“Why were you annoyed with her?”
“Annoyed,” he spat. “Annoyed, I get annoyed with the fucking dog when she stands there barking at a squirrel. I’m not the hypocritical type, I’ve got no problem admitting I hated her. And I wasn’t the only one.”
Keep talking, thought Anna-Maria, nodding sympathetically.
“Why did you hate her?”
“Because she broke up my marriage, that’s why! Because my son starting pissing in his bed when he was eleven years old! We had problems, Anki and me, but once she’d spoken to Mildred there was no more talk of sorting things out. I said ‘do you want to go to family counseling, I’ll do that if you want,’ but no, that fucking priest messed with her head until she left me. And took the kids with her. You didn’t think the church approved of that sort of thing, did you?”
“No. But you…”
“Anki and I used to quarrel, sure. But maybe you and your old man have words now and again?”
“Often. But you got so angry that you…”
Anna-Maria broke off and leafed through her notebook.
“… set fire to her shed, punctured her tires, smashed the glass in her greenhouse.”
Magnus Lindmark smiled broadly at her and said sweetly:
“But that wasn’t me.”
“So what were you doing the night before midsummer’s eve?”
“I’ve already said, I stayed over with a friend.”
Anna-Maria read from her notebook.
“Fredrik Korpi. Do you often stay over with your little friends?”
“When you’re too fucking pissed to drive home…”
“You said you weren’t the only one who hated her? Who else?”
He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.
“Just about anybody.”
“Well liked, I heard.”
“By a load of hysterical old women.”
“And a number of men.”
“Who are nothing but hysterical old women. Ask any, excuse the expression, real man and they’ll tell you. She was after the hunting fraternity as well. Wanted to cancel their permit and fuck knows what else. But if you think Torbjorn killed her, then you’ve got that fucking wrong as well.”
“Torbjorn?”
“Torbjorn Ylitalo, the church’s forest warden and the chairman of the hunting club. They had a terrible quarrel back in the spring. I reckon he’d have liked to stick his shotgun in her mouth. And then she started that fucking wolf foundation. And that’s a class thing, you know. It’s easy for a load of fuckers from Stockholm to love wolves. But the day a wolf comes down to their golf courses and their terrace bars and gobbles up their poodles for breakfast, they’ll be out there hunting!”
“But Mildred Nilsson wasn’t from Stockholm, was she?”
“No, but somewhere down there. Torbjorn Ylitalo’s cousin had his old dog killed by a wolf when he went down to Varmland to visit his in-laws at Christmas ninety-nine. He sat there in Micke’s crying when he was telling us about finding the dog. Or the remains of the dog, I should say. There was only the skeleton left, and a few bloody scraps of fur.”
He looked at her. She kept her face expressionless-did he think she was going to faint because he was talking about skeletons and scraps of fur?
When she didn’t say anything he turned his head aside, his gaze sweeping away across the pine trees to the ragged clouds scudding across the chilly blue autumn sky.
“I had to get a lawyer before I was allowed to meet my own kids, for fuck’s sake. I hope she suffered. She did, didn’t she?”
When Rebecka and Nalle got back to Micke’s bar, it was already five o’clock in the afternoon. Lisa Stockel was walking down toward the bar from the road, and Nalle ran to meet her.
“Dog!” he shouted, pointing at Lisa’s dog Majken. “Little!”
“We’ve been looking at puppies,” explained Rebecka.
“Becka!” he yelled, pointing at Rebecka.
“Wow, you’re popular,” Lisa smiled at Rebecka.
“The puppies swung it,” Rebecka replied modestly.
“He loves anything to do with dogs,” said Lisa. “You like dogs, don’t you, Nalle? I heard you looked after Nalle today, thanks for that. I can pay if you’ve had any expenses for food and so on.”
She took a wallet out of her pocket.
“No, no,” said Rebecka, waving her hand, and Lisa dropped the wallet on the ground.
All her cards fell out onto the gravel, her library ticket, supermarket loyalty card, her Visa card and her driving license.
And the photograph of Mildred.
Lisa bent down quickly to gather everything up, but Nalle had already picked up the photograph of Mildred. It had been taken during a coach trip the Magdalena group had gone on, to a retreat in Uppsala. Mildred was smiling at the camera, surprised and reproachful. Lisa had been holding the camera. They’d stopped to stretch their legs.
“Illred,” said Nalle to the photograph, and laid it against his cheek.
He smiled at Lisa as she stood there, her hand impatiently outstretched. She had to exercise an iron control not to snatch it off him. It was a bloody good job nobody else was there.
“They were friends, those two,” she said, nodding toward Nalle, who still had the photograph pressed against his cheek.
“She seems to have been a very special priest,” said Rebecka seriously.
“Very,” said Lisa. “Very.”
Rebecka bent down and patted the dog.
“He’s such a blessing,” said Lisa. “You forget all your troubles when you’re with him.”
“Isn’t it a bitch?” asked Rebecka, peering under the dog’s stomach.
“I was talking about Nalle,” said Lisa. “This is Majken.”
She stroked the dog absentmindedly.
“I’ve got a lot of dogs.”
“I like dogs,” said Rebecka, stroking Majken’s ears.
Not so keen on people, though? thought Lisa. I know. I was like that myself for a long time. Probably still am.
But Mildred had got Lisa to do whatever she wanted. Right from the start. Like when she got Lisa to give talks about budgeting. Lisa had tried to refuse. But Mildred had been… stubborn was a ridiculous word. You couldn’t contain Mildred in that word.
“Don’t you care?” asks Mildred. “Don’t you care about people?”
Lisa is sitting on the floor with Bruno lying alongside her. She’s clipping his claws.
Majken is standing beside them like a nurse, supervising. The other dogs are lying in the hallway hoping it will never be their turn. If they keep really still and quiet, maybe Lisa will forget about them.
And Mildred is sitting on the sofa in the kitchen and explaining. As if the problem was that Lisa didn’t understand. Magdalena, the women’s group, wants to help women who’ve gone adrift in purely financial terms. Long term unemployed, those on benefit because they’re signed off sick for a long time, with the authorities after them and the kitchen drawers stuffed full of papers from debt collecting agencies and God knows who else. And
