“No, it was after the cat.”
Anna-Maria waited in silence.
“I used to have a cat,” said Anki, clearing her throat as if she had something stuck in it. “Puss. When I left Magnus I shouted for her, but she’d been gone for a while. I thought I’d come back later to collect her. I was so nervous. I didn’t want to meet Magnus. He kept ringing me. And my mother. In the middle of the night, sometimes. Anyway, he rang me at work and said he’d hung a carrier bag with some things of mine in it on the door of the apartment.”
She stopped speaking.
Her mother blew a cloud of smoke at Anna-Maria. It drifted apart in thin veils.
“Puss was in the bag,” she said, when her daughter didn’t speak. “And her kittens. Five of them. They’d all had their heads chopped off. It was just blood and fur.”
“What did you do?”
“What could she do?” her mother went on. “You lot can’t do anything. Even Lars-Gunnar said the same. If you report something to the police, it has to be a crime. If they’d suffered, it could have been cruelty to animals. But as he’d chopped their heads off, they wouldn’t have suffered at all. It could have been criminal damage if they’d had any financial value, if they’d been pedigree cats or an expensive hunting dog or something. But they were just farm cats.”
“Yes,” said Anki Lindmark. “But I don’t think he’d kill…”
“Okay, what about later then?” said her mother. “After you’d moved here? Don’t you remember what happened with Peter?”
Her mother stubbed out her cigarette, got out a new one and lit it.
“Peter lives in Poikkijärvi. He’s divorced too, but such a nice, kind guy. Anyway, he and Anki started seeing each other now and again…”
“Just as friends,” Anki interjected.
“One morning when Peter was on his way to work, Magnus pulled out straight in front of him. Magnus stopped the car and jumped out. Peter couldn’t drive around, because Magnus had parked sort of diagonally across the narrow gravel track. And Magnus jumps out and goes to the trunk and gets out a baseball bat. Walks over to Peter’s car. And Peter’s sitting there thinking he’s going to die and thinking about his own kids, thinking maybe he’s dead meat. Then Magnus just lets out a loud guffaw, gets back in his own car and screeches away with the gravel spraying up around his tires. So that was the end of the dating, wasn’t it, Anki?”
“I don’t want to quarrel with him. He’s very good to the boys.”
“But you hardly dare go to the supermarket. There’s hardly any difference from before, when you were married to him. I’m so bloody tired of the whole thing. The police! They can do sod all.”
“Why was he so angry with Mildred?” asked Anna-Maria.
“He said she’d kind of influenced me to leave him.”
“And had she?”
“No, she hadn’t,” said Anki. “I’m an adult. I make my own decisions. And I’ve told Magnus that.”
“And what did he say?”
“ ‘Did Mildred tell you to say that?’ ”
“Do you know what he was doing the night before midsummer’s eve?”
Anki Lindmark shook her head.
“Has he ever hit you?”
“He’s never hit the boys.”
Time to go.
“Just one last thing,” said Anna-Maria. “When you were staying with Mildred. What impression did you get of her husband? How were things between them?”
Anki Lindmark and her mother exchanged glances.
The talk of the village, thought Anna-Maria.
“She came and went like the cat,” said Anki. “But he seemed happy with things as they were… I mean, they never fell out or anything.”
The evening was closing in. The hens went into the henhouse and nestled close together on their perches. The wind eased and lay down on the grass. Details were obliterated. Grass, trees and buildings floated away into the dark blue sky. Sounds crept closer, became clearer.
Lisa Stöckel listened to the sound of the gravel beneath her feet as she walked down the track to the bar. Her dog Majken trailed behind her. In an hour the women’s group would be holding its autumn meeting and dinner at Micke’s.
She’d stay sober and take it easy. Put up with all that talk about how everything must carry on without Mildred. How Mildred felt just as close now as when she was alive. All she could do was bite the insides of her lips, hang on to the chair and not stand up and shout: We’re finished! Nothing can carry on without Mildred! She isn’t close! She’s a rotting lump down in the ground! Earth to earth! And you, you can all go back to being home-birds, making the coffee, discussing your fibromyalgia, gossiping like old women. You can read your magazines and serve your men.
She walked in and the sight of her daughter interrupted her train of thought.
Mimmi. Wiping the tables and windowsills with a cloth. Her tri-colored hair in two big bunches above her ears. Pink lacy bra peeping over the neckline of her tight black jumper. Cheeks rosy with warmth, presumably she’d been in the kitchen getting the food ready.
“What are we having?” asked Lisa.
“I’ve gone for a bit of a Mediterranean theme. Little olive bread rolls with dips to start,” answered Mimmi without slowing down her actions with the cloth. It was swishing across the shiny bar counter. She followed it with the hand towel she always carried folded over the waistband of her apron.
“There’s tzatziki, tapenade and hummus,” she went on. “Then bean soup with pistou, it made sense to do vegetarian for everybody, because half of you are grass eaters…”
She looked up and grinned at Lisa, who was just taking off her cap.
“But Mum,” she exclaimed, “what on earth do you look like? Are you letting the dogs chew your hair off when it gets too long?”
Lisa ran her hand over her cropped hair to try and flatten it. Mimmi looked at her watch.
“I’ll fix it,” she said. “Pull up a chair and sit down.”
She disappeared through the swing door into the kitchen.
“Mascarpone ice cream with cloudberries for dessert,” she shouted from the kitchen. “It’s absolutely…”
She finished the sentence with an appreciative wolf whistle.
Lisa pulled up a chair, took off her jacket and sat down. Majken immediately lay down at her feet; just this short walk had worn her out, or she was in pain, probably the latter.
Lisa sat as still as in church as Mimmi’s fingers worked through her hair and the scissors evened it all out to the width of a finger.
“What’s going to happen now, without Mildred?” asked Mimmi. “Your hair grows in three circles in a row just here.”
“I suppose we’ll just carry on as normal.”
“With what?”
“Meals for mothers and children, the clean panties and the wolf.”
The clean panties project had begun as an appeal. When it came to the practical help social services offered women who were on drugs, it turned out to be very much focused on men. There were disposable razors and underpants in the clothing pack, but no women’s panties or tampons. Women had to make do with sanitary towels like nappies, and men’s underpants. Magdalena had offered to work with social services, buying panties and tampons as well as things like deodorant and moisturizer. They had also provided a contact list. The name of the contact person was given to a landlord who could be persuaded to let a room to the woman who was using. If there were problems, the landlord could ring the contact person.
“What are you going to do about the wolf?”
“We’re hoping for some kind of monitoring in association with the Nature Conservancy Council. When the snow comes and they can start tracking on scooters, she’s going to be at serious risk if we can’t get something sorted out. But we’ve got some money in the foundation, so we’ll see.”
“You realize you’re stuck with it now, don’t you?” said Mimmi.