The Second Deadly Sin Page 10

  “But my living there doesn’t stop me from taking on other crimes in Kurravaara, does it? Breaking the snow scooter speed limit, thefts of boat engines, burglaries …”

  “But this murder is getting one thousand per cent media coverage. They’ll have us for breakfast if we put a foot wrong. You know that.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?” he said at last.

  “It’s best if I don’t say anything,” she said.

  She sounded upset. He wished she had sounded angry.

  “What ought I to have done?” he asked.

  “Maybe you should have trusted me. Relied on my handing over to somebody else if that kind of problem arose. Just as in any other case. Instead of taking the coward’s way out because the media are in full cry. It was my murder. And you simply gave it away without even phoning me.”

  He ran his hand over his face and tried to muffle the sound of his frustrated sigh, which sounded to him like the trumpeting of a blue whale.

  Why had he not telephoned her? he asked himself. She was far and away the best prosecutor at his disposal. He was the one who had begged her to come and work for him. He ransacked the innermost depths of his conscience.

  Von Post had come to see him. “It’s my turn now,” he’d said. Then he had raised the possible problem of people in Kurravaara being interrogated by somebody who lived in the same village. It had seemed reasonable at the time. Then he admitted in all humility that a tax evasion scam he had been helping Björnfot with was beyond his capabilities. He suggested it was something that Rebecka could take on instead. “Something for her to get her teeth into,” von Post had said. “Nobody knows more about tax laws than she does.”

  And so Björnfot had said yes. But why had it not occurred to him to phone her at once? Because somewhere deep down inside himself he knew he had done the wrong thing. He had chosen to avoid conflict with von Post. He had given the dog a bone. Taken it for granted that it was no big deal as far as Martinsson was concerned.

  Thought that she might have fun sorting out that tax scam. Van Post was so bloody dissatisfied all the time. He had thought that … Well, he hadn’t really thought at all.

  “Anyway, that’s the way it is now,” he said.

  He sounded grumpy. He could hear that himself, and tried to change course.

  “Anyway, I have a tax scam in Luleå that I need somebody competent to get involved in. Would you like to take it on?”

  He regretted it the moment the words had passed his lips.

  “You must be joking,” Martinsson said slowly. “Don’t you even have the sense to be ashamed of what you’ve done? No, I am not prepared to pick up the crumbs from a rich man’s table. But I am owed seven weeks’ holiday. I’m going on leave as from now. You or von Post can take over the criminal case I’m supposed to be dealing with in court tomorrow, and all the rest of the stuff that’s lying on my desk.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “Don’t you dare say no,” she growled. “Or I’ll resign.”

  He became angry.

  “Don’t be childish,” he exclaimed.

  “I’m not being childish,” she barked. “I’m grown up and pissed off. And so damned disappointed in you. You coward. Whoever would have thought you’d end up sucking von Post’s cock?”

  He gasped for breath. He seemed to have a steel band clamped around his chest.

  “What the … That’s more than enough … I’m hanging up,” he roared back. “You can ring me when you’ve calmed down.”

  He slammed his mobile down onto his desk. Stood there for a few moments looking at it. Hoping that she would ring him back. Then he would tell her that she should pull her socks up.

  “You’d better pull your damned socks up!” he yelled at the mobile, pointing menacingly at it.

  He sat down and started rummaging through his papers. He couldn’t remember for the life of him what he’d been doing before the call came.

  Who did she think she was? How did she dare?

  His administrative assistant came in and asked about the following week’s court timetable. It took them half an hour to run through it, by which time his anger had ebbed away. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down on the edge of his desk.

  He almost wished that he was angry again. The calm after the storm revealed a mirror in which he could see his own reflection. He was not happy with what he saw.

  He should not have handed the case over to von Post. He hadn’t been thinking straight. He had simply said: “O.K., take over.” And now he found himself in a right pickle. But what was done could not be undone. He did not want her to be angry with him.

  “It was wrong,” he said out loud to himself.

  He pinched his nose and breathed out through his mouth.

  And there is no need to start thinking in terms of damned gender roles.

  At ten o’clock on the evening of her first day in Kiruna, Hjalmar Lundbohm comes to visit her.

  “I saw that the lights were still on,” he says by way of explanation. Lizzie curtseys and invites him in.

  She and Elina have just washed themselves with the last of the water in the cauldron. Earlier, Lizzie roasted a pork joint American style with a divine onion sauce for the removal men who returned to build the bookcase. So much has happened that Elina feels giddy and bewildered: it seems to be at least a week since she got off the train feeling embarrassed after Lundbohm had marched off with no more than a curt goodbye.

  Now she wishes she had put on a rather more elegant blouse, but it had never occurred to her that he might come to visit them.

  Lundbohm has come for a specific purpose, of course. He wants Lizzie to have the guest list for dinner the next evening. Lizzie looks surprised. He tends to give her advance notice only when a largescale gathering has been organised, and not always even then. She curtseys again, and gives Elina a knowing look.

  “I expect that fröken Pettersson is used to having a flat of her own,” Lundbohm says. “But we’re short of space in Kiruna, so it’s usual to share.”

  For God’s sake don’t make me have to live on my own again, Elina says to herself, but what she actually says is, “I’ve no doubt the arrangement will work very well. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Lundbohm would love some coffee, if there is nothing stronger on offer.

  And so they drink coffee from traditional wooden mugs. Elina notices that he does not seem to mind that. He is evidently the type who eats simple Lappish food on wooden plates one day, then dines with royalty the next.

  He admires the rag rugs, and compliments them on making the flat so snug and homely. He sits on the wooden bench that converts into a double bed at night, and Lizzie says they’ll do some painting tomorrow, and hang up some wallpaper. She informs him that the bookcase will be painted blue.

  “What are you going to put into that?”

  “Books, of course!”

  She points at the trunk.

  “The new teacher has brought a whole library with her.”

  Lundbohm looks long and hard at the new teacher. Then he asks if he might be allowed to take a look at the books.

  Elina’s hands are shaking, but what choice does she have?

  And at the same time, she also welcomes the opportunity to show who she is.

  When Lizzie sees all the books, she needs to sit down.

  “That’s amazing,” she says. “Have you read them all?”

  “Yes,” Elina says, with a trace of bravado in her voice. “And I’ve read some of them several times!”

  Lundbohm produces a pince-nez from his pocket.

  “Let’s have a look, then,” he says, and Lizzie takes books out of the chest one by one. They are lovingly packed between linen towels and sheets of tissue paper. Lizzie folds the tissue paper meticulously and piles it up. Lundbohm reads the titles out loud.

  Elina just sits there and lets them get on with it. There are so many emotions surging through her. So many voices.

>   I’m so tired, she thinks when a lump in her throat signals that she is close to tears.

  Voices. The women in the village back home who insist on telling her mother that the girl will be driven mad as a result of reading all those books. Who say that she’s an idle layabout when she sits there concentrating on her school homework. Snatch the pen out of her hand and tell her she should be helping her mother with the washing up. It is her mother who puts her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and prevents her from standing up. Who puts the pen back into her hand and says: “My girl is going to read books. As long as I have the strength to keep going, my daughter is going to study.” She recalls her schoolteacher sitting at the kitchen table back home, talking to her mother. “If Elina proceeds to higher education, I’ll pay whatever it costs. I don’t have any children of my own to pay for.”

  Lundbohm picks and chooses from among her books, commenting on the ones he has read and asking about the ones he has not.

  Elina tells him what he wants to know. She keeps it simple. After all, how could she explain to a man like him that books can save your life? He’s no doubt never been more than an arm’s length away from the theatre, literature, studies, travels.

  But she smiles, and it feels better. She is soon speaking without inhibitions, and whenever she picks up one of her books she is only too happy to make its acquaintance again.

  She is also sitting on the kitchen bench that converts into a bed, and soon she has a pile of books on her knee. Unfortunately there is a pile between her and herr Lundbohm as well.

  There are books for children, of course – both she and Lundbohm prefer Huckleberry Finn, but there is also Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, although Elina explains that the latter is not really for children, and outlines the plot for Lizzie, who shudders in horror but rather likes the feeling. Then Elina digs out Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and announces that they will be reading aloud from that book every evening.

  Lundbohm reads a few paragraphs aloud from Jack London’s Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf. Kipling’s Kim is wrapped up in a towel together with Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore’s Song Offerings.

  English and German novels, Selma Lagerlöf, Ellen Key and August Strindberg.

  Lundbohm and Elina pass the books to one another, and sometimes, for just a few moments, they are both holding the same book. She leans forward and reads the same text as he is reading. He smells of soap.

  He must have washed himself before coming to visit us, she thinks. Does anybody really do that when they are just going to call in on their housekeeper and tell her how many guests there will be for dinner?

  Lizzie makes some more coffee, then waves her magic wand and produces some sugar lumps and the special cheese that people up here in the north dip into their coffee. They all drink the sweet coffee, then fish up the lumps of cheese that make crunching sounds as they chew them.

  Down at the very bottom of the chest are some books wrapped up in brown paper tied with string.

  “Because these books are not all appropriate for being looked at by one’s employer,” Elina explains with a stiff upper lip.

  “Let’s see how much this employer can tolerate,” Lundbohm says with a laugh, opening the packages one after the other.

  First up is the The Penholder by Elin Wägner.

  “Wägner and Key …” Lundbohm says.

  “Yes,” Elina says. “And Stella Kleve.”

  They both know what the other is thinking. The teacher sympathises with authors who believe that love is more important than a marriage certificate.

  And she buys books, he thinks. That’s why she wears worn-out shoes and a scruffy overcoat.

  He is possessed by a desire to buy some clothes for her. A pretty blouse. With lace trimmings.

  In the next parcel is Fröding’s Splashes and Spray. No wonder that collection of poetry was wrapped up in brown paper. Fröding was even taken to court for one of his poems.

  Elina loves Fröding. How can anybody think that what he writes is obscene? All those poems about loneliness and the longing for love and tenderness. How often did Fröding console her when she sat there in the schoolroom, all alone? He was always even worse off than her, always more of an outsider.

  “He didn’t die, actually,” she says.

  Lundbohm closes his eyes as he sits there and recites from memory:

  I sat down there with well-filled glasses,

  drinking all day and all the night,

  dreaming away as well I might

  of alcohol and lovely lasses.

  There follow several seconds of silence. Elina is lost for words. A man quoting Gustav Fröding. He did so with the perfect level of restraint in his voice, not too much emotion. He made a short pause between “dreaming away” and “as well I might”, so that one almost had the impression he was creating the poem himself, searching for the right words, searching for everything she was searching for herself. Anything that can douse the fever that sometimes takes possession of her – the feeling of restlessness, loneliness.

  Lundbohm sits there in silence, his eyes half-closed as if he is dreaming.

  I ought to kiss him, she thinks, and is astonished by the reaction of her heart.

  She immediately tells herself that she is being stupid. She has only just met the man. He is so much older than she is. And he is fat.

  But when she looks at those weary, half-closed eyes and those lips that only a few seconds ago curled slightly to express a stab of pain as he recited somebody else’s words that embodied his own longings, she sees a young man in him, even a young boy. She wants to get to know him. To become familiar with all his ages. She wants to know everything about him. She wants to kiss him. To own him.

  “Good Lord,” Lizzie says. “‘Dreaming away of alcohol and lovely lasses’. That’s just what my Johan-Albin used to do. Before he met me. He’s given up booze now. But I can tell you that I’ve got some books as well.”

  She takes out her contribution to the bookcase from one of her suitcases.

  Lundbohm comes back to life in delight when he reads titles like Behind Closed Curtains and The Sweetness of Sin.

  He puts on his pince-nez, thumbs through the pages at random, then begins to read:

  Leopold slowly put his arm round her, and sent hundreds of white rose petals floating down onto her neck. “My lovely,” he whispered and gazed longingly into her eyes. Then he kissed her – one long, passionate kiss.

  Now it’s Lizzie’s turn to close her eyes and listen as if she is sitting in church.

  “Lovely!” she says when he has finished reading.

  Lundbohm smiles in amusement.

  “Aha,” says Elina. “So you smile at sentimental novels, do you? I have quite a few of those as well.”

  She unpacks several brown paper parcels containing cheap paperbacks. There are crime novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and Nick Carter, and the Swedish writer Samuel Duse’s books about his detective Leo Carring; also adventure tales, romantic fiction set in the wilds of northern Sweden, mystery yarns, and love stories by the Swedish bestseller Jenny Brun.

  The air is now filled with formal dress balls, inheritances, murder by poisoning, crofters’ daughters who become wealthy socialites, ghosts, opium dens, gold-mining communities, pirates, grave desecrators, thwarted love, forbidden love, shattered dreams, spies, jealousy, pangs of conscience, baby farmers, swindlers, revenge, sheikhs in the desert, seducers, mysterious strangers, innocent victims, hypnotists, car chases, polar bears, man-eating tigers, charming doctors, unscrupulous criminals, desert islands in the Pacific Ocean, North Pole expeditions, dangers, despair and happy endings.

  They read aloud from the blurbs, and admire all the stylish covers.

  “What a lot of immoral pornography!” Lundbohm says, smiling at Elina.

  She puts her head on one side and indicates that she is a hopeless case.

  Lizzie yawns loudly and ostentatiously. Lundbohm stands up
at once, as if she has made a trumpet call.

  “I’ll come and inspect the rest of the books in the near future,” he says, pretending to be censorious as he points to the rest of the brown-paper parcels at the bottom of Elina’s chest.

  They look out of the window and see that it has started snowing in earnest.

  “Not again!” Lizzie says with a sigh.

  Lundbohm takes his leave. Lizzie and Elina convert the kitchen bench into a bed. As soon as they have put on their nightdresses, they collapse into it.

  “I’m so pleased to discover that you are very good at cleaning and laughing,” mumbles Lizzie into Elina’s ear. “You’re just what the doctor ordered.”

  Then they both fall asleep.

  Lundbohm walks home through the snow. There is no sign of life in the streets. He is in remarkably high spirits. He has not had so much fun for a very long time. Albeit with his housekeeper and the new teacher.

  He says her name out loud. He’s feeling that childish. The sound doesn’t travel far. The dancing snowflakes swallow up his voice.

  “Elina,” he says. “Elina.”

  Rebecka Martinsson knocked on Krister Eriksson’s door. He lived in a brown-painted four-roomed detached house in Hjortvägen. It was good of him to look after Marcus. She wondered how things had gone. A chorus of barking dogs could be heard from inside the house.

  She went in, squatted down and greeted them all. Tintin stood there with great dignity, all four paws on the floor, and allowed herself to be tickled under her neck while curling her lip in the direction of young Roy, making it clear that he would have to wait his turn. The Brat was unworthy of her attention, and she ignored him as he crawled and slithered around Martinsson, whimpering and trying to lick her face. His mistress, his lovely mistress – where had she been all this time? Vera said a brief hello, but then returned to the kitchen. Krister was frying thin slices of reindeer meat, which were spitting and crackling in the pan.

  Marcus came crawling up on all fours.

  He was wearing a jumper that was a little on the large side.