The Savage Altar

by Unknown

  “No?” asked Rebecka.

  “Sara was with me when I found him. Well, Lova was too, but she was sleeping in the sledge outside the church. And Sara is in total shock. She won’t speak. I’ve tried to reach her, but she just sits and stares out through the window and tucks her hair behind her ears.”

  Rebecka could feel her stomach tying itself in knots.

  “For God’s sake, Sanna. Get some help. Ring the Psychiatric Service and tell them it’s an emergency. Both you and the girls could do with some support at the moment. I know it sounds dramatic, but—”

  “I can’t, you know I can’t,” wailed Sanna. “Mum and Dad will say I’ve gone mad and they’ll try to take the girls away from me. You know what they’re like. And the church is totally against psychologists and hospitals and all that. They’d never understand. I daren’t talk to the police, they’ll just make everything worse. And I daren’t answer the phone in case it’s some reporter; it was difficult enough when the revival first started, with everybody ringing up and saying he was hallucinating and he was crazy.”

  “But you do understand that you can’t just stay away,” pleaded Rebecka.

  “I can’t cope with this, I can’t cope with this,” said Sanna as if she were talking to herself. “I’m very sorry I rang and disturbed you, Rebecka. You get on with your work now.”

  Rebecka swore to herself. Shit, shit, shit.

  “I’ll come,” she sighed. “You have to let the police interview you. I’ll come up and go with you, okay?”

  “Okay,” whispered Sanna.

  “Can you manage to drive the car? Can you get to my grandmother’s house in Kurravaara?”

  “I can ask someone to give me a lift.”

  “Good. There’s never anyone there in the winter. Take Sara and Lova. You remember where the key is. Get the fire going. I’ll be there this afternoon. Can you manage until then?”

  Rebecka stared at the telephone when she had put the receiver down. She felt empty and confused.

  “Unbelievable,” she said to Maria Taube in an exhausted voice. “She didn’t even have to ask me.”

  Rebecka looked down at her watch. Then she closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose and straightened her head at the same time, then breathed out through her mouth and let her shoulders drop. Maria had seen her do it many times. Before negotiations and important meetings. Or when she was sitting working in the middle of the night with a deadline hanging over her.

  “How do you feel?” asked Maria.

  “I don’t think I want to find out.”

  Rebecka shook her head and let her gaze fly out through the window to avoid Maria’s troubled eyes. She bit her lips hard from the inside. It had stopped raining.

  “Listen, kid, you shouldn’t work so bloody hard,” said Maria gently. “Sometimes it’s a good idea just to let go and scream a bit.”

  Rebecka clasped her hands on her lap.

  Let go, she thought. What happens if you find out you keep on falling? And what happens if you can’t stop screaming. Suddenly you’re fifty. Pumped full of drugs. Shut up in some mental hospital. With the scream that never stops inside your head.

  “That was Viktor Strandgård’s sister,” she said, and was surprised at how calm she sounded. “Evidently she found him in the church. It seems as if she and her two daughters could do with some help right now, so I’m going to take some time off and go up there for a few days. I’ll take my laptop and work from up there.”

  “This Viktor Strandgård, he was something big up there?” asked Maria.

  Rebecka nodded.

  “He had a near-death experience, and then there was a kind of religious explosion in Kiruna.”

  “I remember,” said Maria. “It was in the evening papers. He’d been to heaven, and he said that if you fell over, it didn’t hurt; the ground just sort of received you into its embrace. I thought it sounded lovely.”

  “Mmm.” Rebecka went on, “And he said he’d been sent back to this earthly life to tell everyone that God had great plans for Christianity in Kiruna. A great revival was coming, and it would spread from the north over the whole world. Wonders and miracles would happen if the churches would only unite and believe.”

  “Believe in what?”

  “In the power of God. In the vision. In the end all those who believed in everything joined together to form a new church, The Source of All Our Strength. And then the whole of copper red Kiruna turned into one big revivalist meeting. Viktor wrote a book that was translated into loads of languages. He stopped studying and started preaching. They built a new church, the Crystal Church; it was supposed to make people think of the ice church and the ice sculptures they build in Jukkasjärvi every winter. Above all, it wasn’t meant to remind anyone of the Kiruna church, which is really dark inside.”

  “And what about you? Were you part of all this?”

  “I was already a member of the Mission church before Viktor’s accident. So I was there from the start.”

  “And now?” asked Maria.

  “Now I’m a heathen,” said Rebecka with a mirthless smile. “The pastors and the elders requested that I leave the church.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s a long story; some other time.”

  “Okay,” said Maria hesitantly. “What do you think Måns is going to say when you tell him you’re taking some leave at such short notice?”

  “Nothing. He’s just going to kill me, tear me limb from limb and feed my body to the fish in Nybroviken. I’ll have to talk to him as soon as he gets in, but first I’ll ring the police in Kiruna so they don’t pull Sanna in for questioning; she won’t be able to cope with that.”

  Assistant Chief Prosecutor Carl von Post stood at the door of the Crystal Church and stared at the people who were getting on with the business of packing up Viktor Strandgård’s body. The police surgeon, Senior Medical Examiner Lars Pohjanen, was drawing heavily on a cigarette as usual, mumbling orders to Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, and two burly men with a stretcher.

  “Try and loop his hair up so it doesn’t get caught in the zip. Pull the plastic round the whole thing and try to keep the intestines inside the body when you lift it. Anna, can you sort out a paper bag for the hand?”

  A murder, thought von Post. And a sodding awful murder. Not some miserable bloody tale of an alky who finally kills the old woman more or less by mistake after a week on the booze. A terrible murder. Worse than that—the terrible murder of a celebrity.

  And it was all his. It belonged to him. All he had to do was take the helm, let the whole world switch on the spotlights and sail straight into fame. And then he could get away from this pit. He had never meant to stay here, but his qualifications had only been good enough to get a place with the court in Gällivare. Then he’d got a job with the prosecutor’s office. He’d applied for plenty of jobs in Stockholm, but without success. All of a sudden the years had gone by.

  He stepped to one side to let the men carrying the stretcher, with its well-sealed gray plastic body bag, pass by. Senior Medical Examiner Lars Pohjanen came limping behind, shoulders slightly hunched as if he were cold, eyes fixed on the ground. The cigarette was still dangling from the corner of his mouth. His hair was usually plastered over his shiny bald head; now it was hanging tiredly down over his ears. Anna Granlund was just behind him. She was carrying a paper bag containing Viktor Strandgård’s hand. When she caught sight of von Post her lips tightened. He stopped them on their way out.

  “So?” he said challengingly.

  Pohjanen looked uncomprehending.

  “What can you tell me at this stage?” asked von Post impatiently.

  Pohjanen took his cigarette between his thumb and his index finger and drew heavily on it before he allowed it to leave his thin lips.

  “Well, I haven’t actually performed the autopsy yet,” he answered slowly.

  Carl von Post could feel his pulse rate rising. He wasn’t going to stand for anybody being obstruct
ive or awkward.

  “But surely you must have noticed something already? I want ongoing reports and detailed information at all times.”

  He snapped his fingers as if to illustrate the speed with which all this information was to be passed on.

  Anna Granlund looked at the snapping fingers; it occurred to her that she used exactly the same gesture to her dogs.

  Pohjanen stood in silence, looking at the floor. The sound of his breathing, slightly too fast, quietened only when he raised the cigarette to his lips and inhaled with great concentration. Carl von Post met Anna Granlund’s fierce gaze.

  You can stare, he thought. A year ago at the police Christmas party you were giving me a very different look. For God’s sake, I’m surrounded by spastics and morons. Pohjanen looked worse now than before the operation and his sick leave.

  “Well, then?” he said challengingly, when he thought the doctor had been silent for long enough.

  Lars Pohjanen looked up and met the prosecutor’s raised eyebrows.

  “What I know at this moment,” he said in his rasping voice, which was not much more than a loud whisper, “is that first of all he’s dead, and that secondly death was probably due to externally applied force. That’s all, so you can let us pass now, sonny.”

  The prosecutor saw how the corners of Anna Granlund’s mouth twitched downward in an attempt to suppress a smile as they walked past him.

  “When will I get the autopsy report?” snapped von Post as he followed them to the door.

  “When we’ve finished,” replied Pohjanen, and let the church door slam shut in the assistant chief prosecutor’s face.

  Von Post raised his right hand and caught the swinging door; at the same time he was forced to root in his inside pocket with his left hand because his cell phone had started to vibrate.

  It was the girl from the police switchboard.

  “I’ve got a Rebecka Martinsson on the line saying she knows where Viktor Strandgård’s sister is and she wants to arrange a time for an interview. Tommy Rantakyrö and Fred Olsson have gone to look for the sister, so I didn’t know whether to put her through to them or to you.”

  “You did exactly the right thing; put her through to me.”

  Von Post allowed his gaze to wander up the aisle of the church as he waited for the call to be connected. It was evident that the architect had had a clear vision in mind: the long red handwoven carpet ran along the nave right up to the choir stalls, and on either side stood rows of blue chairs with wavy contours on the back. It made you think immediately of the Bible story of the parting of the Red Sea. He began to stroll up the aisle.

  “Hello,” said a woman’s voice on the telephone.

  He answered with his name and title, and she went on.

  “My name is Rebecka Martinsson. I’m calling on behalf of Sanna Strandgård; I understand that you wish to speak to her with regard to the murder.”

  “Yes; you have information about where we can find her.”

  “Well, not exactly,” continued the polite and almost too well-spoken voice. “Since Sanna Strandgård wishes me to accompany her to the interview, and since I am in Stockholm at the moment, I wanted to check with whoever is in charge of the investigation to see if it would be more convenient for us to come in this evening, or if tomorrow would be better.”

  “No.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No,” said von Post, not bothering to hide his irritation, “it isn’t convenient this evening and it isn’t convenient tomorrow. I don’t know whether you’ve quite grasped this, Rebecka Whatever-your-name-is, but this is actually an ongoing murder investigation, for which I am responsible, and I want to talk to Sanna Strandgård right now. I think you should advise your friend not to stay in hiding, because I’m quite prepared to issue a warrant for her arrest in her absence and to post her as wanted by the police straightaway. As for you, there is a crime called obstructing the police in the course of their duty. If you’re convicted you can end up in prison. So now I would like you to tell me where Sanna Strandgård is.”

  For a few seconds there was silence. Then the young woman’s voice could be heard again. She spoke extremely slowly, almost drawling, and she was clearly exercising considerable self-control.

  “I’m afraid there has been a slight misunderstanding. I am not ringing to ask your permission to come in for an interview with Sanna Strandgård at a later stage, but to inform you that she intends to cooperate fully with the police and that an interview cannot take place before this evening at the earliest. Sanna Strandgård and I are not friends. I am a lawyer with Meijer & Ditzinger; I don’t know whether you are familiar with the name up there—”

  “Well, actually, I was born in—”

  “And I’d think twice about making threats,” the woman interrupted von Post’s attempt to pass a comment. “Any attempt to frighten me into telling you where Sanna Strandgård is seems to me to be bordering on professional misconduct, and if you issue her name as wanted by the police without her being an actual suspect, simply because she is waiting to be interviewed until her legal representative can be present, I can guarantee that a notice from the Justice Department will be heading your way.”

  Before von Post could answer, Rebecka Martinsson continued, her tone of voice suddenly friendly.

  “Meijer & Ditzinger doesn’t wish to cause any difficulties. We normally have a very good working relationship with the Prosecution Service; at least that is our experience in the Stockholm area. I hope you will permit me to guarantee that Sanna Strandgård will present herself for an interview as agreed. Let’s say eight o’clock this evening at the police station.”

  She put the phone down.

  “Shit,” exclaimed Carl von Post as he realized that he had trodden in some blood and something sticky; he didn’t want to think about what that might be.

  He rubbed his shoes along the carpet on the way to the door, feeling slightly sick. He’d deal with that stuck-up cow when she turned up tonight. Now, however, it was time to get ready for the press conference. He rubbed his hand over his face. He needed a shave. In three days he would meet the press with just a little stubble, looking for all the world like an exhausted man giving his all in the hunt for a murderer. But today he needed to be clean shaven, hair just a little tousled. They’d love him. They just wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

  Måns Wenngren, a lawyer and a partner with Meijer & Ditzinger, sat behind his desk and looked at Rebecka Martinsson with a sour expression. Her whole attitude annoyed him. She didn’t look defensive, with her arms folded over her chest. Instead her arms were hanging straight down by her sides as if she were standing in the ice-cream queue. She had explained the situation and was waiting for an answer. Her expressionless gaze rested on the erotic Japanese woodcut on the wall. A young man, so young that he still had long hair, was kneeling in front of a woman, a prostitute, both with their sexual organs exposed. Other women usually tried to avoid looking at the graphic representation, nearly two hundred years old. Måns Wenngren could often see how their eyes were instinctively drawn to the picture, like curious dogs sniffing the air. But they never sniffed for long. They dropped their eyes straightaway, or forced themselves to look somewhere else in the room.

  “How many days will you be away?” he asked. “You’re entitled to two days off with pay for family circumstances, will that be enough?”

  “No,” replied Rebecka Martinsson. “And it isn’t my family; I’m what you might call an old friend of the family.”

  Something in the way she spoke gave Måns Wenngren the feeling that she was lying.

  “Unfortunately I can’t say for sure how long I’ll be away,” said Rebecka, looking him calmly in the eye. “I’ve got quite a bit of holiday owing and—”

  She broke off.

  “And what?” continued her boss. “I hope you’re not about to start talking to me about overtime, Rebecka, because I’d be very disappointed in you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it ag
ain, if you lot feel you can’t cope with the work during normal hours, then by all means resign. Any overtime is voluntary and unpaid. Otherwise I might just as well let you disappear on a year’s sabbatical with pay.”

  He added the last sentence with a conciliatory laugh, but quickly resumed his censorious expression when she didn’t even give a hint of a smile in return.

  Rebecka regarded her boss in silence before she replied. He had started to read some papers lying in front of him, but in a preoccupied manner, as if to indicate that her audience was now at an end. The day’s post lay in a neat pile. A few bits and pieces from Georg Jensen stood to attention along the edge of the desk. No photos. She knew that he had been married and had two grown-up sons. But that was all. He never mentioned them. No one else talked about them either. You found out about things slowly in the office. The senior partners loved to gossip, it was true, but they were sensible enough to gossip only with each other, not with the juniors or associates. The secretaries were far too timid to dare to reveal any secrets. But now and again somebody got a bit too drunk at a party and said something they shouldn’t, and gradually you became one of those in the know. She knew that Måns drank too much, but then practically everybody who met him in the street knew that. He actually looked quite good, with his dark curly hair and his blue husky-dog eyes. Although he was starting to look a bit frayed at the edges. Bags under his eyes and a bit overweight. He was still one of the very best in the country when it came to taxation cases, both criminal and civil. And as long as he brought in the cash, his colleagues were happy to let him drink in peace. It was the money that mattered. Presumably it would be too expensive for the firm to help somebody to stop drinking. A rehab clinic and sick pay, that would cost money, then on top of that there was the loss of income for the firm. His situation was probably the same as many others’. When you drank, your private life was the first thing to fall apart.

  She still felt the prickle of humiliation when she thought about last year’s office Christmas party. Måns had danced and flirted with all the other female lawyers during the evening. Toward the end of the party he had come over to her. Crumpled, drunk and full of self-pity, he had put his hand round the back of her neck and made a rambling speech that had ended in a pathetic attempt to get her to go home with him, or maybe just into his. office, who knows. After that she was at least clear about what she was in his eyes. The last resort. The one you have a go at when you’ve tried everybody else and you’re half a millimeter from unconsciousness. Since then relations between Rebecka and Måns had been frosty. He never laughed or chatted in a natural way with her as he did with the others. She communicated with him mostly via e-mail and notes placed on his desk when he wasn’t in. This year she hadn’t gone to the Christmas party.