This isn’t what Mauri had in mind at all. But they take the number 540 bus and then the subway into town and he tramps with her through the wet falling snow to Strix.
She walks a little close to him, her upper arm brushing against him from time to time. He’d like to take her arm, like in an old film. She’s easy to talk to, and she laughs often. It’s quite a low, soft laugh. They have time for a few drinks before Diddi arrives.
Inna insists on paying. She’s done a job for a relative who owns a real estate company, and she just got paid. Mauri is interested and asks questions, she’s asked him about so many things already, but she slips skillfully past although he doesn’t notice it at the time. It’s just that suddenly they’re talking about something else. He’s pleasantly under the influence and forgets himself and he’s talking a little bit too much and his eyes become disobedient and slide down toward her heavy breasts beneath the man’s shirt.
And when Diddi arrives it really is like an old film, where three best friends are finally reconciled. The snow falling outside on the dark Stockholm streets. Insignificant people walk along Drottninggatan like film extras, or raise their glasses, talking and laughing at the tables nearby, but they’re simply mediocre.
And Diddi, who is the most beautiful ghost and wreck you can imagine, weeps openly there in the restaurant as the story of Sofia comes pouring out of him.
“She had no problem squandering my money, as long as it was there.”
And Inna fleetingly caresses her brother’s hand, but her knee is touching Mauri’s all the time, although perhaps that doesn’t mean a thing.
And much later, when they’re standing under a streetlight outside an all-night store and it’s time to part, Diddi says he wants to carry on speculating on the stock market with Mauri.
Mauri doesn’t say anything about the fact that he and Diddi have never speculated together, it’s Mauri who does the job. But the hardness inside him begins to wake up; no Inna or Diddi or any magic in the world can rock it completely to sleep.
“Fine,” he says with a half smile. “Come up with the money and you’re in again. But this time I’m taking thirty percent.”
The atmosphere immediately becomes less pleasant. Mauri takes great gulps of the awkwardness and discomfiture. Thinks he’ll have to get used to this. If you’re going to do business, and do it successfully, you need to be able to put up with things. Unpleasantness, awkwardness, tears, hatred.
And the homeless dog that sits somewhere inside his chest, he’ll need to keep that on the leash.
Then Inna bursts out into her melodious laugh.
“You’re wonderful,” she says. “I hope we can see each other again sometime.”
Inspector Anna-Maria Mella pulled the sheet over Inna Wattrang’s face.
“We’ll go down to the station,” she said. “I’d like you to tell me a bit about Inna Wattrang.”
What can I say? thought Mauri Kallis. That she was a whore and a drug addict? That she was as much like God as a human being can be?
And then he lied to the very best of his ability. And he could lie very well indeed.
R
ebecka Martinsson finished her work at one o’clock. She microwaved something boring and went through the morning’s post. Just as she’d sat down at her desk, her computer pinged. An e-mail from Måns Wenngren.
Just seeing his name on the screen was enough to send a pang through her body. She clicked on the message to open it as if it were a reflex action.
I assume all hell has broken loose up there. Read about Inna Wattrang this morning. By the way, everybody in the office is coming up to the Riksgränsen resort to go skiing this weekend. Three days, Fri–Sun. Come up and join us for a drink.
Nothing else. She read the message several times. Pressed Send/Receive as if it might magic up something else, another message perhaps.
He’d make me unhappy, she thought. I know that.
Because she’d been his assistant advocate, she’d sat in the next office to him, listening to him talking on the phone, his “Look,
I’m just on my way to a meeting,” although Rebecka knew he wasn’t. “I’ll call you…no, really, I will…I’ll call you tonight.” Then the conversation would be brought to an end, or else the person on the end wouldn’t give up, and then the door of his office would slam shut.
He never talked about his grown-up children, perhaps because he had no contact with them, perhaps because he didn’t want to remind people that he was actually over fifty.
He drank too much.
He slept with newly employed lawyers, and even with clients.
Once he’d come on to Rebecka. It was at an office Christmas party. He’d been pretty drunk, and everybody else had given him the brush-off. His drunken groping wasn’t even a compliment, it was an insult.
And yet she still thought constantly about his hand on the back of her neck. About all the times they’d sat in court together, had lunch together. Always a little bit too close to each other, just so that they happened to brush against each other now and again. Or was that just her imagination?
And that time she’d been stabbed. He’d sat by her bed watching over her.
This is exactly what it is, she thought. This is exactly what I’m so tired of. This brooding. On the one hand, on the other hand. On the one hand, this and this mean he cares. On the other hand, this and this mean he doesn’t care. On the one hand, I ought to forget him. On the other hand, I ought to cling on to every little scrap of love I can find, like a drowning man. On the one hand, it’ll be complicated. On the other hand, it’s never simple. Love, that is.
Love is like being possessed by a demon. Your will softens like butter. Your brain is full of holes. You have no control over yourself.
She’d done her best when she was working for Måns. She put on her straitjacket, muzzle and choke chain every morning. Watching herself all the time so that she didn’t give herself away. She climbed into a kind of stiffness and hid herself inside it. She didn’t talk to him any more than necessary. Communicated via yellow Post-it notes and e-mail, although she was in the office next door. Often gazed out the window when he was talking to her.
But she worked like the devil for him. She was the best assistant he’d ever had.
Like a pathetic dog, she thought now.
She ought to e-mail him back. She wrote a reply, but deleted it immediately. Then all of a sudden it became difficult. Writing one single letter was like climbing a mountain. She turned and twisted the words. Nothing sounded right.
What would Grandmother have said about him? She would have thought he was a boy. And that was probably true. He was like one of Daddy’s hunting dogs that didn’t want to stop playing. It never really grew up, racing into the forest and coming back with sticks for Daddy to throw. In the end it was shot. No room in the house for a useless dog.
Grandmother would have noticed Måns’s soft white hands. She wouldn’t have said anything, but she would have thought a great deal. Puppy’s games instead of real work. Sailing and using the treadmill at the gym. Rebecka could still remember him moaning and groaning all the way through a two-day court case because he’d turned his ice-yacht over out in the archipelago. He’d been black and blue all over.
Completely different from her father and the other men in the village.
She could see Daddy and Uncle Affe sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen. They’re drinking beer. Affe is cutting off slices of raw Falun sausage for his dog Freja. He holds the slice of sausage in front of her and asks: “What do the girls in Stockholm do?” And Freya lies on her back with all her legs in the air.
Rebecka likes their hands. Capable of doing all kinds of skillful work. The tips of the fingers always slightly rough and black from something that no soap can shift, there’s always some machine that needs looking at.
It’s always okay to sit on Daddy’s lap. You can stay there as long as you want. With Mummy your chances are fifty-fifty. “Oh, you’re so heavy!” she says.” Or: “Let me drink my coffee in peace.”
Daddy smells of sweat and warm cotton and a little bit of engine oil. She nuzzles into the stubble on his neck. His face is always sunburned, and his neck and hands. But his body is as white as paper. He never sunbathes. None of the men in the village do, only their wives. The women lie on sun loungers sometimes. Weed the garden wearing a bikini.
Sometimes Daddy might lie down on the grass for a rest, with one arm underneath his head and his cap over his face. Homeowner Martinsson. It was a man’s right and privilege to take a little rest on the grass in his own yard from time to time. Daddy works hard. Drives the logging machine in the forest at night to make his expensive investment pay. Does work around the house and yard himself. Does some work for a pipemaker in town when there isn’t much work in the forest.
But sometimes he lies down for a while. On the kitchen sofa in the winter. Out in the yard like this in the summer. Their oldest dog, Jussi, often comes to lie beside him. And soon he has Rebecka on his other arm. The sun warms them. There’s a strong scent from the wild chamomile growing in the poor, sandy soil. Otherwise there aren’t many plants like that. With a powerful scent. You always have to get close to them to smell anything.
Rebecka has never seen her grandmother lying down like this. She never rests. And she certainly wouldn’t be doing it outside, right in front of the house. People would think she’d lost her mind. Or even died.
No, Grandmother would have thought Måns very strange. A Stockholm boy who couldn’t take an engine apart, fish with a dragnet or even rake hay. And rich. Uncle Affe’s wife, Inga-Britt, would have been nervous and got out the serviettes. And everybody would have wondered about Rebecka: who does she belong to now?
Just as they had already done. You always had to prove you hadn’t changed. People were always saying “It’s nothing special…I’m sure you’re used to much better.” And then she’d have to heap praise on the food, say it was a long time since she’d eaten perch, how delicious. The others were allowed to eat in peace, in silence. And then it became even clearer that she’d taken on those Stockholm ways, too much praise.
There was a kind of gravity in Daddy that is lacking in Måns. She won’t say a depth, it’s not that Måns is superficial. But Måns has never had to worry about his finances, fretting that he isn’t getting enough work to cover the payments on the logging machine. And there’s another difference too. Something that doesn’t come from worrying. A streak of melancholy.
That melancholy, thinks Rebecka. Was that what made Daddy cling on to Mummy with such intensity?
I think she came into his life with her laughter and her simplicity, because in her good periods she was as light as the wind. And I think he grabbed her upper arms with both hands. Held on to her, firm and tight. And I think she liked that, but only for a little while. I think she thought she needed that. Security and calm and his embrace. And then she slunk away like an impatient cat.
And what about me? thought Rebecka, looking at Måns’s message. Shouldn’t I find somebody like Daddy, but hang on to him, unlike Mummy?
A heart that’s in love is an indomitable thing. You can hide your feelings, but inside your heart takes over the whole thing. Your head changes jobs, stops reasoning or making sensible decisions, and starts painting pictures: pathetic, romantic, sentimental, pornographic. The whole bloody thing.
Rebecka Martinsson prays in vain: God protect me from passion.
But it’s already too late. She writes:
Sounds cool. Hope not too many of you end up with a broken leg on the slopes. I might come up for a drink, might not—depends on the weather and work and so on. Be in touch.
R
Then she changes the “R” to “Rebecka.” And then she changes it back. The message is ridiculously short and simple, but it takes her forty minutes to write it. Then she sends it. Then she opens it again and again to check what she’s written. Then she can’t get anything useful done at all. Just moves papers from one pile to another.
I
s it okay if I switch the tape recorder on?” asked Anna-Maria.
She was sitting in interview room one with Mauri Kallis.
He had explained that they didn’t have much time left, they were flying back soon. So they had decided that Sven-Erik would talk to Diddi Wattrang, and Anna-Maria to Mauri Kallis.
The security chief was hanging around in the corridor with Fred Olsson and an impressed Tommy Rantakyrö.
“Of course,” replied Mauri Kallis. “How did she die?”
“It’s a little early to release details of the murder at this stage.”
“But she was murdered?”
“Yes, murder or manslaughter…at any rate, somebody else will…She worked as head of information? What did that involve?”
“It was just a title. She did all kinds of things within the company. But certainly she was the one who was good at dealing with the media and building the brand. She was generally very good at dealing with people, the authorities, landowners, investors, you name it.”
“Why? What was she so good at?”
“She was one of those people you just want to like you. You
wanted to please her. Her brother’s the same, although at the moment he’s a little too…”
Mauri Kallis made a slight shaking movement with his hand.
“You must have been close to her, you could say she lived with you after all.”
“Well, no, Regla is a large property with several farms and houses. There are a lot of us living there: my family and I, Diddi and his wife and children, my half sister, several employees.”
“But she had no children?”
“No.”
“Who was close to her, apart from you?”