The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  “Can you find a picture of the meeting?”

  Fred Olsson turned his back on the three people who had popped up in his doorway and switched on the computer. The three visitors waited patiently.

  “They elected somebody from Kiruna, Sven Israelsson, onto the board,” said Fred Olsson; “I’ll do a search on him. If I look for Mauri Kallis I’m bound to get thousands of hits.”

  “I’ve got a vague memory of a gang of suits standing in the snow having their photo taken,” said Alf Björnfot. “I think the woman in the ark was in that picture.”

  Fred Olsson tapped away at his keyboard for a little while. Then he said:

  “There. Looks like it is her.”

  On the screen was a picture of a group of men in suits. In the center of the picture stood a woman.

  “Yes,” said Anna-Maria. “She’s got that antique nose, it kind of starts up between her eyebrows.”

  “Inna Wattrang, head of information,” read Alf Björnfot.

  “Bingo!” said Anna-Maria Mella. “Get her identified. Inform her next of kin. I wonder how she ended up on the marsh.”

  “Kallis Mining has a cabin in Abisko,” said Fred Olsson.

  “You’re joking!” exclaimed Anna-Maria.

  “It’s true! I know because my sister’s ex is a plumbing and heating engineer. And he was working up there when they built it. And it isn’t really a cabin. More like a proper house with top sports facilities, something like that.”

  Anna-Maria turned to Alf Björnfot.

  “No problem,” he said before she could get the question out. “I’ll sign a search warrant straightaway. Shall I ring Benny the locksmith?”

  “Please,” said Anna-Maria. “Let’s go!” she shouted, racing to her room to pick up her jacket. “We’ll do the briefing this afternoon instead!”

  Her voice could be heard from inside her office.

  “You come too, Fredde! Sven-Erik!”

  A minute later, they’d all disappeared. There was a sudden Sunday silence in the building. Alf Björnfot and Rebecka Martinsson were still standing in the corridor.

  “So,” said Alf Björnfot. “Where were we?”

  “We were drinking coffee,” Rebecka said, smiling. “It was just time for a top-up.”

  “Isn’t it beautiful,” said Anna-Maria Mella. “Like a tourist brochure.”

  They were driving along Norgevägen in her red Ford Escort. To the right of them lay Torneträsk. Clear blue sky. Sun and sparkling snow. Everywhere along the length of the lake were arks in every conceivable color and shape. On the other side of the road the mountains stretched away into the distance.

  The wind had dropped. But it hadn’t turned warm. Anna-Maria looked in among the birch trees and thought the snow had formed a solid crust. They might be able to use kick sledges in the forest.

  “Try looking at the road instead,” said Sven-Erik, who was sitting next to her.

  Kallis Mining’s mountain cabin was a large, timbered house. It was situated in an attractive spot down by the lake. In the opposite direction Nuolja Mountain towered above.

  “My sister’s ex told me about this place when he was working up here,” said Fred Olsson. “His father was involved in the building. It’s actually two chalets from Hälsingland that they’ve transported here. The timber is two hundred years old. And the sauna’s down there by the shore of the lake.”

  Benny the locksmith was sitting outside in his van. He wound down the window and shouted, “I’ve opened up, but I’ve got to go.” He raised his hand in a quick salute and drove away.

  The three police officers walked in. Anna-Maria thought she’d never seen anything like it. The hand-hewn silver-gray timber walls were sparsely decorated with small oil paintings featuring motifs from the mountains, and mirrors in heavy gilded frames. Enormous Indian-style wardrobes in pink and turquoise contrasted sharply with their simple surroundings. The ceiling had been opened up, with the beams exposed. The broad wooden floor planks were covered with rag rugs in every room but one: in front of the big open fire in the living room lay a polar bear skin with the head on and its mouth gaping open.

  “Good grief,” commented Anna-Maria.

  The kitchen, hall and living room were open plan; on one side were huge windows giving a view over the marsh, sparkling in the late winter sunshine. On the other side of the room the light filtered in through small high-set leaded windows with hand-blown glass in different shades.

  On the kitchen table stood a carton of milk and a packet of muesli, a used bowl and a spoon. On the draining board dirty plates were piled high, with the cutlery sticking out in between.

  “Ugh,” said Anna-Maria as she shook the carton of milk and heard the soured lumps clunking around inside.

  Not that her house was ever tidy. But to think that somebody could stay in such a fine place all by themselves and not keep it nice. That’s what she’d do if she ever had the chance to live like this. Strap her skis on outside the door and go for a long cross-country trek over the marsh. Come home and cook dinner. Listen to the radio while washing up, or just enjoy the silence and think her own thoughts with her hands in the warm water. Lie on that inviting sofa in the living room and light a fire, crackling in the hearth.

  “Perhaps these people aren’t the kind that wash up,” commented Sven-Erik. “There’s probably somebody who comes in and cleans up after them when they’ve gone.”

  “In that case we need to get hold of that person,” said Anna-Maria quickly.

  She opened the doors to the four bedrooms. Big double beds with Sami coverlets. Above the bed heads hung reindeer skins, silver gray against the silver gray walls.

  “Nice,” said Anna-Maria. “Why doesn’t my house look like this?”

  There were no wardrobes in the bedrooms; instead big American trunks and antique chests stood on the floor to store things in. Coat hangers hung from beautiful Indian folding screens and elegant hooks or horns on the wall. There was a sauna, a laundry room and a big drying cupboard. Next to the sauna was a large changing room with space for ski clothes and boots.

  In one of the bedrooms was an open suitcase. Clothes lay in a heap both in and out of the case. The bed was unmade.

  Anna-Maria poked about among the clothes.

  “A bit of a mess, but no sign of a struggle or a break-in,” said Fred Olsson. “No blood anywhere, nothing unusual. I’ll check the bathrooms.”

  “No, nothing’s happened here,” said Sven-Erik Stålnacke.

  Anna-Maria swore to herself. It would have been helpful if this had been the scene of the murder.

  “I wonder what she was doing here,” she said, eyeing a skirt that looked expensive, and a pair of silky stockings. “These aren’t exactly the clothes for a skiing holiday.”

  Fred Olsson reappeared behind them. He was holding a purse. It was made of black leather, with a gold-colored chain.

  “This was in the bathroom,” he said. “Prada. Ten to fifteen thousand kronor.”

  “Inside it?” asked Sven-Erik.

  “No, that’s how much it costs.”

  Fred Olsson tipped out the contents onto the unmade bed. He opened the wallet and held Inna Wattrang’s driving license up to Anna-Maria.

  Anna-Maria Mella nodded. It was definitely her. No doubt.

  She looked at the rest of the things that had fallen out of the bag. Tampons, nail file, lipstick, sunglasses, face powder, a load of yellow credit card slips, a pack of painkillers.

  “No cell phone,” she established.

  Fred Olsson and Sven-Erik nodded. There was no telephone anywhere else either. That might mean the perpetrator was somebody she knew, somebody whose number was programmed into the phone.

  “We’ll take her stuff to the station,” said Anna-Maria. “And we’ll seal this off anyway.”

  Her glance fell on the purse again.

  “It’s wet,” she said.

  “I was just coming to that,” said Fred Olsson. “It was in the sink. The tap must hav
e been dripping.”

  They looked at each other in surprise.

  “Strange,” said Anna-Maria.

  Sven-Erik’s substantial moustache came to life beneath his nose, moving in and out and from side to side.

  “Can you take a walk around the outside?” asked Anna-Maria. “I’ll just go round inside one more time.”

  Fred Olsson and Sven-Erik Stålnacke disappeared outside. Anna-Maria walked around slowly.

  If she didn’t die here, she thought, the killer has at least been here. And he was the one who took the phone. But of course she might have had it with her when she went out running, or whatever she was doing. In her pocket.

  She looked in the washbasin where the purse had been. What had it been doing there? She opened the bathroom cabinet. Completely empty. Typical for a place that’s going to be used by guests and employees or rented out; nothing personal is left behind.

  I can assume that any personal items that are here were hers, thought Anna-Maria.

  There were a few microwave meals in the refrigerator. Three of the four bedrooms were completely untouched.

  There’s nothing more to see here, she thought, walking back into the hallway.

  On a white bureau in the hall stood an old lamp. It would have looked kitsch anywhere else, but it fitted in well here, thought Anna-Maria. The base was made of porcelain. It had a painted landscape on it that looked as if it might be from the German Alps, with a mountain in the background and a magnificent stag in the foreground. The shade was the color of cognac, with a fringe. The switch was just below the lightbulb fitting.

  Anna-Maria tried to switch it on. When it didn’t work, she discovered that it wasn’t because the bulb had gone, but because the electric cord was missing.

  In the base of the lamp there was just a hole where the cord had been.

  What have they done with it? she wondered.

  Maybe they’d bought the lamp at a flea market or in an antique shop, and it was already like that. Perhaps they’d put it on the bureau thinking they’d fix it soon, it could stand there for the time being.

  Anna-Maria had thousands of things like that at home. Things they were going to fix any year now. But in the end, you just got used to the defects. The front of the dishwasher, for example. It had been made in the same style as the kitchen cupboards, but it had come loose about a hundred years ago and now the door of the dishwasher was too light for the spring. The whole family had got used to loading and unloading the dishwasher with one foot on the door so that it wouldn’t close by itself. She did the same thing in other people’s houses without even thinking about it. Robert’s sister always laughed at her when Anna-Maria was helping load their machine.

  Perhaps they’d just moved the lamp and the cord had got caught between the wall and a piece of furniture, and been pulled out. But that could be dangerous. If the cord was still plugged in, but not attached to the lamp.

  She thought about the fire risk and then she thought about Gustav, her three-year-old, and about all the plastic covers on the sockets at home to keep them child-safe.

  She got a fleeting picture in her head of Gustav when he was eight months old, and crawling everywhere. What a nightmare. A plug in a socket with a broken cord lying on the floor. The copper wires clearly visible inside the plastic covering. And Gustav, whose main method of investigating the world around him was putting things in his mouth. She quickly pushed the picture aside.

  Then it struck her. Electric shock. She’d seen several during her career. God, there was that guy who’d died five years ago. She’d gone along to confirm that it was an accident. He’d been standing on the draining board in his bare feet, fiddling with a ceiling light. The skin on the soles of his feet had been badly burned.

  Inna Wattrang had a circular burn around her ankle.

  You could imagine someone ripping an ordinary cord out of a lamp, thought Anna-Maria. Opening it up and removing the plastic covering and winding one of the copper wires around someone’s ankle.

  She flung the door open and shouted to her colleagues. They came striding quickly through the deep snow.

  “Bloody hell!” she yelled. “She died here! I’m sure of it! Call in Tintin and Krister Eriksson.”

  Krister Eriksson, inspector and dog handler, arrived at the scene almost an hour after his colleagues had rung him. They’d been lucky; he was often out and about on duty with Tintin.

  Tintin was a black Alsatian bitch. An excellent tracker dog, good at finding dead bodies. Eighteen months earlier she’d found a murdered priest in Nedre Vuolusjärvi; someone had wound an iron chain around his body, then sunk it in the lake.

  Krister Eriksson looked like some kind of alien. His face had been badly burned in an accident when he was a youngster. He had no nose, just two holes in his face. His ears looked like a mouse’s ears. He had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. His eyes looked very strange, because his eyelids had been reconstructed using plastic surgery.

  Anna-Maria looked at his shiny pink skin, like a pig’s, and her thoughts bounced back to Inna Wattrang and her burned ankle.

  I must ring Pohjanen, she thought.

  Krister Eriksson put Tintin on the lead. She was dancing around his feet, whimpering with expectation.

  “She always gets so excited,” said Krister, disentangling himself from the lead. “You still have to hold her back, otherwise she searches a bit too quickly, and then she might miss something.”

  Krister Eriksson and Tintin went into the house alone. Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson plowed around the corner and looked in through the window.

  Anna-Maria Mella went and sat in her car and rang Lars Pohjanen. She told him about the missing cord.

  “Well?” she said.

  “The burn mark around her ankle could certainly be the result of a wire conducting electricity through her body,” said Pohjanen.

  “The end of a cord, split and wound around her ankle?”

  “Definitely. And you use the other end of the cord to transmit the electricity.”

  “Has she been tortured?”

  “Maybe. It could also be a game that got out of hand, of course. Not very common, but it has happened. There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are traces of stickiness on her ankles and wrists. You should get the technicians to check the furniture in the house. She’s been taped, it could just be that her hands and feet were taped together. But she could have been bound to a piece of furniture, bedposts or a chair or…Just hang on.”

  It took a minute. Then she heard the doctor’s hoarse voice again.

  “I’ve just put my gloves on and I’m looking at her now,” he said. “There’s a tiny but distinct mark on her neck.”

  “The mark from the other part of the electric cable,” said Anna-Maria.

  “A lamp cord, you said?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Then there should be traces of copper where the epidermis has melted. I’ll take a tissue sample and do a histology test, then you’ll know for sure. But that’s probably what happened. Something certainly interrupted the rhythm of her heart. And she ended up in a state of shock. That would explain the fact that she’d chewed her tongue, and the marks of her own nails on her palms.”

  Sven-Erik Stålnacke knocked on the car window and pointed at the house.

  “I’ve got to go,” said Anna-Maria. “I’ll call you later.”

  She got out of the car.

  “Tintin’s found something,” said Sven-Erik.

  Krister Eriksson was standing in the kitchen with Tintin. She was tugging at the lead, barking and scrabbling madly at the floor.

  “She’s marking something there,” said Krister Eriksson, pointing to a spot on the kitchen floor between the sink and the stove. “I can’t see anything, but she seems convinced.”

  Anna-Maria looked at Tintin, who was now howling with frustration at not being allowed to get to her goal.

  The floor was covered with turquoi
se linoleum with an Oriental design. Anna-Maria walked over and looked closely at it. Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson accompanied her.

  “I can’t see anything,” said Anna-Maria.

  “Nope,” said Fred Olsson, shaking his head.

  “Could there be something underneath the floor covering?” wondered Anna-Maria.

  “There’s definitely something,” said Krister Eriksson; it was all he could do to hold on to Tintin.

  “Okay,” said Anna-Maria, checking her watch. “We’ve got time to have lunch at the tourist station while we’re waiting for the technicians.”

  By two-thirty in the afternoon the scene-of-crime team had taken up the linoleum floor covering. When Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson got back to the house, it was lying in the hallway, rolled up and wrapped in paper.

  “Look at this,” said one of the technicians to Anna-Maria, pointing at a tiny nick in the wood that had been underneath the linoleum.

  In the little nick there was something brown that looked like dried blood.

  “That dog must have one hell of a nose.”

  “Yes,” said Anna-Maria. “She’s very good.”

  “It has to be blood, given the dog’s reaction,” said the technician. “Linoleum is such fantastic stuff for floors. My mother had it on her floor, and it looked good for over thirty years. It heals itself, if it’s damaged.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if it’s damaged in some way, cut or something, it pulls itself back together so that it doesn’t show. It looks as if something sharp and pointed, a weapon or a tool, went straight through and cut into the wood underneath. Then the blood ran down into the nick. The linoleum knitted itself back together, and once you’ve cleaned the floor, there’s no trace. We’ll send the blood, if that’s what it is, for analysis and then we’ll know if it’s Inna Wattrang’s.”

  “I’d put money on it,” said Anna-Maria. “This is where she died.”

  It was eight o’clock on Sunday evening when Anna-Maria pulled on her jacket and rang Robert to tell him she was going to call it a day. He didn’t sound tired or annoyed, just asked if she’d eaten and said there was food ready to be warmed up for her. Gustav was asleep, they’d been out playing on the sledge. Petter had been with them too, despite the fact that he usually stayed indoors. Jenny had gone to a friend’s, he said, adding quickly that she was on her way home right now before Anna-Maria had even managed to think “school tomorrow.”