by Asa Larsson
“Sorry to interrupt,” said a voice that was not Mella’s.
When Pohjanen finally turned round, he saw that his visitor was District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson. He had met Martinsson once before, when he had been called in to advise on one of her cases having to do with domestic violence. The husband and wife had given different explanations for the woman’s injuries. But Pohjanen and Martinsson had never spoken outside the courtroom. He could see that she was staring at the thimble of dead skin he was wearing on his index finger.
Introducing herself, she reminded him that they had already met. He said he recalled the circumstances clearly, and asked what she wanted.
“Is that Wilma Persson?” she said.
“Yes, I was just taking her fingerprints. You have to get everything done as quickly as possible – things change very rapidly when you take a body out of the water.”
“I was just wondering if there was any way of establishing whether she actually died at the place where she was found.”
“What makes you think she might not have done?”
Martinsson appeared to steady herself. He noticed how she pursed her lips, shook her head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts and then looked at him as if begging his indulgence.
“I had a dream about her,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “In the dream she said that she had been moved. That she had died somewhere else.”
Pohjanen looked long and hard at Martinsson without speaking. There was not a sound, apart from his own wheezing and the hum from the air conditioning.
“As far as I’m aware, the cause of death was accidental drowning. Is it your intention to turn the case into something more elaborate?”
“No, er, well . . .”
“Is there something I ought to know? How the hell am I supposed to do my job if nobody tells me anything? If you say there’s no suspicion of a crime having been committed, that’s the basis on which I will conduct my examination. I don’t want to be told later on that I’ve missed something. Is that clear?”
“I’m not here to . . .”
“You’re here all the time, but . . .”
She held up her hands.
“Forget it,” she said. “Pay no attention. I should never have come. I was being silly.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that you often are,” Pohjanen said unkindly.
Turning on her heel, she left the room. His comment hung in the air. Rang through the autopsy lab like a church bell.
“The silly bitch should stop poking her nose in,” Pohjanen said to himself defensively.
But his guilty conscience gnawed away at him. The dead spirits surrounding him were unusually silent.
“They can go to hell, the whole lot of ’em,” he said to himself.
A week passes. Snow crashes down from the trees. Sighs deeply as it collapses into the sunny warmth. Bare patches appear. The southern sides of anthills heat up in the sun. The snow buntings return. Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving Fjällborg finds bear tracks in the forest. The big sleep of winter is over.
“Have they found the boy yet?” Fjällborg asks her.
Martinsson has invited Fjällborg and Bella the dog round for supper. She has served sushi, which Fjällborg is forcing down with a sceptical expression on his face. He pronounces it “sishu”, making it sound like a sneeze. Having settled on the sofabed, Bella is lying on her back, hind legs apart, fast asleep. Her front paws keep twitching.
Martinsson says they have not.
“Piilijärvi,” Fjällborg says. “That’s the last place on earth I’d like to live in. That’s where the Krekula brothers live.
“Krekula Hauliers,” he says when he sees that Martinsson has not understood. “Tore and Hjalmar Krekula. They’re about the same age as my kid brother. A right pair of crooks if ever there was one. Huh. It was their father who set up the haulage business, and he was just as bad when he was in his prime. He must be getting on for ninety now. The elder brother, Hjalmar, is the worst. He’s been done for assault loads of times – there are I don’t know how many other people who are too scared to report him. It was the same when they were kids. That was quite a rumpus, that was. Surely you’ve heard about it? About the Krekula brothers? No? No, come to think of it, it was long before your time. Hjalmar can hardly have been ten, and his little brother must have been about six, maybe seven. They were out in the forest. They were taking the cows to their summer pasture. Not all that far away, in fact. Hjalmar left his kid brother behind. Came back home without him. That started a major kerfuffle – soldiers, mountain rescue, the police. But they didn’t find him. They gave up after a week. Everyone thought he was dead. Then out of the blue the little kid turned up at the front door. It was headline news all over Sweden. Tore was interviewed on the wireless, and all the papers wrote about it. The lad survived. A bloody miracle, there’s no other word for it. That Hjalmar, well, he’s as cold as a dead fish. Always has been. Even in primary school the pair of ’em used to go round collecting debts – real ones and made-up ones, it was all the same to them. One of my cousins, Einar – you’ve never met him, he moved away ages ago, been dead for years. Had a heart attack. Anyway, he was at school with the Krekula brothers. And he and his mates had to pay up. If they didn’t, they’d have Hjalmar on their backs.
“Ah well,” Fjällborg says, scraping the wasabi off the rice, “not everything was better in the old days, I suppose.”
FRIDAY, 24 APRIL
Pathologist Lars Pohjanen telephoned Inspector Anna-Maria Mella at 11.15 on the evening of Friday, 24 April.
“Have you got a moment?” he said.
“Of course,” Mella said. “Marcus rented a film; it’s supposed to be deep, profound even. But Robert fell asleep after a few minutes. He woke up just now and said, ‘Are they still sitting around nattering? Haven’t they solved the world’s problems yet?’ Then he fell asleep again.”
“Who is it?” Robert shouted, sounding distinctly drowsy. “I’m awake.”
“It’s Pohjanen.”
“This bloody film is just a gang of people lounging around on a park bench talking, going on and on nonstop,” Robert yelled, loud enough for Pohjanen to hear. “It’s Friday night, for Christ’s sake! What we need is a car chase or two, a few murders and a dollop of sex.”
Pohjanen chuckled.
“I apologize,” said Mella. “I got drunk one night and he made me pregnant.”
“They are not sitting on a park bench. Can you just shut up, please?” Mella’s eldest son Marcus said.
“What’s the film?” Pohjanen asked.
“The Lives of Others. It’s in German.”
“I’ve seen that,” Pohjanen said. “It was good. It made me cry.”
“Pohjanen says he cried when he saw it,” Mella advised Robert.
“Tell him I’m crying my eyes out as well,” Robert yelled.
“There you are, you see,” Mella said to Pohjanen. “The last time he cried was when Wassberg beat Juha Mieto in the 1980 Olympics. Can you be quiet now so I can hear what Pohjanen wants?”
“One hundredth of a second,” Robert said, touched by the memory of that famous skiing victory. “Fifteen kilometres, and he won by five centimetres.”
“Can’t you all shut up so I can watch this film?” Marcus said.
“Wilma Persson,” Pohjanen said. “I tested some water from her lungs.”
“And?”
“And I compared it with water from the river.”
Her son was looking daggers at Mella, who stood up and went into the kitchen.
“Are you still there?” Pohjanen said grumpily. Then he cleared his throat.
“Yes, I’m still here,” Mella said, sitting down on a kitchen chair and trying to ignore Pohjanen’s phlegmy wheezing.
“I . . . khrush, khrush . . . I sent the samples to the Rudbeck Laboratory in Uppsala. Told Marie Allen to push them through rapido. They . . . khrush . . . did a sequential analysis of the samples. Very interesting.”
“Well, this is cutting-edge technology. You can identify the genetic material in anything living in water. Bacteria, algae, that sort of thing. As you probably know, everything is made up of four building blocks. Even us humans. A person’s D.N.A. has three million of these building blocks in a particular sequence.”
Mella looked at the clock. First a profound film in German, then D.N.A. technology with Lars Pohjanen.
“Anyway, I don’t suppose you’re all that interested in such things,” Pohjanen said with a rattling squeak. “But I can confirm that the water in Wilma Persson’s lungs had entirely different algae and micro-organic flora from the water in the river where she was found.”
Mella stood up.
“So she didn’t die in the river,” she said.
“No, she didn’t die in the river,” Pohjanen said.
SATURDAY, 25 APRIL
Sven-Erik Stålnacke was woken by his mobile.
Feeling the familiar wave of early-morning fatigue flow through his body, he answered the phone.
“It’s me,” Anna-Maria Mella said, sounding chirpy.
Holding the phone at arm’s length, he squinted at the display. Twenty past seven.
Mella was an early bird. He was a night owl. They had always had an unspoken agreement that it was O.K. for either of them to ring and wake the other one up. Stålnacke might think of something at 1.00 in the morning and phone Mella. She might phone him bright and early, already in her car and on the way to pick him up. But that had been then.
Then, before Regla, Stålnacke would have said, “Are you up already?” and Mella would have said something about having to drag Gustav out of bed and take him to nursery during the week, while at weekends he would be jumping up and down on her head at dawn, begging her to switch on the television for the children’s programmes.
“Sorry to disturb you so early,” Mella said.
She regretted having phoned him; she had done it without thinking. But things were not as they had been.
Stålnacke could hear the change in her voice, and felt a mixture of regret and bad conscience.
Then he became angry. It was not his fault that things had turned out as they had done.
“Pohjanen rang me late last night,” Mella said, as if to stress that she was not the only one who phoned colleagues at odd times.
In bed next to Stålnacke, Airi Bylund opened her eyes. “Coffee?” she mimed. He nodded. Airi got up and pulled on her red towelling dressing gown. Boxar the cat, who had been fast asleep on Stålnacke’s legs, jumped eagerly down from the bed and tried to grab the belt of Airi’s dressing gown as she tied it round her waist, making it jiggle up and down irresistibly.
“He’s taken samples of water from Wilma Persson’s lungs and from the river, and that’s not where she died,” Mella said.
“You don’t say.”
“You thought that business of the car with no petrol in the tank was odd. Why venture into the back of beyond without enough juice to get them home again? Now we hear that she didn’t die in the river. So how did she get there?”
“You tell me.”
Neither spoke for a while. Finally she said, “I’m going to drive out to Piilijärvi today and ask if anybody there knows where the kids intended to go diving.”
Now was his chance, his opportunity to say he would accompany her.
“Didn’t they ask questions like that when she disappeared?” he said instead.
“Yes, no doubt they asked the people closest to her. But the situation has changed. Now I’m going to ask everyone.”
“Fair enough. Do that. Good luck.”
The silence between them was heavy with disappointment and accusation.
“Thank you,” she said, and hung up.
Airi came in with coffee and open sandwiches on a tray.
“What was all that about?” she said.
“Anna-Maria,” Stålnacke said. “She rings and wakes you up on a Saturday morning and expects you to drop everything and be at her beck and call. She can forget it.”
Airi said nothing. Handed him his mug of coffee.
“She’s so bloody inconsiderate,” he said.
“You know,” Airi said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, “I’ve heard you say that so often this year. But I think that being in-considerate means thinking about not doing something and then doing it anyway. That business at Regla – she just . . . Well, it just happened.”
“She doesn’t think!”
“That’s as may be. But it’s how she is. She’s impulsive, quick to act. I love you, darling, but it would be pretty boring if people were all the same. All I’m trying to say is that I don’t think she just stood there and said to herself, right, I’m going to put my life and Sven-Erik’s at risk.”
Stålnacke got up. Pulled on his trousers. Shoved Boxar exasperatedly to one side just as she went on the attack.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s going to be pretty mild today. I’d better go home and check that there isn’t any snow still lying on the roof. It’ll be wet and heavy if it is.”
“I know,” Airi said to Boxar with a sigh when Stålnacke had left. “It’s a waste of time trying to reason with him.”
Morning sun and pink clouds above the treetops. But all Mella saw was black forest on all sides, and dirty snowdrifts. Her eyes searched automatically for reindeer wandering along the edge of the road, but otherwise concentrated on the frost-damaged tarmac.
Her mood improved significantly when she got out of her car outside Anni Autio’s house.
“There’s a lovely smell of baking in the air,” she said when Anni opened the door.
Once in the kitchen, Anni packed buns and biscuits into plastic bags for Mella to take home with her.
“What else is there for me to do with them?” she said when Mella tried to protest. “All the old folk in the village have freezers chock-a-block with their own buns and biscuits. Surely you can let me offload the odd goodie on you, especially as they’re newly baked? You’re not on a G.I. diet, are you?”
“Good Lord, no.”
“Well, then, dunk away!”
Mella broke a corner off a cinnamon biscuit and dipped it in her coffee.
“Did Wilma and Simon tell you where they were going diving?” she said.
“I didn’t even know they were going diving. I told the police that when they went missing. Nobody knew anything at all. Simon’s mother said that his diving gear had disappeared from the garage, so we assumed they had gone diving. But as you know, they didn’t find the car. No sign of it.”
“I see. Do you think they might have told someone? Their friends in the village, perhaps?”
“There are hardly any young people left in the village. Just us old-timers. The children live in Kiruna or somewhere in the south. They argue among themselves about who’s going to look after the houses they’ve inherited from their parents. They make no attempt to sell them, and they never come to the village, not even in summer. The houses are falling to pieces. I usually refer to my nephews, Tore and Hjalmar Krekula, as ‘the boys’ – but they’re over fifty, for God’s sake. And Tore has two sons of his own: they do a bit of driving for their dad, but they also live in Kiruna. So Wilma and Simon used to stay at home most of the time. They drove into Kiruna now and then. He had a bedsit there. More coffee?”
“No thanks, I’ve had three cups already! Can I take a look at her room?”
“Of course. I won’t come with you, it’s upstairs.”
Anni suddenly looked worried.
“It’s very cold up there. I turned off the heating when she . . . I mean, she wasn’t . . . I suppose I was just thinking of the expense.”
She fell silent, standing by the countertop. Anxiously brushed traces of flour from her apron.
“It’s O.K.,” Mella said. “It costs a lot of money to keep a house warm. I know. I live in one myself.”
“It’s not O.K. The heating should have been on. The house
and I ought to have been ready for her.”
“Do you know what?” Mella said. “You can be practical at the same time as you’re worrying or grieving. I reckon you were doing both.”
“I don’t want to start crying again,” Anni said, looking entreatingly at Mella as if hoping that she would be able to stop her going on about it. “You should have felt what the house was like when she was living here. So full of life. I still keep waking up and thinking it’s time to make her breakfast. I don’t suppose you believe me, knowing that I turned the heating off.”
“Listen, Anni, I couldn’t care less about the heating being off.”
Anni smiled wanly.
“I was so happy back then. I enjoyed every day, every morning when she was here with me. I didn’t take it for granted, though. I knew she could move back to Stockholm at any moment.”
This isn’t a typical teenager’s room, Mella thought as she entered Wilma’s room.
An old office desk stood in front of the window. A blue-painted Windsor-style chair served as a desk chair. The bed was narrow – 80 centimetres, perhaps. On it was a white embroidered bedspread. There were no posters on the walls, no ancient teddy bears or other plush toys to remind Wilma of her childhood. A photograph of her with Simon was pinned to the wall beside the bed. It looked as if Wilma had taken it herself. She was roaring with laughter, he was smiling in mild embarrassment. Mella’s heart bled as she looked at it.
