last.
Down in the darkness she hears the shots. They come from outside. Two shots. Then the outside door slams. She hears footsteps across the kitchen floor. Then the final shot.
Something old wakes up inside her. Something from times past.
She scrambles up the steps to get away. Bangs her head on the trapdoor. Almost falls back down, but grabs hold of something.
It’s impossible to shift the trapdoor. She bangs on it with her fists. Her knuckles are torn open. She rips off her nails.
Anna-Maria Mella drives into Lars-Gunnar Vinsa’s yard at half past three in the afternoon. Sven-Erik is sitting beside her in the car. They haven’t spoken all the way down to Poikkijarvi. It isn’t a nice feeling, knowing that you’re going to have to tell a former colleague that you’re seizing his gun and taking it in for testing.
Anna-Maria is driving slightly too fast as usual, and she very nearly runs over the body lying on the gravel.
Sven-Erik curses. Anna-Maria slams the brakes on and they jump out of the car. Sven-Erik is already on his knees, feeling the side of the neck with his hand. A black swarm of heavy flies lifts from the bloody back of the head. He shakes his head in reply to Anna-Maria’s unspoken question.
“It’s Lars-Gunnar’s boy,” he says.
Anna-Maria looks toward the house. She hasn’t got her gun with her. Shit.
“Don’t you even think about doing anything stupid,” Sven-Erik warns her. “Get in the car and we’ll call for backup.”
It’ll take forever before the others get here, thinks Anna-Maria.
“Thirteen minutes,” says Sven-Erik, checking the time.
It’s Fred Olsson and Tommy Rantakyro in an unmarked car. And four colleagues in bulletproof vests and black overalls.
Tommy Rantakyro and Fred Olsson park up on the ridge and come running down to Lars-Gunnar’s yard, crouching as they run. Sven-Erik has reversed Anna-Maria’s car out of firing range of the house.
The second police car pulls up in the yard. They shelter behind it.
Sven-Erik Stalnacke picks up a megaphone.
“Hello!” he shouts. “Lars-Gunnar! If you’re in there, come on out so we can have a chat.”
No response.
Anna-Maria meets Sven-Erik’s eyes and shakes her head. Nothing to wait for.
The four men in bulletproof vests go in. Two through the outside door. One first, the other right behind him. Two get in through a window at the back.
There isn’t a sound, apart from the noise of breaking glass from the back of the house. The others wait. One minute. Two.
Then one of them comes out onto the porch and waves. Okay to come in.
Lars-Gunnar’s body is lying on the floor in front of the kitchen sofa. The wall behind the sofa is spattered with his blood.
Sven-Erik and Tommy Rantakyro push aside the cupboard that’s standing in the middle of the floor on top of the trapdoor.
“There’s somebody down here!” shouts Tommy Rantakyro.
“Come on,” he says, reaching down a hand.
But the person who’s down there doesn’t come. In the end Tommy climbs down. The others can hear him.
“Shit! Okay, take it easy. Can you stand up?”
She comes up through the trapdoor. It takes a long time. The others help her. Support her under the arms. That makes her whimper a little.
It takes a fraction of a second before Anna-Maria recognizes Rebecka Martinsson.
Half of Rebecka’s face is swollen and black and blue. She has a large wound on her forehead and her upper lip is hanging off, held only by a flap of skin. “Looked like a pizza with everything on it,” Tommy Rantakyro will say much later.
Anna-Maria is thinking mainly of her teeth. They’re clenched so tightly, as if her jaws have locked together.
“Rebecka,” says Anna-Maria. “What…”
But Rebecka waves her away. Anna-Maria sees her glance at the body on the kitchen floor before she walks stiffly out through the door.
Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik Stalnacke and Tommy Rantakyro follow her out.
Outside the sky has turned gray. The clouds are hanging low, heavy with rain.
Fred Olsson is standing out in the yard.
Not a word passes his lips when he catches sight of Rebecka. But his mouth opens around the unspoken words, and his eyes are staring.
Anna-Maria is watching Rebecka Martinsson. She’s standing like a statue in front of Nalle’s dead body. There’s something in her eyes. They all sense instinctively that this is not the time to touch her. She’s in a place of her own.
“Where the hell are the paramedics?” asks Anna-Maria.
“On the way,” someone replies.
Anna-Maria glances upward. It’s starting to spit with rain. They need to get something over the body lying outside. A tarpaulin or something.
Rebecka takes a step backwards. She waves her hand in front of her face as if there were something there she was trying to shoo away.
Then she begins to walk. First of all she staggers toward the house. Then she sways and walks toward the river instead. It’s as if she were blindfolded, doesn’t seem to know where she is or where she’s going.
The rain comes. Anna-Maria feels the chill of autumn like a torrent of cold air. It sweeps across the yard. Heavy, cold rain. A thousand icy needles. Anna-Maria pulls up the zip of her blue jacket, her chin disappears into the neckline. She needs to sort out that tarpaulin for the body.
“Keep an eye on her,” she shouts to Tommy Rantakyro, pointing at Rebecka Martinsson who is still tottering away. “Keep her away from the gun in there, and from yours too. And don’t let her go down to the river.”
Rebecka Martinsson makes her way across the yard. There’s a big dead dead dead boy lying on the gravel. Not long ago he was sitting in the cellar with a biscuit in his hand, feeding a mouse.
It’s windy. The wind is roaring down inside her ears.
The sky is filled with black scratch marks, deep gouges that in their turn are filled with black ink. Is it raining? Has it started raining? She raises her hands tentatively toward the sky to see if they get wet. Her sleeves fall back, exposing the thin, bare wrists, the hands like naked birch trees. She drops her scarf on the grass.
Tommy Rantakyro catches up with Rebecka Martinsson.
“Listen,” he says. “Don’t go down to the river. There’ll be an ambulance here in a minute, and then…”
