The Second Deadly Sin Read online

  But one thing was certain. He would talk to Martinsson himself. He had a lot to say to her.

  *

  Martinsson and Pohjanen had donned thin rubber gloves and were playing jigsaw puzzles with the shredded shirt. They succeeded in fitting most of it together, but half a sleeve was missing, and part of the back.

  “What claws that bear must have had,” Pohjanen said with admiration in his voice as he examined the edges of the various pieces of cloth. “It’s as if somebody had cut it up with a pair of sharp scissors.”

  He lifted up part of the front of the shirt and held it towards the light. It was stained brown with mud and blood, but in the middle of it was an obvious hole.

  “What do you think this is?” he asked.

  Martinsson examined the hole.

  “I don’t know,” she said, but her heart missed a beat. “What do you think?”

  “Well,” said Pohjanen slowly, “I think it’s a bullet hole. That’s what I think. And I think we should send it to the National Forensic Science Laboratory and ask them to test it for traces of metal and gunpowder.”

  “So the bear didn’t kill him,” Martinsson said. “It ate him, but it didn’t kill him.”

  Pohjanen gave her a look that she could not really fathom.

  “You and your dreams,” he said in the end.

  Then he shook his head.

  “I’m …”

  “As drunk as a lord,” Martinsson said. “I reckon we should have a sauna – what do you think?”

  *

  It was Martinsson’s grandfather, together with his brothers, who had constructed the wooden sauna on the riverbank. It was painted in traditional Falun red, had an entrance porch with wooden benches for two on either side, then a little changing room with an open fire, followed by a washroom with buckets, ladles and a washbasin – and then the inner sanctum: the sauna itself, heated by firewood of course, and with a window overlooking the river.

  Both Pohjanen and Martinsson had grown up in environments where it was the done thing from time immemorial for men and women to sit naked together in the sauna without the slightest feeling of embarrassment. Bodies were exposed irrespective of their imperfections, their signs of ageing or of multiple births – one had no need to feel ashamed of anything in the sauna. The plumpness of youth in the right places, skin like flower petals – no-one gave such things a second glance.

  Martinsson carried in buckets of water and lit the fires while Pohjanen purred with delight, drank beer and warmed up his rickety body in front of the open fire.

  Then they entered the sauna itself. Martinsson was better able to cope with the heat, and sat on the highest bench. Sweat trickled down into their eyes, the water sizzled away on the hot stones, the steam rose up to the ceiling.

  They spoke about all the things people always discuss in the sauna. That they ought really to have had birch twigs to beat themselves with – but that was not really possible at this time of year because there were no leaves on the trees. That this was the only way to become really clean – who the hell would want to splash around in water tainted by the filth of their own bodies in a bathtub? They talked about smoke saunas, and old relatives who could tolerate the heat of a real sauna; about their childhood sauna experiences, and how electric-fired saunas were an invention of the devil.

  They scratched their skin and contemplated the grey deposits under their nails. They bowed their heads and groaned in a mixture of delight and pain when Martinsson poured more water onto the burning hot stones and the first of the hot steam hit their skins. Martinsson blew onto her hand, and as always was astonished by how hot that spot became in the area blown onto.

  Martinsson went out twice into the darkness and snow and immersed herself in the wintry river. Pohjanen desisted, but declared his willingness to bathe in a hole bored through the ice if he was invited to a Christmas sauna later in the year. The Brat, who had been basking in front of the open fire in the changing room, followed Martinsson out, barking excitedly at her, and after failing to catch falling snowflakes eventually jumped into the water after her.

  “What’s the matter with dogs?” wondered Pohjanen with a laugh when Rebecka came back into the warm sauna with the Brat at her heels. “Why do they always have to shake the water off themselves when they’re standing next to a human being?”

  Eventually they felt they had had enough of the sauna, and made their way back to the house.

  Martinsson contemplated Pohjanen’s emaciated back.

  I really do hope you’ll come here for a Christmas dip, she thought. Please do live that long.

  As Pohjanen took hold of the door handle, von Post turned in to the drive.

  He got out of the car dressed only in his shirtsleeves. Pointed at Martinsson and yelled, “Damn you, Martinsson! Damn and blast you!”

  Martinsson didn’t say a word. She lowered her hands and let her arms hang loosely. The snow gathered to form a cap on her damp hair. Pohjanen walked up the steps to the porch, but the balcony overhead was an inadequate shelter.

  “Do you think I don’t know exactly what you are doing?” von Post bawled. “You know that we’ve arrested the murderer, but if we can’t get the necessary forensic proof it will be a case based on circumstantial evidence. And now you are trying to cock it all up for me by inventing alternative motives …”

  “I’m not inventing—”

  “Shut your mouth! If there’s the slightest suspicion that somebody is intent on murdering the whole family – her son, her father – you know full well that it will be impossible to nail Jocke Häggroth. You are trying to find alternative motives, alternative suspicions, purely in order to stop me from solving this case. You’re prepared to let a murderer go free for no other reason than to do me down. It’s scandalous. You’re sick, damn you.”

  He raised his index finger again.

  Pohjanen took an unsteady pace forward.

  “Calm down, young man. Come in and have a drink, and you can hear what we’ve discovered. It’s no secret.”

  Both Martinsson and von Post looked at Pohjanen as if he had just announced an arranged marriage, or that they should all sing “We Shall Overcome”.

  “You’re out of your minds!” von Post snarled. “You think you can bugger me about, Martinsson, but you’ll soon find out how wrong you are. I know the man in charge of personnel at the Prosecutor-General’s office, and I shall tell him that you are a security risk for the investigation. A danger to yourself. Everybody knows you spent time in a psychiatric hospital. And now you’re falling to pieces in this sensitive situation. I worry that you will abuse the means of compulsion that we have at our disposal. So the personnel unit will make sure that you undergo neuropathological tests in connection with your abnormal behaviour. I can assure you that it is a very degrading business. A sort of inquisition. And then you will be moved to a new post where you will be unable to cause any harm. A job in the legal department of the police – dealing with such matters as objections to parking tickets, or the granting of permission for officers to carry weapons.”

  He paused. Breathing heavily. Panting, as if he had been running up a hill.

  The Brat ran up to him, wagging his tail, and dropped a pine cone in front of his feet. This was the Brat’s role on such occasions: to defuse tension. To produce a cone from somewhere and suggest the playing of a game. A harmless little clown.

  Von Post stared at the cone with a mixture of revulsion and incomprehension. Then he waved his hand at the Brat, as if to shoo him away. The dog picked up the cone and moved it a little closer to von Post. Looked up at him, ears cocked, as if to say: Aren’t I irresistible? Pohjanen produced a strange, hoarse sound. Only if you knew him well could you know that it was a laugh.

  “You’re bloody stark, staring mad,” von Post said. “The lot of you!”

  He got back into his car without brushing off the snow, and drove away.

  “What a prat!” Pohjanen chuckled as von Post’s car disappeared from
view.

  He held out his hand and allowed the Brat to drop the cone onto it. Then threw it a couple of metres away.

  “The man’s a bloody psychopath. I pity the poor old man in the street if it’s bastards like him leading the fight against crime.”

  Martinsson was watching the Brat fetching the pine cone.

  She thought about von Post. He had stared at the dog as if he wanted to kill it.

  “That dog,” she said to Pohjanen when they had reached her kitchen and relit the fire in the stove. “Sol-Britt’s dog. When I read the record of the interrogation Mella had with Marcus, he didn’t say a word about the night of the murder. It was as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. But he did say that their dog had gone missing.”

  “Really?”

  With considerable effort she took out her mobile and rang Sivving. He answered immediately, as if he had been sitting by the phone waiting for a call. She felt a pang of conscience. She ought to have invited him to the sauna as well.

  “I have a question,” she said. “Didn’t Sol-Britt use to have a dog? Do you know when it disappeared?”

  “Yes, she did,” Sivving said. “She posted lost notices all over the village. When can it have been? Less than a month ago. I’ve told you, haven’t I: keep Vera on a leash! There are weird people around. Some go out of their way to run over dogs if they get the chance.”

  “Thank you,” Martinsson said. “I’ll ring you again later.”

  “Have you been drinking? You sound a bit jolly.”

  “Of course not,” Martinsson said and hung up before Sivving could say anything else.

  “It went missing about a month ago,” she said to Pohjanen. “If I were planning to break into a house and murder somebody, I’d certainly make sure they didn’t have a dog.”

  Pohjanen nodded.

  “Yes indeed,” he said. “The gangs who break into every house in a street in the middle of the night, when people are fast asleep in their beds, always miss out houses where there are dogs.”

  “If it really was Jocke Häggroth who did it …” Martinsson said “. . . if it was … Then he didn’t do it on the spur of the moment.”

  The day after the incident with Fasth, Elina comes home at about three o’clock. Lizzie and Johan-Albin are sitting at the table. The lodgers are still at work. Johan-Albin is sitting with his head bowed, and Lizzie is holding his hands. She gives Elina a serious look. Johan-Albin is staring down at the table.

  “What’s the matter?” Elina asks. “What’s happened?”

  Johan-Albin shakes his head, but Lizzie explains.

  “It’s Fasth,” she says. “He’s sacked Johan-Albin.”

  “Not sacked,” Johan-Albin says.

  “No, he daren’t do that because of the reaction there would be from the trade union. There’s a lot of dissatisfaction simmering away everywhere just now, and Johan-Albin is popular. But Fasth has redeployed him. He was a loader earning six kronor an hour, and Fasth has now switched him to the stone crusher – three kronor an hour! That’s barely enough to live on. And of course, we’re meant to be saving for our future …”

  “It just involves keeping an eye on things and making adjustments when necessary,” Johan-Albin says. “They don’t pay much for that kind of work. And Heikki’s new job is emptying the shithouses in the resting huts.”

  Elina cannot even bring herself to enter the kitchen. She remains standing in the hall.

  The stone crusher. The machine from hell that crushes the ore into small stones. There is no worse job in the whole mine. Workers are made deaf by the noise from the enormous screw-like auger that crushes the stones and spits them out into the wagons standing underneath. Their lungs become black as a result of the flying dust. And it is highly dangerous as well. The attendants stand around with their iron rods and prise away loose stones and slabs that get stuck in the screw. The rod can also get stuck and drag the operator down into the crusher, or spring back and give him fatal injuries. It can happen in a split second.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s my fault.”

  Johan-Albin shakes his head again, but neither he nor Lizzie contradict her.

  Lizzie’s face, which is always so bright and cheerful, is full of worry. She gives Elina a stern look.

  “You’ll have to talk to Lundbohm.”

  Elina turns white.

  Lizzie stands up and walks over to her. She adjusts Elina’s scarf and strokes her cheek.

  “You really must talk to him … no matter what. Don’t you think?” she says quietly, her eyes roving over Elina’s breasts and stomach.

  Elina nods without speaking. Of course. Two women who sleep in the same bed. What can they possibly hide from each other?

  “It’s nothing you need to plan or to worry about,” Lizzie says. “He’s at home. Just go and tell him.”

  What shall I do? wondered Martinsson.

  Pohjanen and the Brat had fallen asleep on the sofa in the little lounge. The fire had died down and the last of the small logs were glowing red in the darkness.

  Von Post had succeeded in frightening her. Good and proper. Martinsson could not bear the thought of neuropathological tests. Some second-rater with his head on one side: “How do you really feel, Rebecka?” And some poor soul from the union who would have to hold her hand … Never. She might as well resign the next day.

  But what would she do then? Everybody seemed to think that working in the solicitors’ office in Stockholm was always there as an alternative. Måns thought so as well.

  But that would finish me off …

  The very idea of life in the office. The frenzied efforts of the trainees, pressure from the partners, the lawyers with children who simply couldn’t cope with the lifestyle. Everybody always felt so ill. But superficial appearances were everything. And the money.

  This is where I want to be, no question.

  She felt the urge to talk to somebody. Much to her surprise. But who could she talk to about something like this? She still had a friend in the Stockholm office, Maria Taube – but no, Maria was about to become a partner. She was busy toeing the line. She had become one of them. She simply could not understand what Martinsson was doing in a prosecutor’s office in the far north of Lapland.

  Martinsson put on a jacket and went down the stairs. The Brat woke up and insisted on going with her.

  Then she cycled to Maja Larsson’s place. It had stopped snowing, but there was a layer of snow thick enough to make pedalling hard work. Sometimes the wheels spun round and round as the tyres failed to grip, but she managed it.

  The Brat was rushing about, back and forth. As happy as a sandboy in all the snow.

  Fröken Elina Pettersson is sitting in Hjalmar Lundbohm’s study, plucking up courage. He calls the room his smoking room. She has always felt at home here. It smells of cigars, and in cold weather there is always a crackling fire in the grate.

  One of the girls has just been in and added some more wood: the fire is now spitting and sizzling and spluttering and crackling, and before long it is blazing away. The flames are thrusting their way eagerly up the chimney.

  The fireplace was created by Lundbohm’s good friend the sculptor Christian Eriksson. The side columns are made of sandstone: one depicts two bear cubs climbing up it, and the other a female bear playing with her cubs. In the fireplace itself are three cast-iron plates with motifs from the interior of a Lapp tent, the centre one depicting a Lapp couple and the other two children playing, and a reindeer-herding dog.

  Elina knows that it is when the fire has died down and only the embers are still glowing that the images really come to life. She and Lundbohm have often sat in front of the fire and said that the people depicted are them and their children, and joked about Lundbohm having lost such a lot of weight. Then he has suddenly become serious and declared that this is how he would like to live, free and unconstrained, close to nature. And she has talked about her love of that very freedom, how that was the reason why she
became a teacher – so that she could support herself. Not be dependent on anybody else.

  She recalls some of their first nights when he asked what she thought about marriage, and she said: never!

  Freedom is simple when love is strong.

  But now she is prepared to sacrifice that freedom. Now she wants him to go down on his knees before her. Or just say: “Shouldn’t we …”

  Her gaze wanders over what can be seen of the wood-clad walls, the top half of them covered by a tapestry from Jukkasjärvi; the mahogany furniture polished red, the table with its carved legs, the chairs with their high backs. It is a beautiful room. He was helped by his artistic friends when he planned it. It looks simple, but she knows better.

  On the floor are a polar bear skin and a brown bear skin, side by side. Not long ago she was lying stretched out on them. Now she is sitting here, straight-backed, on the bench standing next to the wall, as if she is a representative of some worthy association or other, respectfully asking the managing director of the mine for a modest contribution to their activities.

  She wants to live in this house as his wife. She wants to accompany him on his journeys. She and the boy, because she knows it is a boy. She wants to see America and Canada. And when she is unable to accompany him, she wants to be at home here, waiting for him, longing for him, borrowing his desk and writing long letters to him while the children run up and down the stairs and Lizzie sings out in the kitchen. She wants to. Oh, how she wants to.

  But she is proud as well. She would never force herself upon him. But if, instead of proposing to her, he asked how much she wanted paying? What would she do then? When her fantasy conversation gets that far, her brain comes to a stop.

  Now Lundbohm comes into his study, and apologises for keeping her waiting. Then he kisses her. On her forehead!

  He sits down – not next to her, but on one of the chairs round the library table. He looks her in the eye, but she notices how his gaze soon shifts to the Stjärnsund clock in the corner.