The Second Deadly Sin (24 page)

It’s like having a bear in your house, Mella thought.

“Let’s begin at the beginning,” Stålnacke said. “Would you like to tell us all about it? About you and Sol-Britt? How did your relationship begin?”

Häggroth looked down at his hands.

“It was last spring. I’d had a row with Jenny. I suppose I was drunk. Not all that much, but still … I went round to Sol-Britt’s house. Not that I really know her. We say hello if we meet somewhere. But I couldn’t go to anybody we know, there’d be so much gossip. I couldn’t take the car as I was over the limit. I just went out for a walk. I didn’t know where to go. And I was cold, I hadn’t taken a jacket with me. Then I found myself outside her house. It was pure chance.”

He looked up at Stålnacke.

“I didn’t kill her.”

Oh damn, Mella thought.

“Let’s take one thing at a time,” Stålnacke said. “What happened next?”

“We just talked. Nothing more. I suppose I tried to get off with her – she had a reputation after all.”

“What kind of a reputation?”

“That she would go to bed with more or less anybody. Folk … They talk such a lot of crap.”

He exhaled, then breathed in greedily, as if his lungs were not getting what they needed.

“Ouch,” he said, placing his hand over his jaw.

“And then?” Stålnacke said.

“Then? Not … oh hell … The next time I screwed her. And then we carried on like that occasionally. That’s all there was to it. I didn’t kill her. I don’t … I don’t know who did it.”

He panted like a bull elk. Held his hand to his chin. His face had turned deathly white.

“Ouch,” he whimpered again. “Bloody hell.”

Mella and von Post exchanged glances. Stålnacke looked hard at Häggroth.

“How do you feel?”

“Not good. Damnation!”

His hand slid over his neck and landed on his chest. He leaned forward.

“Try and breathe calmly, my friend,” Stålnacke said. “Where does it hurt?”

“In my face, here.” He stroked his cheeks and nose. “Oh shit, shit, shit!”

He put his other hand on the table, as if to support himself.

Then he fell off the chair. Landed flat on his face.

Mella and von Post jumped to their feet.

“What the hell did you do?” von Post yelled to Stålnacke.

Häggroth was sweating like a pig and was already soaking wet.

“Call an ambulance,” said von Post. “He mustn’t die, for God’s sake! An ambulance! Without delay. He’s going to be arrested, dammit!”

Von Post rushed down the hospital corridor. He was furious. He ought to have taken charge of the interrogation himself. He knew that he should have been the one. He must stop listening to other people. Take control over that confounded police station.

He glanced over his shoulder at Mella, who was half-jogging behind him. He opened the double doors, walked through them then let go so that they smashed into her.

The dwarf unit, he thought, glancing back again. Special measures against goblins and trolls.

“Who killed her and wrote ‘whore’ on her wall?” he bawled, pressing the lift button over and over again, as if that would hurry it up. “Her boyfriend, or lover! Lesson one in the murdering of women. She dumped him! Häggroth was raving. Drank until his brain was like a lump of mouse shit. Then he took the hayfork and did her in. Staggered back to his pathetic farmhouse, slung the fork under the barn and went to bed. That’s exactly what happened. All too predictable. That’s how it always happens, for Christ’s sake.”

They stepped out of the lift. God, how he hated hospitals. A handrail ran all the way along one of the corridor walls. Occasional chairs outside the closed doors. An empty hospital bed on wheels. Some sort of so-called art hanging on the walls, slightly higher than the plaques with instructions to follow if the place needed to be evacuated. A green, highly polished plastic floor, reflecting the fluorescent tube lights.

They came to the locked door of the intensive care unit, and he kept his finger pressed on the bell button, demanding to be let in.

She’s scared stiff now, he thought as he looked at Mella. There’s a lump in that wobbly baby-belly of hers.

Häggroth was your archetypal femicidal maniac. Although the way he actually killed her was rather novel. A touch of the mad professor there, Jocke. Instead of bashing her against the nearest wall, or hitting her with a hammer, or cutting her up with a kitchen knife.

Nervous devils. Not to mention Stålnacke. He’d been on the point of tears when the ambulance arrived to fetch Häggroth.

And he had good reason to cry. Uncle Walrus would be well and truly in the shit if Häggroth died on them. Mella as well!

Von Post kept his finger on the bell button, swaying back and forth. Thank God he was in no way responsible for this catastrophe.

Out of respect for their long experience he had remained a passive observer. He hadn’t said a bloody word!

It was just as well that he hadn’t conducted the interrogation himself.

But what if Häggroth died without confessing? The investigation would be written off. And the whole pack of bloody hyenas would set about the police. Their interrogation methods would be questioned. The circumstances of his arrest would be splashed all over the papers.

He was surrounded by idiots. And they were always plotting against him. They couldn’t even keep that Häggroth woman under control. How the hell could they allow her to vandalise his car and then run off into the woods? How the hell was that possible?

*

The duty doctor refused to allow the police access to her patient.

She positioned herself like a Russian border guard outside the
closed door of his private ward. She ran her hand over her closecropped dark hair and pushed up her aviator-style spectacles, which had slid down to the tip of her nose. Then she explained that Jocke Häggroth was conscious, but had probably suffered a heart attack. She used words like “morphine” and “low pulse rate” and “oxygen” and “beta-blockers”, and concluded by saying that under no circumstances must the patient be exposed to stress.

A dyke, decided von Post in annoyance. So there was no point in putting on a smile and addressing her in a manly voice.

But a competent young lady as well, he thought when the doctor explained that yes, she heard what von Post was saying. The patient was suspected of the brutal murder of a woman. And yes, of course she was horrified by that: but she had no intention of risking her patient’s life. They could continue with the interrogation when the patient’s condition had stabilised. When would that be? Hard to say.

She stood there, the case notes under her arm. She didn’t even come up to von Post’s chin. The
A.& E. DOCTOR
on her identity disc shone into von Post’s eyes like a searchlight.

“I want to speak to your superior,” von Post said.

But that did him no good. The senior doctor was based in Luleå, and said on the telephone that he had no reason to doubt his colleague’s assessment of the patient’s critical condition.

He had no alternative but to return to the police station. How the hell could you do a decent job when everybody was conspiring against you on all sides?

*

Life became no kinder to von Post when he got back to the station. The inspector from Umeå who was supposed to be a specialist in interrogating children had spent the day wasting taxpayers’ money.

She was in plain clothes. A large woman wearing layer upon layer of linen clothing, with thick grey hair gathered in a bun. Round her
neck was a leather strap with a large ornament made of silver and wood, which von Post assumed was supposed to bring out the goddess in her.

Von Post eyed her up and down, and had the feeling that he also needed a dose of oxygen and beta-blockers and morphine.

Only the best studied law. And only the best of the best became prosecutors and judges. But evidently any old riff-raff could become a police officer.

“So he didn’t say anything?” he asked.

“He doesn’t remember anything,” she said. “My guess is that he really has seen or heard something horrific. There is a gap in his story which suggests this. Why did he wake up? How did he get to the hut in the forest? Why did he climb out through the window?”

“I know all about the gaps,” von Post said steadily. “That’s why we brought you here. Surely it must be possible to find out what that memory is. By hypnosis or some such method, I don’t know. Isn’t that your job? We’ve flown you here. What the hell are we getting for our money?”

“My job is to talk to the boy. I’ve done that. But he doesn’t say anything about the night of the murder. He can’t. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. He shall certainly not be hypnotised.”

“So when can we interrogate him?”

“You can interrogate him as much as you like. But if you want to get out of him what he’s seen, you must make him feel secure. That police officer who’s been looking after him, Krister Eriksson. The boy is evidently living with him and pretending that he’s a dog. Eriksson told me he would be able to carry on looking after him for a while. That’s excellent. The boy has nobody else he can turn to, as I understand it. The more secure he feels, the better the odds that he will tell us something. And it’s not usual for everything to come out at once. It tends to come out a bit at a time. And it doesn’t come when we expect it to – very seldom when we’re talking about
the incident; when mostly he’s busy with something quite different.”

“Brilliant,” said von Post. “We’ve paid all that money to be advised that we have to wait. Marvellous! Wonderful! It would be fantastic if only somebody, some time, would do the job they get paid for.”

The inspector opened her mouth, but closed it again. She took out her mobile and looked at it.

“I must go to the airport now,” she said, looking out at the falling snow. “We’d better leave plenty of time. Inspector Mella’s going to drive me there.”

Von Post made no reply. Why should he?

Give me a normal person who understands what people are saying, he thought.

*

“That prosecutor,” the colleague from Umeå said to Mella while they were driving out to the airport. “He wasn’t a very nice man.”

“Hänen ej ole ko pistää takaisin ja nussia uuesti,” said Mella sternly.

“I don’t understand Finnish – what does that mean?”

“Er, well … That he’s not a nice man. God, but it’s really snowing hard now. We’ll have to see if it settles.”

The windscreen wipers swung back and forth. The headlights were reflected in all the flakes. It was like a white wall ahead of her, hard to see anything at all.

It’s snowing. It’s 14 April, 1915, and the snowflakes are fluttering down from a grey winter sky. Hjalmar Lundbohm has some very special visitors. Artist Carl Larsson’s wife has travelled up with Anders Zorn and his wife, the architect Ferdinand Boberg along with fru Boberg, the sculptor Christian Eriksson and the illustrator Ossian Elgström.

Larsson himself has never been to Kiruna, but his wife Karin comes up occasionally with various artist and author friends. Trips to Kiruna are always such jollies.

Lundbohm has arranged some reindeer-racing for his guests. They are all wearing Laplander hats and riding on Lapp sledges. The weather could have been better: Lundbohm would have preferred some brilliant winter sun shining down on a delightfully snow-covered Kiruna, but not even he can control the weather.

Even so, the event is very successful. The reindeer race pell-mell along Bromsgatan, and the guests cheer and urge on their horned steeds.

Johan Tuuri and other Lapps join in the fun and run alongside at times, to keep the animals on the right course.

The winner is Karin Larsson. She laughs until she cries, the photographer Borg Mesch immortalises the moment as she stands there looking delightful, her Lappish hat askew and with a young Lappish boy standing proudly by her side. The reindeer belongs to
his family and he has been skiing alongside it all the way, shouting encouragement.

Anders Zorn has fallen out of his sledge and wins the improvised prize for Snowman of the Day.

Everyone is so hot that they are boiling over, exhilarated and noisy. They chase one another and push each other off the troddendown pathways – as soon as anybody leaves the path they sink down into the snow up to their waists. On the way back they try to engage in a snowball fight, but the temperature is below freezing and the snow is too powdery to make into snowballs. Instead they throw loose snow at each other until they are all completely white from top to toe.

Yes indeed, Lundbohm has every reason to be pleased when they get back to his residence for hot punch, a change of clothes and lunch.

Even so there is something gnawing away inside him. What irks him is the knowledge that he can join in and play one day, but not the next.

For instance, the Zorns held a masked ball last New Year’s Eve, and he was not on the guest list. And when they throw parties out at the island of Bullerö in the summer, he is never invited.

He sees Karin Larsson laughing away, arm in arm with Emma Zorn, and the thought strikes him that if only he were married to a woman like that, sociable, artistic, happy and pretty and from a superior family … And just as he is gazing at Karin and thinking along those lines, they bump into Elina and Lizzie.

He feels rather ashamed when he sees Elina. It is partly her appearance, but also because his conscience is troubled: he hasn’t been in touch with her. He has had so much to do. Because of the war he has travelled to the U.S.A. and Canada, and also to the Krupp works in Germany. It takes a special sort of person to deal with all these mixed loyalties. He has made sure that when ships take iron ore
to the U.S.A., they bring back with them salted American pork for the workers in Kiruna. He has held his own with the Swedish government when they tried to confiscate the meat for feeding the Swedish military. He has not been able to spend much time with Elina. They meet when he is at home in Kiruna, but not so often. A few evenings, a few nights: but what he has longed for above all else is sleep.

*

Lizzie and Elina have been out in the forest, collecting firewood. They have to make the most of the opportunity now, before it gets warmer and the snow on the winter paths becomes soft and treacherous to travel on.