Afterward. Every single day afterward, she thinks about that. All the time. That Lars-Gunnar’s car wasn’t there. That Lars-Gunnar is all Nalle’s got. That nothing can bring Mildred back to life.
Mans Wenngren rings and wakes Rebecka Martinsson. Her voice is warm, a little bit hoarse because it’s early.
“Up you get!” he orders. “Get yourself a coffee and something to eat. Have a shower and get yourself ready. I’ll ring again in twenty minutes. You need to be ready by then.”
He’s done this before. When he was married to Madelene and still putting up with her periodic agoraphobia and panic attacks and God knows what else, he used to talk her through visits to the dentist, meals with relatives, buying shoes at the NK department store. Every cloud… at least he knows the technique by now.
He rings after twenty minutes. Rebecka answers like an obedient Girl Guide. Now she’s to get in the car, drive into town and take out enough money to pay the rent on her cabin in Poikkijarvi.
The next time he calls, he tells her to drive down to Poikkijarvi, park outside the bar and ring him.
“Right,” says Mans when she calls him. “It’ll take a minute and a half, then the whole thing will be behind you. Go in and pay. You don’t need to say a word if you don’t want to. Just hold out the money. When you’ve done that, get back in the car and call me again. Okay?”
“Okay,” says Rebecka, like a child.
She sits in the car and looks at the bar. It looks white and slightly scruffy in the bright autumn sunshine. She wonders who’s there. Micke or Mimmi?
Lars-Gunnar opens his eyes. It’s Stefan Wikstrom who wakes him through the dream. His pathetic cries, whining and whimpering as he falls to his knees by the lake. When he knows.
He’s been asleep in the armchair in the living room. His gun is on his knee. He gets up with difficulty, his back and shoulders stiff. He goes up to Nalle’s room. Nalle is still fast asleep.
He should never have married Eva, of course. But he was just a stupid man from Norrland. Easy prey for somebody like her.
He’s always been big. He was fat even as a child. At that time children were skinny little sprats chasing after footballs. They were thin and quick and threw snowballs at fat boys lumbering home as fast as their legs would carry them. Home to Dad. Who hit them with his belt if he felt like it.
I’ve never raised a hand to Nalle, he thinks. I never would.
But Lars-Gunnar the fat boy grew up and did very well in school despite the hassles. He trained to be a policeman and moved back home. And now he was a different man. It’s not easy to return to the village of your childhood without falling back into the role you had before. But Lars-Gunnar had changed during his year at the police training college. And you don’t mess with a policeman. He had new friends too. In town. Colleagues. He got a place on the hunting team. And because he wasn’t afraid of hard work and was good at planning and organizing, he soon became the leader of the hunt. The idea had been to make it a rotating post, but it never happened. Lars- Gunnar thinks it probably suited the rest of them to have somebody planning and organizing things. In a little corner of his mind he’s also aware that nobody would have dared to question his right to continue as leader. That’s good. No harm in a bit of respect. And he’s earned that respect. Not exploited it as some would have done.
No, his problem has been that he’s too nice. Always thinks well of his fellow men. Like Eva.
It’s hard not to blame himself. But he’d turned fifty when he met her. Lived alone all those years, because things never worked out with women. He was still kind of slow with them, conscious that his body was far too big. And then there was Eva. Who leaned her head against his chest. Her head almost disappeared in his hand when he held her close. “My little one,” he used to say.
But when it didn’t suit her any longer, she’d cleared off. Left him and the boy.
He can hardly remember the months that dragged by after she left. It was like a darkness. He’d thought people were looking at him in the village. Wondered what they were saying about him behind his back.
Nalle turns over laboriously in his sleep. The bed creaks beneath him.
I must… thinks Lars-Gunnar, and loses the thread of his thought.
It’s difficult to concentrate. But everyday life. That has to carry on. That’s the whole point. His and Nalle’s everyday life. The life Lars-Gunnar has created for them both.
I must get some shopping, he thinks. Milk and bread and margarine. Everything’s running out.
He goes downstairs and rings Mimmi.
“I’m going into town,” he says. “Nalle’s asleep and I don’t want to wake him up. If he comes over to you, give him some breakfast, will you?”
“Is he there?”
Anna-Maria Mella had phoned the medical examiner’s office in Lulea. Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, answered, but Anna-Maria wanted to speak to Lars Pohjanen, the senior police surgeon. Anna Granlund kept an eye on him like a mother looking after her sick child. She kept the autopsy room in perfect order. Opened up the bodies for him, lifted out the organs, put them back when he’d finished, stitched them up and wrote the major part of his reports as well.
“He can’t retire,” she’d said to Anna-Maria on one occasion. “It’s like a marriage in the end, you know; I’ve got used to him, I don’t want anybody else.”
And Lars Pohjanen kept plodding on. Seemed as if he were breathing through a pipe, sucking out the fluid. Just talking made him breathless. A year or so earlier he’d had an operation for lung cancer.
Anna-Maria could see him in her mind’s eye. He was probably asleep on the scruffy seventies sofa in the staff room. The ashtray beside his well-worn clogs. His green scrubs spread over him like a blanket.
“Yes, he’s here,” Anna Granlund replied. “Just a minute.”
Pohjanen’s voice on the other end of the phone, scratchy and rattling.
“Tell me,” said Anna-Maria, “you know how bloody useless I am at reading.”
“There isn’t much. Hrrrm. Shot in the chest from the front. Then in the head, at very close range. There’s an explosive effect in the exit wound from the head.”
A long intake of breath, the sucking noise.
“… waterlogged skin, but not swollen… although you know when he disappeared…”
“Friday night.”
“I’d assume he’s been there since then. Minor damage to those parts of the skin not covered by clothing, the hands and face. The fish have been nibbling. Not much more. Have you found the bullets?”
“They’re still looking. Any signs of a struggle? No other injuries?”
“No.”
“And otherwise?”
Pohjanen’s voice became snappy.
“Nothing, I told you. You’ll have to ask somebody… to read the report out loud for you.”
“I meant how were things with you.”
“Oh, I see,” he said, his tone instantly more amiable. “Everything’s crap, of course.”
Sven-Erik Stalnacke was talking to the police psychiatrist. He was sitting in the parking lot in his car. He liked her voice. Right from the start he’d taken to its warmth. And he liked the fact that she spoke slowly. Most women in Kiruna talked too bloody fast. And loudly. It was like a hail of bullets, you didn’t stand a chance. He could hear Anna-Maria’s voice in his head: “What do you mean, you don’t stand a chance, we’re the ones that don’t stand a chance. No chance of getting a sensible answer within a reasonable amount of time. You ask: How was it, then? And then there’s silence, and more bloody silence, and after an interminable consideration the answer comes: Good. Then it’s hell trying to squeeze out anything more- from Robert, anyway. So we have to kind of talk for two. Don’t stand a chance? Do me a favor.”
Now he was listening to the psychiatrist’s voice and he could hear her sense of humor. Although the conversation was serious. If he’d just been a few years younger…
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s a copycat murder. Mildred Nilsson was put on display. Stefan Wikstrom’s
