ANNA-MARIA: Where did she come from originally?
ERIK NILSSON: She was born and bred in Uppsala. Daughter of a parish priest. We met when I was studying physics. She used to say she was fighting against moderation. “As soon as you feel too strongly about something, the church sets up a crisis group.” She talked too much, too quickly and too loudly. And she was almost manic once she got an idea in her head. It could drive you mad. I wished a thousand times that she was a bit more moderate. But… [gestures with his hand]… when a person like that is snatched away… it isn’t only my loss.
She’d looked around the house. There was nothing next to Mildred’s side of the double bed. No books. No alarm clock. No Bible.
Suddenly Erik Nilsson was standing behind her.
“She had her own room,” he said.
It was a little room under the eaves. There were no flowers in the window, just a lamp and some ceramic birds. The narrow bed was still unmade, just as she must have left it. A red fleecy dressing gown lay carelessly tossed across it. On the floor beside the bed, a tower of books. Anna-Maria had looked at the titles:
“There’s nothing to see here,” said Erik Nilsson tiredly. “There’s nothing more for you to see.”
It was odd, thought Anna-Maria, folding the children’s clothes. It was as if he was hanging on to his dead wife. Her mail lay unopened in a big pile on the table. Her glass of water was still on the bedside table, and beside it her reading glasses. The rest of the house was so clean and tidy, he just couldn’t bring himself to tidy her away. And it was a lovely home. Just like something out of one of those interior design magazines. And yet he’d said it wasn’t a home, but “half priest’s house, half hotel.” And then he also said he “respected her.” Strange.
Rebecka drove slowly into town. The gray white moonlight was absorbed by the asphalt and the rotting leaf canopy. The trees were pulled back and forth in the wind, seemed as if they were almost reaching out hungrily for the poor light, but getting nothing. They remained naked and black. Wrung out and tortured just before their winter sleep.
She drove past the parish hall. It was a low building made of white bricks and dark-stained wood. She turned up on to Gruvvagen and parked behind the old dry cleaner’s.
She could still change her mind. No, actually, she couldn’t.
What’s the worst that can happen? she thought. I can get arrested and fined. Lose a job I’ve already lost.
Having got this far, it felt as if the worst she could do would be to go back to the chalet and back to bed. Get on the plane to Stockholm tomorrow morning and keep on hoping that she’d be sufficiently sorted out on the inside to go back to work again.
She thought about her mother. The memory rose to the surface, vivid and tangible. She could almost see her through the side window of the car. Nice hair. The pea green coat she’d made herself, with a wide belt around the waist and a fur collar. The one that made the neighbors roll their eyes to heaven when she swished past. Who exactly did she think she was? And the high-heeled boots that she hadn’t even bought in Kiruna, but in Lulea.
It felt like a stab of love in her breast. She’s seven years old, reaching out her hand for her mummy. Her coat is so beautiful. And her face too. Sometime when she was even younger she’d said, “You’re like a Barbie doll, Mummy.” And Mummy laughed and hugged her. Rebecka took the opportunity to breathe in all those wonderful aromas at close quarters. Mummy’s hair smelled nice. The powder on her face too, but it smelled different. And the perfume in the hollow of her throat. Rebecka said the same thing on several occasions afterward too: “You look like a Barbie doll,” just because Mummy had been so pleased. But she was never as pleased as that again. It was as if it had only worked the first time. “That’s enough, now” her mother had said in the end.
Now Rebecka remembered. There was more. If you looked a little more closely. What the neighbors didn’t see. That the shoes were cheap. The nails split and bitten right down. The hand that carried the cigarette to the lips shaking slightly, as it does when people are of a nervous disposition.
On the rare occasions when Rebecka thought about her, she always remembered her as being frozen. Wearing two thick sweaters and woolly socks at home by the kitchen table.
Or like now, shoulders slightly raised, there’s no room for a thick sweater under the elegant coat. The hand that isn’t holding the cigarette is hidden in the coat pocket. She peers into the car and finds Rebecka. Narrow, searching eyes. Corners of her mouth turned down. Who’s crazy now?
I’m not crazy, thought Rebecka. I’m not like you.
She got out of the car and walked quickly toward the parish hall. Almost running away from the memory of the woman in the pea green coat.
Someone had kindly smashed the light above the back door of the hall. Rebecka tried the keys. There might be an alarm. Either the cheap version that only sounds inside the building, to frighten away thieves. Or a proper one that goes through to a security firm.
It’s okay, she told herself. The national guard aren’t likely to turn up; it’ll be some tired security guy in a car who’ll pull up outside the front door. Plenty of time to get away.
Suddenly one of the keys fitted. Rebecka turned it and slipped inside into the darkness. Silence. No alarm. No beeping noise to indicate that she had sixty seconds to punch in a code. The parish hall was in the basement, so the back door was upstairs and the main entrance was on the ground floor. She knew the office was upstairs. She didn’t bother creeping about.
There’s nobody here, she said to herself.
It felt as if her footsteps were echoing as she walked quickly across the stone floor to the office.
The room containing the lockers was inside. It was narrow and windowless; she had to put the light on.
Her pulse rate increased and she fumbled with the keys as she tried them in the locks of the unmarked gray lockers. If anybody came along now, she had no way of escape. She tried to listen out on to the stairs and the street. The keys were making more noise than church bells.
When she tried the third locker the key turned smoothly in the lock. It must be Mildred Nilsson’s. Rebecka opened it and looked inside.
It was a small locker. There wasn’t much, but it was almost full. A number of small boxes and fabric bags containing jewelry. A pearl necklace, some heavy gold rings with stones inset, earrings. Two wedding rings, worn smooth with age, left to her no doubt. A blue folder, containing a pile of papers. There were also several letters in the locker. The addresses on the envelopes were in different handwriting.
Now what do I do? thought Rebecka.
She wondered what the parish priest might know about the contents of the locker? Would he miss anything?
She took a deep breath, then went through the whole lot. Sat on the floor and sorted it all into piles around her. Her brain was working as it usually did now, quickly, taking in information, processing, sorting. Half an hour later Rebecka switched on the office’s photocopier.
She took the letters as they were. There might be prints or traces on them. She put them in a plastic bag she found in a drawer.
She copied the papers from the blue folder. She put the copies along with the letters in the plastic bag. She put the folder back in the locker and locked it, turned off the light and left. It was half past three in the morning.
Anna-Maria Mella was woken by her daughter Jenny tugging at her arm.
“Mummy, there’s somebody ringing the doorbell.”
The children knew they weren’t allowed to open the door at unusual times. As a police officer in a small town, you could get strange visitors at odd times. Tearful thugs looking for the only mother confessor they had, or colleagues with serious faces and the car engine running. And sometimes, very rarely, but it did happen, somebody who was angry or high on something, often both.
Anna-Maria got up, told Jenny to creep in beside Robert, and went down into the hall. She had her cell phone in
