The Black Path (26 page)

Forget it, she tried to tell herself. He’s not interested.

But her heart was stubbornly contradicting her.

Look here, it said, calling up some pictures for her to look at. Måns and Rebecka in the skiff. She’s rowing. He’s trailing a hand in the water. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his white office shirt. His face soft and relaxed. Then: Rebecka on the floor in the living room in front of the open fire. Måns between her legs.

When she got undressed to change from her work clothes into jeans and a sweater, she looked at herself in the mirror. Pale and slender. Her breasts were far too small. And weren’t they a really odd shape? Not two little mounds, more like two upside-down ice-cream cones. She suddenly felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar with this body that nobody wanted and inside which no child had grown to full term. She pulled her clothes on quickly.

She poured herself a whisky and sat down at her grandmother’s old drop-leaf table in the kitchen, taking bigger gulps than usual. Its warmth spread through her stomach, and her thoughts stopped tumbling over one another in her head.

The last time she’d really been in love…it had been Thomas Söderberg, which ought to tell her something about her ability to choose men. She wouldn’t think about it.

She’d had the odd boyfriend after that, all law students at the university. She hadn’t actually chosen any of them herself. She’d allowed herself to be invited out to dinner, allowed herself to be kissed and somehow ended up in bed. Depressing and predictable from the start. Contempt had always been close by. She’d despised them all because they were such babies, upper-class boys, all convinced they’d get higher grades than her if they could only be bothered to study. She despised their pathetic rebellion against their parents, which consisted of a moderate intake of drugs and a somewhat larger intake of alcohol. She despised their illusions of being different. She even despised their contempt for philistines, until they started work and got married and turned into philistines.

And now there was Måns. Take a little bit of boarding school, fine art, arrogance, alcohol and a sharp legal mind in a male body and shake.

Her father probably couldn’t believe his luck when her mother chose him. That was how she imagined it had happened. Her mother chose her father, just as you pluck a piece of ripe fruit from a tree.

Rebecka was seized by a sudden desire to look at pictures of her mother. After her grandmother’s death, she ripped all the photos of her mother out of Grandmother’s album herself.

She pulled on her boots and ran across to Sivving.

There was still a faint aroma of fried sausage in the air down in Sivving’s boiler room. A newly washed plate lay on the string shelf, along with a glass, a pan and a frying pan, turned upside down on a red and white checked tea towel. Sivving was lying on top of the bed dozing, with the local paper over his face. There was a great big hole in one of his socks. Rebecka was strangely moved when she saw him.

Bella leapt up, almost knocking the chair over in her joy at Rebecka’s visit. Rebecka scratched her, and the rhythmic thumping of Bella’s tail against the kitchen table and her ecstatic whimpering woke Sivving.

“Rebecka,” he said happily. “Would you like some coffee?”

She said yes, and while he was measuring it out she explained her errand.

Sivving went upstairs, and after a while he came back with two albums under his arm.

“I’m sure there must be some pictures of your mother in here,” he said. “Although it’s mostly Maj-Lis and the kids, of course.”

Rebecka flicked through the pictures of her mother. In one her mother and Maj-Lis were sitting on a reindeer skin on the snow in early spring, squinting and laughing at the camera.

“We’re like each other,” said Rebecka.

“True,” agreed Sivving.

“How did she and my father meet?”

“I don’t know. But I expect it was at a dance. He was actually a really good dancer, your father. When he had the nerve.”

Rebecka tried to create pictures in her head. Her mother in her father’s arms on the dance floor. Her father, with the self-confidence he’s borrowed from a bottle, allows his hand to move across her back.

She was filled with an old emotion when she saw the pictures. A strange mixture of shame and anger. Fury to counteract the villagers’ condescending sympathy.

They called Rebecka “poor girl” over her head.
Piika riepu
. Lucky she had her grandmother, they said. But how long would Theresia Martinsson be able to cope? That was the question. We all have our faults, that’s true. But not to be able to take care of your own child…

Sivving looked at her sideways.

“Maj-Lis was very fond of your mother,” he said.

“Was she?”

Rebecka could hear that her own voice was no more than a whisper.

“They always had plenty to talk about, they used to sit there laughing at the kitchen table.”

Oh yes, thought Rebecka. I remember that mother too. She looked for a photo where her mother wasn’t posing. Where she hadn’t chosen the best angle for the camera and fixed her smile.

A real film star, by Kurravaara standards.

Two memories:

Memory number one. Rebecka wakes up in the morning in the two-room apartment in the town center. They’ve moved from Kurravaara. Daddy is still living on the ground floor in Grandmother’s house. The most practical thing is for Rebecka to live with her mother in town, they say. Close to school and everything. She wakes up and everything smells fresh and clean. It’s sparkling. And her mother has rearranged the furniture in the whole apartment. The only thing that’s still in its old place is Rebecka’s bed. Breakfast is on the table. Freshly baked scones. Her mother is out on the balcony smoking a cigarette, and she looks really happy.

She must have spent the whole night cleaning and heaving furniture around. Whatever will the neighbors think?

Rebecka slinks down the stairs like a cat, keeping her eyes firmly on the ground. If Laila from downstairs opens the door she’ll just die of shame.

Memory number two. The teacher says: “Get into pairs.”

Petra: “I don’t want to sit next to Rebecka.”

Teacher: “Don’t be so silly!”

The class listens. Rebecka stares down at her desk.

Petra: “She smells of pee.”

It’s because they haven’t got any electricity in the apartment. It’s been cut off. It’s September so they’re not cold, but they can’t use the washing machine.

When Rebecka comes home crying, her mother is furious. She drags Rebecka along to the local telecom offices and plays hell with the staff. It doesn’t make any difference when they try to explain that she needs to contact the electricity company, that it isn’t the same thing at all.

Rebecka looked at the picture of her mother. It struck her that she was about the same age as Rebecka is now.

She was probably doing her best, she thought.

She looked at the smiling woman on the reindeer skin, and a feeling of reconciliation came over her. It was as if something inside her had found peace. Perhaps it was the realization that her mother wasn’t very old.

What kind of mother would I have been if I’d chosen to have my baby? wondered Rebecka. My God!

And then it became the norm for my mother to leave me with Grandmother during periods when she couldn’t cope. And I was here in Kurra for the summer holidays too.

And all the kids were grubby up here, she thought. The whole lot of us probably smelled of pee.

Sivving interrupted her thoughts.

“I wondered if you could help me…” he began.

He always made sure he got her working. Rebecka suspected it wasn’t so much that he actually needed help, but that he thought she did. A little bit of physical work to stop her brooding over things.

Now he wanted her to get up on the roof to knock down some overhanging snow.

“The thing is, it’s going to come down any day now, and Bella might be underneath it. Or me, if I forget it’s there.”

She climbed up onto Sivving’s roof in the darkness of the evening. The outdoor lighting wasn’t much help. It was snowing. And the old snow underneath was hard and slippery. A rope around her waist and a shovel in her hand. Sivving had a shovel too, but only to lean on. He pointed and shouted out tips and orders. Rebecka was doing it her way, and he was getting annoyed because his way was the best. That’s the way things always were when they worked together. She was sweaty when she climbed back down.

But it didn’t help. When she got in the shower back home, her thoughts turned to Måns again. She looked at the clock. It was only nine.

She needed something else to occupy her brain. She might as well sit down at the computer and carry on checking out Inna Wattrang.

At quarter to ten there was a knock at Rebecka’s front door. Anna-Maria Mella’s voice came from downstairs in the hallway:

“Hi there! Anyone home?”

Rebecka opened the door to the upstairs landing and shouted: “Up here!”

“There is a Santa Claus,” puffed Anna-Maria when she reached the top of the stairs.

She was carrying a banana box. Rebecka remembered her joke from that morning, and laughed.

“I’ve been a good girl all year,” she promised.

Anna-Maria laughed too. She found it really easy to get on with Rebecka now they were working together on Inna Wattrang’s murder.

“These are papers and all kinds of stuff from Örjan Bylund’s computer,” said Anna-Maria after a moment, nodding toward the banana box.

She sat down at the kitchen table and explained about the dead journalist while Rebecka made coffee.

“He told a colleague he was working on something to do with Kallis Mining. Six weeks later he was dead.”

Rebecka turned around.

“How?”

“Hanged himself at home in his study. Although I’m not at all sure about that. I’ve applied for permission to exhume his body and have an autopsy done. I just wish the authority would get a move on with their decision. Here!”

She placed a USB stick on the table.

“The contents of Örjan Bylund’s computer. The hard drive had been wiped, but Fred Olsson sorted it.”

Anna-Maria looked around. It was a really comfortable kitchen. Simple, rustic furniture mixed with pieces from the forties and fifties. Several trays hanging from embroidered holders. Attractive, and slightly old-fashioned. It reminded Anna-Maria of her own grandmother and the way her house had been.

“It’s lovely here,” she said.

Rebecka poured her a coffee.

“Thanks. You’ll have to have it black.”

Rebecka looked around her kitchen. She was pleased with the way she had it. It wasn’t some kind of mausoleum to her grandmother, but she’d kept most things. When she’d moved up here she’d felt very strongly that she liked it just that way. She’d stood in her apartment in Stockholm when she was discharged from the psychiatric ward and looked around. Looked at her trendy Ant chairs and her Poul Henningsen lighting. The Italian sofa from Asplund’s that she’d bought as a present to herself when she was elected into the Law Society. “This isn’t me,” she’d thought. And so she’d sold the lot along with the apartment.

“There’s a payment to Inna Wattrang that I’m going to check on,” Rebecka told Anna-Maria. “Somebody paid two hundred thousand kronor in cash into her personal account.”

“Thanks,” said Anna-Maria. “Tomorrow?”

Rebecka nodded.

This was brilliant, thought Anna-Maria. It was exactly the sort of thing she didn’t have time to do. Maybe she should ask Rebecka to come along when they all went bowling. Then she and Sven-Erik could talk about cats.

“Actually, I’m too old for this,” said Anna-Maria, looking at her coffee cup. “When I drink coffee in the evenings nowadays, I wake up during the night and my thoughts just go…”

She made a circular movement with her hand to show how her thoughts spun round and round in her head.

“Me too,” confessed Rebecka.

They laughed, conscious that they’d both had a cup anyway, just to get closer to each other.

Outside, the snow went on falling.

T
UESDAY
M
ARCH
20, 2005

I
t snowed throughout Wednesday night. But on Thursday morning it stopped; the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Only thirty degrees. At quarter past nine in the morning Örjan Bylund’s coffin was dug up. The graveyard workers had cleared away the snow the night before and placed a heater on top of the grave.

Anna-Maria had argued with them about it.

“We need a decision from the authorities,” they’d said.

“To exhume the body, yes,” Anna-Maria had replied. “But all I’m asking you to do is to put the heater on now, so that you can dig him up quickly when we get the decision.”

By now the deep frost had gone from the ground, and they dug up the coffin with the graveyard’s little Kubota.

There were a dozen or so photographers hanging about. Anna-Maria looked at them, and her thoughts flew guiltily to Airi Bylund.

But I’m working on a murder investigation here, she defended herself. That lot just want front-page pictures.

And they got them. The filthy hole in the ground, the earth, the sad remains of roses, the black coffin. And all around the sparkling early spring, newly fallen snow and sunshine.

Lars Pohjanen and Anna Granlund were waiting at the hospital to receive the body.

Anna-Maria Mella looked at her watch.

“Half an hour,” she said to Sven-Erik. “Then we’ll ring and ask how far he’s got.”

At that moment her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Rebecka Martinsson.

“I’ve checked that payment into Inna Wattrang’s bank account,” she said. “And there’s something odd about it. On the fifteenth of January, somebody went into a small branch of Svenska Enskilda Banken on Hantverkargatan in Stockholm and paid in 200,000 kronor. On the paying in slip, the person wrote: ‘Not for your silence.’”