“Well liked, I heard.”
“By a load of hysterical old women.”
“And a number of men.”
“Who are nothing but hysterical old women. Ask any, excuse the expression, real man and they’ll tell you. She was after the hunting fraternity as well. Wanted to cancel their permit and fuck knows what else. But if you think Torbjörn killed her, then you’ve got that fucking wrong as well.”
“Torbjörn?”
“Torbjörn Ylitalo, the church’s forest warden and the chairman of the hunting club. They had a terrible quarrel back in the spring. I reckon he’d have liked to stick his shotgun in her mouth. And then she started that fucking wolf foundation. And that’s a class thing, you know. It’s easy for a load of fuckers from Stockholm to love wolves. But the day a wolf comes down to their golf courses and their terrace bars and gobbles up their poodles for breakfast, they’ll be out there hunting!”
“But Mildred Nilsson wasn’t from Stockholm, was she?”
“No, but somewhere down there. Torbjörn Ylitalo’s cousin had his old dog killed by a wolf when he went down to Värmland to visit his in-laws at Christmas ninety-nine. He sat there in Micke’s crying when he was telling us about finding the dog. Or the remains of the dog, I should say. There was only the skeleton left, and a few bloody scraps of fur.”
He looked at her. She kept her face expressionless-did he think she was going to faint because he was talking about skeletons and scraps of fur?
When she didn’t say anything he turned his head aside, his gaze sweeping away across the pine trees to the ragged clouds scudding across the chilly blue autumn sky.
“I had to get a lawyer before I was allowed to meet my own kids, for fuck’s sake. I hope she suffered. She did, didn’t she?”
When Rebecka and Nalle got back to Micke’s bar, it was already five o’clock in the afternoon. Lisa Stöckel was walking down toward the bar from the road, and Nalle ran to meet her.
“Dog!” he shouted, pointing at Lisa’s dog Majken. “Little!”
“We’ve been looking at puppies,” explained Rebecka.
“Becka!” he yelled, pointing at Rebecka.
“Wow, you’re popular,” Lisa smiled at Rebecka.
“The puppies swung it,” Rebecka replied modestly.
“He loves anything to do with dogs,” said Lisa. “You like dogs, don’t you, Nalle? I heard you looked after Nalle today, thanks for that. I can pay if you’ve had any expenses for food and so on.”
She took a wallet out of her pocket.
“No, no,” said Rebecka, waving her hand, and Lisa dropped the wallet on the ground.
All her cards fell out onto the gravel, her library ticket, supermarket loyalty card, her Visa card and her driving license.
And the photograph of Mildred.
Lisa bent down quickly to gather everything up, but Nalle had already picked up the photograph of Mildred. It had been taken during a coach trip the Magdalena group had gone on, to a retreat in Uppsala. Mildred was smiling at the camera, surprised and reproachful. Lisa had been holding the camera. They’d stopped to stretch their legs.
“Illred,” said Nalle to the photograph, and laid it against his cheek.
He smiled at Lisa as she stood there, her hand impatiently outstretched. She had to exercise an iron control not to snatch it off him. It was a bloody good job nobody else was there.
“They were friends, those two,” she said, nodding toward Nalle, who still had the photograph pressed against his cheek.
“She seems to have been a very special priest,” said Rebecka seriously.
“Very,” said Lisa. “Very.”
Rebecka bent down and patted the dog.
“He’s such a blessing,” said Lisa. “You forget all your troubles when you’re with him.”
“Isn’t it a bitch?” asked Rebecka, peering under the dog’s stomach.
“I was talking about Nalle,” said Lisa. “This is Majken.”
She stroked the dog absentmindedly.
“I’ve got a lot of dogs.”
“I like dogs,” said Rebecka, stroking Majken’s ears.
Not so keen on people, though? thought Lisa. I know. I was like that myself for a long time. Probably still am.
But Mildred had got Lisa to do whatever she wanted. Right from the start. Like when she got Lisa to give talks about budgeting. Lisa had tried to refuse. But Mildred had been… stubborn was a ridiculous word. You couldn’t contain Mildred in that word.
“Don’t you care?” asks Mildred. “Don’t you care about people?”
Lisa is sitting on the floor with Bruno lying alongside her. She’s clipping his claws.
Majken is standing beside them like a nurse, supervising. The other dogs are lying in the hallway hoping it will never be their turn. If they keep really still and quiet, maybe Lisa will forget about them.
And Mildred is sitting on the sofa in the kitchen and explaining. As if the problem was that Lisa didn’t understand. Magdalena, the women’s group, wants to help women who’ve gone adrift in purely financial terms. Long term unemployed, those on benefit because they’re signed off sick for a long time, with the authorities after them and the kitchen drawers stuffed full of papers from debt collecting agencies and God knows who else. And Mildred just happens to know that Lisa works as a debt counselor and budgeting advisor for the council. Mildred wants Lisa to run a course for these women. So they can get their private finances sorted out.
Lisa wants to say no. Say that she doesn’t actually care about people. That she cares about her dogs, cats, goats, sheep, lambs. The female elk that turned up the winter before last, thin as a rake, so she fed her and looked after her.
“They won’t turn up,” Lisa replies.
She clips Bruno’s last claw. He gets a pat and disappears to join the rest of the gang in the hall. Lisa gets up.
“They’ll say ‘yeah, yeah, brilliant’ when you invite them,” she goes on. “But they won’t turn up.”
“We’ll see,” says Mildred, narrowing her eyes. Then her little lingonberry mouth widens into a smile. A row of tiny teeth, like a child’s.
Lisa goes weak at the knees, looks away, says “okay, I’ll do it” just to get rid of the priest before she collapses completely.
Three weeks later Lisa is standing in front of a group of women, talking. Drawing on a whiteboard. Circles and pieces of pie, red, green and blue. Glances at Mildred, hardly dares look at her. Looks at the rest of her audience instead. They’ve got dressed up, God help us. Cheap blouses. Bobbly cardigans. Gold colored costume jewelry. Most of them are listening obediently. Others are staring at Lisa, almost with hatred in their eyes, as if the way their lives have turned out might be her fault.
Gradually she’s drawn into other projects with the women’s group. She just gets carried along. She even attends the Bible study group for a while. But in the end it just doesn’t work anymore. She can’t look at Mildred, because it feels as if the others can read her face like an open book. She can’t avoid looking at her the whole time, that’s just as obvious. She doesn’t know where to turn. Doesn’t hear what they’re talking about. Drops her pen and makes a fuss. In the end she stops going.
She keeps away from the women’s group. Her restlessness is like an incurable illness. She wakes up in the middle of the night. Thinks about the priest all the time. She starts running. Mile after mile. Along the roads at first. Then the ground dries out and she can run in the forest. She goes to Norway and buys another dog, a Springer spaniel. It keeps her busy. She renews the putty in all the windows and doesn’t borrow the rotovator from her neighbor for the potato patch as she usually does, but turns it over by hand instead during the light May evenings. Sometimes she thinks she can hear the telephone ringing in the house, but she doesn’t answer it.
“Can I have the picture, Nalle?” said Lisa, trying to make her voice sound neutral.