telling tales out of school about him, or anything like that. The dog was outside, and the door was wide open. I realized right away that something had happened.”
“There’s nothing for the forensic team to investigate,” Stalnacke said. “It’s obvious what’s happened here.”
Lifting up one of the rucksacks, he showed Mella a name tag sewn inside it:
“One was standing on the floor here, the other was up there.”
He pointed to the open door of the cupboard above the larder.
“He killed them and took their rucksacks,” he said. “You frightened him yesterday with your questions. He clambers up the stepladder to fetch the rucksacks from the cupboard, intending to get rid of them, falls, hits his head and dies.”
“That’s an odd place to keep them,” Mella said, looking up at the cupboard. “Cramped, and awkward to get at. He didn’t do it. This doesn’t add up.”
Stalnacke stared at her as if he felt tempted to pick her up and shake her. His moustache was standing on end.
Mella pulled herself up to her full height.
“Get out!” she said. “I’m in charge here. This is a suspected crime scene. The forensic team will have a look, and then Pohjanen can take over.”
That afternoon Mella appeared in the doorway of the autopsy room. She noted the look of annoyance on the face of the technician, Anna Granlund. Granlund didn’t take kindly to anybody who came nagging her boss.
The way Granlund looked after her pathologist boss Lars Pohjanen always put Mella in mind of the way minders looked after sumo wrestlers – not that Pohjanen bore the least resemblance to a sumo wrestler, skinny as he was, and the colour of putty: but nevertheless… Granlund made sure he always had a sensible lunch, telephoned his wife when Pohjanen was summoned to some crime scene or other, and put a blanket over him when he fell asleep on the sofa in the coffee room, having first removed the glowing cigarette from his hand. She took on as much of his work as she could. And did her best to make sure that nobody quarrelled with or pressurized him.
“He should be left alone to do what he’s best at, and be free of any other responsibilities,” Granlund would say.
She never commented on Pohjanen’s smoking habit. Listened patiently to his wheezing and his lengthy coughing fits, and always had a handkerchief handy when he needed to spit out the phlegm he had coughed up.
But Mella took no account of all that. If you wanted results, you needed to keep on at them. Nudge them, nag them, stir up trouble. If a corpse turned up at the weekend in suspicious circumstances, Anna Granlund always wanted to wait until Monday before carrying out the post-mortem. And she never wanted Pohjanen to have to work in the evenings. All of these things sometimes led to arguments.
“We have to make them understand that passing the buck to the police in Lulea has its price,” Mella would say to her colleagues. “If they do that, then they deserve to be put under pressure.”
“What do you want?” Lars Pohjanen said in his usual complaining tone.
He was leaning over Hjorleifur Arnarson’s sinewy body. He had sawn open the skull and removed the brain, which was lying on a metal tray on a trolley next to the table.
“I just want to know how things are going,” Mella said.
Taking off her woolly hat and mittens, she entered the room. Granlund folded her arms and swallowed thousands of words. It was cold in there, as always. A smell of damp concrete, steel and dead bodies.
“I don’t think it was an accident,” Mella said, nodding in the direction of Hjorleifur’s body.
“I’m told he fell off a stepladder in his kitchen,” Pohjanen said, without looking up.
“Who told you that?” Mella said, annoyed. “Sven-Erik?”
Pohjanen looked at her.
“I don’t think it was an accident either,” he said. “The injuries to the brain suggest a powerful trauma to the head, not a fall.”
Mella pricked up her ears.
“A blow?” she said.
“Very likely. With a fall there is always a contrecoup injury…”
“Do you mind if I phone for an interpreter? It’s several years since I studied Latin, and…”
“If you just let me finish, Mella, you might learn something. Imagine the brain hanging inside a box. If you fall on your face, the brain swings forward and you get a contusion in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex on the contralateral side. And a corresponding injury on the occipital lobe. This is not what we have here. In addition, there were tiny fragments of bark in the wound.”
“A blow from a piece of wood?”
“Most likely. What do forensics say?”
“They say that the door frame in the kitchen has been wiped. You can see it quite clearly: it was pretty filthy, but at one point it is very clean, at a height where you would place a hand if you were leaning on it…”
Mella paused. The image of Hjalmar Krekula standing in the doorway of Kerttu Krekula’s kitchen came into her mind.
“Anything else?” Pohjanen said.
“The body seems to have been moved. He was wearing blue overalls, and they were crumpled up at the back of his neck in a way suggesting that he’d been dragged along by the feet. But that kind of thing can be misleading. You know that yourself. You might not die immediately. You might try to stand up, and there are death throes to take into account.”
“Any blood on the floor?”
“One place that had been wiped.”
Mella looked at Hjorleifur’s body. It was sad that he was dead, but now this was a murder case, no question about it. Now it was justified to drop all other lines of enquiry and concentrate on this one. Stalnacke would not like it. She had been right. He had been tramping around the crime scene. The forensic team were annoyed.
But that’s not my problem, she thought. He can go off and work on something else if he likes.
She zipped up her jacket.
“I have to go,” she said.
“O.K.,” Pohjanen said. “Where…”
“Rebecka Martinsson. I need to get permission to search a house.”
“By the way, this Rebecka Martinsson,” Pohjanen said, sounding curious. “Who exactly is she?”
But Mella had already left.
At Kiruna police station Mella gave a brief summary of the preliminary post- mortem report on Hjorleifur Arnarson to District Prosecutor Martinsson. Mella’s colleagues Stalnacke, Olsson and Rantakyro were also present.
Vera was lying at Martinsson’s feet. Rantakyro had taken the dog from Hjorleifur’s house, left her in Martinsson’s office and then galloped off to the supermarket to buy some dogfood. Rejecting the food, Vera had drunk a little water and lain down.
Speaking of dogs, Martinsson thought, contemplating the police officers crowded into her office… What a pack they are.
