The Second Deadly Sin (23 page)

And she’s on the ball, he thought. Even when she’s dreaming.

“And you want me to do it without …”

He made a circular gesture with his hand to illustrate formalities and bureaucratic procedures.

She nodded.

“I’m not even working at the moment,” she said. “And I might well get the sack tomorrow.”

Pohjanen made a rattling noise that was presumably a laugh.

“Yes, I’ve heard about that,” he said. “Everything you do stirs up a hell of a lot of drama, Martinsson. But anyway, I’m afraid I can’t do it. Not if he was found two months or more ago. He’ll be buried by now, or burnt to a cinder.”

“But you could ring your colleague in Umeå who did the postmortem.”

Martinsson took out her mobile and handed it to him. Pohjanen glared at it.

“I see, so the call has to be made right away, has it? You Kiruna girls are not exactly the patient sort, are you? I’m actually surprised that Mella hasn’t been in to snatch Sol-Britt’s postmortem report out of my hands.”

“They’ve found the bloke she was having an affair with, and are on the way to Kurravaara to arrest him and take him in for interrogation.”

“So that’s the way it is, is it? O.K., I’ll do it. But younger colleagues aren’t often thrilled when an old fart like me rings and asks them about the job they’ve done. They get nervous. But O.K., I’ll do it. If you do something for me in return.”

“What?”

“Invite me to lunch.”

“Of course. Where would you like to eat?”

“At your place, of course. I eat lunch out all the time. I want some homemade food. And you don’t have anything important to do anyway, do you? You can cobble something together for an old graverobber like me.”

He took hold of Martinsson’s mobile and turned it over a few times.

“Is this one of those so-called touchpads? You’ll have to dial the number for me.”

*

“When do you have to be back?” Martinsson wondered.

The colleague in Umeå had been unobtainable. But Pohjanen had left Martinsson’s telephone number and been promised that his colleague would telephone him as soon as possible. Now they were on their way to Kurravaara.

“Huh. Not until tomorrow.”

“That’s O.K., then,” Martinsson said.

They parked in front of her grey Eternit house.

Pohjanen clambered out of the car, leaned against it and lit a cigarette.

“You have a terrific spot here,” he said, gazing out over the river, as blue as a jewel in the autumn sun.

Martinsson came back from the house with a fishing rod over her shoulder and an old Windsor-style chair in her hand.

“Put that fag out and come with me,” she said. “We’re off to the riverbank.”

When they got there she tossed her coat into the frozen grass and attached the Rapala lure.

“If we don’t catch any fish I have some slices of reindeer meat in the freezer.”

“If I were younger I’d ask you to marry me,” Pohjanen said.

He had flopped down onto the chair and lit another cigarette. He screwed up his eyes as he looked towards the setting sun that was spreading a pink glow over the river and the trees and the houses on the opposite bank.

Martinsson spread a blanket over his knees. The Brat had lain down on his feet, and sighed with boredom.

Pohjanen had with him a worn-out Co-op plastic carrier bag containing his belongings. A spare jumper, cigarettes, files, papers. He rummaged around in it and took out a hip flask.

“Would you like a drop?” he asked Martinsson.

She smiled in surprise.

“What is it?” she asked. “Methylated spirits?”

“You can bet your life it is.”

“Ugh,” she said, with feeling.

“None of your ughs. Try it.”

She wound in the line and disappeared in the direction of the woodshed. Came back with a hip flask of her own and two plastic goblets.

Pohjanen couldn’t conceal his delight.

“For Christ’s sake, woman,” he said. “You are a prosecutor. Do you brew your own moonshine?”

She shook her head. He asked no more questions. They each poured out a drink for the other.

Martinsson said that the methylated spirits wasn’t at all bad. Pohjanen explained that the trick was to mix it with water and place it in an ultrasound bath so that the connections between the water molecules were broken down, enabling them to blend with the ethanol.

He emptied his glass in one gulp, and in turn praised Martinsson’s moonshine. She explained that the trick was to keep the temperature at the right level, both on the hob and in the cooling stage of the distillation process.

Pohjanen nodded and held out his glass for a refill.

As the telephone started ringing, Martinsson felt a bite. While Pohjanen was talking to his colleague in Umeå, she reeled in three perch and a salmon trout.

*

If the forensic specialist in Umeå was put out at being asked about a postmortem he had carried out, he didn’t show it. Instead, he offered them a bone.

It was Lars Pohjanen who was asking after all. There wasn’t a pathologist in the whole of Sweden who wouldn’t bend over backwards to assist him in any way possible.

“I remember him very well,” he said. “Hang on a minute, I’ll check up in the computer … Yes, he was buried a month ago. But I still have a bone if you would like it. Yes indeed … You know, the old bloke was over ninety, but fit as a fiddle. When we were trying to identify him, the police didn’t manage to dig up any X-ray plates for him – he had never been in a hospital. And he hadn’t had any teeth for over twenty years, so there was not much point in trying to identify him via dental X-rays. I sawed a piece off his femur to send off for D.N.A. analysis, but it was slightly damaged and looked a bit odd: so I put it in the freezer and sent a different bit to the National Forensic Laboratory.”

“What kind of damage?”

“Possibly the bear. I don’t know. Would you like the bone?”

“Yes please, that would be kind of you. And by the way, you don’t need to make a note of the communication anywhere.”

“I see, so that’s how it is … By the way, I don’t know if it’s of any interest to you, but one of the crackpots in the hunting team that discovered his body found the old boy’s shirt not far away from the spot a week or so later. He rang and wondered if we wanted it. I said he should give it to the police – they’re bloody useless anyway.”

Pohjanen and his colleague from Umeå laughed loudly, like two arrogant crows in the crown of a pine tree.

Martinsson was standing on a rock in her best boots and turned to see what the noise was all about. The Brat lifted his head and barked.

“But you have to agree that it’s very odd,” Martinsson said to Pohjanen, who was sitting with his half-full fourth or fifth glass of methylated spirits. “It’s very strange to have all those deaths in the same family.” She took a sip out of her own glass and pointed it at the stove. “This is the way to boil almond potatoes. Look. You put them in a pan of cold water and just when it starts boiling you take it off the hot plate and let it stand for half an hour. Otherwise the potatoes will crumble. They’re delicate little things.”

She put down her glass and listened to the butter sizzling in the cast-iron pan. When she had put the fish in it, she picked up the potato pan.

“The only thing that’s odd,” said Pohjanen, whose tongue was having difficulty in keeping up with his words. “The only thing that’s strange is that somebody didn’t marry you ages ago.”

Martinsson nodded vehemently and poured off the water from the almond potatoes. Then she whisked a little salt, black pepper and a knob of redcurrent jelly into the morel sauce. Pohjanen staggered as far as the refrigerator and opened two beers.

“You’d better take a taxi home,” Martinsson said. “Or sleep here on the sofa.”

They sat down opposite each other.

“But if you do sleep here, you must promise not to die.”

Pohjanen filled Martinsson’s schnapps glass. The methylated spirits was all gone, but Martinsson’s hip flask was still half full. He nodded.

“That shirt …” said Pohjanen, mashing the potatoes into the sauce with his fork. He didn’t bother to peel them, neither did Martinsson.

“. . . We ought to take a look at it. I wonder if the police still have it?”

*

They ate all the fish. Pohjanen was still eating potatoes and sauce when Martinsson pulled herself together, rang Sonja the switchboard operator, and asked her about the shirt that had been found in the forest. When Sonja rang back Pohjanen had also finished eating. They were now sitting in front of the open fire, each with a beer. They had left the schnapps on the table.

“Have you been crying?” Sonja wondered. “Your voice sounds so odd.”

“No, no,” Martinsson insisted. “I’m fine.”

It’s time to put on a pan of strong coffee, she thought.

Sonja was able to explain that it wasn’t in fact one of the hunters who had found the shirt, but somebody from Lainio who had been out picking berries. After the bear had been shot and Frans Uusitalo’s body found, there had been masses of people wandering around the spot out of sheer curiosity. And one of them, this berrypicker, had found the shirt and contacted the police.

“Have you still … have we still got it?” Martinsson asked.

“No,” Sonja said. “We didn’t want to keep that filthy old thing lying around, good God no. But I’ve still got his number. I can text it to you if you like.”

“Excellent!”

“Are you really sure you’re O.K.? Have you got a cold?”

*

Pohjanen and Martinsson drew lots to decide who would phone the berrypicker. Martinsson drew the short straw. Pohjanen threw a tennis ball for the Brat while she was ringing. Rugs and chairs went flying in all directions.

“It was something I wanted to see with my own eyes – and so did lots of others,” the berrypicker said to Martinsson. “And so I went
to check out a bog not far from the scene, looking for cranberries. Last year I sold fourteen thousand kronors’ worth of lingonberries and cranberries.”

He fell silent. It dawned on him that he was talking to a servant of the law. He had not declared that income in his tax returns. He had opened his mouth and put his foot in it.

“Huh,” Martinsson said. “I’ll believe that when I see it. Still, very impressive. And then you found that shirt, you said.”

“Yes,” the berrypicker said, exhaling in relief and thinking that there are actually prosecutors who are human after all. “I had lots of plastic bags with me, for the berries, so I took a stick and picked up the shirt and poked it down into one of the bags. Then I called the police and asked if they wanted it. But they weren’t interested. They said I should give it to the pathologist. And so I rang him. That was even harder than getting through to the telephone company. But he reckoned I ought to give it to the police. Bloody amateurs, the lot of ‘em, if you ask me.”

He fell silent again.

“Anyway, those are the facts,” he said in the end, his tone of voice suggesting rebellion against those in authority.

“I don’t suppose you still have it, do you?” asked Martinsson.

“Of course I’ve still got it,” said the berrypicker grumpily. “Both the police and the pathologist know that I have the shirt. And then they suddenly decide that they want it after all. Huh, I suppose I’d better cough it up. Don’t you think? It’s in a plastic bag in my garage. Stank to high heaven – it drove the dogs mad.”

Martinsson stood up, her legs feeling decidedly shaky.

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “I’ll come and fetch it right away.”

How do you defend yourself against men? Against Manager-in-Chief Fasth? He’s like a beast of prey, like a wolf. And the only way to defend yourself against a wolf is to seek safety in numbers. As soon as you are alone, you are an easy catch.

Elina no longer goes to and from school alone. Every day she chooses a boy or a girl to carry their teacher’s books home, so Fasth never finds her alone in the classroom, nor on the way home after a day’s work. And she does the same in the mornings: she arranges for one of the children to fetch her.

One day when she comes home she finds Fasth standing at the bottom of the stairs. How long has he been waiting there for her? He has opened a letter addressed to her that somebody has left on the bottom step. He reads it without a trace of embarrassment, then hands it over to her. She cannot prevent her hand from shaking as she accepts the handwritten sheet of paper. She can see from the handwriting that it is not from Hjalmar Lundbohm, she gets as far as “fröken Pettersson, you don’t know who I am, but …”

“Fröken Pettersson,” he says. “Apparently one has to queue up to see you.”

Then he notices the boy she has by her side.

“Run along home now,” he says to him.

But Elina takes hold of the boy’s hand and refuses to let go.

“Arvid isn’t going anywhere,” she says. “He’s going to … practise reading aloud.”

And she elbows her way past Fasth, holding tightly onto the poor little boy who is white about the gills. As she hurries up the stairs, Fasth manages to slap her bottom.

“Sooner or later, fröken,” he says from behind her back.

And he really draws out the word “fröken”. Cuts it to pieces until it means simply “unmarried hussy”.

“Fröööööken Pettersson.”

The interrogation of Jocke Häggroth took place at a quarter past four in the afternoon of Monday, 24 October. Outside, the sky had clouded over and it started snowing. Large flakes that were in no hurry to tumble down through the blue twilight.

Von Post and Mella were the witnesses, and Stålnacke was the interrogator.

“Let Stålnacke conduct the interrogation,” Chief Prosecutor Björnfot had told von Post. “He’s the sort of person that people open their hearts to.”

Now he was sitting there opposite Häggroth. Both were wearing striped shirts. Stålnacke scratched his large moustache.

“Are you alright?” he asked. “Can we begin?”

Häggroth did not answer. With a deep sigh, his tongue tucked into one corner of his mouth, Stålnacke switched on the tape recorder, a routine which involved him checking the battery and making sure it was recording the sound. He shifted his position on the chair. Grunted and panted a few times, and leaned his head on one side to stretch out any stiffness.