The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  When he married Ebba, he placed himself against Inna. For a while, she even stopped being so important to him. Difficult to put your finger on it exactly, but the power base between him and the Wattrangs altered. He became less dependent. Stopped having to stress the fact that he’d be working on the weekends so they wouldn’t think he cared if they didn’t invite him along to whatever they were doing.

  Now he’s giving back what he took from Inna then. At this very moment he doesn’t think it’s something he has to defend.

  He turns onto his side and looks at her.

  “Do you know why I married Ebba?” he asks.

  Inna is inhaling smoke and can’t reply.

  “Or to put it more correctly, why I fell in love with her,” Mauri rambles on. “Because she had to walk a kilometer to school every day when she was little.”

  Inna bubbles up with laughter beside him.

  “It’s true. They lived at Vikstaholm when she was growing up. They had to sell up later, but in any case…to somebody like me…in any case…to some upstart…But in any case!”

  He’s finding it so difficult to follow the thread of the story that Inna just lies there laughing beside him. He goes on:

  “She had transport to school, and once she told me how she had to walk a kilometer from the palace to the road. And she told me she remembered the wood pigeons cooing in the bushes as she walked along the track on her own early in the mornings. That just captivated me completely. The picture of that little girl, walking along toward the road with a bag that was too big for her over one shoulder. The morning silence, broken by the cooing of the doves.”

  He’s a pig and he knows it as soon as the words leave his mouth. Chop off Ebba’s head and serve it to Inna on a silver platter. That picture of Ebba has been a sacred little thing. Now he’s screwed it up like a piece of garbage.

  But Inna never thinks the way he expects her to. She stops sniggering and points out some of the constellations she recognizes as they begin to emerge more clearly.

  Then she says:

  “Actually, I think that sounds like an excellent reason to marry someone. Perhaps the best reason I’ve ever heard.”

  She rolls over onto her side and looks at him. They’ve never had sex. In some way she’s made him understand that what they have together is much greater than that. They’re friends. Her boyfriends, or whatever you want to call them, they come and go. Mauri is never going to be an ex.

  They’re lying there face-to-face. He takes hold of her hand. It’s because he’s been smoking that he’s suddenly filled with the feeling that love doesn’t make you vulnerable. It costs nothing to love. You become Gandhi, Jesus, and the starlit sky.

  “Inna…” he says.

  And then his thoughts run around desperately looking for words he never uses.

  “I’m glad you moved here,” he says in the end.

  Inna smiles. He likes the fact that she’s smiling and not saying anything. That she doesn’t say “I’m glad too” or “You’re wonderful.” He’s learned how easily she uses words like that. He lets go of her hand before she has time to say anything.

  Anna-Maria Mella sank down in Rebecka Martinsson’s armchair. It was quarter past two in the afternoon.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Not so well,” said Rebecka with a half smile. “I’m getting nowhere fast.”

  And I’m not getting any messages from Måns, she thought, glancing at her computer.

  “Oh, one of those days. You sort out one pile and turn it into three new piles. But you were in court this morning, weren’t you?”

  “I was, and that went well. It’s just this…”

  Rebecka waved a hand at the documents and papers covering her desk.

  Anna-Maria smiled mischievously at Rebecka.

  “Damn!” she said. “This conversation’s taken completely the wrong turning. I was going to ask you to carry on helping us with Inna Wattrang.”

  Rebecka Martinsson was pleased.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Go ahead and ask.”

  “I’d really like you to check her out. The kind of thing that shows up on the register. I don’t really know what I’m looking for…”

  “Anything unusual,” supplied Rebecka. “Regular payments. In or out. A sudden sale of personal property. Shall I check out her financial involvement in Kallis Mining as well? Whether she went in as a private investor? If she sold or made a profit in some particularly noteworthy way? What she’s made or lost money on?”

  “Yes please,” said Anna-Maria, getting to her feet. “I’ve got to go now. I was thinking of going up to the house where she was murdered, so I’m going to get on the road now before it gets dark.”

  “Can I come with you?” asked Rebecka. “It would be interesting to see the place.”

  Anna-Maria gritted her teeth and made a rapid choice. She ought to say no, of course; Rebecka had no business visiting the scene of the murder. Plus there was the risk that she might collapse. What effect might the thought of a murder in that kind of location have on her? It was impossible to hazard a guess. Anna-Maria was no psychologist. On the other hand, Rebecka was being kind enough to help out with the investigation. She had a knowledge of financial matters that nobody on Anna-Maria’s team could even come close to. There wasn’t the slightest chance of Anna-Maria finding somebody on the economic crimes squad who would be prepared to spend time randomly searching for something or other that Anna-Maria wasn’t entirely clear about. Besides which, Rebecka was an adult who could take responsibility for her own health.

  “We need to get a move on then,” she said.

  Anna-Maria Mella enjoyed the drive up to Abisko.

  It doesn’t get any better than this, she thought. With the snow and the sunshine and everybody out and about on their snowmobiles and their skis.

  Rebecka Martinsson was sitting in the passenger seat leafing through the preliminary investigation notes, reading and talking to Anna-Maria at the same time.

  “You’ve got four children, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Anna-Maria, and started telling Rebecka about them.

  Well, she’s asking, she thought. So I’ll answer her.

  She told her about Marcus, who was in his final year at high school. They didn’t see him all that often.

  “Although of course sometimes he needs money. And sometimes he comes home to change. I don’t think his clothes have had a chance to get dirty at all, but there’s a hell of a lot of showering and changing and spraying. Jenny’s thirteen and she’s the same. Petter will be nine next week; he plays Bionicle and he really is Mummy’s boy. He’s the complete opposite of the older two. He never goes round to see friends, he’s always at home on his own. And that’s no good either, of course. Then you start worrying about that.”

  “And then there’s Gustav.”

  “Mmm,” said Anna-Maria, stopping herself just in time before she started talking about the last time Robert had taken Gustav to the nursery. There were limits. It was only other mothers who would find that kind of thing amusing.

  There was silence. It was on the night that Gustav was born that Rebecka had killed three men in a cottage in Jiekajärvi, in self-defense. She’d been stabbed, and if Anna-Maria’s colleagues hadn’t got there in time, she would have died.

  “Who likes kissing his old mum,” said Rebecka.

  “But actually he’s Daddy’s biggest fan. The other day Robert was standing in the bathroom having a pee—I’m married to one of those men who think you’ll turn into a homosexual if you sit down, and who’s going to clean up when the boys do the same thing…Anyway, he was standing there having a pee, and Gustav was standing beside him with an expression of total admiration on his face. ‘Daddy,’ he said reverently, ‘you’ve got a huge willy! It’s like an elephant’s willy!’ You should have seen my husband after that. He kind of…”

  She ended the sentence with a flap of her arm and a hoarse cockcrow.

 
Rebecka laughed.

  “But it’s Marcus who’s your favorite, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, well, you love them all just as much in different ways,” said Anna-Maria, keeping her eyes on the road.

  How the hell could Rebecka guess that? Anna-Maria tried to go back a few sentences. It was true. She loved Marcus in a special way. They had always been more than just mother and son. Friends too. Although it wasn’t something she ever allowed to show, or talked about; she hardly even admitted it to herself.

  When they got out of the car at Kallis Mining’s holiday house, Anna-Maria was thinking that she almost felt as if she’d been conned. Rebecka had got her to talk about herself, her family and the job all the way up. Rebecka hadn’t said a word about herself.

  Anna-Maria unlocked the door and showed Rebecka the kitchen, where the flooring had been ripped up.

  “We’re still waiting for the results from the lab, but we’re assuming at this point that it was Inna Wattrang’s blood in this little nick here. So we think she was killed right here. We’ve found traces of tape on her wrists and ankles, and on a chair like those.”

  She pointed to the dark oak kitchen chairs.

  “And we’re hoping to find out what kind of tape it was. And I’m also waiting for the medical examiner’s report. Although on a preliminary basis he has said that she wasn’t raped, at any rate…but you know how it is, you wonder if she’d had intercourse. That would suggest even more strongly that there was some kind of sex game involved….”

  Rebecka nodded to show she was listening, and looked around.

  If I’m waiting for someone, thought Rebecka, as the picture of Måns Wenngren took shape in her head, I put on my best underwear. What else do I do? Clean up, of course, tidy things away so that everything will be nice and cozy.

  She looked at the dirty dishes in the kitchen. The empty milk carton.

  “The kitchen’s a mess,” she said hesitantly to Anna-Maria.

  “You should see what my place looks like sometimes,” muttered Anna-Maria.

  And I buy nice food, Rebecka continued her train of thought. And something to drink.

  She opened the refrigerator. A few microwave meals.

  “Was this all there was in the refrigerator?”

  “Yes.”

  In that case it wasn’t somebody new, thought Rebecka. She didn’t need to make that kind of effort. But why the sports clothes?

  She couldn’t get it to make sense. She closed her eyes and started again.

  He’s on his way, she thought. For some reason I don’t need to clean up and I don’t need to shop. He calls me from Arlanda.

  She thought about Måns’s drawling voice on the telephone.

  “Telephone,” she said to Anna-Maria without opening her eyes. “Have you got her cell phone?”

  “No, we didn’t find one. But we’re checking her out with the networks, of course.”

  “Computer?”

  “No.”

  Rebecka opened her eyes and looked out through the kitchen window toward Torneträsk.

  “A woman like that with a job like that,” she said. “She must have had both a laptop and a cell phone, obviously. She was found in an ark out here. Don’t you think you should send the divers down to check if the person who carried her to the ark dropped her phone through the fishing hole in the ice?”

  “Good idea,” said Anna-Maria without hesitation.

  She ought to feel grateful, of course. Or say something complimentary to Rebecka. But she just couldn’t do it. All she could feel was anger. Because she hadn’t thought of it straightaway. And what the fuck were her colleagues there for!

  Anna-Maria Mella looked at her watch. The divers would have time to search before dark if they came up right away.

  By quarter past four on Monday afternoon a team of three divers had arrived, along with Sven-Erik. They had sawn a hole in the ice. It was one meter in diameter. They had worked with an electric drill and chainsaws, and getting the thick block of ice out had been a real challenge. Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Rebecka Martinsson had all helped the divers with the lifting and carrying. The sun was beating down, and beneath their soaking wet sweaters their back muscles were aching from the exertion.

  But now the sun was beginning to disappear, the temperature was dropping and they were starting to feel the cold.

  “We’ll need to make sure we cordon this off and mark it really clearly afterwards so nobody falls in,” said Sven-Erik Stålnacke.

  “Still, it was lucky it was just here,” the diver looking after the line said to Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke. “It shouldn’t be too deep; we’ll see.”

  The reserve diver was sitting on a mat by the edge of the hole in the ice. He raised his hand in greeting as his colleague disappeared beneath the ice with a seventy-five-watt flashlight. The lineman paid out the line, a few air bubbles floated to the surface, the diver swam below the ice toward the ark where Inna Wattrang had been found.

  Anna-Maria shivered. Her wet clothes were drawing the warmth out of her body. She ought to run around to keep warm, but she just couldn’t do it.

  That’s what Rebecka was doing. Running along the snowmobile tracks. It would soon start to go dark.

  “She thinks we’re complete Muppets, of course,” said Anna-Maria to Sven-Erik. “First of all she has to explain fission and fusion and exchanging capital investments, and now she has to teach us how to do our job.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” said Sven-Erik. “She just happened to think of something before you got there. You can handle that, can’t you?”

  “No,” said Anna-Maria, only half seriously.

  After twelve minutes the diver surfaced. He took the breathing tube out of his mouth.

  “Nothing on the bottom, as far as I could see,” he said. “But I found this, I don’t know if it’s anything important. It was lying there floating under the ice fifteen meters from the hole, beneath the ark.”

  He threw a bundle of cloth onto the ice. The lineman and the reserve diver helped their colleague up out of the water while Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik undid the bundle.

  It was a man’s beige coat made of poplin. Windproof, with a belt and a thin lining.

  “Might not be anything,” said the diver.

  He had been given a mug of hot coffee.

  “People sling all kinds of crap in the water,” he said. “It’s such a fucking tip down there. Old meatball packaging, plastic bags…”

  “I think it is something,” said Anna-Maria slowly.

  On the left shoulder and the back of the coat there were faint pink stains.

  “Blood?” wondered Sven-Erik.

  “From your mouth to the ear of God,” replied Anna-Maria, raising her hands and pretending to pray to a higher power. Let it be blood.

  TUESDAY MARCH 18, 2005

  The avenue of lime trees leading to Mauri Kallis’s home, the Regla estate, ran a kilometer and a half from the main road. The trees were old ladies, some two hundred years old, gnarled yet slender, some of them as hollow as oaks. They stood there neatly, two by two, informing visitors that order had reigned here for many hundreds of years. In this place the occupants sat nicely at the table and observed a polite and civilized manner.

  After a kilometer the avenue was interrupted by an iron gate. Four hundred meters farther on there was another iron gate, set in a whitewashed brick wall surrounding the garden. The iron gates were cleverly crafted, two meters high, opened by means of a remote control in the residents’ cars. Visitors, on the other hand, had to stop outside the first gate and use the entryphone.

  The main building was a white house with a black slate roof, pillars on either side of the entrance, wings off to the sides, and leaded windows. The décor followed the style of the second half of the eighteenth century. Only in the bathroom had the owners gone for a completely modern style—Philippe Starck.

  Regla was such a beautiful place that Mauri could hardly bear it that first sum
mer. It was easier in the winter. In the summer he was often struck by a sense of unreality as he drove or walked along the avenue. The light filtering through the tops of the lime trees, falling like a melody onto the road. He was almost revolted by the pastoral idyll in which he was living.

  Mauri Kallis was lying awake in his bedroom on the second floor. He didn’t want to look at the clock, because if it was quarter to six, he’d have to get up in quarter of an hour, which meant it was too late to go back to sleep. On the other hand, it might be an hour before it was time to get up. He looked at the clock; he always did in the end. Quarter past four. He’d slept for three hours.

  He had to get more sleep, otherwise anybody could see the whole thing was going to go to hell any day now. He tried to breathe calmly, to relax. He turned his pillow over.

  When he’d managed to lull himself into a kind of half sleep, the dream returned.

  In the dream he was sitting on the edge of his bed. His room looked exactly as it did in reality. Sparsely furnished, with the slender desk inlaid with wood, and the beautifully worn Gustavian chair with upholstered arms. His purpose-built dressing room in walnut and frosted glass, where his suits and perfectly ironed shirts hung in rows, his handmade shoes in a special cupboard with cedarwood shoe trees. The walls painted with linseed oil paint, pale blue with the faintest of color variations; he had rejected borders and decorative paint effects when his wife was renovating the place.

  But in the dream he could see Inna’s shadow on the wall. And when he turned his head, she was sitting on the window seat. Behind her there was no glittering Lake Mälaren. Instead he could see the outlines of Terrassen, the apartment block where he grew up, through the window.

  She was scratching and tearing at the watery circular mark around her ankle. The flesh was catching under her nails.

  He was wide awake again now. He could hear the beating of his own heart. Calm, calm. No, it was no good, he couldn’t stand it, he’d have to get up.