Until Thy Wrath Be Past Part 14

Now he was standing beside the grave containing the coffin, feeling uncomfortable in his camouflage trousers and jacket although at least he had had the sense not to wear his duffel coat. Lots of young people had turned up, each carrying a red rose to drop onto the coffin. All of them were dressed in black with jewellery in their eyebrows and noses and lips; all had black make-up around their eyes. But none of that could conceal their smooth skin, their rounded cheeks.

They're so young, he thought. All of them are so young. Wilma as well.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

Wilma's mother had travelled up from Stockholm. She was sobbing loudly. Shouting "Oh my G.o.d!" over and over again. A sister was holding one arm, a cousin the other.

Anni Autio stood there like a shrivelled autumn leaf, teeth clenched. There seemed to be no room for her sorrow. Wilma's mother took up all the available s.p.a.ce with her shrill shrieks and loud sobbing. Hjalmar Krekula was angry on Anni's behalf. Wished he could get rid of those shrieks, so that Anni had room to cry.

There Wilma lay in her coffin.

There was a lot for him to think about now. He needed to get away from there soon. Before he also started shouting and shrieking.

Not long ago her cheeks had been just as rounded as those of the girls standing nearby, holding one another's hands. He did not dare to look at them. He knew what their faces would express if they caught his eye: disgust with the fat paedo.

It was not long ago that Wilma had been sitting at his kitchen table. Her hair, the same red colour as that of all the women in her family her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, Anni and his own mother, Kerttu. Wilma's red hair, tumbling down on both sides of her face as she struggled with her maths homework. She spoke to him like, well, just like she spoke to everyone else.

But then.

Her hands hammering away at the ice beneath his feet.

Now she was hammering away at her coffin lid. On the inside of his skull.

It'll soon be over, he thought. Nothing shows.

Afterwards, at the wake, he forced down several slices of cake. He was aware that people were looking at him. Thinking that he ought to resist the temptation, that it was no wonder he was so fat.

Let them look, he thought, stuffing a few sugar lumps into his mouth, chewing and then letting them dissolve. It eased the pain, made it easier to take. Eating helped him to calm down.

Inspector Tommy Rantakyro was squatting down outside Hjorleifur Arnarson's house, stroking Hjorleifur's dog, when Mella and Martinsson parked their snow scooter not far away.

He stood up and went over to meet them.

"She's refusing to move," he said, nodding towards the dog.

Mella was annoyed to see that the other inspectors had parked their scooter immediately in front of the porch.

"Can you move the scooter," she said curtly to Rantakyro. "We need to tape this area off so the forensic team can search for clues. How many people have touched the front door handle?"

Rantakyro shrugged.

Mella stamped off to the house.

Martinsson went over to the dog.

"Now then, my girl," she said softly, scratching the dog's chest gently. "You can't stay here, I'm afraid."

"We'll have to have her put down," Rantakyro said.

Yes, I suppose so, Martinsson thought.

She stroked the dog's triangular ears: they were very soft, one of them sticking straight up and the top of the other one folded down. The animal was black with white markings, with a white patch round one eye.

"What sort of a mutt are you, then?" she said.

The dog made licking movements in the air. A signal that she was well-disposed towards Martinsson, who stuck out her own tongue and licked her lips in response. She was friend, not foe.

"Do you recognize me?" she said. "Yes, of course you do."

Then she heard herself saying to Rantakyro: "She has intelligent eyes, like a border collie see how she looks right at you? She doesn't feel threatened when you look back at her. Isn't that so, my love? And you're friendly like a Labrador, aren't you? Don't take her away. I'll look after her. If he has a relative who's prepared to take her on, O.K. but if he hasn't, well then . . .

Mns will have a fit, she thought.

"O.K.," Rantakyro said, looking pleased and relieved. "I wonder what her name is."

"Vera," Martinsson said. "He said it yesterday."

"I see," Rantakyro said. "Was it you who was here with Mella yesterday, then? Sven-Erik is pretty p.i.s.sed off about that. I can see his point."

Stlnacke was in the kitchen, talking to Goran Sillfors.

Hjorleifur was lying on his back on the kitchen floor in front of the larder. Next to him was a collapsed pair of steps. The door to the cupboard above the larder was open. There were two rucksacks on the floor.

"What the h.e.l.l's going on?" Mella said when she entered the kitchen. "You can't just go wandering around in here. The forensic boys will have a fit. We must tape the whole place off."

"Who are you bursting in here and telling me what to do?" Stlnacke said.

"No doubt you'd have preferred me not to come at all," Mella said. "When I got to work, Sonja told me about Hjorleifur."

"And I heard from Goran Sillfors that you'd already been here and questioned Hjorleifur. Great. It didn't occur to you to mention that to your colleagues at yesterday's meeting, did it?"

Sillfors looked first at one and then at the other of them.

"Hjorleifur rang me yesterday, after you'd been here," he said. "I'd given him a mobile phone with a prepaid card. He thinks that using them will make you die young . . ."

Cutting himself short, he looked down at Hjorleifur lying dead on the floor.

"Sorry," Sillfors said. "Sometimes words just come tumbling out. Anyway, he was most reluctant to use the mobile. But I told him that one of these days he might break a leg and need help, and that it didn't matter if he kept it in a drawer somewhere, switched off. The card was on special offer, so it didn't cost much. Sometimes you get a new bike or goodness knows what else when you buy a new mobile, although then you need to agree to a rental contract, of course. Anyway, I reckoned it was worth spending a bit on a fellow human being. And we used to get honey and mosquito repellant off him not that I think much of his mosquito repellant, but still . . . Anyway, he used it yesterday the mobile, I mean . . . rang me to say that you'd been here. He wondered what the h.e.l.l we'd told the police, and I had to calm him down. What did you say to him? This morning I thought I'd better drive out and see how he was. And of course make sure he didn't think we'd been telling tales out of school about him, or anything like that. The dog was outside, and the door was wide open. I realized right away that something had happened."

"There's nothing for the forensic team to investigate," Stlnacke said. "It's obvious what's happened here."

Lifting up one of the rucksacks, he showed Mella a name tag sewn inside it: Wilma Persson.

"One was standing on the floor here, the other was up there."

He pointed to the open door of the cupboard above the larder.

"He killed them and took their rucksacks," he said. "You frightened him yesterday with your questions. He clambers up the stepladder to fetch the rucksacks from the cupboard, intending to get rid of them, falls, hits his head and dies."

"That's an odd place to keep them," Mella said, looking up at the cupboard. "Cramped, and awkward to get at. He didn't do it. This doesn't add up."

Stlnacke stared at her as if he felt tempted to pick her up and shake her. His moustache was standing on end.

Mella pulled herself up to her full height.

"Get out!" she said. "I'm in charge here. This is a suspected crime scene. The forensic team will have a look, and then Pohjanen can take over."

That afternoon Mella appeared in the doorway of the autopsy room. She noted the look of annoyance on the face of the technician, Anna Granlund. Granlund didn't take kindly to anybody who came nagging her boss.

The way Granlund looked after her pathologist boss Lars Pohjanen always put Mella in mind of the way minders looked after sumo wrestlers not that Pohjanen bore the least resemblance to a sumo wrestler, skinny as he was, and the colour of putty: but nevertheless . . . Granlund made sure he always had a sensible lunch, telephoned his wife when Pohjanen was summoned to some crime scene or other, and put a blanket over him when he fell asleep on the sofa in the coffee room, having first removed the glowing cigarette from his hand. She took on as much of his work as she could. And did her best to make sure that n.o.body quarrelled with or pressurized him.

"He should be left alone to do what he's best at, and be free of any other responsibilities," Granlund would say.

She never commented on Pohjanen's smoking habit. Listened patiently to his wheezing and his lengthy coughing fits, and always had a handkerchief handy when he needed to spit out the phlegm he had coughed up.

But Mella took no account of all that. If you wanted results, you needed to keep on at them. Nudge them, nag them, stir up trouble. If a corpse turned up at the weekend in suspicious circ.u.mstances, Anna Granlund always wanted to wait until Monday before carrying out the post-mortem. And she never wanted Pohjanen to have to work in the evenings. All of these things sometimes led to arguments.

"We have to make them understand that pa.s.sing the buck to the police in Lule has its price," Mella would say to her colleagues. "If they do that, then they deserve to be put under pressure."

"What do you want?" Lars Pohjanen said in his usual complaining tone.

He was leaning over Hjorleifur Arnarson's sinewy body. He had sawn open the skull and removed the brain, which was lying on a metal tray on a trolley next to the table.

"I just want to know how things are going," Mella said.

Taking off her woolly hat and mittens, she entered the room. Granlund folded her arms and swallowed thousands of words. It was cold in there, as always. A smell of damp concrete, steel and dead bodies.

"I don't think it was an accident," Mella said, nodding in the direction of Hjorleifur's body.

"I'm told he fell off a stepladder in his kitchen," Pohjanen said, without looking up.

"Who told you that?" Mella said, annoyed. "Sven-Erik?"

Pohjanen looked at her.

"I don't think it was an accident either," he said. "The injuries to the brain suggest a powerful trauma to the head, not a fall."

Mella p.r.i.c.ked up her ears.

"A blow?" she said.

"Very likely. With a fall there is always a contrecoup injury . . ."

"Do you mind if I phone for an interpreter? It's several years since I studied Latin, and . . ."

"If you just let me finish, Mella, you might learn something. Imagine the brain hanging inside a box. If you fall on your face, the brain swings forward and you get a contusion in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex on the contralateral side. And a corresponding injury on the occipital lobe. This is not what we have here. In addition, there were tiny fragments of bark in the wound."

"A blow from a piece of wood?"

"Most likely. What do forensics say?"

"They say that the door frame in the kitchen has been wiped. You can see it quite clearly: it was pretty filthy, but at one point it is very clean, at a height where you would place a hand if you were leaning on it . . ."

Mella paused. The image of Hjalmar Krekula standing in the doorway of Kerttu Krekula's kitchen came into her mind.

"Anything else?" Pohjanen said.

"The body seems to have been moved. He was wearing blue overalls, and they were crumpled up at the back of his neck in a way suggesting that he'd been dragged along by the feet. But that kind of thing can be misleading. You know that yourself. You might not die immediately. You might try to stand up, and there are death throes to take into account."

"Any blood on the floor?"

"One place that had been wiped."

Mella looked at Hjorleifur's body. It was sad that he was dead, but now this was a murder case, no question about it. Now it was justified to drop all other lines of enquiry and concentrate on this one. Stlnacke would not like it. She had been right. He had been tramping around the crime scene. The forensic team were annoyed.

But that's not my problem, she thought. He can go off and work on something else if he likes.

She zipped up her jacket.

"I have to go," she said.

"O.K.," Pohjanen said. "Where . . ."

"Rebecka Martinsson. I need to get permission to search a house."

"By the way, this Rebecka Martinsson," Pohjanen said, sounding curious. "Who exactly is she?"

But Mella had already left.

At Kiruna police station Mella gave a brief summary of the preliminary post-mortem report on Hjorleifur Arnarson to District Prosecutor Martinsson. Mella's colleagues Stlnacke, Olsson and Rantakyro were also present.

Vera was lying at Martinsson's feet. Rantakyro had taken the dog from Hjorleifur's house, left her in Martinsson's office and then galloped off to the supermarket to buy some dogfood. Rejecting the food, Vera had drunk a little water and lain down.

Speaking of dogs, Martinsson thought, contemplating the police officers crowded into her office . . . What a pack they are.

Mella was a different person from when Martinsson had seen her last, exuding energy now. The alpha b.i.t.c.h once more, enthusiasm for the hunt obvious in her every movement. She had not even taken her hat off, nor had she sat down. Olsson and Rantakyro were wagging their tails eagerly; their tongues were hanging out expectantly, and they were straining at their leads. Only Stlnacke sat listlessly on Martinsson's extra chair, staring out of the window at nothing.

"We've had a response from the National Forensic Laboratory regarding the flakes of paint under Wilma Persson's fingernails. They match the paint on the door at the Sillfors' summer cottage. And Goran Sillfors used the same paint on the shed door that was stolen. So we can now be sure that someone placed that door over the hole in the ice when Wilma and Simon Kyro were diving. They were murdered."

"Kyro hasn't been found yet," Martinsson said.

"That's correct. And now Hjorleifur Arnarson. I'd like permission to conduct searches at Hjalmar and Tore Krekula's places."

Martinsson sighed.

"There needs to be reasonable suspicion," she said.

"So what?" Mella said. "That's the least thing required by law. Come on, Martinsson. It's not as if I want to go and arrest them but 'reasonable suspicion' . . . Let's face it, that could apply to someone who, say, shopped at the same supermarket as the victim. Come on. This would never have been a problem for Alf Bjornfot."