Stallo (65 page)

Mona sat with her hands clasped, also looking out of the window. There was not much else they could do. On the wall behind her was a long row of red streaks, probably marks from the back of the armchair. Down on the floor, with its speckled surface, was an alarm button.

‘I’ve got to go to the toilet,’ she said, standing up.

She opened the tall narrow door and shut and locked it behind her.

Magnus sat for a while staring at the police officer’s black shoes
before turning his eyes to the window again. Far in the distance a huge crane towered above the rooftops, and on the white window-frame surrounding the bars someone had etched some words in spidery letters. There were names and messages scrawled all over the prison. The mirror in the toilet in Magnus’s cell was made of polished steel riveted to the wall and there was hardly a patch free of graffiti.

‘Excuse me, but could you leave us a minute?’

She had come out of the toilet and was standing with her back to him. Magnus looked at the police officer, who naturally shook his head.

But she did not give up.

‘It would be very kind of you,’ she said.

‘There are restrictions,’ the officer said tersely.

‘Just for a little while.’

‘It isn’t allowed.’

‘I’m sure you can make an exception.’

The police officer had been standing all the time with his arms tightly crossed over his chest, but when Mona took a short step towards him he let them fall.

‘If you want …’ he said in a mouth that had turned dry. ‘If you want to go out …’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who should go out. You’ve got to make an exception and go outside.’

He looked at his watch, a digital one with steel links.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But only for a short while.’

There was a beeping sound as he pressed the button on the intercom.

‘You can open it yourself,’ he said, and when the door was unlocked he went outside.

Magnus watched his mother as she returned to the armchair. She sat down again and immediately pulled one arm inside her tunic top, so the sleeve hung empty. She looked up at the ceiling.

‘There’s got to be a camera in here, hasn’t there?’ she said.

He shook his head.

In her hand, which she struggled to get out of her tunic, she held a little object with a grey strip of fur on its forehead, and Magnus saw immediately that it was the birch mouse that had been with him and Signe in the tunnel when Hybblet was burning. He could not for the life of him understand how it had come to be here, in his mother’s hand. It must have shown in his face because she began instantly to explain.

‘Amina gave it to me. Or Signe.’

‘Signe?’ he said. ‘You’ve met Signe?’

She nodded without looking up from the little animal.

‘She’s with her parents in Växjö. I went down to talk to her. She said you were to have it so it could help you get out. Like it did last time you were locked in.’

‘But I haven’t done anything,’ he said. ‘I didn’t murder them.’

‘I know that, Magnus. But there will be a trial anyway, and I presume you can’t explain exactly what happened. This Lennart Brösth isn’t likely to say much, is he? And you have admitted you were there when the boy was taken.’

‘It wasn’t me, it was Börje.’

‘But you were with him, weren’t you?’

He nodded and looked down at his slippers.

‘Well, it can’t hurt, can it, having him in the court with you?’

He continued nodding.

‘No.’

He lifted his eyes and looked at the little object lying completely
still in Mona’s cupped hands. Its eyes were closed and it looked as if it was trying to sleep. The long fluffy tail lay coiled around its huddled body.

‘Take him,’ she said, and Magnus held out his hands.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘How did you manage to bring him in here?’

She sat up straight and held back a smile.

From his closed fingers it looked as if Lars Nilsson wondered whether he had the right to touch the squirrel’s tail. Trembling, he moved them closer to the bushy tail, but no further. Susso had said he could pat him, but the old man refused. He did not feel brave enough. When she had told him there was another face concealed behind the fur he had looked scared. She might just as well have said that the squirrel would bite.

How could there be another …

Susso picked a snus pouch from the tin and held it to her lips.

‘He’s stallo,’ she explained. ‘That means he can shapeshift.’

After saying this she inserted the snus, and when her tongue had pushed it under her upper lip she added:

‘It’s the best hiding place in the world.’

Towards the end of February we decided to arrange a presentation. We advertised in
Kuriren
and
Norrländskan
and the Kiruna free ads, and there wasn’t an empty seat in the Nåjden hall. There was not enough room for everyone, even though the hall holds almost four hundred.

Of course, people came because they wanted to hear about the Vaikijaur man and Mattias Mickelsson’s miraculous reappearance. I had asked her how much she was actually going to tell – surely nothing about the squirrel or the bears, or what had happened to Jola Haapaniemi? – but she hadn’t actually said, so I assumed she would be speaking about her website and the photo Dad took.

Cecilia introduced the presentation. I thought she ought to let me or Susso do it because she was still unbalanced. She had been off sick for over a month, and Tommy and I had been helping her look after Ella. It was as if Cecilia looked right through her. But she insisted on holding the microphone. It all went wrong, of course. She repeated herself and lost her thread and then started telling everyone about how Dad had forgotten her on a beach once when she was a little girl and how they had flown to an inland lake in the fells to go fishing. Over and over she scratched her scalp hard – it was a kind of nervous tic – and I more or less had to lead her off the stage so that we could start the presentation.

Afterwards Susso got up on stage and took the microphone.

She explained about her website and how she had taken the photo of the Vaikijaur man. She put in a joke here and there and that made people laugh, but otherwise they sat in absolute silence. We would never really know who the Vaikijaur man was, she predicted. However, the police had confirmed he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Mattias Mickelsson. In conclusion she said she now knew there was no such thing as trolls and that she had decided to close down her website.

I was gobsmacked, while Roland took out his snus and sat there with it in his hand. I looked at Torbjörn, who was standing to the side of the stage, but his expression didn’t change, so I expect he had known exactly what she was going to say.

Someone asked what had made her stop believing in trolls, since it said on the website that she had believed in them all her life.

She could not answer that question. She was embarrassed and jangled her earrings and said it was simply that she didn’t believe any more, and when the questioner insisted she asked him if he believed in trolls himself. That shut him up.

*

There was a bit of a rush in the shop after that. There always is after a presentation, that’s why we have them. Susso and I were at the counter and Roland helped too, although mostly by yapping with the customers. Torbjörn was also there, standing with Susso’s backpack over one shoulder. He was a little pale and I asked him how he was feeling, but all he did was look at me.

Edit Mickelsson and her son Per-Erik had watched the presentation, looking deadly serious in their seats at the end of the front row, but Carina and Mattias had not been with them. They all came to the shop, though. Edit was wearing a small fur hat and came up to the counter to shake hands, but the others stayed
by the shop door, content to say hello from a distance. Susso crouched down to look into the boy’s eyes. She held out her hand and tugged gently at his jacket as she spoke to him. He smiled and nodded, with the tip of his little nose tucked into his collar. Before they left, Mattias’s mother gave Susso a tight hug and I noticed tears in her eyes.

As it started to empty out at around four-thirty Susso and Torbjörn went home, and I was just about to switch off the till when a girl came into the shop pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair. I had noticed them before the slideshow because they stood out from everyone else. The lady in the wheelchair had large dark glasses like a film star and was wearing a fur-trimmed poncho in an expensive-looking fabric. Cashmere, I thought. The girl pushing the wheelchair was about fifteen and looked foreign. Her hair was short and raven black and she said nothing.

I said hello and the woman in the wheelchair replied, asking very graciously if we were about to close. Not at all, I assured her. She thanked me for the presentation, praised Dad’s outstanding photographs, especially the ones from Lofoten, where she came from. She asked if I was his child, and when I nodded she asked if I was his only child. No, I said, I also have a sister. And I told her how we had moved with Mum from Riksgränsen to Kiruna when we were children and that Dad had stayed up there on his own.

‘You must have longed for him very much,’ the woman said.

‘Dreadfully.’

‘Isn’t it remarkable how very strong our love for our parents is, despite all their faults?’

I agreed. It was an infinite love. Unconditional.

‘As a child you are prepared to do
anything
for them.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Anything at all.’

‘You forgive them everything.’

‘Everything.’

The woman sighed and turned her face to the ceiling. The spotlights were reflected in her glasses. It looked like she had white pupils in a pair of black eyes.

‘That must be the worst thing that could happen to a child,’ she said. ‘Losing its mother or father.’

‘No child should have to go through that,’ I said.

‘Just as no parent should have to lose a child.’

‘No, that’s awful,’ I said. ‘I’ve come close to that, so I know.’

‘Which is why we have to look
after
them,’ she said, looking at me. ‘Make sure they don’t come to any harm. We have to
watch over
them. Like a
binne
, a she-bear!’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘It is our responsibility. Our duty.’

‘Our duty,’ she repeated, nodding in agreement.

Then she pulled off her glove and extended her right hand, which was thin and a little crooked, so I held it gently. As I shook it she looked at me and said once again: ‘Our duty.’

Then she withdrew her hand, remarkably slowly.

That was when I felt the claw, lightly scratching my palm, and when I looked down I saw that two of her fingers were hairy and deformed.

Slowly she pulled on her glove, nodded at me and smiled, and then the girl wheeled her out of the shop. I stood there speechless, with my hand still outstretched. Roland pushed his glasses onto his forehead and asked what was wrong.

‘Didn’t you see?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you see her hand?’

He had not seen it. So I described how her little finger and index finger were covered in tufts of fur, how instead of nails she had claws!

He didn’t believe me, I could see that. But we had spent a long time talking about what had happened and how the troll on Färingsö had turned into a bear, and Roland had even met the squirrel, which Susso had agreed to extremely unwillingly, so he dared not say anything.

I slumped down on the stool at the end of the counter. I could still feel the touch of her soft fur and hard claw in my hand. It felt as if she had taken my hand away from me. Or as if it was no longer my hand.

‘But that was definitely a threat,’ he said. ‘She threatened Susso. In that case we’ve got to phone the police. It was a death threat. I’m a witness.’

‘But don’t you understand, Roland? They’re the same creatures John Bauer was dealing with. The stallo. They’re not human. The police can’t do a thing.’

‘That was an eccentric woman, I’ll give you that, but no way is she a troll. The police
can
arrest her. For threatening behaviour. That’s a prison offence.’

‘It wasn’t even a threat …’

‘It was a veiled threat, no doubt about it.’

I was shaken and tired so we said no more. We got a Thai takeaway and walked home in silence. Was it going to begin again, I wondered? And here was me thinking it was all over. On the way up I rang Susso’s bell. I had to press the button several times and even knock before she shouted for me to come in. The venetian blinds were closed and the TV was on. She was sitting on her bed in her knickers and a T-shirt. Her hair was unwashed and she was wearing her glasses. I looked at her briefly before my eyes were led to the ceiling. I knew where the squirrel usually sat, and just as I thought, there it was on the curtain rail, looking down at
me watchfully. Despite everything it had done for us I had really started to dislike it, but that was not something I could say out loud or even really
think
about in its presence, so I tried looking in another direction.