Until Thy Wrath Be Past (12 page)

He points in the opposite direction.

They start arguing. Tore’s opposition makes his older brother certain that following the beck upstream is the best thing to do.

Tore refuses absolutely. Hjalmar calls him a stupid brat, tells him he is being idiotic, that he must do as he is told.

“You don’t tell me what to do,” Tore howls.

He starts blubbing and shouts for his mother. Hjalmar slaps him. Tore punches Hjalmar in the stomach. Soon they are both on the ground. The fight doesn’t last long. Tore doesn’t have a chance. Age wins the day. And Hjalmar Krekula is big.

“I’m going now,” he bellows.

He is sitting on top of his brother. Lets go of his arms, but grabs them again when Tore tries to hit him in the face. The younger boy gives up in the end. He has lost the fight. But not the battle. When he eventually stands up, he marches off resolutely in the direction he had chosen to begin with.

Hjalmar shouts after him.

“Don’t be an idiot. Come with me! Now!”

Tore pretends not to hear. After a while Hjalmar can no longer see him.

At 11.15 that night Hjalmar Krekula comes to the main road to Vittangi. He starts walking along it, and just over an hour later a lorry stops and picks him up. It is one of his father’s lorries, but his father is not driving it. The driver is Johannes Svarvare. In the passenger seat is another villager, Hugo Fors. They pull up 50 metres in front of Hjalmar, and both men open their doors and shout to him. Their soft caps are askew over their sunburnt faces. Shirt sleeves rolled up. Hjalmar feels his chest opening up as joy and relief flood in. He will soon be home.

They laugh as they help him to clamber up into the lorry. He is allowed to sit between them. By Jove, my boy, they say, his mother and father have been worried sick. Since the evening milking, practically everyone in the village has been out shouting and looking for them. Hjalmar wants to reply, but the words stick in his throat.

“Where’s Tore?” they say.

He cannot produce a single word. The men exchange worried looks.

“What’s happened?” Svarvare says. “Out with it, my boy. Where’s your brother?”

Hjalmar turns his head towards the forest.

The men do not know how to interpret that movement. Has his younger brother got stuck in one of the bogs?

“Let’s get you home,” Fors says, placing his hand on Hjalmar’s head. “We can talk about it later.”

His voice is as calm as a lake in the evening, but beneath the surface a shoal of worry glints like a sheet of steel.

They are gathered outside the Krekulas’ house. It is like a Laestadian prayer meeting. Ten grown-ups in a circle round Hjalmar Krekula. The women are whimpering and shouting with emotion – but not too loudly; they do not want to miss a word of what is said. Kerttu Krekula does not whimper. She is white and as frozen as an icicle. Isak Krekula is red and sweaty; he has run all the way home from the forest.

“Right, let’s hear what’s happened to Tore,” he says.

Hjalmar forces the words out.

“He’s still in the forest,” he says.

The grown-ups stand around him. Like black pine trees on a summer night. He is alone in this particular clearing.

“You mean you left him in the forest?”

“He didn’t want to. I told him to come with me. We were lost. He didn’t want to.”

He bursts into tears. One of the women shouts, “Oh, Lord!” in Tornedalen Finnish, and presses her hand over her mouth.

Kerttu Krekula stares at Hjalmar.

“This is the punishment,” she says to her husband, without taking her eyes off her son. “We’ll never find him.”

Then she turns slowly, just as slowly as an icicle would turn if it were alive, and goes into the house.

“Take him away,” Isak Krekula bellows to the crowd. “Someone had better take him home before I do him an injury. You left him in the forest. You left your little brother in the forest.”

Elmina Salmi takes Hjalmar home with her. He turns several times and looks back at his house. His father ought to have given him a good hiding with his belt. That would have been better.

“When will I be able to go home?” he says.

“God knows,” Elmina says. She is very religious. “We must pray that they find poor little Tore.”

My name is Wilma Persson. I’m dead. I don’t really know what that involves yet.

Hjalmar is on his knees outside his house, pressing snow onto his face. He doesn’t want to think about it any more. He doesn’t want to think at all.

Enough now, enough, he says to himself.

I’m looking at Anni. She’s lying in bed asleep, on her side. Her clothes are folded neatly over the back of a chair in the bedroom. She’s sleeping with one hand under her cheek. It’s like a dish for her head to rest in. Her other hand is open, on her chest. She makes me think of a fox. How it snuggles down for the night. Curls up into itself. Uses its tail to keep its body warm.

The policewoman Anna-Maria Mella is lying awake in her bedroom. Her husband has turned away from her and is snoring. She feels lonely and can’t keep herself warm like a fox. She wishes he’d given her that hug now. So that she didn’t need to feel angry and abandoned. Her life has been torn apart today.

I sit down on her side of the bed. Place my hand against her heart.

If you want to go to sleep in his arms, then do it, I tell her.

After a while she wriggles closer to Robert. Lies behind him. Wraps her arms around him. He wakes up sufficiently to turn over and embrace her.

“How do you feel?” he says sleepily.

“Not good,” she says. He caresses her, squeezes her, kisses her forehead. At first she thinks it’s a bloody scandal, having to beg him to do this, having to make all the moves. But she no longer has the strength to be bothered. She relaxes and falls asleep.

SUNDAY, 26 APRIL

On Sunday someone phoned the police station in Kiruna to say that he had information about the two kids who had featured in the late-night news bulletin the day before. He said his name was Göran Sillfors.

“I don’t know if what I have to tell you is all that significant,” he said, “but you said yourselves, ‘Rather a call too many than one too few’, so I thought . . .”

The receptionist put him through to Anna-Maria Mella.

“Absolutely right,” Mella replied when Sillfors repeated what he had already said.

“Anyway, those two kids. They were out in a canoe on the lake at Vittangijärvi last summer. We have a summer cottage up there. I always say that not all young people sit glued to their computers from morning to night. This pair carried and dragged their canoe along the river, paddled over Tahkojärvi and up as far as the lake. That’s a hell of a long way. I don’t know how much they were being paid by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, but it can’t have been all that much.”

“What do you mean, paid by the M.H.I.?”

“They were taking soundings in the lake for the M.H.I. – that’s what they told us when they called in for a chat and a coffee. First-class young people, they were. I didn’t know they’d gone missing – we were abroad when it happened. Our daughter and her partner have bought a hotel in Thailand, so we went out there for a three-week holiday. Obviously we had to muck in – you know how it is: when anything needs doing, Father’s the only one who knows how.”

“They called in for a chat and a coffee . . . What was it they said?”

“Not much.”

No, Mella thought. No doubt you did most of the talking.

Sillfors continued.

“They were taking some kind of measurements for the M.H.I. What did you say?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No, not you, I was responding to my wife. She says they were taking depth soundings in the lake. I recognized them the moment I saw them on the telly. The girl looked a bit dangerous with those little daggers stuck through her eyebrows. Huh! I asked her if she was into that what-do-you-call-it – you know, when you hang yourself from a rope with hooks you stick into your skin. Christ Almighty, I saw a programme on the telly about these characters with piercings all over their bodies, hanging themselves up on a washing line. But no, she said she only had the things in her eyebrows and ears.”

“Can you remember what they said about the lake? Were they thinking of going diving there, for instance?”

“No. They asked if I fished there.”

“And you said?”

“That I did.”

“Anything else?”

“No, nothing else.”

“Think hard, now. If you were drinking coffee, you must have had time to chat about all kinds of things.”

“I suppose so. We spoke a bit about fishing. I said there was a particular place where the fish always seem to bite. I thought maybe they were interested in fishing themselves. We usually joke about that spot in the middle of the lake and reckon there must be a meteorite or an especially big rock there. Somewhere the fish can hide, because that’s always where they bite the most. But the kids weren’t going fishing. Hang on a minute, my wife is trying to say something.”

He doesn’t hear what I’m saying, Mella thought. That’s because I’m not saying anything. He’s doing all the talking.

“You what?” Sillfors shouted to his wife. “Why should she be interested in that? Talk to her yourself if you must.”

“What’s all that about?” Mella said.

“Huh, she’s going on about the door to our shed. How someone pinched it last winter.”

Mella’s heart skipped a beat. She recalled the flakes of green paint Pohjanen had found under Wilma Persson’s fingernails.

“What colour was the door?” she said.

“Black,” Göran Sillfors said.

Mella’s hopes collapsed. It had been too good to be true. She heard Sillfors’ wife saying something in the background.

“Ah yes. You’re right,” he said. “It was black on the outside – that was the side I painted a couple of years ago. You know how weather and especially wind ruins paintwork. I had a bit of black paint left over from when I helped our neighbour to paint our fences. There wasn’t much, but I thought I might as well give the outside a coat at least.”

“Go on,” Mella said, concealing her impatience with difficulty.

“The inside was green. Why do you want to know?”

Mella gasped. This was it. Bloody hell, this was it!

“Stay where you are,” she yelled into the telephone. “Where do you live? I’m on my way.”

Göran Sillfors and his wife Berit took Mella to their cottage at Vittangijärvi. It was a brown-painted timber house with white window frames. The porch was unusually wide with a little roof supported by carved wooden columns. Göran drove the snow scooter with Mella in the sledge.

“Shall we go in?” Berit said when they arrived.

Mella shook her head.

“Where’s the shed door?” she said.

“There isn’t a door,” Göran said. “That’s the problem.”

The snow on the shed roof had melted and then frozen again. An enormous cake of ice hung ominously from the edge.

Mella took off her woolly hat and unzipped her scooter overalls. She was much too hot.

“You know what I mean,” she said with a jolly smile. “Show me where the door was. At the back?”

The opening, at the gable end, had been boarded over.

“I’ll sort out a new door in time for the spring,” Göran said. “We’re not here in the winter, so this is a bit amateurish.”

Mella examined the door frame. No sign of green paint, or of black paint, come to that.

“Could you remove the boards, please?” she said. “Just so I can go inside and take a quick look round.”

“Might one ask what you’re looking for?”

“Obviously I’m hoping there’s a bit of green paint left on the inside of the door frame. So that we can take some samples.”

“No, there won’t be any. It must be, let’s see, fifteen years ago that I painted it green. I unscrewed the hinges and laid it down on trestles. So there won’t be any paint on the frame.”

Göran Sillfors’ expression changed from pride at having done the painting so carefully to worry when he saw how disappointed Mella was.

“But do you know what?” he said. “One of the doors inside the cottage was painted with the same stuff. From the same tin. I painted it the same day, if I remember rightly. Will that do?”

Mella’s face lit up, and she threw her arms round a somewhat surprised Göran Sillfors.

“Will it do?” she shouted in delight. “You bet your life it will!”

“Shall we go inside after all, then?” Berit Sillfors said. “It would be good if I could check the mousetraps while we’re here.”

Scraping a bit of paint from the green door between the cottage’s vestibule and large hall, Mella put the flakes carefully in an envelope.

“Scrape as much as you like,” Göran said generously. “It needs repainting anyway.”

Berit Sillfors emptied the mousetraps in the upstairs wardrobes and beneath the sink. When she had finished she showed the result to Mella and her husband: five frozen mice in a red plastic bucket.

“I’ll just go and dispose of them,” she said.

“I’m finished,” Mella said.

She looked out through the hall window. The whole lake still seemed to be covered with ice. With a lot of snow on top of it.

What if they made a hole in the ice and went diving through it? Mella asked herself. And then someone laid the door over the hole so that they would drown? That might be what had happened. But why move her body? And where is his? Is the door still out there on the ice, hidden beneath the snow?

“Can I go out on the ice and have a look?” she said.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Göran said. “It’s slushy and unreliable.”

“Is there anybody who spends time out here in winter?” Mella said. “Who owns the other house? I’m just wondering if there might be someone who could have seen something or met Wilma and Simon.”

“No, there’s never anyone in the house next to ours,” Berit said sadly. “The man who owns it is too ill and too old, and his nephews and nieces have shown no interest in it at all. But there’s Hjörleifur . . .”

“That’s enough!” Göran said. “You can’t send her to Hjörleifur.”

“But she was asking.”

“Leave Hjörleifur out of this! He can’t cope with the authorities.”