No sooner has she registered the thought than the phone rings. At first she thinks it is Eriksson sensing that she has been thinking about him, but then she realizes that it is the police switchboard. After Sonja tells her she has a call, Martinsson hears a man clearing his throat.
“Er, hi. It’s Hjalmar Krekula. I want to profess,” he says.
Then corrects himself.
“Confess.”
“I see,” she says.
Hell and damnation, she thinks. No tape recorder handy, nothing.
“It was me who killed them. Wilma Persson. And Simon Kyro.”
There’s something wrong. Martinsson can feel it in her bones. She can hear that he is in his car. Where is he going?
Thoughts as quick as swimming vipers.
“O.K.,” she says calmly. “I’d like to record this. Can you come to the police station?”
Holding the receiver away from her face, she swallows. He must not hear that she is worried or afraid.
“No.”
“We can come to you. Are you at home?”
“No. This will have to do. I’ve said it now. So now you know.”
No, no. He must not hang up. She can see a little boy in front of her, his eyes red with crying.
“No, that won’t do,” she says. “How do I know that you’re telling the truth? People ring us to make confessions all the time.”
But he has already hung up.
“Shit, shit, shit!” she yells, making the dogs pause and look at her.
But as soon as they realize that she is not angry with them, they continue about their business. Vera has found a pine cone and laid it at Tintin’s feet. Backing off a few paces, she has crouched down. Come on, she is saying. Let’s have a game. See if you can grab it before I do. Tintin yawns demonstratively.
Martinsson tries to ring Anna-Maria Mella, but there is no answer. “Ring me right away,” she tells the answering machine.
She looks at the dogs. Vera has soil and clay on her legs and belly. Tintin has applied horse-shit perfume to her neck and behind her ears.
“Filthy swine,” she says to them. “Criminals. What the hell do I do now?”
The moment she says that, she knows. She must drive to his house. So that he does not. So that he does not. The dogs. She will have to take them with her. Despite the filthy state they are in.
“You’re coming with me,” she says to them.
But no. Nobody answers the door when she gets to Hjalmar’s place. Martinsson trudges all the way round the house through the wet snow, peering in through the windows. She knocks on them as well. But she decides that he is not at home. And his car is not there.
Anni Autio. Maybe she will know.
Nobody opens the door at Anni’s house either.
A flock of ravens is circling above the house, round and round.
What’s the matter with them? Martinsson wonders.
The door is unlocked, so she goes in.
Anni is lying on the kitchen sofa. Her eyes are closed.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Martinsson says.
Anni opens one eye.
“Yes, well… the door wasn’t locked, so… I’m looking for Hjalmar Krekula. You’re his aunt, aren’t you, Anni? Aren’t you? Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
She closes her eye again.
If I were him, Martinsson thinks, I’d run away to my cottage.
“Does he have a cottage somewhere?”
“If I tell you where it is, and I can draw you a map, will you leave me in peace? I don’t want to hear his name ever again. I don’t want to speak to anybody. Help me up. You’ll find pen and paper on the countertop, by the scales.”
What if I get there too late, Martinsson thinks as she drives like a madwoman along the E10 and then turns off along the Kuosanen road down to the River Kalix. What if he has shot himself? What if he is lying on the floor in a pool of blood? If the back of his head has been shot away? If he does not have any face left? That could be what is in store for me. It could be.
She tries to ring Mella again. Gets the answering machine again.
“I’m on my way to Hjalmar Krekula’s cottage,” she says. “He’s confessed to the murder of Wilma and Simon. And I have a nasty feeling… Don’t panic, there’s no danger. But ring me. If I can pick up, I will.”
Then she rings Krister Eriksson.
“Hi,” he says before she has a chance to say anything.
It is such a tender-sounding “hi”. It sounds happy over the fact that she has called him, and ever so intimate. It sounds like a “hi” the second before a man slides his hand under his lover’s hair and round the back of her head. He saw from the display that it was her, and so that is how he sounds.
She is thrown off balance. Feels warm from somewhere between her ribs down to her pelvis.
“How’s my little girl doing?” he says, and at first she does not realize that he is talking about Tintin.
She tells him that all is well and then mentions that Tintin felt the need to break away from her policing role and just be a dog for a while. So she has been rolling around in horse shit.
“That’s my girl,” Eriksson says, laughing proudly.
Then Martinsson tells him where she is going, and why.
“We searched his house last Tuesday,” she says. “I really don’t know how to explain this.”
Becoming serious, Eriksson says nothing. Does not tell her that in no circumstances must she go there alone.
“I saw an entirely different person when I looked right at him,” she says. “It was as if I should, well, not that I should help him, but that we shared similar problems, as it were. There was something in the atmosphere. I have to make a choice.”
She is fumbling for words to explain her feelings, but suddenly feels that she is just making a fool of herself.
“I understand,” he says.
“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” Martinsson says.
“You don’t need to. Just do what you feel is right. And look after Tintin.”
“I’d never allow anything to happen to her.”
“I know.”
A brief silence follows. There is a lot waiting to be expressed, but in the end he simply says, “Bye for now,” and hangs up.
Hjalmar Krekula’s cottage at Saarisuanto is built of brown-stained logs. The window frames and door are painted blue, and the two lots of steps leading up to the door have been fused together crudely. The roof is corrugated iron, but the chimneys are properly built in. Beautiful pine trees grow on the slope down to the riverbank. An old red-painted boathouse leans provocatively under the snow. It might
