Until Thy Wrath Be Past (32 page)

A few days later there is an article about the fire in the local paper,
Norrbottenskuriren
, saying that it had not been possible to identify the three men who died in the accident alongside Viebke. Kerttu notes that it is the only time she has not seen the newspaper on Krekula’s desk in the garage office. But he never says anything. Asks no questions. And she does not say anything either. It is a matter of forgetting, of carrying on.

She never receives payment. They never see Schörner again. In September depot manager Zindel informs them that there is a parcel for Kerttu in a transport plane from Narvik, which is due to land in Kurravaara.

But Krekula, Johannes Svarvare and three young lads from Kurravaara employed to assist with loading and unloading wait in vain for that aeroplane, all evening and half the night. And after that, the matter is never mentioned again. Krekula is informed that the transport plane has disappeared, and Kerttu has constant visions of it crashing somewhere in the forest, and someone finding it, and discovering a briefcase. A briefcase similar to Schörner’s black pigskin briefcase. And that in it are details of everything that she, Kerttu the Fox, did to help the German army. Every time berry-picking season comes, she is worried to death.

“Are you going to tell me?” Martinsson says to Hjalmar Krekula. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

She has made some coffee. Hjalmar has put his mug on the little table in front of the sofa. Vera is lying at his feet; Tintin has fallen asleep in front of the fire. Martinsson is finding it difficult to stop looking at the photograph of the Krekula family. She would like to go and fetch Pantzare’s photograph of the girl and Viebke in order to compare them. But she is sure it is her. It is Kerttu.

“Where to begin?” Hjalmar says. “We drove there. To the lake.”

“Who did?”

“Me . . .”

He hesitates. Then he takes a deep breath and says, “Me and Tore and Mother.”

It is October 9. Hjalmar Krekula is sitting in the back seat of Tore Krekula’s car. Tore is driving. Kerttu Krekula is in the passenger seat. She has been to see Anni Autio. Asked about Wilma. As one does. In passing. Anni said that Simon Kyrö had been by to collect Wilma that morning, and they had gone off on some adventure or other. They would be out all day. Anni did not know where they were going. But Kerttu knew. She went to the garage. Spoke to her boys.

“They’ll be at Vittangijärvi, that’s for sure. That’s where Svarvare thought they should start looking. We need to go there.”

That was all Kerttu said. Tore Krekula loaded the four-wheeler onto the trailer. Now they are driving along the Luonatti road. Gravel clatters against the underside of the chassis. Tore drives skilfully between the potholes.

Hjalmar thinks, What the hell are we doing?

Nobody speaks.

Hjalmar looks at Martinsson. He is searching for words.

“You know,” he says, “it didn’t happen like you might think it did. Nobody said, ‘We’ll kill them.’ It just happened.”

“Try to explain,” she says. “And drink your coffee. Before it gets cold.”

A tune plays in her pocket. She takes out her mobile. It is displaying Wenngren’s number.

Oh hell! she thinks.

“Answer it,” Hjalmar says. “I’m not bothered.”

“No,” Martinsson says. “Sorry, I should have switched it off.”

She lets the phone ring until Wenngren gives up, then turns it off.

“Sorry,” she says again. “Let’s hear it.”

“There’s not much to say. We got there. Mother cut the safety line. I fetched the door.”

“And you laid it over the hole in the ice?”

“Yes.”

They are driving through the forest in the four-wheeler. It is almost unbearably beautiful down by the lake. When they switch off the engine, it is totally silent. The sun is shining on the bare ice. It is glittering like a silver brooch in the middle of the forest.

And there is the hole in the ice. With a wooden cross over it.

They pause for a while and watch the bubbles of air plopping up through the hole.

“Give me the knife,” Kerttu says to Tore. He pulls it out of the sheath on his belt and hands it to her.

She says to Hjalmar: “Go and fetch a door from up there.”

She nods towards the farmhouse, which appears to be deserted. Hjalmar looks over at it. Kerttu becomes impatient.

“There’s bound to be a door to the outdoor toilet or something. Get a move on.”

He walks to the farmhouse, lifts the shed door off its hinges and carries it back to the frozen lake. When he gets to the hole in the ice, he sees that his mother has cut the line and removed the wooden cross.

“Put the door there,” she says, pointing at the hole.

He does as he is told. And when she tells him to stand on the door, that is what he does.

The light is dazzling. It is almost impossible to see. Hjalmar screws up his eyes and looks at the sky. Tore whistles a tune. A few minutes pass. Then someone appears beneath the ice. Scratches at the door. It is just someone. It could be anybody. Hjalmar does not think about Wilma and Simon.

Kerttu says nothing. Looks the other way. Hjalmar also looks away. Only Tore stares at the door with interest. It is as if he has suddenly come alive.

“What did Tore do?” Martinsson says.

“Nothing,” Hjalmar says. “It was me. I was the one who . . .”

The person beneath the ice swims away from the door. Tore, staring like a raptor at its prey, stops whistling.

“It’s her,” he says quietly. “She’s so little. It’s her.”

Hjalmar does not want to hear. It is not her. It is someone.

Now someone starts cutting a hole through the ice, stabbing and jabbing with a diving knife.

Tore seems amused.

“Bloody she-cat!” he says, seeming rather impressed. “She’s got spunk, you’ve got to give her that.”

He stands a couple of metres off and watches as the hole grows bigger and bigger. Eventually a hand sticks up through the ice.

Tore immediately runs over and grabs hold of it.

“Hi there, pleased to meet you!” he says, laughing as he pulls the hand back and forth.

He looks provocatively at Hjalmar. The same sort of look he used to give his brother when they were growing up. Stop me if you can, it says. Say something if you dare.

Hjalmar says nothing. He switches off his face, just as he always did. Lets Tore carry on.

Suddenly Tore is standing there with nothing but a diving glove in his hand. Someone has managed to shake off his grip.

“Oh, fuck!” he says in annoyance.

Then he sees someone swimming away beneath the ice. He runs behind, waving the diving glove.

“Wait!” he shouts, and starts laughing. “You’ve forgotten something! Hello!”

All the time he remains above the person swimming beneath the ice.

“Whore!” he shouts.

He sounds angry now. Keeping above her. Panting. He is not used to running. The ice is shiny and slippery, and she is swimming quite fast underneath it.

“Fucking Stockholm whore!”

She is back beneath the door now, scratching and hammering.

Then she swims off again. With Tore after her.

Then it is the end. She stops. So does Tore.

“Now,” he says, breathing heavily. “Now.”

He kneels down and presses his face against the ice.

“Let’s put an A.P.B. out on Tore Krekula,” Anna-Maria Mella says to Stålnacke, Rantakyrö and Olsson.

They have assembled at the police station.

“Inform the duty officers in Gällivare, Boden, Luleå, Kalix and Haparanda for starters. Fax a list of all the vehicles owned by the haulage company and by members of the Krekula family.”

Her mobile pings; there is a voicemail message. She dials the number and listens.

“Oh, shit!” she says.

Her colleagues raise their eyebrows.

“Rebecka has driven off to Piilijärvi to talk to Hjalmar Krekula. Apparently he called her to say he wants to confess.”

She dials Martinsson’s number. No answer.

“Bloody inconsiderate,” she says.

Her colleagues say nothing. Mella looks at Stålnacke. She can see that he is thinking about Regla. If there is anyone who is inconsiderate, it is Mella.

Suddenly she feels exhausted and miserable. She tries to steel herself for anything Stålnacke might say, but she feels vulnerable and defenceless, does not have the strength to clench her fists, roll up her sleeves, put her guard up.

I’ll resign, she thinks. I can’t take any more. I’ll have another child.

A few seconds pass, but an awful lot can happen in a few seconds. Mella looks at Stålnacke. Stålnacke looks at her. Finally he says, “That’s over and done with. Let’s go to Piilijärvi.”

The burden falls from Mella’s shoulders. Like melting snow from a roof in the spring.

“That’s over and done with.” He means Regla.

Hjalmar Krekula takes a sip of coffee. Holds the mug with both hands. Vera scratches demonstratively at his leg: he is not allowed to stop stroking her.

“I didn’t realize that it was her,” he says to Martinsson. “I just didn’t have the strength to think about it. She died there. I stood there.”

“But you’ve thought about her since?”

“Yes,” he says. “A lot.”

“How did she get into the river?”

“Mother said we ought to move her. She didn’t want Wilma’s body to be found there. The aeroplane, you know. People shouldn’t know about that. We pulled her out. We waited for him, but he never came up to the surface.”

Hjalmar closes his eyes. He relives the way they smashed up the door and threw the bits into the hole in the ice.

And we forgot the rucksacks, he thinks. You’re convinced you’re keeping a cool head, but in fact you’re not.

Wiping his face with his hand, he goes on.

“We took the four-wheel-drive into the forest. I was holding her in my lap. That’s when it started to feel unbearable. And that feeling never went away. If only I hadn’t held her in my lap. Then, maybe . . . I don’t know, I might have been able to forget. We put her in their car, where they’d left it near the track. I drove the car to Tervaskoski. The river still hadn’t frozen there. There was only just enough petrol. Tore drove our mother home. Then he drove our car out to where I was. We carried her as far as the rapids, then threw her in. Hid the car keys in the wheel arch.”

“Your mother,” Martinsson says to Hjalmar. “I believe she sold information to the Germans during the war.”

Hjalmar nods.

That could well be, he thinks. He recalls a dance he and his brother went to when they were teenagers. He remembers a lad about their own age giving them a scornful Hitler salute. The lad’s dad was a Communist. It ended up in one hell of a brawl. They did not stop fighting until someone yelled that the police were on their way.

He remembers his mother shouting from the bedroom when his brother lost his way in the forest: “This is the punishment.”

He remembers his father in the sauna. That was not all that long ago. After Johannes Svarvare had told them he had spoken to Wilma about the aeroplane. After Isak’s heart attack. After the killing.

The mood at home was troubled and the atmosphere heavy with everything that could not be said or referred to. Kerttu was wracked with pain. Worse than ever. She complained loudly about how difficult it was to look after her husband. Even so, he was better then. Last winter. One morning at the beginning of March, he was unable to get out of bed. The doctors said he probably had had a series of small heart attacks during the night. He had to stay in bed. But it was better last winter.

“He smells,” Kerttu says to Hjalmar.

She is sitting at the kitchen table wearing her best coat and shoes and with her handbag on her lap, waiting for Tore’s wife Laura to collect her and drive her into town. Kerttu has a doctor’s appointment. Such occasions are the only times she ever leaves the village, when she has to go to the doctors’s, as she puts it. With an extra
’s
.

It is clear why she has become aware that her husband smells. She herself has just had a shower and sprayed herself with deodorant and is wearing clean underclothes.

Isak Krekula is out in the village. Walking around despite the serious heart attack he had last autumn. This is something the villagers do now and again – make the rounds. You pay a call on a few other residents, sit in their kitchens, drink coffee and exchange information about the latest goings-on. There are a few other villagers Isak can still visit. Johannes Svarvare, and one or two more. But he no longer talks to most of them. You can fall out with a lot of people during your life. A lot of people no longer want to see him. Business is business, Isak has always said, and there are folk who get angry and feel they have been cheated.