Until Thy Wrath Be Past (7 page)

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.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said a voice that was not Mella’s.

When Pohjanen finally turned round, he saw that his visitor was District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson. He had met Martinsson once before, when he had been called in to advise on one of her cases having to do with domestic violence. The husband and wife had given different explanations for the woman’s injuries. But Pohjanen and Martinsson had never spoken outside the courtroom. He could see that she was staring at the thimble of dead skin he was wearing on his index finger.

Introducing herself, she reminded him that they had already met. He said he recalled the circumstances clearly, and asked what she wanted.

“Is that Wilma Persson?” she said.

“Yes, I was just taking her fingerprints. You have to get everything done as quickly as possible – things change very rapidly when you take a body out of the water.”

“I was just wondering if there was any way of establishing whether she actually died at the place where she was found.”

“What makes you think she might not have done?”

Martinsson appeared to steady herself. He noticed how she pursed her lips, shook her head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts and then looked at him as if begging his indulgence.

“I had a dream about her,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “In the dream she said that she had been moved. That she had died somewhere else.”

Pohjanen looked long and hard at Martinsson without speaking. There was not a sound, apart from his own wheezing and the hum from the air conditioning.

“As far as I’m aware, the cause of death was accidental drowning. Is it your intention to turn the case into something more elaborate?”

“No, er, well . . .”

“Is there something I ought to know? How the hell am I supposed to do my job if nobody tells me anything? If you say there’s no suspicion of a crime having been committed, that’s the basis on which I will conduct my examination. I don’t want to be told later on that I’ve missed something. Is that clear?”

“I’m not here to . . .”

“You’re here all the time, but . . .”

She held up her hands.

“Forget it,” she said. “Pay no attention. I should never have come. I was being silly.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that you often are,” Pohjanen said unkindly.

Turning on her heel, she left the room. His comment hung in the air. Rang through the autopsy lab like a church bell.

“The silly bitch should stop poking her nose in,” Pohjanen said to himself defensively.

But his guilty conscience gnawed away at him. The dead spirits surrounding him were unusually silent.

“They can go to hell, the whole lot of ’em,” he said to himself.

A week passes. Snow crashes down from the trees. Sighs deeply as it collapses into the sunny warmth. Bare patches appear. The southern sides of anthills heat up in the sun. The snow buntings return. Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving Fjällborg finds bear tracks in the forest. The big sleep of winter is over.

“Have they found the boy yet?” Fjällborg asks her.

Martinsson has invited Fjällborg and Bella the dog round for supper. She has served sushi, which Fjällborg is forcing down with a sceptical expression on his face. He pronounces it “sishu”, making it sound like a sneeze. Having settled on the sofabed, Bella is lying on her back, hind legs apart, fast asleep. Her front paws keep twitching.