I remember best what happened before and after, thought Rebecka. Before and after. I ought to ask Sven-Erik really. What it looked like when they arrived at the cottage. He can tell me about the blood and the bodies.
You want him to tell you you did the right thing, said a voice inside her. That it was self-defense. That you had no choice. Just ask, he’s bound to say what you want to hear.
They sat down in the little cottage. Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria on Rebecka’s bed. Rebecka on the only chair. On the little radiator hung a T-shirt, a pair of tights and a pair of panties over the “ei saa peittää” sticker.
Rebecka glanced anxiously at the wet clothes. But what could she do? Bundle up the wet panties and chuck them under the bed? Or out through the window, maybe?
“Well?” she said tersely, couldn’t manage politeness.
“It’s about the photocopies you gave me,” Anna-Maria explained. “There are some things I don’t understand.”
Rebecka clasped her knees.
But why? she thought. Why do we have to remember? Wallow in it all, go over things over and over again? What do we gain from that? Who can guarantee that it will help? That we won’t just drown in the darkness?
“The thing is…” she said.
She spoke very quietly. Sven-Erik looked at her slender fingers around her knees.
“… I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she went on. “I gave you the photocopies and the letters. I got them by committing a crime. If that comes out, it’ll cost me my job. Besides which, people round here don’t know who I am. I mean, they know my name. But they don’t know I was involved in what happened out in Jiekajärvi.”
“Please,” begged Anna-Maria, staying where she was as if her bottom was welded to the bed, although Sven-Erik had made a move to get up. “A woman’s been murdered. If anybody asks what we were doing here, tell them we were looking for a missing dog.”
Rebecka looked at her.
“Good plan,” she said slowly. “Two plainclothes detectives looking for a missing dog. Time for the police authorities to look at how their resources are used.”
“It might be my dog,” said Anna-Maria, slightly abashed.
Nobody spoke for a little while. Sven-Erik felt as if he were about to die of embarrassment, perched on the edge of the bed.
“Let’s have a look, then,” said Rebecka in the end, reaching out for the folder.
“It’s this,” said Anna-Maria, taking a sheet of paper out of the folder and pointing.
“It’s an extract from somebody’s accounts,” said Rebecka. “This entry’s been marked with a highlighter pen.”
Rebecka pointed at a figure in a column headed 1930.
“Nineteen thirty is a current account, a check account. It’s been credited with one hundred and seventy-nine thousand kronor from account seventy-six ten. It’s down as additional staff costs. But here in the margin somebody’s written in pencil ‘Training?’ ”
Rebecka pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
“What about this, then?” asked Anna-Maria. “ ‘Ver,’ what does that mean?”
“Verified, authenticated. Could be an invoice or something else to show what the costs consisted of. It seems to me as if she was wondering about this particular cost, that’s why I took it.”
“What company is it, then?” Anna-Maria wondered.
Rebecka shrugged her shoulders. Then she pointed at the top right-hand corner of the page.
“The number of the organization begins with eighty-one. That means it must be a foundation.”
Sven-Erik shook his head.
“Jukkasjärvi church nature conservancy foundation,” said Anna-Maria after a second or two. “A foundation she set up.”
“She was wondering about that particular expenditure for training,” said Rebecka.
Silence fell once again. Sven-Erik swatted at a fly that kept wanting to land on him.
“She seems to have got on quite a lot of people’s nerves,” said Rebecka.
Anna-Maria smiled mirthlessly.
“I was talking to one of them yesterday,” she said. “He hated Mildred Nilsson because his ex-wife stayed at her house with the children after she’d left him.”
She told Rebecka about the decapitated kittens.
“And we can’t do a thing,” she concluded. “Those farm cats don’t have any financial value, so it isn’t criminal damage. Presumably they didn’t have time to suffer, so it isn’t cruelty to animals. You just feel so powerless. As if you might be more useful selling fruit and vegetables in the supermarket. I don’t know, do you feel like that as well?”
Rebecka smiled wryly.
“It’s very rare I have anything to do with criminal cases,” she said evasively. “And when I do, it’s financial crime. But yes, this business of being on the side of the suspect… Sometimes I do feel a sort of revulsion toward myself. When you’re representing somebody who really has no conscience whatsoever. You keep repeating ‘everybody is entitled to a defense’ like a kind of mantra against the…”
She didn’t actually say self-contempt, but allowed a shrug of her shoulders to finish the sentence.
Anna-Maria had noticed that Rebecka Martinsson often shrugged her shoulders. Shaking off unwelcome thoughts, perhaps, a way of interrupting a difficult train of thought. Or maybe she was like Marcus. His constant shrugs were a way of marking the distance between him and the rest of the world.
“You’ve never thought about changing sides, then?” asked Sven-Erik. “They’re always looking for public prosecutors, people don’t stay up here.”
Rebecka’s smile was rather strained.
“Of course,” said Sven-Erik, obviously feeling like a complete idiot, “you must earn three times as much as a prosecutor.”
“It’s not that,” said Rebecka. “I’m not actually working at the moment, so the future is…”
She shrugged her shoulders again.
“But you told me you were up here with your job,” said Anna-Maria.
“Yes, I’m working a bit now and again. And when one of the partners was coming up here, I wanted to come along.”
She’s off sick, Anna-Maria realized.
Sven-Erik gave her a lightning glance, he’d understood as well.
Rebecka stood up, indicating that the conversation was at an end. They said good-bye.
When Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria had gone just a few paces, they heard Rebecka Martinsson’s voice behind them.
“Threatening behavior,” she said.
They turned around. Rebecka was standing on the cottage’s little veranda, her hand resting on one of the posts that supported the roof, leaning against it slightly.
She looks so young, thought Anna-Maria. Two years ago she was one of those real career girls. She’d seemed so super-slim and super-expensive, her long dark hair beautifully cut, not just chopped off like Anna-Maria’s. Now Rebecka’s hair was longer. And just chopped off. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. No makeup. Her hip bones stuck out where they met the waistband of her jeans, and her tired but stubbornly upright posture as she leaned against the post made Anna-Maria think about the kind of grown-up children she sometimes met through her job. Coping with impossible circumstances, taking care of their alcoholic or mentally ill parents, looking after their brothers and sisters, keeping the facade up as far as possible, lying to the police and social services.
“The man with the kittens,” Rebecka went on. “It’s threatening behavior. It appears that his action was intended to frighten his ex-wife. According to the law, a threat doesn’t actually have to be spelled out. And she was frightened, I presume. It might be harassment of a female. Depending on what else he’s done, there could be grounds for an injunction to stop him going anywhere near her.”
As Sven-Erik and Anna-Maria were walking along the road on the way back to the car, they met a lion yellow Merc. In it sat Lars-Gunnar and Nalle Vinsa. Lars-Gunnar gave them a long look. Sven-Erik raised his hand in a wave, after all it wasn’t that many years since Lars-Gunnar had retired.