification was difficult due to intense facial damage, as in this case. The skin of Wilma’s left thumb had come away just as he was about to press it onto the paper. Such things happen, and he did what he usually did, sliding his own finger inside the pocket of Wilma’s skin and pressing it down on the paper. As he did so he heard someone in the doorway. Assuming it was Inspector Mella, he didn’t turn round but said: “Right, Anna-Maria. All done here. You’ll be able to read the autopsy report as soon as it’s written. Assuming it ever gets written.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” said a voice that was not Mella’s.
When Pohjanen finally turned round, he saw that his visitor was District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson. He had met Martinsson once before, when he had been called in to advise on one of her cases having to do with domestic violence. The husband and wife had given different explanations for the woman’s injuries. But Pohjanen and Martinsson had never spoken outside the courtroom. He could see that she was staring at the thimble of dead skin he was wearing on his index finger.
Introducing herself, she reminded him that they had already met. He said he recalled the circumstances clearly, and asked what she wanted.
“Is that Wilma Persson?” she said.
“Yes, I was just taking her fingerprints. You have to get everything done as quickly as possible – things change very rapidly when you take a body out of the water.”
“I was just wondering if there was any way of establishing whether she actually died at the place where she was found.”
“What makes you think she might not have done?”
Martinsson appeared to steady herself. He noticed how she pursed her lips, shook her head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts and then looked at him as if begging his indulgence.
“I had a dream about her,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “In the dream she said that she had been moved. That she had died somewhere else.”
Pohjanen looked long and hard at Martinsson without speaking. There was not a sound, apart from his own wheezing and the hum from the air conditioning.
“As far as I’m aware, the cause of death was accidental drowning. Is it your intention to turn the case into something more elaborate?”
“No, er, well…”
“Is there something I ought to know? How the hell am I supposed to do my job if nobody tells me anything? If you say there’s no suspicion of a crime having been committed, that’s the basis on which I will conduct my examination. I don’t want to be told later on that I’ve missed something. Is that clear?”
“I’m not here to…”
“You’re here all the time, but…”
She held up her hands.
“Forget it,” she said. “Pay no attention. I should never have come. I was being silly.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that you often are,” Pohjanen said unkindly.
Turning on her heel, she left the room. His comment hung in the air. Rang through the autopsy lab like a church bell.
“The silly bitch should stop poking her nose in,” Pohjanen said to himself defensively.
But his guilty conscience gnawed away at him. The dead spirits surrounding him were unusually silent.
“They can go to hell, the whole lot of ’em,” he said to himself.
A week passes. Snow crashes down from the trees. Sighs deeply as it collapses into the sunny warmth. Bare patches appear. The southern sides of anthills heat up in the sun. The snow buntings return. Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving Fjällborg finds bear tracks in the forest. The big sleep of winter is over.
“Have they found the boy yet?” Fjällborg asks her.
Martinsson has invited Fjällborg and Bella the dog round for supper. She has served sushi, which Fjällborg is forcing down with a sceptical expression on his face. He pronounces it “sishu”, making it sound like a sneeze. Having settled on the sofabed, Bella is lying on her back, hind legs apart, fast asleep. Her front paws keep twitching.
Martinsson says they have not.
“Piilijärvi,” Fjällborg says. “That’s the last place on earth I’d like to live in. That’s where the Krekula brothers live.
“Krekula Hauliers,” he says when he sees that Martinsson has not understood. “Tore and Hjalmar Krekula. They’re about the same age as my kid brother. A right pair of crooks if ever there was one. Huh. It was their father who set up the haulage business, and he was just as bad when he was in his prime. He must be getting on for ninety now. The elder brother, Hjalmar, is the worst. He’s been done for assault loads of times – there are I don’t know how many other people who are too scared to report him. It was the same when they were kids. That was quite a rumpus, that was. Surely you’ve heard about it? About the Krekula brothers? No? No, come to think of it, it was long before your time. Hjalmar can hardly have been ten, and his little brother must have been about six, maybe seven. They were out in the forest. They were taking the cows to their summer pasture. Not all that far away, in fact. Hjalmar left his kid brother behind. Came back home without him. That started a major kerfuffle – soldiers, mountain rescue, the police. But they didn’t find him. They gave up after a week. Everyone thought he was dead. Then out of the blue the little kid turned up at the front door. It was headline news all over Sweden. Tore was interviewed on the wireless, and all the papers wrote about it. The lad survived. A bloody miracle, there’s no other word for it. That Hjalmar, well, he’s as cold as a dead fish. Always has been. Even in primary school the pair of ’em used to go round collecting debts – real ones and made-up ones, it was all the same to them. One of my cousins, Einar – you’ve never met him, he moved away ages ago, been dead for years. Had a heart attack. Anyway, he was at school with the Krekula brothers. And he and his mates had to pay up. If they didn’t, they’d have Hjalmar on their backs.
“Ah well,” Fjällborg says, scraping the wasabi off the rice, “not everything was better in the old days, I suppose.”