The Blood Spilt

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 12

It’s all in the morning papers. And they’re talking about it on the news on the radio. The missing priest has been found in a lake with chains around his body. Shot twice. Once in the chest. Once in the head. An execution, according to a police source, describing the fact that the body was found as more luck than skill.

Lisa is sitting at the kitchen table. She’s folded up the newspaper and turned off the radio. She’s trying to sit completely still. As soon as she moves, it’s as if there’s a wave inside her, a wave that surges through her body, getting her up on her feet, making her walk round and round in her empty house. Into the living room with the gaping bookshelves and the empty windowsills. Into the kitchen. The dishes have been washed. The cupboards wiped out. All the drawers full of rubbish have been emptied. No papers or unpaid bills lying around. Into the bedroom. Last night she slept without any bed linen, just pulled her quilted coat over her, fell asleep, much to her surprise. The cover is folded up at the foot of the bed, the pillows placed on top of it. Her clothes are gone.

By sitting completely still she can curb her longing. Her longing to scream and cry. Or her longing for pain. To place her hand on the burning hotplate. It will soon be time to go. She’s had a shower and put on clean underwear. Her bra is chafing under her arms; it doesn’t usually do that.

It’s not so easy to fool the dogs. They come up to her, wagging their tails. The sound of their claws on the floor, clickety-clickety-click. They don’t take any notice of her stiff body, rejecting them. They push their noses against her stomach and between her legs, wriggle their heads under her hands and demand to be patted. She pats them. It takes an enormous effort. To shut everything off to the extent that she can manage to stroke them, feel their soft fur, the warmth of the living blood flowing beneath it.

“In your baskets,” she says in a voice which is not her own.

And they go to their baskets. Then they come straight back and start walking around her again.

When it’s half past seven, she gets up. Rinses out her coffee mug and places it on the draining board. It looks strangely abandoned.

Out in the yard the dogs start playing up. Normally they just jump straight into the car, knowing it means a long day in the forest. But now they’re messing about. Karelin scampers off and pees on the currant bushes. The German sits down and stares at her as she stands there ordering them into the car through the open tailgate. Majken is the first to give in. Scuttles across the yard, crouching, tail pressed down between her legs. Karelin and the German jump in after her.

Sicky-Morris is never very keen on travelling by car. But now he’s worse than ever. Lisa has to chase after him, shouting and swearing until he stops. She has to drag him to the car.

“Get in, for Christ’s sake!” she shouts, slapping him on the backside.

And then he jumps in. He understands. They all do. Looking at her through the window. She sits down on the bumper, worn out already. The last thing she’s doing is fighting with them, that wasn’t the way she wanted it to be.

She drives to the churchyard. Leaves the dogs in the car. Walks down to Mildred’s grave. As usual there are lots of flowers, small cards, even photographs that have warped and thickened with the dampness.

They’re keeping it nice for her, all the women.

She should have had something with her to place on the grave, of course. But what could she have brought?

She tries to think of something to say. A thought to think. She stares at Mildred’s name on the wet, gray stone. Mildred, Mildred, Mildred. Drives the name into her body like a knife.

My Mildred, she thinks. I held you in my arms.

Erik Nilsson is watching Lisa from a distance. She stands there passive and rigid, as if she’s looking right through the stone. The other women always get down on their knees and poke about in the earth, busying themselves and tidying, talking to other visitors.

He’s on his way to the grave, but he stops for a moment. He usually comes here on weekday mornings. To have his time there in peace. He’s got nothing against the Magdalena crowd, but they’ve taken over Mildred’s grave. There’s no room for him among the grieving. They clutter the place with flowers and candles. Place little pebbles on top of the headstone. His contributions are lost among all the bits and pieces. No doubt it’s okay for the others, this sense of collective grieving. It’s a consolation to them that so many miss her. But for him. It’s a childish thought, he knows. He wants people to point at him and say: “He was her husband, you have to feel sorry for him most of all.”

Mildred passes behind him.

Shall I go down there? he asks.

But she doesn’t reply. She’s staring at Lisa.

He walks over to Lisa. Clears his throat in plenty of time so as not to startle her, she seems so absorbed in her thoughts.

“Hi,” he says tentatively.

They haven’t met since the funeral.

She nods and tries to force a smile.

He’s just about to say “so you’ve got a breakfast meeting here as well,” or something equally meaningless to oil the wheels between them. But he changes his mind. Instead he says seriously:

“We only had her on loan. If we could only bloody realize that while they’re still with us. I was often angry with her because of what she didn’t give me. Now I wish I’d… I don’t know… accepted what she did give with pleasure, instead of being tormented by what I didn’t get from her.”

He looks at her. She looks back without any expression on her face.

“I’m just talking,” he says defensively.

She shakes her head.

“No, no,” she manages to get out. “It’s just… I can’t…”

“She was always so busy, working all the time. Now that she’s dead it feels as if we’ve finally got time for one another. It’s as if she’s retired.”

He looks at Mildred. She’s crouching down, reading the cards on the grave. Sometimes she gives a big smile. She picks up the pebbles on the top of the headstone and holds them in her hand. One after the other.

He stops speaking. Waits for Lisa to ask him how he’s getting on, perhaps. How he’s coping.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “The dogs are in the car.”

Erik Nilsson watches her as she leaves. When he bends down to change the flowers in the vase buried in the ground, Mildred has gone.

Lisa gets into the car.

“Lie down,” she says to the dogs in the back.

I should have lain down myself, she thinks. Instead of wandering round the house waiting for Mildred. Then. The night before midsummer’s eve.

It’s the night before midsummer’s eve. Mildred is already dead. Lisa doesn’t know that. She wanders round and round. Drinking coffee, although she shouldn’t do that when it’s this late.

Lisa knows Mildred was conducting midnight mass in Jukkasjärvi. All the time she’s been expecting Mildred to come to her afterward, but now it’s getting very late. Maybe somebody stayed behind to chat. Or maybe Mildred’s gone home to bed. Home to Erik. Lisa’s stomach ties itself in knots.

Love is like a plant, or an animal. It lives and develops. Is born, gets bigger, grows old, dies. Produces strange new shoots. Not so long ago, her love for Mildred was a burning, vibrating joy. Her fingers always thinking about Mildred’s skin. Her tongue thinking of her nipples. Now it’s just as big as before, just as strong. But in the darkness it’s become pale and needy. It absorbs everything that is in Lisa. Her love for Mildred makes her exhausted and unhappy… She is just so incredibly tired of thinking about Mildred all the time. There’s no room for anything else in her head. Mildred and Mildred. Where she is, what she’s doing, what she said, what she meant by this or that. She can yearn for her all day long, only to quarrel with her when she finally arrives. The wound on Mildred’s hand healed long ago. It’s as if it had never been there.

Lisa looks at the time. It’s well after midnight. She puts Majken on the lead and walks down to the main road. Thinks she’ll go down to the jetty to see if Mildred’s boat is there.

On the way she passes Lars-Gunnar and Nalle’s house.

She notices that the car isn’t there.

Afterward. Every single day afterward, she thinks about that. All the time. That Lars-Gunnar’s car wasn’t there. That Lars-Gunnar is all Nalle’s got. That nothing can bring Mildred back to life.

Måns Wenngren rings and wakes Rebecka Martinsson. Her voice is warm, a little bit hoarse because it’s early.

“Up you get!” he orders. “Get yourself a coffee and something to eat. Have a shower and get yourself ready. I’ll ring again in twenty minutes. You need to be ready by then.”

He’s done this before. When he was married to Madelene and still putting up with her periodic agoraphobia and panic attacks and God knows what else, he used to talk her through visits to the dentist, meals with relatives, buying shoes at the NK department store. Every cloud… at least he knows the technique by now.

He rings after twenty minutes. Rebecka answers like an obedient Girl Guide. Now she’s to get in the car, drive into town and take out enough money to pay the rent on her cabin in Poikkijärvi.

The next time he calls, he tells her to drive down to Poikkijärvi, park outside the bar and ring him.

“Right,” says Måns when she calls him. “It’ll take a minute and a half, then the whole thing will be behind you. Go in and pay. You don’t need to say a word if you don’t want to. Just hold out the money. When you’ve done that, get back in the car and call me again. Okay?”

“Okay,” says Rebecka, like a child.

She sits in the car and looks at the bar. It looks white and slightly scruffy in the bright autumn sunshine. She wonders who’s there. Micke or Mimmi?

Lars-Gunnar opens his eyes. It’s Stefan Wikström who wakes him through the dream. His pathetic cries, whining and whimpering as he falls to his knees by the lake. When he knows.

He’s been asleep in the armchair in the living room. His gun is on his knee. He gets up with difficulty, his back and shoulders stiff. He goes up to Nalle’s room. Nalle is still fast asleep.

He should never have married Eva, of course. But he was just a stupid man from Norrland. Easy prey for somebody like her.

He’s always been big. He was fat even as a child. At that time children were skinny little sprats chasing after footballs. They were thin and quick and threw snowballs at fat boys lumbering home as fast as their legs would carry them. Home to Dad. Who hit them with his belt if he felt like it.

I’ve never raised a hand to Nalle, he thinks. I never would.

But Lars-Gunnar the fat boy grew up and did very well in school despite the hassles. He trained to be a policeman and moved back home. And now he was a different man. It’s not easy to return to the village of your childhood without falling back into the role you had before. But Lars-Gunnar had changed during his year at the police training college. And you don’t mess with a policeman. He had new friends too. In town. Colleagues. He got a place on the hunting team. And because he wasn’t afraid of hard work and was good at planning and organizing, he soon became the leader of the hunt. The idea had been to make it a rotating post, but it never happened. Lars-Gunnar thinks it probably suited the rest of them to have somebody planning and organizing things. In a little corner of his mind he’s also aware that nobody would have dared to question his right to continue as leader. That’s good. No harm in a bit of respect. And he’s earned that respect. Not exploited it as some would have done.

No, his problem has been that he’s too nice. Always thinks well of his fellow men. Like Eva.

It’s hard not to blame himself. But he’d turned fifty when he met her. Lived alone all those years, because things never worked out with women. He was still kind of slow with them, conscious that his body was far too big. And then there was Eva. Who leaned her head against his chest. Her head almost disappeared in his hand when he held her close. “My little one,” he used to say.

But when it didn’t suit her any longer, she’d cleared off. Left him and the boy.

He can hardly remember the months that dragged by after she left. It was like a darkness. He’d thought people were looking at him in the village. Wondered what they were saying about him behind his back.

Nalle turns over laboriously in his sleep. The bed creaks beneath him.

I must… thinks Lars-Gunnar, and loses the thread of his thought.

It’s difficult to concentrate. But everyday life. That has to carry on. That’s the whole point. His and Nalle’s everyday life. The life Lars-Gunnar has created for them both.

I must get some shopping, he thinks. Milk and bread and margarine. Everything’s running out.

He goes downstairs and rings Mimmi.

“I’m going into town,” he says. “Nalle’s asleep and I don’t want to wake him up. If he comes over to you, give him some breakfast, will you?”

“Is he there?”

Anna-Maria Mella had phoned the medical examiner’s office in Luleå. Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, answered, but Anna-Maria wanted to speak to Lars Pohjanen, the senior police surgeon. Anna Granlund kept an eye on him like a mother looking after her sick child. She kept the autopsy room in perfect order. Opened up the bodies for him, lifted out the organs, put them back when he’d finished, stitched them up and wrote the major part of his reports as well.

“He can’t retire,” she’d said to Anna-Maria on one occasion. “It’s like a marriage in the end, you know; I’ve got used to him, I don’t want anybody else.”

And Lars Pohjanen kept plodding on. Seemed as if he were breathing through a pipe, sucking out the fluid. Just talking made him breathless. A year or so earlier he’d had an operation for lung cancer.

Anna-Maria could see him in her mind’s eye. He was probably asleep on the scruffy seventies sofa in the staff room. The ashtray beside his well-worn clogs. His green scrubs spread over him like a blanket.

“Yes, he’s here,” Anna Granlund replied. “Just a minute.”

Pohjanen’s voice on the other end of the phone, scratchy and rattling.

“Tell me,” said Anna-Maria, “you know how bloody useless I am at reading.”

“There isn’t much. Hrrrm. Shot in the chest from the front. Then in the head, at very close range. There’s an explosive effect in the exit wound from the head.”

A long intake of breath, the sucking noise.

“… waterlogged skin, but not swollen… although you know when he disappeared…”

“Friday night.”

“I’d assume he’s been there since then. Minor damage to those parts of the skin not covered by clothing, the hands and face. The fish have been nibbling. Not much more. Have you found the bullets?”

“They’re still looking. Any signs of a struggle? No other injuries?”

“No.”

“And otherwise?”

Pohjanen’s voice became snappy.

“Nothing, I told you. You’ll have to ask somebody… to read the report out loud for you.”

“I meant how were things with you.”

“Oh, I see,” he said, his tone instantly more amiable. “Everything’s crap, of course.”

Sven-Erik Stålnacke was talking to the police psychiatrist. He was sitting in the parking lot in his car. He liked her voice. Right from the start he’d taken to its warmth. And he liked the fact that she spoke slowly. Most women in Kiruna talked too bloody fast. And loudly. It was like a hail of bullets, you didn’t stand a chance. He could hear Anna-Maria’s voice in his head: “What do you mean, you don’t stand a chance, we’re the ones that don’t stand a chance. No chance of getting a sensible answer within a reasonable amount of time. You ask: How was it, then? And then there’s silence, and more bloody silence, and after an interminable consideration the answer comes: Good. Then it’s hell trying to squeeze out anything more- from Robert, anyway. So we have to kind of talk for two. Don’t stand a chance? Do me a favor.”

Now he was listening to the psychiatrist’s voice and he could hear her sense of humor. Although the conversation was serious. If he’d just been a few years younger…

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s a copycat murder. Mildred Nilsson was put on display. Stefan Wikström’s body wasn’t even meant to be found. And no use of violence to relieve tension either. This is a completely different modus operandi. It could be another person altogether. So the answer to your question is no. It’s highly unlikely that Stefan Wikström was murdered by a serial killer suffering from a psychological disorder, and that the murder was committed in a highly emotional state and inspired by Viktor Strandgård. Either it was somebody else, or Mildred Nilsson and Stefan Wikström were killed for a more, how shall I put it, down to earth reason.”

“Yes?”

“I mean, Mildred’s murder seems very… emotional. But Stefan’s murder is more like…”

“… an execution.”

“Exactly! It feels a bit like a crime of passion. I’m just speculating now, I want you to bear that in mind, I’m just trying to communicate the emotional picture I’m getting… okay?”

“Fine.”

“Like a crime of passion, then. Husband kills his wife in a rage. Then kills the lover in a more cold-blooded way.”

“But they weren’t a couple,” said Sven-Erik.

Then he thought, as far as we know.

“I don’t mean they’re a married couple. I just mean…”

She fell silent.

“… I don’t know what I mean,” she said. “There could be a link. It could definitely be the same perpetrator. Psychopath. Certainly. Maybe. But not necessarily, not at all. And not to the extent that your grasp on reality has completely lost its basis in reality.”

It was time to hang up. Sven-Erik did so with a pang of loss. And Manne was still missing.

Rebecka Martinsson walks into Micke’s. Three people are having breakfast in the bar. Elderly men who look at her appreciatively. A real live beautiful woman. Always welcome. Micke’s mopping the floor.

“Hi,” he says to Rebecka, putting the mop and bucket aside. “Come with me.”

Rebecka follows him into the kitchen.

“I’m really sorry,” he says. “Everything turned out wrong on Saturday. But when Lars-Gunnar told us, I just didn’t know what to think. Were you the one that killed those pastors in Jiekajärvi?”

“Yes. Although it was actually two pastors and a…”

“I know. A madman, wasn’t it? It was in all the papers. Although they never said what your name was. They never put Thomas Söderberg’s name or Vesa Larsson’s either, but everybody around here knew who it was. It must have been terrible.”

She nods. It must have been.

“On Saturday, I thought maybe what Lars-Gunnar said was true. That you’d come here to snoop. I did ask you if you were a journalist and you said no, but then I thought well, no, maybe she isn’t a journalist, but she works for a newspaper all the same. But you don’t, do you?”

“No, I… I ended up here by mistake, because Torsten Karlsson and I were looking for somewhere to eat.”

“The guy who was with you the first time?”

“Yes. And it isn’t something I usually tell people. Everything that happened… then. Anyway, I ended up staying here, because I wanted some peace, and because I didn’t dare go out to Kurravaara. My grandmother’s house is out there and… but in the end I went there with Nalle after all. He’s my hero.”

The last remark is accompanied by a smile.

“I came to pay for the cabin,” she says, holding out the money.

Micke takes it and gives her change.

“I’ve included your wages as well. What does your other boss think about you working in a bar on the side?”

Rebecka laughs.

“Oh, now you’ve got a hold over me!”

“You ought to say good-bye to Nalle, you’ll be passing his house on your way. If you take a right up toward the chapel…”

“I know, but it’s probably a really bad idea, his father…”

“Lars- Gunnar’s in town and Nalle’s on his own at home.”

No chance, thinks Rebecka. There are limits.

“Say good-bye for me,” she says.

Back in the car she rings Måns.

“I’ve done it,” she says.

Måns Wenngren answers her the way he used to answer his wife. He doesn’t even need to think about it.

“That’s my girl!”

Then he quickly adds:

“Well done, Martinsson. I’ve got to go to a meeting now. Talk to you soon.”

Rebecka sits there with her cell phone in her hand.

Måns Wenngren, she thinks. He’s like the mountains. It’s raining and it’s horrible. Howling wind. You’re tired and your shoes are soaked through and you don’t really know who you are. The map doesn’t seem to match the reality. And then all of a sudden the clouds part. Your clothes dry out in the wind. You sit on the side of the mountain looking down over a sun-drenched valley. Suddenly it’s all worth it.

She tries to call Maria Taube, but gets no reply. Sends a text: “Everything fine. Call me.”

She drives away down the main road. Tunes the car radio to some kind of background music.

By the turning off toward the chapel, she meets Nalle. A shiver of guilt and sorrow runs down her spine. She raises her hand and waves to him. In the rearview mirror she can see him waving back at her. Waving like mad. Then he starts to run after the car. He’s not very fast, but he won’t give up. Suddenly she sees him fall. It looks bad. He tumbles down into the ditch.

Rebecka stops the car by the side of the road. Looks in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t get up. She moves fast now. Jumps out of the car and runs back.

“Nalle!” she shouts. “Nalle!”

What if he’s hit his head on a stone?

He’s lying there in the ditch, smiling up at her. Like a beetle on its back.

“Becka!” he says when she appears.

Of course I have to say good-bye, she thinks. What kind of person am I?

He gets to his feet. She brushes him down.

“Bye then, Nalle,” she says. “It was really good fun…”

“Come with,” he says, tugging at her arm like a child. “Come with!”

He turns on his heel and lumbers away up the road. He’s going home.

“No, really, I…” she begins.

But Nalle keeps on going. Doesn’t turn around. Is confident that she’s following him.

Rebecka looks at the car. It’s parked tidily by the side of the road. Clearly visible to other drivers. She could go with him for a little while. She sets off after him.

“Wait for me, then!” she calls.

Lisa stops the car outside the vet’s. The dogs know exactly where they are. This is not a nice place. They all get up and look out through the car window. Jaws hanging open. Tongues lolling. The German begins to shed dandruff. He always does that when he’s nervous. White scales work their way up through his fur and cover his brown coat like snow. Their tails are plastered to their stomachs.

Lisa goes in. The dogs are left in the car.

Aren’t we coming with you? their eyes ask her. Are we going to get away without any injections, examinations, frightening smells and those humiliating white plastic funnels round our heads?

Annette, the vet, comes to meet her. They sort out the payment, Annette deals with it herself. There’s only the two of them there. No other staff. Nobody in the waiting room. Lisa is moved by her consideration.

The only thing Annette asks is:

“Are you taking them with you?”

Lisa shakes her head. She hasn’t actually thought that far ahead. She’s only just managed to think this far. And now she’s here. They’ll become garbage. She pushes aside the idea of how unworthy that is. That she owes them more than that.

“How shall we do this?” asks Lisa. “Shall I bring them in one at a time, or what?”

Annette looks at her.

“That’ll be too hard for you, I think. Let’s bring them all in, then I can give them something to calm them down first.”

Lisa staggers out.

“Stay!” she warns them as she opens the tailgate.

She puts on their leads. Doesn’t want to risk any of them running away.

Into reception, the dogs around her legs. Through the waiting room, past the office and the treatment room.

Annette opens the door to the operating room.

The panting. The sound of their claws clicking and scrabbling across the floor. They get entangled in each other’s leads. Lisa pulls at them and tries to untangle them as she walks toward that room, just get them in there.

They’ve made it at last. They’re in that ugly room with its ugly red plastic floor and blotchy brown walls. Lisa catches her thigh on the black operating table. All the claws that have scratched the floor have enabled the dirt to work its way down into the plastic matting so that it’s impossible to scrub it clean. It’s turned into a dark red pathway from the door and around the table. On one of the wall cupboards there’s a ghastly poster of a little girl surrounded by a sea of flowers. She’s holding a floppy-eared puppy on her lap. The clock on the wall has a text running across the face from the ten to the two: “The time has come.”

The door glides shut behind Annette.

Lisa unclips their leads.

“We’ll start with Bruno,” says Lisa. “He’s so stubborn, he’ll still be the last to lie down. You know what he’s like.”

Annette nods. While Lisa strokes Bruno’s ears and chest, Annette gives him a sedative injection into the muscle of his foreleg.

“Who’s my best boy?” asks Lisa.

Then he looks at her. Straight in the eye, although that isn’t what dogs do. Then he glances quickly away. Bruno is a dog who maintains the correct etiquette. Looking the leader of the pack in the eye is not allowed, no way.

“You’re a patient boy, aren’t you,” says Annette, giving him a pat when she’s finished.

Soon Lisa is sitting on the floor beneath the window. The radiator is burning into her back. Sicky-Morris, Bruno, Karelin and Majken are lying on the floor around her, half asleep. Majken’s head resting on one thigh. Sicky-Morris on the other. Annette pushes Bruno and Karelin closer to Lisa, so that she has them all with her.

There are no words. Only a terrible ache in her throat. Their warm bodies beneath her hands.

To think you’ve managed to love me, she thinks.

Someone who carries such a hopeless weight inside her. But a dog’s love is simple. You run about in the forest. You’re happy. You lie basking in each other’s warmth. Relax and feel good.

The electric razor buzzes, then Annette inserts a canula into their forelegs.

It happens quickly. All too quickly. Only the last thing is left to do. Where are her farewell thoughts? The ache in her throat swells into an unbearable pain. It hurts so much, everywhere. Lisa is shaking as if she has a fever.

“I’ll do it, then,” says Annette.

And she gives them the injection that puts them to sleep.

It takes half a minute. They are lying there as they were before. Their heads on her lap. Bruno’s back pressed against the bottom of her back. Majken’s tongue is lolling out of her mouth in a way that it doesn’t do when she’s asleep.

Lisa thinks she’ll get up. But she can’t.

The tears are just beneath the skin of her face. Her face is trying to resist. It’s like a tug-of-war. The muscles are fighting against it. Wanting to pull her mouth and eyebrows back into their normal expression, but the tears squeeze their way out. Finally she cracks into a grotesque, sobbing grimace. Tears and snot pour out. To think it can be so unbearably painful. The tears have been waiting behind her eyes, and it’s been like pressing down the lid of a pan. Now they’ve boiled over and are running down her face. Down onto Sicky-Morris.

A cross between a groan and a whimper emerges from her throat. It sounds so ugly. A kind of oohoo, oohoo. She can hear it herself, this dried up condemned old woman moaning. She gets up on all fours. Hugs the dogs. Her movements are violent and reckless. She crawls among them, pushing her arms under their limp bodies. Strokes their eyelids, their noses, their ears, their stomachs. Pushes her face against their heads.

The tears are like a storm. They snatch and tear at her body. She snivels and tries to swallow. But it’s hard to swallow when she’s on all fours with her head down. In the end the snot trickles out of her mouth. She wipes it away with her hand.

At the same time, she can hear a voice. Another Lisa who is standing there watching her. Who says: What kind of a person are you? What about Mimmi?

And she stops crying. Just as she’s thinking it’ll never stop.

It’s remarkable. The whole summer has been a list of things to do. One by one she’s ticked them off. Tears weren’t on the list. They put themselves there. She didn’t want them. She’s afraid of them. Afraid of drowning in them.

And when they came. At first they were horrible, an unbearable torment, darkness. But then. Then the tears became a refuge. A place to rest. A waiting room before the next thing on the list. Then a part of her suddenly wanted to stay there among the tears. Put off the other thing which is going to happen. And then the tears leave her. Say: that’s it, then. And just stop.

She gets up. There’s a hand basin, she grabs the edge and pulls herself to her feet. Annette has obviously left the room.

Her eyes are swollen, they feel like half tennis balls. She presses her icy fingertips against her eyelids. Turns on the tap and splashes her face. There are some rough paper towels beside the basin. She dries her face and blows her nose, avoids looking in the mirror. The paper rasps against her nose.

She looks down at the dogs. She’s so exhausted, worn out with her tears, that she isn’t capable of feeling so strongly any longer. The overwhelming grief is just like a memory. She crouches down and gives each dog a much more thoughtful caress.

Then she leaves the room. Annette is busy at the computer in the office. All Lisa needs to do is mutter a good-bye.

Out into the September sunshine. That stabs and torments her. Sharply defined shadows. The sun is in her eyes, except when a few clouds drift by. She gets in the car and flips down the sun visor. Starts the car and drives through town before driving out onto the road to Norway.

She thinks about precisely nothing during the journey. Except for how the road curves its way forward. How the pictures change. Bright blue sky. White, ragged clouds shredding themselves as they scud along high above the mountains. Sharply defined, rugged ravines. The length of Torneträsk, like a shining blue stone with yellow gold spun around it.

When she has passed Katterjåkk it appears. A huge truck. Lisa keeps driving fast. She undoes her seat belt.

Rebecka Martinsson followed Nalle down into the cellar. A stone staircase painted green made its way down beneath the house. He opened a door. Inside was a room that was used as a larder, and for carpentry and general storage. Lots of things everywhere. It was damp. The white paint was covered with black spots in places. Here and there the plaster had come away. There were basic storage shelves covered in jam jars, boxes of nails and screws and all kinds of bits and pieces, tins of paint, tins of varnish that had evaporated, brushes that had gone hard, sandpaper, buckets, electrical tools, piles of flex. Tools hung on the walls where there was space.

Nalle shushed her. Placed his forefinger on his lips. He took her hand and led her to a chair; she sat down. He knelt down on the cellar floor and tapped on it with his fingernail.

Rebecka sat in silence, waiting.

He took an almost empty packet of biscuits out of his breast pocket. Rustled the packet as he unfolded it, took out a biscuit and broke it into pieces.

And then a little mouse came scampering across the floor. It ran over to Nalle following an S-shaped route, stopped by his knees, reared up on its hind legs. It was brownish gray, no more than four or five centimeters long. Nalle held out half a biscuit. The mouse tried to take it from him, but as Nalle didn’t let go, it stayed and ate. The only sound was small nibbling noises.

Nalle turned to Rebecka.

“Mouse,” he said loudly. “Little.”

Rebecka thought it would be frightened away when he spoke so loudly, but it stayed where it was and kept right on nibbling. She nodded at him and gave him a big smile. It was a strange sight. Great big Nalle and the tiny mouse. She wondered how it had come about. How he’d managed to get it to overcome its fear. Could he have been patient enough to sit quietly down here, waiting for it? Maybe.

You’re a very special boy, she thought.

Nalle reached out his forefinger and tried to pat the mouse on the back, but then fear overcame hunger. It shot away like a gray streak and disappeared among all the rubbish standing by the wall.

Rebecka watched it.

Time to go. Couldn’t leave the car parked like that indefinitely.

Nalle was saying something.

She looked at him.

“Mouse,” he said. “Little!”

A feeling of sorrow came over her. She was standing here in an old cellar with a mentally handicapped boy. She felt closer to him than she’d been to another human being for a long, long time.

Why can’t I? she thought. Can’t like people. Don’t trust them. But you can trust Nalle. He can’t pretend to be what he’s not.

“Bye then, Nalle,” she said.

“Bye then,” he said, without the least trace of sorrow in his voice.

She went up the green stone staircase. She didn’t hear the car pull up outside. Didn’t hear the footsteps on the porch. Just as she opened the door into the hallway, the outside door was opened. Lars-Gunnar’s enormous bulk filled the doorway. Like a mountain blocking her path. Something shriveled up inside her. And she looked into his eyes. He looked at her.

“What the hell,” was all he said.

The scene of crime team found a rifle bullet at nine thirty in the morning. They dug it out of the ground by the shore of the lake. Caliber 30-06.

By quarter past ten the police had matched the firearms register with the motor vehicle database. All those who owned a diesel car and were registered as owning a gun.

Anna-Maria Mella leaned back in her office chair. It really was a luxury item. You could recline the back so you were almost lying down, just like in a bed. Like a dentist’s chair, but without the dentist.

Four hundred and seventy-three people matched. She glanced through the names.

Then she caught sight of one name she recognized. Lars-Gunnar Vinsa.

He owned a diesel Merc. She checked in the firearms register. He was registered for three weapons. Two rifles and one shotgun. One of the rifles was a Tikka. Caliber 30-06.

What they really ought to do was take in all the guns of the right caliber for testing. But maybe they ought to talk to him first. Although that wasn’t likely to be particularly pleasant when it was a former colleague.

She checked the time. Half ten. She could drive out there with Sven-Erik after lunch.

Lars-Gunnar Vinsa looks at Rebecka Martinsson. Halfway to town he’d remembered that he’d forgotten his wallet, and turned back.

What kind of bloody conspiracy was this? He’d told Mimmi he was going out. Had she phoned that lawyer? He can hardly believe it. But that’s what must have happened. And she’s come dashing down here to snoop around.

The cell phone in the woman’s hand rings. She doesn’t answer it. He stares doggedly at her ringing phone. They stand there motionless. The phone goes on ringing and ringing.

Rebecka thinks she ought to answer. It’s probably Maria Taube. But she can’t. And when she doesn’t answer, it’s suddenly written in his eyes. And she knows. And he knows that she knows.

The paralysis passes. The phone ends up on the floor. Did he knock it out of her hand? Did she throw it down?

He’s standing in her way. She can’t get out. A feeling of absolute terror seizes her.

She turns and runs up the staircase to the top floor. It’s narrow and steep. The wallpaper dirty with age. A flowery pattern. The varnish on the stairs is like thick glass. She scrabbles rapidly on all fours, like a crab. Mustn’t slip now.

She can hear Lars-Gunnar. Heavy behind her.

It’s like running into a trap. Where will she go?

The bathroom door in front of her. She dashes inside.

Somehow she manages to shut the door and makes her fingers turn the lock.

The handle is pressed down from the outside.

There’s a window, but there’s nothing left inside her that can manage to try and escape. The only thing that exists is fear. She can’t stand up. Sinks down on the toilet seat. Then she begins to shake. Her body is jerking and shuddering. Her elbows are pressed against her stomach. Her hands are in front of her face, they’re shaking so violently that she involuntarily hits herself on the mouth, the nose, the chin. Her fingers are bent like claws.

A heavy thud, a crash against the outside of the door. She screws her eyes tight shut. Tears pour out. She wants to press her hands against her ears, but they won’t obey, they just keep shaking and shaking.

“Mummy!” she sobs as the door flies open with a bang. It hits her knees. It hurts. Someone is lifting her up by her clothes. She refuses to open her eyes.

He lifts her by the collar. She’s whimpering.

“Mummy, Mummy!”

He can hear himself whimpering. Äiti, äiti! It’s more than sixty years ago, and his father is throwing his mother around the kitchen like a glove. She’s locked Lars-Gunnar and his brother and sisters in the bedroom. He’s the eldest. The little girls are sitting on the sofa, ashen-faced and silent. He and his brother are hammering on the door. His mother sobbing and pleading. Things falling on the floor. His father wanting the key. He’ll get it soon. Soon it will be Lars-Gunnar’s and his brother’s turn, while the girls watch. His mother will be locked in the bedroom. The strap will come into play. For something. He can’t remember what. There were always so many reasons.

He slams her head against the hand basin. She shuts up. The child’s tears and his mother’s “Älä lyö! Älä lyö!” also fall silent in his head. He lets go of her. She falls down onto the floor.

When he turns her over she looks at him with big, silent eyes. Blood is pouring from her forehead. It’s just like that time he hit a reindeer on the way to Gällivare. The same big eyes. And the shaking.

He grabs hold of her feet. Drags her out into the hallway.

Nalle is standing on the stairs. He catches sight of Rebecka.

“What?” he shouts.

A loud, anxious cry. He sounds like a long-tailed skua.

“What?”

“It’s nothing, Nalle!” shouts Lars-Gunnar. “Out you go.”

But Nalle is terrified. Not listening. Takes a few more steps up the stairs. Looks at Rebecka lying there. Shouts again, “What?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” roars Lars-Gunnar. “Outside!”

He lets go of Rebecka’s feet and waves his hands at Nalle. In the end he goes down the stairs and pushes him out into the yard. He locks the door.

Nalle stands outside. He can hear him out there. “What? What?” Fear and confusion in his voice. Can see him in his mind’s eye, walking round and round on the porch, completely at a loss.

He feels an overwhelming rage toward the woman upstairs. It’s her fault. She should have left them in peace.

He takes the stairs in three bounds. It’s like Mildred Nilsson. She should have left them in peace. Him and Nalle and this village.

Lars-Gunnar is standing out in the yard, pegging out washing. It’s late May. No leaves yet, but one or two things are starting to appear in the flower beds. It’s a sunny, windy day. Nalle will be thirteen in the autumn. It’s six years since Eva died.

Nalle is running around in the yard. He’s good at amusing himself. It’s just that you can never be alone. Lars-Gunnar misses that. Being left in peace sometimes.

The spring breeze tugs and pulls at the washing. Soon the sheets and underclothes will be hanging between the birch trees like a row of dancing flags.

Behind Lars-Gunnar stands the new priest Mildred Nilsson. How she can talk. It seems as if she’ll never stop. Lars-Gunnar hesitates as he reaches for the underpants that are a bit tatty. They don’t come up very white either, although they are clean.

But then he thinks, what the hell. Why should he be embarrassed in front of her?

She wants Nalle to be confirmed in the church.

“Listen,” he says. “A couple of years ago some of those hallelujah types turned up here wanting to pray for him to be healed. I threw them out on their ear. I’m not that keen on the church.”

“I’d never do that!” she says firmly. “I mean, of course I’ll pray for him, but I promise to do it quietly at home, in my own room. But I’d never want him to be any different. You really have been blessed with a fine boy. He couldn’t be any better.”

Rebecka draws up her knees. Pushes them down. Draws them up. Pushes them down. Shuts herself in the bathroom again. Can’t manage to get up. Crawls as far away as she can, into a corner. He’s coming back up the stairs.

It was so bloody simple for Mildred to say that Nalle was a blessing, Lars-Gunnar thinks. She didn’t have to look after him day and night. And she wasn’t the one with a broken marriage behind her because of the child they’d had. She didn’t need to worry. About the future. How Nalle would manage. About Nalle’s puberty and sexuality. Standing there with the soiled sheets, wondering what the hell to do. No girl would want him. A mass of strange fears in his head, that he could become dangerous.

After the priest’s visit the village women came running. Let the boy be confirmed, they said. And they offered to organize everything. Said Nalle would be bound to enjoy it, and if he didn’t, they could just stop. Even Lars-Gunnar’s cousin Lisa came to say her bit. Said she could sort out a suit, so he wouldn’t be standing there in something that was too small.

Then Lars-Gunnar lost his temper. As if it was about the suit or the present.

“It’s not about the money!” he roared. “I’ve always paid for him, haven’t I? If I’d wanted to save money I’d have shoved him in an institution long ago! All right then, he can be confirmed!”

And he’d paid for a suit and a watch. If you had to pick two things Nalle had no use whatsoever for, it would be a suit and a watch. But Lars-Gunnar didn’t say a word about it. Nobody was going to say he was mean behind his back.

Afterward it was as if something had changed. As if Mildred’s friendship with the boy took something away from Lars-Gunnar. People forgot about the price he’d had to pay. Not that he had any big ideas about himself. But he hadn’t had an easy life. His father’s brutality toward the family. Eva’s betrayal. The burden of being the single parent of a disturbed child. He could have made other choices. Simpler choices. But he educated himself and returned to the village. Became someone.

He hit rock bottom when Eva left. He stayed at home with Nalle, feeling as if nobody wanted him. The shame of being surplus to requirements.

And yet he still looked after Eva when she was dying. He kept Nalle at home. Looked after him. If you listened to Mildred Nilsson, he was bloody lucky to have such a fine boy. “Of course,” Lars-Gunnar had said to one of the women, “but it’s a heavy responsibility as well. A lot to worry about.” And he’d got his answer: parents always worry about their children. He wouldn’t have to be separated from Nalle, as other parents were when their children grew up and left home. They talked a load of crap. People who hadn’t a clue what it was really like. But after that he kept quiet. How could anybody understand.

It was the same with Eva. Since Mildred had arrived, whenever Eva came up in the conversation, people said: “Poor soul.” About her! Sometimes he wanted to ask what they meant by that. If they thought he was such a bastard to live with that she’d even left her own son?

He got the feeling they were talking about him behind his back.

Even then he regretted agreeing to Nalle’s confirmation. But it was already too late. He couldn’t forbid him to spend time with Mildred in the church, because that would just look like sour grapes. Nalle was enjoying himself. He hadn’t the wit to see through Mildred.

So Lars-Gunnar let it carry on. Nalle had a life away from him. But who washed his clothes, who carried the responsibility and the worry?

And Mildred Nilsson. Lars-Gunnar now thinks he was her target all the time. Nalle was just a means to an end.

She moved into the priest’s house and organized her female Mafia. Made them feel important. And they let themselves be led along like cackling geese.

It’s obvious she had a grudge against him from the start. She envied him. He had a certain standing in the village, after all. Leader of the hunting team. He’d been a policeman. He listened to people too. Put others’ needs before his own. And that gave him a certain level of respect and authority. She couldn’t stand that. It was as if she set herself the task of taking everything away from him.

It turned into a kind of war between them, but only they could see it. She tried to discredit him. He defended himself as best he could. But he’d never had any aptitude for that kind of game.

The woman has crawled back into the bathroom. She’s curled up on the floor between the toilet and the hand basin, holding her arms up over her face to protect herself. He grabs her feet and drags her down the stairs. Her head thumps rhythmically on every step. Thud, thud, thud. And Nalle’s cry from outside: “What? What?” It’s hard to close his ears to that. There has to be an end to it. There has to be an end to it now, at long last.

He remembers the trip to Majorca. It was one of Mildred’s bright ideas. All of a sudden the young people in the church were going to a camp abroad. And Mildred wanted Nalle to go too. Lars-Gunnar had said no, definitely not. And Mildred had said the church would send an extra member of staff along, just for Nalle. The church would pay. “And just think,” she said, “how much kids of this age normally cost. Slalom gear, trips, computer games, expensive stuff, expensive clothes…” And Lars-Gunnar had understood. “It’s not about money,” he’d said. But he’d realized that in the eyes of the villagers, that’s exactly what it would look like. That he begrudged Nalle having things. That Nalle had to do without. That when Nalle finally had the opportunity to do something that would be fun… So Lars-Gunnar had to give in. All he could do was get out his wallet. And everybody said to him how nice it was that Mildred was so good to Nalle. Lucky for the boy that she’d moved here.

But Mildred wanted to see him go under, he knows that. When her windows got smashed, or when that idiot Magnus Lindmark tried to set fire to her shed, she didn’t report it to the police. And so there was talk. Just as she’d intended. The police can’t do anything. When you really need them, all they can do is just stand there. It really got to Lars-Gunnar. He was the one who had to put up with the embarrassment.

And then she turned her attention to his place on the hunting team.

It might be the church’s mark on the paper. But the forest belongs to him. He’s the one who knows it. It’s true that the cost of the lease has been low. But really, in all fairness, the hunters ought to get paid for shooting. Elk cause enormous damage to the forest, chewing the bark of the trees.

The autumn elk hunt. Planning with the other guys. Walking through the forest in the early morning. Before sunrise. The dogs are excited, pulling on their leads. Sniffing at the gray darkness deep in the forest. Somewhere in there is their quarry. The hunt itself, during the day. Autumn air, the sound of dogs barking far away. The sense of togetherness when you’re dealing with the kill. Struggling with the body in the slaughterhouse. Chatting around the fire in the cabin in the evening.

She wrote a letter. Didn’t dare bring it up face-to-face. Wrote that she knew Torbjörn had been convicted of breaking the law on hunting. That he hadn’t lost his firearms license. That it was Lars-Gunnar who’d sorted it all out. That he and Torbjörn couldn’t be permitted to hunt on church land. “It isn’t only inappropriate, but also objectionable in view of the fact that the church is intending to offer protection to the she-wolf,” she wrote.

He can feel the pressure squeezing his chest as he thinks about it. She would plunge him into isolation, that’s what she wanted. Make him into a fucking loser. Like Malte Alajärvi. No job, no hunting.

He’d talked to Torbjörn Ylitalo. “What the fuck can we do?” Torbjörn had said. “I’ll be glad if I can just hang on to my job.” Lars-Gunnar had felt as if he were sinking into a swamp. He could see himself in a few years. Growing old, stuck at home with Nalle. They could sit there like two idiots, gawping at game shows on TV.

It wasn’t right. All that business about the license! It was nearly twenty years ago, after all! It was just an excuse to do him some damage.

“Why?” he’d said to Torbjörn. “What does she want to do to me?” And Torbjörn had shrugged his shoulders.

A week went by without him speaking to a single soul. A foretaste of what life would be like. In the evenings he drank, just so that he could get to sleep.

The night before midsummer’s eve he was sitting in the kitchen having a little celebration. Well, maybe celebration wasn’t quite the word. Shut in the kitchen with his own thoughts. Poured himself a drink, talked to himself, drank the drink on his own. Went to bed in the end, tried to sleep. It was as if something was thumping in his chest. Something he hadn’t felt since he was a child.

Then he got in the car and tried to pull himself together. He remembers he almost put the car in the ditch when he was reversing out of the yard. And then Nalle came running out in just his underpants. Lars-Gunnar thought he’d fallen asleep hours ago. He was waving and shouting. Lars-Gunnar had to switch off the engine. “You can come with me,” he said. “But you need to put some clothes on.” “No, no,” said Nalle, refusing to let go of the car door. “It’s okay, I’m not going anywhere. Go and put something on.”

There’s a kind of fog in his head when he tries to remember. He wanted to talk to her. She was going to fucking listen to him. Nalle fell asleep in the passenger seat.

He remembers hitting her. Thinking: That’s enough. That’s enough now.

She wouldn’t stop making a noise. However much he hit her. Rattling and squeaking. Breathing. He dragged off her shoes and socks. Shoved her socks in her mouth.

He was still furious when he carried her up to the church. Hung her up by the chain in front of the organ pipes. As he stood up there in the gallery he thought it didn’t matter if anybody came, if anybody had seen him.

Then Nalle came in. He’d woken up and came stumbling into the church. Suddenly he was standing down there in the aisle gazing up at Lars-Gunnar and Mildred with huge eyes. He didn’t say a word.

Lars-Gunnar sobered up at once. He was angry with Nalle. And suddenly terrified. He remembers that very clearly. Remembers dragging Nalle to the car. Driving away. And they didn’t speak. Nalle didn’t say anything.

Every day Lars-Gunnar was expecting them to come. But nobody came. Well, they came and asked if he’d seen anything, of course. Or knew anything. Asked him the same questions they were asking everybody else.

He remembered he’d put his work gloves on. They’d been in the trunk of the car. He hadn’t done it intentionally. Hadn’t been thinking about fingerprints or anything. It had just been automatic. If you’re using a tool like a crowbar, you put your gloves on. Pure luck. Pure luck.

And then everything carried on as usual. Nalle didn’t seem to remember anything. He was just the same as always. Lars-Gunnar had been just the same as always too. He slept well at night.

I was lying there like a wounded animal, he thinks now, as he stands there with this woman at his feet. Like an animal that lies down in a hollow, but it’s only a matter of time before the huntsman catches up with it.

When Stefan Wikström rang he could hear it in his voice. That he knew. Just the fact that he was ringing Lars-Gunnar, why would he do that? They saw each other when they were hunting, but he didn’t have anything to do with that milksop of a priest otherwise. And now he was ringing up. Telling him the parish priest seemed to be changing his mind about the future of the hunting team. Bertil Stensson might suggest to the church council that it was time to revoke the lease. And he talked about the elk hunt as if… as if he had something quite different to say about the whole thing.

And when Stefan rang, the fog in Lars-Gunnar’s head cleared. He remembers standing by the jetty waiting for Mildred. His pulse throbbing like a jackhammer. He looked up at the priest’s house. And somebody was standing at the upstairs window. He didn’t remember that until Stefan Wikström rang.

What did he want with me? he thinks now. He wanted power over me. Like Mildred.

Lars-Gunnar and Stefan Wikström are sitting in the car on the way to the lake. Lars-Gunnar has said he’s going to lift the boat out of the water for the winter and chain down the oars.

Stefan Wikström is whining about Bertil Stensson like a baby. Lars-Gunnar is listening with only half an ear. It’s all about the hunting permit and the fact that Bertil doesn’t appreciate the work Stefan does as a priest. And then Lars-Gunnar has to listen to his unbearable infantile babble about hunting. As if he understood anything about it. The little boy who got his place on the team as a present from the parish priest.

The constant babbling is confusing Lars-Gunnar. What does he want, the priest? It feels as if Stefan is holding the parish priest up to Lars-Gunnar as a small child holds up its arm when it’s fallen over. Kiss it better.

He has no intention of being under the thumb of this little runt. He’s prepared to pay the price for his actions. But that price is not going to be paid to Stefan Wikström. Never.

Stefan Wikström keeps his eyes on the section of the road that can be seen in the headlights. He gets carsick really easily. Has to keep looking ahead.

A sense of fear is beginning to steal over him. He can feel it writhing in his stomach like a slender snake.

They talk about all kinds of things. Not about Mildred. But her presence is tangible. It’s almost as if she were sitting in the backseat.

Stefan Wikström thinks about the night before midsummer’s eve. How he stood by the bedroom window. He saw somebody standing next to Mildred’s boat. Suddenly the person took a few steps. Disappeared behind a little log cabin on the museum’s land. He didn’t see anything else. But he thought about it afterward, of course. That it was Lars-Gunnar. That he’d had something in his hand.

Even now, he doesn’t think it was wrong not to tell the police. He and Lars-Gunnar are among the eighteen members of the hunting team. That makes him Lars-Gunnar’s priest. Lars-Gunnar is part of his flock. A priest lives by different laws from normal citizens. As a priest, he couldn’t point the finger at Lars-Gunnar. As a priest, he must be there when Lars- Gunnar is ready to talk.

This was another burden laid upon him. And he accepted it. Placed it in God’s hands. Prayed: Thy will be done. And added: I cannot feel that thy yoke is gentle, thy burden light.

They’ve arrived, and get out of the car. He is given the chain to carry. Lars-Gunnar tells him to walk in front.

He sets off along the path in the moonlight.

Mildred is walking behind him. He can feel it. He’s reached the lake. Drops the chain on the ground. Looks at it.

Mildred climbs into his ear.

Run! she says inside his head. Run!

But he can’t run. He just stands there waiting. Hears Lars-Gunnar coming. Slowly he takes shape in the moonlight. And yes, he is carrying his gun.

Lars-Gunnar looks down at Rebecka Martinsson. After the trip down the stairs she’s stopped shaking. But she’s still conscious. Staring at him all the time.

Rebecka Martinsson looks up at the man. She’s seen this image before. The man who is an eclipse of the sun. The face in shadow. The sun coming in through the kitchen window. Like a corona around his head. It’s Pastor Thomas Söderberg. He is saying: I loved you like my own daughter. Soon she will smash his head.

When the man bends down over her she grabs hold of him. Well, grabs hold is putting it a bit strongly; the forefinger and middle finger of her right hand creep in under the neck band of his sweater. Only the weight of the hand itself draws him closer.

“How can a person live with that?”

He detaches her fingers from his sweater.

Live with what? he wonders. Stefan Wikström? He felt a greater sorrow that time when he shot a female elk over in Paksuniemi. That was over twenty years ago. The second after she fell, two calves emerged from the trees. Then they disappeared into the forest. He thought about his mistake for a long time. First the female. And then the fact that he hadn’t reacted in time and shot the calves as well. They must have faced an agonizing death.

He opens the trapdoor in the kitchen that leads down to the cellar. Grabs hold of her and drags her toward the hole.

Nalle’s hand is knocking on the kitchen window. His uncomprehending gaze between the plastic pelargoniums.

And now the woman comes to life. When she sees the hole in the floor. She begins to wriggle in his grasp. Grabs the leg of the kitchen table, the whole table is dragged along with her.

“Let go,” he says, unclasping her fingers.

She scratches his face. Writhing and lashing out. A silent, jerky struggle.

He lifts her by the collar. Her feet leave the floor. Not a word comes out of her mouth. The scream is in her eyes: No! No!

He hurls her down like a bag of garbage. She falls backwards. A thud and a bang, then silence. He lets the trapdoor fall shut. Then he gets hold of the cupboard that stands over by the southern wall and drags it over the trapdoor with both hands. It weighs a ton, but he has the strength.

She opens her eyes. It takes a while for her to realize that she’d lost consciousness for a little while. But she can’t have been out for long. A few seconds. She can hear Lars-Gunnar dragging something heavy over the trapdoor.

Her eyes are wide open, and she can’t see a thing. Pitch dark. She can hear the footsteps and the dragging noise up above. Up onto her knees. Her right arm is dangling uselessly. Instinctively she places her left hand over her right arm at shoulder level and pulls the arm back into joint. It makes a crunching sound. A bolt of pain shoots from her shoulder down her arm and her back. Everything hurts. Apart from her face. She can’t feel anything there at all. She touches it with her hand. It’s somehow numb. And something is hanging off, loose and wet. Is it her lip? When she swallows she can taste blood.

Down on all fours. Earth beneath her hands. The dampness soaks through the knees of her jeans. It stinks of rat shit.

If she dies here. Then the rats will eat her.

She begins to crawl. Gropes ahead of her with her hand, looking for the staircase. Sticky cobwebs everywhere, winding themselves around the hand as it fumbles its way. Something rustles in the corner. There’s the staircase. She’s on her knees, with her hands resting on a step a bit higher up. Like a dog, up on its hind legs. She listens. And waits.

Lars-Gunnar has dragged the cupboard into place. He wipes his brow with the back of his hand.

Nalle’s “What?” has stopped. Lars-Gunnar looks out of the window. Nalle is out in the yard, walking round in a circle. Lars-Gunnar recognizes the signs. Whenever Nalle is unhappy and afraid, he starts walking around like that. It can take half an hour to calm him down. It’s as if he loses the ability to hear. The first time it happened, Lars-Gunnar felt so frustrated and powerless that he hit him in the end. The blow still burns inside him. He remembers looking at his hand, the one that had delivered the blow, and thinking about his own father. And it didn’t make Nalle any better. Just worse. Now he knows you have to have patience. And time.

If only there were time.

He goes out into the yard. Tries, although he knows it won’t work:

“Nalle!”

But Nalle doesn’t hear anything. Round and round he goes.

Lars-Gunnar has thought about this moment a thousand times. But in his thoughts Nalle has been sleeping peacefully. He and Lars-Gunnar have had a wonderful day. Maybe they’ve been in the forest. Or been on the river on the snow scooter. Lars-Gunnar has sat by Nalle’s bed for a while. Nalle has fallen asleep, and then…

This is too much. It couldn’t be any bloody worse than this. He runs his hand over his cheek. It seems as if he’s crying.

And he sees Mildred in front of him. He’s been on his way to this point ever since then. He realizes that now. The first blow. At the time he was full of rage toward her. But afterward. Afterward it was his own life he smashed to bits. Hung it up for everyone to see.

To the car. The rifle is there. It’s loaded. It has been all summer. He releases the safety catch.

“Nalle,” he says thickly.

He still wants to say good-bye. He would have liked to have done that.

“Nalle,” he says to his big lad.

Now. Before it gets to the point where he can’t hold the gun. He can’t be sitting here when they arrive. Can’t let them take Nalle away.

He raises the gun to his shoulder. Takes aim. Fires. The first bullet in the back. Nalle falls forward. The second bullet in the head.

Then he goes in.

What he’d like to do most of all is to open the trapdoor and kill her. What is she? Nothing.

But the way he feels at the moment, he hasn’t the strength to shift the cupboard.

He slumps down on the kitchen sofa.

Then he gets up. Opens the door of the wall clock and stops the pendulum with his hand.

Sits down again.

The barrel in his mouth. It’s been torture for as long as he can remember. This will be a relief. It will be over at last.

Down in the darkness she hears the shots. They come from outside. Two shots. Then the outside door slams. She hears footsteps across the kitchen floor. Then the final shot.

Something old wakes up inside her. Something from times past.

She scrambles up the steps to get away. Bangs her head on the trapdoor. Almost falls back down, but grabs hold of something.

It’s impossible to shift the trapdoor. She bangs on it with her fists. Her knuckles are torn open. She rips off her nails.

Anna-Maria Mella drives into Lars-Gunnar Vinsa’s yard at half past three in the afternoon. Sven-Erik is sitting beside her in the car. They haven’t spoken all the way down to Poikkijärvi. It isn’t a nice feeling, knowing that you’re going to have to tell a former colleague that you’re seizing his gun and taking it in for testing.

Anna-Maria is driving slightly too fast as usual, and she very nearly runs over the body lying on the gravel.

Sven-Erik curses. Anna-Maria slams the brakes on and they jump out of the car. Sven-Erik is already on his knees, feeling the side of the neck with his hand. A black swarm of heavy flies lifts from the bloody back of the head. He shakes his head in reply to Anna-Maria’s unspoken question.

“It’s Lars-Gunnar’s boy,” he says.

Anna-Maria looks toward the house. She hasn’t got her gun with her. Shit.

“Don’t you even think about doing anything stupid,” Sven-Erik warns her. “Get in the car and we’ll call for backup.”

It’ll take forever before the others get here, thinks Anna-Maria.

“Thirteen minutes,” says Sven-Erik, checking the time.

It’s Fred Olsson and Tommy Rantakyrö in an unmarked car. And four colleagues in bulletproof vests and black overalls.

Tommy Rantakyrö and Fred Olsson park up on the ridge and come running down to Lars-Gunnar’s yard, crouching as they run. Sven-Erik has reversed Anna-Maria’s car out of firing range of the house.

The second police car pulls up in the yard. They shelter behind it.

Sven-Erik Stålnacke picks up a megaphone.

“Hello!” he shouts. “Lars-Gunnar! If you’re in there, come on out so we can have a chat.”

No response.

Anna-Maria meets Sven-Erik’s eyes and shakes her head. Nothing to wait for.

The four men in bulletproof vests go in. Two through the outside door. One first, the other right behind him. Two get in through a window at the back.

There isn’t a sound, apart from the noise of breaking glass from the back of the house. The others wait. One minute. Two.

Then one of them comes out onto the porch and waves. Okay to come in.

Lars-Gunnar’s body is lying on the floor in front of the kitchen sofa. The wall behind the sofa is spattered with his blood.

Sven-Erik and Tommy Rantakyrö push aside the cupboard that’s standing in the middle of the floor on top of the trapdoor.

“There’s somebody down here!” shouts Tommy Rantakyrö.

“Come on,” he says, reaching down a hand.

But the person who’s down there doesn’t come. In the end Tommy climbs down. The others can hear him.

“Shit! Okay, take it easy. Can you stand up?”

She comes up through the trapdoor. It takes a long time. The others help her. Support her under the arms. That makes her whimper a little.

It takes a fraction of a second before Anna-Maria recognizes Rebecka Martinsson.

Half of Rebecka’s face is swollen and black and blue. She has a large wound on her forehead and her upper lip is hanging off, held only by a flap of skin. “Looked like a pizza with everything on it,” Tommy Rantakyrö will say much later.

Anna-Maria is thinking mainly of her teeth. They’re clenched so tightly, as if her jaws have locked together.

“Rebecka,” says Anna-Maria. “What…”

But Rebecka waves her away. Anna-Maria sees her glance at the body on the kitchen floor before she walks stiffly out through the door.

Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Tommy Rantakyrö follow her out.

Outside the sky has turned gray. The clouds are hanging low, heavy with rain.

Fred Olsson is standing out in the yard.

Not a word passes his lips when he catches sight of Rebecka. But his mouth opens around the unspoken words, and his eyes are staring.

Anna-Maria is watching Rebecka Martinsson. She’s standing like a statue in front of Nalle’s dead body. There’s something in her eyes. They all sense instinctively that this is not the time to touch her. She’s in a place of her own.

“Where the hell are the paramedics?” asks Anna-Maria.

“On the way,” someone replies.

Anna-Maria glances upward. It’s starting to spit with rain. They need to get something over the body lying outside. A tarpaulin or something.

Rebecka takes a step backwards. She waves her hand in front of her face as if there were something there she was trying to shoo away.

Then she begins to walk. First of all she staggers toward the house. Then she sways and walks toward the river instead. It’s as if she were blindfolded, doesn’t seem to know where she is or where she’s going.

The rain comes. Anna-Maria feels the chill of autumn like a torrent of cold air. It sweeps across the yard. Heavy, cold rain. A thousand icy needles. Anna-Maria pulls up the zip of her blue jacket, her chin disappears into the neckline. She needs to sort out that tarpaulin for the body.

“Keep an eye on her,” she shouts to Tommy Rantakyrö, pointing at Rebecka Martinsson who is still tottering away. “Keep her away from the gun in there, and from yours too. And don’t let her go down to the river.”

Rebecka Martinsson makes her way across the yard. There’s a big dead dead dead boy lying on the gravel. Not long ago he was sitting in the cellar with a biscuit in his hand, feeding a mouse.

It’s windy. The wind is roaring down inside her ears.

The sky is filled with black scratch marks, deep gouges that in their turn are filled with black ink. Is it raining? Has it started raining? She raises her hands tentatively toward the sky to see if they get wet. Her sleeves fall back, exposing the thin, bare wrists, the hands like naked birch trees. She drops her scarf on the grass.

Tommy Rantakyrö catches up with Rebecka Martinsson.

“Listen,” he says. “Don’t go down to the river. There’ll be an ambulance here in a minute, and then…”

She isn’t listening. Staggers on toward the riverbank. Now he thinks this is unpleasant. She’s unpleasant. Horrible staring eyes in that raw meat face. He doesn’t want to be alone with her.

“Sorry,” he says, grabbing hold of her arm. “I can’t… You just can’t go down there.”

Now the world splits open like a rotten fruit. Somebody’s got hold of her arm. It’s Pastor Vesa Larsson. He no longer has a face. A brown dog’s head is sitting on his shoulders. The black doggy eyes are looking accusingly at her. He had children. And dogs, who can’t weep.

“What do you want from me?” she screams.

Pastor Thomas Söderberg is standing there too. He is lifting dead babies out of the well. Bending down and lifting them out, one after the other. Holding them upside down, by the heel or by their little feet. They are naked and white. Their skin is loose, they’ve been in the water for a long time. He throws them onto a great big pile. It grows and grows in front of him.

When she quickly turns away, she’s standing face to face with her mother. She’s so clean and smart.

“Don’t you touch me,” she says to Rebecka. “Do you understand? Do you understand what you’ve done?”

Anna-Maria Mella has got hold of a rug. She’s going to put it over Lars-Gunnar’s son. It’s not so easy to know what the scene of crime technicians will want her to do. She also needs to set up some kind of barricade before the whole village starts turning up. And the press. Why did it have to bloody rain? In the middle of everything, when she’s shouting about barricades and half-running with the rug, she longs for Robert. For this evening, when she’ll be able to sob in his arms. Because everything is so pointless and so unbearable.

Tommy Rantakyrö calls out to her and she turns.

“I can’t hold her,” he shouts.

He’s wrestling with Rebecka Martinsson in the grass. Her arms are flailing, hitting out wildly. She breaks free and begins to run down to the river.

Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson set off after her. Anna-Maria hardly has time to react before Sven-Erik has almost caught up with her. Fred Olsson is right behind him. They grab hold of Rebecka. She’s like a snake in Sven-Erik’s arms.

“It’s okay,” says Sven-Erik loudly. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Tommy Rantakyrö is holding his hand under his nose. A trickle of blood is seeping through his fingers. Anna-Maria always has paper tissues in her pockets. Gustav always needs something wiped off his face. Ice cream, banana, snot. She passes the tissue to Tommy.

“Get her down on the ground,” shouts Fred Olsson. “We need to cuff her.”

“Like hell we do,” answers Sven-Erik sharply. “Is the ambulance coming soon?”

The last remark is shouted to Anna-Maria. She makes a movement with her head to indicate that she doesn’t know. Sven-Erik and Fred Olsson are now each holding on to one of Rebecka Martinsson’s arms. She’s on her knees between them, lurching from side to side.

At that very moment the ambulance finally arrives. Closely followed by another radio car. Flashing lights and sirens slicing through the hard gray rain. There’s a hell of a noise.

And right through the middle of it all Anna-Maria can hear Rebecka Martinsson screaming.

Rebecka Martinsson is screaming. She’s screaming like someone who’s lost her mind. She can’t stop.