Until Thy Wrath Be Past (24 page)

He didn’t like Martinsson comparing Stockholm and Kiruna to Stockholm’s advantage. He was afraid of losing her to the metropolis again.

“Have you got a moment?” he said.

Martinsson adopted an apologetic expression and was about to explain that she had to go to work.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to clear away snow or anything like that,” Fjällborg said. “But there’s someone you ought to meet. For your own good. Or rather, for the good of Wilma Persson and Simon Kyrö.”

Martinsson felt depressed the moment she and Fjällborg walked through the door of the Fjällgården care home for the elderly. They brushed off as much snow as they could in the chicken-yellow stairwell, climbed the stairs and walked across the highly polished grey plastic floor tiles. The plush painted wallpaper and neat, practical pine furniture cried out
INSTITUTION
.

Two residents in wheelchairs were leaning forward over their breakfast in the kitchen. One of them was propped up with cushions to make sure he did not fall sideways. The other kept repeating “Yes, yes, yes!” in an increasingly loud voice until a carer placed a calming hand on his shoulder. Fjällborg and Martinsson hurried past, trying not to look.

Please spare me this, Martinsson said to herself. Spare me from ending up in a day room with worn-out, incontinent old folk. Spare me from needing to have my bottom wiped, from sitting parked in front of a television surrounded by staff with shrill voices and bad backs.

Fjällborg led the way as fast as he could along a corridor with doors either side leading into individual rooms. He also seemed far from happy with what he was seeing.

“The man we’re going to meet is called Karl-Åke Pantzare,” he said quietly. “My cousin used to know him. They saw a lot of each other when they were young. I know he was a member of a resistance group during the war, and I know my cousin was a member as well – but he’s dead now. It wasn’t something he talked about. This is Pantzare’s room.”

He stopped in front of a door. There was a photo of an elderly man and a nameplate that announced: “Bullet lives here”.

“Just a minute,” Fjällborg said, holding on to the rail running along the wall so that the old folk still able to walk had something to hang on to. “I need to pull myself together.”

He rubbed his hand over his face and took a deep breath.

“It’s so damned depressing,” he said to Martinsson. “Bloody hell! And this is one of the better places. All the girls who work here are really friendly and caring – there are homes that are much worse. But even so! Is this what we have to look forward to? Promise to shoot me before I get to this stage. Oh dear, I’m sorry . . .”

“It’s O.K.,” Martinsson said.

“I forget, I’m afraid. I know you had no choice but to shoot . . . Huh, it’s like talking about ropes in a house where a man’s hanged himself.”

“You don’t need to muzzle yourself. I understand.”

“I get so damned depressed,” Fjällborg said. “Please understand that I think about this even though I try hard not to. Especially with my arm and all that.”

He nodded towards his dysfunctional side. The one that could not keep up. The side whose hand could not be trusted, and kept dropping things.

“As long as I can . . .” Martinsson said.

“I know, I know.” Fjällborg waved a hand dismissively.

“And why must places like this always have such cheerful names?” he hissed. “Fjällgården, Mountain Lodge, Sunshine Hill, Rose Cottage.”

Martinsson could not help laughing.

“Woodland Glade,” she said.

“It sounds like a tract from the Baptists. Anyway, let’s go in. You should be aware that his short-term memory is pretty bad. But don’t be misled if he seems a bit confused. His long-term memory is fine.”

Fjällborg knocked on the door and they entered.

Karl-Åke Pantzare had white, neatly combed hair. His eyebrows and sideburns were bushy, with the stubbly, spiky hair typical of old men. He was wearing a shirt, pullover and tie. His trousers were immaculately clean and smartly pressed. It was obvious that earlier in his life he had been very good-looking. Martinsson checked his hands: his nails were clean and cut short.

Pantzare shook hands with both her and Fjällborg in a pleasant, friendly fashion. But behind his welcoming look was a trace of anxiety: had he ever met these people before? Ought he to recognize them?

Fjällborg hurried to allay his uncertainty.

“Sivving Fjällborg,” he said. “From Kurravaara. When I was a lad they used to call me Erik. Arvid Fjällborg is my cousin. Or was. He’s been dead for quite a few years now. And this is Rebecka Martinsson, the granddaughter of Albert and Theresia Martinsson. She’s from Kurravaara as well. But you haven’t met her before.”

Pantzare relaxed.

“Erik Fjällborg,” he said brightly. “Of course I remember you. But goodness me, you’ve aged a lot.”

He winked to show that he was teasing.

“Huh,” Fjällborg said, pretending to be offended. “I’m still a teenager.”

“Of course,” Pantzare said with a grin. “Teenager. That was a long time ago.”

Fjällborg and Martinsson accepted the offer of a coffee, and Fjällborg reminded Pantzare of a dramatic ice-fishing session with Fjällborg’s cousin and Pantzare on Jiekajaure.

“And Arvid used to tell me about how you cycled into town whenever there was a dance on a Saturday night. He said that the 13 kilometres from Kurra to Kirra was nothing, but if you met a nice bit of skirt from Kaalasluspa, that meant you had to cycle back with her first, and it was a long way home from there. And then of course he had to be up at 6.00 the next morning to do the milking. He sometimes fell asleep on the milking stool. Uncle Algot would be furious with him.”

The usual run-through of relatives they both knew followed. How a sister of Pantzare’s had rented a flat in Lahenperä. Fjällborg thought it was from the Utterströms, but Pantzare was able to inform him that it was in fact from the Holmqvists. How another of Fjällborg’s cousins, a brother of Arvid’s, and one of Pantzare’s brothers had been promising skiers, had even competed in races in Soppero and beaten outstanding Vittangi boys. They ran through who was ill. Who had died or moved to Kiruna, and, in those cases, who had taken over the childhood home.

Eventually Fjällborg decided that Pantzare was sufficiently relaxed and that it was time to come to the point. Without beating around the bush, he said that he had heard from his cousin that both he and Pantzare had been members of the resistance organization in Norbotten. He explained that Martinsson was a prosecutor, and that two young people who had been murdered had been diving in search of a German aeroplane in Lake Vittangijärvi.

“I’ll tell you straight, because I know it will go no further than these four walls, that there’s reason to assume that Isak Krekula from Piilijärvi and his haulage business were mixed up in it somehow.”

Pantzare’s face clouded over.

“Why have you come to see me?”

“Because we need help,” Fjällborg said. “I don’t know anybody else who is familiar with how things were in those days.”

“It’s best not to talk about that,” Pantzare said. “Arvid should never have told you. What can he have been thinking?”

Standing up, he took an old photograph album from a bookshelf.

“Have a look at this,” he said.

He produced a newspaper cutting that had been hidden among the pages of the album. It was dated five years earlier.

Pensioners Robbed and Murdered
, ran the headline. The article described how a ninety-six-year-old man and his wife aged eighty-two had been murdered in their home just outside Boden. Martinsson glanced through it and was disgusted to read that the woman had been found with a pillow tied over her face. She had been beaten up, choked and strangled, and “violated” after she died.

Violated, Martinsson thought. What do they mean by that?

As if he had read her thoughts, Pantzare said, “They shoved a broken bottle up her pussy.”

Martinsson carried on reading. The man had been alive at 6.00 that morning when the district nurse had come to give his wife her insulin injection. He had been badly beaten, punched and kicked, and died later in hospital. According to the article, the police had conducted a door-to-door, but without success. As far as anybody knew, the couple had not kept significant sums of money or other valuables in their home.

“He was one of us,” Pantzare said. “I knew him. And no bloody way was this a robbery, I’m absolutely certain of that. They were neo-Nazis or some other gang of right-wing extremists who had discovered that he had been a member of the resistance. Nobody’s safe even though it was so long ago. Youngsters impress old Nazis by doing things like that. They made the old man watch while they beat his wife to death. Why would a robber want to violate her? They wanted to torture him. They’re still looking for us. And if they find us . . .”

A shake of the head completed the sentence.

Of course he’s scared, Martinsson thought. It’s easier to risk your life when you’re young, healthy and immortal than when you’re shut up in a place like this and all you can do is wait.

“We simply had to do something,” Pantzare said, as if he were talking to himself. “The Germans were sending ship after ship to Luleå – lots of them never recorded in the port registers. Many of them left again with cargoes of iron ore, of course. And provisions and equipment and weapons and soldiers. The official line was that the soldiers were going on leave. The hell they were! I watched S.S. units marching on and off those ships. They took trains up to Norway, or were transported to the Eastern front. We often considered sabotage, but that would have meant declaring war on our own country. After all it was Swedish customs officials and police officers and troops guarding the ports and depots, and supervising the transports. If we’d been an occupied country, the whole situation would have been different. The Germans had far more problems in occupied Norway, with the local resistance movements and the inhospitable terrain, than in comparatively flat and so-called neutral Sweden.”

“So what can you tell us about Isak Krekula and his haulage company?” Fjällborg said.

“I don’t know. I mean, there were so many haulage contractors. But I do know that one of the haulage firm owners up here informed for the Germans. At least one, that is. We didn’t know who it was, but we were told that it was a haulier. That put the wind up us, because a large part of our work was building up and servicing Kari.”

“What was that?” Martinsson said.

“The Norwegian resistance movement, X.U., had an intelligence base on Swedish territory, not far from Torneträsk. It was called Kari. The radio station there was called Brunhild. Kari passed information from ten substations in northern Norway to London. It was powered by a wind turbine, but it was located in a hollow so you couldn’t see it unless you came to within 15 metres of it.”

“Are you saying that there was an intelligence base in Sweden?”

“There were several. Sepal bases on Swedish territory were run with the support of the British secret service and the American O.S.S., which eventually became the C.I.A. They specialized in intelligence, sabotage and recruitment, and training in weapons, mine-laying and explosives.”

“It was thanks to those services that the British were able to sink the
Terpitz
,” Fjällborg said to Martinsson.

“Both the radio stations and the wind turbines had to be maintained,” Pantzare said, “and they needed provisions and equipment. We needed hauliers, and it was always a dodgy business initiating a new one, especially as we knew there was a haulier who was a German informer. My God, once a new driver – a lad from Råneå – and I were on our way to Pältsa. We had a cargo of sub-machine-guns. We took a short cut via the Kilpisjärvi road, which the Germans controlled, and they stopped us at a roadblock. The driver suddenly started talking in German to the officer in charge. I thought he was informing on me: I didn’t even know he could speak German, and I was about to leap out of the lorry and run for my life. But the German officer just laughed and let us through, after we’d given him a few packets of cigarettes. The lad had simply told him a joke. I gave him a telling off afterwards. He could have told me that he spoke German, after all! Although of course there were quite a few who could in those days. It was the first foreign language in Swedish schools. It had the same sort of status that English has now. Anyway, everything went well on that occasion.”

Pantzare fell silent. A hunted look flitted across his face.

“Were there occasions when things didn’t go so well?” Martinsson asked.

Pantzare reached for the photograph album and opened it at a particular page.

He pointed at a photograph that looked as if it had been taken in the 1940s. It was a full-length picture of a young man. He was leaning against a pine tree. It was summer. Sunlight was reflected in his curly blond hair. He was casually dressed in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and loose-fitting trousers with the cuffs turned up untidily. He gripped his upper arm with one hand, while the other held a pipe.

“Axel Viebke,” Pantzare said. “He was a member of the resistance group.”

Sighing deeply, he continued.

“Three Danish prisoners of war escaped from a German cargo ship moored in Luleå harbour. They ended up with us. Axel’s uncle owned a hut used at haymaking time to the east of Sävast. It was standing empty. He put them up there. They all died when the hut burned down. The newspapers called it an accident.”

“What do you think really happened?” Fjällborg said.

“I think they were executed. The Germans discovered they were there, and killed them. We never found out who had leaked the information.”

Pantzare grimaced.

Martinsson took the photograph album and turned a page.

There was a picture of Viebke and Pantzare standing on each side of a pretty woman in a flowered dress. She was very young. A nicely trimmed lock of hair hung down over one eye.

“Here you are again,” Martinsson said. “Who’s the girl?”

“Oh, just a bit of skirt,” Pantzare said, without looking at the photograph. “He had a weakness for the girls, did our Axel. He was always with a different one.”