The Blood Spilt

by Asa Larsson

  “We only had her on loan. If we could only bloody realize that while they’re still with us. I was often angry with her because of what she didn’t give me. Now I wish I’d…I don’t know…accepted what she did give with pleasure, instead of being tormented by what I didn’t get from her.”

  He looks at her. She looks back without any expression on her face.

  “I’m just talking,” he says defensively.

  She shakes her head.

  “No, no,” she manages to get out. “It’s just…I can’t…”

  “She was always so busy, working all the time. Now that she’s dead it feels as if we’ve finally got time for one another. It’s as if she’s retired.”

  He looks at Mildred. She’s crouching down, reading the cards on the grave. Sometimes she gives a big smile. She picks up the pebbles on the top of the headstone and holds them in her hand. One after the other.

  He stops speaking. Waits for Lisa to ask him how he’s getting on, perhaps. How he’s coping.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says. “The dogs are in the car.”

  Erik Nilsson watches her as she leaves. When he bends down to change the flowers in the vase buried in the ground, Mildred has gone.

  Lisa gets into the car.

  “Lie down,” she says to the dogs in the back.

  I should have lain down myself, she thinks. Instead of wandering round the house waiting for Mildred. Then. The night before midsummer’s eve.

  It’s the night before midsummer’s eve. Mildred is already dead. Lisa doesn’t know that. She wanders round and round. Drinking coffee, although she shouldn’t do that when it’s this late.

  Lisa knows Mildred was conducting midnight mass in Jukkasjärvi. All the time she’s been expecting Mildred to come to her afterward, but now it’s getting very late. Maybe somebody stayed behind to chat. Or maybe Mildred’s gone home to bed. Home to Erik. Lisa’s stomach ties itself in knots.

  Love is like a plant, or an animal. It lives and develops. Is born, gets bigger, grows old, dies. Produces strange new shoots. Not so long ago, her love for Mildred was a burning, vibrating joy. Her fingers always thinking about Mildred’s skin. Her tongue thinking of her nipples. Now it’s just as big as before, just as strong. But in the darkness it’s become pale and needy. It absorbs everything that is in Lisa. Her love for Mildred makes her exhausted and unhappy. She is just so incredibly tired of thinking about Mildred all the time. There’s no room for anything else in her head. Mildred and Mildred. Where she is, what she’s doing, what she said, what she meant by this or that. She can yearn for her all day long, only to quarrel with her when she finally arrives. The wound on Mildred’s hand healed long ago. It’s as if it had never been there.

  Lisa looks at the time. It’s well after midnight. She puts Majken on the lead and walks down to the main road. Thinks she’ll go down to the jetty to see if Mildred’s boat is there.

  On the way she passes Lars-Gunnar and Nalle’s house.

  She notices that the car isn’t there.

  Afterward. Every single day afterward, she thinks about that. All the time. That Lars-Gunnar’s car wasn’t there. That Lars-Gunnar is all Nalle’s got. That nothing can bring Mildred back to life.

  Måns Wenngren rings and wakes Rebecka Martinsson. Her voice is warm, a little bit hoarse because it’s early.

  “Up you get!” he orders. “Get yourself a coffee and something to eat. Have a shower and get yourself ready. I’ll ring again in twenty minutes. You need to be ready by then.”

  He’s done this before. When he was married to Madelene and still putting up with her periodic agoraphobia and panic attacks and God knows what else, he used to talk her through visits to the dentist, meals with relatives, buying shoes at the NK department store. Every cloud…at least he knows the technique by now.

  He rings after twenty minutes. Rebecka answers like an obedient Girl Guide. Now she’s to get in the car, drive into town and take out enough money to pay the rent on her cabin in Poikkijärvi.

  The next time he calls, he tells her to drive down to Poikkijärvi, park outside the bar and ring him.

  “Right,” says Måns when she calls him. “It’ll take a minute and a half, then the whole thing will be behind you. Go in and pay. You don’t need to say a word if you don’t want to. Just hold out the money. When you’ve done that, get back in the car and call me again. Okay?”

  “Okay,” says Rebecka, like a child.

  She sits in the car and looks at the bar. It looks white and slightly scruffy in the bright autumn sunshine. She wonders who’s there. Micke or Mimmi?

  Lars-Gunnar opens his eyes. It’s Stefan Wikström who wakes him through the dream. His pathetic cries, whining and whimpering as he falls to his knees by the lake. When he knows.

  He’s been asleep in the armchair in the living room. His gun is on his knee. He gets up with difficulty, his back and shoulders stiff. He goes up to Nalle’s room. Nalle is still fast asleep.

  He should never have married Eva, of course. But he was just a stupid man from Norrland. Easy prey for somebody like her.

  He’s always been big. He was fat even as a child. At that time children were skinny little sprats chasing after footballs. They were thin and quick and threw snowballs at fat boys lumbering home as fast as their legs would carry them. Home to Dad. Who hit them with his belt if he felt like it.

  I’ve never raised a hand to Nalle, he thinks. I never would.

  But Lars-Gunnar the fat boy grew up and did very well in school despite the hassles. He trained to be a policeman and moved back home. And now he was a different man. It’s not easy to return to the village of your childhood without falling back into the role you had before. But Lars-Gunnar had changed during his year at the police training college. And you don’t mess with a policeman. He had new friends too. In town. Colleagues. He got a place on the hunting team. And because he wasn’t afraid of hard work and was good at planning and organizing, he soon became the leader of the hunt. The idea had been to make it a rotating post, but it never happened. Lars-Gunnar thinks it probably suited the rest of them to have somebody planning and organizing things. In a little corner of his mind he’s also aware that nobody would have dared to question his right to continue as leader. That’s good. No harm in a bit of respect. And he’s earned that respect. Not exploited it as some would have done.

  No, his problem has been that he’s too nice. Always thinks well of his fellow men. Like Eva.

  It’s hard not to blame himself. But he’d turned fifty when he met her. Lived alone all those years, because things never worked out with women. He was still kind of slow with them, conscious that his body was far too big. And then there was Eva. Who leaned her head against his chest. Her head almost disappeared in his hand when he held her close. “My little one,” he used to say.

  But when it didn’t suit her any longer, she’d cleared off. Left him and the boy.

  He can hardly remember the months that dragged by after she left. It was like a darkness. He’d thought people were looking at him in the village. Wondered what they were saying about him behind his back.

  Nalle turns over laboriously in his sleep. The bed creaks beneath him.

  I must…thinks Lars-Gunnar, and loses the thread of his thought.

  It’s difficult to concentrate. But everyday life. That has to carry on. That’s the whole point. His and Nalle’s everyday life. The life Lars-Gunnar has created for them both.

  I must get some shopping, he thinks. Milk and bread and margarine. Everything’s running out.

  He goes downstairs and rings Mimmi.

  “I’m going into town,” he says. “Nalle’s asleep and I don’t want to wake him up. If he comes over to you, give him some breakfast, will you?”

  * * *

  “Is he there?”

  Anna-Maria Mella had phoned the medical examiner’s office in Luleå. Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, answered, but Anna-Maria wanted to speak to Lars Pohjanen, the senior police surgeo
n. Anna Granlund kept an eye on him like a mother looking after her sick child. She kept the autopsy room in perfect order. Opened up the bodies for him, lifted out the organs, put them back when he’d finished, stitched them up and wrote the major part of his reports as well.

  “He can’t retire,” she’d said to Anna-Maria on one occasion. “It’s like a marriage in the end, you know; I’ve got used to him, I don’t want anybody else.”

  And Lars Pohjanen kept plodding on. Seemed as if he were breathing through a pipe, sucking out the fluid. Just talking made him breathless. A year or so earlier he’d had an operation for lung cancer.

  Anna-Maria could see him in her mind’s eye. He was probably asleep on the scruffy seventies sofa in the staff room. The ashtray beside his well-worn clogs. His green scrubs spread over him like a blanket.

  “Yes, he’s here,” Anna Granlund replied. “Just a minute.”

  Pohjanen’s voice on the other end of the phone, scratchy and rattling.

  “Tell me,” said Anna-Maria, “you know how bloody useless I am at reading.”

  “There isn’t much. Hrrrm. Shot in the chest from the front. Then in the head, at very close range. There’s an explosive effect in the exit wound from the head.”

  A long intake of breath, the sucking noise.

  “…waterlogged skin, but not swollen…although you know when he disappeared…”

  “Friday night.”

  “I’d assume he’s been there since then. Minor damage to those parts of the skin not covered by clothing, the hands and face. The fish have been nibbling. Not much more. Have you found the bullets?”

  “They’re still looking. Any signs of a struggle? No other injuries?”

  “No.”

  “And otherwise?”

  Pohjanen’s voice became snappy.

  “Nothing, I told you. You’ll have to ask somebody…to read the report out loud for you.”

  “I meant how were things with you.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, his tone instantly more amiable. “Everything’s crap, of course.”

  * * *

  Sven-Erik Stålnacke was talking to the police psychiatrist. He was sitting in the parking lot in his car. He liked her voice. Right from the start he’d taken to its warmth. And he liked the fact that she spoke slowly. Most women in Kiruna talked too bloody fast. And loudly. It was like a hail of bullets, you didn’t stand a chance. He could hear Anna-Maria’s voice in his head: “What do you mean, you don’t stand a chance, we’re the ones that don’t stand a chance. No chance of getting a sensible answer within a reasonable amount of time. You ask: How was it, then? And then there’s silence, and more bloody silence, and after an interminable consideration the answer comes: Good. Then it’s hell trying to squeeze out anything more—from Robert, anyway. So we have to kind of talk for two. Don’t stand a chance? Do me a favor.”

  Now he was listening to the psychiatrist’s voice and he could hear her sense of humor. Although the conversation was serious. If he’d just been a few years younger…

  “No,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s a copycat murder. Mildred Nilsson was put on display. Stefan Wikström’s body wasn’t even meant to be found. And no use of violence to relieve tension either. This is a completely different modus operandi. It could be another person altogether. So the answer to your question is no. It’s highly unlikely that Stefan Wikström was murdered by a serial killer suffering from a psychological disorder, and that the murder was committed in a highly emotional state and inspired by Viktor Strandgård. Either it was somebody else, or Mildred Nilsson and Stefan Wikström were killed for a more, how shall I put it, down to earth reason.”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean, Mildred’s murder seems very…emotional. But Stefan’s murder is more like…”

  “…an execution.”

  “Exactly! It feels a bit like a crime of passion. I’m just speculating now, I want you to bear that in mind, I’m just trying to communicate the emotional picture I’m getting…okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Like a crime of passion, then. Husband kills his wife in a rage. Then kills the lover in a more cold-blooded way.”

  “But they weren’t a couple,” said Sven-Erik.

  Then he thought, as far as we know.

  “I don’t mean they’re a married couple. I just mean…”

  She fell silent.

  “…I don’t know what I mean,” she said. “There could be a link. It could definitely be the same perpetrator. Psychopath. Certainly. Maybe. But not necessarily, not at all. And not to the extent that your grasp on reality has completely lost its basis in reality.”

  It was time to hang up. Sven-Erik did so with a pang of loss. And Manne was still missing.

  Rebecka Martinsson walks into Micke’s. Three people are having breakfast in the bar. Elderly men who look at her appreciatively. A real live beautiful woman. Always welcome. Micke’s mopping the floor.

  “Hi,” he says to Rebecka, putting the mop and bucket aside. “Come with me.”

  Rebecka follows him into the kitchen.

  “I’m really sorry,” he says. “Everything turned out wrong on Saturday. But when Lars-Gunnar told us, I just didn’t know what to think. Were you the one that killed those pastors in Jiekajärvi?”

  “Yes. Although it was actually two pastors and a…”

  “I know. A madman, wasn’t it? It was in all the papers. Although they never said what your name was. They never put Thomas Söderberg’s name or Vesa Larsson’s either, but everybody around here knew who it was. It must have been terrible.”

  She nods. It must have been.

  “On Saturday, I thought maybe what Lars-Gunnar said was true. That you’d come here to snoop. I did ask you if you were a journalist and you said no, but then I thought well, no, maybe she isn’t a journalist, but she works for a newspaper all the same. But you don’t, do you?”

  “No, I…I ended up here by mistake, because Torsten Karlsson and I were looking for somewhere to eat.”

  “The guy who was with you the first time?”

  “Yes. And it isn’t something I usually tell people. Everything that happened…then. Anyway, I ended up staying here, because I wanted some peace, and because I didn’t dare go out to Kurravaara. My grandmother’s house is out there and…but in the end I went there with Nalle after all. He’s my hero.”

  The last remark is accompanied by a smile.

  “I came to pay for the cabin,” she says, holding out the money.

  Micke takes it and gives her change.

  “I’ve included your wages as well. What does your other boss think about you working in a bar on the side?”

  Rebecka laughs.

  “Oh, now you’ve got a hold over me!”

  “You ought to say good-bye to Nalle, you’ll be passing his house on your way. If you take a right up toward the chapel…”

  “I know, but it’s probably a really bad idea, his father…”

  “Lars-Gunnar’s in town and Nalle’s on his own at home.”

  No chance, thinks Rebecka. There are limits.

  “Say good-bye for me,” she says.

  Back in the car she rings Måns.

  “I’ve done it,” she says.

  Måns Wenngren answers her the way he used to answer his wife. He doesn’t even need to think about it.

  “That’s my girl!”

  Then he quickly adds:

  “Well done, Martinsson. I’ve got to go to a meeting now. Talk to you soon.”

  Rebecka sits there with her cell phone in her hand.

  Måns Wenngren, she thinks. He’s like the mountains. It’s raining and it’s horrible. Howling wind. You’re tired and your shoes are soaked through and you don’t really know who you are. The map doesn’t seem to match the reality. And then all of a sudden the clouds part. Your clothes dry out in the wind. You sit on the side of the mountain looking down over a sun-drenched valley. Suddenly it’s all worth it.

  She tries to c
all Maria Taube, but gets no reply. Sends a text: “Everything fine. Call me.”

  She drives away down the main road. Tunes the car radio to some kind of background music.

  By the turning off toward the chapel, she meets Nalle. A shiver of guilt and sorrow runs down her spine. She raises her hand and waves to him. In the rearview mirror she can see him waving back at her. Waving like mad. Then he starts to run after the car. He’s not very fast, but he won’t give up. Suddenly she sees him fall. It looks bad. He tumbles down into the ditch.

  Rebecka stops the car by the side of the road. Looks in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t get up. She moves fast now. Jumps out of the car and runs back.

  “Nalle!” she shouts. “Nalle!”

  What if he’s hit his head on a stone?

  He’s lying there in the ditch, smiling up at her. Like a beetle on its back.

  “Becka!” he says when she appears.

  Of course I have to say good-bye, she thinks. What kind of person am I?

  He gets to his feet. She brushes him down.

  “Bye then, Nalle,” she says. “It was really good fun…”

  “Come with,” he says, tugging at her arm like a child. “Come with!”

  He turns on his heel and lumbers away up the road. He’s going home.

  “No, really, I…” she begins.

  But Nalle keeps on going. Doesn’t turn around. Is confident that she’s following him.

  Rebecka looks at the car. It’s parked tidily by the side of the road. Clearly visible to other drivers. She could go with him for a little while. She sets off after him.

  “Wait for me, then!” she calls.

  Lisa stops the car outside the vet’s. The dogs know exactly where they are. This is not a nice place. They all get up and look out through the car window. Jaws hanging open. Tongues lolling. The German begins to shed dandruff. He always does that when he’s nervous. White scales work their way up through his fur and cover his brown coat like snow. Their tails are plastered to their stomachs.