Leo’s cell phone is on the aquarium. It has a tiger-striped shell. Fredrik takes it, weighs it in his hand and almost feels a little like a grown-up. Hello, this is Bengtsson speaking, Fredrik Bengtsson. In the contact list there are girls’ names. Fredrik keeps punching and suddenly someone answers. It feels as in a horror movie. She can’t see him. He is evil. Evil people pant in telephones to frighten girls. He’s seen that on TV.
“Hello, is anyone there?” She actually sounds scared.
Fredrik pants heavily and shudders at his own awfulness. And there is a pleasure in frightening someone, a feeling of power. It makes you want more. When the first girl hangs up on him he goes on to the next and the next again until only his grandmother’s number remains. Then he quits and puts the phone back on the aquarium without looking. Where he had thought would be glass is open water and the cell slowly spins down to the bottom like a hunting tiger shark. It looks cool. The doorbell rings.
Miss Viktorsson and Mom are in the kitchen and have closed the door. Fredrik looks at his watch. It’s ten. Mom has slept for only two hours after her night shift. That’s not good. He knows that from experience. She is speaking in her night voice, the soft, whispering voice they use at the hospital. His teacher, on the other hand, speaks loudly and clearly. She uses words like difficulties and concerned. Then she says ill and school nurse. Fredrik doesn’t need to hear any more. What do you do at the school nurse’s office? You have an injection or someone is counting your balls. Both are equally horrible. What if you did that to all the old men in parliament, had them line up alphabetically and . . . they’d be sure to write about that in the paper. Just as they did about murders. Fredrik doesn’t want to think about the dead lady. Or about the bike. Or about who had come out of the earth cellar. The beast in his stomach moves again. It doesn’t want to be disturbed by those kinds of thoughts. Sickness fills him so quickly that Fredrik can’t get to the bathroom fast enough. He throws up on the blue hallway carpet. All that comes is some acid yellow water. Now the kitchen door is opening. He can’t stay here. Quickly he grabs his jacket and steps into his boots.
“Fredrik. Freeeedrik!” His mother’s voice echoes in the stairwell.
But he doesn’t turn. His feet hardly even touch the asphalt while he flies away into the forest. Once he is hidden by its darkness he removes the Ring from his finger. It’s cold. He didn’t get his mittens, or his cap. It would have been simpler to walk on the forest road. But someone might find him there. It’s better to move among the trees, where there are places to hide. His feet ache from cold in the thin rubber boots. Thin smoke is rising from one of the chimneys down in the old village, but he can’t see anyone. A longing for warmth overpowers him. Fredrik runs down to the little cottage with the porch. The door is locked. But out here nobody is in the habit of locking for real; people just lock their doors to let visitors know if they’re in or out. The key is under the juniper twigs on the stair. When he silently sneaks into the hallway, the heat envelops him. For a moment he stands immobile, his back to the wall, listening. Then he slides into the room. On a chair is a rolled-up sleeping bag. Fredrik takes it and makes himself a small nest on the floor under the bed.
Detective Captain Maria Wern pulls her long, blonde hair into a ponytail and climbs into the patrol car. Hartman is already seated behind the wheel.
“So how do we proceed from here?” he says, eyes in the rear mirror. The Bäckalund school shrinks as the car accelerates, then disappears behind trees.
“We’ll take two of the absent pupils. The two Bengtsson brothers. One of them is in high school, the other in first grade. The older has a cold and is at home, the other one disappeared during the Lucia pageant. His teacher thinks he had something wrong with his stomach. Do you know the way to Lingonstigen?”
“Yes, I do. Anything else new?”
“I talked to the forensics guy this morning. He found surprisingly little. No fingerprints. No murder weapon. The ground outside the earth cellar was frozen, and it didn’t start snowing until the afternoon on December twelfth. So the only footprints to be found are Sara Skoglund’s, and they fit in with what she told us. Time of death has been fixed at just after eight in the morning.”
“What about that notebook you found? Anything in it?”
“Numbers, just numbers. I suspect it might be time listings—dates, hours, minutes. None of the numbers are higher than fifty-nine. Then there are some kind of symbols. They look more or less like the ones used to indicate curses in Donald Duck comics, if you know what I mean.”
“Do you think any of the numbers relate to December ninth?”
“I think so. We’ll have a full analysis in an hour or so. But Hartman, there’s one detail that doesn’t fit. Maybe it means nothing, but I just can’t let go of it. Let’s go to Bäckalund.”
The sound of Leo’s voice wakes Fredrik. At first he believes he must be at home, in his own bed, but the smell is all wrong. He smells dampness, mice droppings and resin and something else, something cold and unknown. Before answering his brother he looks around. Sees two pair of feet, very close to each other.
“You can’t phone me. I thought we agreed about that,” the woman says peevishly, wagging her right foot.
“I haven’t phoned!” Leo says in a surprised tone of voice.
“Really! Then who was panting on the line when the display showed your number?” she says angrily, her voice rising.
“I don’t know. I forgot my cell at home this morning, so I haven’t had it all day. I tinkered with my car down in the garage. Maybe Fredrik has sneaked into my room.”
“Anyway we can’t keep meeting like this. I hope you understand that,” the woman’s voice says.
“But I have to see you, Lovisa. I love you,” Leo whimpers in a voice Fredrik has never heard before.
The smaller feet take a step back. The larger ones follow.
“You’re just horny. It’ll pass. Go now and forget about me.”
“I can’t!”
“You have to. A school nurse isn’t allowed to have a relationship with a student.”
“But you said you loved me,” Leo says, hopelessly.
“Maybe I did, but it’s over. And Ellen Borg saw us. She had a little black book where she wrote down every time we met here. She wanted money to keep quiet about it.”
“But she’s dead now.”
“Right. And if you ever say a word about any of this to anyone, I’ll tell them you did it. Tell them you killed her. In a very safe place I have a hammer with your fingerprints and Ellen’s blood on it. Whenever I want to, I can plant it somewhere and tip off the police. And do you really think anyone would believe anything you might say after that?”
“You can’t. I never thought . . . How could it have my fingerprints?”
“You put them there when you helped me put up the hanging.”
“But how could you just . . . kill her?”
“You have no idea what I can do.”
The feet belonging to Leo move across the door. The house echoes from the sound of the door being slammed. Fredrik tries to be quiet but the sobs in his throat force themselves out. A hand grabs his hair and pulls him out on the floor while the sound of Leo’s car dies away. She grabs him by the scruff of his neck as if he were a kitten. A stream of words pour out of the school nurse, but he can’t make them out through the roar of the waterfall inside his head. Passively he goes along with her movements and lets himself be led down through the hatch in the floor into the damply cold cellar darkness. He hears her lock the hatch. There is only darkness. And cold. And silence.
Detective Captain Maria Wern knocks again at the door and waits. Behind her, Hartman steps back and slaps his arms against his sides for warmth. Smoke is rising from the chimney of the gray cottage with the porch.
“What do you want this time?” Lovisa says when she opens the door.
Her cheeks are very red.
“Is it a bad time?”
“No, it’s all ri
ght.”
Lovisa leads the way in. Her movements seem nervous and jerky to Maria. They sit down at the kitchen table. Lovisa bites her lower lip. Maria waits for a moment without speaking.
“So what is this about?” Lovisa says in a shrill voice.
“Did you pick these rowanberries yourself?”
“Yes, I did. What’s that got to do with anything? What do you want?”
“You said before that you hadn’t been here since midsummer. Was that true?”
Lovisa stares at the table, rubs her hands against her thighs. Then she meets Maria’s gaze. “I may have been here once or twice in October. I’m not really sure.”
Maria is silent. So is Hartman. Lovisa lowers her eyes.
“Was that all you wanted to ask?” she says with a strained smile.
“Yes, for now. We may be back again later.”
Maria rises without haste. Glances out the window at the white-rimed trees. A half-eaten red apple is lying on the snow, abandoned by magpies. Long icicles hang from the edge of the roof. Then she turns to nod at Hartman, who follows her into the hallway. Lovisa remains sitting. Suddenly she gives a jerk. There is a scratching sound from below them. A weak, small voice is calling for mommy.
“If it’s easier for you to tell me that way, you can put on your Ring and become invisible,” Maria Wern says and turns on the recorder.
“But what if I slip away?”
“I trust you,” Maria says, and her eyes are kind and very serious.
“I don’t think I want it any longer,” Fredrik says. “You can have it.”
Anna Jansson is originally from Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, situated off the east coast in the Baltic, close to sixty miles from the mainland. She was born in 1958 and initially trained and then worked for twenty years as a nurse. When her family bought its first computer in 1997, she began writing stories and finished two novels before finding a publisher for her third, Stum sitter guden (The God Sits Mute), in 2000. That book introduced Detective Inspector Maria Wern with the Gotland police force, who has been the protagonist of all Anna Jansson’s fourteen crime novels. Her 2006 Maria Wern novel, Främmande fågel (Strange Bird), was the Swedish nominee for the Glass Key Award given annually to the best crime novel published in the five Nordic countries. Beginning with that book, the Wern novels also began to be produced as TV miniseries. Jansson is one of Sweden’s most popular crime authors; her novels have also appeared in translation throughout Europe. In addition to her adult writing, she also publishes books for young readers.
THE MAIL RUN
ÅSA LARSSON
Åsa Larsson is one of Sweden’s finest crime novelists. Her first novel, Solstorm (Sun Storm), won the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy Award for Best First Novel in 2003; she went on to win the Academy’s Best Novel of the Year Award for her second novel in 2004 and for her fifth in 2012. Larsson’s novels are contemporary and feature a recurring heroine, public prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson. But the following story is very different.
“The Mail Run” is a historical story set in Kiruna, home of Åsa Larsson’s paternal grandfather and where she herself lived from the age of four until leaving to attend college. Kiruna is a mining town at the extreme north of Sweden, built on a major iron ore deposit, which had been impossible to mine profitably before a railroad was finally built in 1891 and the newly formed Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB) staked out large tracts in the area. The mining town, earlier called Luossavare and basically a haphazard collection of sheds, was renamed Kiruna in 1900, as a more modern town began to be built, financed, and run by the mining company. Larsson gives an insightful, humorous, and tragic image of this Swedish frontier outpost a century ago. A town of mainly railroad men and miners, with a mixed population of Samish, Finnish, and Swedish descent, was in the grip of fundamentalist religious groups, where the most important one was the Laestadians, characterized by their severe lifestyle, ecstatic services, and extreme piety. This conservative Lutheran strain still exists in Sweden, Finland, and the United States, though it has long since broken up into several splinter groups.
Here, then, is a tale of what might be called the Swedish frontier a century ago, with sheriffs and gunmen, set not on the sunbaked western plains but in a company town built on a northern mountain, where the mean temperature throughout the year is around twenty-nine, where the sun for two months never rises above the horizon, and where snow covers the ground, often more than two feet deep, from October to early June.
BÄCKSTRÖM’S ASSISTANT NEVER QUITE BECAME HIMSELF AGAIN AFTERWARDS. Before it happened he had been a cheerful type. One of those who sang while he worked. Throwing two-hundred-pound sacks on his back while winking at the girls and tucking snuff under his lip. He became more serious afterwards. Surly, even. Never joked with the girls at Hannula’s general store when he came to pick up goods. Began to lose half his pay at cards. Bought liquor from the bootleggers at Malmberget and sold it to the miners, young boys with more money in their pockets than sense in their heads.
But about this thing that happened. It was December 14, 1912. Bäckström, the hauler, and his assistant were on their way to Gällivare. Their sled was full of grouse intended for the train to Stockholm. But the train didn’t run between Kiruna and Gällivare due to the amount of snow on the tracks. The snowstorm had lasted for three days and was only now starting to abate. But the restaurant keepers in Stockholm didn’t want to wait.
Bäckström delighted in the winter evening. Huge, soft stars of snow fell slowly from the heavens. Almost sleepily they came to rest one by one on top of the outer pelt of his wolf’s- fur coat, gathered on top of his Russian fur cap like a white hillock.
The moon found a rift between the snow-filled clouds. It wasn’t particularly cold out, though of course his assistant was freezing, dressed as he was in only rough homespun and knitted clothes. But the hauler’s assistant wrapped the reindeer skin around himself and was soon shouting his love to the mare, who really was the best in the world. Lintu, which means bird in Finnish. And wasn’t she just like a long-necked crane? So beautiful! Now and then he gave her an encouraging lash when she stepped off the wintry road and risked sinking into the deep drifts. The sled remained right-side up, but all the newly fallen snow made it hard going. The mare steamed from exertion, though her load was light.
Hauler Erik Bäckström let his eyes follow the falling snow upwards, to the sky. A faint smile played over his lips as he thought that perhaps God’s angels were a bunch of women doing needlework. Not very different from his own dead mother and the women in his childhood village. Perhaps they were sitting there crocheting in God’s old cabin, dressed in their long skirts, their long hair pinned up and covered in head cloths. They had certainly been busy at needlework while alive. No matter how many socks and sweaters, caps and mufflers they made, it was never enough. They had spun, knitted, woven and mended. But now, carefree in the hands of the Lord, they could knit snowflakes. With gnarled hands that had carried well water to the cows during painfully cold winter mornings and had rinsed washing in holes cut through the ice, they were knitting all these stars, absently letting them fall to the floor.
Which is no floor, the hauler thought philosophically, but the vault of sky above our heads.
“What are you smiling about, sir?” the assistant asked, panting.
He had jumped off the sled and was trudging through the snow beside the mare, who was the light and joy of his heart, to help her manage an uphill slope. In his pocket was a cube of sugar, which he gave her.
“Nothing, really,” Bäckström replied, happy about the freedom you enjoyed in your own mind, after all. Even a workingman who was also a businessman like himself could think the most girlish thoughts without risk.
His assistant jumped back up on the sled. Brushed the snow from his pants. Wrapped his muffler around his head all the way up to his ears.
Aside from occasional snorts from their horse, the silence was as deep as it can only be in a wintry w
ood during snowfall. The runners slid soundlessly over the soft, new snow. Only just before meeting the other sled did they hear the horse bells.
Both Bäckström and his assistant immediately recognized the mail sled.
They called a loud greeting to the postman, whom they both knew very well indeed.
“Hello, Johansson!”
There was no answer. The postman, Elis Johansson, sat deeply hunched over in his sled and gave no reply no matter how loudly Bäckström and his assistant called.
The mail horse trotted on in the opposite direction and Bäckström and his assistant continued on towards Gällivare.
“Was he drunk?” the hauler’s assistant asked, looking back over his shoulder. He could no longer see the mail sled, only the black silhouettes of trees in the weak moonlight that managed to escape between the snow-laden clouds.
“Nonsense,” Bäckström replied angrily. Johansson, never. He was a deeply devout Laestadian and a teetotaler.
“Maybe he was deep in prayer,” the assistant said mockingly.
Erik Bäckström did not reply. Shame over his recent fanciful speculations about God stopped him from defending Johansson the way he should. But he knew that Johansson was a hardworking and capable man. His faith was serious and grounded in scripture. He would never speculate freely about heaven the way Bäckström just had.
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