The Second Deadly Sin (34 page)

Lindmark thought for a moment, then said frankly, “I don’t know why you are asking all these questions, because I didn’t know him all that well. But he did have a girlfriend here in the village. He was handsome, it has to be said. Tall, and he still had lovely curly hair. She lives only three houses away. Over there. A brick-built house. There is only one. Her name is Anna Jaako. Would you like to borrow an umbrella? We’re in for some wet snow, not much more than sleet. But I shouldn’t complain – it means I won’t have to dig out all the old men and women on my list. It’s not part of the job, but you have to do it even so, of course. Good Lord, last winter they’d never have got out at all if me and my old man hadn’t cleared the snow away for them. It snowed practically every day.”

*

I am out of my mind, Martinsson thought as she walked over to Anna Jaako’s house. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

Anna Jaako was at home, and invited Martinsson in for coffee.
She accepted, and drank it as slowly as she possibly could in order to make sure that Anna didn’t offer to top it up.

She was pretty. Looked like an elderly ballerina. Her hair was glistening white, tied up in a trendy ponytail.

“I don’t think he was mauled by a bear,” said Martinsson, who had made up her mind to throw caution to the wind.

They were only going to have a chat after all, so she might as well say what she thought, and hope to get some frank comments in return.

“I think he was shot, and that the bear ate him later.”

Jaako turned a little pale.

“I’m sorry,” Martinsson said.

Jaako gestured dismissively with her hand.

“No problem. I’m not as fragile as I look. But who would want to shoot him?”

“It could have been a mistake,” Martinsson said feebly. “A hunter, for instance. Who didn’t even see him.”

“Isn’t that rather unlikely?”

Very unlikely indeed, Martinsson thought. Especially in view of the fact that he was shot in his leg and his chest.

“I don’t really know what I’m fishing for, to be honest,” Martinsson said. “Could anybody have had a reason for wanting to kill him? Did anything special happen shortly before he disappeared?”

“No,” Jaako said. “Not as far as I can recall. And he didn’t have any money. But he could dance. We used to dance here in the kitchen.”

The memory of that seemed to inspire her.

“If you remember anything, please give me a ring,” said Martinsson, writing her telephone number down on the back of a receipt she happened to have in her handbag.

Anna Jaako looked at the receipt and read the number out aloud.

“I don’t suppose it’s important,” she said, as if arguing with herself. “It was several years ago.”

“What was?” Martinsson asked.

“The only thing I can think of. As I said, it was three years ago,” Jaako said. “I remember that because I was just about to celebrate my seventy-fifth birthday. Anyway, he was Hjalmar Lundbohm’s illegitimate son – perhaps you didn’t know that.”

“Yes, I do know,” Martinsson said.

“His mother – although she wasn’t his real mother, but the one he grew up with – was Lundbohm’s housekeeper. And she was so angry with Lundbohm. And so he sort of grew up with the conviction that Lundbohm was a prat. Or really did, in fact, not sort of. She didn’t tell him about his real parents until his foster father had died, and by then Frans was more than twenty. Anyway. Three years ago he found some old documents in a box with ancient photographs and school reports. There was a letter from Lundbohm in which he wrote that he had left some shares to his son Frans Uusitalo. He had been given his stepfather’s name. And Frans joked with me and said that we could now book a cruise, because we were going to be rich. Wealthy. That’s the word he used. Wealthy.”

“Really?”

“But I suppose nothing came of it, because he never mentioned it again. I think his daughter looked into it, and established that the shares were worth nothing. But it was nice to be able to look at them. Nowadays shares only exist in computers.”

“Three years ago, you said?”

“Yes.”

And Sol-Britt’s son was run over three years ago, Martinsson thought.

“I’m sorry,” Jaako said, wiping her eyes that were suddenly filled with tears. “But I miss him so very much. If anybody had told me
when I was your age that I would meet the love of my life when I was over seventy, I would have killed myself laughing.”

She looked hard at Martinsson.

“You have to make the most of love when you find it, you know. Before you know where you are, you’ve experienced it for the last time. And everything else is meaningless.”

You have to keep working so as not to go out of your mind. Lizzie has cleaned the flat several times, scrubbed the floor and the ceiling in the kitchen, washed and ironed the thin linen curtains and painted the cupboard doors in the kitchen blue.

“Are you mad?” her neighbours ask. “Washing the curtains in the middle of winter! Haven’t you got enough to do with all the mining clothes?”

She has decided to make real potato dumplings. She has cut up the pork and the bacon rind, added cornflour and grated potatoes and shaped the result into grey balls. She drops the balls into the big cauldron of boiling water, and the whole kitchen fills with steam. It’s like a sauna in there.

She hears a noise behind her, and for a fraction of a second she thinks it is Elina.

When she turns round she sees that it is in fact Manager-in-Chief Fasth.

His eyes are like the points of knives in his red, fat face. He peers quickly into the living room to make sure that he and Lizzie are alone in the flat.

“Fröööken,” he says.

His voice is rough. She feels frozen to the bone by the sound of it. As when she has been rinsing washed clothes in winter and can’t stop shivering, despite making a roaring fire in the stove during the evening.

“My fiancé is due at any moment,” says Lizzie.

She regrets that straight away. The words sound so pitiful. She can’t resist glancing at the kitchen knife.

He snorts scornfully.

“I don’t give a fuck about all your boyfriends. Just listen to me. Tongues are wagging in Kiruna. About that whore Elina Pettersson and me. And the owner of the tongue that is wagging the most is Busy Lizzie Anderson.”

“Yes, you have threatened your maids so that—”

“The next time you interrupt me I shall punch you in the face. That’s the whore’s baby, isn’t it?”

He nods at the basket in the corner where Frans is lying asleep.

“If you utter so much as a word to the superintendent of police, or the managing director when he comes back from his travels, or to any other living person, I shall take that baby away from you. I shall tell the Child Welfare Committee about the dissolute life you lead – living here alone with four men, right? Plus an extra fiancé. Before there were two of you to share them all, but now you have to satisfy them yourself.”

He pauses and gives Lizzie such a contemptuous look that she feels bound to cross her arms over her chest.

“Who do you think they will listen to, you or me? I’ll take over the boy as a foster child. He’ll get a regular good hiding, I can promise you that. Every day. Only the cane and the belt can overcome the inheritance left him by his loose-living mother. Now you may answer. Is that what you want? Answer me, I said.”

Lizzie leans against the edge of the cooker. All she can do is to shake her head.

“Right,” he says. “Not a word shall pass your lips. And you can pack your things together and move out of Kiruna. I’ll give you a month, no more. And I warn you, I’m not the patient type.”

Now she is incapable of standing up any longer. She sinks down onto the stool standing by the cooker.

Fasth leans over her and whispers into her ear.

“She enjoyed it, that schoolteacher. She begged and pleaded with me to continue. I was forced to strangle her to shut her up.”

Then he disappears down the stairs.

The cauldron with the dumplings boils over, but Lizzie is incapable of moving it aside. She can’t even stand up. When Johan-Albin arrives shortly afterwards to eat, she is still sitting there on the stool, Frans is crying in his basket, and the potato dumplings are burnt and stuck to the bottom of the cauldron. Water is running down the windowpanes.

Martinsson rummaged around among Sol-Britt’s belongings. She had phoned Björnfot to check that the warrant for searching the house was still valid.

“I don’t want that added to the list of accusations when von Post drags me up before the neuropathological crowd,” she had said.

“If he tries anything like that, I’ll make sure he spends the rest of his working life dealing with unpaid parking fines,” Björnfot had growled.

What a lot of stuff people accumulate during their lifetime. Martinsson could feel the dust irritating her nostrils. Photographs, letters, copies of income tax returns, insurance documents, invoices, special mail-order offers from ten years ago, and God only knows what else.

When she found a letter from Sol-Britt’s boss concerning her drinking habits, Martinsson was overcome by moral considerations and was forced to pause and go out with the Brat.

“But what I’m doing doesn’t hurt anybody,” she said to the dog, who was scampering around in the wet snow and leaving lonely-hearts messages on every tree trunk. “I’m just poking my nose around. More or less like you.”

Her mobile buzzed in her pocket. It was Eriksson.

“Hi,” he said, and his voice sounded so mellow that she couldn’t help but smile. “I was wondering if you could take Vera. I’m
going to have words with the parents of some hooligans who have been bullying Marcus. I rang Maja and she said they were going to borrow a friend’s cottage at Rautasälven, and that Marcus could go with them and do some fishing. So that fits in very nicely. It will be fun for him. They’re only going to be there for the day.”

“You can leave Vera at my place,” Martinsson said. “I’ll be home soon. Then I can go and fetch Marcus as well. The key is under the flowerpot in the porch.”

Eriksson sighed audibly at the other end of the line.

“Under the flowerpot. . . Why bother to lock the door at all if you leave the key under a flowerpot? It would be the first place anybody would look. Either there or under the shoes that for some inexplicable reason are standing out in the cold.”

“I know, I know,” said Martinsson. “But isn’t it great? When Grandma was alive the tradition was that nobody ever locked the door. And if you went out you left a broom outside the gate so that any visitors hoping for a cup of coffee wouldn’t need to walk all the way from the road to the house in vain. It was obvious that there was nobody at home.”

“O.K., I’ll let the dog in and leave the broom outside the gate,” Eriksson said with a laugh, and hung up.

Martinsson went back inside and continued searching through Sol-Britt’s belongings. She eventually found what she was looking for. A large brown envelope containing three documents marked
SHARE CERTIFICATE
. And a letter in old-fashioned handwriting, somewhat shaky.

An old man, she thought, her heart pounding.

“Dear Lizzie,” the letter began.

But she decided to postpone reading it, and in any case, the handwriting was not easy to interpret. Instead she telephoned Måns. He answered almost immediately, and sounded so happy. Her
bad conscience gnawed at her, but she didn’t have time for lovey-dovey talk.

“You know all there is to know about company law and shares and bonds,” she said. “I need your help.”

Lizzie wakes up during the night and speaks to God. It makes no difference how hard she works. She simply can’t sleep. She tells her Good Lord that she can’t cope. She lies there, staring up at the dark ceiling, so full of hatred. All she can manage to do is pray. She can’t think of many words, just:
Help me, God, please help me
.

She tries to banish from her mind’s eye the image of Elina’s blonde head. Of Elina and Fasth. Of Elina’s blood-soaked blouse the verger had given her when she went with clean clothes to the church where Elina was lying in a remembrance room before the funeral.

Help me, God, she begs. I want to kill him. Why should he be allowed to live? It’s not right.

She is scared as well, all the time. She wants to leave Kiruna this very moment, for who knows what Fasth will do next? He might suddenly take Frans away from her. Johan-Albin promises that they will move away, but first they must find work in another town.

She thinks about what she will do if Fasth so much as looks at the boy: she will smash his fat skull with the poker, hit him again and again … How she wishes she had poured the boiling water and potato dumplings all over him.

Help me, she prays again. Help me. Dear, sweet Jesus.

Stålnacke, Eriksson and Marcus got out of the car when the dirt road petered out. In the middle of the forest. They could hear the sound of the River Rautas in the distance.

“Rebecka and Vera will soon come to collect you,” Eriksson said to Marcus. “And I shan’t be away all that long.”

“But I want to go with you,” Marcus said, grabbing hold of the sleeve of Eriksson’s jacket.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Eriksson promised.

The snow was still lying on the path through the trees, trampled down. It was like walking along a narrow street covered in ice. Water was dripping from the trees. On the ground at either side of the path there were only occasional patches of snow left. They tried to tread on stones and clumps of lingon stalks sticking up through the ice, so as not to slip and fall.

But it was looking a bit brighter now, Eriksson thought, although he didn’t dare to take his eyes off the path for more than a few seconds. The clouds had lifted and were thinning out.

A wooden staircase led down to a bog, and the path over the bog was a sort of bridge made of wooden planks.

But it was almost impossible to make progress. The steps were extremely slippery, and the wooden bridge over the bog was covered in a layer of ice, turning it into a skating rink.

“Talk about style and grace,” Stålnacke mumbled. “I’m walking as if I’ve just shat myself. This is a death trap.”