The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  “What kind of guy is he, then?” asks Måns.

  “Oh, it’s Sivving. He’s retired, he lives in a house over the road.”

  She tells him about Sivving. How he lives down in the boiler room with his dog. Because it’s simpler. He’s got everything he needs down there after all, including a refrigerator, a shower and a hotplate. And less housework to worry about if you don’t spread yourself all over the place. And she tells him how Sivving got his name. That his real name is Erik, but that his mother, in a fit of pride, had his civil engineer title added to the telephone book: “civ. ing.” And that the punishment had followed swiftly in the village, where it was a crime to regard oneself as better than anyone else: “Oh, yes, here comes civ.ing himself.”

  Måns laughs. So does Rebecka. And then they laugh a little more, mostly because they haven’t got anything to say. He asks if it’s cold. She clambers up onto the sofa and looks at the thermometer.

  “Minus twenty-five degrees.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  Silence again. A little too long. Then he says quickly:

  “I just wanted to wish you Happy New Year…I mean, I’m still your boss.”

  What does he mean by that? wonders Rebecka. Is he ringing everybody who works for him? Or just those he knows don’t have a life? Or does he actually care?

  “Happy New Year to you too,” she says, and since the words are bordering on the formal, she allows her voice to soften.

  “Right…well…I’ll probably go out and take a look at the fireworks…”

  “And I’ve got to take the dog out…”

  When they’ve hung up, she sits there with the receiver in her hand. Was he alone in Barcelona? Hardly likely, is it? It was all a bit quick there at the end. Did she hear a door? Did somebody come in? Was that why he ended the conversation so abruptly?

  JUNE 2004

  It was fortunate that Rebecka Martinsson never got to see Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot begging to be allowed to give her a job. If she had, her pride would have made her turn it down.

  Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot is in a meeting with his boss, head of chambers Margareta Huuva, over an early dinner after work, and he chooses a place with real linen serviettes and real flowers in vases on the tables.

  This puts Margareta Huuva in a good mood; what’s more, the boy who’s serving them pulls her chair out for her and pays her a compliment.

  You would have thought they were out on a date. A couple who got together late in life; both of them are over sixty.

  Head of chambers Margareta Huuva is a short, rather stocky woman. Her silver gray hair is cut flatteringly short, and her lipstick matches the pink polo neck sweater she is wearing under her blue jacket.

  As Alf Björnfot is sitting down, he notices that the corduroy on the knees of his trousers is more or less completely worn away. The flaps on his jacket pockets are always pushed halfway into the pockets; they always get like that because they’re in his way when he stuffs things in his pockets.

  “Stop shoving a load of crap in your pockets,” his daughter scolds him as she tries to smooth out the crumpled flaps.

  Margareta Huuva asks Alf Björnfot to tell her why he wants to take on Rebecka Martinsson.

  “I need somebody in my area who knows about financial crime,” he says. “The mining company, LKAB, is contracting out more and more work. We’re getting more and more firms up there, and that means more and more financial entanglements to sort out. If we manage to persuade Rebecka Martinsson to work for us, we’ll get a hell of a lot of lawyer for our money. She worked for one of Sweden’s top business law firms before she moved up here.”

  “You mean before she became mentally ill,” Margareta Huuva replies sharply. “What actually happened to her?”

  “I wasn’t involved, but she killed those three guys in Jiekajärvi a couple of years ago. It was a clear case of self-defense, so there was never any question of a prosecution. And then…when she was just getting over that, there was the incident in Poikkijärvi. Lars-Gunnar Vinsa locked her in the cellar, then shot himself and his son. And when she saw the boy, she just went completely to pieces.”

  “Ended up in a secure unit.”

  “Yes. She didn’t even know what day it was at the time.”

  Alf Björnfot falls silent, thinking about what Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke told him. How Rebecka Martinsson had screamed like a lunatic. Seen things and people that didn’t exist. How they’d had to hold on to her to stop her walking into the river.

  “And this is the person you want me to appoint as a special prosecutor.”

  “She’s fine now. This opportunity won’t come again. If this hadn’t happened to her, she’d have stayed down there in Stockholm earning a ton of money. But she’s come home. And I don’t think she wants to carry on working in an office.”

  “Carl von Post says she didn’t do a particularly good job when she was representing Sanna Strandgård.”

  “But that’s because she wiped the floor with him! You can’t listen to him. He thinks the sun rises out of his bloody asshole in the mornings.”

  Margareta Huuva smiles and looks down at her plate. Personally, she has no problem with Carl von Post. He’s the kind of man who’s always nice to those in authority over him. But it’s true, deep down he is a self-obsessed little shit; she’s not so stupid that she doesn’t realize it.

  “Six months, then. To start with.”

  Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot groans.

  “No, no. She’s a lawyer; she earns more than twice as much as I do. I can’t show up with a provisional position.”

  “I don’t care whether she’s a lawyer or not. Right now we don’t even know whether she can manage to sort out fruit in the local supermarket. It’s provisional, and that’s the end of it.”

  And so the decision is made. They move on to more agreeable topics of conversation, exchanging gossip about colleagues, police officers, judges and local politicians.

  A week later, Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot is sitting with Rebecka on the steps outside the house in Kurravaara.

  The swallows slice through the air like knives. There’s a clattering noise as they hurtle in beneath the roof of the barn. Then they’re off again. You can hear their young tweeting encouragingly.

  Rebecka looks at Alf Björnfot. A man in his sixties, horrible trousers, reading glasses on a cord around his neck. He seems like a nice man. She wonders if he’s good at his job.

  They’re drinking coffee out of mugs, and she offers him a digestive biscuit straight out of the packet. He’s come to offer her a job as a special prosecutor in Kiruna.

  “I need somebody good,” he says simply. “Somebody who’ll stay.”

  As she’s replying, he sits with his eyes closed and his face turned up toward the sun. He hasn’t much hair left; you can see the age spots on the top of his head.

  “I don’t know if I can do that sort of job any longer,” says Rebecka. “I don’t trust my head.”

  “But it’s such a waste if you don’t even try,” he says without opening his eyes. “Try it for six months. If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out.”

  “I went crazy, you know that?”

  “Yes, I know the police officers who found you.”

  She’s reminded of it once again. The fact that she’s a topic of conversation.

  Chief Prosecutor Björnfot still has his eyes closed. He’s thinking about what he’s just said. Should he have said something different? No, best to be straight with this girl, he senses that strongly.

  “Were they the ones who told you I’d moved back up here?” she asks.

  “That’s right, one of them has a cousin who lives here in Kurravaara.”

  Rebecka laughs. It’s a dry, joyless sound.

  “It’s only me who doesn’t know anything about anybody.”

  “It all got too much for me,” she says after a moment. “Nalle, lying there dead on the gravel. I really liked him. And hi
s father…I thought he was going to kill me.”

  He grunts in reply. Eyes still closed. Rebecka takes the opportunity to look at him in peace. And it’s easy to talk when he’s not looking at her.

  “It’s the sort of thing you think is never going to happen to you. At first I was so scared it would happen again. And that I’d be stuck there. Living the rest of my life in a nightmare.”

  “Are you still afraid it’ll happen again?”

  “At any moment, you mean? You’re just walking across the road, and then…kapow!”

  She clenches her fist and opens it out, spreading her fingers, as if to illustrate a fireworks display of insanity.

  “No,” she goes on. “I needed the insanity just then. Reality was too heavy for me.”

  “Anyway, none of that concerns me,” says Alf Björnfot.

  And now he’s looking at her.

  “I need good prosecutors.”

  He falls silent. Then he speaks again. Much later, Rebecka will remember his words and think that he knew exactly what he was doing. How to handle her. She will discover that he really knows about people.

  “Although of course I do understand if you’re not sure about it. The position is in Kiruna, after all. So it’ll be bloody lonely. The other prosecutors are based in Gällivare and Luleå, and they only come up here when the criminal court is sitting. The idea is for you to take most of the sessions. A secretary will come up one day a week and deal with applications for summonses, that sort of thing. So it’ll be pretty isolated.”

  Rebecka promises to think it over. But that business about working alone seals the deal. No people around her. That, and the fact that somebody from her insurance company had rung up just a week earlier and talked about training and a gradual return to working life. It had made Rebecka feel sick with fear. Being shoved together with a load of burnt-out no-hopers and being made to take her driving license or join in some positive-thinking course.

  “The respite is over,” she says to Sivving that evening. “I might as well give the prosecution service a go as anything else.”

  Sivving is standing by the stove, turning over slices of blood pudding.

  “Stop giving the dog bread under the table,” he says. “I can see you. What about your lawyer’s job, then?”

  “Never again.”

  She thinks about Måns. She’ll have to resign now. She’s felt like a burden on the firm for a long time. But he’ll disappear forever.

  It’s fine, she says to herself. What would a life with him be like? You’d be going through his pockets while he was asleep, searching for receipts and yellow credit card slips to check that he hasn’t been out drinking. His past would certainly put you off. Is it possible for anybody to be worse at maintaining relationships? Sporadic contact with his grown-up children. Divorced. Nothing but short-term relationships.

  She makes a list of his faults. It doesn’t help in the slightest.

  When she was working for him, he would touch her sometimes. “Well done, Martinsson,” and then the touch. His hand around her upper arm. Once, a brief caress of her hair.

  I’m going to stop thinking about him, she tells herself. It just drives you bloody mad. Your whole head is full of some guy, his hands, his mouth, what he looks like from the back and from the front and all the rest of it. You can go for months without a single sensible thought.

  SUNDAY MARCH 16, 2005

  The dead woman came sailing through the darkness toward Inspector Anna-Maria Mella. She was floating in the air as she would have done if a magician had waved his wand over her and made her rise, lying on her back with her arms pressed closely by her sides.

  Who are you? thought Anna-Maria.

  Her white skin and those eyes of frosted glass made her look like a statue. Her features were also reminiscent of a marble statue from antiquity. The bridge of her nose was set high up between her eyebrows, her forehead and nose forming an unbroken line in profile.

  Gustav, Anna-Maria’s three-year-old, turned over in his sleep and gave her a series of kicks in the side. She got hold of his small but muscular body and turned him firmly so that he was lying with his bottom and back toward her instead. She drew him close and stroked his tummy with circular movements, nuzzling his night-sweaty hair with her nose and kissing him. He sighed contentedly in his sleep.

  It was just so blissful and so sensual, this time with the children. They grew up so quickly, and that was the end of the stroking and tickling. Anna-Maria dreaded the time when they would no longer have a small child in the house. Hopefully there would be grandchildren. She could always hope that Marcus, her eldest, would start early.

  And there’s always Robert in an emergency, she thought, smiling at her sleeping husband. There are advantages to hanging on to the same guy you’ve had from the start. However wrinkly and saggy I get, he’ll still see the girl he got to know at the dawn of time.

  Or else you have to get a load of dogs, she thought. Who’ll be allowed to sleep on the bed with filthy paws and slavering jaws and all the rest of it.

  She let go of Gustav and groped for her cell phone, looked at the clock, half four.

  One cheek was burning. She’d probably got a touch of frostbite the previous evening when she and Sven-Erik were knocking on doors out there on the ice. But nobody in the arks close by had seen anything. She and her colleagues had asked around up at the mountain center, woken up the tourists who were there for the skiing and kept the people in the bar behind. Nobody could tell them anything about the woman. The owners of the ark where she’d been lying had also been traced. They had seemed genuinely shocked, and didn’t recognize the picture of the dead woman.

  Anna-Maria Mella tried to come up with likely scenarios. Obviously it’s possible for a person to go out running along snowmobile tracks while wearing makeup. Or maybe she was running along Norgevägen. A car stops. It’s somebody she knows. Somebody who asks if she’d like a lift. And then? She gets in the car and somebody hits her over the head? Or she goes along and takes a sauna, gets raped, fights back, gets stabbed.

  Or it might have been somebody she didn’t know. She’s running along Norgevägen. A man drives past her in a car. He turns around a little way ahead. Maybe he runs into her with the car and drags her into the backseat; that would make her easy to handle. And not a soul in sight. He drives her to a cottage…

  Anna-Maria turned her pillow over and told herself to try and get back to sleep.

  Maybe she wasn’t raped, she thinks. Maybe she was jogging along in the snowmobile tracks on the lake. Met some bloody lunatic with his body full of drugs and a knife in his pocket. There are people like that everywhere. Up on the marshes too. Every woman’s nightmare. Just happening to come across the wrong man at the very moment when the madness strikes.

  Stop it, she says to herself. No fully formed images in your head before you actually know anything.

  She needs to talk to the medical examiner, Lars Pohjanen. He’d traveled up from Luleå the previous evening. The question was whether they’d managed to do anything with the frozen body.

  Staying in bed was completely pointless. And why should she go back to sleep, anyway? She wasn’t tired, after all. Her head was stuffed full of adrenaline pumping, brain cells playing guessing games.

  She got up and got dressed. She was used to doing it in the dark, so she was quick and silent.

  It was five past five when Anna-Maria Mella parked her red Ford Escort outside the hospital. The Securitas guard let her into the culvert that ran beneath the building. The ventilation pipes humming on the ceiling. Deserted corridors. A scruffy vinyl floor and the sound of automatic doors opening ahead of her. She met a caretaker, whizzing along on a kick scooter, otherwise everything was peaceful and quiet.

  The lights were out in the autopsy room, but in the smoking room Lars Pohjanen, the medical examiner, was lying on the battered 1970s sofa just as she’d hoped. He was lying with his back to the room, his thin body moving up and down in time with hi
s laborious breathing.

  A few years ago he had undergone an operation for throat cancer. His technician, Anna Granlund, took care of more and more of his work. She sawed open the chest cavity, lifted out organs, took the necessary samples, put the organs back, sutured stomachs, carried Pohjanen’s bags, answered the telephone, put the most important calls through, which in principle meant those from his wife, made sure his lab coat was washed between shifts and wrote up his reports.

  By the side of the sofa, his battered clogs stood neatly side by side. Once upon a time they’d been white. In Anna-Maria’s imagination, Anna Granlund tucked the medical examiner in with the checked blanket that lay over him, placed his clogs tidily beside the sofa, removed the cigarette from his mouth and turned the light out before she went home.

  Anna-Maria took off her jacket and settled down in an armchair that matched the sofa.

  Thirty years’ collected dust, and completely permeated with smoke, she thought, pulling the jacket over her like a blanket. Nice.

  She fell asleep at once.

  Half an hour later she was awoken by the sound of Pohjanen coughing. He was sitting on the sofa leaning forward, and it sounded as if half his lungs were due to end up on his knee.

  All at once Anna-Maria felt stupid and uncomfortable. Sneaking in like that and sleeping in the same room. It was almost as if she’d crept into his bedroom and got into his bed.

  There he sat with his morning cough and the Grim Reaper’s arm around his shoulders. It wasn’t the sort of thing everybody should witness.

  He’s angry now, she thought. What did I come here for?

  Pohjanen’s attack of coughing ended with a strangled clearing of his throat. His hand automatically patted his jacket pocket to reassure himself that the packet of cigarettes was there.

  “What do you want? I haven’t even started on her yet. She was frozen solid when she came in last night.”

  “I needed a place to sleep,” said Anna-Maria. “Home’s full of kids sprawled across the bed kicking their legs out and enjoying themselves.”