Until Thy Wrath Be Past Read online

“Of course.” Mella made an effort. “Maybe someone siphoned off the petrol while the car was standing here during the winter. Someone on a snow scooter, perhaps?”

  “There aren’t any scratches on the cap to the petrol tank. Mind you, if I could find the key, no doubt anybody else could have as well. I still think it’s odd, though.”

  “Everything O.K.?”

  Eriksson knocked on the open door of Martinsson’s office. He remained standing in the doorway. This time he took a good look round the place. The desk was piled high with legal documents. A cardboard box full of material having to do with some environmental investigation occupied the visitor’s chair. It was obvious that she was working her socks off. But he had known that already. Everyone in the police station knew it. When she had taken up her post in Kiruna, she had set lawsuits in motion at such a rate that the local solicitors complained. And God help any police officer who submitted inadequate preliminary-investigation documents – she would chase them up, thrust instructions detailing what needed to be done into their hands, then phone and nag them until they did what she wanted them to do.

  Martinsson looked up from the file on a drink-driving case.

  “No problems at all. How did it go out there? Did you find him?”

  “No. What have you done with Tintin?”

  “She’s here,” Martinsson said, rolling back her desk chair. “Under my desk.”

  “What?” Eriksson said. His face was one big smile as he bent over to investigate. “Now look here, old girl; did it take just one afternoon for you to forget your boss? You’re supposed to jump up and dance out to greet me the moment you hear my footsteps in the corridor.”

  When Eriksson bent down and started talking to her, Tintin got up and walked over to him, her tail wagging.

  “Just look at her,” he said. “Now she’s ashamed because she didn’t show me the respect I deserve.”

  Martinsson smiled at Tintin, who was arching her back submissively, wagging her tail excitedly and trying to lick her master on the mouth. Then she suddenly seemed to remember Martinsson. She hurried back, sat down beside Martinsson’s chair and placed her paw on the woman’s knee. Then she scurried back to Eriksson again.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Eriksson said. “Amazing! She stayed under your desk even as I was approaching. And now this. She’s giving you the highest possible marks. She’s normally very loyal to her master. This is most unusual.”

  “I like dogs,” Martinsson said.

  She looked him in the eye. Did not avert her gaze. He returned the look.

  “Lots of people like dogs,” he said. “But dogs obviously like you. Are you thinking of getting one?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But the dogs I have in mind are those I played with as a child. It’s difficult to find intelligent hunting dogs now. Mind you, I don’t hunt myself. I want a dog that runs loose around the village during the winter, but that’s not allowed any more. That’s how it was when I was a girl. They knew everything that was going on. And hunted mice in the stubble-fields.”

  “One like her, in other words?” he said, nodding towards Tintin. “Wouldn’t that be the right dog for you?”

  “Of course. She’s lovely.”

  Several long seconds passed. Tintin sat between them, looking first at one, then the other.

  “Anyway,” Martinsson said eventually, “you didn’t find him.”

  “No, but I knew we wouldn’t from the start.”

  “How could you know that? What do you mean?”

  Eriksson looked out of the window. Sunshine and a light blue sky, softening up the icy crust on the snow. Icicles hung in pretty rows dripping from gutters. The trees were suffering the pains of spring.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that I sometimes get a feeling. Sometimes I know the dog is about to find something even before it starts barking. Or that we aren’t going to find anything, as on this occasion. It’s when I feel . . . how shall I put it? . . . maybe open is the right word. A human being is something special. There’s more to us than we realize. And Mother Earth is more than just a lump of dead rock. She’s also alive. If there’s a dead body lying somewhere in the countryside, you can feel it when you reach the place. The trees know, and vibrate with the knowledge. The stones know. The grass. They create an atmosphere. And we can perceive it if we just . . .”

  He shrugged as a way of finishing the sentence.

  “Like people do when they are dowsing for water,” Martinsson said, feeling that this sounded awkward. “They don’t really need a divining rod. They simply know that the water is there.”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Something like that, perhaps.”

  He gave her a searching look, suspected that there was something she wanted to tell him.

  “What’s on your mind?” he said.

  “The girl they found,” Martinsson said. “I had a dream about her.”

  “Really?”

  “It was nothing much. Anyway, I have to go home now. Need a lift?”

  “No, but thanks all the same. A mate of mine’s coming to help me with the car. So you saw Wilma, did you?”

  “I dreamt about her.”

  “What did she want, do you think?”

  “It was a dream,” Martinsson said again. “Don’t they say that all the people in your dreams are really yourself?”

  Eriksson smiled.

  “Cheerio,” was all he said.

  And off he went, with the dog.

  Mella drove down to Piilijärvi, some 60 kilometres south-east of Kiruna. The snow had melted from the road. All that was left was an icy ridge in the middle. Mella needed to inform Anni Autio, Wilma Persson’s great-grandmother, that the girl had been found, and that she was dead. It would have been helpful to have Stålnacke with her, but that was out of the question. He could not forgive her for what had happened during the shooting in Regla.

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do about that?” Mella said aloud to herself. “He’ll be retiring soon, so he won’t have to put up with me much longer. He can stay at home with Airi and her cats.”

  But it nagged at her. She was used to laughing and joking with her colleagues. It had always been such fun, going to work. But now . . .

  “Not much bloody fun at all!” she said to herself as she turned off onto the narrow, winding road leading from the E10 to the village.

  And things were not getting any better. She rarely asked the others if they fancied lunch somewhere as a group. Often she just drove home and forced down some yoghourt and muesli on her own. She had started ringing her husband from work. In the middle of the day. To talk about nothing at all. Or she would invent errands: “Did you remember Gustav’s extra pair of gloves when you took him to nursery?” “Can you pick up some shopping on the way home?”

  Anni Autio lived in a pink Eternit-clad house in the middle of the village, by the lake. The wooden steps up to the front door were stained brown, carefully looked after, and generously sanded to prevent falls. The handrail was black-painted iron. A handwritten note inside a plastic pocket, attached to the front door with a drawing pin, read:

  “RING

  And WAIT.

  It takes ages for me to get to the door.

  I AM at home.”

  Mella rang the bell. And waited. A few ravens were frolicking in the thermals above the lake. Black and majestic against the blue sky. Their cries filled the air. One of them was wheeling round and round in concentric circles. Without a care in the world.

  Mella waited. Could feel every nerve in her body itching to hurry back to her car and drive away. Anything to avoid coming face to face with another person’s sorrow.

  A cat came strolling across the parking area, caught sight of Mella and quickened its pace. Stålnacke was a cat person. Mella’s thoughts turned back to him. He was good at this kind of thing. Telling people what they least wanted to hear. Hugging and consoling them.

  Damn him, she thought.

  “Damn,�
�� she said out loud, in an attempt to banish her depressing thoughts.

  At that same moment the door opened. A thin, stooped woman in her eighties was clinging on to the handle with both hands. Her white hair hung down her back in a string-like plait. She was wearing a simple blue dress buttoned up to her neck and a man’s cardigan. Her legs were encased in thick nylon stockings, and her pointed shoes were made of reindeer skin.

  “Sorry,” Mella said. “I was lost in my thoughts.”

  “Never mind,” the woman said in a friendly tone. “I’m pleased that you’re still here. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t have the patience to wait, despite the note I pinned to the door. I struggle this far only to see them driving away. I’m always tempted to shoot them. I look forward to a nice little chat, then find myself cheated. Mind you, the Jehovah’s Witnesses always wait.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m not so particular nowadays. They’re welcome to stay for a chat. But you’re not religious, are you? Are you selling raffle tickets?”

  “Anna-Maria Mella, Kiruna police,” Mella said, showing her I.D. “Are you Anni Autio?”

  The smile disappeared from the woman’s face.

  “You’ve found Wilma,” she said.

  Anni Autio supported herself against the walls and held on to strategically placed chairs as she shuffled to the kitchen. Mella took off her winter boots and left them in the vestibule, which was almost completely filled by a large, humming freezer. She accepted Anni’s offer of coffee. The kitchen gave the impression of having been untouched since the 1950s. The tap shook and the pipes shuddered as Anni filled the coffee pan. The conifer-green cupboards reached all the way to the ceiling. The walls were crammed with photographs, poems by Edith Södergran and Nils Ferlin, children’s watercolours now so faded that it was impossible to see what they were meant to represent, miniature prints of birds, framed pages torn out of old flower books.

  “We haven’t managed to find her mother,” Mella said. “According to the electoral register, Wilma lived with you, and the police report on her disappearance names you as next of kin. She was your granddaughter . . .”

  “My great-granddaughter, in fact.”

  Anni hunched over the stove as she waited for the water to boil. Listening to Mella’s account of how Wilma had been found, she occasionally lifted the saucepan lid with an embroidered pot-holder.

  “Tell me if there’s anything I can do,” Mella said. Anni made a dismissive gesture.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked when she had finished pouring out the coffee.“I know it’s dicing with death, but I was eighty last January, and I’ve always smoked. Some people look after their health . . . But life isn’t fair.”

  Tapping her cigarette against the glass jar she used as an ashtray, she said again, “Life isn’t fair.”

  She wiped her nose and cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Cry as much as you like,” Mella said, just as Stålnacke used to do.

  “She was only seventeen,” Anni said with a sob. “She was too young. And I’m too old to have to live through all this.”

  She looked angrily at Mella.

  “I’m totally fed up,” she said. “It’s bad enough outliving nearly everyone my own age. But when you start outliving the youngsters, well . . .”

  “How come she lived with you?” Mella asked, mainly to have something to say.

  “She used to live in Huddinge with her mother, my granddaughter. Went to grammar school, but was having trouble getting through all the work. She insisted on taking a break and coming up here to live with me. She moved in last Christmas. She worked for Marta Andersson at the campsite. And then she met Simon. He’s a relative of Kyrö who lives in the red wooden cottage over there . . .”

  She gestured towards the building.

  “Simon thought the world of Wilma.”

  She stared hard at Mella.

  “I’ve never been as close to anyone as I was to Wilma. Not to my daughters. Certainly not to my sister. Mind you, here in the village nobody has much time for anybody else. But Wilma gave me a feeling of freedom, I don’t know how to explain it. My sister Kerttu, for instance – she’s always been better off than me. She married Isak Krekula. He runs the haulage firm.”

  “I recognize the name,” Mella said.

  “Anyway, none of them have exactly been pals with the police. It’s his sons who run the firm nowadays, of course. That Kerttu is always annoying me. All she wants to talk about is money and business and what big shots her boys keep meeting. But Wilma used to say, ‘Take no notice. If money and that sort of stuff make her feel good, then fine. You don’t need to be any less happy on her account.’ Huh, I know it sounds simple and straightforward – but last summer . . . I’d never felt so liberated and so young. You can think whatever you like, Ann-Britt, but . . .”

  “Anna-Maria.”

  “But she was my best friend. An eighty-year-old and a teenager. She didn’t treat me like a useless pensioner.”

  It is the middle of August. Blueberry time. Simon Kyrö is driving along a forest track. Wilma Persson is in the passenger seat. Anni Autio is in the back, her walker beside her. This is the place they were looking for. Blueberries and lingonberries growing right by the track. Anni wriggles out of the car unaided. Simon lifts out her walker and her basket. It is a lovely day. The sun is shining, and the heat is squeezing threads of attractive scent from the forest.

  “I haven’t been here for years,” Anni says.

  Simon gives her a worried look. Of course not. How on earth could she have negotiated any kind of rough terrain with her walker?

  “Would you like us to come with you?” he says. “I can carry your basket.”

  “Just leave her,” Wilma says, and Anni emits a loud expletive in Tornedalen Finnish, shooing him away as if his interpolation were a fly buzzing around her. Wilma knows. Anni needs to be alone in the silence. If she finds it impossible to move around and does not manage to pick a single blueberry, that will not matter. She can sit down on a rock and just be herself.

  “We’ll come back and collect you in three hours,” Wilma says.

  Then she turns to Simon with a cheeky smile.

  “I know how you and I can figure out how to spend the time.”

  Simon’s face turns as red as a beetroot.

  “Stop it,” he says, glancing over at Anni.

  Wilma laughs.

  “Anni’s nearly eighty. She’s given birth to five children. Do you think she’s forgotten what people can get up to when they’re on their own?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Anni says. “But stop embarrassing him.”

  “Make sure you don’t die while we’re away,” Wilma says chirpily before she and Simon get back into the car and drive off.

  They do not go far. The car stops. Wilma sticks her head out of the window and shouts so loudly that her voice echoes through the forest, “Mind you, if you do die, it’s a fantastic day and place for it.”

  It was 5.30 in the afternoon when Mella entered the autopsy unit of Kiruna’s hospital.

  “Huh, you again?” was her sardonic greeting from the pathologist Lars Pohjanen.

  His thin body always looked frozen inside his crumpled green autopsy coat.

  Mella’s mood improved immediately – here was someone who still pulled her leg just as in the old days.

  “I assumed that you just couldn’t wait to see me again,” she said, giving him a 100-watt smile.

  He chuckled, though it sounded as if he was simply clearing his throat.

  Wilma Persson was lying naked on the stainless-steel autopsy table. Pohjanen had cut away her diving suit and underclothes. Her skin was greyish-white and looked bleached. Next to her was an ashtray full of Pohjanen’s cigarette butts. Mella made no comment – she was neither his mother nor his boss.

  “I’ve just been talking to her great-grandmother,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’
d be able to tell me what happened.”

  Pohjanen shook his head.

  “I haven’t opened her up yet,” he said. “She’s a bit of a mess, as you can see, but all this damage happened after she died.”

  He pointed to Wilma’s face, her missing nose and lips.

  “Why is her hair all over the floor?” Mella said.

  “Water rots the roots, so the hair becomes very loose.”

  Holding up Wilma’s hands, he contemplated them through narrowed eyes. The little finger and thumb of her right hand were missing.

  “I noticed something odd about her hands,” he said, clearing his throat. “She’s lost a lot of nails, but not all of them. Take a look at her right hand – oops! I have to be careful, the skin detaches itself from her fingers before you know where you are. As you can see, the little finger and thumb are missing from the right hand, but the middle and ring fingers are still there. Compare that with the other hand . . .”

  He held up both hands, and Mella leaned forward somewhat reluctantly to take a close look.

  “The nails on her left hand, the ones she has left, are varnished black and neatly filed – they’re in quite good shape, don’t you think? But the nails on the middle and ring fingers of her right hand are broken, and the varnish is almost scraped away.”

  “What does that imply?” Mella said.

  Pohjanen shrugged.

  “Difficult to say. But I scraped the underside of the nails. Come and see what I found.”

  He laid Wilma’s hands down with care, then led Mella to his workbench. On it were five sealed test tubes labelled “right middle”, “right ring”, “left thumb”, “left middle”, “left index”. In each of the tubes was a flat wooden toothpick.

  “Under both the nails on her right hand there were flakes of green paint. That doesn’t necessarily mean it had anything to do with the accident – she might have been scraping window frames, or painting, or something of the sort. Most people are right-handed.”

  Mella nodded and glanced at her watch. Dinner at 6.00, Robert had said. Time to go home.

  A quarter of an hour later, Pohjanen was standing once more with Wilma’s hand in his. He was taking her fingerprints. This was something he always did when identification was difficult due to intense facial damage, as in this case. The skin of Wilma’s left thumb had come away just as he was about to press it onto the paper. Such things happen, and he did what he usually did, sliding his own finger inside the pocket of Wilma’s skin and pressing it down on the paper. As he did so he heard someone in the doorway. Assuming it was Inspector Mella, he didn’t turn round but said: “Right, Anna-Maria. All done here. You’ll be able to read the autopsy report as soon as it’s written. Assuming it ever gets written.”