The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  “I don’t know. But I expect it was at a dance. He was actually a really good dancer, your father. When he had the nerve.”

  Rebecka tried to create pictures in her head. Her mother in her father’s arms on the dance floor. Her father, with the self-confidence he’s borrowed from a bottle, allows his hand to move across her back.

  She was filled with an old emotion when she saw the pictures. A strange mixture of shame and anger. Fury to counteract the villagers’ condescending sympathy.

  They called Rebecka “poor girl” over her head. Piika riepu. Lucky she had her grandmother, they said. But how long would Theresia Martinsson be able to cope? That was the question. We all have our faults, that’s true. But not to be able to take care of your own child…

  Sivving looked at her sideways.

  “Maj-Lis was very fond of your mother,” he said.

  “Was she?”

  Rebecka could hear that her own voice was no more than a whisper.

  “They always had plenty to talk about, they used to sit there laughing at the kitchen table.”

  Oh yes, thought Rebecka. I remember that mother too. She looked for a photo where her mother wasn’t posing. Where she hadn’t chosen the best angle for the camera and fixed her smile.

  A real film star, by Kurravaara standards.

  Two memories:

  Memory number one. Rebecka wakes up in the morning in the two-room apartment in the town center. They’ve moved from Kurravaara. Daddy is still living on the ground floor in Grandmother’s house. The most practical thing is for Rebecka to live with her mother in town, they say. Close to school and everything. She wakes up and everything smells fresh and clean. It’s sparkling. And her mother has rearranged the furniture in the whole apartment. The only thing that’s still in its old place is Rebecka’s bed. Breakfast is on the table. Freshly baked scones. Her mother is out on the balcony smoking a cigarette, and she looks really happy.

  She must have spent the whole night cleaning and heaving furniture around. Whatever will the neighbors think?

  Rebecka slinks down the stairs like a cat, keeping her eyes firmly on the ground. If Laila from downstairs opens the door she’ll just die of shame.

  Memory number two. The teacher says: “Get into pairs.”

  Petra: “I don’t want to sit next to Rebecka.”

  Teacher: “Don’t be so silly!”

  The class listens. Rebecka stares down at her desk.

  Petra: “She smells of pee.”

  It’s because they haven’t got any electricity in the apartment. It’s been cut off. It’s September so they’re not cold, but they can’t use the washing machine.

  When Rebecka comes home crying, her mother is furious. She drags Rebecka along to the local telecom offices and plays hell with the staff. It doesn’t make any difference when they try to explain that she needs to contact the electricity company, that it isn’t the same thing at all.

  Rebecka looked at the picture of her mother. It struck her that she was about the same age as Rebecka is now.

  She was probably doing her best, she thought.

  She looked at the smiling woman on the reindeer skin, and a feeling of reconciliation came over her. It was as if something inside her had found peace. Perhaps it was the realization that her mother wasn’t very old.

  What kind of mother would I have been if I’d chosen to have my baby? wondered Rebecka. My God!

  And then it became the norm for my mother to leave me with Grandmother during periods when she couldn’t cope. And I was here in Kurra for the summer holidays too.

  And all the kids were grubby up here, she thought. The whole lot of us probably smelled of pee.

  Sivving interrupted her thoughts.

  “I wondered if you could help me…” he began.

  He always made sure he got her working. Rebecka suspected it wasn’t so much that he actually needed help, but that he thought she did. A little bit of physical work to stop her brooding over things.

  Now he wanted her to get up on the roof to knock down some overhanging snow.

  “The thing is, it’s going to come down any day now, and Bella might be underneath it. Or me, if I forget it’s there.”

  She climbed up onto Sivving’s roof in the darkness of the evening. The outdoor lighting wasn’t much help. It was snowing. And the old snow underneath was hard and slippery. A rope around her waist and a shovel in her hand. Sivving had a shovel too, but only to lean on. He pointed and shouted out tips and orders. Rebecka was doing it her way, and he was getting annoyed because his way was the best. That’s the way things always were when they worked together. She was sweaty when she climbed back down.

  But it didn’t help. When she got in the shower back home, her thoughts turned to Måns again. She looked at the clock. It was only nine.

  She needed something else to occupy her brain. She might as well sit down at the computer and carry on checking out Inna Wattrang.

  At quarter to ten there was a knock at Rebecka’s front door. Anna-Maria Mella’s voice came from downstairs in the hallway:

  “Hi there! Anyone home?”

  Rebecka opened the door to the upstairs landing and shouted: “Up here!”

  “There is a Santa Claus,” puffed Anna-Maria when she reached the top of the stairs.

  She was carrying a banana box. Rebecka remembered her joke from that morning, and laughed.

  “I’ve been a good girl all year,” she promised.

  Anna-Maria laughed too. She found it really easy to get on with Rebecka now they were working together on Inna Wattrang’s murder.

  “These are papers and all kinds of stuff from Örjan Bylund’s computer,” said Anna-Maria after a moment, nodding toward the banana box.

  She sat down at the kitchen table and explained about the dead journalist while Rebecka made coffee.

  “He told a colleague he was working on something to do with Kallis Mining. Six weeks later he was dead.”

  Rebecka turned around.

  “How?”

  “Hanged himself at home in his study. Although I’m not at all sure about that. I’ve applied for permission to exhume his body and have an autopsy done. I just wish the authority would get a move on with their decision. Here!”

  She placed a USB stick on the table.

  “The contents of Örjan Bylund’s computer. The hard drive had been wiped, but Fred Olsson sorted it.”

  Anna-Maria looked around. It was a really comfortable kitchen. Simple, rustic furniture mixed with pieces from the forties and fifties. Several trays hanging from embroidered holders. Attractive, and slightly old-fashioned. It reminded Anna-Maria of her own grandmother and the way her house had been.

  “It’s lovely here,” she said.

  Rebecka poured her a coffee.

  “Thanks. You’ll have to have it black.”

  Rebecka looked around her kitchen. She was pleased with the way she had it. It wasn’t some kind of mausoleum to her grandmother, but she’d kept most things. When she’d moved up here she’d felt very strongly that she liked it just that way. She’d stood in her apartment in Stockholm when she was discharged from the psychiatric ward and looked around. Looked at her trendy Ant chairs and her Poul Henningsen lighting. The Italian sofa from Asplund’s that she’d bought as a present to herself when she was elected into the Law Society. “This isn’t me,” she’d thought. And so she’d sold the lot along with the apartment.

  “There’s a payment to Inna Wattrang that I’m going to check on,” Rebecka told Anna-Maria. “Somebody paid two hundred thousand kronor in cash into her personal account.”

  “Thanks,” said Anna-Maria. “Tomorrow?”

  Rebecka nodded.

  This was brilliant, thought Anna-Maria. It was exactly the sort of thing she didn’t have time to do. Maybe she should ask Rebecka to come along when they all went bowling. Then she and Sven-Erik could talk about cats.

  “Actually, I’m too old for this,” said Anna-Maria, looking at her coffe
e cup. “When I drink coffee in the evenings nowadays, I wake up during the night and my thoughts just go…”

  She made a circular movement with her hand to show how her thoughts spun round and round in her head.

  “Me too,” confessed Rebecka.

  They laughed, conscious that they’d both had a cup anyway, just to get closer to each other.

  Outside, the snow went on falling.

  TUESDAY MARCH 20, 2005

  It snowed throughout Wednesday night. But on Thursday morning it stopped; the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Only thirty degrees. At quarter past nine in the morning Örjan Bylund’s coffin was dug up. The graveyard workers had cleared away the snow the night before and placed a heater on top of the grave.

  Anna-Maria had argued with them about it.

  “We need a decision from the authorities,” they’d said.

  “To exhume the body, yes,” Anna-Maria had replied. “But all I’m asking you to do is to put the heater on now, so that you can dig him up quickly when we get the decision.”

  By now the deep frost had gone from the ground, and they dug up the coffin with the graveyard’s little Kubota.

  There were a dozen or so photographers hanging about. Anna-Maria looked at them, and her thoughts flew guiltily to Airi Bylund.

  But I’m working on a murder investigation here, she defended herself. That lot just want front-page pictures.

  And they got them. The filthy hole in the ground, the earth, the sad remains of roses, the black coffin. And all around the sparkling early spring, newly fallen snow and sunshine.

  Lars Pohjanen and Anna Granlund were waiting at the hospital to receive the body.

  Anna-Maria Mella looked at her watch.

  “Half an hour,” she said to Sven-Erik. “Then we’ll ring and ask how far he’s got.”

  At that moment her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Rebecka Martinsson.

  “I’ve checked that payment into Inna Wattrang’s bank account,” she said. “And there’s something odd about it. On the fifteenth of January, somebody went into a small branch of Svenska Enskilda Banken on Hantverkargatan in Stockholm and paid in 200,000 kronor. On the paying in slip, the person wrote: ‘Not for your silence.’”

  “‘Not for your silence,’” repeated Anna-Maria. “I want to see the slip.”

  “I’ve asked them to scan it and e-mail it to you, so check your messages when you get in,” said Rebecka.

  “Leave the prosecutor’s office and come and work downstairs with us instead,” exclaimed Anna-Maria. “Money isn’t everything.”

  Rebecka was laughing on the other end of the phone.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m in court.”

  “Again? Weren’t you there on Monday and Tuesday?”

  “Mmm…It’s Gudrun Haapalahti in the main office. She’s just completely stopped sending anybody else up here.”

  “You ought to complain,” said Anna-Maria, in an attempt to be helpful.

  “Actually, I’d rather die.” Rebecka laughed. “See you later.”

  Anna-Maria looked at Sven-Erik.

  “Don’t start,” she said.

  She rang Tommy Rantakyrö.

  “Can you check on something for me?” she said, and without waiting for an answer she went on:

  “Find out if any of the people Inna Wattrang spoke to on either of her cell phones lives or works anywhere near the SEB branch on Hantverkargatan in Stockholm.”

  “How exactly did I end up in this telephone hell?” whined Tommy Rantakyrö. “How far back do you want me to go?”

  “Six months?”

  There was a groan on the other end of the phone.

  “Start with January, then. The payment into her account was made on January 15.”

  “Actually, I was just going to ring you,” said Tommy Rantakyrö before Anna-Maria had time to ring off.

  “Yes?”

  “You asked me to check the phone at Abisko tourist station.”

  “Yes?”

  “Somebody, and I reckon it has to be her, rang Diddi Wattrang’s house late on Thursday night.”

  “He told me he didn’t know where she was,” said Anna-Maria.

  “The conversation lasted exactly four minutes and twenty-three seconds. I think he’s lying, don’t you?”

  Mauri Kallis was up in his study, looking down at the yard.

  His wife, Ebba, was walking across the white gravel. Her riding hat under her arm, her new Arabian stallion held loosely. Her black hairband was shiny with sweat, her head drooping, tired but contented.

  Ulrika Wattrang was coming from the opposite direction. She didn’t have the little boy with her. He was probably at home with the nanny.

  The question was whether Diddi had come home yet. As far as Mauri was concerned, it didn’t matter. He could manage the meeting with the African Mining Trust just as well without him. Better. You couldn’t count on Diddi these days. Besides, Mauri could easily get a monkey to do Diddi’s job. You didn’t exactly need to exert yourself to find investors for Mauri’s projects. Now people had lost faith in IT shares, and it seemed impossible to calculate China’s appetite for steel, they were queuing up to join him.

  He’d get rid of Diddi. It was only a question of time before Diddi and his wife and their little prince were told to pack up and move on.

  Ulrika had stopped to talk to Ebba.

  Ebba glanced up at his window, and he stepped back behind the curtain. It moved slightly, but you probably wouldn’t notice from outside.

  I don’t care about her, he thought spitefully about Ebba.

  When she had suggested separate bedrooms, he’d agreed without any discussion. It had no doubt been a final attempt on her part to provoke a row, but he’d felt nothing but relief. It meant he no longer had to lie there pretending not to notice that she was lying there crying with her back to him.

  And I don’t care about Diddi, he thought. I can’t actually remember what I used to think was so fantastic about him.

  I cared about Inna, he thought.

  It’s snowing. It’s two weeks until Christmas Eve. Mauri and Diddi are in their third year at Business School. Mauri is already working part-time for a firm of brokers. He’s started to follow trading in commodities as a little special interest. It will be seventeen years before he ends up on the front cover of Business Week.

  The area around Stureplan is like an advertising film. Or maybe like one of those toys, a plastic dome filled with water, and when you shake it, there’s a snowstorm inside it.

  Beautiful women are drinking espresso and café au lait in the cafés, with shopping bags from the NK department store on the floor beside them, full of packages. Outside, the snow is floating down.

  Little boys and girls in cloaks and duffel coats, like miniature adults, hold on to the hands of their well-dressed parents, almost walking backward so they can see all the Christmas displays in the shop windows. Diddi is making fun of the Christmas displays in Östermalm.

  “They’ve got such a London complex.” He laughs.

  They’re on their way to Riche. Pleasantly tipsy, although it’s only quarter past six in the evening. But they’ve decided it’s time for their Christmas celebrations.

  On the corner of Birger Jarlsgatan and Grev Turegatan, they bump into Inna.

  She’s walking arm in arm with an older man. Much older. He’s bony, in the way that old men are. Death is making its presence felt in his appearance; his skeleton is pressing against his skin from the inside, saying: soon there’ll only be me left. The skin has very little resistance left these days. It’s stretched over his forehead where his cranium bulges outward, without a hint of elasticity. His cheekbones are sticking out above his cheeks, which have collapsed inward. The bones of his wrists are very prominent.

  Not until afterwards does it occur to Mauri that Diddi was about to walk past without saying hello, but of course Mauri stops and introductions are necessary.

  Inna isn’t bot
hered in the least. Mauri looks at her and thinks she’s like a Christmas present herself. Her smile and her eyes always look as though there’s a lovely surprise inside.

  “This is Ecke,” she says, pressing herself affectionately against him.

  All these pet names they have, the upper classes and the nobility. It never ceases to amaze Mauri. There’s Noppe and Bobbo and Guggu. Inna is actually called Honorine. And while a William is never known as Wille, a Walter is always Walle.

  The man extends a bony hand covered with brown age spots from out of his expensive, but somewhat shabby, woolen coat. Mauri finds it disgusting. He resists the urge to sniff at his hand afterwards to see if it smells dirty.

  “I don’t get it,” he says to Diddi when they’ve said goodbye to Inna and her companion. “Is that Ecke?”

  Inna has mentioned him from time to time. She can’t come out with them because she’s off to the country with Ecke, she and Ecke have seen this film or that film. Mauri has pictured an upper-class young man with slicked-back blond hair. Sometimes he’s wondered if he might be married, since they never get to meet him and Inna doesn’t have much to say about him. But then she never says much about her boyfriends. Mauri has also thought that her boyfriends are probably older, and that Inna doesn’t think they’ll have anything in common with her brother and Mauri, little boys who are still at school. But not that much older!

  When Diddi doesn’t reply, Mauri goes on:

  “But he’s an old man! What does she see in him?”

  Then Diddi says, in a casual tone, but Mauri can hear him clinging onto his air of insouciance as it threatens to slip through his fingers, although he’s holding on tightly to it, it’s the only thing he has to hang on to:

  “You really are naive.”

  They stop there on the pavement outside Riche, inside a Christmas card. Diddi flicks his cigarette away and stares intensely at Mauri.

  He’s going to kiss me, thinks Mauri, but doesn’t have time to work out whether that scares him or not before the moment has passed.