The Second Deadly Sin Page 2

  It’s O.K., he thinks. He wipes his hand on his trouser leg. A bit of adrenalin goes with the territory.

  Fifty metres to go. He peers into the undergrowth where the barking is coming from. Both dogs are wearing jackets that are luminescent green on one side and orange on the other. To distinguish them from the bear in circumstances where that is necessary. And also to see what direction the dog is facing.

  Now he sees a glimpse of something orange up ahead. Which of the dogs is it? Impossible to tell. The bear usually stands between the dogs. Mäkitalo screws up his eyes, peers into the undergrowth again, moves as quietly as he can to one side. Ready to shoot, reload, shoot again.

  The wind veers again. At the same time he catches sight of the other dog. There are about ten metres between the two of them. The bear must be in there somewhere, but he can’t see it. He must get closer. But now the wind is coming from diagonally behind him. That is not good. He raises his rifle.

  Then he sees the bear. Ten metres away. No clear view for taking a shot. Too many tree trunks and too much undergrowth in the way. It suddenly stands up. It must have got wind of him.

  It charges at him. It all happens so quickly. He hardly has time to draw breath before it is almost upon him. There is a creaking and crashing and snapping of branches.

  He shoots. The first shot makes the bear swerve to one side, but it keeps on coming. The second shot is perfect. The bear collapses three metres short of him.

  The dogs pounce on it immediately. Bite at its ears. Chew its fur. He lets them do whatever they want. That is their reward.

  His heart is slamming like an open door in a storm. He tries to get his breath back in between praising his dogs. Well done! There’s a good girl!

  He takes out his mobile. Rings the local huntsmen.

  That was a close shave. A bit too close for comfort. He thinks briefly about his little boy and his partner. Then he banishes any such thoughts from his mind. Looks at the bear. It is big. Really big. And almost black.

  *

  The local huntsmen arrive. The air is heavy with autumn chill, pungent bear and admiring respect. They truss up the body of the bear with ropes and attach straps running over their shoulders and under their arms so that they can drag it to a clearing not far from a track that can be accessed by their four-wheel drive pick-up. They work like slaves, and agree that it is a hell of a big beast.

  The inspector from the county council arrives. He inspects the place where the bear was shot to make sure that no laws have been broken. Then he takes no end of samples while the hunters are recovering from their efforts. He clips off a clump of fur, cuts out a skin sample, cuts off the testicles, prises out a tooth with his sheath knife so that the age of the bear can be established.

  Then he cuts open its stomach.

  “Shall we check what Teddy’s been eating?” he says.

  Mäkitalo has tied his dogs to a tree trunk. They whimper and strain at their leashes. It’s their bear, after all.

  Steam rises from the contents of the bear’s stomach. And the stench is awful.

  Some of the men take an involuntary step back. They know what’s inside there. The remains of Johansson’s Norwegian elk-hound. The inspector knows that as well.

  “Ah well,” he says. “Berries and meat. Fur and skin.”

  He pokes around in the slushy mess. His face suddenly assumes a suspicious expression.

  “But for Christ’s sake, this isn’t …”

  He falls silent. Picks up a few pieces of bone with his right hand, which is protected by a plastic glove.

  “What the hell is this it’s been eating?” he mumbles as he pokes around in the slush.

  The huntsmen come closer. Scratch at the back of their heads so that the peaks of their caps slide down their foreheads. One of them takes out a pair of glasses.

  The inspector straightens up. Quickly. Takes a step backwards. He’s holding a piece of bone with his fingers.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asks.

  His face has turned grey. The look in his eyes sends shivers down the spines of all the others. The forest has fallen silent. There is no wind. No birdsong. It seems that it is refusing to reveal a secret.

  “It’s not a dog in any case. I can assure you of that.”

  SUNDAY, 23 OCTOBER

  The autumnal river was still talking to her about death. But in a different way. Before, it was funereal in tone. It used to say: You can put an end to it all. You can run out onto the thin ice, as far as you can before it breaks. But now the river said: You, my girl, are no more than the blinking of an eye. It felt consoling.

  District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson was sleeping calmly as dawn began to break. She was no longer woken up by angst poking away at her from the inside, digging into her, scratching around. No more night sweats, no more palpitations.

  She no longer stood in the bathroom, staring into the mirror at black pupils and wanting to cut off all her hair, or to set fire to something – preferably herself.

  It’s good now, she said instead. To herself or to the river. Sometimes to another person, if anybody dared to ask.

  And it was good. Good to be able to do her job again. To tidy up her home. Not to feel her mouth constantly parched, not to break into a rash after taking all her medicine. To sleep soundly at night.

  And occasionally she even laughed. While the river flowed past as it had done for generation after generation before her, and would continue to flow long after she was no more.

  But just now, for the blinking of an eye she would be alive, she could laugh and keep her house tidy, do her job properly and occasionally smoke a cigarette in the sunshine on her balcony. Then she would be nothing, for a very long time.

  That’s the way it is, the river said.

  She liked to have the house clean and tidy. To keep it as it was in Grandma’s time. She slept in the alcove in the varnished sofa bed. The floor was covered by rag mats made by her grandmother. Wooden trays hung from wall hooks in embroidered slings.

  The drop-leaf table and chairs were painted blue, and worn and shiny wherever hands and feet had rested. Crammed onto the metal ladder shelves were volumes of low-church pastor Laestadius’s sermons, hymn books and thirty-year-old copies of magazines from another time – Hemmets Journal, Allers and Land. The linen cupboard was full of threadbare mangled sheets.

  Lying at Martinsson’s feet was the puppy Jasko, sniffling away. The police dog handler Krister Eriksson had given it to her eighteen months ago. A handsome sheepdog. He would soon be lord of all he surveyed – at least, that’s what he himself thought. Raised his leg high when he peed, and almost fell over. In his dreams he was the King of Kurravaara.

  His paws twitched and trod in his sleep as he chased after all those annoying mice and rats that filled his days with their tempting scents but never allowed themselves to be captured. He yelped and his lips twitched when he dreamed about clamping his teeth into their backs with a satisfying crunching noise. Perhaps he was also dreaming about all the local bitches responding to all the bewitching love-letters he peed onto every available blade of grass during the day.

  But when the King of Kurravaara woke up, nobody called him anything but the Brat. And no bitches queued up outside his door.

  Martinsson’s other dog never lay in her bed. Never sat in her lap as the Brat frequently did. Vera the mongrel might allow herself to be stroked very briefly, but there was no question of longer spells of tenderness.

  She slept under the table in the kitchen. Nobody knew her age, nor her pedigree. She used to live with her master in the depths of the forest, a hermit who made his own anti-mosquito balm and pranced around naked in the summer. When he was murdered, his dog ended up with Martinsson. If she hadn’t taken her in, she would have been put down. Martinsson wouldn’t have been able to cope with that, and so she had taken Vera home with her. And she had stayed there.

  In a way, at least. She was a dog who knew her own mind. Who left it up to Martinss
on to track her down when she wandered off along the village road, or went off to explore the potato patch down by the boathouse.

  “How on earth can you let her wander off like that?” said Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving. “You know what people are like. Somebody will shoot her.”

  Please look after her, Martinsson prayed. To a God she sometimes hoped existed. And if you can’t do that, let it happen quickly. Because I can’t stop her. She’s not my dog in that sense.

  Vera’s paws never twitched when she was asleep, nor did she go hunting after tempting scents in her dreams. What the Brat dreamed about, Vera did while she was awake. In the winter she would listen for sounds made by field mice under the snow, pounce down upon them and break their backs just as foxes do. Or stamp down with her front paws and kill them off like that. In the summer she would dig out mouse nests, gobble up the naked youngsters and eat horse dung in the pastures. She knew which farms and houses to avoid. She would run past those places, skulking down in the ditches. But she knew where she would be treated to cinnamon buns and slices of reindeer meat.

  Sometimes she just stood there, staring into the north-east. On such occasions Martinsson would get goose pimples. Because that was where the dog’s original home was, on the other side of the river, up in Vittangijärvi.

  “Do you miss him?” Martinsson would ask on such occasions.

  And was pleased that only the river could hear her.

  Now Vera woke up, sat on the floor next to the head of the bed and stared at Martinsson. When Martinsson opened her eyes, Vera started wagging her tail.

  “You must be joking,” Martinsson groaned. “It’s Sunday morning. I’m asleep.”

  She pulled the covers up over her head. Vera lay her head on the edge of the bed.

  “Go away,” Martinsson said from under the covers – although she knew it was too late now: she was wide awake.

  “Do you need to pee?”

  Whenever she heard the word “pee”, Vera usually sat down next to the door. But not this time.

  “Is it Krister?” Martinsson asked. “Is Krister on his way here?”

  It was as if Vera could feel when Krister Eriksson got into his car in Kiruna, fifteen kilometres away from the village.

  In reply to Martinsson’s question, Vera walked over to the door and lay down to wait.

  Martinsson collected her clothes that were hanging over a chair back next to the sofa bed, and lay on them for a few minutes before getting dressed under the covers. It was freezing cold in the house after the minus temperatures of the night, and you couldn’t just leap out of bed and put on icy cold clothes.

  As she sat on the lavatory, both dogs assembled in front of her. The Brat put his head on her knee and insisted on being stroked.

  “Time for breakfast now,” she said, reaching for the toilet paper.

  Both dogs dashed out into the kitchen. But when they noticed that their food bowls were empty, it seemed to dawn on them that the alpha-female was still in the bathroom, and they raced back to Martinsson. By now she had flushed the toilet and washed her hands in cold water.

  After breakfast the Brat went back to the warm bed.

  Vera lay down on the rag mat next to the hall door, settled down with her nose on her front paws, and sighed deeply.

  Ten minutes later a car drew up outside.

  The Brat shot out of the bed in such a rush that the covers were scattered in all directions. He dashed under the dining table, raced up to Martinsson, then to the door, then to the bed and repeated the same operation. The rag mats were sent flying, he slid over the varnished wooden floorboards, and kitchen chairs fell over.

  Vera had stood up, was standing there patiently and also wanted to be let out. Her tail was wagging away, but she didn’t overdo things.

  “I really don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” said Martinsson innocently. “You’ll have to explain yourselves more clearly.”

  And the Brat whimpered and yelped and stared pleadingly at the door, running up to it and then back to Martinsson.

  Martinsson walked extremely slowly to the door. In slow motion. Looked unremittingly at the Brat, who was shaking and trembling with excitement. Vera just sat there, anticipating the inevitable. Martinsson turned the key and opened the door. The dogs bounded down the steps.

  “Oh, was that what you wanted?” she exclaimed with a laugh.

  *

  Eriksson the police dog handler parked his car outside Martinsson’s house. Even from a distance he had noted that there was a light in her kitchen window on the upper floor, and his heart gave a little leap of joy.

  Then he opened the car door just as Martinsson’s dogs came rollicking down the steps.

  Vera was first. Her hindquarters were swinging from side to side, and she hunched her back in sheer pleasure.

  Krister’s own two dogs, Tintin and Roy, were two hardworking, handsome, well-disciplined and pedigree sheepdogs. Martinsson’s Brat was Tintin’s son. He was destined to be a super-dog.

  And so Vera, a vagrant with no pedigree at all, had become a member of the gang. As thin as a rake. One of her ears stood straight up, the other was limp. And she had a black patch around her eye.

  To start with he had tried to train her. “Sit!” he had said. She had looked him in the eye and put her head on one side. If I could understand what you meant, well, maybe – but if you’re not going to eat that tasty-looking bit of liver, then perhaps …

  He was used to dogs obeying him. But her he could not charm.

  “Hello, you scruffy little mongrel!” he said, tugging gently at her ears and stroking her head. “How can you be so slim when you spend all your time gobbling?”

  She allowed herself to be stroked, then made way for the Brat. He was running around like a cat with a firework up its bottom – between Eriksson’s legs, all over the place, couldn’t stand still long enough for Eriksson to stroke him, then lay down totally submissive – then up again, stood up with his paws on Eriksson, lay down once more on his back, twirled around, then ran off and fetched a pine cone that they might be able to play with, dropped it at Eriksson’s feet, licked Eriksson’s hand then yawned – one way of getting rid of some of those feelings that had become too much to cope with.

  *

  Martinsson appeared in the porch. He looked at her. Beautiful, beautiful. Her arms crossed and her shoulders up by her ears to keep in the warmth. The contours of her small breasts were visible through her military-style vest. Her long dark hair was slightly tousled in a just-out-of-bed way.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “I’m glad to see that you’re an early bird.”

  “Early bird, my foot,” Martinsson shouted back. “It’s that confounded dog. You two are in cahoots in some mysterious way. She wakes me up whenever you’re on your way here.”

  He laughed. Joy and pain arm in arm. She already had a boyfriend, a lawyer in Stockholm.

  But I’m her man here in the forest, he thought. I’m the one who looks after her house and garden and takes care of her dogs. When she goes to see him, admittedly. But still.

  I take whatever I can get, was his mantra. I take whatever I can get.

  “That’s a good girl,” he whispered to Vera. “You carry on waking her up. And give that bloody lawyer a bite in his leg.”

  Martinsson looked back at Eriksson, and shook her head pensively. He hadn’t said straight out that he was in love with her. Nor did he impose himself upon her. But he always gave himself the pleasure of gazing long and hard at her. He sometimes smiled and looked at her as if she were a miracle. Without asking first he would come and visit her, and go for walks through the forest with her. As long as Måns wasn’t staying with her, of course. When he was, Eriksson would give them a wide berth.

  Måns did not like Krister Eriksson.

  “He looks like something from outer space,” Måns used to say.

  “Yes,” Martinsson would say.

  Because it really was true. Eriksson had been badly
burnt as a young boy, and his features were permanently damaged. He had no ears, and his nose was not much more than two holes in the middle of his face. His skin was like a shrivelled map in pink and brown.

  But he has a strong and nimble body, she thought as she watched the Brat licking his face. The dogs knew what that dry skin of his felt like.

  “Just so that you know,” she said with a little smile, “he spent all yesterday afternoon in Larsson’s dunghill, digging up old cowpats and wolfing down all the white maggots he could find.”

  “Huh!” Krister said, pulling a face and trying to thrust the Brat to one side.

  Vera raised her head, looked towards the road and gave a bark.

  Eriksson’s dogs also started barking in his car. They obviously thought everybody had been having fun for ages, except them.

  The next moment Sivving the neighbour appeared down by the letter boxes.

  “Hi there,” he shouted. “And hello, Krister – I thought I heard your car.”

  “Oh my God,” Martinsson mumbled. “Only a few minutes ago I was having a nice quiet Sunday morning …”

  *

  Vera scampered off to greet Sivving. He was walking as fast as he could, but that was not very fast at all. The left side of his body was unable to do what he wanted. His left foot was dragging behind him. His left arm hung helplessly at his side.

  Martinsson watched as Vera pulled off Sivving’s mitten then circled slowly round him – just sufficiently slowly and close to him that he was able to grab it back.

  “Bloody bitch!” he exclaimed, his voice full of warmth.

  Vera never plays with me like that, Martinsson thought.

  By now Sivving had reached them. He was still a big man. Tall. A dauntingly large belly and a shock of white, fluffy hair looking like the puffball head of a dandelion.

  “Can we drive out to Sol-Britt Uusitalo?” he asked without beating about the bush. “I’ve promised to go and see how she is. They rang from her workplace and were worried about her. She lives out at Lehtiniemi.”

  Martinsson groaned inwardly.