“You don’t tell me what to do,” Tore howls.
He starts blubbing and shouts for his mother. Hjalmar slaps him. Tore punches Hjalmar in the stomach. Soon they are both on the ground. The fight doesn’t last long. Tore doesn’t have a chance. Age wins the day. And Hjalmar Krekula is big.
“I’m going now,” he bellows.
He is sitting on top of his brother. Lets go of his arms, but grabs them again when Tore tries to hit him in the face. The younger boy gives up in the end. He has lost the fight. But not the battle. When he eventually stands up, he marches off resolutely in the direction he had chosen to begin with.
Hjalmar shouts after him.
“Don’t be an idiot. Come with me! Now!”
Tore pretends not to hear. After a while Hjalmar can no longer see him.
At 11.15 that night Hjalmar Krekula comes to the main road to Vittangi. He starts walking along it, and just over an hour later a lorry stops and picks him up. It is one of his father’s lorries, but his father is not driving it. The driver is Johannes Svarvare. In the passenger seat is another villager, Hugo Fors. They pull up 50 metres in front of Hjalmar, and both men open their doors and shout to him. Their soft caps are askew over their sunburnt faces. Shirt sleeves rolled up. Hjalmar feels his chest opening up as joy and relief flood in. He will soon be home.
They laugh as they help him to clamber up into the lorry. He is allowed to sit between them. By Jove, my boy, they say, his mother and father have been worried sick. Since the evening milking, practically everyone in the village has been out shouting and looking for them. Hjalmar wants to reply, but the words stick in his throat.
“Where’s Tore?” they say.
He cannot produce a single word. The men exchange worried looks.
“What’s happened?” Svarvare says. “Out with it, my boy. Where’s your brother?”
Hjalmar turns his head towards the forest.
The men do not know how to interpret that movement. Has his younger brother got stuck in one of the bogs?
“Let’s get you home,” Fors says, placing his hand on Hjalmar’s head. “We can talk about it later.”
His voice is as calm as a lake in the evening, but beneath the surface a shoal of worry glints like a sheet of steel.
They are gathered outside the Krekulas’ house. It is like a Laestadian prayer meeting. Ten grown-ups in a circle round Hjalmar Krekula. The women are whimpering and shouting with emotion – but not too loudly; they do not want to miss a word of what is said. Kerttu Krekula does not whimper. She is white and as frozen as an icicle. Isak Krekula is red and sweaty; he has run all the way home from the forest.
“Right, let’s hear what’s happened to Tore,” he says.
Hjalmar forces the words out.
“He’s still in the forest,” he says.
The grown-ups stand around him. Like black pine trees on a summer night. He is alone in this particular clearing.
“You mean you left him in the forest?”
“He didn’t want to. I told him to come with me. We were lost. He didn’t want to.”
He bursts into tears. One of the women shouts, “Oh, Lord!” in Tornedalen Finnish, and presses her hand over her mouth.
Kerttu Krekula stares at Hjalmar.
“This is the punishment,” she says to her husband, without taking her eyes off her son. “We’ll never find him.”
Then she turns slowly, just as slowly as an icicle would turn if it were alive, and goes into the house.
“Take him away,” Isak Krekula bellows to the crowd. “Someone had better take him home before I do him an injury. You left him in the forest. You left your little brother in the forest.”
Elmina Salmi takes Hjalmar home with her. He turns several times and looks back at his house. His father ought to have given him a good hiding with his belt. That would have been better.
“When will I be able to go home?” he says.
“God knows,” Elmina says. She is very religious. “We must pray that they find poor little Tore.”
My name is Wilma Persson. I’m dead. I don’t really know what that involves yet.
Hjalmar is on his knees outside his house, pressing snow onto his face. He doesn’t want to think about it any more. He doesn’t want to think at all.
Enough now, enough, he says to himself.
I’m looking at Anni. She’s lying in bed asleep, on her side. Her clothes are folded neatly over the back of a chair in the bedroom. She’s sleeping with one hand under her cheek. It’s like a dish for her head to rest in. Her other hand is open, on her chest. She makes me think of a fox. How it snuggles down for the night. Curls up into itself. Uses its tail to keep its body warm.
The policewoman Anna-Maria Mella is lying awake in her bedroom. Her husband has turned away from her and is snoring. She feels lonely and can’t keep herself warm like a fox. She wishes he’d given her that hug now. So that she didn’t need to feel angry and abandoned. Her life has been torn apart today.
I sit down on her side of the bed. Place my hand against her heart.
If you want to go to sleep in his arms, then do it, I tell her.
After a while she wriggles closer to Robert. Lies behind him. Wraps her arms around him. He wakes up sufficiently to turn over and embrace her.
“How do you feel?” he says sleepily.
“Not good,” she says. He caresses her, squeezes her, kisses her forehead. At first she thinks it’s a bloody scandal, having to beg him to do this, having to make all the moves. But she no longer has the strength to be bothered. She relaxes and falls asleep.
SUNDAY, 26 APRIL
On Sunday someone phoned the police station in Kiruna to say that he had information about the two kids who had featured in the late-night news bulletin the day before. He said his name was Goran Sillfors.
“I don’t know if what I have to tell you is all that significant,” he said, “but you said yourselves, ‘Rather a call too many than one too few’, so I thought…”
The receptionist put him through to Anna-Maria Mella.
“Absolutely right,” Mella replied when Sillfors repeated what he had already said.
“Anyway, those two kids. They were out in a canoe on the lake at Vittangijarvi last summer. We have a summer cottage up there. I always say that not all young people sit glued to their computers from morning to night. This pair carried and dragged their canoe along the river, paddled over Tahkojarvi and up as far as the lake. That’s a hell of a long way. I don’t know how much they were being paid by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, but it can’t have been all that much.”
“What do you mean, paid by the M.H.I.?”
