The Second Deadly Sin (39 page)

She has laid Marcus down beside her, and turned him away. This is something he must not see.

“My lovely little girl,” she says to Vera in a soft, hoarse voice.

She presses her battered face against Vera’s head, rubs her forehead against the dog’s silky skin, against her soft ears. She kisses Vera on the nose – although it’s not much of a kiss, her mouth is too cracked and sore.

Vera allows herself to be held. She can’t slink off when Martinsson is holding on to her, but she doesn’t even try to. Just sits there submissively.

“I’m sorry,” whispers Martinsson with a lump in her throat. “You are the loveliest dog I have ever come across.” She swallows.

On three, she thinks. One …

Perhaps he is waiting for his dog, that strange, solitary madman who owned her in the first place.

Two …

Now they can roam around in the wilds again. She can picture Vera running round and round him, barking in doggy delight.

Three. Martinsson hits with all her strength on the precise spot where Vera’s snout sticks out from her head.

You were never my dog in that sense, she thinks. But I love you even so.

And Vera becomes heavy in her hand, sinks down onto Martinsson’s feet, her paws twitch slightly. Martinsson lets go of the collar. She ought to hit her again, but she cannot. It is simply not possible.

The branch falls out of her hand and she digs her fingers into Vera’s fur.

Let go now. Away you go. Away you go, now.

She will cry later, not now. Not now. Up. Up on your feet.

She takes hold of Marcus, and the pain she feels in her head and face is a blessed relief now as she drags him between the tree trunks and over the moss and the undergrowth. Lifts him over roots and low branches.

In the end her legs and arms are trembling. She simply cannot go on, she hasn’t the strength to drag him even one more metre. She pushes Marcus under a fir tree, rips off twigs and small branches and covers him almost completely.

“You must keep absolutely silent,” she whispers into his ear. “No matter what she says. Don’t say a single word. The police will soon be here to rescue us. Krister. O.K.? We’re waiting for Krister.”

She thinks she sees him nod his head in the darkness.

Should she move away from him? But if she does, he might get scared and give himself away. She can’t make up her mind. Nor does she have the strength. She tumbles down into the undergrowth.

In her mind’s eye Vera is still running around. Scampering along a dry, dusty country lane, crouching slightly as usual. She slinks
down into a ditch, comes up again. The sun is shining and Vera scuttles over a meadow which is covered by a veil of midsummer flowers, buttercups, red clover. It is almost impossible to see more of her than that ear sticking straight up.

How can one love a dog as much as I love her? Martinsson thinks. I hope you felt free when you were with me.

Then her thoughts and her tears trickle away into the cold moss.

*

Marcus the Wild Dog can feel that Martinsson has stopped shaking. She has been crying, but now she has stopped. He moves his arms, and now he can disentangle them from his legs. But his wrists are still taped together. The Wild Dog has sharp teeth. It finds the edge of the tape, and soon it has worked its paws free.

Now he hears the voice, despite the loud roaring from the rapids. She – Larsson – is quite close now. He has to hold his paw over his mouth. The light from the torch is sweeping back and forth over the ground. He pulls Martinsson’s dark-coloured scarf over her white hand and face. Now they are almost invisible.

“Rebecka!” Larsson shouts, shining the torch in all directions. “I didn’t think you were capable of that. So cold-blooded.”

The torchlight moves further away. The Wild Dog doesn’t dare to follow it with its eyes, but it doesn’t dare to keep its eyes closed all the time either.

The voice is coming out of the darkness. What he sees most of is the torch. Sometimes it is shining directly at him and Martinsson. Then he hardly dares to breathe, although she is a long way away. Sometimes he can see her clearly in the moonlight. She is like a ghost.

“Rebecka,” she shouts. “We can share it. You are Virpi’s daughter. I would never … Surely you understand that?”

The torch continues to shine. For a while it is a long way away,
but then it comes closer again. She starts shouting again. Now she is shouting to him.

“Marcus? Wild Dog! I’m worried about Rebecka. Is she with you?”

The torch is back where they left Vera. Now she is walking in a circle. Then a larger circle. She shines the torch behind rocks and under pine trees.

“Has Rebecka fainted?” she shouts. “Is she bleeding? She might die if she doesn’t get to a hospital.”

Now the Wild Dog is very scared.

“It’s all your fault, Marcus,” she shouts.

Maja sounds so angry. The Wild Dog looks at Martinsson. She keeps fainting, over and over again. She might die.

Should he shout? Martinsson said he ought to keep quiet, but she hadn’t fainted then.

He opens his mouth to shout, but no sound comes. He has promised, after all.

And then, just when he is so scared that he can hardly stop himself from crying, he sees a very large lamp some way away in the trees. Two lamps. Three.

And then he hears Krister’s voice.

“Marcus!” Eriksson shouts. “Rebecka!”

Maja’s torch is extinguished and she disappears into the trees.

Marcus caresses Rebecka. Everything will be O.K. now. He won’t say a word. The Wild Dog has played hide and seek with Krister before. And Tintin is no doubt with them. They will soon find him. And then everything will be alright.

Hjalmar Lundbohm dies in the morning of Easter Day, 1926. The doctor has been to visit him the evening before. He listened to Lundbohm’s heart and his fast, irregular breathing. And said that there was not long to go now. Lundbohm did not wake up during the brief visit.

When the doctor left, Sixten returned to the armchair they had placed beside the bed. He held his brother’s hand for a while. Then he read a few pages of his book. Fell asleep as he sat there. The book fell to the floor.

At half past four in the morning, Lundbohm opens his eyes for the last time. Sixten is asleep in the armchair. His head is drooping like a faded flower. His glasses are on his knee.

Elina is sitting on the edge of the bed. She bends down over Hjalmar and kisses his face.

Then she stands up. He stretches his hands out to her like a drowning man. She must not leave him.

“Come now,” she says, and gives him a slightly surprised smile, as if she is wondering why he is lying there.

And then he steps out of his body, with no difficulty at all.

As soon as he takes a pace forward, he is no longer in Sixten’s home.

It is early spring. The sun is shining over a snow-covered Kiruna.

She is walking a few metres in front of him. Her fair hair is constantly working its way free from the bun in which it is tied.
He hurries to catch up with her. She turns her head and smiles at him. There is no sorrow in her, no hatred, no disappointment. Nevertheless, he has stabbing pains in his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Please forgive me, Elina.”

She stops and looks surprised.

“What for?” she asks.

And he realises that she doesn’t remember anything. He turns, as if the memory is something he has dropped out of his pocket and might be lying on the pavement behind him. But there is nothing there.

Then there is just snow and sunshine and a laughing schoolteacher with whom he has linked arms, and whom he will never let go. And the glories of spring that are lying underneath all the whiteness, waiting to burst forth in their full majesty.

Anna-Maria Mella went out into the hospital corridor to fetch another cup of coffee. When she got back, Martinsson had regained consciousness. She was lying in bed with a drip in her arm, staring up at the ceiling light.

“Hello,” Mella said cautiously.

Martinsson turned her head slowly to look at her. Her eyes were as black as a winter night when she fixed her gaze on Mella.

“Marcus?” she said.

“He’s fine. That Örjan knocked him out at the very beginning, so he’ll be here in intensive care for tonight. But that’s just so that they can keep an eye on him. He’s asleep.”

Mella sat down on the edge of Martinsson’s bed, and stroked her colleague’s head as she usually did with her children when they were ill.

“Can you speak?”

“Maja?” whispered Martinsson.

Mella took a deep breath.

“Tintin tracked her down,” she said. “She ran off through the trees, but we commandeered a quad bike from one of the cottages, and caught up with her quite quickly.”

Martinsson nodded. She knew the score. She had seen Tintin perched on a bathroom mat so as not to slip on the platform of a quad bike, pointing her nose in the direction the driver ought to follow.

“When we caught up with her she ran down to the river,” Mella said. “And swam out.”

She looked down at her coffee and pulled a face.

“You can guess what happened. Strong currents and below freezing. She didn’t survive. Her body ended up twenty metres downstream. Tintin found it right away.”

Mella took a swig of coffee. Thought about how she had stood there on the riverbank with her hand on her service pistol while Eriksson attempted cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, determined not to give up. Moonlight. Wet rocks glistening. The black river water. Stålnacke reporting by telephone that the ambulances had arrived with stretchers and that Martinsson was alive.

“Do you have the strength to say what happened?”

“There’s an inheritance,” Martinsson said, clearing her throat. “From Frans Uusitalo. Old shares that Hjalmar Lundbohm gave him. They are in Frans’s name, so they are only of value to him or his legal heirs. I can’t be certain, but I can well imagine that Frans Uusitalo or Sol-Britt asked Maja Larsson to look into it and find out if they were worth anything. Or perhaps she offered to do so.”

“And were they?”

“Several million.”

Mella whistled in astonishment – or perhaps it was mostly a blowing without sound.

“I think,” Martinsson went on, “that Maja said they were worthless. Then she decided to be patient. Worked out how to ensure that all the other heirs would have accidents. Left quite a long time between them. Then she discovered that Sol-Britt had a half-brother. Perhaps she intended to kill him straight away, but then it occurred to her that she could save him until last, so that he could be the perfect scapegoat if anything went wrong, and if the police discovered that all the deaths were not in fact accidents.”

She paused. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth.
Her head no longer felt as if it were about to burst. She wondered what medication they had given her. Mella stood up and fetched her a white plastic mug of water.

“Maja couldn’t inherit Sol-Britt’s fortune; they were only cousins. Cousins don’t inherit. But if there are no children or grandchildren, and no siblings nor children of siblings, then an aunt can inherit. Maja’s mother was Sol-Britt’s aunt.”

“So she started with Sol-Britt’s son.”

“Yes. And then there was no great hurry. Until her mother got cancer of the liver, and so she suddenly needed to get a move on. She shot Frans in the forest. Stole a rifle from a hunter’s cottage, and then returned it to where she had taken it from. Örjan told me about that. Is he … ?”

Mella shook her head.

“No, he’s O.K. He’s talking away – Stålnacke noted it all down. What do you think? Complicity in murder? Protecting a criminal?”

“In any case complicity in attempted murder, in connection with Marcus,” Martinsson said. “And Grievous Bodily Harm. He won’t get away with that.”

“I don’t understand Maja,” Mella said. “She seemed to be, I don’t know, such a pleasant person. And she dropped von Pest in the shit.”

Martinsson said nothing. She was thinking about her own conversation with Maja.

I wasn’t even a person as far as she was concerned, she thought. We were all simply obstacles, or tools. We had to be eliminated, or used.

“She must have been overjoyed when she discovered that Sol-Britt was having an affair with Jocke Häggroth,” Mella said. “It would have been dead easy to borrow Sol-Britt’s mobile and send a text message to her own, saying that she was going to break it off. And then erase it from Sol-Britt’s mobile. She knew that we would dig out all her messages, including the erased ones.”

They said nothing for a while, and both of them thought about Larsson. Larsson stabbing Sol-Britt over and over again with the hayfork, to make it look like a frenzied attack by a madman. Larsson writing
WHORE
on the wall. Larsson searching for Marcus – opening all the cupboards. Putting the hayfork under Häggroth’s barn.

“She probably never thought it would have been possible for him to escape through a first-floor window,” Mella said, gulping down her coffee.

Much better than the stuff we get from the vending machine at work, she thought.

“We’re going through her mother’s house with a fine-tooth comb now. They’ve been at it for three hours already. We found a plastic sack in the compost heap containing the body of a dead dog.”

“Sol-Britt and Marcus’s dog,” Martinsson said.

“And then she put the burning torch in the dog kennel while Marcus was asleep there,” continued Mella. “A perfect accident.”

“Yes,” Martinsson said. “She didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what?”

“That she had already lost. When Marcus outlived Sol-Britt, that was curtains for Maja. Her mother would never have inherited Sol-Britt’s fortune. What counts is the time of death, not the time when the estate of the deceased is distributed. An aunt is a third-in-line heir. She can only inherit if there is no first-or second-in-line heir alive when the person whose estate is to be distributed dies. Marcus became Sol-Britt’s heir the very second she died. If Maja had killed him later, it would have been Marcus’s mother in Stockholm who inherited the fortune. Marcus would have to have died simultaneously with Sol-Britt or before her for Maja’s mother to inherit. She cocked it up.”