She says nothing.
Hjalmar looks at Martinsson. He hadn’t expected to see that prosecutor here. He passed through the new part of the cemetery on his way to Wilma’s grave. All the new graves were free of snow, neat and tidy. The relatives must have been here the moment the sun came out. They had certainly spent their lunch breaks making sure everything looked presentable. Much loved and missed, it said on nearly all the stones. Hjalmar wondered vaguely what it would say on his own stone. Whether Tore’s wife Laura would look after the grave. She might well do, simply to stop people talking in the village. He paused for a few moments in front of a child’s grave. Calculated quickly on the basis of the inscribed dates how old Samuel had been when he died. Two years, three months and five days. There was an image of the boy on the top left-hand corner of the stone. Hjalmar had never seen anything like that before. Not that he visited the cemetery all that often. There was a wreath with a teddy bear in it, flowers and a lantern.
“Poor little lad,” he said, feeling a tug at his heart-strings. “Poor little lad.”
Then he couldn’t bring himself to stop at Wilma’s grave. Just walked past the temporary plastic nameplate on an aluminium peg: “Persson Wilma”. Gifts, flowers, a few flickering candles. He walked back through the old part of the cemetery wondering why the hell he had come, and then caught sight of the prosecutor.
He recognized her by her overcoat and long, dark hair. He didn’t know why he decided to walk towards her. He stopped a few metres short. She was frightened when she turned round. He could tell.
He wants to tell her she has nothing to be afraid of, but can’t produce a sound. Just stands there like an idiot. But that is what he’s been all his life. An idiot people are afraid of.
She says nothing. The fear disappears from her eyes and is replaced by something else. Something he finds it difficult to cope with. He’s not used to it. He’s not used to people being quiet. He’s usually the one who says nothing and lets the others do the talking, lets the others decide what to do.
“They can scatter my ashes to the winds,” he says eventually.
She nods.
“Have you come to visit the people you killed?” he asks after another pause.
He knows about that, of course. He’s read about her in the evening papers. And people talk.
“No,” she says. “I’ve come to visit my grandmother. And my grandfather.”
She nods towards the grave she is clearing.
Then it dawns on her what his question sounded like. There was an “also” there that he didn’t actually say. But it was there. Have you also come to visit the people you killed?
She turns her head and points. Adds in a calm voice: “The ones I killed are over there. And there. But Thomas Söderberg isn’t buried here.”
“You were acquitted,” he says.
“Yes,” she says. “They said it was self-defence.”
“How did you feel?”
He stresses the “you”. Looks her in the eye. Then looks down at the snow as if he were standing in front of the altar at church, showing due deference.
What does he want? Martinsson wonders.
“I don’t know,” she says hesitantly. “At first I didn’t feel anything much. I didn’t remember much either. But then things got worse. I couldn’t work. I tried to get a grip, but in the end I made a mistake that cost my firm lots of money and prestige – they had a good insurance policy, but still… Then I went on sick leave. I hung around the flat. Didn’t want to go out. Slept badly. Ate badly. The flat was in a terrible mess.”
“Yes,” he says.
They fall silent as someone else approaches. She nods as she walks past. Martinsson nods back. Hjalmar doesn’t seem to have noticed.
It occurs to Martinsson that he might be going to confess. What the hell should she do if that happens? Ask him to accompany her to the police station, of course. But what if he refuses? What if he confesses and then regrets having done so and kills her instead?
She looks him in the eye for a while. And she recalls one of Meijer & Ditzinger’s clients, a prostitute who owned a number of flats. She made no attempt to hide her profession, having commissioned the law firm to sort out a tax problem. Måns Wenngren had been drunk on one occasion when they had gone out for an afternoon drink, and quite irresponsibly had started asking her if she was ever afraid of her clients. He had been flirtatious, flattering, fascinated. Martinsson had been embarrassed, had looked down at the table. The woman had remained friendly but never wavered in her integrity – it was obvious that she was used to this kind of curiosity. She said no, she wasn’t afraid. She always looked new clients in the eye long and hard. “That way you know,” she had said, “if you need to be frightened or not. Everything you need to know about a person can be seen in his eyes.”
Martinsson looks Hjalmar in the eye long and hard. No, she doesn’t need to be afraid of him.
“You ended up in a psychiatric ward,” he says.
“Yes, in the end I did. I went out of my mind. It was when Lars-Gunnar Vinsa shot himself and his boy. I couldn’t cope with another death. It sort of opened all the doors I was trying to keep closed.”
Hjalmar finds it almost impossible to breathe. That’s exactly what it’s like, he wants to say. First Wilma and Simon. That had been bad enough, although he managed to cope. But then there was Hjörleifur Arnarson…
“Did you sink all the way down?” he says. “Did you hit rock bottom?”
“I suppose I did, yes. Although I don’t remember much of the worst part. I was so poorly.”
They gave me electric-shock treatment, she thinks. And they kept me under close supervision. I don’t want to talk about this.
They stand there, Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula. For him it is so difficult to ask questions. For her it is so difficult to answer. They battle their way forward through the conversation like two hikers in a blizzard. Heads bowed, struggling with the wind.
“I don’t remember,” she says. “I sometimes think that if you recall a situation in which you were really depressed, you feel all the sorrow flooding back when you think about it. And if you recall a situation in which you were really happy, the happiness comes back to you. But if your memory of a situation fills you with anxiety, the feelings you had don’t come back, no matter what. It’s as if your brain simply goes on strike. It’s not going to go back there. You can only remember what it was like. You can’t experience how it felt.”
Depressed? Hjalmar thinks. Sorrow? Happiness?
Neither of them speaks.
“What about you?” Rebecka says eventually. “Whom have you come to visit?”
“I thought I’d come and say hello to her.”
She realizes that it’s Wilma he’s talking about.
“Did you know her?” she says.
Yes, his mouth says, although no sound is produced. But he nods.
“What was she like?”
“She was O.K.,” he says, and adds with a wry smile: “She wasn’t very good at maths.”
Wilma is sitting at Anni’s kitchen table with her maths textbook open in front of her, tearing her hair in desperation. She has to read up on maths and Swedish in order to be able to apply to grammar school. Anni is at the sink washing up, watching Hjalmar Krekula through the window as he clears away the snow from the parking area in front of the house with his tractor. Anni is his aunt, after all.
The air turns blue as Wilma curses and swears over her maths book. God’s angels come out in goose pimples when they hear her.
“Hell, damnation, shit, fuck, cunt,” she says, snarling.
“Hey, calm down now,” Anni says disapprovingly.