The Second Deadly Sin (26 page)

He tells them about his parents, who were poverty-stricken crofters outside Överkalix.

“And my dad was good with animals. He knew all about herbs that could cure illnesses in cattle. In people as well, but they didn’t
talk about that. How to stop bleeding. That sort of thing. And he was good when mothers were giving birth, brilliant at getting them out – calves, foals, babies. ‘Oops! Look out there, give me a hand, Heikki – we’ll lift her over this little lake. When are they going to dig proper drainage channels here? It’s the same every spring when the snow melts …’ Anyway, sometimes he wasn’t able to get them out in one piece. When the calves were too big, or lying in an impossible position. That was always a hellish job, breaking up the unborn calf inside its mother without injuring her, then getting it out. But it had to be done. If a family lost its cow, they were ruined. That was the only time he ever drank heavily, after an incident like that …”

He shakes his head.

“People used to give him a bottle of schnapps as thanks for his efforts. He would find his way to an isolated hayloft and drink until he passed out. Didn’t come back home until he’d sobered up.”

Heikki comments in Finnish: “Voi helvetti.”

“But what about managers and other bosses?” Elina says. She knows the answer already, but wants to help him to continue his tale.

“They had an assistant bailiff supervising all the crofters in the area. He was a German, and keen on Lappish girls.”

“I’m sure you know,” Heikki says to Elina, “Karl XII had a lot of German mercenaries in his army. After the war they couldn’t return home – they had been fighting against their own countrymen after all – so they settled in Sweden and did what they were good at.”

“They became executioners,” Johan-Albin says, “and bailiffs. And their sons became executioners and bailiffs. And their sons … Anyway, all those eleven-and twelve-year-olds … They were only Lapps, so he could have his way with them. But when they became pregnant, their bodies weren’t ready to produce children. And so my dad was called in. He was unable to save two girls. They died in childbirth. And then, after the second death …”

They are back at Elina’s and Lizzie’s home now. Elina invites them in. They will have to cook for the lodgers anyway, so it will be easy to accommodate a couple of extra guests. That is the least she can do.

Lizzie comes home shortly after them. She has a bucket of fish with her. It will be boiled burbot for dinner.

They tell her what happened to Elina. She listens while cutting the heads off the burbot, then skins them and guts them as if it is Manager-in-Chief Fasth lying there on the chopping board.

Then Johan-Albin continues his story.

“When the second girl died, Dad had had enough. He grabbed hold of that bailiff one spring evening and castrated him as one castrates a horse. Beat him unconscious first. Then nailed him to the stable door through his clothes. Split open his scrotum, turned it inside out and snipped off his balls.”

He clenches his fists and has to pause for a few moments. Lizzie stands there with her hands soiled by the fish she has been cutting up, but looking as if she is about to hug him.

“The bailiff survived. But my dad was condemned to five years in prison. After two years he died of consumption. Mum couldn’t take care of us children on her own – there were five of us. I was six years old. We were all put up for sale at a paupers’ auction. I was bought by a Finnish charcoal-burner. But I could only take that for a year, then I ran away. I joined up with the navvies building the railway. I started as a so-called nail boy for teams of navvies. My job was to run back and forth with buckets full of nails and spikes that had buckled, take them to the smithy where they were hammered out straight, then take them back to where the action was. I’ve never been to school or anything like that. And now I’ve ended up here. As I said, I’ve no time for bailiffs and managers and types like that.”

The atmosphere is hardly uplifting as they eat their dinner.
Poverty is lurking around in the forests surrounding the mining town of Kiruna. Ready to swallow up any woman who loses an arm, a husband, or her virtue.

Virtue. Elina feels the food swelling inside her mouth, but she says nothing. Neither to the others nor to herself.

Von Post was going out of his mind.

“I’m going out of my mind!” he yelled at Sonja on the switchboard.

And when he pressed Sonja a little he discovered that as well as collecting a shirt that had been worn by Sol-Britt Uusitalo’s father when he was mauled by a bear, Martinsson had also asked Sonja to produce records of the hit-and-run incident that robbed Sol-Britt’s son of his life.

“Fucking hell!” he shouted as he hurtled up the stairs to Martinsson’s office where Björnfot was writing judgments one after another after the day’s proceedings.

“That woman,” he said in a voice shaking with emotion, “that Rebecka Martinsson! She’s interfering in my investigation.”

Björnfot slid his glasses down to the bridge of his nose and looked at von Post. Then he slid them up onto his forehead again and continued writing while von Post gave a long and rather loud summary of what had happened.

“This is a matter for the personnel section of the Prosecutor-General’s Office,” von Post claimed. “She must be moved away from here.”

“But if I understand you rightly,” Björnfot said calmly, “it’s not your investigation that she is getting involved in. She is looking into two accidents – the fact that those involved are related to your murder victim …”

“This is not O.K.,” von Post snarled. “You can’t defend her, and you know that full well. The Prosecutor-General should …”

Björnfot flung out his arms in an I-give-up gesture.

“I’ll have a word with her,” he said.

Von Post was incapable of speech. He was so furious that his mind was a complete blank.

But one thing was certain. He would talk to Martinsson himself. He had a lot to say to her.

*

Martinsson and Pohjanen had donned thin rubber gloves and were playing jigsaw puzzles with the shredded shirt. They succeeded in fitting most of it together, but half a sleeve was missing, and part of the back.

“What claws that bear must have had,” Pohjanen said with admiration in his voice as he examined the edges of the various pieces of cloth. “It’s as if somebody had cut it up with a pair of sharp scissors.”

He lifted up part of the front of the shirt and held it towards the light. It was stained brown with mud and blood, but in the middle of it was an obvious hole.

“What do you think this is?” he asked.

Martinsson examined the hole.

“I don’t know,” she said, but her heart missed a beat. “What do you think?”

“Well,” said Pohjanen slowly, “I think it’s a bullet hole. That’s what I think. And I think we should send it to the National Forensic Science Laboratory and ask them to test it for traces of metal and gunpowder.”

“So the bear didn’t kill him,” Martinsson said. “It ate him, but it didn’t kill him.”

Pohjanen gave her a look that she could not really fathom.

“You and your dreams,” he said in the end.

Then he shook his head.

“I’m …”

“As drunk as a lord,” Martinsson said. “I reckon we should have a sauna – what do you think?”

*

It was Martinsson’s grandfather, together with his brothers, who had constructed the wooden sauna on the riverbank. It was painted in traditional Falun red, had an entrance porch with wooden benches for two on either side, then a little changing room with an open fire, followed by a washroom with buckets, ladles and a washbasin – and then the inner sanctum: the sauna itself, heated by firewood of course, and with a window overlooking the river.

Both Pohjanen and Martinsson had grown up in environments where it was the done thing from time immemorial for men and women to sit naked together in the sauna without the slightest feeling of embarrassment. Bodies were exposed irrespective of their imperfections, their signs of ageing or of multiple births – one had no need to feel ashamed of anything in the sauna. The plumpness of youth in the right places, skin like flower petals – no-one gave such things a second glance.

Martinsson carried in buckets of water and lit the fires while Pohjanen purred with delight, drank beer and warmed up his rickety body in front of the open fire.

Then they entered the sauna itself. Martinsson was better able to cope with the heat, and sat on the highest bench. Sweat trickled down into their eyes, the water sizzled away on the hot stones, the steam rose up to the ceiling.

They spoke about all the things people always discuss in the sauna. That they ought really to have had birch twigs to beat themselves with – but that was not really possible at this time of year because there were no leaves on the trees. That this was the only way
to become really clean – who the hell would want to splash around in water tainted by the filth of their own bodies in a bathtub? They talked about smoke saunas, and old relatives who could tolerate the heat of a real sauna; about their childhood sauna experiences, and how electric-fired saunas were an invention of the devil.

They scratched their skin and contemplated the grey deposits under their nails. They bowed their heads and groaned in a mixture of delight and pain when Martinsson poured more water onto the burning hot stones and the first of the hot steam hit their skins. Martinsson blew onto her hand, and as always was astonished by how hot that spot became in the area blown onto.

Martinsson went out twice into the darkness and snow and immersed herself in the wintry river. Pohjanen desisted, but declared his willingness to bathe in a hole bored through the ice if he was invited to a Christmas sauna later in the year. The Brat, who had been basking in front of the open fire in the changing room, followed Martinsson out, barking excitedly at her, and after failing to catch falling snowflakes eventually jumped into the water after her.

“What’s the matter with dogs?” wondered Pohjanen with a laugh when Rebecka came back into the warm sauna with the Brat at her heels. “Why do they always have to shake the water off themselves when they’re standing next to a human being?”

Eventually they felt they had had enough of the sauna, and made their way back to the house.

Martinsson contemplated Pohjanen’s emaciated back.

I really do hope you’ll come here for a Christmas dip, she thought. Please do live that long.

As Pohjanen took hold of the door handle, von Post turned in to the drive.

He got out of the car dressed only in his shirtsleeves. Pointed at Martinsson and yelled, “Damn you, Martinsson! Damn and blast you!”

Martinsson didn’t say a word. She lowered her hands and let her arms hang loosely. The snow gathered to form a cap on her damp hair. Pohjanen walked up the steps to the porch, but the balcony overhead was an inadequate shelter.

“Do you think I don’t know exactly what you are doing?” von Post bawled. “You know that we’ve arrested the murderer, but if we can’t get the necessary forensic proof it will be a case based on circumstantial evidence. And now you are trying to cock it all up for me by inventing alternative motives …”

“I’m not inventing—”

“Shut your mouth! If there’s the slightest suspicion that somebody is intent on murdering the whole family – her son, her father – you know full well that it will be impossible to nail Jocke Häggroth. You are trying to find alternative motives, alternative suspicions, purely in order to stop me from solving this case. You’re prepared to let a murderer go free for no other reason than to do me down. It’s scandalous. You’re sick, damn you.”

He raised his index finger again.

Pohjanen took an unsteady pace forward.

“Calm down, young man. Come in and have a drink, and you can hear what we’ve discovered. It’s no secret.”

Both Martinsson and von Post looked at Pohjanen as if he had just announced an arranged marriage, or that they should all sing “We Shall Overcome”.

“You’re out of your minds!” von Post snarled. “You think you can bugger me about, Martinsson, but you’ll soon find out how wrong you are. I know the man in charge of personnel at the Prosecutor-General’s office, and I shall tell him that you are a security risk for the investigation. A danger to yourself. Everybody knows you spent time in a psychiatric hospital. And now you’re falling to pieces in this sensitive situation. I worry that you will abuse the means of compulsion that we have at our disposal. So the personnel unit will make
sure that you undergo neuropathological tests in connection with your abnormal behaviour. I can assure you that it is a very degrading business. A sort of inquisition. And then you will be moved to a new post where you will be unable to cause any harm. A job in the legal department of the police – dealing with such matters as objections to parking tickets, or the granting of permission for officers to carry weapons.”

He paused. Breathing heavily. Panting, as if he had been running up a hill.

The Brat ran up to him, wagging his tail, and dropped a pine cone in front of his feet. This was the Brat’s role on such occasions: to defuse tension. To produce a cone from somewhere and suggest the playing of a game. A harmless little clown.

Von Post stared at the cone with a mixture of revulsion and incomprehension. Then he waved his hand at the Brat, as if to shoo him away. The dog picked up the cone and moved it a little closer to von Post. Looked up at him, ears cocked, as if to say:
Aren’t I irresistible?
Pohjanen produced a strange, hoarse sound. Only if you knew him well could you know that it was a laugh.

“You’re bloody stark, staring mad,” von Post said. “The lot of you!”

He got back into his car without brushing off the snow, and drove away.

“What a prat!” Pohjanen chuckled as von Post’s car disappeared from view.

He held out his hand and allowed the Brat to drop the cone onto it. Then threw it a couple of metres away.

“The man’s a bloody psychopath. I pity the poor old man in the street if it’s bastards like him leading the fight against crime.”

Martinsson was watching the Brat fetching the pine cone.