The Black Path (19 page)

My God, the bear is so much like my father I have to smile. It’s like Antte too. I’ve only realized it now.

I remember Antte standing in the doorway of Mother’s studio. He’s eleven. I’m seven. Mother is choosing canvases. She’s been given the opportunity to hang five pictures in a gallery in Umeå, and is finding it difficult to decide. She asks me what I think.

I consider and point. Mother nods and ponders.

“I think you should take these,” says Antte, who has appeared at the door.

He points to completely different pictures from the ones I’ve chosen, looking at each of us in turn, challenging and defiant.

In the end Mother goes for the ones I picked out. And Antte stands there in the doorway, his bear’s head drooping.

Poor Antte. He thought Mother was choosing between him and me. In fact she was choosing art. She would never have been able to include something that was less good, just to please him. That’s how simple it was. And how difficult.

And it was the same with Father. He probably knew, deep down. He felt lonely in the reality that consisted of the house and the children, their bed, the neighbors, the reindeer, and the Sami council.

I remember before I started school, when Father and Antte had already left in the mornings. How I helped her look for her wedding ring in their big bed. She used to take it off at night when she went to sleep.

Now she’s gone. When her body stopped obeying her, that must have been the worst time.

Before that time came, she used to stand in the studio painting until late at night. Not very rewarding financially, compared with the commissions from Matarahkka and a shop in Luleå that sold her silver jewelry and ceramic animals.

I would try to make myself invisible. I used to sit on the stairs leading up to our apartment, two rooms and a kitchen, looking into the old waiting room. Our home was full of different smells. Both old and new. You don’t open the windows in the winter when it’s minus thirty outside. So there’s a kind of shut-in smell, and wet dogs. There’s the smell of cooked meat and the sharp odor of old reindeer skins, the way it gets when the fat in the skin has gone off slightly. She had so many things made of reindeer skin in the studio, from when she was little. Papooses and winter shoes, rucksacks and rugs. And in the quiet of the evenings, the smell of turpentine and oil paints, or a faint aroma of clay if she was working on her ceramics. I knew the staircase inside out, moving down little by little so that she wouldn’t hear, avoiding every spot that creaked. I would push down the handle of the studio door so carefully, then sit out in the hall watching her through the gap. It was her hand I used to watch. How it moved over the canvas. Long, sweeping movements with the wide brush. The distinctive marking with the knife. The dance of the fine brush made of pine marten hair as she leaned forward shortsightedly, working on the small details: a blade of grass sticking up above the snow, or a reindeer’s eyelashes.

She didn’t usually notice I was there, or at least she pretended not to notice. Sometimes she’d say, “It was bedtime a long time ago.”

Then I’d say I couldn’t sleep.

“Come and lie down here then,” she’d say.

There was an old sofa in the studio. The arms were made of pine, and it was covered in a speckled pink fabric. It was covered with lots of blankets to protect it from the dogs. I’d pull one of the hairy blankets over me.

Musta and Sampo would wag their tails in greeting as I wriggled my legs in between them so they didn’t need to move.

In a cardboard box in the corner lay all my drawings, done in pencil, ink and chalk.

I longed to paint in oils. But it was too expensive.

“When you get a summer job and start earning your own money,” she’d say.

I wanted to paint layer on layer. My longing was purely physical. Making a sandwich could take me ages as I spread the butter, trying as hard as I could to make it as smooth as newly fallen snow, or layered like snow that has drifted.

I tried to beg sometimes, but she was implacable.

She was painting a white landscape. I said, “Can I paint something down there in the corner? You can paint over it afterwards. It won’t show.”

That aroused her interest.

“Why do you want to do that?”

“It’ll be like a secret. Between you, me and the canvas.”

“No, it would still show. You’d be able to see that the layers of paint were thicker and had a different structure just there.”

I didn’t give in.

“Even better,” I said. “That’ll make the person looking at the picture curious.”

She was smiling now.

“It’s a good idea, I’ll give you that. Maybe we could do something slightly different.”

She gave me several sheets of white paper.

“Paint your secrets,” she said. “Then stick a sheet of white paper on top and paint something else on that.”

I did as she said. I still have that picture in a box here in my room at my biological half brother’s house.

Mauri. He rummages through my pictures and canvases. Now Inna’s died it’s as if he’s homeless. He owns the whole of Regla and more, but it doesn’t help much. He comes up here to me and looks at my pictures. Asks a load of questions.

I pretend everything’s fine, and talk to him. Work with my weights all the time. If I get a lump in my throat, I change weights or switch to the bench.

I did the picture the way my mother suggested. It was nothing special of course, I was a child after all. You can see a winter birch tree and a mountain. The railway winding through the landscape toward Narvik. The picture is stuck onto another sheet of paper. But the bottom right-hand corner is loose and has been folded back. I rolled the corner of the paper around a pen so that it wouldn’t lie flat against the motif underneath. I wanted the person looking at it to be seized by the desire to try to tear the sheets of paper apart to see the hidden picture. All you can see of that is a dog’s paw and the shadow of someone or something. I know it’s a woman with a dog, the sun shining on his back.

She was very pleased with the picture. Showed it to Father and Antte.

“The ideas she has,” she said, fingering the rolled-up corner of the paper.

I was filled with an enormous emotion. If I’d been a house, the roof would have lifted off.

M
orning briefing at Kiruna police station. It was seven o’clock, but nobody seemed tired or reluctant to be there. The trail was still warm, and they hadn’t ground to a halt.

Anna-Maria Mella summed things up and pointed to the pictures on the wall.

“Inna Wattrang. Forty-four years old. She travels up to Kallis Mining’s holiday place…”

“…on Thursday morning, according to the airline,” supplied Fred Olsson. “She took a taxi up to Abisko. Expensive trip. I had a chat with the driver. She was alone. I asked if they’d talked, but he said she was very quiet and seemed down.”

Tommy Rantakyrö gave a little wave.

“I got hold of the woman who usually does the cleaning up there,” he said. “She told me they always let her know in plenty of time if somebody’s going to be staying at the house. She turns up the heating before they arrive, and does the cleaning while they’re there. Nobody had informed her. She didn’t know anybody had been in the house.”

“Nobody seems to have known that she’d gone up there,” said Anna-Maria. “The killer taped her to a chair in the kitchen and
electrocuted her. She went into some kind of epileptic shock, chewed her tongue to pieces, clenched…”

Anna-Maria pointed to the pictures taken from the autopsy report, showing the palms of her hands with the livid marks of her nails.

“But,” she said, “the cause of death is probably a penetrating blow to the heart with a long, sharp object. It went straight through her body. Not a knife, Pohjanen says. And at that point—although this isn’t entirely clear—at that point she wasn’t sitting on the chair, she was lying on the floor. Tintin found a mark on the floor under the floor covering. The lab says the blood from that mark is Inna Wattrang’s.”

“Maybe the chair fell over,” suggested Fred Olsson.

“Maybe. Maybe somebody untied her and laid her on the floor.”

“To have sex with her?” asked Tommy Rantakyrö.

“Perhaps. There was no sperm in her body…but we still can’t rule out sex, consensual or otherwise. After that the killer moved her to the ark.”

“And the ark was locked, wasn’t it?” asked Inspector Fred Olsson.

Anna-Maria nodded.

“But it wasn’t a difficult lock,” said Sven-Erik. “Any of our villains could deal with it.”

“Her purse was in the washbasin in the bathroom,” Anna-Maria went on. “Her cell phone and laptop are missing; they’re not in her house at Regla either, we’ve asked our colleagues in Strängnäs to check.”

“It’s all so peculiar,” exclaimed Tommy Rantakyrö.

There was silence for a moment. Tommy Rantakyrö was right. It was impossible to get a clear picture of the course of events. What had actually happened up there?

“Yes,” said Anna-Maria. “We need to try and keep all our options open. It could be anything. A crime of hatred, a sex crime, a madman, blackmail, a kidnapping that went wrong. Mauri Kallis and Diddi Wattrang are keeping quiet about what they know about her, that’s for sure. If it was a kidnapping, then these are the kind of people who won’t involve the police.

“And we haven’t found a weapon of any kind either. We’ve searched all around the cottage and Tintin has searched, nothing there. I definitely want the list of calls from her cell phone network operator. Her address book would be brilliant too, but that’s probably in the missing laptop and her phone. But the list of calls, please. Could you take care of that, Tommy?”

Tommy Rantakyrö nodded.

“And yesterday,” said Anna-Maria, “the divers found this coat under the ice.”

She pointed at a picture of the light-colored poplin coat.

“It doesn’t show up very well there,” she said, “but there’s a stain just here, just on the shoulder. I think it’s blood, Inna Wattrang’s. But we’ve sent it to Linköping, so we’ll see. I hope they can find a strand of hair or a trace of sweat or something from the inside of the collar. Then we might get the murderer’s DNA.”

“Do you really think it’s the murderer’s coat?” asked Tommy Rantakyrö. “I mean, it’s a summer coat.”

Anna-Maria Mella pressed her fingers against her forehead, a sure sign that she was thinking.

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “It’s a summer coat. And if it’s the murderer’s coat, that means he came from the summer.”

The others looked at her. What was she talking about?

“It’s winter here,” said Anna-Maria. “But in Skåne and the rest of Europe, it’s spring. Pleasantly warm. Robert’s cousin and her partner were in Paris last weekend. They were able to sit outside the pavement cafés drinking their coffee. What I mean is this: if he came from somewhere warm, then he wasn’t from here, he was from somewhere far away. In which case he must have come by plane, mustn’t he? And maybe hired a car? It’s worth checking. Sven-Erik and I will go out to the airport and check if anyone remembers a guy in a coat like this.”

M
auri Kallis was squatting down in Ester’s attic. He was looking through her paintings and drawings, which were in two big cardboard boxes. Inna had provided paints, canvas, easel, brushes, watercolor paper. Everything top of the range.

“Is there anything else you’d like?” she’d asked a young Ester, standing there with her suitcases, looking very small.

“Weights,” Ester had replied. “Weights and a bar.”

Ester was lying on her back using the bench press while Mauri rummaged through the boxes.

I was terrified the day she arrived, he thought.

Inna had rung to tell him that she and Ester and Ester’s aunt were on their way. Mauri had wandered back and forth in his study, thinking about how he’d felt at his mother’s funeral. His sisters, who had reminded him of her. And now he was going to run the risk of bumping into his mother at any moment. It would feel like Russian roulette every time he poked his nose outside the bedroom door.

“I’m busy,” he’d said to Inna. “You show them round. I’ll ring when you can come over.”

In the end he’d pulled himself together and rung.

And his whole body had become one huge sigh of relief when she walked in through the door. She was Indian. She looked Indian. Not a trace of their mother.

Her aunt had forced out the words:

“Thank you for looking after her, I only wish I could do it myself, but…”

And Mauri had seized hold of Ester’s wrist, almost dizzy.

“Of course,” he’d said. “Of course.”

Ester sneaked a look at Mauri. He was going through her pictures again. If she still drew, she would draw herself in her head, lifting her weights, and above her Mauri with the boxes in his arms. She was lifting him and his curiosity. Carrying both without showing any sign of it on the outside. Moving the pain to the pectoralis major, to the triceps brachii. Lift, nine…ten…eleven…twelve.

But I still want him here, she thought. He needs to have a refuge here with me. That’s the way it’s meant to be.

Mauri looked into a different life when he went through Ester’s drawings. He wondered what would have become of him if he’d been the one who ended up in the Far North when he was very small. A trip to an alternative life.

The motifs were almost exclusively taken from her childhood home, the old railway station in Rensjön. He took out a few pencil drawings of her foster family. Her mother, busy with indoor tasks or with her ceramics. Her brother, in his blue overalls and baseball cap, tinkering with his snowmobile in the middle of summer, a riot of delicate wildflowers framing them both. Her foster father, cleaning the reindeer enclosure on the far side of the railway track down toward the lake, the pack reindeer standing by. And everywhere, in almost every picture, the sinewy little Swedish Lapphunds with their shiny coats and wagging tails.