The Second Deadly Sin (16 page)

“How’s Marcus?” Sivving wondered.

“I don’t know. He was pretending to be a dog all the time he was with Krister. He seems to be somehow oblivious.”

“Poika riepu,” Sivving said with a sigh. “Poor boy. Both his dad and his grandma dead. He has nobody left. They really are an accident-prone family.”

“They certainly are,” Martinsson said, feeling something stirring deep down inside her.

Like a grass snake swimming in still waters.

“And then there’s Sol-Britt’s dad,” she said. “He was devoured by a bear.”

“By Jove yes, those hunters must have had a shock when they found the remains of Frans Uusitalo in the bear’s stomach. Did you hear, the bear was so big they had to call in Patrik Mäkitalo from Luleå. And that dog of his.”

I hate coincidence, Martinsson thought.

While she was an articled law clerk in Stockholm, she had met a police officer who used to say that as a sort of mantra. He was dead now. But the mantra had stuck with her. I hate coincidence.

If the whole family is wiped out …

But then, the old man was devoured by a bear, she thought. Not murdered.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. There had been too many deaths in that family.

Sivving contemplated his shiny winter boots with the feeling of satisfaction that only genuine shoe care can endow.

“My mum used to say that Hjalmar Lundbohm was Frans Uusitalo’s father,” he said.

Martinsson sat up and paid attention.

“What? The managing director of the mine? With that teacher who was also murdered?”

“Yes,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I recall my mum saying that a lot of people thought he ought to have settled down when he’d fallen in love. But nothing came of it.”

“Because she was murdered.”

“Yes. Or maybe they split up before that. I don’t know. Nobody said anything about it afterwards. I know my mum sort of bit her tongue after she’d told me about it. Sol-Britt knew, but she never spoke about it either. She told me once when she was – well, let’s say, not completely sober, and on a war footing with men in general and with one of hers in particular. But you had to turn a blind eye to it. Pretend that you weren’t even born when it happened.”

Martinsson could see Hjalmar Lundbohm before her very eyes. A portrait of the man who built up Kiruna and was managing director of the mining company from 1900 to 1920: he always seemed to be overweight with heavy, drooping eyelids. Not a good-looking man.

“I gather he never married?” she asked.

“That wasn’t because he had anything against women – according to what I’ve heard, in any case.”

Sivving looked hard at her.

“Anyway,” he said. “Shall we have a little nightcap? And then it’s time for you to go to bed. You have to be up early tomorrow in order to carry wood for me. Don’t forget that.”

Martinsson promised.

Winter is beating a retreat. Hjalmar Lundbohm and the schoolteacher Elina Pettersson fall madly in love.

The late winter snow is sighing and dripping tears. Icicles as long as church steeples. The streets are covered in mud and slush. Trees are trembling as they long for spring. The snow is still a metre or more deep in the forest, but the sun is warming everything up. Nobody needs to feel cold for a while, at least: spring is on its way, God bless it!

They make love with wild abandon. Tell each other that they have never felt like this before. Think that nobody could ever have felt like this. Believe that they were made for each other. Compare their hands and find that they are almost identical.

“Like brother and sister,” they say, placing the palms of their hands together, and feeling that they want to remain in Lundbohm’s bedroom for evermore.

“I’ll lock the door and swallow the key,” he says when she gets up in the early morning so she can slink away without being seen.

But like everybody who is madly in love, they are careless.

Lundbohm sends a messenger boy to the school. He knocks on the classroom door and hands over an envelope.

Elina can’t wait to open it, and reads it to herself in front of the class as her cheeks become bright red.

“Dear Schoolma’am,” it reads, “on the advice of my doctor I have
stuffed my underpants full of snow. It doesn’t help.”

She writes a reply while the boy waits.

“Herr Lundbohm,” she writes, “I’m standing in front of a class of children. This must stop.”

If anybody else reads this, they’ll think we’re short of chairs, she thinks.

In May the nights start to become light. They lie awake, talking. Making love and talking. Making love again. She can talk to him about anything at all. He is interested in everything. He is curious and educated.

“Tell me something,” she sometimes says. “Anything at all.”

Outside in the light of the night male ptarmigans are running around over the snow, laughing away in ghostly fashion. Pygmy owls and hawk owls are hooting. Arctic foxes sob like babies as they listen for field mice beneath the covering of frozen snow.

They sometimes tiptoe down into the kitchen. Eat leftovers of ptarmigan breast, artic char, reindeer fillet with cold sauce and jelly, jam, white bread. They drink full-cream cow’s milk or beer. Making love makes you hungry.

The people in Kiruna are not used to seeing the managing director around so often. He travels a lot. He spends most of his time in Stockholm. But he goes abroad as well. To Germany, America and Canada.

He is never normally to be seen in Kiruna during the summer, for instance. He could no doubt face up to it snowing at midsummer, but he would have problems with all the mosquitoes and gnats, those blood-sucking pests.

But in the summer of 1914 he astonishes the citizens of Kiruna by staying at home all the time. People think this is because of the war. On June 28 Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort are murdered in broad daylight in Sarajevo. That sparks off a whole series of
declarations of war. It means business for the mine in Kiruna. The King of Lapland is in excellent spirits.

But that is not because money is rolling in. He is in love. That is why.

Martinsson walked home through the dark. She was thinking about what Sivving had told her about Sol-Britt’s family. Her father had been mauled and eaten by a bear. Her son had been run over. Her paternal grandmother, the schoolteacher who had an affair with the one and only Hjalmar Lundbohm, had been murdered. And Sol-Britt herself had been stabbed to death with a hayfork.

She collected her mobile phone from her car. She had missed a call from Måns. He had left a message:
Hi there, it’s me. Ring if you have time
.

That was all.

What do you mean, “ring if you have time”? she thought, and was filled with a mixture of guilt and anger, and a need to defend herself against an accusation he would deny he had made.

She could write a whole essay on that message.

He seems to be trying to get his own back, she thought as she walked up the steps.

The Brat ran up the steps in front of her. Stood wagging his tail outside the door to the suite of rooms on the upper floor. Just as pleased and expectant at the thought of coming home as of going out.

Getting his own back for what? she thought as she listened to the crackling sound from the dry birch bark as she lit a fire in the stove in the bedroom.

She washed her face and wiped away her make-up. The Brat had already settled down in her bed.

Because she hadn’t rung. Because she hadn’t answered her phone. She ought to ring him now. But she didn’t want to. “If you have time” squeezed all the positive feelings out of her.

Damn it all, she thought. Why can’t he simply write “I’m longing to be with you”?

She sent him a text message:
Tired worked all eve bed time now g.n.

Then she changed “g.n” to “goodnight”. She wondered if she ought to add “love you”, but decided not to. She sent the text then switched off her mobile. Disconnected the landline as well.

And she did not set the alarm clock either – she was not going to go to work the next morning.

Her thoughts turned to von Post and her boss, Björnfot. It was dereliction of duty not to take on the cases she was supposed to do.

But they can go to hell, she thought angrily.

She closed her eyes, but couldn’t go to sleep. The Brat was too warm, jumped off the bed and lay down under the kitchen table.

Sol-Britt’s family. Rather too much bad luck, too many accidents.

After a while she felt for her mobile and phoned Sivving.

“What actually happened in that hit-and-run case?” she said.

“What?” Sivving said, half asleep. “Has something happened?”

“Sol-Britt’s son. That hit-and-run case. What actually happened?”

“Good God! What time is it? Nobody knows. As I said, they never caught whoever did it. One of those bastards … Just left him to die at the side of the road. It was some time before they found him. He’d been flung behind some osier bushes.”

I hate coincidence, Martinsson thought again.

“Now listen here, young lady,” Sivving said brusquely. “Think about that tomorrow. Goodnight!”

Martinsson had barely registered that he had hung up when the mobile rang again, and she answered.

It was Måns.

“Hello,” she said in her most seductive voice. Her irritation was all gone now.

“Hello,” he responded. His voice was teddy bears, warm blankets, a cup of tea and foot massage.

Silence ensued.

Who was going to start? It was as if they were proceeding with caution now, a reluctance to make the first move. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to”, or “Why is it always me who has to?” Perhaps also a worry that the other one would not respond with the same degree of vulnerable affection.

It was Måns who played his cards first.

“How are you, my diddle-diddle darling? I’ve been following the news today – but it wasn’t somebody you knew, was it?”

No complaints because she hadn’t phoned him. Just affectionate solicitude.

“No, but I’ve had an … interesting day. I don’t know where to start.”

“Come on, tell Daddy all about it.”

“Huh,” she said, pretending to be reluctant as always.

Then she told him. About the murder. About how she had been swept aside from the investigation. About her row with Björnfot.

He laughed at the thought of her quarrelling with her boss.

“That’s my girl,” he said.

Måns said nothing about how he would happily wipe his arse with documents lying on the desk of a chief prosecutor in the far north of Sweden. He said nothing at all.

Martinsson melted. She was well aware that if she had continued working for Måns at Meijer & Ditzinger, one of the biggest firms of solicitors in Sweden, she would have been earning three times as much as she was making now. She knew that Måns thought she was wasting her talents as a prosecutor in the far north of the country, that she might just as well be working on the checkout at a local
supermarket, and that he very much wanted her to go back and be with him in Stockholm. She knew that. But she was pleased that he hadn’t raised the matter.

“That’s great,” he said instead, in his sexiest voice. “You can come here and lie in my bed waiting for me to come home from work. At last we can get our relationship back on track.”

“I can take a holiday,” he said after a moment’s thought. “How about a trip to somewhere exciting? The West Indies? South Africa? I have a mate who sells fantastic themed holidays in China and India – I could have a word with him. Shall I do that?”

“Yes, do that,” Martinsson said.

She didn’t want to travel anywhere at all, but she didn’t have the strength to argue with Måns as well. One major row a day was quite enough.

She knew what Måns was like. He did things so quickly. He was quite capable of booking a holiday for the pair of them in the West Indies while they were still talking on the telephone. But if he was going to have a chat with his friend, that gave her a little respite. Her mind was in turmoil. She would have to pack a suitcase. Otherwise: ahoy, Captain, stand by for a major storm. Only a few seconds ago she had felt so good, talking to him: but now she found herself trapped in a corner.

“I love you,” she said, although that was not how she was feeling just now. “I must go to bed.”

I’m out of my mind, she thought. One moment I’m in love, the next I’m running away. How on earth does he put up with me?

“Goodnight,” he said. His voice was different now.

He didn’t tell her he loved her. She could hear him thinking:
I’m certainly not going to. Why am I the one who always has to?

They hung up.

*

Måns Wenngren concluded his call to Rebecka Martinsson. He felt restless, not in the least tired. If only he’d had somebody to go out with, he’d have gone to Riche and ordered a vodka martini or two.

He regretted having made the call.

I ought to hold back, he thought. Trying to love her is like trying to squeeze a handful of sand.

Bloody woman, he thought, examining himself in the mirror.

Handsome top dog? Old man? He would go to Riche anyway, and have a glass or two. Just sit there, observing beautiful women. Much better than gaping at “Mad Men” on the telly, all alone in his flat.

*

Martinsson looked dejectedly at her mobile.

Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself, as it said in the Good Book.

Her mobile ting-a-linged yet again. She thought it would be a text message from Måns, but it was from Eriksson.

The Wild Dog, Roy and, believe it or not, Vera are racing around here for all they are worth, making deep scratches in the parquet floor. Tintin thinks animal welfare should take all the others into custody. I hope the Wild Dog will soon be domesticated.

All her depression faded away in a flash.

She could see in her mind’s eye how Vera and Marcus and Roy were chasing each other round the living room table, while Tintin sat in the kitchen, staring accusingly at Eriksson.

Marcus is really enjoying himself. Eriksson is doing a great job. Kind and playful and …