The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  She was like a sister and a best friend, thought Ebba.

  Things had changed later. When Ebba and Mauri had their first child. He was traveling more than he used to. When he was at home, he was always on the telephone. Or lost in his own thoughts.

  She had been at a loss to understand it. The fact that he didn’t seem to care about his own son.

  “You’ll never have this time again,” she’d said to him. “Don’t you understand that?”

  She remembered her frustrating attempts at conversation. Sometimes she was angry, accusing. Sometimes calm, measured. He hadn’t changed at all.

  The renovation of Inna’s and Diddi’s houses was complete, and they moved into Regla.

  Inna lost interest in Ebba at the same time as Mauri did.

  They’re at a cocktail party at the American Embassy. Inna is standing out on the terrace chatting to a group of middle-aged men. She’s wearing a low-cut dress. One of her black stockings is torn. Ebba goes over to them, laughs at some joke, and whispers discreetly in Inna’s ear.

  “You’ve got a huge ladder in your stockings. I’ve got a spare pair in my bag, come to the ladies’ room and you can change.”

  Inna gives her a quick look, her expression impatient and annoyed.

  “Don’t be so insecure,” she says crossly.

  Then she turns her attention to the rest of the group, pushing her shoulder forward imperceptibly so that Ebba almost ends up behind her.

  This effectively excludes her from the conversation, and she lopes away to look for Mauri. She longs to get home to her baby. She shouldn’t have come.

  She has the strangest feeling that Inna stood there in the ladies’ and tore her stocking deliberately. That huge ladder makes the women gasp in horror. But it doesn’t bother the men. And Inna is as open and natural as ever.

  It’s a signal, thinks Ebba. That ladder in her stocking. It’s a signal.

  It’s just that Ebba can’t work out what kind of signal. And who it’s aimed at.

  Ebba got up to fetch another cup of coffee. At that moment there was a knock at the door, and they heard Diddi’s wife, Ulrika, shout “Hello” out in the hallway.

  A second later she appeared in the doorway. She had the baby on her hip. Her hair was caught up in a ponytail so no one would notice that it hadn’t been washed. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  “Have you heard from Diddi?” she asked in a voice that was on the point of breaking. “He didn’t come home on Monday after you’d been to Kiruna. And he hasn’t been home since. I’ve tried calling his cell phone, but…”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe I ought to call the police,” she said.

  “Absolutely not,” said Mauri Kallis, without looking up from the paper. “The last thing I need is that kind of attention. On Friday evening representatives of the African Mining Trust are coming…”

  “You’re out of your mind!” yelled Ulrika.

  The child in her arms burst into tears, but she didn’t appear to notice.

  “I haven’t heard from him, do you understand that? And Inna’s been murdered. I know something’s happened to him. I can feel it. And you’re thinking about a business dinner!”

  “It’s those ‘business dinners’ that put food on your table and pay for the house you live in and the car you drive. And I know Inna’s dead. Does it make me a better person if I lose my grip on everything and let us go under? I’m doing everything I can to hold myself and this company together. Unlike Diddi! Wouldn’t you say?”

  Mikael Wiik stared into his glass of juice and pretended he wasn’t there. Ebba Kallis stood up.

  “Come along now,” she said, sounding like a mother.

  She went over to Ulrika and took the sobbing child from her.

  “He’ll be home soon, I promise you. Maybe he just needs to be on his own for a while. It’s been a shock. For all of us.”

  As she made the last comment she was looking at Mauri, who was staring down at his newspaper without appearing to read a single line.

  If I could choose between horses and people, thought Ebba Kallis, I wouldn’t need to think about it for one second.

  Anna-Maria Mella looked around Rebecka Martinsson’s office for somewhere to sit.

  “Chuck those on the floor,” said Rebecka, nodding toward the files that were occupying the visitor’s armchair.

  “Haven’t got the strength,” said Anna-Maria exhaustedly, and sat down on top of the files. “He doesn’t exist.”

  “Santa Claus?”

  Anna-Maria couldn’t help smiling, despite the fact that she was so disappointed.

  “The guy who rented the car. The one who was wearing a light-colored coat like the one the divers found in the water under the place where we found the body. John McNamara. He doesn’t exist.”

  “In what way does he not exist? Is he a complete figment of somebody’s imagination, or has he died?”

  “Died, eighteen months ago. And the person who rented the car was using his identity.”

  Anna-Maria Mella rubbed her whole hand over her face, up and down. She did that sometimes. Rebecka was fascinated by the gesture; it was so unusual for a woman.

  “That means we can probably discount the idea of a sex game with somebody she knew that just went wrong,” said Anna-Maria. “He came up here to kill her, right? Otherwise why would he use a false identity?”

  “So, his name wasn’t John McNamara,” said Rebecka. “But he was a foreigner?”

  “The guy from Avis thinks he spoke English with a British accent. And it has to be him. He was wearing the same kind of light-colored coat as the divers found in the water under the ark.”

  “Have you heard anything from the lab?”

  Anna-Maria shook her head.

  “But it has to be her blood on the coat. It can’t be a coincidence. How many people wear a light summer coat like that in the winter? Nobody.”

  She looked Rebecka straight in the eye.

  “It was good that you had the idea of sending the divers down under the ark,” she said.

  “But that was to look for the cell phone,” said Rebecka, with a modest shrug of her shoulders. “And it wasn’t down there.”

  Anna-Maria linked her hands behind the back of her neck, leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

  “He didn’t kill her straightaway,” she said in an almost dreamlike voice. “He tortured her first. Taped her to the kitchen chair and electrocuted her.”

  She chewed her tongue to pieces, thought Rebecka.

  Anna-Maria opened her eyes and leaned forward.

  “We have to choose which clues to work on,” she said. “We don’t have the resources to follow everything up.”

  “Do you think this was a professional hit?”

  “Could be.”

  “Why do you torture someone?” asked Rebecka.

  “To cause them pain, because you hate them,” said Anna-Maria.

  “Because you want information,” Rebecka fired back.

  “Because you want to…warn somebody.”

  “Mauri Kallis?”

  “Why not?” said Anna-Maria. “Blackmail. Don’t do this or this, otherwise this is what’s going to happen to you and your family.”

  “Kidnapping?” ventured Rebecka. “And they didn’t pay up?”

  Anna-Maria nodded.

  “I need to talk to Kallis and the brother again. But if it’s to do with the company, they’re not going to say a word.”

  She broke off and smiled, shaking her head.

  “What?” asked Rebecka.

  “These people. In this job you meet ordinary, middle-class people who think having anything to do with the police is rather unpleasant. Everybody has at least driven too fast at some time, so there’s a kind of respect there mixed with fear.”

  “And?”

  “Or you’re dealing with villains who hate the cops, but there’s a kind of respect there too. But these people. It feels as if they think we’re nothing b
ut uneducated pond life whose job is to keep the streets clean and stay out of their business.”

  Anna-Maria checked the time on her cell phone.

  “Do you fancy some lunch? I was thinking of going to the stir-fry place in the old Tempo building.”

  On the way out Anna-Maria Mella knocked on Sven-Erik Stålnacke’s office door.

  “Do you want to join us for lunch?” she asked.

  “Why not,” said Sven-Erik, trying to hide how pleased he was.

  Shit, thought Anna-Maria. How lonely is he these days? Since that cat of his died he’s always like a wilting plant.

  That morning she’d listened to the morning Thought for the Day on the car radio by mistake. Somebody had been talking about the importance of just stopping, the importance of silence.

  A message like that must be a real slap in the face for so many people, thought Anna-Maria. It must be bloody silent around Sven-Erik when he isn’t working.

  She promised herself that she’d take the whole group out for some fun when this investigation was over. Not that she had any entertainment funds to speak of in the budget. But an evening’s bowling and a pizza, at any rate.

  Then of course she thought that Sven-Erik himself could suggest they did something.

  They walked along Hjalmar Lundbohmsvägen, turned up Geologgatan and went into the old Tempo building. Nobody seemed to have anything to say.

  Rebecka was a lonely sort of person too, thought Anna-Maria. No, she’d much rather have her life full of bloody kids who left their clothes in a pile on the floor and a man who has some kind of built-in fault in his system that means he can never actually finish anything. If he cooks dinner, he doesn’t clear away afterwards. And if he clears away after dinner, he never wipes the table and the draining board.

  But I’d never swap my life for hers, thought Anna-Maria as they were hanging their coats over the back of their chairs in the restaurant and going up to pay for lunch. Even if she does have an incredibly flat stomach and can give all her energy to her job. Although sometimes you could envy her the ability to focus completely on the job.

  There had been rumors about Rebecka when she’d started in the prosecutor’s office. That she snapped at the old misery-guts who worked there for no reason. That she sorted out all the case proceedings herself, wrote all the summons applications herself, the old biddies in the office in Gällivare didn’t need to come up to Kiruna.

  Anna-Maria’s colleagues saw her in court sometimes when they were called as witnesses. Sharp and well prepared, they said. And they were pleased. They were on the same side in court, after all. The bloody defense lawyers had a fight on their hands.

  Just wait till the kids have left home, thought Anna-Maria, spooning chicken and vegetable stir-fry with rice onto her plate. Then I’ll be piling up completed investigations on her desk.

  Her thoughts landed guiltily in the middle of a pile of investigations that had been put to one side because of the murder.

  Then she pulled herself together and turned her attention to Rebecka and Sven-Erik.

  They were exchanging cat stories. Sven-Erik had just been telling her something about Manne, and now it was her turn.

  “They’re such characters,” she said, sprinkling soy sauce on her rice. “My grandmother’s cats were all just called ‘kitty.’ But of course I still remember them. I remember a time when Grandmother had two dogs and Daddy had one, so there were three dogs in the house. And then we got a new kitten. Whenever we got new kittens they were fed on the worktop; they were so scared of the dogs at first, and were too nervous down on the floor. But this one! First of all he ate all his own food. Then he jumped down on the floor and emptied the dogs’ bowls.”

  Sven-Erik laughed as he worked his way through the hottest dish on the buffet.

  “You should have seen them,” she went on. “If he’d been a dog there would have been a fight, but they just didn’t know what to do with this little guy. They looked at us as if to say: ‘What’s he doing? Can you take him away, please?’ On the second day, he attacked the lead dog. Threw himself at him without a trace of fear, and ended up hanging from the skin of Jussi’s throat. And Jussi! He was just so nice. And it was beneath his dignity to acknowledge this little irritation. He just sat there with the kitten hanging round his neck. The cat was doing his best to fight, scrabbling away with his back legs. And Jussi was trying to hang on to his dignity. Completely miserable.”

  “‘What’s he doing? Can you take him away, please?’” Sven-Erik repeated.

  Rebecka laughed.

  “Exactly. Then he started having some toilet problems because of all the dog food he was bolting down just to be difficult. But he was so little he couldn’t manage to climb right into the litter tray, and he soiled himself. Daddy rinsed him off under the tap, but he still smelled fairly unpleasant. Then he went and lay down in the biggest of the dog baskets, and none of the dogs dared to move him out, and they didn’t want to lie down next to smelly pants. We had two dog baskets in the hallway. The cat lay there on his own in the bigger of the two, snoring away in comfort. Our three big dogs piled in together in the smaller basket, looking soulfully at us as we walked past. That cat ruled the place until he died.”

  “How did he die?” asked Sven-Erik.

  “Don’t know, he just disappeared.”

  “That’s the worst thing of all,” said Sven-Erik, mopping up the spicy sauce from his plate with a piece of bread. “Here comes somebody who certainly doesn’t understand the first thing about cats.”

  Anna-Maria and Rebecka followed Sven-Erik’s eyes and saw Inspector Tommy Rantakyrö approaching their table. When Sven-Erik’s cat had disappeared, he’d joked injudiciously with a grieving Sven-Erik. Fortunately, Tommy was blissfully ignorant of the fact that his sins had not been forgiven.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said.

  He handed some papers to Anna-Maria.

  “Inna Wattrang’s incoming and outgoing calls on her cell phone,” he said.

  “But,” he went on, holding up another piece of paper, “this was the company phone. She also had a private subscription.”

  “Why?” said Anna-Maria, taking the paper.

  Tommy Rantakyrö shrugged his shoulders.

  “How should I know? Maybe she wasn’t allowed to make private calls from the cell phone.”

  Rebecka Martinsson laughed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I forget you’re employed by the government. So am I nowadays, nothing wrong with that. But I mean, how much did she earn a month? Almost ninety thousand kronor, before bonuses. That means you have a job that owns you. You have to be accessible all the time, and the fact that you can make private calls is probably the least of your fringe benefits.”

  “So why, then?” asked Tommy Rantakyrö, slightly hurt.

  “The company can check the company phone,” mused Anna-Maria. “She probably wanted a phone that was guaranteed to be private. I want the name, address and shoe size of every single person she’s spoken to on this phone.”

  She waved the list from the private cell phone.

  Tommy Rantakyrö raised his index and middle fingers in a salute, indicating that her orders would be carried out.

  Anna-Maria Mella checked the printouts again.

  “No calls in the days immediately before the murder; that’s a shame.”

  “What kind of subscription was it?” asked Rebecka Martinsson.

  “Comviq,” said Anna-Maria, “so there’s no network coverage up there.”

  “Abisko is small, though,” said Rebecka. “If she’s made any calls it has to be from the payphone in the tourist station. It might be interesting to compare the outgoing calls from there with the lists from the cell phones.”

  Tommy Rantakyrö looked exhausted at the thought.

  “But that could be several hundred calls,” he whimpered.

  “I don’t think so, actually,” said Rebecka. “If she arrived on Thursday and was murdered sometime betwee
n Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning, that’s less than two days, so there can’t be more than twenty or so calls. People are out skiing or sitting in the bar; I don’t think they sit in a telephone box unless they have to.”

  “Check it out,” said Anna-Maria to Tommy Rantakyrö.

  “Red alert,” said Sven-Erik, his mouth full of bread.

  Per-Erik Seppälä, a journalist with the local Norrbotten television station, was walking toward their table. Anna-Maria turned the printouts facedown.

  Per-Erik said hello. He spent a little extra time looking at Rebecka Martinsson. So that was what she actually looked like. He knew she’d moved back into town and started working for the prosecutor’s office, but he’d never met her. He found it difficult not to stare at the red scar running diagonally from her upper lip to her nose. She’d really done herself some damage in that incident eighteen months ago. He’d actually filmed a report, a reconstruction of the whole thing. It had been broadcast on the evening news.

  He managed to take his eyes off Rebecka, and turned to Anna-Maria.

  “Have you got a minute?” he asked.

  “Sorry, I can’t help you,” Anna-Maria said sympathetically. “We’ll be holding a press conference just as soon as we have any information that’s of interest to the general public.”

  “No, it’s not that. Well, yes, it is about Inna Wattrang. There’s something you ought to know.”

  Anna-Maria nodded to indicate that she was listening.

  “Not here, if you don’t mind,” said Per-Erik.

  “I’ve finished,” said Anna-Maria to her colleagues, getting up.

  At least she’d managed to eat half her lunch.

  “I don’t know if this…if it means anything,” said Per-Erik Seppälä. “But I need to tell you about it. Because if it does…well, that’s why I wanted this just between the two of us. I’ve no wish to die before my time.”

  They were walking down Gruvvägen, past the old fire station. Anna-Maria didn’t speak.

  “You know Örjan Bylund,” Per-Erik Seppälä went on.