Until Thy Wrath Be Past

But Bella had vanished into the snow.

“Huh, I expect she’ll turn up when she’s hungry,” he said with a smile. “What about you? I’m going to make some dumplings. There’ll be plenty for both of us.”

Bella appeared just as they were about to go in, scampering down into the cellar ahead of them. Sivving Fjallborg had moved into his boiler room several years before.

“You can always find what you’re looking for, and it’s easy to keep tidy,” he would say.

The house above was neat and tidy, but was only used when the children and grandchildren came to visit.

The boiler room was sparsely furnished.

Nice and cosy, Martinsson thought as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the wooden bench next to the Formica table.

A table, a chair, a stool, a kitchen sofa – what more could you want? There was a made-up bed in one corner. Rag rugs on the floor to prevent the chill seeping up.

Fjallborg was standing by the hotplate, wearing an apron that had once belonged to his wife tucked into the waistband of his trousers. His stomach was too big for him to knot it at his back.

Bella had lain down next to the boiler, in order to get dry. There was a smell of wet dog, wet wool, wet concrete.

“Why not have a little rest,” Fjallborg said.

Martinsson lay down on the wooden sofa. It was short, but if you piled two cushions under your head and tucked up your knees it was comfortable enough.

Fjallborg cut a dumpling into thick slices. He swirled a large knob of butter around the hot frying pan.

Martinsson’s mobile pinged again. Another text from Mans.

“You can work some other time. I want to put my arms around your waist and kiss you, lift you up onto the kitchen table and hoist up your skirt.”

“Is it from work?” Fjallborg said.

“No, it’s from Mans,” Martinsson said archly. “He’s wondering when you’re going to go down to Stockholm and build him a sauna.”

“Huh, the idle fool. Tell him to come up here and do some shovelling. All this snow – a bit of mild weather is all we need, and it’ll be sheer hell. Tell him that.”

“I will,” Martinsson said, and wrote: “Mmm… More.”

Fjallborg tipped the sliced dumpling into the pan. The fat hissed and spat. Bella raised her head and sniffed happily.

“And me with my gammy arm,” Fjallborg said. “Build a bloody sauna? You must be joking. No, we should all do what Arvid Backlund has done.”

“What has he done?” Martinsson asked.

“If you can tear your eyes away from that thing for one second, I’ll tell you.”

Martinsson switched off her mobile. She spent far too little time with her neighbour. Now that she was here, the least she could do was give him her full attention.

“He lives on the other side of the creek. He turned eighty-two last week. He worked out how much firewood he was going to need for the rest of his life…”

“How can he do that when he doesn’t know how much longer he’s going to live?”

“Maybe you’d like me to give you a doggy bag so you can eat at home on your own? I’m trying to tell you a story.”

“Sorry! Carry on!”

“Anyway, he ordered a load of wood and got them to tip it in through his living- room window. So it’s nice and handy. Enough to keep him warm for the winters he has left to him.”

“In the living room?”

“A bloody big pile in the middle of the floor.”

“I bet he hasn’t got a wife,” Martinsson said.

They shared the joke for a while. Their laughter went some way towards salving Martinsson’s guilty conscience over calling on Fjallborg so seldom and his resulting disappointment. Fjallborg’s stomach wobbled beneath his apron. Martinsson had a coughing fit.

Then Fjallborg changed tack completely, becoming fretful.

“Not that there’s anything wrong in that,” he said in Arvid Backlund’s defence.

Martinsson stopped laughing.

“At least he can manage at home on his own now,” Fjallborg said vehemently. “Of course he could have his firewood in the woodshed like everyone else. Then go out there one morning, slip and break his leg. At his age. You never come home from hospital when you’re that old. You just get shoved off into a nursing home. It’s easy to laugh when you’re young and healthy.”

He slammed the cast-iron pan with the fried dumpling onto the table.

“Time to eat!”

They put lumps of butter and heaps of lingonberry preserve and fried pork on their plates. Piled the butter and preserve and meat onto the slices of dumpling. Ate without talking.

He’s scared, Martinsson thought.

She would have liked to tell him. Explain that she was never going to move back to Stockholm. Promise to clear the snow from around his house and do his shopping for him when the time came.

I’ll look after you, she thought, watching him as he drank from his glass of milk, taking big gulps.

Just like he looked after my farmor, she thought as she cut into her dumpling and the knife made squeaking noises against the plate. When I had moved away and left her. He shovelled snow for her and kept her company. Even though she grew anxious towards the end and nagged at him all the time. Even though she kept complaining about the way he cleared the snow. I want to be the kind of person who looks after someone else. That is who I want to be.

“I had a hell of a case last Friday,” she said.

Fjallborg didn’t react. He ate his dumpling and drank his milk as if he had not heard, still in a bad mood.

“It was sexual assault,” she said, disregarding the lack of response. “The accused had rung two officials at the Employment Office and masturbated during the conversations. One of the ladies was fifty and the other over sixty, and they were terrified they might actually meet him. They thought that if he found out what they looked like, he would jump them and rape them if they happened to encounter him at the supermarket. So I asked for the ladies to be questioned without the accused being present.”

“What does that mean?” Fjallborg said, annoyed that he needed to ask but too curious not to.

“He was put in a neighbouring room so that he could listen to what they said without being able to see them. My God, but those poor dears found it incredibly difficult to describe what had happened. I had to push them quite hard in order to clarify the sexual nature of the complaint. Among other things I asked them what made them think that he was masturbating.”

Martinsson paused to put a large piece of dumpling into her mouth. She chewed away at it, seemingly in no hurry. Fjallborg had stopped eating altogether and was waiting for her to go on.

“And?” he said impatiently.

“They said they had heard rhythmic slapping noises, and at the same time he was panting heavily. One of the old dears said he had ejaculated, so then of course I had to ask her what had