The Black Path (28 page)

Anna-Maria Mella refrained from commenting acidly that the police hadn’t even been called to the scene, since a doctor, one of Pohjanen’s professional colleagues, had chosen to ignore the proper procedures and written “heart attack” on the death certificate and allowed the undertaker to collect the body. But it was more important to keep Pohjanen in a good mood than to make that particular point.

She muttered something that could be interpreted as an apology, and allowed Pohjanen to carry on.

“Okay,” he continued in a pleasanter tone of voice. “It’s a good job he was buried in the winter, because the soft tissue hasn’t deteriorated. Although of course it’s happening quickly, now he’s thawed out.”

“Mmm,” replied Anna-Maria, taking a bite of her sandwich.

“I can understand the assumption that it was suicide; the external injuries are consistent with the victim having hanged himself. There’s the mark of a ligature around the neck…and he’d been taken down by the time the local doctor saw him, hadn’t he?”

“Yes, his wife cut him down. She wanted to avoid the gossip. Örjan Bylund was a well-known person in Kiruna. He’d worked on the newspaper for thirty years.”

“In that case it would be difficult to see if the injuries are consistent with the actual…hrrr…hrrr…method of hanging…hrrr…”

Pohjanen broke off and cleared his throat.

Anna-Maria held the receiver away from her ear while he got it over with. She didn’t mind talking about corpses while she was eating, but listening to that made her lose her appetite. He could talk about the police not following the rules! He was a doctor, and he smoked like a chimney.

Pohjanen went on:

“I became a little suspicious as soon as I started a superficial examination of the body. There were a number of small bleeds in the conjunctiva of the eyes. Nothing much, just like tiny pinpricks. And then there are the internal injuries, bleeds at different levels, around the throat and in the musculature.”

“Yes?”

“Well, if this is a hanging, you would normally expect the bleeding to be beneath and around the ligature mark, wouldn’t you?”

“Okay.”

“But these bleeds are too big and too scattered. Besides which there’s considerable damage to the hyoid cartilage and the tongue bone.”

Pohjanen sounded as if he’d finished and was about to hang up.

“Just a minute,” said Anna-Maria. “What conclusions would you draw from all this?”

“That he was strangled, of course. You wouldn’t expect these internal injuries to the throat from a hanging. I’d guess at strangulation. By hand. He’d been drinking too. A great deal. So I’d check out the wife if I were you. They sometimes take the opportunity when the old man’s had a bit too much.”

“It wasn’t his wife,” said Anna-Maria. “It’s bigger than that. Much, much bigger.”

M
auri Kallis saw Ester come jogging across the yard. She nodded briefly to Ulrika and Ebba, then carried on down toward the little woods that lay between the old and the new jetties. She liked to run along that route, following a little path leading down to the old jetty, where Mauri’s forestry manager kept his motorboat.

It was remarkable, this obsession with exercise that seemed to have replaced her painting. She read about proteins and building up muscles, lifted her weights and went running.

And it seemed as if she closed her eyes when she ran. It was like a challenge. Trying to run without bumping into the trees. Allowing her feet to find the path, even though she couldn’t see.

He remembered a dinner party they’d had not so long ago. Ebba’s cousins from Skåne, Inna, Diddi and his wife and the little prince. Ester had just moved into the attic, and Inna had persuaded her to eat with them. Ester had tried to get out of it.

“I’ve got to exercise,” she’d said, staring at the floor.

“If you don’t eat, it won’t matter how much exercise you do,” Inna had said. “Go for a run, then come in and eat when you’re
ready. You can go when you’ve finished eating. Nobody will notice if you slip away a little bit early.”

In the middle of dinner, with the white linen tablecloth and the candelabra and the silver cutlery, Ester came down to the table. Her hair was wet and there were grazes all over her face; she was bleeding in two places.

Ebba had introduced her. White and concerned beneath her smile and words like “art school” and “acclaimed exhibition at the Lars Zanton Gallery.”

Inna had found it difficult not to laugh.

Ester had eaten, focused and silent, with blood on her face, taking huge mouthfuls and leaving her serviette untouched beside her plate.

When they went out for a smoke on the veranda after the meal, Diddi said:

“I’ve seen her running down through the glade on the way to the old jetty with a blindfold over her eyes. That’s when she gets…”

He made a clawlike gesture toward his face, indicating scratches and scrapes.

“Why does she do that?” one of Ebba’s cousins had asked.

“Because she’s crazy?” Diddi suggested.

“Exactly!” Inna agreed happily. “You must see that we have to get her to start painting again.”

Ester cut across the lawn and almost ran over the top of Ulrika and Ebba and that black horse. Once she would have seen his slender little head, the line of him, his big beautiful eyes. Lines and lines. The sway of his back when Ebba practiced his dressage turns in the paddock. The curves of his whole body: the throat, the hollow of his back, the legs, the hooves. And Ebba’s line: straight back, straight neck, straight nose, the reins tight and straight in her hands.

But nowadays Ester didn’t bother about any of that. Instead she was looking at the horse’s muscles.

She nodded in the direction of Ulrika and Ebba, thinking she was an Arabian horse.

Light is my burden, she thought as she headed for the little woods between the estate and Lake Mälaren. She was beginning to know the path. Soon she would be able to run the whole way blindfolded, without bumping into a single tree.

It was the dogs that first realized Mother was ill. She was hiding it from Ester and Antte and Father.

I didn’t understand anything, thought Ester as she ran with her eyes closed through the dense wood toward the Regla estate’s old jetty. It’s strange. Often, time and space do not constitute impenetrable walls, but are like glass; I can see straight through. You can know things about people. Big things, small things. But when it came to her, I saw nothing. I was so preoccupied with my painting. So happy that I could finally paint in oils that I didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand why she was suddenly allowing me to hold the brush.

She ran faster. Sometimes branches scratched her face. It didn’t matter, it was almost a relief.

“Right, then,” says Mother. “You’ve always wanted to paint in oils—would you like to learn now?”

She lets me stretch the canvas. I exert myself so much when I’m stretching it from corner to corner that I get a headache. Desperate for it to be right. I pull and fold and staple. My father has made the frame. He doesn’t want my mother to buy cheap frames made from poorly dried wood that will warp.

My mother doesn’t say anything, and I know that means I’ve stretched the canvas perfectly. She saves money by buying cheap canvas, but it has to be prepared using tempera. I’m allowed to do this. Then she draws guidelines using charcoal, and I’m allowed to stand beside her and watch. I think excitedly that when I’m allowed to paint all by myself, my own pictures, I won’t draw one single line with charcoal. I’ll just use the brush straightaway. In my head I’m forming shapes using burnt umber or Venetian red.

My mother gives instructions, and I paint in the large areas of color. The snow in dazzling white and cadmium yellow. The shadow of the mountain in cerulean blue. And the rock face, tending toward a dark violet.

It’s difficult for my mother not to be holding the brush herself. Several times she snatches it out of my hand.

“Big brushstrokes, stop hesitating like that, shaking like a leaf. More color, don’t be such a coward. More yellow, more yellow. Don’t hold the brush like that, it’s not a pen.”

At first I resist. She knows what will happen, after all. When the colors are as harsh and unsettling as she wants them to be, the pictures are difficult to sell. It’s happened before. My father looks at the finished painting in the evening, and says: “That won’t do.” And then she’s had to change it. The contrasts have been made less disturbing. On one occasion I tried to console her by saying:

“The real picture is there underneath, though. We’ve seen it.”

My mother carried on patiently painting, with the brush pressed hard against the canvas.

“It doesn’t help,” she said. “They’re idiots, the lot of them.”

She became more and more impatient, thought Ester, running between the trees. I didn’t understand. Only the dogs understood.

Mother has made a thick meat soup. She places the big pan on the kitchen table to cool down. Later she will pour the soup into separate containers and freeze it. While it’s cooling, she settles down in the studio to work on her ceramic birds.

A noise from the kitchen makes her wipe the clay from her fingers and go up there. Musta is standing on the table. She’s knocked the lid off the pan and is fishing for bones in the soup. She burns her nose on the hot soup, but can’t stop herself from trying again. Burns herself and barks angrily, as if the soup were burning her on purpose and needed to be told off.

“What on earth,” says Mother, making a movement toward Musta to shoo her off the table or perhaps give her a smack.

Like lightning Musta goes for her. Snaps at my mother’s hand, her lips drawn back over her teeth. A low, threatening growl comes from deep in her throat.

My mother pulls back her hand in shock. No dog has ever dared do anything like that to her. She picks up the sweeping brush from the corner and tries to drive Musta off the table.

Then Musta really goes for her. The soup is hers, and nobody’s going to take it away from her.

My mother backs out of the kitchen. Just at that moment I get home from school, go up the stairs and almost bump into my mother on the landing. She turns around, her face white, her red, bitten hand clenched against her breast. Through the door behind her I can see Musta on the kitchen table. Like a little black demon, teeth bared, hackles up. Ears flattened. I stare at the dog, and then at my mother. What the hell has happened?

“Ring your father and tell him to come home,” says my mother hoarsely.

My father arrives in the Volvo a quarter of an hour later. He doesn’t say much. Fetches his shotgun and throws it in the trunk. Then he fetches Musta. She doesn’t have time to jump down from the table when she sees him, whimpers with pain and submissiveness as he grabs her by the scruff of the neck and the tail, carries her to the car and throws her in. She lies down on top of the gun case.

The car means outdoor work and fun, she doesn’t understand what’s going to happen. That’s the last we see of her. My father comes home that evening without the dog, and we don’t mention it.

Musta was a born leader. I’m sure my father was sorry to lose such an excellent worker and companion, out there in the mountains. She could set off across the mountain after a straying reindeer and return with it after two hours.

She could see what was happening to my mother. That she was growing weaker. Naturally Musta tried to take my mother’s place as leader.

That afternoon my mother sat in the kitchen by herself. Snapped at me, so I kept out of the way. I understood that she was ashamed. Ashamed because she’d been afraid of the dog. Because of her fear and weakness, Musta was dead.

Sven-Erik Stålnacke went round to see Airi Bylund on his lunch break. He’d offered to do it, and Anna-Maria had been relieved that she didn’t have to go. Sitting at Airi’s kitchen table, he explained that her husband hadn’t killed himself, but had been murdered.

Airi Bylund’s hands kept moving, unsure of what to do with themselves. She smoothed out a crease that wasn’t there from the tablecloth.

“So he didn’t kill himself,” she said, after a long silence.

Sven-Erik Stålnacke unzipped his jacket. It was warm. She’d been baking. There was no sign of the cat or her kittens.

“No,” he said.

A muscle near the corner of Airi Bylund’s mouth was twitching. She got up quickly and put some coffee on.

“I thought about it so often,” she said, with her back to Sven-Erik. “Wondered why. I mean, he did have a tendency to brood about things, but just to leave me like that…without a word. And the boys. They’re grown up, of course, but still…Just to leave us all.”

She arranged pastries on a plate and put it on the table.

“I was angry too. God, I’ve been so angry with him.”

“He didn’t do it,” said Sven-Erik, looking into her eyes.

She gazed back at him. And in her eyes was all the anger, sorrow and pain of the past months. A clenched fist raised toward heaven, an impotent despair beneath an unanswered question, the search for her own guilt.

She had beautiful eyes, he thought. A black sun with blue rays against a gray sky. Beautiful eyes and a beautiful ass.

Then she began to cry. Still gazing at Sven-Erik as the tears poured down her cheeks.

Sven-Erik got up and put his arms around her. Placed one hand behind her head, feeling her soft hair. The mother cat came strolling in from the bedroom, closely followed by her kittens, who began winding themselves around Sven-Erik and Airi’s feet.

“Oh God,” said Airi at last, sniffling and wiping under her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “The coffee will be going cold.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Sven-Erik, rocking her gently. “We’ll heat it up in the microwave later.”

Anna-Maria Mella walked into Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot’s office at quarter past two.