Stallo (35 page)

From the ceiling above our table hung an ancient gun, a vast chandelier with electric light bulbs, Sami boots with hooked toes, ordinary leather boots, bowls and copper pans.

‘She’s talking to the police,’ he said, squirting ketchup over his food.

He was eating Falu sausage, fried egg and fried potatoes, the same as Susso had ordered. I was still waiting for my hamburger, so I stole a slice of potato from Susso’s plate at the very moment she walked back between the tables.

‘It was a stolen weapon,’ she said, sitting down. ‘It belongs to someone called Holmqvist, but he has nothing to do with the case, they’re positive about that. His cabin in the fells was burgled four years ago and the theft was reported.’

She cut a piece of sausage and put it into her mouth.

‘But the sight wasn’t his,’ she said, chewing. ‘So that arsehole must have attached it.’

‘But what about fingerprints and things?’ I asked, reaching out for another piece of potato. She stabbed my knuckles with her fork.

‘They’re still waiting to hear about that,’ she answered, waving the fork to indicate I could take the potato if I wanted it. ‘My fingerprints will be all over it, that’s for sure, but he was wearing gloves.’

‘But he might have handled it without gloves earlier,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘We’ll have to see,’ she said. ‘It would be such a relief if they found them soon.’

My food arrived. I unscrewed the top of a large container of seasoning and sprinkled it over the thin fries. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and I was starving.

‘But what did they say?’ asked Torbjörn. ‘Do they think it’s because you took that photo? Do they think that’s the reason they attacked us? Because in that case it proves the dwarf is mixed up in the kidnapping. And that more people are involved.’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ Susso said. ‘Let’s say that’s the case. That it’s this Vaikijaur man who has taken Mattias, and that the photo I took means him and his partners will get caught. Assuming he has partners. But why attack me, in that case? What good would that do? The damage had already been done. It can hardly be a kind of revenge.’

‘No,’ said Torbjörn. ‘That’s true.’

‘I can see only one explanation. They don’t like what I’m doing.’

‘You mean your website?’ I asked.

‘The very fact,’ she said in a low voice, glancing quickly at the two men sitting at the next table, ‘the very fact that there are people out there who hate my website so much they’re prepared to murder me proves I’m right. It proves the Vaikijaur man
is
a troll.’

‘Then perhaps you’d better take it down,’ I said, with my mouth full.

Susso sprinkled salt on her potatoes as she shook her head.

‘I’m not planning to sit here and wait until it all calms down. I’m going to get those bastards. They’ll regret it. What do you think, Torbjörn?’

Torbjörn looked up and then nodded.

‘I feel sorry for them,’ he said. ‘Seriously.’

*

I felt revived when I sat in the driver’s seat again, and despite the worrying and fairly extreme decisions Susso had talked about in the restaurant, the atmosphere was noticeably improved after we had eaten something and drunk a cup of coffee. We were getting closer to the coast too, so it felt as if we were making headway south. The blanket of snow on the fir trees formed a long wall along the roadside, shimmering pale pink. As I drove, Torbjörn told me about his training. He had taken an electronics course at Luleå University of Technology, and it seemed well worth it because he had found work straight away.

I also asked him about his mother and whether she liked living up at Riksgränsen, but Susso yelped like a little dog from the back seat.

‘Oh, give it a rest, can’t you?’ she said. ‘Leave him alone!’

And so I did.

But he hadn’t been offended. He smiled at me in secret when Susso wasn’t looking.

*

I had booked rooms for us at the Höga Kusten Bridge hotel, and we ate dinner at the restaurant there. We sat in silence looking at the menu and then we all ordered the meat loaf with mashed potato and salted cucumber, the speciality of the house. I looked out of the panoramic window but it was pitch black outside. The bridge looked like two glowing arcs in the night.

I noticed that Susso and Torbjörn’s eyes met from time to time. It wasn’t over between them, you could tell that a mile off.

‘We’ll have to share a room,’ I said, after the food had been served. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

They said that was all right.

‘I think it will make me feel more secure,’ Susso said.

‘What about you, Torbjörn?’ I said. ‘How do you feel about it, really? Will you be able to sleep?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I thought it would feel better once we got away from town. But I’m still feeling tense, like someone’s going to leap on me. Even the waiter. It affects you deeply, so deeply you can’t calm yourself down.’

‘You’d better have some wine,’ I said.

He nodded and emptied his glass.

It was not only the fact that Susso Myrén was still alive. The attack was all over the newspapers as well, which no doubt meant her website was receiving even more attention. So Börje and Jola had made the situation even worse by trying to shut her up. Seved was not allowed to know the content of the website – he was not even really sure what a website was – but he could understand what the fuss was about. She had come too close. Others might have suspected something in the past, but this was different.

She was investigating.

And Lennart wanted to put a stop to it, at any price.

Which is why he went ballistic with rage when she suddenly disappeared.

Jola, who had travelled up to Kiruna to finish what he and Börje had started, phoned Lennart to say she was nowhere to be found. He had parked outside her flat for over twenty-four hours but there was no sign of her. Her mobile was switched off and had been for a long time. The following day he had phoned her mother’s shop pretending to be a journalist. He had spoken to Susso’s sister, who told him Susso had gone away.

Where?

Somewhere in Dalarna, she thought.

That same evening Lennart had set off. And he was not travelling alone. Seved saw how heavily laden the camper van had been.

They slept late and then ate breakfast sitting at the same table as the night before, and this time the view was revealed. Beyond the fence the ground dropped steeply away. There was a cluster of snow-topped pines on the slope, keeping watch over the gigantic pylons and the cars like small splashes of sunlight travelling along the road far below. Susso was bent over the newspaper. She had slept badly. Thoughts had raced around in her head and both Gudrun and Torbjörn had snored, keeping pace with each other, or so it seemed. Susso had thrown money at them to try and get them to stop. When Gudrun woke up and found her bed covered in one-krona coins she had sat up and cried: ‘I’m rich!’

She was joking all the time, trying as hard as she could to lighten the mood. Susso knew she was doing it for her sake, that it pained her to see Susso depressed and so afraid that she looked with suspicion at everybody they came in contact with.

On the opposite side of the bay there was a dark ridge of forest, with three wind turbines rising above it like huge white flowers.

‘Look, they’re not moving,’ said Gudrun, pointing with her coffee cup. ‘That means they’ve run out of diesel.’

Susso rubbed her eyes and smiled. She couldn’t help herself.

*

Torbjörn was driving. Gudrun sat in the front and Susso in the back with her arms folded and her head resting on her jacket,
which she had rolled up against the door. It was easier for her to sleep now. Torbjörn and Gudrun’s chatter and the vibration from the car made her feel drowsy.

After a couple of hours they stopped at a filling station to stretch their legs, as Gudrun put it, but Susso stayed where she was, unfastened her seat belt and lay down on the seat. She was certain her mother would tell her to fasten it as soon as they were out on the road again, but she didn’t. She let her sleep. And she slept deeply for a long time. When she woke up they were travelling through a forest with trees standing like black crystals beside the road. All that remained of the snow was an occasional isolated patch.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, sitting up.

‘Gävle,’ said Gudrun.

They were travelling on a B road and it was beginning to get dark. Torbjörn had to change constantly from full beam to dipped, and the road ahead shot into view and then disappeared, shot back into view and disappeared.

Torbjörn nodded his head in the direction of a dark opening in the forest.

‘This is where Gudrun passed through,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ Gudrun said, craning her neck to look out of the window.

‘Was she this far north?’

‘Why did they call the hurricane Gudrun?’ asked Susso. ‘Did it come on your name day then, Mum?’

‘Don’t you know when my name day is?’

‘Seventh of January? Eighth?’

‘The twenty-fourth of November. One month before Christmas!’

‘But who cares?’

‘I care.’

‘When’s my name day then?’

‘You haven’t got one.’

‘No, and that’s because I’ve got a Lapp name.’

‘It was your dad’s idea. You’re called Maria as well. You can change to that if you’re so keen on having a name day. It’s the twenty-eighth of February.’

‘So why
was
the hurricane called Gudrun?’ asked Torbjörn.

‘Firstly,’ said Gudrun, ‘she wasn’t a hurricane, she was a cyclone at best. Or worst. Roland teased me about it, naturally, so I looked into it. The Norwegian Institute of Meteorology decided on the name. Storms are given names so you won’t confuse cyclones and hurricanes that happen at the same time. They alternate between male and female. All in alphabetical order from ready-prepared lists.’

‘When’s your name day, Torbjörn?’ asked Susso.

‘Ninth of March. I know because it comes after Siv, and that’s why Mum wanted me to be called Torbjörn. If I’d been a girl, I would have been called Edla.’

‘Edla?’ snorted Susso.

He nodded.

‘What would I have been called, Mum, if I’d been a boy?’

‘I don’t know. I knew you were a girl.’

‘Yes, but if!’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said? I knew you were a girl!’

Seved stood with the red bucket in his hand, looking into the barn. The gaps in the walls were compact streams of radiant light. There were large windows near the ceiling at both ends, but it was black and uncertain below the loft. The space was a mass of shadows that overlapped and became successively darker. From under a tarpaulin poked the shafts of an old sleigh. There were kick sledges in there as well, in a tangle of rust-brown runners and turned wooden handles: he counted five all together. The wood on most of them was old and grey but one was bright-yellow and even had reflectors. He knew it was Ejvor’s.

Next to the kick sledges was a moped. Was that his old moped? It was so old it was impossible to see the make. Oh yes,
SACHS
it said at the base of the engine cover. He saw it as he crouched down to examine it. The tyres were as thin as bicycle tyres. With his fingertips he brushed away the dust and wood shavings from the glass cover of the speedometer. The dial went up to seventy but it was doubtful the moped could reach even half that speed. Unless it was souped-up. Of course. Had Börje done that? He actually had no idea. Börje had tried to get him interested in engines, kneeling on the ground and pointing to cylinders and carburettors with black oily fingers, explaining how they worked, but he had not taken it in. He had nodded but not really listened.

There was left-over macaroni in the bucket, stuck together
in a yellowish block at the bottom, clearly frozen solid. It was glittering.

The foxshifter was eating less these days. He was unsure whether to tell Börje about it. He did not want to worry him unnecessarily. A kind of darkness had settled over his face and he was often snappy, even with the boy. Probably it was easier for him that way. Under the anger he could hide all his other feelings.

There was a click far back in the gloom of the barn and he knew at once he was being watched. He felt the little man’s eyes on him, even though he could not see them. But was he up in the loft or down below?

He had taken a step to one side to be able to see better when he heard someone call out. At first he thought it came from outside and he turned to the barn door. Was it Signe?

He heard it again and realised the cry was inside his head.