Sven-Erik, come and help me, she thought.
He knew how to talk to women.
Anki Lindmark shrugged her shoulders.
“Anything we discuss is just between you and me,” said Anna-Maria in an attempt to push the continental shelves together. “Are you afraid of him?”
“Tell her why you live here,” said her mother.
“Well,” said Anki Lindmark. “In the beginning, after I left him, I lived in Mum’s cottage in Poikkijarvi…”
“It’s been sold now,” said her mother. “We can’t go out there anymore. Carry on.”
“… but Magnus kept giving me articles out of the evening paper about fires and so on, and in the end I didn’t dare live there anymore.”
“And the police can’t do a thing,” said the mother with a mirthless smile.
“He’s not bad to the boys, you mustn’t think that. But sometimes when he drinks… well, he sometimes comes up and shouts and yells at me… whore and all sorts… kicking the door. So it’s best to live here where we’ve got neighbors and no windows at ground level. But before I got this apartment and found the courage to live on my own with the boys, I stayed with Mildred. But she got her windows smashed and he… and slashed tires… and then her shed caught fire.”
“And that was Magnus?”
Anki Lindmark looked down at the table. Her mother leaned over to Anna-Maria.
“The only people who don’t believe it was him are the bloody police,” she said.
Anna-Maria refrained from explaining the difference between believing something and being able to prove it. She nodded thoughtfully instead.
“I just hope he’ll find somebody new,” said Anki Lindmark. “Preferably have children with her. But things have been better lately, since Lars-Gunnar talked to him.”
“Lars-Gunnar Vinsa,” said her mother. “He’s a policeman, or he was-he’s retired now. And he’s the leader of the hunting club. He talked to Magnus. And if there’s one thing Magnus doesn’t want, it’s to lose his place with the hunt.”
Lars-Gunnar Vinsa, Anna-Maria knew who he was. But he’d only worked for a year after she started in Kiruna, and they’d never worked together. So she couldn’t say she knew him. He had a mentally handicapped son, she remembered. She remembered how she’d found that out too. Lars-Gunnar and a colleague had arrested a heroin user who was playing up down at the Cupola club. Lars-Gunnar had asked if she had any needles in her pockets before he searched her. No bloody chance, they were at home in her apartment. So Lars-Gunnar had stuck his hands in her pockets to go through them and had jabbed himself with a needle. The girl had come into the station with her upper lip like a burst football and blood pouring from her nose. His colleagues had talked Lars-Gunnar out of owning up, that’s what Anna-Maria had heard. That was in 1990. It took six months to get a definite result from an HIV test. After that there was a lot of talk about Lars-Gunnar and his six-year-old son. The boy’s mother had abandoned the child and Lars-Gunnar was all he had.
“So Lars-Gunnar spoke to Magnus after the fire?” asked Anna-Maria.
“No, it was after the cat.”
Anna-Maria waited in silence.
“I used to have a cat,” said Anki, clearing her throat as if she had something stuck in it. “Puss. When I left Magnus I shouted for her, but she’d been gone for a while. I thought I’d come back later to collect her. I was so nervous. I didn’t want to meet Magnus. He kept ringing me. And my mother. In the middle of the night, sometimes. Anyway, he rang me at work and said he’d hung a carrier bag with some things of mine in it on the door of the apartment.”
She stopped speaking.
Her mother blew a cloud of smoke at Anna-Maria. It drifted apart in thin veils.
“Puss was in the bag,” she said, when her daughter didn’t speak. “And her kittens. Five of them. They’d all had their heads chopped off. It was just blood and fur.”
“What did you do?”
“What could she do?” her mother went on. “You lot can’t do anything. Even Lars-Gunnar said the same. If you report something to the police, it has to be a crime. If they’d suffered, it could have been cruelty to animals. But as he’d chopped their heads off, they wouldn’t have suffered at all. It could have been criminal damage if they’d had any financial value, if they’d been pedigree cats or an expensive hunting dog or something. But they were just farm cats.”
“Yes,” said Anki Lindmark. “But I don’t think he’d kill…”
“Okay, what about later then?” said her mother. “After you’d moved here? Don’t you remember what happened with Peter?”
Her mother stubbed out her cigarette, got out a new one and lit it.
“Peter lives in Poikkijarvi. He’s divorced too, but such a nice, kind guy. Anyway, he and Anki started seeing each other now and again…”
“Just as friends,” Anki interjected.
“One morning when Peter was on his way to work, Magnus pulled out straight in front of him. Magnus stopped the car and jumped out. Peter couldn’t drive around, because Magnus had parked sort of diagonally across the narrow gravel track. And Magnus jumps out and goes to the trunk and gets out a baseball bat. Walks over to Peter’s car. And Peter’s sitting there thinking he’s going to die and thinking about his own kids, thinking maybe he’s dead meat. Then Magnus just lets out a loud guffaw, gets back in his own car and screeches away with the gravel spraying up around his tires. So that was the end of the dating, wasn’t it, Anki?”
“I don’t want to quarrel with him. He’s very good to the boys.”
“But you hardly dare go to the supermarket. There’s hardly any difference from before, when you were married to him. I’m so bloody tired of the whole thing. The police! They can do sod all.”
“Why was he so angry with Mildred?” asked Anna-Maria.
“He said she’d kind of influenced me to leave him.”
“And had she?”
“No, she hadn’t,” said Anki. “I’m an adult. I make my own decisions. And I’ve told Magnus that.”
“And what did he say?”
“ ‘Did Mildred tell you to say that?’ ”
“Do you know what he was doing the night before midsummer’s eve?”
Anki Lindmark shook her head.
“Has he ever hit you?”
“He’s never hit the boys.”
Time to go.
“Just one last thing,” said Anna-Maria. “When you were staying with Mildred. What impression did you get of her husband? How were things between them?”
Anki Lindmark and her mother exchanged glances.
The talk of the village, thought Anna-Maria.
“She came and went like the cat,” said Anki. “But he seemed happy with things as they were… I mean, they never fell out or anything.”
The evening was closing in. The hens went into the henhouse and nestled close together on their perches. The wind eased and lay down on the grass. Details were obliterated. Grass, trees and buildings floated away into the dark blue sky. Sounds crept closer, became clearer.
Lisa Stockel listened to the sound of the gravel beneath her feet as she walked down the track to the bar. Her dog Majken trailed behind her. In an hour the women’s group would be holding its autumn meeting and dinner at Micke’s.
She’d stay sober and take it easy. Put up with all that talk about how everything must carry on without Mildred. How Mildred felt just as close now as when she was alive. All she could do was bite the insides of her lips, hang on to the chair and not stand up and shout: We’re finished! Nothing can carry on without Mildred! She isn’t close! She’s
