“What company is it, then?” Anna-Maria wondered.
Rebecka shrugged her shoulders. Then she pointed at the top right-hand corner of the page.
“The number of the organization begins with eighty-one. That means it must be a foundation.”
Sven-Erik shook his head.
“Jukkasjarvi church nature conservancy foundation,” said Anna-Maria after a second or two. “A foundation she set up.”
“She was wondering about that particular expenditure for training,” said Rebecka.
Silence fell once again. Sven-Erik swatted at a fly that kept wanting to land on him.
“She seems to have got on quite a lot of people’s nerves,” said Rebecka.
Anna-Maria smiled mirthlessly.
“I was talking to one of them yesterday,” she said. “He hated Mildred Nilsson because his ex-wife stayed at her house with the children after she’d left him.”
She told Rebecka about the decapitated kittens.
“And we can’t do a thing,” she concluded. “Those farm cats don’t have any financial value, so it isn’t criminal damage. Presumably they didn’t have time to suffer, so it isn’t cruelty to animals. You just feel so powerless. As if you might be more useful selling fruit and vegetables in the supermarket. I don’t know, do you feel like that as well?”
Rebecka smiled wryly.
“It’s very rare I have anything to do with criminal cases,” she said evasively. “And when I do, it’s financial crime. But yes, this business of being on the side of the suspect… Sometimes I do feel a sort of revulsion toward myself. When you’re representing somebody who really has no conscience whatsoever. You keep repeating ‘everybody is entitled to a defense’ like a kind of mantra against the…”
She didn’t actually say self-contempt, but allowed a shrug of her shoulders to finish the sentence.
Anna-Maria had noticed that Rebecka Martinsson often shrugged her shoulders. Shaking off unwelcome thoughts, perhaps, a way of interrupting a difficult train of thought. Or maybe she was like Marcus. His constant shrugs were a way of marking the distance between him and the rest of the world.
“You’ve never thought about changing sides, then?” asked Sven-Erik. “They’re always looking for public prosecutors, people don’t stay up here.”
Rebecka’s smile was rather strained.
“Of course,” said Sven-Erik, obviously feeling like a complete idiot, “you must earn three times as much as a prosecutor.”
“It’s not that,” said Rebecka. “I’m not actually working at the moment, so the future is…”
She shrugged her shoulders again.
“But you told me you were up here with your job,” said Anna-Maria.
“Yes, I’m working a bit now and again. And when one of the partners was coming up here, I wanted to come along.”
She’s off sick, Anna-Maria realized.
Sven-Erik gave her a lightning glance, he’d understood as well.
Rebecka stood up, indicating that the conversation was at an end. They said good-bye.
When Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria had gone just a few paces, they heard Rebecka Martinsson’s voice behind them.
“Threatening behavior,” she said.
They turned around. Rebecka was standing on the cottage’s little veranda, her hand resting on one of the posts that supported the roof, leaning against it slightly.
She looks so young, thought Anna-Maria. Two years ago she was one of those real career girls. She’d seemed so super-slim and super-expensive, her long dark hair beautifully cut, not just chopped off like Anna-Maria’s. Now Rebecka’s hair was longer. And just chopped off. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. No makeup. Her hip bones stuck out where they met the waistband of her jeans, and her tired but stubbornly upright posture as she leaned against the post made Anna-Maria think about the kind of grown-up children she sometimes met through her job. Coping with impossible circumstances, taking care of their alcoholic or mentally ill parents, looking after their brothers and sisters, keeping the facade up as far as possible, lying to the police and social services.
“The man with the kittens,” Rebecka went on. “It’s threatening behavior. It appears that his action was intended to frighten his ex-wife. According to the law, a threat doesn’t actually have to be spelled out. And she was frightened, I presume. It might be harassment of a female. Depending on what else he’s done, there could be grounds for an injunction to stop him going anywhere near her.”
As Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria were walking along the road on the way back to the car, they met a lion yellow Merc. In it sat Lars-Gunnar and Nalle Vinsa. Lars-Gunnar gave them a long look. Sven-Erik raised his hand in a wave, after all it wasn’t that many years since Lars-Gunnar had retired.
“Of course,” said Sven-Erik, gazing after the car as it disappeared in the direction of Micke’s bar. “He lives down here in the village, I wonder how things are going with that lad of his.”
Bertil Stensson was holding a lunchtime service in Kiruna church. Once every two weeks the townspeople could receive the Eucharist during their lunch break. About twenty people were gathered in the small chapel.
Stefan Wikstrom was sitting in the seat nearest the aisle on the fifth row, wishing he hadn’t turned up.
A memory popped into his head. His father, also a parish priest, at home on the kitchen sofa. Stefan beside him, maybe ten years old. The boy babbling on, he’s holding something, something he wants to show his father, he can’t remember what it was now. His father with the newspaper held up in front of his face like the veil in the temple. And suddenly the boy begins to cry. Then his mother’s pleading voice behind him: you could at least listen to him for a while, he’s been waiting for you all day. Out of the corner of his eye Stefan can see she’s wearing her apron. It must be dinnertime. His father lowers the paper, annoyed at the interruption to his reading, the only restful time of the day before dinner, feeling injured at the accusation in her voice.
Stefan’s father had been dead for many years. His poor mother too. But that was exactly how the priest was making him feel now. Like that annoying child in need of attention.
Stefan had tried to avoid going to the lunchtime service. A voice inside him had said quite clearly: “Don’t go!” But still he went. He’d persuaded himself it was for Bertil Stensson’s sake, not because he was in need of the Eucharist.
He’d thought things would get easier when Mildred was gone, but on the contrary, everything was more difficult. Much more difficult.
It’s like the prodigal son, he thought.
He’d been the dutiful, conscientious son, the one who stayed at home. He’d done so much for Bertil over the years: taken boring funerals, boring services in hospitals and old people’s homes, relieved the parish priest of paperwork-Bertil was useless when it came to administration-unlocked the church for the youngsters on a Friday night.
Bertil Stensson was vain. He’d taken over all the work involving the ice hotel in Jukkasjarvi. Any weddings or christenings in the ice hotel were his. He also bagged any event that had even the slightest chance of ending up in the local press, like the crisis group set up after the road accident when seven young people on a ski trip lost their lives, or specially arranged services for the Sami district court. In between all this, he was very fond of his free time. And it was Stefan who made all this possible, who covered up for him and took over.
Mildred Nilsson had been like the prodigal son. Or more accurately: like the prodigal son must have been while he was still living at home. Before restlessness took him away to foreign lands. Troublesome and difficult, he must have got on his father’s nerves, just like Mildred.
Everybody believed Stefan had been the one who really couldn’t stand Mildred. But they were wrong, it was just that Bertil had been more adept at hiding his dislike.
Things had been different then, when she was alive. Everything the woman touched was surrounded by trouble
