Hunting is different without the pack. She catches hares and other small wild animals. Not much for a wolf on a long journey.
Her relationship to other animals is different too. Foxes and ravens are quite happy to be with a pack of wolves. The fox eats the pack’s leftovers. The raven prepares the wolf’s table. He shouts from the trees: There’s prey over here! It’s a rutting deer! Busy rubbing his antlers against a tree! Come and get him! A bored raven can sometimes plump down in front of a sleeping wolf, peck its head and take a few hops backwards, looking slightly ridiculous and clumsy. The wolf snaps at it. The bird takes off at the very last second. They can entertain each other like this for quite some time, the black and the gray.
But a lone wolf is no playmate. She doesn’t turn down any prey, doesn’t want to play with birds, isn’t willing to share.
One morning she surprises a vixen outside her earth. Several holes have been dug in a slope. One of the holes is hidden beneath a tree root. Only her tracks and a little bit of soil on the snow outside gives away its location. The vixen emerges from the hole. The wolf has picked up the acrid scent and taken a slight diversion from her route. She moves down the slope into the wind, sees the fox poke her head out, the spindly body. The wolf stops, freezes on the spot, the fox has to come out a little bit further, but as soon as it turns its head in this direction it will see her.
She pounces. As if she were a cat. A fight through the bushes and the branches of a fallen young spruce. Bites the fox right across her back. Snaps the spine. Eats her greedily, holding the body down with one paw as she rips the flesh, gulping down what little there is.
Two ravens immediately appear, working together to try to secure a share. One risks its life, coming dangerously close to make her chase it so that its companion can quickly steal a morsel. She snaps at them as they dive-bomb her head, but her paw doesn’t leave the body of the fox. She gobbles every scrap, then trots around all the other holes, sniffing. If the fox had cubs and they’re not too far down, she can dig them out, but there’s nothing there.
She returns to her original route. The legs of the lone wolf move restlessly onward.
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 11
“It’s just as if he’s been swallowed up by the ground.”
Anna-Maria Mella looked at her colleagues. It was the morning meeting in the prosecutor’s office. They had just established that they had no trace whatsoever of Stefan Wikstrom, the missing priest.
You could have heard a pin drop for the next six seconds. Inspector Fred Olsson, Prosecutor Alf Bjornfot, Sven-Erik Stalnacke and Inspector Tommy Rantakyro looked distressed. That was the worst thing imaginable, that he actually had been swallowed up by the ground. Buried somewhere.
Sven-Erik looked particularly upset. He’d been the last to arrive at the prosecutor’s morning service. It wasn’t like him. There was a small plaster on his chin. It was stained brown with blood. The sign that a man is having a bad morning. The stubble on his throat below his Adam’s apple had escaped the razor in his haste, and was protruding from his skin like coarse gray tree trunks. Below one corner of his mouth were the remains of dried-up shaving foam, like white adhesive.
“Okay, so far it’s still just a missing person,” said the prosecutor. “He was a servant of the church, after all. And then he found out we were onto him about that trip he went on with his family with the wolf foundation’s money. That could well be enough to make him run. The fear of his reputation being ruined. He might pop up somewhere like a jack-in-the-box.”
There was silence around the table. Alf Bjornfot looked at the people sitting there. Difficult to motivate this shower. They seemed to be just waiting for the priest’s body to turn up. With clues and proof to give the investigation a new lease on life.
“What do you know about the period just before he disappeared?” he asked.
“He rang his wife from his cell phone at five to seven on Friday evening,” said Fred Olsson. “Then he was busy with the youngsters in the church, opened up their club, held an evening service at half nine. He left there just after ten, and nobody’s seen him since.”
“The car?” asked the prosecutor.
“Parked behind the parish hall.”
It was such a short distance, thought Anna-Maria. It was perhaps a hundred meters from the youngsters’ club to the back of the parish hall.
She remembered a woman who’d disappeared some years before. A mother of two who’d gone out one evening to feed the dogs in their run. And then she was gone. The genuine despair of her husband, his assurances and everybody else’s that she would never leave her children of her own free will had led the police to prioritize her disappearance. They’d found her buried in the forest behind the house. Her husband had killed her.
But Anna-Maria had thought exactly the same then. Such a short distance. Such a short distance.
“What did you find out from checking phone calls, e-mails and his bank account?” asked the prosecutor.
“Nothing in particular,” said Tommy Rantakyro. “The call to his wife was the last one. Otherwise there were a few work-related calls with various members of the church and the parish priest, a call to the leader of the hunting team about the elk hunt, his wife’s sister… I’ve got a list of the calls here, and I’ve made a little note of what the calls were about.”
“Good,” said Alf Bjornfot encouragingly.
“What did the sister and the parish priest have to say?” wondered Anna-Maria.
“He called the sister to tell her he was worried about his wife. Worried she was going to be ill again.”
“She wrote those letters to Mildred Nilsson,” said Fred Olsson. “Things seem to have been pretty bad between the Wikstroms and Mildred Nilsson.”
“So what did Stefan Wikstrom talk to the parish priest about?” asked Anna-Maria.
“Well, he got a bit worked up when I asked him,” said Tommy Rantakyro. “But he told me Stefan was worried because we’d borrowed the accounts for the wolf foundation.”
An almost imperceptible frown appeared on the prosecutor’s brow, but he didn’t say anything about improper conduct and seizing items without permission. Instead he said:
“Which could indicate that he disappeared of his own free will. That he’s staying away because he’s afraid of the shame. Believe me, the most common reaction to this sort of thing is to bury your head in the sand. You say to yourself ‘can’t they see they’re just making things worse for themselves,’ but often they’ve gone beyond sensible logic.”
“Why didn’t he take the car?” asked Anna-Maria. “Did he just walk off into the wilderness? There weren’t any trains at that time. Nor any flights.”
“Taxi?” asked the prosecutor.
“No pickups,” answered Fred Olsson.
Anna-Maria looked at Fred appreciatively.
You stubborn little terrier, she thought.
“Right, then,” said the prosecutor. “Tommy, I’d like you to…”
“… start knocking on doors in the area around the parish hall asking if anybody’s seen anything,” said Tommy with resignation in his voice.
“Exactly,” said the prosecutor, “and…”
“… and talk to the kids from the church youth club again.”
“Good! Fred Olsson can go with you. Sven-Erik,” said the prosecutor. “Maybe you could ring the profiling group and see what they’ve got to say?”
Sven-Erik nodded.
“How did you get on with the drawing?” the prosecutor asked.
“The lab is still working on it,” said Anna-Maria. “They haven’t come up with anything yet.”
“Good! We’ll meet again first thing tomorrow morning, unless anything major happens in the meantime,” said the prosecutor, folding his glasses with a snap and pushing them into his breast pocket.
