The Second Deadly Sin (12 page)

She clings onto Elina’s arm.

“And I’m delighted to share with you. I could see that the moment I met you!”

*

The place is called B12 – short for building number twelve. It’s a so-called tin box. It’s almost impossible to see that the walls are green, as they are covered by ice and snow. The tin roof is red, Lizzie informs Elina.

“Just wait and see how it gleams in the summer, thanks to the midnight sun! It’s so beautiful here!”

Their flat comprises a large kitchen and a living room upstairs. No furniture. A simple wooden floor.

“A stove!” exclaims Lizzie. “A real iron stove with an oven!”

She inspects the Husqvarna stove. The hotplates seem to be in working order, as is the ash door. And there are two special baking plates.

Lizzie turns to look at Elina with a broad smile.

“We can bake every morning. And sell stuff to the labourers who work in the mine or at the ironworks during the week. If you and I sleep down here in the kitchen, we can rent out the living room – there’s enough space there to sleep four people. During the day we can stand their mattresses on end and make sufficient room for a drop-leaf table with two chairs. So you can read and work there, or have sessions with your pupils. I mean, the tenants won’t come back home until eight or nine o’clock at night. Maybe a bit earlier if they have their dinner here – that would give us a bit of extra income. But if we only give them bed and breakfast, we would earn eight kronor a week from them. And then we’d earn a bit more from selling bread as well.”

Having heard all this talk about bread and breakfast and dinner, Elina has to sit down – she’s so hungry. She flops down onto the firewood bin. It dawns on Lizzie the state she’s in.

“What an idiot I am!” she exclaims, taking hold of Elina’s head with both hands and kissing her on the forehead. “I ought to have realised.”

She instructs Elina not to move from the spot – she’ll be back directly.

While Lizzie is away, Elina feels her body filling up with happiness. It is as if the early spring sunshine is flowing through her veins, a stream of gold. She has acquired a friend, she can feel it. A cheerful, irrepressible, lovely friend. Who has hurried away because Elina “must get something solid in her belly”!

Elina looks around. That’s where the kitchen sofa must stand, the wooden bench that converts into a double bed. There must be rugs on the floor, and the walls need painting – white, obviously. Everything must be simple but tasteful, just as Ellen Key recommends. And there must be geraniums on the window ledges in the summer, of course.

She recalls all the lonely evenings and Sundays she has endured over the last three years. Never again.

Lizzie comes back, accompanied by a young girl who works as a housemaid. They are laden with cleaning equipment: aprons, buckets, scouring cloths, soft soap, a big cauldron for heating up water, and brushes. She has some sandwiches for Elina, and a piece of dried, salted reindeer meat. She takes a knife and cuts the almost black meat into thin slices.

“It tastes a bit different if you’re not used to it, but it warms the cockles of your heart. Try a bit. You’ve only got your posh travelling clothes, but I thought I could give this place a thorough clean …”

Elina bursts out laughing. Does Lizzie think she is so posh that she doesn’t know how to do the cleaning? Her clothes can be washed,
after all. If Lizzie would be so good as to hand over an apron, she will soon see what her new friend is capable of!

Lizzie laughs as well, and says that she has not yet come across anybody who is better than she is at cleaning. The housemaids can look after Lundbohm this evening. She has produced a steak from the larder and no guests are expected, so she and Elina can brush and scrub away until midnight, no problem.

Then they start cleaning. There is only the kitchen and a living room, and with some help from the housemaid it is all done in no time. They go out into the garden and fill the cauldron with snow, then heat it up on the stove. They use a mop to clean the ceiling, dust the walls and doors, and get down on their knees to scrub the floor. The neighbour from the flat downstairs comes up to inform them politely that it has started raining in the room down below, so could they please take it easy with all the water. They go over everything again with lots of cloths and a modicum of clean water, then polish the window panes with newspaper. Steam is gushing forth from the floors and the cauldron – the little flat resembles a sauna. They open all the windows wide, and the fresh air mixes with the smell of soft soap. All the time they are singing at the top of their voices: hymns and folk songs about mothers who murder their children, unhappy love, and poverty-stricken children who die of an endless stream of afflictions.

In the afternoon two removal men arrive with Lizzie’s furniture: a kitchen sofa bed exactly as Elina had envisaged it, with mattresses, covers and pillows; a small drop-leaf table, two Windsor-style chairs, a commode, a washbasin and a water jug. A large pile of rugs and tablecloths. Two chests full of goodness only knows what.

Lizzie and Elina sit down on the firewood bin, each of them with a traditional wooden mug of hot coffee. Every muscle in their bodies is aching after all that carrying and scrubbing. Their skin is covered in a thin layer of salty, evaporated sweat.

But they both know exactly how to spruce themselves up and flirt with the removal men: they toss their heads, stroke their hair to one side, offer them coffee and cakes – and hey presto! The men produce a wide plank of wood and various pieces of timber with which they construct a couple of trestles that the plank can rest on to make a bench for the lodgers to sit on in the kitchen when they have their breakfast; and it all fits neatly under the kitchen sofa when they are not being used.

As the removal men walk down the stairs, they meet the young sleigh driver and a friend who are carrying up Elina’s luggage.

The chest is so big and heavy that it’s almost impossible to manoeuvre it up the stairs – the young boys nearly let it slip and end up underneath it. The removal men give them a hand.

“What on earth have you got in there?” Lizzie wonders.

Everybody looks at Elina.

“You didn’t need to bring a chest full of iron ore,” says one of the removal men. “We’ve got plenty of that here already.”

“It’s books.”

Lizzie’s eyes bulge like those of a squirrel.

“Books? My God! Where the devil will we put them?”

“I thought we could have a bookcase.”

Lizzie stares at Elina as if she has just suggested that they should keep tigers and elephants in the flat. A bookcase! Only the gentry have anything like that.

The removal men roar with laughter, and promise that they will soon be back with appropriate bits of wood and nails – but in return Lizzie must offer them a meal: they have heard about her reputation as a cook. She nods without smiling, unable to avert her eyes from the chest.

Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot looked at the display on his mobile. Martinsson. He cursed to himself. He ought to have phoned her. He was tempted not to answer the call, but he was not that much of a coward.

“Hello Rebecka,” he said. “Damn and blast—”

“Had you intended to ring me?” she said, interrupting him.

“Yes,” he said, taking a deep breath. “But the day simply flew past – you know how it is.”

Don’t ask her to forgive you, he told himself.

“Go on, then,” she said in a calm voice. “That’ll be best, as I really don’t know what to say.”

“Well,” he said. “Von Post came to me and … er, he offered to take over responsibility for the preliminary investigation. She lived in Kurravaara after all, and you live there as well and so … No doubt you can see the problem.”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Rebecka. Surely everybody in the village knows everybody else? Sooner or later there was bound to be a hell of a difficult situation.”

“But my living there doesn’t stop me from taking on other crimes in Kurravaara, does it? Breaking the snow scooter speed limit, thefts of boat engines, burglaries …”

“But this murder is getting one thousand per cent media coverage.
They’ll have us for breakfast if we put a foot wrong. You know that.”

Silence.

“Hello?” he said at last.

“It’s best if I don’t say anything,” she said.

She sounded upset. He wished she had sounded angry.

“What ought I to have done?” he asked.

“Maybe you should have trusted me. Relied on my handing over to somebody else if that kind of problem arose. Just as in any other case. Instead of taking the coward’s way out because the media are in full cry. It was my murder. And you simply gave it away without even phoning me.”

He ran his hand over his face and tried to muffle the sound of his frustrated sigh, which sounded to him like the trumpeting of a blue whale.

Why had he not telephoned her? he asked himself. She was far and away the best prosecutor at his disposal. He was the one who had begged her to come and work for him. He ransacked the innermost depths of his conscience.

Von Post had come to see him. “It’s my turn now,” he’d said. Then he had raised the possible problem of people in Kurravaara being interrogated by somebody who lived in the same village. It had seemed reasonable at the time. Then he admitted in all humility that a tax evasion scam he had been helping Björnfot with was beyond his capabilities. He suggested it was something that Rebecka could take on instead. “Something for her to get her teeth into,” von Post had said. “Nobody knows more about tax laws than she does.”

And so Björnfot had said yes. But why had it not occurred to him to phone her at once? Because somewhere deep down inside himself he knew he had done the wrong thing. He had chosen to avoid conflict with von Post. He had given the dog a bone. Taken it for granted that it was no big deal as far as Martinsson was concerned.

Thought that she might have fun sorting out that tax scam. Van Post was so bloody dissatisfied all the time. He had thought that … Well, he hadn’t really thought at all.

“Anyway, that’s the way it is now,” he said.

He sounded grumpy. He could hear that himself, and tried to change course.

“Anyway, I have a tax scam in Luleå that I need somebody competent to get involved in. Would you like to take it on?”

He regretted it the moment the words had passed his lips.

“You must be joking,” Martinsson said slowly. “Don’t you even have the sense to be ashamed of what you’ve done? No, I am not prepared to pick up the crumbs from a rich man’s table. But I
am
owed seven weeks’ holiday. I’m going on leave as from now. You or von Post can take over the criminal case I’m supposed to be dealing with in court tomorrow, and all the rest of the stuff that’s lying on my desk.”

“You can’t just—”

“Don’t you dare say no,” she growled. “Or I’ll resign.”

He became angry.

“Don’t be childish,” he exclaimed.

“I’m not being childish,” she barked. “I’m grown up and pissed off. And so damned disappointed in you. You coward. Whoever would have thought you’d end up sucking von Post’s cock?”

He gasped for breath. He seemed to have a steel band clamped around his chest.

“What the … That’s more than enough … I’m hanging up,” he roared back. “You can ring me when you’ve calmed down.”

He slammed his mobile down onto his desk. Stood there for a few moments looking at it. Hoping that she would ring him back. Then he would tell her that she should pull her socks up.

“You’d better pull your damned socks up!” he yelled at the mobile, pointing menacingly at it.

He sat down and started rummaging through his papers. He couldn’t remember for the life of him what he’d been doing before the call came.

Who did she think she was? How did she dare?

His administrative assistant came in and asked about the following week’s court timetable. It took them half an hour to run through it, by which time his anger had ebbed away. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down on the edge of his desk.

He almost wished that he was angry again. The calm after the storm revealed a mirror in which he could see his own reflection. He was not happy with what he saw.

He should not have handed the case over to von Post. He hadn’t been thinking straight. He had simply said: “O.K., take over.” And now he found himself in a right pickle. But what was done could not be undone. He did not want her to be angry with him.

“It was wrong,” he said out loud to himself.

He pinched his nose and breathed out through his mouth.

And there is no need to start thinking in terms of damned gender roles.

At ten o’clock on the evening of her first day in Kiruna, Hjalmar Lundbohm comes to visit her.

“I saw that the lights were still on,” he says by way of explanation. Lizzie curtseys and invites him in.

She and Elina have just washed themselves with the last of the water in the cauldron. Earlier, Lizzie roasted a pork joint American style with a divine onion sauce for the removal men who returned to build the bookcase. So much has happened that Elina feels giddy and bewildered: it seems to be at least a week since she got off the train feeling embarrassed after Lundbohm had marched off with no more than a curt goodbye.

Now she wishes she had put on a rather more elegant blouse, but it had never occurred to her that he might come to visit them.

Lundbohm has come for a specific purpose, of course. He wants Lizzie to have the guest list for dinner the next evening. Lizzie looks surprised. He tends to give her advance notice only when a largescale gathering has been organised, and not always even then. She curtseys again, and gives Elina a knowing look.

“I expect that fröken Pettersson is used to having a flat of her own,” Lundbohm says. “But we’re short of space in Kiruna, so it’s usual to share.”

For God’s sake don’t make me have to live on my own again, Elina says to herself, but what she actually says is, “I’ve no doubt the
arrangement will work very well. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Lundbohm would love some coffee, if there is nothing stronger on offer.