Until Thy Wrath Be Past

by Asa Larsson

She searched the desk drawers. No maps. No diary.

  She could hear Anni Autio struggling up the stairs, and hastened to open the wardrobe and look through the clothes piled at the bottom. When Anni entered the room, Mella was standing on a chair, examining the top of the wardrobe. Anni sat down on the bed.

  “What are you looking for?” she said – not aggressively, she was just interested.

  Mella shook her head.

  “I don’t really know. Something that might indicate where they went. Where they were going to go diving.”

  “But you found her in the river at Tervaskoski. Isn’t that where they were diving?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Johannes Svarvare,” Anni said. “He lives in that little red house with the glazed porch on the right just after the curve as you enter the village. He used to lend maps to Wilma and Simon when they were going exploring in the forest. I’m going to lie down here for a while. Perhaps you could call in and help me down the stairs before you drive back to town?”

  Mella felt the urge to give Anni a big hug. To console her. And hopefully find a bit of consolation for herself.

  But all she said was: “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll stop by on my way home.”

  Johannes Svarvare also offered Mella coffee. She accepted even though she was feeling a bit queasy from having drunk so much already. He fetched the best china from the glass-fronted cupboard in the living room. The cups clinked against the saucers as he put the tray down on the kitchen table. They were delicate, with handles you could not fit your finger through, ivory-coloured with pink roses.

  “Please excuse the mess,” Svarvare said, gesturing towards himself. “It never occurred to me that the forces of law and order would come visiting on a Saturday afternoon.”

  His hair was unkempt, and he looked as if he had slept in his clothes. His brown woollen trousers were almost falling down. His crumpled shirt had several stains down the front.

  “How nice to have a wood-burning stove in the kitchen,” Mella said, in an attempt to lessen his embarrassment.

  Christmas curtains were still hanging in the windows. Rag rugs lay chaotically on the floor, one on top of the other, to keep the heat in. The floor itself was covered in crumbs.

  His eyesight can’t be all that good, Mella thought. He doesn’t see that the place could do with a good vacuuming.

  What a fascinating village, she thought. It’s just as Anni said: in a few years’ time there’ll be nobody left. At best, the houses will have become summer cottages for surviving family members. The place will be completely deserted in winter.

  “This is a big loss for poor old Anni,” Svarvare said, moving his jaw from side to side. “A tragic accident.”

  It looked as if his false teeth were a bad fit. There was a glass of water on the draining board – no doubt that was where he normally kept them. Mella suspected that he only put his teeth in when he was about to eat or expecting visitors.

  “I’m trying to find out what happened,” she said, coming straight to the point. “Various details are unclear. Did she tell you where they were going to dive?”

  “Didn’t you find her downstream from Tervaskoski?”

  “Yes . . . even so.”

  “‘Even so?’ What do you mean, details that are unclear?”

  Mella hesitated. She preferred not to put her cards on the table. But sometimes you had to take a gamble to get results.

  “There are indications that she didn’t drown in the river,” she said.

  Svarvare slammed his cup down on the saucer.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean anything at all! Really! It’s just that I need to investigate this death in a bit more detail. And then, of course, we want to find Simon Kyrö as well.”

  “She came here,” Svarvare said. “She came here . . .”

  As he spoke, he made sweeping gestures with both hands on the kitchen table.

  “We chatted. The way one does. People need to talk. I mean, the only people left in the village are us old wrecks. As a result, perhaps we talk too much.”

  “What do you mean?” Mella said.

  “What do I mean? What do I mean?” Svarvare said, lost in thought. “Do you know that just over a week before they disappeared, Isak Krekula had a heart attack? He’s back home now, but I haven’t even seen him going to his post box to collect the newspaper.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mella said. “But I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  Svarvare poked at a scratch on the kitchen table with a dirty fingernail. He looked at the wall clock. It had stopped at 7.00. In fact it was 12.05.

  “Oh dear,” he said, sounding as if he had made up his mind. “I need to lie down. I’m an old man, you know.”

  He stood up, removed his dentures and put them in the glass of water on the draining board. Then he lay down on the kitchen sofa, his arms crossed over his chest, and closed his eyes.

  “Fair enough,” Mella said, feeling a complete idiot. “But can’t you explain what you meant?”

  There was no response from the sofa. The conversation was over. Svarvare’s chest rose and fell rapidly.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Mella said as she got into her car.

  She knew she ought to have let him talk. He had been on the way to telling her something. Stålnacke would have sat there quietly, waiting. Let Svarvare speak in his own good time. Damn that Stålnacke! And what was all that about Isak Krekula having a heart attack? How was it revelant?

  “We’d better have a word with Isak Krekula,” Mella said to herself as she turned the ignition key.

  The Krekulas’ houses formed a group of three at the far end of the village. Mella parked, got out of the car and stood beside it. So this was where Tore and Hjalmar lived, and their parents as well. She tried to guess which house belonged to whom. All were clad in red-painted wooden panels. One of the houses was older than the other two, and had a barn attached, with a roof of irregular corrugated-iron sheets. Embroidered curtains in the windows. This had to be where the parents lived.

  Mella hesitated. A feeling of unease swept over her. In a pen at the side of the older house, a hunting dog was hurling itself over and over again at the wire netting, barking for all it was worth. Baring its fangs. Gnawing at the wooden frame. Snarling and snapping at the air. Barking and barking. Tireless and aggressive.

  Spruce trees grew close together along the boundary of the plot. The house stood in deep shade. Nobody ever seemed to have bothered to thin the trees. They were very tall, seemingly bent forward. Black, straggly and threatening. The branches looked wispy and weak, drooping down onto the slope. The image they evoked was of a father in a bedroom doorway, belt in hand, ready to attack. Of a mother, her feeble arms dangling at her sides.

  Don’t go in there, a voice said deep inside Mella.

  The hair stood up on the back of her neck.

  Afterwards, she would recall the feeling. But now she was paying no attention to it.

  The dog was scratching away at the netting. The air was a thick soup of hostility. One of the curtains twitched slightly. Someone was at home.

  A notice on the door proclaimed: “No beggers. No hawkers.” When Mella rang the bell, the door opened a fraction. The face of an old woman wondered what she wanted. Mella introduced herself.

  Anni’s sister, she thought. What had Anni said her name was? Kerttu. Mella tried to see if there was a family resemblance. Perhaps, but then Mella realized that what she had noticed most about Anni were the signs of old age. Her bearing, her many wrinkles, her scraggy hands. Mella tried to imagine what the sisters had looked like when they had been her age. Anni had little hair left. Her face was long and narrow, just like Mella’s own. Kerttu Krekula still had thick hair. Her cheekbones were high. No doubt she had been the pretty sister. She was younger, as well.

  But Anni had been happy. Except when she was grieving over Wilma, of course.

  The
sides of Kerttu Krekula’s mouth were drawn downwards, as if she had a devil on each shoulder pulling at them with a boathook.

  “I don’t usually allow strangers in my house,” she said. “You never know.”

  “You are Anni Autio’s sister, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve just come from Anni’s. She’s been baking.”

  “I never bake. What’s the point? When you can buy stuff. Besides, my hands are so bad.”

  At least she’s talking, Mella thought.

  “Do you have a toilet?” she said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Do you think I might use it? I badly need a pee. It’s a long way back to town.”

  “Come in, then, before you let the winter in with you,” Kerttu said, opening the door just wide enough for Mella to squeeze through.

  “No, I didn’t think much of Wilma. She filled my sister’s head with no end of nonsense, if you ask me.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. Mella had hung her jacket over a green-painted chair.

  “In what ways did she fill your sister’s head with nonsense?”

  “Huh, in all kinds of ways. Last summer they went swimming in the lake, stark naked. Not after a sauna or anything like that. In broad daylight. For no reason at all. Anni’s dugs were hanging down to her belly. Disgusting, it was. Made you feel ashamed. But Wilma didn’t seem to have anything against displaying herself to all the men for miles around. Flashed her pussy and her tattooed bottom.”

  The dog started barking again in its pen. A man’s voice shouted “Shut up!” to no effect whatsoever. There was a sound of feet stamping off snow outside the front door. Shortly afterwards two men appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  Tore and Hjalmar, Mella thought.

  She had heard about them. A long time ago, just after she had moved back to Kiruna after completing her course at police college, an accusation of assault had been withdrawn by the injured party. Mella recalled the fear in the plaintiff’s eyes as he begged the prosecutor to drop the case. It was Hjalmar Krekula who got off on that occasion. Hjalmar already had a record for several assaults. Two or three, she seemed to remember. And there were several other cases that had never progressed past suspicion. She had heard that Hjalmar was big. And he certainly was. Head and shoulders taller than his brother. Well built and decidedly overweight. He leaned listlessly against the door jamb. Washed-out-looking skin hung from his cheekbones, which were badly in need of a shave.

  Not much in the way of fruit and veg in his diet, Mella thought. Both men, in their fifties, were wearing work trousers. Tore Krekula’s hair was close-cropped. He seemed unable to keep still. There was something restless about him.

  “So you have visitors, eh?” he said to his mother, without introducing himself to Mella.

  “From the police,” Kerttu said curtly. “Asking about Wilma and Simon.”

  “The police?” Tore said, staring at Mella as if she were from another world. “Well, I’ll be damned. We don’t see the likes of you very often. Or what do you think, Hjallie?”

  Hjalmar stayed leaning against the door jamb and said nothing. His face was expressionless, his eyes blank, his mouth open. It was impossible to say if he had heard what his brother had said. A shiver ran down Mella’s spine.

  “When Stig Rautio’s summer cottage was burgled, could we get you out here to investigate?” Tore said. “Like hell. We told you what you needed to do – check cars with Polish registration. If you’d done that, you’d have found his stuff in a flash. They’ve caught on to the fact that it’s a waste of time picking berries up here. They can break into people’s property and earn themselves a packet, no risk at all, ’cos the police . . . fuck only knows what you get up to, you seem to have more important things to do than catch thieves. Bikes, out-board motors . . . no matter what gets nicked, everyone knows it’s pointless going to the police. Our drivers have stuff pinched all the time. The crooks cut open the tarps and take whatever they like. There hasn’t been a single thief brought to book all the years I’ve worked for the firm.”

  He leaned over the table. Thrust his face close to Mella’s.

  “You couldn’t give a fuck about us,” he said. “Snotty-nosed kids vandalize cars and smash windscreens, and the worst that can happen is that they end up with some old crone at Social Services who tells them what deprived childhoods they’ve had. Half-witted, feather-brained old biddies. That’s what the bloody lot of you are, if you ask me. So, what are you nosing around here for?”

  “If you back off, I’ll be pleased to inform you,” Mella said, slipping into the measured, professional tone of voice she always used when dealing with people who were aggressive or drunk and looking for trouble.

  “You think I should back off, do you?” Tore said, without shifting a millimetre.

  He jabbed his index finger hard on the table in front of Mella.

  “I pay your wages. Just bear that in mind, constabitch. Me, my brother, my father. People like us with real jobs who actually do something useful and pay taxes. You could say you’re my employee. And I think you do a bloody awful job. Am I allowed to think that?”

  “You can if you like,” Mella said. “I’m leaving.”

  Tore’s face was still pressed up against hers. Now he backed off slightly and waved his hand about in front of her face.

  “There’s no charge for fresh air, I suppose you know that?” he said.

  “Didn’t you want to use the toilet?” Kerttu said. “You came in because you wanted to go to the toilet. It’s to the right in the hall.”

  Mella nodded. Hjalmar Krekula moved unhurriedly to one side, so that she could get past him.

  Once safely in the toilet, she took a deep breath. What ghastly people.

  She stood there for a while, trying to pull herself together. Then she flushed the lavatory and turned on the tap.

  There was no sign of Hjalmar when she came out. Tore was sitting at the kitchen table. Mella took her jacket from the chair and put it on.

  “You can’t go yet,” Tore said. “Hjalmar has let Reijo out. He’ll gobble you up.”

  “Could you ask him to shut the dog in again, please,” Mella said. “I want to go now.”

  “He’s just letting him do a quick round of the house. In a hurry, are you? Lots to do?”

  Don’t let them see you’re afraid, Mella told herself.

  “Do you know where Wilma and Simon were planning to go diving?” she said, her voice steady as a rock.

  She heard a faint groan coming from the little room next to the kitchen. It was the sound of a restless sleeper. An old man.

  “How is he?” Tore asked his mother.

  She replied with a shrug and an expression on her face that seemed to signify “same as usual”.

  Mella wondered if the sleeping man was Isak Krekula. She supposed it must be. She ought to ask about what Johannes Svarvare had told her, about Isak Krekula having a heart attack a week or so before the kids disappeared, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Nor could she manage to ask again whether any of them knew where Simon and Wilma were planning to go diving. She was sweating, and all she wanted to do was to get away. The kitchen really was ugly. Painted various peculiar shades of green, as if they had mixed green paint with a bit of white here and there. There were hardly any countertops, and what little space there was had cheap, ugly ornaments crammed into it.

  The door opened and Hjalmar came in.

  “Can she go now?” Tore asked his brother in an odd tone of voice.

  Hjalmar didn’t reply, didn’t look at Mella.

  “Goodbye, then,” she said. “I may be back.”

  She left the house. The dog was barking nonstop. Both brothers followed her out. They stood in the porch, watching her.

  “What the hell?” she said when she got to her car.

  All the tyres were flat.

  “My tyres!” she said, aghast.

  “Well, fuck me!” Tore said. “
No doubt some kids did it.”

  He smiled so there could be no doubt that he was lying.

  Someone has to come and fetch me, Mella thought, fumbling for her mobile in the inside pocket of her jacket. Her first thought was Stålnacke – but no, that was out of the question. She would have to ring Robert. He would have to bring Gustav with him.

  The mobile was not in the pocket where she usually kept it. She felt in her other pockets. No phone. Had she left it in the car? She checked. No.

  She looked at the brothers standing in the porch. They had taken it. While she had been in the toilet.

  “My mobile,” she said. “It’s missing.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting that we took it,” Tore said. “That would really piss me off. Come out here and start casting aspersions. Do you need a lift into town?”

  “No. I need to borrow a phone.”

  She looked at the dog. It was running around in its pen, barking gruffly. Typical behaviour for a dog that would run off if it got the chance. Hjalmar had not let it out at all. If he had done, it would be several kilometres away by now. Besides, the snow around the pen was unmarked.

  “Mother’s telephone is out of order,” Tore said. “Hop into the red Volvo. Me and Hjallie are going to town anyway. You can come with us.”

  They must be out of their minds, she thought.

  A series of images flashed through her mind. Hjalmar wrenches open the back door and drags her out of the car. Tore has driven on-to a forest track. Hjalmar grabs hold of her hair and bashes her head against a tree trunk. He pins her arms down while Tore rapes her.

  I’m not getting into a car with them, she thought. I’d rather walk all the way back to town.

  “I’ll manage,” she said. “I’ll come back with some colleagues and collect the car.”

  Turning on her heel, she strode off. Followed the village street in the direction of Anni Autio’s house. Halfway there she was overtaken by Tore and Hjalmar Krekula in their car, on the way to Kiruna. She half-expected them to stop and for Tore to offer her a lift again, but they just sailed past without even slowing down. She forced herself to walk at normal speed.