Åsa Larsson - Until Thy Wrath Be Past

“Ah well,” Fjällborg says, scraping the wasabi off the rice, “not everything was better in the old days, I suppose.”

Pathologist Lars Pohjanen telephoned Inspector Anna-Maria Mella at 11.15 on the evening of Friday, 24 April.

“Have you got a moment?” he said.

“Of course,” Mella said. “Marcus rented a film; it’s supposed to be deep, profound even. But Robert fell asleep after a few minutes. He woke up just now and said, ‘Are they still sitting around nattering? Haven’t they solved the world’s problems yet?’ Then he fell asleep again.”

“Who is it?” Robert shouted, sounding distinctly drowsy. “I’m awake.”

“It’s Pohjanen.”

“This bloody film is just a gang of people lounging around on a park bench talking, going on and on nonstop,” Robert yelled, loud enough for Pohjanen to hear. “It’s Friday night, for Christ’s sake! What we need is a car chase or two, a few murders and a dollop of sex.”

Pohjanen chuckled.

“I apologize,” said Mella. “I got drunk one night and he made me pregnant.”

“They are not sitting on a park bench. Can you just shut up, please?” Mella’s eldest son Marcus said.

“What’s the film?” Pohjanen asked.

“ The Lives of Others . It’s in German.”

“I’ve seen that,” Pohjanen said. “It was good. It made me cry.”

“Pohjanen says he cried when he saw it,” Mella advised Robert.

“Tell him I’m crying my eyes out as well,” Robert yelled.

“There you are, you see,” Mella said to Pohjanen. “The last time he cried was when Wassberg beat Juha Mieto in the 1980 Olympics. Can you be quiet now so I can hear what Pohjanen wants?”

“One hundredth of a second,” Robert said, touched by the memory of that famous skiing victory. “Fifteen kilometres, and he won by five centimetres.”

“Can’t you all shut up so I can watch this film?” Marcus said.

“Wilma Persson,” Pohjanen said. “I tested some water from her lungs.”

“And?”

“And I compared it with water from the river.”

Her son was looking daggers at Mella, who stood up and went into the kitchen.

“Are you still there?” Pohjanen said grumpily. Then he cleared his throat.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Mella said, sitting down on a kitchen chair and trying to ignore Pohjanen’s phlegmy wheezing.

“I… khrush , khrush … I sent the samples to the Rudbeck Laboratory in Uppsala. Told Marie Allen to push them through rapido . They… khrush … did a sequential analysis of the samples. Very interesting.”

“Why?”

“Well, this is cutting-edge technology. You can identify the genetic material in anything living in water. Bacteria, algae, that sort of thing. As you probably know, everything is made up of four building blocks. Even us humans. A person’s D.N.A. has three million of these building blocks in a particular sequence.”

Mella looked at the clock. First a profound film in German, then D.N.A. technology with Lars Pohjanen.

“Anyway, I don’t suppose you’re all that interested in such things,” Pohjanen said with a rattling squeak. “But I can confirm that the water in Wilma Persson’s lungs had entirely different algae and micro-organic flora from the water in the river where she was found.”

Mella stood up.

“So she didn’t die in the river,” she said.

“No, she didn’t die in the river,” Pohjanen said.

Sven-Erik Stålnacke was woken by his mobile.

Feeling the familiar wave of early-morning fatigue flow through his body, he answered the phone.

“It’s me,” Anna-Maria Mella said, sounding chirpy.

Holding the phone at arm’s length, he squinted at the display. Twenty past seven.

Mella was an early bird. He was a night owl. They had always had an unspoken agreement that it was O.K. for either of them to ring and wake the other one up. Stålnacke might think of something at 1.00 in the morning and phone Mella. She might phone him bright and early, already in her car and on the way to pick him up. But that had been then.

Then, before Regla, Stålnacke would have said, “Are you up already?” and Mella would have said something about having to drag Gustav out of bed and take him to nursery during the week, while at weekends he would be jumping up and down on her head at dawn, begging her to switch on the television for the children’s programmes.

“Sorry to disturb you so early,” Mella said.

She regretted having phoned him; she had done it without thinking. But things were not as they had been.

Stålnacke could hear the change in her voice, and felt a mixture of regret and bad conscience.

Then he became angry. It was not his fault that things had turned out as they had done.

“Pohjanen rang me late last night,” Mella said, as if to stress that she was not the only one who phoned colleagues at odd times.

In bed next to Stålnacke, Airi Bylund opened her eyes. “Coffee?” she mimed. He nodded. Airi got up and pulled on her red towelling dressing gown. Boxar the cat, who had been fast asleep on Stålnacke’s legs, jumped eagerly down from the bed and tried to grab the belt of Airi’s dressing gown as she tied it round her waist, making it jiggle up and down irresistibly.

“He’s taken samples of water from Wilma Persson’s lungs and from the river, and that’s not where she died,” Mella said.

“You don’t say.”

“You thought that business of the car with no petrol in the tank was odd. Why venture into the back of beyond without enough juice to get them home again? Now we hear that she didn’t die in the river. So how did she get there?”

“You tell me.”

Neither spoke for a while. Finally she said, “I’m going to drive out to Piilijärvi today and ask if anybody there knows where the kids intended to go diving.”

Now was his chance, his opportunity to say he would accompany her.

“Didn’t they ask questions like that when she disappeared?” he said instead.

“Yes, no doubt they asked the people closest to her. But the situation has changed. Now I’m going to ask everyone.”

“Fair enough. Do that. Good luck.”

The silence between them was heavy with disappointment and accusation.

“Thank you,” she said, and hung up.

Airi came in with coffee and open sandwiches on a tray.

“What was all that about?” she said.

“Anna-Maria,” Stålnacke said. “She rings and wakes you up on a Saturday morning and expects you to drop everything and be at her beck and call. She can forget it.”

Airi said nothing. Handed him his mug of coffee.

“She’s so bloody inconsiderate,” he said.

“You know,” Airi said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, “I’ve heard you say that so often this year. But I think that being in-considerate means thinking about not doing something and then doing it anyway. That business at Regla – she just… Well, it just happened.”

“She doesn’t think!”

“That’s as may be. But it’s how she is. She’s impulsive, quick to act. I love you, darling, but it would be pretty boring if people were all the same. All I’m trying to say is that I don’t think she just stood there and said to herself, right, I’m going to put my life and Sven-Erik’s at risk.”

Stålnacke got up. Pulled on his trousers. Shoved Boxar exasperatedly to one side just as she went on the attack.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s going to be pretty mild today. I’d better go home and check that there isn’t any snow still lying on the roof. It’ll be wet and heavy if it is.”

“I know,” Airi said to Boxar with a sigh when Stålnacke had left. “It’s a waste of time trying to reason with him.”