The Second Deadly Sin Page 3

  There’s always something he wants me to do for him, she thought. He promises people things, then comes here to me even though it’s early on Sunday morning.

  But Eriksson opened the car door on the passenger’s side.

  “Jump in,” he said to Sivving, pushing back the seat so that it would be easier for him to sit down.

  He’s nice, Martinsson thought. Kind and thoughtful. She felt a prick of conscience.

  “Ann-Helen Alajärvi – I expect you know who she is, Gösta Asplund’s girl,” said Sivving, struggling to fasten the safety belt over his large stomach. “She works as a breakfast waitress with Sol-Britt at the Winter Palace. She rang and was worried about her: Sol-Britt ought to have been at work at six o’clock this morning. I promised to call in and check up on her. I was just going to go out for a walk with Bella, but then I saw that Krister had turned up. It’s good that you’re here as well, in case we need to break the door down.”

  He smiled at them. A prosecutor and a police officer.

  “That’s not the way we work,” Martinsson said.

  “Oh yes it is,” Eriksson said with a laugh. “That’s exactly how we work. Rebecka climbs up onto the roof and swings her way in through the window and I barge down the door.”

  They set off for Lehtiniemi.

  “Is she a friend of yours, then, this Sol-Britt?” Eriksson asked.

  Martinsson was sitting in the back seat with Vera and Sivving’s German pointer Bella. The Brat had to share the dog cage with Eriksson’s dogs.

  The car reeked of dog. Bella tended to get carsick, and long strands of dribble were dangling from her mouth.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s a friend,” Sivving said. “I mean, she lives some distance away. And she’s younger than I am. But Sol-Britt has always lived here, and so obviously we have a chat whenever we meet. She had a bit of an alcohol problem a few years ago, and so at that time it was nothing unusual if she sometimes didn’t turn up for work. Her workmates knew all about it. She once appeared on my porch and wanted to borrow some money. I said no, but I offered her some food. But that wasn’t what she wanted. Anyway, three years ago her son was run over and died. He was thirty-five, worked at the ice factory in Jukkasjärvi; he was a promising skier as a young lad, won the Junior District Championship when he was seventeen. He left a little boy, only about three or four years old. What’s his name, now …”

  Sivving fell silent and shook his head, as if that would make the boy’s name come tumbling out. You could not tell a story without knowing all the names.

  My God, does he never stop talking? Martinsson wondered, gazing out of the window.

  It came in the end.

  “Marcus! That’s it! Thereby hangs a tale as well. His mum had moved to Stockholm a long time before that. She’d found a new man, and had two kids with him. Pretty quick work. She ran off to Stockholm just after Marcus’s first birthday. She moved in with the new bloke straight away and had new kids. And she wasn’t very interested in looking after the lad. Sol-Britt was really pissed off. Mind you, she was pleased to have Marcus staying with her. And it was like a new start for her. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking altogether. I asked Ann-Helen this morning when she rang if she thought Sol-Britt might have had a relapse, but she said no way. So no doubt she’s right. All kinds of things could have happened. People slip on mats and hit their heads on tables. It can be days before anybody finds them.”

  Martinsson pulled a face that said I call in on you at least once every day. She noticed Eriksson looking at her in the rear-view mirror.

  “Anyway, have you been picking cloudberries this year yet?” he said.

  “It’s a bad year for cloudberries. Nobody seems to have found any. Too few insects. I have a few bogs over at Rensjön where I usually go picking. There’s always some about – but not this year. I spent several hours looking, and I didn’t even get enough to cover the bottom of the bucket. There’s a sort of strip of birch trees along the edge of the lake. I went down three or four years ago, when it was a very good year for cloudberries, and I thought there was bound to be loads: but there wasn’t a single one. And so this year, when there wasn’t a cloudberry to be seen anywhere, I thought I’d better check that strip of birch trees even so – and it was full of them! It was like an orange carpet wherever you looked! No more than about fifteen metres wide and a hundred metres long. I spent a couple of hours picking, and I got seven or eight litres. But that was all there was.”

  “Wow!” Eriksson said, duly impressed.

  Martinsson took the opportunity to allow her mind to wander. Good that Eriksson was on form and interested. So that Sivving could chatter away to his heart’s content. Dogs weren’t the only things that needed to be exercised.

  “Mind you, it’s not that easy nowadays, with my arm as it is,” Sivving said. “You should have seen us in the old days, when Maj-Lis and I used to go picking blueberries in Pauranki. Could it have been ’95? In eight hours I picked 145 litres of blueberries. They were growing everywhere. At the edge of bogs and on dry land and in clearings. They were so heavy that the stalks were bent over – at first all you could see was greenery, and you had to lift them up in order to get at the berries. Great big ones. Sun-drenched and incredibly sweet. Here we are! You don’t need to drive into the parking area. Just park at the side of the road.”

  At last, Martinsson thought.

  Sivving was pointing at a house by the side of the road. Made of wood, two storeys. Painted yellow. Built at some time in the first half of the twentieth century. An iron balcony over the front door seemed to be in such a state that you couldn’t walk on it. There was no porch. Two wooden duckboards, one on top of the other, led up to the front door. Presumably the original porch had been dismantled, but nobody had got round to building a new one. There was no lawn; the house was standing on soft pasture-land on a sandy-soil base. A sundial and a flagpole with paint flaking off it stood in the middle of the garden, looking lost. Hanging on an outdoor drier were some duvets and pillowcases, frozen stiff – a sign that the frosty nights had already arrived.

  “I wonder if it wasn’t that same year that I picked so many cranberries,” Sivving said, enjoying all his berry memories and reluctant to stop recalling them. “I was out picking in the late autumn. You had to wait until the afternoon because the night frosts meant that the berries would be frozen fast into the turf by morning.”

  Martinsson shuffled around on the back seat. Why couldn’t he get out now and find out what had happened to Sol-Britt, so that they could go for a walk in the forest?

  He no doubt needs to carry on remembering until there’s nothing left for him to say, she told herself. Let him finish off.

  “One day I picked twenty-four litres,” Sivving said. “I gave two litres to Maj-Lis’s sister in Pajala. Some Finnish relatives came to visit her, they went out and picked five litres and were thrilled to bits. Gunsan said: ‘I know somebody who picked twenty-four litres.’ ‘Sitä ei voi,’ they said. ‘Nobody can do that.’ ‘He can,’ Gunsan said.”

  He broke off and looked at the house. Everything was quiet.

  “I’d better go and check,” he said. “You’ll wait here, won’t you?”

  Sivving opened the front door without knocking, as was the custom in the village.

  “Hello!” he shouted, but there was no answer.

  The entrance hall led into the kitchen, which was neat and tidy. The stainless steel sink was bright and shiny: the draining board had a little cloth in the middle with an empty vase on it. The plate rack was empty. The white glazed tiles were decorated with stickers, every other one with a four-fruit pattern, and those in between with large flowers in yellow and brown.

  He paused for a moment. His thoughts went back to his wife Maj-Lis: she too had never left even the smallest glass on the draining board. Everything had to be finished and done with, dried with the tea towel and put away in its cupboard.

  He remembered oc
casions when he had done the washing up. No matter how careful he thought he’d been, she had always followed him round with a cloth, wiping and polishing.

  Things are not the same without Maj-Lis, he thought.

  It had never occurred to him that she would die before he did. They were the same age, after all. All that confounded research showing that women lived longer than men … Why should he and Maj-Lis be the exception?

  When she died he had ironed tablecloths and picked flowers to put in vases all around the house. Heather and wild rosemary and globeflowers. But the house had not seemed to be alive. It was as if it did not want to be alive.

  He could not face the prospect of selling it. Nor could he bear to carry on living there among all that emptiness. The best solution had been to move downstairs into the boiler room in the cellar.

  Less cleaning to do, he told anybody who wondered what was going on. How could he possibly explain the real reason to people who would not understand?

  Now he looked around Sol-Britt Uusitalo’s kitchen. Curtains with tie-backs. Ornaments and flowers on the window ledges.

  But all the doors of the lower cupboards were standing open.

  Odd, he thought. Why on earth were they open? Perhaps she heard a mouse gnawing away, and tried to find it. Or had she been looking for something else? Cleaning stuff that she had misplaced? Or something like that.

  The bedroom door was ajar. Not a sound from inside. Should he go in?

  “Hello!” he shouted again. “Sol-Britt!”

  He hesitated. Should he really go into a woman’s bedroom without being invited? Perhaps she was lying there drunk.

  Drunk, half-dressed, unconscious. He didn’t really know her, and even if Ann-Helen didn’t believe she could have had a relapse, nevertheless …

  He felt more and more uncomfortable. It would be best if Rebecka went in. She was a woman, after all.

  *

  Outside in the road Martinsson and Eriksson had got out of the car. The dogs were all lying peaceably – soon they would be able to go running around in the forest.

  Eriksson took a tin of chewing tobacco out of his pocket. He pressed some to form a wad and inserted it under his top lip.

  He noticed a faint trace of disapproval in Martinsson’s look.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Have your baccy if you want,” she said with a smile. “It’s just that it’s not my thing. I tried it once and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so ill.”

  Eriksson put the tin back into his pocket. Then he took it out again.

  “I’m going to give it up,” he announced.

  “Why?”

  He looked down the hill.

  She said nothing but looked down the hill as well.

  Then his face lit up again and he pointed at his upper lip.

  “My last wad of baccy.”

  He hurled the tin of chewing tobacco as far as he could into the trees.

  Sivving emerged from the house.

  “She’s not in the kitchen,” he shouted, looking back over his shoulder. “But I didn’t want to go into her bedroom. She might be lying there asleep, then all of a sudden she wakes up and finds a man standing there … God only knows what might happen. Or what do you say? Do you think I should go in?”

  “Her car is parked here,” Martinsson said to Eriksson.

  They looked at each other. It does happen that people pass away in their sleep. It is not all that uncommon.

  Tintin barked loudly, and started scratching at the bars of her cage.

  “O.K., I’ll go in,” Martinsson said.

  Eriksson grabbed hold of her arm.

  “Hang on a minute!” he said, looking at Tintin.

  The dog was standing up on her hind legs, sniffing in all directions. She barked again, and scratched at the cage bars.

  “She’s making a point,” he said in a low voice. “There’s a smell of death in the air. She’s caught on to it very quickly. The air here must be like a sea of blood.”

  “Sivving,” Martinsson shouted. ‘Wait. Don’t go back into the house. Krister and I will go.”

  *

  Martinsson went in through the door with Eriksson close behind her. She shouted, but still there was no response. The open cupboard doors looked as if they wanted to say something, but they did not manage to produce a single word.

  A heart attack, Martinsson thought as she approached the bedroom door. She has fallen and smashed her skull.

  But what if she is not dead? Maybe she is lying there injured.

  In fact Sol-Britt Uusitalo was lying on her back on her bed. Her head was turned to one side. Her eyes were open, as was her mouth. Her tongue was halfway out. One arm was hanging down from the bed.

  She was wearing only a pair of knickers. The duvet was on the floor beside the bed. All over the corpse were little brown wound marks.

  “What on earth …” Martinsson began, but stopped short.

  Eriksson went up to the bed and just to be sure placed his fingers against the woman’s neck. A few sluggish flies flew up from the corpse to the ceiling. He nodded to Martinsson.

  Martinsson observed the dead woman. Thin trickles of dried blood from some of the wounds. She searched inside her own body for feelings. Something approaching agitation, perhaps? Horror?

  But she felt nothing.

  She looked at Eriksson: he was serious, but calm. It was only on television that police officers threw up at the scene of a murder.

  “What’s happened?” she said, noting her objective tone of voice. “Has somebody stabbed her?”

  “Are you still there?” Sivving shouted from outside.

  “She’s here!” Martinsson shouted in reply. “Stay where you are.”

  “Look at her face,” Eriksson said, leaning over the body. “Here, on her cheekbone. It looks as if somebody has peeled away the skin.”

  “We must leave her as she is,” Martinsson said, “and ring for the forensics boys and the pathologist.”

  “Look at the wall,” Eriksson said.

  Somebody had written something on the wall over the headboard. WHORE, it said, in large black letters.

  Martinsson turned on her heel and left the house. Sivving was standing outside the front door, worried stiff.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Oh, Sivving,” Martinsson said.

  She stretched out her hand to touch him, but stopped halfway through and let her hand drop.

  She was so fond of him. Her parents were dead. Her grandmother as well. Sivving was closer to her than anybody else in the world, but they never touched each other. That was not their way.

  She felt just now that she ought to have made touching him a regular habit.

  I could have touched him just as Grandma used to touch me, she thought. Casually. Just a little pat on the back or a stroke on the arm as she passed by me in the kitchen. When she helped me to zip up my jacket, or to put my gloves on. When she brushed the snow off me on the porch.

  If she had done that sort of thing with Sivving, perhaps it would not have felt so awkward now. She longed to hold his hand, but could not bring herself to do it.

  “What’s happened?” Sivving said. “Has something awful happened? She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  Eriksson had appeared behind Martinsson’s back. He looked at Sivving.

  “Didn’t you say that she lived with her grandson?” he said in a low voice. “Marcus, was that his name?”

  “Yes,” Sivving said. “Where is he? Where’s the boy?”

  Police Inspector Anna-Maria Mella looked in surprise at her youngest son, Gustav. How could there be such a lot of chat in so small a body? He started talking the moment he opened his eyes in the morning.

  Now he was standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom while she was rummaging through a drawer, looking for a pair of tights with no holes in them.

  It was the birthday of Robert’s sister in Junosuando, and Mella thought she should wear a skirt. How was it possi
ble to have a whole drawer full of tights, but none of them without holes?

  Besides, her skirt was too tight. It was astonishing that just an extra kilo could make such a difference. It used to fit her snugly around the waist. Now it crept up higher and higher so that the waistband reached her ribs the moment she moved. It became too short, displaying half her thighs.

  I look like a spring chicken, she thought as she examined her reflection despondently in the mirror.

  “Mum, do you know what? Malte’s big brother has ‘The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass’. Me and Malte were allowed to watch him play, and he got really really far. There’s a cave. And in it there’s a door, and do you know what you have to do to get through it? Mum? Do you know?”

  “No.”

  “You have to talk to a plate on the door and then you write on it – I can’t remember what you have to write, I’ll have to ask Malte, but anyway … Are you listening?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Then the door opens and you cross over a bridge and there’s a sword there. Oh, I’d love to have a Nintendo D.S. Can you buy me one?”

  “No. Go to your room and put your clothes on. They’re on the chair.”

  Hole after hole, she thought, flinging another pair of tights to the floor. I have such hard, cracked heels, they make holes in all my tights.

  Gustav was still in the bedroom doorway, but now he was on all fours, shuffling away.

  “Look, I can stand on my hands, look now when I—”

  “Now listen here, young man. Off you go to your room. On with your clothes. This very minute!”

  He slunk off to his room.

  Ah, at last, she thought, running a pair of tights over her hand to examine them more easily. Not a hole to be seen!

  She began to wriggle her way into them. As she pulled them over her bottom a large hole appeared … The next pair were no good either. And the following pair acquired a hole as she pulled them over her knees.

  She rummaged through the drawer again. An untidy mess of knickers, socks and tights. The dust made her sneeze.

  “Oh, bugger it!” she exclaimed.

  “What’s the matter?” her husband Robert said as he came in, newly showered.