by Stefan Spjut
‘It’s my father’s sister.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘She can’t help us. Because she has nothing left. Dad has taken everything from her. He’s taken Sakka, and he’s taken her treasures.’
‘What treasures?’
‘Jewellery. Gold.’
‘But then all that must be around here somewhere.’
‘Mind what you’re saying.’
She glanced at the mice running around aimlessly in the grass. When her hand swooped in to catch them again, they chirped like tiny birds warning each other about a predator.
‘We can’t hide anything from my dad. Do you understand me?’
Anders rubbed his forehead. His head was throbbing.
‘I think I saw him before. Ransu.’
Now she was staring at him.
‘Where?’
‘On the other side of the lake.’
‘You saw him on the other side of the lake?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know it was him? There are others here.’
‘I thought it was him.’
‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I don’t know. You were asleep.’
She was walking away from him; he grabbed her.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to look for him.’
‘No. Don’t.’
‘What’s wrong with you? Let go of me!’
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘If he’s there, I have to see him. I promised Dad we’d get him here.’
‘But I was probably mistaken. It probably wasn’t him.’
He held her hard and nestled his head in under her hair and kissed her neck and when she tried to wrest free, he turned rough, the way he’d learnt she liked. He ushered her toward the front door and into the hallway and shoved a knee in between her legs and pushed it against her genitals hard; she opened her mouth and hissed like a malevolent spirit.
‘You can take those off now, Diana. We know what you look like. Underneath.’
‘It’s not that,’ she said and put her hand on her baseball cap as she leaned her elbow on the table. ‘I’m paranoid. I have it in my head that he’s going to walk by on the street and spot me.’
‘Here? On our street?’
‘That’s not a rational fear,’ her father said.
‘No, it can’t be, since he’s dead.’
‘And now you’re laughing, how can you laugh? My poor darling.’
Her mother reached out and put her hand on her hand and squeezed it; she squeezed it hard.
‘We’ll have to be grateful,’ she said, ‘that you came back.’
‘I know you think I was mistaken, that I was exhausted and delirious. But I know what I saw and I’m asking you, begging you, actually, not to try to wear me down.’
‘Wear you down?’
‘Try to persuade me that what I saw wasn’t real. He was this tall and had a tail and these people who have taken Susso, they’re not normal. You have to believe me. Dad. You have to believe me.’
Kent Sillfors put his hand over his mouth, leaned back in his chair and studied his daughter.
‘Maybe we should shelve this discussion,’ he said at length. ‘And focus on what needs doing instead.’
‘What’s to discuss,’ her mother said, ‘we have to call the police!’ She leaned in and whispered. ‘You were kidnapped.’
‘Eva,’ he said. ‘Go easy on the girl. You never know how something like this can affect the rest of your life. Granted, I don’t think there is any risk of legal consequences. But you never know. You never know. If Diana states that she was present when this Norwegian man killed himself and it turns out to be impossible to prove that anyone else was, things could get sticky. You’re not likely to be convicted of anything, but you know how people talk. That doctor who was involved in that weird suicide up in Finnmark. Things like that never go away. They can be held against you for the rest of your life.’
Her mother leaned forward and when she spoke, it was in a voice that was meant to not carry to the living room, where Kiruna was watching a children’s show on TV.
‘But what if it’s found out after the fact? If they catch Lennart Brösth and that Erasmus guy and start investigating what happened and Susso tells them what happened to her and they see a connection with a body found in Finnmark, won’t it count against Diana that she didn’t say anything? Won’t that look suspicious? To have kept something like that from the police?’
Kent turned his arm over, pinched the loose skin of his elbow and studied it.
‘This is quite a pickle,’ he said.
‘If that happens,’ Diana said, ‘I’ll have to tell them, I don’t know, I’ll think of something. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that we help Susso and that means telling the police she’s missing and reminding them that Lennart Brösth recently escaped and then tip them off about someone seeing him in that village.’
‘Or we go up there ourselves.’
‘No, Kent, you’re not going up there!’
‘They’re dangerous, Dad. You don’t understand how dangerous they are. They’re not like anything you can imagine.’
‘Then here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to talk to Denny. Keep it informal, see what he says.’
‘You have to do it today.’
He held up his phone.
‘I’ll call him right now.’
*
They walked back through the church grounds. The little girl frolicked through the undergrowth lining the footpath. She was looking for dead baby birds and found it strange that she wasn’t finding any; just a few days ago, they had been everywhere. Where had they gone? She crept through the grass, calling them, making kulning calls with her tiny voice.
‘Little dead bird babies, where are you? Come out!’
Diana pulled out her phone. Still no reply from Håkan. Her messages had been delivered but not read. Could he have left his phone at home? Considering what she had been through, she knew it was well within her rights to be furious with him. He should make sure to be available on a day like this one. At her beck and call like a hotel receptionist. But her anger never made it out of the theoretical plane. It didn’t do anything to her.
A person leading a bicycle was walking toward them through the park; she turned her head away. But it was too late. The ticking sound stopped and then the bell tinkled. It was one of Håkan’s colleagues. He wore a chequered shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Backpack and sturdy helmet. She could almost hear the processor in his brain rattling to life when he saw her. She was tempted to lie. Say she’d had a bad fall. Or crashed her car. So that the story about her battered face circulating among their co-workers at the hospital would be a story of everyday bad luck, possibly laced with unspoken suspicions aimed at Håkan. But she had already told Kiruna the truth. That she had been beaten up by some men who were angry at Susso. If she fibbed now, there was a significant risk the little girl might get involved and correct her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘I got beaten up. By some idiots.’
‘At work?’
She shook her head.
‘I have a childhood friend who’s fallen in with the wrong crowd. It happened when I tried to help her.’
‘Dramatic.’
‘Right?’
‘How’s Håkan?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He wasn’t at work today.’
‘He wasn’t?’
His unbuckled chinstrap swung back and forth when he shook his head.
‘I don’t know, maybe he’s not feeling well; I haven’t been home.’
‘He didn’t call in sick. And he’s not answering his phone. So things were a bit hectic in the clinic, put it that way.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘Mm.’
‘He must have thought he had the day off. Wasn’t he on call last weekend?’
He shook his head.
‘Very odd.’
*
Worry unfurled its tentacles inside her; they were cold and refused to retract. She clutched her phone and the little girl had to run to keep up.
‘Why are you walking so quickly?’
‘Hurry up!’
She had been home all morning, so she knew he hadn’t been there. And she clearly remembered him asking if she wanted him to take off work, because it was as close as he had come to showing concern for her. It followed, then, that he had definitely been aware that he didn’t have the day off. Could something have happened to him on his way to work? It was a ten-minute walk. Hardly likely. On the other hand, she had to admit the laws of probability seemed to be suspended since a few days back. It was as though all of existence had been decalibrated by an earthquake. She had left one Kiruna and returned to another. To the strange Kiruna of the Myréns. Kinura. Krinua.
The car was in the driveway, its number plate spray-painted with splattered bugs, as a reminder of her trip to the latitude of death. The front door was locked, but she still called out. Kiruna called out too, but rather than shouting Daddy, she mimicked her mother and yelled Håkan.
‘Håååkan!’
The house was empty. Diana glanced out the terrace doors, but he wasn’t out there. A film of rain on the plastic garden furniture and further down the slope their neighbour’s sled like a forgotten temple in a jungle of weeds.
She went to the bathroom. Both the lid and the seat were up, which was odd because Håkan was always extremely meticulous about that and who else in their household would have put the seat up? But she didn’t give the seat any thought until much later.
She tore off some loo roll and held it in her hand while she peed. Afterwards, she stayed on the toilet, tapping out yet another message to Håkan. Then she changed her mind and called instead.
It took her a while to realise the buzzing sound was coming from the other side of the shower curtain. She stared at the New York subway map, hanging near enough for her to reach out and touch it. A shuffling sound made her jump to her feet. She flung the door open and dashed out with her trousers around her knees.
Outside, she stopped and tried to collect herself, heart pounding. After pulling her trousers up, she took one long step back into the bathroom and tore the shower curtain aside. And there he was. Curled up with his arms around his pulled-up knees. Shirt and chinos. But barefoot. He was staring at the wall and only tore his eyes away from the tiles for a vacant glance in her direction when she said his name.
Diana closed and locked the door. Then she sat down on the toilet and looked at him. He didn’t like that; he twisted away as though her eyes had emitted an unpleasantly strong light.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
It was the only thing she could think of to say, and if there was empathy in her voice, it was artificial. She wanted to scream at him that he wasn’t allowed to act this way, but she curbed herself, for Kiruna’s sake.
‘Leave.’
‘I’m fine right here.’
‘Please.’
‘Get it together,’ she said and then she chortled loudly through her nostrils. She couldn’t help it. It was so absurd. Him sitting there. If anyone should be crying in the bathroom, it should be her, shouldn’t it?
‘Can’t you just leave me alone,’ he said in a thick voice.
‘Only if you tell me what’s wrong.’
When he didn’t reply, she took off her baseball cap and sat holding it for a while before putting it down in the sink.
‘I get if you were worried, but I’m back now. Look. I’m here, Håkan. A bit black and blue, but mostly in one piece.’
He didn’t look at her, and it didn’t seem like her words were getting through to him. She had a mind to ask him what diagnosis he would give a father behaving this way. It was as though he was enacting a mental collapse of exactly the kind he liked to talk about with arch contempt during discussions about the rocketing number of people on medical leave and the failing work ethic of the general population. But she bit her tongue. Sarcastic digs were unlikely to help improve his state.
‘How long have you been sitting here? Håkan.’
‘Go away.’
‘Can you tell me what’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothing. I just want to sit here.’
‘You just want to sit there? In the shower?’
He nodded.
‘And how long were you planning on sitting there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better if you went to bed?’
No answer.
‘What do you want me to tell your daughter?’
His body twitched; she assumed it was meant as a shrug.
When she exited the bathroom, Kiruna was sitting on the stairs, watching her. Her eyes were bigger than normal and her mouth was open solemnly; she wondered how much the little girl had overheard. She shut the door behind her.
‘Daddy’s sick,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave him be.’
When Roland told me he had asked a couple of friends of his from Malmberget to decontaminate Susso’s garden, I was cross with him for having the gall to joke about something like that. But he wasn’t joking and when that sank in, I had to sit down. A stool met me halfway, but mentally I continued down through the stone floor and straight into the abyss of the Kiruna mine, where I tumbled around in a darkness without dimensions.
‘We can trust these lads,’ he said.
He had a younger brother and I might have understood if he’d gone to him for help, but he just shook his head at that. There was no one in the world he trusted more than these boys. Two good old village lads, he called them.
Since I’d never heard him mention any friends of his, I had more or less assumed he didn’t have any. At least none you could turn to with something like this. I mean: who does? So they were supposedly going to materialise out of nowhere and dig up and transport and dispose of a corpse, a corpse that had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Just like that, no questions asked? Was he going to pay them for it?
‘First of all,’ he said, ‘they’re not materialising out of nowhere, they’re from Malmberget. And second of all, Gudrun, you have to understand that these boys are very special. They’re not like other people.’
‘What do you mean, not like other people; are they retarded?’
‘You might say that. But only in a positive sense.’
‘Have you told them? About the trolls?’
He had fished out a sweet from the glass bowl on the counter and was trying to unwrap it.
‘You can hardly think I’d ask them to help us with something like this without informing them about the risks?’
Aska had delivered a package that morning; I started tearing at it to give my anxious fingers something to do. It was a stack of table runners. I picked one of them up and ran my hand over the cloth, studying the pattern, which consisted of long rows of yellow, blue, red and green squares. She had attached a note saying the pattern was called Kiruna.
‘And what did they say to that?’
He tore off the sweet wrapper with his teeth. Then he stood there, picking flakes of plastic out of his mouth. I was apparently not going to get an answer.
‘What kind of people are they?’
‘Their names are Harr and Ensimmäinen. Harr is my second cousin.’
‘Harry?’
‘Harr.’
‘I don’t think that’s a real name.’
‘You’re clearly wrong about that, since it’s his name. Harr is a bus driver, but I think he’s retired now. He’s a troubadour as well. He’s recorded a real CD. I’m not sure what Ensimmäinen gets up to these days, but he used to work at Gällivare Tractors.’
‘You think he’s retired? If you’re such good friends, shouldn’t you know whether he’s retired or not?’
‘With really good friends, regular contact’s not a requirement. You know the other person’s there for you come rain
or shine and that’s enough. The bond is so strong it doesn’t need maintenance. It’s a maintenance-free friendship.’
‘I still don’t think we should involve them.’
‘Oh well. Too late.’
‘Just tell them they don’t need to go out there.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they were already there.’
I glared at him.
‘You don’t have to worry, Gudrun.’
‘That’s easy for you to say!’
‘We can trust them.’
‘But what did they do with him?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘No, I suppose I don’t.’
‘The only thing Susso needs to do, when she gets back,’ he said and popped the sweet in his mouth, ‘the only thing she needs to do is to ponder who dug a potato patch in her garden.’
‘A potato patch without potatoes.’
‘They planted potatoes.’
‘Why? That’s a bit over the top, don’t you think?’
‘They bought a bag so they’d have a reason for being there in case someone asked what they were up to. And then I reckon they planted the potatoes mostly as a fun thing to do. Minerva. Extremely hardy, according to Harr.’
I was about to make a sign for the table runners but instead I just stood there with the marker in my hand and I was so confused I wrote ‘Minerva’ on the sign.
‘And I tipped the police off. About Lennart Brösth. About him being seen in that village. I asked a mate up in Karesuando to put the call in. Figured it was better than doing it anonymously. More credible that way.’
‘But we don’t even know if he’s there!’
‘Surely the main thing is to get them to head out there and look around. What you have to do, and you have to do it right now, is to report Susso missing, and to mention that you think Lennart Brösth might have taken her. Then we have to hope the police put two and two together.’
‘You might have asked me first. Before you called the police. And before you asked your friends for help. I really don’t like that.’
‘What were you going to say? You would have said no. And Susso doesn’t have time for that. I imagine.’
‘Do I have to call the police? I don’t want to.’