Åsa Larsson - Until Thy Wrath Be Past

It was 5.30 in the afternoon when Mella entered the autopsy unit of Kiruna’s hospital.

“Huh, you again?” was her sardonic greeting from the pathologist Lars Pohjanen.

His thin body always looked frozen inside his crumpled green autopsy coat.

Mella’s mood improved immediately – here was someone who still pulled her leg just as in the old days.

“I assumed that you just couldn’t wait to see me again,” she said, giving him a 100-watt smile.

He chuckled, though it sounded as if he was simply clearing his throat.

Wilma Persson was lying naked on the stainless-steel autopsy table. Pohjanen had cut away her diving suit and underclothes. Her skin was greyish-white and looked bleached. Next to her was an ashtray full of Pohjanen’s cigarette butts. Mella made no comment – she was neither his mother nor his boss.

“I’ve just been talking to her great-grandmother,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’d be able to tell me what happened.”

Pohjanen shook his head.

“I haven’t opened her up yet,” he said. “She’s a bit of a mess, as you can see, but all this damage happened after she died.”

He pointed to Wilma’s face, her missing nose and lips.

“Why is her hair all over the floor?” Mella said.

“Water rots the roots, so the hair becomes very loose.”

Holding up Wilma’s hands, he contemplated them through narrowed eyes. The little finger and thumb of her right hand were missing.

“I noticed something odd about her hands,” he said, clearing his throat. “She’s lost a lot of nails, but not all of them. Take a look at her right hand – oops! I have to be careful, the skin detaches itself from her fingers before you know where you are. As you can see, the little finger and thumb are missing from the right hand, but the middle and ring fingers are still there. Compare that with the other hand…”

He held up both hands, and Mella leaned forward somewhat reluctantly to take a close look.

“The nails on her left hand, the ones she has left, are varnished black and neatly filed – they’re in quite good shape, don’t you think? But the nails on the middle and ring fingers of her right hand are broken, and the varnish is almost scraped away.”

“What does that imply?” Mella said.

Pohjanen shrugged.

“Difficult to say. But I scraped the underside of the nails. Come and see what I found.”

He laid Wilma’s hands down with care, then led Mella to his workbench. On it were five sealed test tubes labelled “right middle”, “right ring”, “left thumb”, “left middle”, “left index”. In each of the tubes was a flat wooden toothpick.

“Under both the nails on her right hand there were flakes of green paint. That doesn’t necessarily mean it had anything to do with the accident – she might have been scraping window frames, or painting, or something of the sort. Most people are right-handed.”

Mella nodded and glanced at her watch. Dinner at 6.00, Robert had said. Time to go home.

A quarter of an hour later, Pohjanen was standing once more with Wilma’s hand in his. He was taking her fingerprints. This was something he always did when identification was difficult due to intense facial damage, as in this case. The skin of Wilma’s left thumb had come away just as he was about to press it onto the paper. Such things happen, and he did what he usually did, sliding his own finger inside the pocket of Wilma’s skin and pressing it down on the paper. As he did so he heard someone in the doorway. Assuming it was Inspector Mella, he didn’t turn round but said: “Right, Anna-Maria. All done here. You’ll be able to read the autopsy report as soon as it’s written. Assuming it ever gets written.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said a voice that was not Mella’s.

When Pohjanen finally turned round, he saw that his visitor was District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson. He had met Martinsson once before, when he had been called in to advise on one of her cases having to do with domestic violence. The husband and wife had given different explanations for the woman’s injuries. But Pohjanen and Martinsson had never spoken outside the courtroom. He could see that she was staring at the thimble of dead skin he was wearing on his index finger.

Introducing herself, she reminded him that they had already met. He said he recalled the circumstances clearly, and asked what she wanted.

“Is that Wilma Persson?” she said.

“Yes, I was just taking her fingerprints. You have to get everything done as quickly as possible – things change very rapidly when you take a body out of the water.”

“I was just wondering if there was any way of establishing whether she actually died at the place where she was found.”

“What makes you think she might not have done?”

Martinsson appeared to steady herself. He noticed how she pursed her lips, shook her head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts and then looked at him as if begging his indulgence.

“I had a dream about her,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “In the dream she said that she had been moved. That she had died somewhere else.”

Pohjanen looked long and hard at Martinsson without speaking. There was not a sound, apart from his own wheezing and the hum from the air conditioning.

“As far as I’m aware, the cause of death was accidental drowning. Is it your intention to turn the case into something more elaborate?”

“No, er, well…”

“Is there something I ought to know? How the hell am I supposed to do my job if nobody tells me anything? If you say there’s no suspicion of a crime having been committed, that’s the basis on which I will conduct my examination. I don’t want to be told later on that I’ve missed something. Is that clear?”

“I’m not here to…”

“You’re here all the time, but…”

She held up her hands.

“Forget it,” she said. “Pay no attention. I should never have come. I was being silly.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that you often are,” Pohjanen said unkindly.

Turning on her heel, she left the room. His comment hung in the air. Rang through the autopsy lab like a church bell.

“The silly bitch should stop poking her nose in,” Pohjanen said to himself defensively.

But his guilty conscience gnawed away at him. The dead spirits surrounding him were unusually silent.

“They can go to hell, the whole lot of ’em,” he said to himself.

A week passes. Snow crashes down from the trees. Sighs deeply as it collapses into the sunny warmth. Bare patches appear. The southern sides of anthills heat up in the sun. The snow buntings return. Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving Fjällborg finds bear tracks in the forest. The big sleep of winter is over.

“Have they found the boy yet?” Fjällborg asks her.

Martinsson has invited Fjällborg and Bella the dog round for supper. She has served sushi, which Fjällborg is forcing down with a sceptical expression on his face. He pronounces it “sishu”, making it sound like a sneeze. Having settled on the sofabed, Bella is lying on her back, hind legs apart, fast asleep. Her front paws keep twitching.

Martinsson says they have not.

“Piilijärvi,” Fjällborg says. “That’s the last place on earth I’d like to live in. That’s where the Krekula brothers live.

“Krekula Hauliers,” he says when he sees that Martinsson has not understood. “Tore and Hjalmar Krekula. They’re about the same age as my kid brother. A right pair of crooks if ever there was one. Huh. It was their father who set up the haulage business, and he was just as bad when he was in his prime. He must be getting on for ninety now. The elder brother, Hjalmar, is the worst. He’s been done for assault loads of times – there are I don’t know how many other people who are too scared to report him. It was the same when they were kids. That was quite a rumpus, that was. Surely you’ve heard about it? About the Krekula brothers? No? No, come to think of it, it was long before your time. Hjalmar can hardly have been ten, and his little brother must have been about six, maybe seven. They were out in the forest. They were taking the cows to their summer pasture. Not all that far away, in fact. Hjalmar left his kid brother behind. Came back home without him. That started a major kerfuffle – soldiers, mountain rescue, the police. But they didn’t find him. They gave up after a week. Everyone thought he was dead. Then out of the blue the little kid turned up at the front door. It was headline news all over Sweden. Tore was interviewed on the wireless, and all the papers wrote about it. The lad survived. A bloody miracle, there’s no other word for it. That Hjalmar, well, he’s as cold as a dead fish. Always has been. Even in primary school the pair of ’em used to go round collecting debts – real ones and made-up ones, it was all the same to them. One of my cousins, Einar – you’ve never met him, he moved away ages ago, been dead for years. Had a heart attack. Anyway, he was at school with the Krekula brothers. And he and his mates had to pay up. If they didn’t, they’d have Hjalmar on their backs.