“Why?”
“Why? I thought it was the last thing you needed.”
Rebecka didn’t look at him as she answered.
“Perhaps you’d allow me to decide what I need and don’t need.”
She was beginning to become vaguely aware of the fact that people nearby were tuning in to her and Måns. They were pretending to be busy dancing and chatting, but hadn’t the general murmur of conversation dropped a little? Maybe now they’d all have something to talk about next week at work.
Måns seemed to have noticed as well, and lowered his voice.
“I was only thinking of you, I do apologize.”
Rebecka jumped down into the boat.
“Oh, you were thinking of me, were you? Is that why you’ve had me sitting in on all those criminal trials like some kind of tart?”
“Right, that’s enough,” snapped Måns. “You said yourself that you didn’t mind. I thought it was a good way of keeping in touch with the job. Get out of that boat!”
“As if I had a choice! You could see that if you bothered to think about it!”
“Stop doing the bloody criminal cases, then. Get out of the boat and go upstairs and get some sleep, then we’ll talk in the morning when you’ve sobered up.”
Rebecka took a step forward in the boat. It rocked back and forth. For a moment the thought went through Måns’ mind that she was going to clamber out onto the jetty and slap him. That would be just perfect.
“When I’ve sobered up? You… you’re just unbelievable!”
She placed her foot against the jetty and pushed off. Måns considered grabbing hold of the boat, but that would cause a scene as well. Hanging on to the prow till he fell in the water. The office’s very own comedy turn. The boat slipped away.
“Go to bloody Kiruna then!” he shouted, without paying any attention to who might hear him. “You can do what you bloody well like as far as I’m concerned.”
The boat disappeared into the darkness. He heard the oars rattling in the rowlocks and the splash as the blades slid into the water.
But Rebecka’s voice was still close by, and had gone up a pitch.
“Tell me what could possibly be worse than this.”
He recognized the voice from those endless rows with Madelene. First of all Madelene’s suppressed rage. Him without the faintest idea of what the hell he’d done wrong this time. Then the row, every time the storm of the century. And afterward that voice, a little bit higher pitched and about to splinter into tears. Then it might be time for the reconciliation. If you were prepared to pay the price: being the scapegoat. With Madelene he’d always trotted out the old story: said he was just a heap of shit. Madelene in his arms, sobbing like a little girl with her head leaning on his chest.
And Rebecka… His thoughts lumbered drunkenly through his head searching for the right words, but it was already too late. The sound of the oars was moving further and further away.
He wasn’t bloody well going to shout after her. She could forget that.
Suddenly Ulla Carle, one of the firm’s two female partners, was standing behind him wondering what was going on.
“So shoot me,” he said, and walked off up toward the hotel. He headed for the outdoor bar under the garlands of colored lanterns.
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 5
Inspector Sven-Erik Stålnacke was driving from Fjällnäs to Kiruna. The gravel clattered against the underside of the car and behind him the dust from the road swirled up in a great cloud. When he swung up toward Nikkavägen the massive ice blue bulk of Kebnekaise rose up against the sky on his left-hand side.
It’s amazing how you never get tired of it, he thought.
Although he was over fifty he still loved the changing seasons. The thin cold mountain air of autumn, flowing down through the valleys from the highest mountains. The sun’s return in the early spring. The first drips from the roof as the thaw began. And the ice breaking. He was almost getting worse with every passing year. He’d need to take a week’s holiday just to sit and stare at the countryside.
Just like Dad, he thought.
During the last years of his life, must have been at least fifteen, his father had constantly repeated the same refrain: “This summer will be my last. This autumn was the last one I’ll ever see.”
It was as if that was the thing that had frightened him most about dying. Not being able to experience one more spring, a bright summer, a glowing autumn. That the seasons would continue to come and go without him.
Sven-Erik glanced at the time. Half one. Half an hour until the meeting with the prosecutor. He had time to call in at Annie’s Grill for a burger.
He knew exactly what the prosecutor wanted. It was almost three months since the murder of Mildred Nilsson, the priest, and they’d got nowhere. The prosecutor had had enough. And who could blame him?
Unconsciously he stepped on the gas. He should have asked Anna-Maria for her advice, he realized that now. Anna-Maria Mella was his team leader. She was on maternity leave, and Sven-Erik was standing in for her. It just didn’t seem right to disturb her at home. It was strange. When they were working together she felt so close. But outside work he couldn’t think of anything to say. He missed her, but yet he’d only been to visit her once, just after the little boy had been born. She’d called in at the station to say hi once or twice, but then all the girls from the office were all over her, cackling like a flock of chickens, and it was best to keep out of the way. She was due back properly in the middle of January.
They’d knocked on enough doors. Somebody ought to have seen something. In Jukkasjärvi, where they’d found the priest hanging from the organ loft, and in Poikkijärvi, where she lived. Nothing. They’d gone round knocking a second time. Not a damned thing.
It was so odd. Somebody had killed her, on the folk museum land down by the river, quite openly. The murderer had carried her body to the church, quite openly. True, it had been the middle of the night, but it had been as light as day.
They’d found out that she was a controversial priest. When Sven-Erik had asked if she had any enemies, several of the more active women in the church had answered “Pick any man you like.” One woman in the church office, with deep lines etched on either side of her pursed mouth, had practically come out with it and said that the priest had only herself to blame. She’d made the headlines in the local paper when she was alive as well. Trouble with the church council when she arranged self-defense courses for women on church property. Trouble with the community when her women’s Bible study group, Magdalena, went out and demanded that a third of the time available at the local ice rinks should be set aside for girls’ ice hockey teams and figure skating. And just lately she’d fallen out with some of the hunters and reindeer farmers. It was all because of the she-wolf who’d settled on church ground. Mildred Nilsson had said that it was the responsibility of the church to protect the wolf. The local paper had run a picture of her and one of her opponents on its center page spread, under the headings “The Wolf Lover” and “The Wolf Hater.”
And in Poikkijärvi vicarage on the other side of the river from Jukkasjärvi sat her husband. On sick leave and in no condition to make any sense of what she’d left behind. Sven-Erik felt once again the pain that had filled him when he’d talked to the guy. “You again. It’s never enough for you lot, is it?” Every conversation had been like smashing the ice that had formed overnight over a hole in the ice. The grief welling up. The eyes wrecked by weeping. No children to share the grief.
Sven-Erik did have a child, a daughter who lived in Luleå, but he recognized that terrible bloody loneliness. He was divorced and lived alone. Although of course he had the cat, and nobody had murdered his wife and hung her from a chain.