nobody tells me anything? If you say there’s no suspicion of a crime having been committed, that’s the basis on which I will conduct my examination. I don’t want to be told later on that I’ve missed something. Is that clear?”
“I’m not here to…”
“You’re here all the time, but…”
She held up her hands.
“Forget it,” she said. “Pay no attention. I should never have come. I was being silly.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that you often are,” Pohjanen said unkindly.
Turning on her heel, she left the room. His comment hung in the air. Rang through the autopsy lab like a church bell.
“The silly bitch should stop poking her nose in,” Pohjanen said to himself defensively.
But his guilty conscience gnawed away at him. The dead spirits surrounding him were unusually silent.
“They can go to hell, the whole lot of ’em,” he said to himself.
A week passes. Snow crashes down from the trees. Sighs deeply as it collapses into the sunny warmth. Bare patches appear. The southern sides of anthills heat up in the sun. The snow buntings return. Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving Fjallborg finds bear tracks in the forest. The big sleep of winter is over.
“Have they found the boy yet?” Fjallborg asks her.
Martinsson has invited Fjallborg and Bella the dog round for supper. She has served sushi, which Fjallborg is forcing down with a sceptical expression on his face. He pronounces it “sishu”, making it sound like a sneeze. Having settled on the sofabed, Bella is lying on her back, hind legs apart, fast asleep. Her front paws keep twitching.
Martinsson says they have not.
“Piilijarvi,” Fjallborg says. “That’s the last place on earth I’d like to live in. That’s where the Krekula brothers live.
“Krekula Hauliers,” he says when he sees that Martinsson has not understood. “Tore and Hjalmar Krekula. They’re about the same age as my kid brother. A right pair of crooks if ever there was one. Huh. It was their father who set up the haulage business, and he was just as bad when he was in his prime. He must be getting on for ninety now. The elder brother, Hjalmar, is the worst. He’s been done for assault loads of times – there are I don’t know how many other people who are too scared to report him. It was the same when they were kids. That was quite a rumpus, that was. Surely you’ve heard about it? About the Krekula brothers? No? No, come to think of it, it was long before your time. Hjalmar can hardly have been ten, and his little brother must have been about six, maybe seven. They were out in the forest. They were taking the cows to their summer pasture. Not all that far away, in fact. Hjalmar left his kid brother behind. Came back home without him. That started a major kerfuffle – soldiers, mountain rescue, the police. But they didn’t find him. They gave up after a week. Everyone thought he was dead. Then out of the blue the little kid turned up at the front door. It was headline news all over Sweden. Tore was interviewed on the wireless, and all the papers wrote about it. The lad survived. A bloody miracle, there’s no other word for it. That Hjalmar, well, he’s as cold as a dead fish. Always has been. Even in primary school the pair of ’em used to go round collecting debts – real ones and made-up ones, it was all the same to them. One of my cousins, Einar – you’ve never met him, he moved away ages ago, been dead for years. Had a heart attack. Anyway, he was at school with the Krekula brothers. And he and his mates had to pay up. If they didn’t, they’d have Hjalmar on their backs.
“Ah well,” Fjallborg says, scraping the wasabi off the rice, “not everything was better in the old days, I suppose.”
FRIDAY, 24 APRIL
Pathologist Lars Pohjanen telephoned Inspector Anna-Maria Mella at 11.15 on the evening of Friday, 24 April.
“Have you got a moment?” he said.
“Of course,” Mella said. “Marcus rented a film; it’s supposed to be deep, profound even. But Robert fell asleep after a few minutes. He woke up just now and said, ‘Are they still sitting around nattering? Haven’t they solved the world’s problems yet?’ Then he fell asleep again.”
“Who is it?” Robert shouted, sounding distinctly drowsy. “I’m awake.”
“It’s Pohjanen.”
“This bloody film is just a gang of people lounging around on a park bench talking, going on and on nonstop,” Robert yelled, loud enough for Pohjanen to hear. “It’s Friday night, for Christ’s sake! What we need is a car chase or two, a few murders and a dollop of sex.”
Pohjanen chuckled.
“I apologize,” said Mella. “I got drunk one night and he made me pregnant.”
“They are not sitting on a park bench. Can you just shut up, please?” Mella’s eldest son Marcus said.
“What’s the film?” Pohjanen asked.
“
“I’ve seen that,” Pohjanen said. “It was good. It made me cry.”
“Pohjanen says he cried when he saw it,” Mella advised Robert.
“Tell him I’m crying my eyes out as well,” Robert yelled.
“There you are, you see,” Mella said to Pohjanen. “The last time he cried was when Wassberg beat Juha Mieto in the 1980 Olympics. Can you be quiet now so I can hear what Pohjanen wants?”
“One hundredth of a second,” Robert said, touched by the memory of that famous skiing victory. “Fifteen kilometres, and he won by five centimetres.”
“Can’t you all shut up so I can watch this film?” Marcus said.
“Wilma Persson,” Pohjanen said. “I tested some water from her lungs.”
“And?”
“And I compared it with water from the river.”
Her son was looking daggers at Mella, who stood up and went into the kitchen.
“Are you still there?” Pohjanen said grumpily. Then he cleared his throat.
“Yes, I’m still here,” Mella said, sitting down on a kitchen chair and trying to ignore Pohjanen’s phlegmy wheezing.
“I…
“Why?”
“Well, this is cutting-edge technology. You can identify the genetic material in anything living in water. Bacteria, algae, that sort of thing. As you probably know, everything is made up of four building blocks. Even us humans. A person’s D.N.A. has three million of these building blocks in a particular sequence.”
Mella looked at the clock. First a profound film in German, then D.N.A. technology with Lars Pohjanen.
“Anyway, I don’t suppose you’re all that interested in such things,” Pohjanen said
