Until Thy Wrath Be Past (20 page)

Hjalmar Krekula stands outside his house. Suppresses all thoughts of Svarvare, Wilma, Simon Kyrö and all the rest of it. He has no desire at all to go into his own house. But what alternative does he have? Sleep in the woodshed?

Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Airi Bylund drive to Airi’s cottage in Puoltsa. They are only going to check on things – besides, it is such a lovely evening.

In the course of the journey, Stålnacke tells Airi how he and Martinsson lured Tore Krekula into a trap.

Airi listens, albeit absent-mindedly, and says, “Good for you.”

Stålnacke lapses into a bad mood. For no obvious reason. He says, “It’s a good job I can do something right, I suppose.”

He tries not to think about how he trampled all over the evidence in Hjörleifur Arnarson’s house and pontificated about the cause of death without knowing what he was talking about.

He wants Airi to say something along the lines of “You always do the right thing, bless you”, but she does not say a word.

Stålnacke is overcome by the feeling that he is not good enough for anybody. He becomes downhearted and surly and silent.

Airi does not say anything either.

And it certainly is not the sort of silence to make the most of. Usually it is uplifting for the two of them to share silence. Silence full of glances and smiles and sheer joy at having found one another. Silence occasionally broken by Airi chatting to the cats or the flowers, to herself or to Stålnacke.

But this particular silence is filled with the echo of Stålnacke’s thought: She’s going to leave me. There’s no point any more.

He can sense how fed up she has become with his dissatisfaction with his job. She thinks he goes on and on about Mella, about the shooting at Regla, about goodness only knows what else. But Airi was not there. She cannot possibly understand.

They arrive at their destination. Getting out of the car, she says, “I’ll make some coffee. Would you like some?”

All Stålnacke can manage to say is: “Yes, alright, if you’re making some anyway . . .”

She goes inside and he stands outside, at a loss, not knowing what to do next.

He trudges round the house. At the back Airi has made a cat cemetery. All the cats she has ever owned are buried there, and also some that belonged to her friends. Hidden under the snow are small wooden crosses and beautiful stones. Last summer when he was off sick, he helped her to plant a Siberian rose. He wonders if it has survived the winter. He likes to sit on the veranda with Airi and listen to her stories about all the cats lying there in her garden.

As he stands there thinking, Airi turns up at his side. She hands him a mug of coffee.

He does not want her to go back inside, so he says, “Tell me about Tigge-Tiger again.”

Like a little child, he wants to hear his favourite fairy story.

“What can I say?” Airi begins. “He was my very first cat. I wasn’t a cat person in those days. Mattias was fifteen, and he kept going on about how we ought to get ourselves a cat. Or at the very least a canary. Anything at all. But I said, Certainly not! But then that grey-striped cat started visiting us. We lived in Bangatan at the time. I didn’t let him in, obviously; but every day when I came home from work he was sitting on the gatepost. Miaowing. Enough to break your heart. It was late autumn, and he was as thin as a year of famine.”

“Some people are awful,” Stålnacke growled. “They acquire a cat, then abandon it.”

“I went round the neighbours, knocking on doors, but nobody admitted to knowing anything about it. And it kept on following me wherever I went. If I was in the laundry room, it would sit on the window ledge outside, staring at me. If I was in the kitchen, it would sit on a decorative pedestal we had in the garden, glaring at me. It would jump up onto the front door, clinging on to the ledge over the window, miaowing. It was driving me mad. The house was under siege. Every day when I came home from work I would think to myself: I hope to God it’s not there again.

“Mattias came home late one evening. The cat was sitting outside,miaowing, really crying its eyes out. ‘Can’t we let him in, Mother?’ Mattias said. I gave in. ‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘But he’ll have to live downstairs with you. He’ll be your cat.’ Some hopes! That cat followed me wherever I went. He always sat on my knee. Only very rarely on Mattias’s. But then Mattias moved out, and I sometimes went away on holiday. Then the cat would sit the whole evening, staring at Örjan. After three or four days he would eventually sit on Örjan’s knee. But then when I came back home, like that time I’d been in Morocco – I’ll never forget it – he slapped me with his paw, gave me a really solid smack, to show how angry he was.”

“You had abandoned him, after all,” Stålnacke says.

“Yes. Then all was forgiven. But before we got to that stage, he kept on smacking me. I remember when Örjan was depressed and in no fit state to do anything. Between us Tigge-Tiger and I built the May Day bonfire. He spent all day with me in the garden, working away. Then we sat together, gazing into the flames. And he was a terrific acrobat. When he wanted to come indoors in the evening he would cling on to the gutter with his front paws and swing towards the window, sort of knocking on it. So we’d open the window, and he would jump down onto the top of the frame and then into the house. I had lots of potted plants and cut flowers in vases on the window ledges, but he never knocked over a single one. Never ever.”

They sit in silence for a while, looking at the birch tree under which Tigge-Tiger is buried.

“And then he grew old and died,” Airi says. “He turned me into a cat person.”

“You grow attached to them,” Stålnacke says.

Then Airi takes hold of his hand. As if to demonstrate that she is attached to him.

“Life is too short for arguing and falling out,” she says.

Stålnacke squeezes her hand. He knows she is right. But what is he going to do about that lump of anger lodged permanently in his chest?

20.32: “You have reached Måns Wenngren at Meijer & Ditzinger. I can’t take your call right now. Please leave a message after the beep.”

Martinsson: “Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to say I’m thinking about you and love you to bits. Ring me when you can.”

She looks at Vera, who is having a pee outside the front door. It is still light, a bright spring evening. She can hear the chuckling call of a curlew. She is not the only one pining for love.

“Why does life have to be so complicated?” she asks the dog.

21.05: Text from Rebecka Martinsson to Måns Wenngren:
Hi sweetheart. Sitting here, reading up on murder investigation. Would rather be creeping into bed with you. Be nice to me, my love
.

She puts her mobile on the lavatory lid and turns on the shower. Gives Vera a thorough rinse to follow up her shampoo.

“So, stop all this rolling around in muck,” she scolds her. “Is that clear?”

Vera licks her hands. It is clear enough.

23.16: “You have reached Måns Wenngren at Meijer & Ditzinger. I can’t take your call right now. Please leave a message after the beep.”

Martinsson hangs up without leaving a message. She gives Vera some food.

“I don’t deserve to be punished,” she says.

Vera comes over to her and dries her mouth on Martinsson’s trouser leg.

04.36: Martinsson wakes up and reaches for her mobile. No message from Måns. No missed call. Documents concerning the murder investigation are scattered all around her on the bed. Vera is lying at the foot, snoring.

It’s O.K., she says to herself and makes a hushing noise into the darkness. You can go to sleep now.

WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL

At 6.05 in the morning Rebecka Martinsson rang Anna-Maria Mella. Mella answered in a low voice, so as not to wake Robert. Robert snuggled up behind her and fell asleep again, his warm breath fanning the back of her neck.

“I read the notes you made after talking to Johannes Svarvare,” Martinsson said.

“Mmm.”

“You recorded that he gave the impression of wanting to say something, but that he cut the interview short by lying down on the sofa and closing his eyes.”

“Yes, although he first took out his false teeth and tossed them into a glass.”

Martinsson laughed.

“Is it O.K. with you if I ask him to put his teeth back in and have a word with me?”

Mella vacillated between two reactions. Of course they would need to interview Svarvare again. She felt annoyed at not having reached that conclusion herself, and even more annoyed because Martinsson wanted to repeat the interrogation Mella had already done. But at the same time she realized that Martinsson was phoning her as a peace-making gesture. That was decent of her. Martinsson was good. Mella decided not to sulk.

“That’ll be fine,” she said. “When I spoke to him we were still investigating what looked like an accidental death with a few details that needed clarifying.”

“You wrote that he had been talking to Wilma, and had told her more than he ought to have done.”

“Yes.”

Mella began to feel uneasy. She really had handled that interrogation badly.

“But he didn’t say anything about what they actually discussed?”

“No. I suppose I ought to have pressed him, though I’m not sure how; but like I said, it wasn’t a murder investigation then.”

She fell silent.

Don’t start making excuses, she told herself.

“Hey,” Martinsson said, “you handled the situation extremely well. You made all these notes. Observed that there seemed to be something else he wanted to say. O.K., so we know what we need to concentrate on in round two, now that we’ve established what this case is really about.”

“Thank you,” Mella said.

“It’s me who should be thanking you.”

“For what?”

“For trusting me to go and talk to him.”

“I can always conduct round three, if necessary. When are you going to see him?”

“Now.”

“Now? But it’s only . . .”

“Yes, but you know what old people are like. When they finally get the chance to get the night’s sleep they’ve always longed for, they wake up at 4.00 in the morning.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am. I’m sitting in my car outside his house. He just looked out at me from behind his kitchen curtain for the third time.”

“She’s mad,” Mella said when she had hung up.

“Who?” Robert said as he caressed her breasts.

“Rebecka Martinsson. She’s taken over the investigation. I like the woman, for Christ’s sake – I mean, I saved her life back there in Jiekajärvi: that does things to you. And she’s fun to talk to when she relaxes. Even if we are very different. She’s a bloody good prosecutor.”

Robert kissed the back of her neck, and pressed his lower body against her backside.

Mella sighed.

“I suppose I’m put out because she seems to be taking everything over. I’d really prefer to run this case myself.”

“She needs to realize that you’re an alpha female,” Robert said, squeezing her nipples.

“Yes,” she said.

“Didn’t you read a book recently? What was it called –
There’s a Special Place in Hell for Women Who Don’t Help Each Other
?”

“No, you’re thinking of
There’s a Special Place in Hell for Men Who Don’t Have the Sense to Agree When Their Wives Act Like a Bitch
. Hey, what do you think you’re going to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” he said softly into her ear. “What does the alpha bitch want me to do with it?”

Svarvare offered Martinsson a cup of coffee to start the day. Declining his best china, she asked for a mug instead. And accepted his offer of a sandwich. He smelled dirty the way old men do; hygiene was evidently not his strong point. He was wearing a vest under a knitted cardigan. A pair of black trousers, very shiny at the rear, held up by braces. She could not suppress the feeling that she did not want to put anything in her mouth that he had touched. When had he last washed his hands? She shuddered at the thought that the fingers he had used to hold his false teeth had also been in contact with the bread and whatever he had put into the sandwich.

But then again I can allow a dog I have never seen before to lick my mouth, she thought.

She smiled and looked down at Vera, who was sniffing around under the kitchen table, gulping down scraps of food and crumbs, and licking the legs of the bench where something had trickled down and dried up.

Including you, you filthy little swine! she thought. I must be out of my mind.

“You knew Wilma, is that right?” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Svarvare said, downing half his mug of coffee.

There are questions he is dreading that I might ask, Martinsson thought. I’ll start with the easy ones.

“Can you tell me a bit about her?”

He seemed surprised. Relieved at the same time.

“She was so young,” Svarvare said, shaking his head. “Much too young. But you know, it’s a good thing if youngsters come to a village like this one. And when she moved in with Anni, Simon Kyrö also started to come and visit his uncle. The whole place seemed to come to life. Those of us who live here are all old-timers. But her and her friends – well, they looked like . . .”

He held up both hands and bent his fingers to look like claws, and pulled a face intended to be frightening.

“Black all round their eyes, and black clothes. But they were fun. And there was no harm in them. Once they borrowed kick-sledges from us old-timers and went racing around the village. There must have been ten of them. Careering around and shouting and laughing. Taking it in turns to give the others rides. Like a flock of crows. They say that young people nowadays just sit around indoors and gape at computers. Not her.”

“Did she visit you sometimes?”

“Oh yes, often. She liked to hear me going on about the old days. It’s not the old days for me, of course: everything seems to have happened quite recently. You’ll understand what I mean one of these days. It’s only your body that grows old. Inside here I feel . . .”

He tapped the side of his forehead and grinned.

“. . . like a seventeen-year-old.”

“Did you tell her anything you regret having told her?”