The Second Deadly Sin Page 20

  “Goodbye, then, girls,” says Zorn, who has got snow inside his collar and is beginning to long for the promised punch.

  The group moves on. Karin Larsson and Emma Zorn wave to Elina and Lizzie as one does to small children. Elina hears Karin saying “what a sweet little thing”, and one of the men makes some comment that she can’t catch, and everybody laughs.

  Elina is embarrassed and angry. She puts all her strength into pulling the firewood over the last lap of its journey. She is angry with Lizzie as well, although she cannot really explain why.

  When Lizzie asks what is wrong with her, she says, “He could have introduced me to them at least.”

  “As what?” Lizzie wonders.

  She is not the sort to pass judgement, and she says nothing, but she nevertheless thinks that Elina is a goose. Starting an affair with a big shot like that. Personally, she has always steered clear of men with too much or too little money, and in the end chose a working man from the same social class as herself. A man who looks after himself and doesn’t hit the booze. So that they can make plans for the future. There’s nothing wrong with Lundbohm – as an employer! But this relationship can only end in tears, Lizzie can see it coming.

  They keep silent all the way home. In the evening Lizzie goes out dancing with her Johan-Albin, but doesn’t manage to have much fun.

  Lundbohm’s guests depart, but he makes no attempt to contact Elina.

  Lizzie tries to persuade Elina to accompany her to the Baptist church, and to a lecture on phrenology that Borg Mesch is giving in Folkets Hus, but without success.

  “You can’t just sit here reading and reading,” Lizzie says, genuinely worried.

  After four days a messenger boy comes with a note from Lundbohm, but it is not an invitation to meet: it is just a quick couple of lines to say he has to go off on his travels again. He writes that he misses her, but that doesn’t help much. He doesn’t use any of the loving names he used to call her, such as “little bunny”, “Puss-Puss”, “my little fox cub”. No, just “I miss you”. But if he really missed her, surely they would have met? There is no getting away from that.

  And it doesn’t help that the whole of Kiruna is teeming with young men. She is lost. It is a different Elina who goes to school every day, somebody else who smiles and talks and behaves exactly as she always did.

  The real Elina reads Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. And cries as soon as she is alone.

  *

  He comes back again in May. She receives another note. The same old story. He wants to meet her. A thousand times she has told herself that she certainly will not agree to see him. But that treacherous heart of hers somehow convinces her otherwise. Persuades her that the right thing to do is to see him. She washes her hair. Irons her best blouse.

  She falls immediately into his arms, and there is no yesterday or tomorrow. She hasn’t the strength to worry about anything, as long as she can feel his skin next to hers. And he seems to be just as hungry for her. It is like it was at the beginning.

  “Are you angry with me?” he asks as she lies on his arm.

  He has lit a cigar, which she borrows and takes a puff from.

  “No,” she says. “Why should I be?”

  “I ought to have introduced you to my friends,” he says. “It was just that I was so surprised. I hadn’t expected to bump into you in the street like that.”

  Her mouth is full of “perhaps you should have invited me to be there as well” and “what exactly am I to you?”, but she doesn’t let them slip out. She doesn’t want to start an argument. All she wants is to sleep here on his arm.

  In the middle of the night she wakes up and is as hungry as a wolf. She sneaks into the kitchen, and goes into the scullery. She eats two cold boiled eggs, some soured whole milk, two sandwiches, yesterday’s boiled salmon trout and some meatballs lying in a dish.

  Then she takes down a cast iron frying pan from one of the hooks in the ceiling, sits down on a stool, and sucks it. Sucks the greasy, shiny black iron.

  It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon. It was starting to get dark. And it was snowing for all it was worth. Not exactly ideal weather for a car trip. But Martinsson and Pohjanen wanted to go to Lainio to pick up that shirt, no matter what.

  He offered to drive. He had not driven a car for a whole year now, and it would make a nice change. Martinsson made it quite clear that since at this stage he was barely able to get up from his chair, there was no chance of him driving a car.

  In the end they agreed that they should take a taxi. It would be rather expensive, of course, but if they thought about it … In fact they didn’t do any thinking but simply picked up the telephone and ordered a taxi. Pohjanen promised to pay the fare from his own pocket provided that Martinsson invited him to dinner again when they got back.

  The taxi arrived. The journey took an hour.

  The car took them right up to the front door. Nevertheless, they were soaked through after walking the few steps they had to take without shelter. The snow clung to their hair and found its way under their collars, stuck in their eyelashes so that they got snow in their eyes whenever they blinked. They were standing outside the door like two homeless snowmen when the owner opened it. They declined the offer of coffee, and the berrypicker fetched the shirt, which was wrapped in a plastic carrier bag. They were given an extra bag to tie round it in the hope of preventing it from polluting the car. They thanked him profusely for his help, and ran back to the taxi.

  “It must have been something extremely important,” said the taxi driver, eyeing the tightly tied plastic bag in his rear-view mirror. “A long drive there and back. And in this bloody weather.”

  But by then both Martinsson and Pohjanen were fast asleep on the back seat. They didn’t wake up until they were back in Kurravaara.

  Pohjanen handed his Visa card to the driver.

  Now they were both as hungry as wolves. The Brat was pleased to see them, and parked himself beside the stove.

  Martinsson fried some potato dumplings which they ate with melted butter, pork and lingon jam. They drank milk with it.

  Then they spread newspapers over the table, produced their hip flasks again and braced themselves to try and puzzle out the story behind the late Frans Uusitalo’s filthy, torn shirt.

  *

  Back in Lainio the berrypicker was beginning to regret what he had done. He had kept that shirt in his garage for months. He had made it clear to any police officer prepared to listen what he had done – but what had he done now? Handed over the bloodstained and torn shirt to a woman and a man who had more or less tumbled out of a taxi on his drive. They stank as if they had just come from a party at which the booze had been flowing freely – that woman wearing high-heeled boots that she could barely walk in, and the walking corpse who accompanied her. How could he be sure that they were in fact a prosecutor and a pathologist? He hadn’t seen any identification documents.

  If that pair of drunks lost the shirt, well: he was left sitting there with his arse on the waffle-iron. What the hell had he been thinking of?

  It took a few hours, but in the end he got up from his television armchair and telephoned the police in Kiruna.

  A woman answered in sing-song Finland-Swedish.

  Could he please have a receipt for that shirt? That was surely the least he could ask for?

  Sonja on the switchboard put him through to District Prosecutor von Post.

  It is the end of May 1915. Fröken Elina Pettersson is walking home from the bandstand where there was a showing of the artist Isaac Grünewald’s adults-only film about the one-step.

  Critics consider the dance to be disgusting, a modern dance aimed at subverting healthy and natural happiness, and insist that everybody who feels a sense of responsibility for the young people of today, and expects to find culture and refinement even in popular entertainment, must condemn the showing of this film in family circles.

  Grünewald, who dances with his wife in this cine
matographic response, defends it passionately. This is a young person’s dance, he maintains. Just like the tango. And obviously, everything new is obscene and unaesthetic. How obscene is modern art in general? he wonders.

  Elina both one-steps and two-steps as she plods away. The snow is melting, and the ground cannot absorb all the water: the street is a river of mud.

  The nights are still cold, so it is easier in the mornings: she can walk on the frozen mud, which crackles under her feet. But during the day the sun acts like a flamethrower. Shoes are stuffed with straw and newspaper and stand in the kitchen to dry, but are still damp in the mornings. The hems of her skirts are mud-stained. The lodgers reek of the cowshed, and bring so much filth into the flat that Lizzie tears her hair out.

  Elina does not normally walk home alone, but on this occasion nobody else was going her way. Bearing in mind that it was light outside, and she didn’t have far to go, it felt awkward to ask somebody to accompany her. Nor has she told anybody else apart from Lizzie about Fasth and his improper advances. People talk. And you end up being regarded as the guilty party, as always. Especially when the aggressor is a man like Fasth.

  But just as she is passing the cemetery, she hears footsteps approaching rapidly from behind.

  When she turns to look, Fasth has already caught up with her. Fear crawls down her spine.

  The street is deserted. Only him and her. She starts walking faster, forges ahead straight through all the puddles without a thought for the welfare of her skirt or boots.

  “Fröööken Pettersson,” he says. “Why the rush?”

  He puts his arm around her waist and tells her that she really must be nice to him – he is the one who pays her wages after all.

  She tries to insist that it is in fact the mining company and herr Lundbohm who pays her wages.

  Oh no, he tells her. Lundbohm doesn’t stoop so low as to bother about such minor matters. Especially not now. He spoke to Lundbohm on the telephone earlier today, and he seemed to be having fun with a new girlfriend in Stockholm. Surely she didn’t think that she was anything special as far as Lundbohm was concerned? Of course not. And besides, she’s no doubt an emancipated woman. If she has urges, no doubt he can help to satisfy them.

  He takes firm hold of her wrist so that she has to stop, and forces her hand down to the bulge in his trousers. His face is as red as a slice of raw meat.

  “Feel that,” he urges her. “It will make you …”

  At that very moment somebody shouts, “Hi there!”

  And there, thank God, is Lizzie’s fiancé Johan-Albin, with a friend. They hurry towards Elina, who is standing as if caught in a bear trap. Fasth has still not released her wrist; his grip is like steel.

  “What’s going on here?” wonders Johan-Albin when they come up to Fasth and Elina.

  Elina is incapable of speech, but Fasth is.

  “Off you go, boys,” he says, without even taking his eyes off Elina. “This young lady and I are enjoying a little chat.”

  “Off you go now, on your way,” he adds when the young men show no sign of moving.

  But the two men merely take a step forward.

  “Off you go yourself, Fasth,” says Lizzie’s fiancé. “I shall say that only once: after that it will be fists that do the talking.”

  Manager-in-Chief Fasth lets go of Elina’s wrist.

  “Alright, you can have her. She has an urge in her pussy, and she was so keen on me helping her to satisfy it.”

  Then he walks calmly away. Does not hurry at all.

  The two men and Elina remain standing there, without saying a word. Only when Fasth is no longer in sight does Johan-Albin say, “Don’t cry, Elina. We’ll take you home now.”

  “Thank you,” she whimpers.

  “No need to thank me – I have no time for managers and similar types who boss you around.”

  And as they are walking home, he tells his tale to Elina and his friend. Elina has already heard about it from Lizzie, but she doesn’t mention that – she does not want him to think that Lizzie has betrayed a confidence. Men sometimes do not understand things like that – the fact that women tell each other things. About themselves and about the people they love.

  He tells them about his parents, who were poverty-stricken crofters outside Överkalix.

  “And my dad was good with animals. He knew all about herbs that could cure illnesses in cattle. In people as well, but they didn’t talk about that. How to stop bleeding. That sort of thing. And he was good when mothers were giving birth, brilliant at getting them out – calves, foals, babies. ‘Oops! Look out there, give me a hand, Heikki – we’ll lift her over this little lake. When are they going to dig proper drainage channels here? It’s the same every spring when the snow melts …’ Anyway, sometimes he wasn’t able to get them out in one piece. When the calves were too big, or lying in an impossible position. That was always a hellish job, breaking up the unborn calf inside its mother without injuring her, then getting it out. But it had to be done. If a family lost its cow, they were ruined. That was the only time he ever drank heavily, after an incident like that …”

  He shakes his head.

  “People used to give him a bottle of schnapps as thanks for his efforts. He would find his way to an isolated hayloft and drink until he passed out. Didn’t come back home until he’d sobered up.”

  Heikki comments in Finnish: “Voi helvetti.”

  “But what about managers and other bosses?” Elina says. She knows the answer already, but wants to help him to continue his tale.

  “They had an assistant bailiff supervising all the crofters in the area. He was a German, and keen on Lappish girls.”

  “I’m sure you know,” Heikki says to Elina, “Karl XII had a lot of German mercenaries in his army. After the war they couldn’t return home – they had been fighting against their own countrymen after all – so they settled in Sweden and did what they were good at.”

  “They became executioners,” Johan-Albin says, “and bailiffs. And their sons became executioners and bailiffs. And their sons … Anyway, all those eleven-and twelve-year-olds … They were only Lapps, so he could have his way with them. But when they became pregnant, their bodies weren’t ready to produce children. And so my dad was called in. He was unable to save two girls. They died in childbirth. And then, after the second death …”

  They are back at Elina’s and Lizzie’s home now. Elina invites them in. They will have to cook for the lodgers anyway, so it will be easy to accommodate a couple of extra guests. That is the least she can do.

  Lizzie comes home shortly after them. She has a bucket of fish with her. It will be boiled burbot for dinner.

  They tell her what happened to Elina. She listens while cutting the heads off the burbot, then skins them and guts them as if it is Manager-in-Chief Fasth lying there on the chopping board.

  Then Johan-Albin continues his story.

  “When the second girl died, Dad had had enough. He grabbed hold of that bailiff one spring evening and castrated him as one castrates a horse. Beat him unconscious first. Then nailed him to the stable door through his clothes. Split open his scrotum, turned it inside out and snipped off his balls.”

  He clenches his fists and has to pause for a few moments. Lizzie stands there with her hands soiled by the fish she has been cutting up, but looking as if she is about to hug him.

  “The bailiff survived. But my dad was condemned to five years in prison. After two years he died of consumption. Mum couldn’t take care of us children on her own – there were five of us. I was six years old. We were all put up for sale at a paupers’ auction. I was bought by a Finnish charcoal-burner. But I could only take that for a year, then I ran away. I joined up with the navvies building the railway. I started as a so-called nail boy for teams of navvies. My job was to run back and forth with buckets full of nails and spikes that had buckled, take them to the smithy where they were hammered out straight, then take them back to where the action was. I’v
e never been to school or anything like that. And now I’ve ended up here. As I said, I’ve no time for bailiffs and managers and types like that.”

  The atmosphere is hardly uplifting as they eat their dinner. Poverty is lurking around in the forests surrounding the mining town of Kiruna. Ready to swallow up any woman who loses an arm, a husband, or her virtue.

  Virtue. Elina feels the food swelling inside her mouth, but she says nothing. Neither to the others nor to herself.

  Von Post was going out of his mind.

  “I’m going out of my mind!” he yelled at Sonja on the switchboard.

  And when he pressed Sonja a little he discovered that as well as collecting a shirt that had been worn by Sol-Britt Uusitalo’s father when he was mauled by a bear, Martinsson had also asked Sonja to produce records of the hit-and-run incident that robbed Sol-Britt’s son of his life.

  “Fucking hell!” he shouted as he hurtled up the stairs to Martinsson’s office where Björnfot was writing judgments one after another after the day’s proceedings.

  “That woman,” he said in a voice shaking with emotion, “that Rebecka Martinsson! She’s interfering in my investigation.”

  Björnfot slid his glasses down to the bridge of his nose and looked at von Post. Then he slid them up onto his forehead again and continued writing while von Post gave a long and rather loud summary of what had happened.

  “This is a matter for the personnel section of the Prosecutor-General’s Office,” von Post claimed. “She must be moved away from here.”

  “But if I understand you rightly,” Björnfot said calmly, “it’s not your investigation that she is getting involved in. She is looking into two accidents – the fact that those involved are related to your murder victim …”

  “This is not O.K.,” von Post snarled. “You can’t defend her, and you know that full well. The Prosecutor-General should …”

  Björnfot flung out his arms in an I-give-up gesture.

  “I’ll have a word with her,” he said.

  Von Post was incapable of speech. He was so furious that his mind was a complete blank.