Åsa Larsson - Until Thy Wrath Be Past

Let them look, he thought, stuffing a few sugar lumps into his mouth, chewing and then letting them dissolve. It eased the pain, made it easier to take. Eating helped him to calm down.

Inspector Tommy Rantakyrö was squatting down outside Hjörleifur Arnarson’s house, stroking Hjörleifur’s dog, when Mella and Martinsson parked their snow scooter not far away.

He stood up and went over to meet them.

“She’s refusing to move,” he said, nodding towards the dog.

Mella was annoyed to see that the other inspectors had parked their scooter immediately in front of the porch.

“Can you move the scooter,” she said curtly to Rantakyrö. “We need to tape this area off so the forensic team can search for clues. How many people have touched the front door handle?”

Rantakyrö shrugged.

Mella stamped off to the house.

Martinsson went over to the dog.

“Now then, my girl,” she said softly, scratching the dog’s chest gently. “You can’t stay here, I’m afraid.”

“We’ll have to have her put down,” Rantakyrö said.

Yes, I suppose so, Martinsson thought.

She stroked the dog’s triangular ears: they were very soft, one of them sticking straight up and the top of the other one folded down. The animal was black with white markings, with a white patch round one eye.

“What sort of a mutt are you, then?” she said.

The dog made licking movements in the air. A signal that she was well-disposed towards Martinsson, who stuck out her own tongue and licked her lips in response. She was friend, not foe.

“Do you recognize me?” she said. “Yes, of course you do.”

Then she heard herself saying to Rantakyrö: “She has intelligent eyes, like a border collie – see how she looks right at you? She doesn’t feel threatened when you look back at her. Isn’t that so, my love? And you’re friendly like a Labrador, aren’t you? Don’t take her away. I’ll look after her. If he has a relative who’s prepared to take her on, O.K. – but if he hasn’t, well then…

Måns will have a fit, she thought.

“O.K.,” Rantakyrö said, looking pleased and relieved. “I wonder what her name is.”

“Vera,” Martinsson said. “He said it yesterday.”

“I see,” Rantakyrö said. “Was it you who was here with Mella yesterday, then? Sven-Erik is pretty pissed off about that. I can see his point.”

Stålnacke was in the kitchen, talking to Göran Sillfors.

Hjörleifur was lying on his back on the kitchen floor in front of the larder. Next to him was a collapsed pair of steps. The door to the cupboard above the larder was open. There were two rucksacks on the floor.

“What the hell’s going on?” Mella said when she entered the kitchen. “You can’t just go wandering around in here. The forensic boys will have a fit. We must tape the whole place off.”

“Who are you bursting in here and telling me what to do?” Stålnacke said.

“No doubt you’d have preferred me not to come at all,” Mella said. “When I got to work, Sonja told me about Hjörleifur.”

“And I heard from Göran Sillfors that you’d already been here and questioned Hjörleifur. Great. It didn’t occur to you to mention that to your colleagues at yesterday’s meeting, did it?”

Sillfors looked first at one and then at the other of them.

“Hjörleifur rang me yesterday, after you’d been here,” he said. “I’d given him a mobile phone with a prepaid card. He thinks that using them will make you die young…”

Cutting himself short, he looked down at Hjörleifur lying dead on the floor.

“Sorry,” Sillfors said. “Sometimes words just come tumbling out. Anyway, he was most reluctant to use the mobile. But I told him that one of these days he might break a leg and need help, and that it didn’t matter if he kept it in a drawer somewhere, switched off. The card was on special offer, so it didn’t cost much. Sometimes you get a new bike or goodness knows what else when you buy a new mobile, although then you need to agree to a rental contract, of course. Anyway, I reckoned it was worth spending a bit on a fellow human being. And we used to get honey and mosquito repellant off him – not that I think much of his mosquito repellant, but still… Anyway, he used it yesterday – the mobile, I mean… rang me to say that you’d been here. He wondered what the hell we’d told the police, and I had to calm him down. What did you say to him? This morning I thought I’d better drive out and see how he was. And of course make sure he didn’t think we’d been telling tales out of school about him, or anything like that. The dog was outside, and the door was wide open. I realized right away that something had happened.”

“There’s nothing for the forensic team to investigate,” Stålnacke said. “It’s obvious what’s happened here.”

Lifting up one of the rucksacks, he showed Mella a name tag sewn inside it: Wilma Persson .

“One was standing on the floor here, the other was up there.”

He pointed to the open door of the cupboard above the larder.

“He killed them and took their rucksacks,” he said. “You frightened him yesterday with your questions. He clambers up the stepladder to fetch the rucksacks from the cupboard, intending to get rid of them, falls, hits his head and dies.”

“That’s an odd place to keep them,” Mella said, looking up at the cupboard. “Cramped, and awkward to get at. He didn’t do it. This doesn’t add up.”

Stålnacke stared at her as if he felt tempted to pick her up and shake her. His moustache was standing on end.

Mella pulled herself up to her full height.

“Get out!” she said. “I’m in charge here. This is a suspected crime scene. The forensic team will have a look, and then Pohjanen can take over.”

That afternoon Mella appeared in the doorway of the autopsy room. She noted the look of annoyance on the face of the technician, Anna Granlund. Granlund didn’t take kindly to anybody who came nagging her boss.

The way Granlund looked after her pathologist boss Lars Pohjanen always put Mella in mind of the way minders looked after sumo wrestlers – not that Pohjanen bore the least resemblance to a sumo wrestler, skinny as he was, and the colour of putty: but nevertheless… Granlund made sure he always had a sensible lunch, telephoned his wife when Pohjanen was summoned to some crime scene or other, and put a blanket over him when he fell asleep on the sofa in the coffee room, having first removed the glowing cigarette from his hand. She took on as much of his work as she could. And did her best to make sure that nobody quarrelled with or pressurized him.

“He should be left alone to do what he’s best at, and be free of any other responsibilities,” Granlund would say.

She never commented on Pohjanen’s smoking habit. Listened patiently to his wheezing and his lengthy coughing fits, and always had a handkerchief handy when he needed to spit out the phlegm he had coughed up.

But Mella took no account of all that. If you wanted results, you needed to keep on at them. Nudge them, nag them, stir up trouble. If a corpse turned up at the weekend in suspicious circumstances, Anna Granlund always wanted to wait until Monday before carrying out the post-mortem. And she never wanted Pohjanen to have to work in the evenings. All of these things sometimes led to arguments.

“We have to make them understand that passing the buck to the police in Luleå has its price,” Mella would say to her colleagues. “If they do that, then they deserve to be put under pressure.”

“What do you want?” Lars Pohjanen said in his usual complaining tone.

He was leaning over Hjörleifur Arnarson’s sinewy body. He had sawn open the skull and removed the brain, which was lying on a metal tray on a trolley next to the table.