by Asa Larsson
Now someone starts cutting a hole through the ice, stabbing and jabbing with a diving knife.
Tore seems amused.
“Bloody she-cat!” he says, seeming rather impressed. “She’s got spunk, you’ve got to give her that.”
He stands a couple of metres off and watches as the hole grows bigger and bigger. Eventually a hand sticks up through the ice.
Tore immediately runs over and grabs hold of it.
“Hi there, pleased to meet you!” he says, laughing as he pulls the hand back and forth.
He looks provocatively at Hjalmar. The same sort of look he used to give his brother when they were growing up. Stop me if you can, it says. Say something if you dare.
Hjalmar says nothing. He switches off his face, just as he always did. Lets Tore carry on.
Suddenly Tore is standing there with nothing but a diving glove in his hand. Someone has managed to shake off his grip.
“Oh, fuck!” he says in annoyance.
Then he sees someone swimming away beneath the ice. He runs behind, waving the diving glove.
“Wait!” he shouts, and starts laughing. “You’ve forgotten something! Hello!”
All the time he remains above the person swimming beneath the ice.
“Whore!” he shouts.
He sounds angry now. Keeping above her. Panting. He is not used to running. The ice is shiny and slippery, and she is swimming quite fast underneath it.
“Fucking Stockholm whore!”
She is back beneath the door now, scratching and hammering.
Then she swims off again. With Tore after her.
Then it is the end. She stops. So does Tore.
“Now,” he says, breathing heavily. “Now.”
He kneels down and presses his face against the ice.
“Let’s put an A.P.B. out on Tore Krekula,” Anna-Maria Mella says to Stålnacke, Rantakyrö and Olsson.
They have assembled at the police station.
“Inform the duty officers in Gällivare, Boden, Luleå, Kalix and Haparanda for starters. Fax a list of all the vehicles owned by the haulage company and by members of the Krekula family.”
Her mobile pings; there is a voicemail message. She dials the number and listens.
“Oh, shit!” she says.
Her colleagues raise their eyebrows.
“Rebecka has driven off to Piilijärvi to talk to Hjalmar Krekula. Apparently he called her to say he wants to confess.”
She dials Martinsson’s number. No answer.
“Bloody inconsiderate,” she says.
Her colleagues say nothing. Mella looks at Stålnacke. She can see that he is thinking about Regla. If there is anyone who is inconsiderate, it is Mella.
Suddenly she feels exhausted and miserable. She tries to steel herself for anything Stålnacke might say, but she feels vulnerable and defenceless, does not have the strength to clench her fists, roll up her sleeves, put her guard up.
I’ll resign, she thinks. I can’t take any more. I’ll have another child.
A few seconds pass, but an awful lot can happen in a few seconds. Mella looks at Stålnacke. Stålnacke looks at her. Finally he says, “That’s over and done with. Let’s go to Piilijärvi.”
The burden falls from Mella’s shoulders. Like melting snow from a roof in the spring.
“That’s over and done with.” He means Regla.
Hjalmar Krekula takes a sip of coffee. Holds the mug with both hands. Vera scratches demonstratively at his leg: he is not allowed to stop stroking her.
“I didn’t realize that it was her,” he says to Martinsson. “I just didn’t have the strength to think about it. She died there. I stood there.”
“But you’ve thought about her since?”
“Yes,” he says. “A lot.”
“How did she get into the river?”
“Mother said we ought to move her. She didn’t want Wilma’s body to be found there. The aeroplane, you know. People shouldn’t know about that. We pulled her out. We waited for him, but he never came up to the surface.”
Hjalmar closes his eyes. He relives the way they smashed up the door and threw the bits into the hole in the ice.
And we forgot the rucksacks, he thinks. You’re convinced you’re keeping a cool head, but in fact you’re not.
Wiping his face with his hand, he goes on.
“We took the four-wheel-drive into the forest. I was holding her in my lap. That’s when it started to feel unbearable. And that feeling never went away. If only I hadn’t held her in my lap. Then, maybe . . . I don’t know, I might have been able to forget. We put her in their car, where they’d left it near the track. I drove the car to Tervaskoski. The river still hadn’t frozen there. There was only just enough petrol. Tore drove our mother home. Then he drove our car out to where I was. We carried her as far as the rapids, then threw her in. Hid the car keys in the wheel arch.”
“Your mother,” Martinsson says to Hjalmar. “I believe she sold information to the Germans during the war.”
Hjalmar nods.
That could well be, he thinks. He recalls a dance he and his brother went to when they were teenagers. He remembers a lad about their own age giving them a scornful Hitler salute. The lad’s dad was a Communist. It ended up in one hell of a brawl. They did not stop fighting until someone yelled that the police were on their way.
He remembers his mother shouting from the bedroom when his brother lost his way in the forest: “This is the punishment.”
He remembers his father in the sauna. That was not all that long ago. After Johannes Svarvare had told them he had spoken to Wilma about the aeroplane. After Isak’s heart attack. After the killing.
The mood at home was troubled and the atmosphere heavy with everything that could not be said or referred to. Kerttu was wracked with pain. Worse than ever. She complained loudly about how difficult it was to look after her husband. Even so, he was better then. Last winter. One morning at the beginning of March, he was unable to get out of bed. The doctors said he probably had had a series of small heart attacks during the night. He had to stay in bed. But it was better last winter.
“He smells,” Kerttu says to Hjalmar.
She is sitting at the kitchen table wearing her best coat and shoes and with her handbag on her lap, waiting for Tore’s wife Laura to collect her and drive her into town. Kerttu has a doctor’s appointment. Such occasions are the only times she ever leaves the village, when she has to go to the doctors’s, as she puts it. With an extra ’s.
It is clear why she has become aware that her husband smells. She herself has just had a shower and sprayed herself with deodorant and is wearing clean underclothes.
Isak Krekula is out in the village. Walking around despite the serious heart attack he had last autumn. This is something the villagers do now and again – make the rounds. You pay a call on a few other residents, sit in their kitchens, drink coffee and exchange information about the latest goings-on. There are a few other villagers Isak can still visit. Johannes Svarvare, and one or two more. But he no longer talks to most of them. You can fall out with a lot of people during your life. A lot of people no longer want to see him. Business is business, Isak has always said, and there are folk who get angry and feel they have been cheated.
“I can tell you, he’s not easy to get on with, in case you two thought otherwise,” Kerttu says, including the absent Tore in the conversation.
Her voice sounds hard, flat.
“I can handle him, but you’ll have to make sure he cleans himself up. I’ve had more than enough.”
Tore’s wife arrives and sounds the car horn.
Hjalmar sighs. Is he meant to pick a quarrel with his father over this? What is he supposed to do? Tie his father up and hold him under the shower? Go over him with a scrubbing brush?
An hour and a half later, Isak Krekula returns from his rounds. Hjalmar is sitting at the kitchen table.
“I’ve started heating up the sauna,” he says. “Do you w
ant to join me?”
On the table is a six-pack of strong beer.
Isak has no desire to take a sauna. He has been visiting someone who has served up something stronger than coffee, that much is obvious to his son. But Isak eyes the beer with interest.
Hjalmar handles his father skilfully. He does not nag him. Does not ask the same question twice. Gives the impression that it is all the same to him – in no circumstances must Isak catch on to the fact that Hjalmar has been set the task of making sure his father has a bath. Isak stands in the doorway and says nothing. Hjalmar picks up the beer and a towel – only one. Isak lets him pass. Hjalmar makes his way down to the sauna.
He puts the beers in a bucket full of snow, to keep them cold. He gives himself a good wash, then sits down in the sauna and pours water over the hot stones. There is a hissing and a spluttering, and the hot steam rises to the top bench, where he is sitting. His skin feels burning hot. He tries to ignore the fact that his stomach is resting on his thighs – it is disturbing to realize how fat he has become.
Instead, he thinks about how it has become obvious that the house is now the home of two elderly people. In the old days, whenever you started up the sauna there was always a dry smell of pine wood, Russian soap and the fire in the stove. Now when he pours water onto the stones, there is a smell of ingrained dirt – it is a long time since the benches were last given a good scrubbing.
He has almost forgotten his father when he hears the outside door slam. Bending over, he fishes a beer out of the bucket.
Isak comes in and clambers up to the top bench. Hjalmar hands his father a beer, which he swigs rapidly. Then takes another swallow.
There is not much of him left, Hjalmar thinks. A frail old body, thinning hair that is far too long, coarse skin covered in the pock-marks and blotches typical of old age. It does not seem very long since muscles rippled when Isak rolled up his sleeves, or since he could lift the tailboard on one of his lorries without assistance.
Wrath, Hjalmar thinks. Isak’s anger is just as strong as it ever was. It provides the backbone that keeps him upright. The anger he feels, knowing that the other villagers are whispering behind his back, the bastards, half of whom would’ve been unemployed if it hadn’t been for his haulage business; the anger directed at the tax authorities, those damned bloodsuckers, desk-bound wimps who have no idea what life is all about; the anger directed at local politicians, at insurance companies, at company directors, at the jerks in Stockholm, at the evening tabloids, at celebs (junkies, the lot of ’em), at the unemployed and shirkers on benefits – idle swine who malinger and cheat and live off the hard work of others; at everything he sees on the television – news bulletins, game shows, docu-soaps, why the hell should he pay for a licence to watch shit like that?; at whoever is responsible for the fruit in the supermarket at Skaulo, a pile of rotting crap surrounded by swarms of fucking fruit flies; at immigrants and gypsies; at academics – a gang of presumptuous poseurs with ramrods shoved up their arseholes.
At Hjalmar. When Hjalmar passed his thirteenth birthday, his father stopped beating him, reduced it to an occasional box on the ears or smack in the face. When Hjalmar celebrated his eighteenth birthday, his father stopped all that as well.
But his anger did not subside. All that changed was the way it was expressed. Isak’s body has grown weaker as he has become older. He can no longer lift a kitchen chair and smash it to pieces by bashing it against the wall. His voice is now the bearer of his anger. It has become shriller, squeakier. His choice of words is cruder. He searches for words at the very bottom of the dunghill. He wallows in sexual references and swearwords like a village dog in the body of a dead cow.
And now it is directed at Kerttu. It simply has to come out. All that wrath boiling and fermenting inside Isak.
“Huh, that fucking woman. So she’s gone swanning off to the doctor’s now, has she?” he says.
Steeling himself, Hjalmar takes a swig of beer.
“I suppose she has to find someone she can flash her boobs at,” Isak says, and fortifies himself with another swallow.
He goes on to argue that it is a good job there are folk around who get paid for gaping at naked old crones. So that nobody else has to look at their drooping dugs, their sagging bellies, their dried-up pussies. No, it’s better to feast your eyes on young women, isn’t that right, Hjallie? But then, for Christ’s sake, Hjallie hasn’t a clue about that.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever had one, have you? Eh?”
Hjalmar wants to say, “Pack it in now.” But he knows better.
Nevertheless Isak notices how distressed his son has become as a result of his ranting. That he has hit the nail on the head. With what he has said about Kerttu, and what he has said about his son’s naivety. The fact that Hjalmar has never had a woman. Isak cannot know for sure, but he keeps on at him.
“Not even a good screw with some dead-drunk tart?” he says.
That seems to have eased things for Isak. The pressure inside him is reduced when he tortures his son. Hjalmar looks down at his fat belly draped over his thighs.
“I don’t want to hear any more about Mother,” he says, pouring water over the stones so that the steam fizzles and splutters.
Isak pauses for a moment. His son does not usually have anything to say for himself. But the older man cannot hold back.
“You think,” he says, and the influence of the toddies he drank in the village and the strong beer in the sauna is making itself felt, “you seem to think that she’s a saint.”
Leaning back against the wall, he farts loudly.
“A saint in hell,” he says. “You should know. August ’43. The resistance hid Danish and Norwegian freedom fighters and Finnish deserters. She was bloody brilliant at getting people to talk. Sweet and young and innocent, you know what I’m saying. In those days. Some Danish resistance fighters had escaped from a German iron-ore freighter in Luleå harbour – they’d been working as slave labourers. Three of them. She went to a dance and persuaded a young man to tell her all about it. Everything. Made a bloody whore of herself, that’s what she did. They were in a hut in the forest. Things didn’t turn out well for them at all.”
Hjalmar is filled with horror and disgust. What? What is his father saying?
Isak turns to look at his son. Something resembling a smile creeps over his face. A grin. Hjalmar thinks he looks like a snake, a bug, something you find when you turn over a stone. His old-man’s teeth protrude provocatively. He does not have false teeth, but what he does have is enough to send shivers up your spine.
“What’s happened to Simon and Wilma?” Isak says.
Hjalmar shrugs.
Isak does not know. Nobody has told him. Of course he has his suspicions. The alcohol encourages him to ask. He is raving over having been excluded, shut out. He has been shrugged off, an old man who does not count. Someone who has to be protected. Someone who cannot be trusted. He is not allowed to know. He is not allowed to drive a car. Anger is gnawing away inside him like a parasite.
“She’ll burn in hell,” he says. “You probably think that’s what will happen to me. But she’ll be a few levels further down. So there.”
His tone of voice changes. He becomes self-absorbed.
“So there, so there,” he says over and over again.
Then he falls silent. Seems to regret having said too much.
“Huh,” he says petulantly. “It wasn’t all that hot in here. You didn’t make the fire hot enough. There’s still too much of a chill in the walls.”
He clambers down from the bench and goes out into the cooling room. Hjalmar can hear him splashing away in the wash basin. Then the outside door closes with a bang.
“What about Hjörleifur Arnarson?” Martinsson says. “What happened to him?”
“That was Tore,” Hjalmar says. “He hit him with a piece of firewood. We couldn’t risk him having seen something. We moved him. Knocked the kitchen stool over. Opened the cupboard and put one of
the rucksacks inside it. It was supposed to look like an accident.” Closing his eyes, he recalls his brother telling him to hold up Hjörleifur’s blood-covered head so that it would not leave a trail on the floor when Tore dragged him along by his legs.
Thank you, God, Martinsson thinks. That means we can put Tore behind bars. The spots of blood on his jacket plus Hjalmar’s testimony. A watertight case.
“What are you intending to do now?” she says. “You’re not thinking of shooting yourself, I hope?”
“No.”
She starts talking more quickly.
“Because if you did . . .” she says, “I couldn’t cope. Not after Lars-Gunnar Vinsa. I was there when he shot himself and Nalle. He’d locked me in the cellar.”
“I know. I read about it. But I’m not going to.”
Looking down at his mug of coffee, he shakes his head.
“Mind you, I did think about it.”
He looks up at her.
“You told me to go out into the forest. And I did. Something happened that I can’t explain. A bear looked at me. It came really close.”
“And?”
“It was as if there was something bigger than me. And I don’t mean the bear. Afterwards I just knew that I had to confess. I had to get it all out of me. All the lies.”
She looks at him doubtfully.
“So why did you come out here?”
“I thought I’d better come here and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I don’t know. For whatever was going to happen. For everything that had to happen.”
Tore Krekula stops the snow scooter beside Hjalmar’s car. There is another car parked there as well. But smoke is only coming from Hjalmar’s chimney. So who is there with Hjalmar? Tore texts the Road Licensing Authorities, asking who owns a car with that registration number. The reply comes immediately. Rebecka Martinsson, Kurravaara. Prosecutor. Her being there is not a problem. He will finish her off. And then his brother.
The death of Hjalmar Krekula will have to look like suicide. Given the state he seems to be in at the moment, he might well kill himself anyway. Maybe he just needs a bit of persuasion. Tore will fix that. Hjalmar killed Wilma and Simon. And as for Hjörleifur, let’s see . . . Hjalmar borrowed Tore’s jacket . . . No, that’s no good: Hjalmar’s so bloody fat, he would never fit into his brother’s jacket. No, here we go: Tore was standing next to Hjörleifur, they were only going to talk to him – but suddenly, without warning, Hjalmar lashed out with the lump of firewood. A splash of blood landed on Tore’s jacket. Yes, that’ll do the trick. Hjalmar murders the prosecutor, then kills himself. Somehow. Tore will have to improvise a bit, but it will be alright. It will all turn out O.K. No problem.
