The Second Deadly Sin Page 6

  “Look!” Martinsson said. “Look at the dog! She’s playing!”

  Vera had suddenly started scurrying after the ball, bringing it back and dropping it at Marcus’s feet.

  “She’s never done that before,” Martinsson said.

  Then added, as if to herself: “Not with me, at least.”

  He’s the type who gets bullied at school, Eriksson thought when Mella switched on the video camera. Like me, but he’s nice.

  Marcus had long, fair hair, was on the small side for his age with a pale face and dark shadows around his eyes. But he was clean and his nails were neatly clipped. His clothes had been kept in a chest of drawers in his bedroom, folded and ironed. The pantry and the refrigerator had been full of wholesome food, and there had been fresh fruit in a bowl in the kitchen. Sol-Britt had evidently taken good care of her grandson.

  Now the boy was sitting on Martinsson’s kitchen sofa. Vera was lying by his side, and enjoying being patted and stroked. Eriksson was sitting on the other side, taking it all in with a somewhat astonished smile.

  That confounded dog, he thought.

  If it had been himself or Martinsson sitting there, stroking Vera, she would have jumped down and gone away ages ago.

  “Do you know what?” he said to Marcus. “I took Vera with me to visit some friends of mine in Laxås not all that long ago. They had a cat that had just had kittens, and she refused to leave her brood, not even for a second. She was as thin as a rake, because she didn’t even allow herself time to eat anything. But when we got there, she ran off and left her kittens with Vera. The kittens crawled all over Vera, and bit her ears and her tail.”

  And sucked her titties dry, he thought. Poor old girl.

  “The cat mother was away for over an hour,” he said. “No doubt she made use of the time to eat lots and lots of mice. But she trusted Vera.”

  Kittens and a lonely boy, he thought. Vera has endless patience with them.

  “So, let’s get started,” Mella said. “Can you tell me your name, and how old you are?”

  “My name is Marcus Elias Uusitalo.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Seven years and three months.”

  “O.K., Marcus. Krister and Tintin found you in a hut in the forest today. Can you tell me how you got there?”

  “I went there.” Marcus moved even closer to Vera. “Will Grandma come to fetch me?”

  “No, your grandma … Don’t you know what’s happened to her?”

  “No.”

  Mella looked at Eriksson, hoping for help. Hadn’t he explained? Hadn’t he told Marcus anything?

  Eriksson gave a subtle nod. Of course he had told Marcus. But she must put the brakes on - he had barely sat down. She ought to talk about something else first.

  “I’m afraid your grandma is dead, my darling,” Mella said. “Do you know what that means?”

  Marcus looked at her, a serious expression on his face.

  “Yes, like my dad.”

  Mella said nothing. She looked uncertain. She contemplated the boy, her eyes narrowed.

  He seemed to be calm and collected, if somewhat subdued. He was stroking Vera’s soft ears.

  Mella shook her head, almost imperceptibly.

  “She’s a nice dog,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Marcus. “She likes to eat pancakes with me and Grandma. Once she came to school with me on the bus. She just jumped on board even though she didn’t have a ticket. But dogs don’t need one. She sat next to me. Nobody minded, not even Willy. Everybody wanted to stroke her. And my teacher - she was only a supply teacher, but she phoned my grandma. And Grandma phoned Sivving, and Vera ended up going back home in a taxi. It wasn’t all that expensive, because Sivving works as a volunteer on the patient ambulance service. But Grandma says that Vera is the only one who has ever taken advantage of the free rides.”

  “Tell me how you came to be in the playhouse in the forest.”

  She’s still going too fast, Eriksson thought. He tried in vain to make eye contact with Mella.

  “We had a dog as well,” Marcus said. “But it disappeared. Maybe it was run over.”

  “Hmm. How did you get to the playhouse, Marcus?”

  “I walked there.”

  “O.K., do you know what time that was?”

  “No, I can’t tell the time.”

  “Was it dark or light outside?”

  “Dark. It was night-time.”

  “Why did you go out to the playhouse in the middle of the night?”

  “I …”

  He paused and looked confused.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it. I’ll wait here while you think it over.”

  They sat there in silence for ages. Eriksson tapped Marcus on his arm. Marcus was lying across Vera. He whispered something into the dog’s ear. He’d forgotten what the question was.

  “Why didn’t you have any shoes on? And no jacket?”

  “You can jump out of my bedroom window. You land on the roof of the porch at the back. And then you can climb down the ladder.”

  “Why didn’t you have any shoes on?”

  “My shoes are in the hall.”

  “Why did you jump out through the window? Why didn’t you go out through the door?”

  The boy said nothing.

  Eventually he shook his head,

  Time to pack up, Eriksson thought.

  *

  Didn’t he remember? The questions piled up inside Mella’s head. They all wanted to come tumbling out at the same time. Why did you wake up? What did you see? Did you hear anything? Would you recognise … ?

  He just sat there, stroking the dog. Seemingly unconcerned. Mella didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you remember anything?” she said in the end. “Anything at all? Do you remember when you went to bed that evening?”

  “I have to go to bed every night at half past seven, Grandma says. Every night. It doesn’t matter what’s on the telly. I always have to go to bed very early.”

  I must stop now, Mella thought. I’m pressing him too much. He’ll soon start inventing things. That’s what they kept emphasising on that course. Children like to keep their interrogators happy. They’ll say anything in order to keep you happy.

  “I wake up when anybody comes to look at me,” said Marcus to Eriksson. “When you and Tintin came I woke up almost straight away. Do you think I was sleepwalking?”

  But a few minutes ago he told us how he jumped out through the window, Mella thought. This just isn’t working. I’m making a mess of everything. We’ll have to call in a real pro.

  “The conversation with Marcus Uusitalo is concluded,” she said, switching off the video camera.

  “We’ll ring your mum,” she said to Marcus. “But she lives in Stockholm. That’s a long way away. Is there any grown-up you know who lives around here that you would like to stay with?”

  “My mum never wants to talk to me. Can’t I go home to my grandma?”

  Mella and Eriksson exchanged looks.

  “But …” she began, then broke off. She was incapable of completing the sentence.

  Eriksson put his arm round Marcus.

  “How about this, my friend?” he said. “Shall you and I and Vera and Jasko – that’s also Rebecka’s dog … Jasko … but do you know what we call him? The Brat! How about all of us, my dogs as well, driving home to my place for some breakfast? You must be starving!”

  Marcus ran out into the garden with the dogs. Eriksson followed him, and in the doorway almost crashed into Martinsson. She took a step back and smiled. He found it difficult not to embrace her. The dogs all jumped up at her in greeting.

  “I’ve spoken to his mum,” Martinsson said.

  “And?”

  The wind made its presence felt on the porch. Raised a few strands of her hair. Her eyes were the same colour as the grey sky and the tall, sand-coloured autumn grass. He was forced to take a deep breath. His heart started beating faster.<
br />
  Calm down, he told himself. I can stand here and look at her. We’re becoming friends. I’ll have to be happy with that.

  Martinsson exhaled deeply, a sure sign that her conversation had been far from easy.

  “What can I say? She was horrified about what had happened, of course, but explained that she wasn’t in a position to look after Marcus. Can you believe that? She said that she and her partner had a few problems, and that he would leave her if she were forced to take care of Marcus. That her man could hardly cope with his own two children just now. That he was an egotistic bastard. That he had problems at work. But that you had to sympathise with him even so. And that I ought to sympathise with her as well. That she never thought about herself, it was nothing to do with that. Blah blah blah.”

  She pulled a face. Pursed her lips. Narrowed her eyes. Averted her gaze.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  “It’s not about me,” she said.

  Now, he thought: his hand reached out and he caressed her. First her cheek and her ear. Then her hair.

  She did not draw back. She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Then she cleared her throat.

  “Is Anna-Maria still here?”

  He nodded. He wanted to embrace her. Press his lips against her skin. His nose into her hair. There was a kind of electric charge between them. Was it possible for her not to feel it?

  “Did you get anywhere?”

  He shook his head.

  He made a big effort and managed to recover his voice.

  “I’ll take him home to my place,” he said. “I didn’t know when you were coming back, so I was going to take Vera and the Brat as well. The young lad has really taken to Vera. She makes him feel safe. I’m not going to let him be taken away by welfare ladies he’s never seen before. Mella can bring in some pro to interrogate him, but until then he’s staying with me and the dogs.”

  “Excellent,” she said with a smile. “That sounds great.”

  *

  Anna-Maria Mella said yes please to the blueberry porridge and coffee that Martinsson offered her.

  “I’m only too pleased to see it finished off,” Martinsson said. “My freezer’s crammed full with berries.”

  She smiled at Mella, who was tucking in like a genuine mother of several children, shovelling in the porridge at high speed and swigging the coffee as if it were juice. Martinsson reported on her conversation with Marcus’s mother. Mella reported on her interrogation of Marcus.

  “He seemed so unaffected,” she said, demolishing a crispbread sandwich as if her mouth were an industrial grinder. “And he seemed completely unable to grasp the fact that his grandmother was dead. I got no sense out of him at all – you can check it out on the computer. But he must surely have seen or heard something. That’s obvious, don’t you think? Why else would he jump out of his bedroom window and hare off to the playhouse? He must have been scared stiff.”

  “I talked to Sivving,” Martinsson said. “He told me that Sol-Britt didn’t have any relatives in Kiruna – apart from a cousin who lives here in Kurravaara on a temporary basis because her mother is in hospital. We must speak to her in any case. Perhaps Marcus can live with her for the time being? No harm in asking. Sivving didn’t know if she and Sol-Britt saw much of each other.”

  “Do you think you could have a word with her?”

  “O.K.”

  Mella looked down at her clean plate with a smile, and made an appreciative gesture with the palms of both hands pointing up towards the heavens.

  “Thank you. I haven’t eaten blueberry porridge since I was a little girl.”

  Mella looked round Martinsson’s kitchen. She felt at home there. The polished wooden floor was strewn with rag rugs. The cushions on the blue-painted sofa had been made by Martinsson’s grandmother out of cloth she had woven herself. And they were stuffed with the feathers of seabirds Martinsson’s grandfather had shot.

  Bouquets of dried buttercups and cat’s foot were hanging over the wood-burning stove alongside a capercaillie’s wing that Rebecka used to wipe crumbs off the well-ironed and embroidered tablecloth. And the thin white curtains were starched, as was the custom in Martinsson’s grandmother’s day.

  The kind of thing one has time to do when one does not have any children, Mella thought.

  All the tablecloths she had inherited were lying unironed in a cupboard at home, giving her a bad conscience for some unknown reason. Her kitchen table was covered by an oilcloth that had turned grey thanks to all the ink from countless copies of the N.S.D. and Annonsbladet

  “Go and speak to her, then we can meet at Pohjanen’s office at two o’clock. I want to hear what he has to say before the run-through at three.”

  Lars Pohjanen was the pathologist. Martinsson nodded. She knew that Mella had invited her to be present at the meeting with Pohjanen and at the run-through so that she didn’t feel excluded, rather than because she felt she needed any help.

  People are odd, Martinsson thought, recalling how things had been the last time she had been in charge of the preliminary inquiries and Mella in charge of the police investigation. Relations had been somewhat strained, and Martinsson had felt excluded. But now that Mella was going out of her way to include Martinsson, she could not help feeling a bit uncomfortable.

  Nobody is ever satisfied, she thought. She has asked me to join in the game, and there’s no need for me to worry about her motives. Whether she really does want me to be on board, or is just trying to be nice to me.

  “I’ll be there,” she said. “And you’re welcome to the meal. Grandma always used to make blueberry porridge for me when I was a girl.”

  “By the way,” she said as Mella was lacing up her boots in the hall, “Sivving told me that Sol-Britt Uusitalo’s grandmother was murdered too.”

  “What?”

  “Yes! She was a schoolteacher in Kiruna.”

  Hjalmar Lundbohm, managing director of L.K.A.B., the mining company that dominates Kiruna, joins the train in Gällivare on 15 April, 1914. He is tired and dejected. Feels old and worn out. It is as if he has a birch-bark knapsack on his back, crammed full of people and worries. Workers seething with anger. Constantly waving clenched fists in the air, chanting trade union slogans, looking for trouble. Palms of hands being slammed down onto tables, demanding an immediate end to all this damned oppression.

  All those trade unionists and hotheads who have been sacked by the sawmills in Västerbotten for being too revolutionary, then move up to Kiruna. Kiruna needs every man and woman it can find who can put up with the cold and the darkness. But then he’s the one who has to tussle with them – agitators, socialists, communists.

  Also crammed into his knapsack of woe are over-zealous civil servants and over-confident engineers who bicker and argue and all want more than they are entitled to. And the Stockholm politicians, and the Wallenberg family who demand profits no matter what. The iron ore must be mined. Dug out of the mountain. All that investment in the railway and the municipal community of Kiruna must be rewarded.

  Right down at the bottom of the knapsack are the mine’s victims – the injured, the maimed. The widows of dead miners, and the little fatherless children staring poverty in the face.

  A knapsack full of granite. The slag from the iron ore.

  How on earth will he be able to satisfy everybody? Take the housing situation: how can he possibly produce accommodation for everyone who needs it? He wants to create a real town. Kiruna will not become like Malmberget. Must not. Malmberget, the mining town a hundred kilometres south of Kiruna, is a real Klondike. Teeming with debauchery and drunkenness and whores. He doesn’t want anything like that. He wants schools and bathhouses and adult education – as in Pullman City in the U.S.A. and Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in South America. Those are models to live up to.

  It must become a genuine town, and it must look good as well: but that will take time. Meanwhile, people must have roofs over their heads. Overcrowding is a problem. Ever
y square inch of floor space is used at night for sleeping on. Unauthorised house building is another problem: they can shoot up in a single night. They have to be demolished, and then women stand there surrounded by their homeless children, sobbing.

  Food is a constant problem. As is the water supply.

  He simply cannot cope. He cannot manage to help everybody in need of assistance.

  He has just had a meeting with the managers of the mines in Malmberget. They are outraged because they consider the Kiruna mines have access to too many railway wagons. They also want to transport their iron ore.

  Just as he boards the train, a gust of wind blows over the railway station. Snow whirls up and every single flake glistens like a hovering diamond.

  If only I could paint, he thinks. If only I could paint instead of having to slave away with all these insoluble problems.

  *

  The train shudders and clatters, and starts to move. He heads straight for the restaurant car.

  There is only one person sitting there. The moment he claps eyes on her, all his oppressive thoughts vanish in a puff of smoke. He feels the need to rub his eyes, and assure himself that what he sees is not a mirage.

  She has chubby pink cheeks, big enchanting eyes with long eyelashes, a snub nose like a potato and a sullen-looking mouth like a small red heart. She looks like a child. Like one of those coloured prints featuring a little girl walking along a footbridge over a beck, blissfully unaware of all the dangers of the world.

  But the most fascinating thing about her is her hair. It is blonde and curly. Lundbohm thinks it must reach down as far as her waist when she lets it hang loose.

  He notices that her shoes are well cared for despite being somewhat the worse for wear, and that the edges of her overcoat are trimmed in order to conceal their threadbare nature.

  Perhaps that is why he asks if she does not mind him sitting down at her table. The fact is that he is surprised to find her sitting there on her own: she ought to be surrounded by navvies and miners desperate for female contact. He looks around, half expecting to see suitors hiding behind the heavy curtains or under the tables.