Until Thy Wrath Be Past (16 page)

Hjörleifur clears his throat

“They were asking about a couple of kids who disappeared. If they’d been to the lake. If I’d seen them.”

“Well, did you? What did you tell them?”

Hjörleifur doesn’t answer. Remains kneeling by the rucksacks.

It’s only now that Tore notices them. Two top-class rucksacks made from posh nylon material. Not the kind of thing Hjörleifur would normally have. He uses army surplus and home-made stuff he nails together or sews by hand from animal skins he’s tanned himself.

“So you found the rucksacks by the lake,” Tore says, feasting his eyes on them. “That’s right, isn’t it, you thieving bastard?”

“I didn’t think about it,” Hjörleifur says. “There was nobody who . . .”

That’s as far as he gets. Tore takes a lump of wood from the pile beside the stove, holds it with both hands like a baseball bat and uses all his strength to bash it against the back of Hjörleifur’s head.

I hear the sound of Hjörleifur’s skull cracking. I hear the thud as his body slumps to the floor. I hear the forest catch its breath in horror. The earth shudders, appalled by the blood being spilt.

Outside the house, the dog stiffens and bristles, then lies down in the snow. She doesn’t go indoors, despite the fact that the brothers have carelessly left the door open.

The whole area smells of death. The birch trees are writhing. Birds are calling. Only the field mice carry on scampering beneath the snow. This means nothing to them.

I also feel strangely cold and unaffected. But perhaps I was like that even when I was alive.

Hjalmar moves away from the door frame.

“That was unnecessary, for Christ’s sake,” he says.

Hjörleifur Arnarson’s legs twitch and kick as life drains out of him.

“Don’t be such an old woman,” Tore says. “Put your gloves on. We need to rearrange the furniture here.”

TUESDAY, 28 APRIL

“Why the devil don’t you pick up when I ring you?”

Måns Wenngren sounded annoyed.

Rebecka Martinsson rolled her desk chair over to the door and kicked it shut.

“But I do,” she said.

“You know what I mean. I’ve been trying to get you on your mobile, and I don’t like my calls being rejected.”

“I’m working, remember,” Martinsson said patiently. “So are you, Måns. Sometimes when I ring you . . .”

“But then I ring you back as soon as I can.”

Martinsson said nothing. She had intended to ring him back, but had forgotten. Or perhaps could not summon up the strength. She had worked late following the trip to Hjörleifur Arnarson’s with Anna-Maria Mella. Then Sivving Fjällborg had invited her to dinner, and she had fallen asleep the moment she had got home. She ought to have phoned Wenngren and told him about Hjörleifur. How he ran around naked in the forest and wanted to give her some ecological eggs that would boost her fertility. That would have made Wenngren laugh.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Are you playing games with me? Now you see me, now you don’t? Just say the word. I’m shit-hot at game-playing.”

“I don’t do that sort of thing,” Martinsson said. “You know that.”

“I know nothing. I think you’re playing a little power game. Make no mistake, Rebecka, you’re wasting your time. It’ll just cool me off, that’s what it’ll do.”

“Sorry, that’s simply not the case. I really am no good at . . . You’re O.K.”

Silence.

“Move back here, then,” he said eventually. “If you think I’m O.K.”

“I can’t,” she said. “You know that.”

“Why not? You’re partnership material, Rebecka. And you’re wasted messing around as a prosecutor up there. I can’t possibly move north.”

“I know,” Martinsson said.

“I want to be with you,” he said.

“And I want to be with you,” Martinsson said. “Can’t we just carry on as we are? We get together fairly often, in fact.”

“It will never work in the long run.”

“Why not? It works for lots of people.”

“Not for me. I want to be with you all the time. I want to wake up with you every morning.”

“If I worked for Meijer & Ditzinger we’d never see each other.”

“Oh, come on . . . !”

“It’s true. Name me one woman working for the firm who’s in a successful relationship.”

“Work as a prosecutor here in Stockholm, then. No, you don’t want to do that either. It seems to suit you down to the ground to keep me at a distance, to answer the phone only when you feel like it. When you’ve nothing better to do. I have no idea what you were doing yesterday evening.”

“Oh stop it. I was having dinner with Sivving.”

“So you say.”

Wenngren continued talking. The door to Martinsson’s office opened, and Mella popped her head round it. Martinsson shook her head and pointed at the telephone, indicating that she was busy. But Mella took a piece of paper from her desk and scribbled on it in large letters
Hjörleifur Arnarson is DEAD!!!

“I’ve got to go,” Martinsson said to Wenngren. “Something’s happened. I’ll call you.”

Wenngren broke off his musing.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not the type to hang around where I’m not wanted.”

He waited for Martinsson to respond.

She said nothing.

He hung up.

“Man trouble?” Mella said.

Martinsson pulled a face, but before she could reply Mella said, “I tell you what – let’s forget about men for the moment. I heard a couple of minutes ago from Sonja on the switchboard that Göran Sillfors found Hjörleifur dead. Sven-Erik and Tommy are already there. You might well ask why they didn’t ring me, but never mind that.”

Sven-Erik will be furious, she thought. Pissed off because I didn’t tell him I was going to visit Hjörleifur Arnarson yesterday.

Wilma Persson was buried on April 28 at 10.00 in the morning. The mourners stood in the churchyard, clustered round the grave. Hjalmar Krekula looked around. He had not bothered to take his dark suit out of the wardrobe that morning. It was God knows how many years since he had grown out of it.

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he had shaved and thought, I can’t cope with this. I can’t take any more.

Then he had sliced up a whole loaf of rye bread for breakfast. Spread each slice thickly with butter. Eaten it while standing by the draining board. Eventally he had calmed down. His heart had stopped pounding against his ribcage.

Now he was standing beside the grave containing the coffin, feeling uncomfortable in his camouflage trousers and jacket – although at least he had had the sense not to wear his duffel coat. Lots of young people had turned up, each carrying a red rose to drop onto the coffin. All of them were dressed in black with jewellery in their eyebrows and noses and lips; all had black make-up around their eyes. But none of that could conceal their smooth skin, their rounded cheeks.

They’re so young, he thought. All of them are so young. Wilma as well.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

Wilma’s mother had travelled up from Stockholm. She was sobbing loudly. Shouting “Oh my God!” over and over again. A sister was holding one arm, a cousin the other.

Anni Autio stood there like a shrivelled autumn leaf, teeth clenched. There seemed to be no room for her sorrow. Wilma’s mother took up all the available space with her shrill shrieks and loud sobbing. Hjalmar Krekula was angry on Anni’s behalf. Wished he could get rid of those shrieks, so that Anni had room to cry.

There Wilma lay in her coffin.

There was a lot for him to think about now. He needed to get away from there soon. Before he also started shouting and shrieking.

Not long ago her cheeks had been just as rounded as those of the girls standing nearby, holding one another’s hands. He did not dare to look at them. He knew what their faces would express if they caught his eye: disgust with the fat paedo.

It was not long ago that Wilma had been sitting at his kitchen table. Her hair, the same red colour as that of all the women in her family – her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, Anni and his own mother, Kerttu. Wilma’s red hair, tumbling down on both sides of her face as she struggled with her maths homework. She spoke to him like, well, just like she spoke to everyone else.

But then.

Her hands hammering away at the ice beneath his feet.

Now she was hammering away at her coffin lid. On the inside of his skull.

It’ll soon be over, he thought. Nothing shows.

Afterwards, at the wake, he forced down several slices of cake. He was aware that people were looking at him. Thinking that he ought to resist the temptation, that it was no wonder he was so fat.

Let them look, he thought, stuffing a few sugar lumps into his mouth, chewing and then letting them dissolve. It eased the pain, made it easier to take. Eating helped him to calm down.

Inspector Tommy Rantakyrö was squatting down outside Hjörleifur Arnarson’s house, stroking Hjörleifur’s dog, when Mella and Martinsson parked their snow scooter not far away.

He stood up and went over to meet them.

“She’s refusing to move,” he said, nodding towards the dog.

Mella was annoyed to see that the other inspectors had parked their scooter immediately in front of the porch.

“Can you move the scooter,” she said curtly to Rantakyrö. “We need to tape this area off so the forensic team can search for clues. How many people have touched the front door handle?”

Rantakyrö shrugged.

Mella stamped off to the house.

Martinsson went over to the dog.

“Now then, my girl,” she said softly, scratching the dog’s chest gently. “You can’t stay here, I’m afraid.”

“We’ll have to have her put down,” Rantakyrö said.

Yes, I suppose so, Martinsson thought.

She stroked the dog’s triangular ears: they were very soft, one of them sticking straight up and the top of the other one folded down. The animal was black with white markings, with a white patch round one eye.

“What sort of a mutt are you, then?” she said.

The dog made licking movements in the air. A signal that she was well-disposed towards Martinsson, who stuck out her own tongue and licked her lips in response. She was friend, not foe.

“Do you recognize me?” she said. “Yes, of course you do.”

Then she heard herself saying to Rantakyrö: “She has intelligent eyes, like a border collie – see how she looks right at you? She doesn’t feel threatened when you look back at her. Isn’t that so, my love? And you’re friendly like a Labrador, aren’t you? Don’t take her away. I’ll look after her. If he has a relative who’s prepared to take her on, O.K. – but if he hasn’t, well then . . .

Måns will have a fit, she thought.

“O.K.,” Rantakyrö said, looking pleased and relieved. “I wonder what her name is.”

“Vera,” Martinsson said. “He said it yesterday.”

“I see,” Rantakyrö said. “Was it you who was here with Mella yesterday, then? Sven-Erik is pretty pissed off about that. I can see his point.”

Stålnacke was in the kitchen, talking to Göran Sillfors.

Hjörleifur was lying on his back on the kitchen floor in front of the larder. Next to him was a collapsed pair of steps. The door to the cupboard above the larder was open. There were two rucksacks on the floor.

“What the hell’s going on?” Mella said when she entered the kitchen. “You can’t just go wandering around in here. The forensic boys will have a fit. We must tape the whole place off.”

“Who are you bursting in here and telling me what to do?” Stålnacke said.

“No doubt you’d have preferred me not to come at all,” Mella said. “When I got to work, Sonja told me about Hjörleifur.”

“And I heard from Göran Sillfors that you’d already been here and questioned Hjörleifur. Great. It didn’t occur to you to mention that to your colleagues at yesterday’s meeting, did it?”

Sillfors looked first at one and then at the other of them.

“Hjörleifur rang me yesterday, after you’d been here,” he said. “I’d given him a mobile phone with a prepaid card. He thinks that using them will make you die young . . .”

Cutting himself short, he looked down at Hjörleifur lying dead on the floor.

“Sorry,” Sillfors said. “Sometimes words just come tumbling out. Anyway, he was most reluctant to use the mobile. But I told him that one of these days he might break a leg and need help, and that it didn’t matter if he kept it in a drawer somewhere, switched off. The card was on special offer, so it didn’t cost much. Sometimes you get a new bike or goodness knows what else when you buy a new mobile, although then you need to agree to a rental contract, of course. Anyway, I reckoned it was worth spending a bit on a fellow human being. And we used to get honey and mosquito repellant off him – not that I think much of his mosquito repellant, but still . . . Anyway, he used it yesterday – the mobile, I mean . . . rang me to say that you’d been here. He wondered what the hell we’d told the police, and I had to calm him down. What did you say to him? This morning I thought I’d better drive out and see how he was. And of course make sure he didn’t think we’d been telling tales out of school about him, or anything like that. The dog was outside, and the door was wide open. I realized right away that something had happened.”

“There’s nothing for the forensic team to investigate,” Stålnacke said. “It’s obvious what’s happened here.”

Lifting up one of the rucksacks, he showed Mella a name tag sewn inside it:
Wilma Persson
.

“One was standing on the floor here, the other was up there.”

He pointed to the open door of the cupboard above the larder.

“He killed them and took their rucksacks,” he said. “You frightened him yesterday with your questions. He clambers up the stepladder to fetch the rucksacks from the cupboard, intending to get rid of them, falls, hits his head and dies.”

“That’s an odd place to keep them,” Mella said, looking up at the cupboard. “Cramped, and awkward to get at. He didn’t do it. This doesn’t add up.”

Stålnacke stared at her as if he felt tempted to pick her up and shake her. His moustache was standing on end.

Mella pulled herself up to her full height.

“Get out!” she said. “I’m in charge here. This is a suspected crime scene. The forensic team will have a look, and then Pohjanen can take over.”