Authors: Åsa Larsson
But Nalle is immune to all that. Lars-Gunnar’s occasional outbursts of bitterness toward Nalle’s mother, his own father, the world in general. His irritation over Nalle’s shortcomings. The self-pity and hatred that only come out properly when the men are drinking, but are always there just beneath the surface. Nalle can hang his head, but for a few seconds at the most. He’s a happy child in a grown man’s body. Gentle and honest through and through. Bitterness and stupidity don’t touch him.
If he hadn’t been brain damaged. If he’d been normal. She can work out how the landscape between father and son would have looked then. Barren and poor. Tainted by that contempt for their own enclosed weakness.
Mildred. She doesn’t know how right she is.
But Mimmi doesn’t embark on any discussion. She shrugs her shoulders by way of a reply, says it was nice to meet you, but now she’s got to get back to work.
* * *
Mimmi heard Lars-Gunnar’s voice in the dining room.
“For God’s sake, Nalle.”
Not angry. But tired and resigned.
“I’ve told you, we have breakfast at home.”
Mimmi came into the dining room. Nalle was sitting with his plate in front of him, hanging his head in shame. Licking the milk moustache off his upper lip. The pancakes were gone, so were the eggs and the bread, only the apple lay untouched.
“Forty kronor,” said Mimmi to Lars- Gunnar, a fraction too cheerfully.
Old skinflint, she thought.
He had a freezer full of free meat from hunting. The women in the village helped him out for free with cleaning and washing; they turned up with home baked bread and invited him and Nalle to dinner.
When Mimmi started working at the bar, Nalle used to get his breakfast there free.
“You mustn’t give him anything when he comes in,” Lars-Gunnar explained. “He’s just getting fat.”
And Micke gave Nalle his breakfast, but because he didn’t really have Lars-Gunnar’s permission, he hadn’t the guts to take payment for it.
Mimmi had.
“Nalle’s had breakfast,” she said to Lars-Gunnar the first time she had a morning shift. “Forty kronor.”
Lars-Gunnar had looked at her in surprise. Looked around for Micke, who was at home fast asleep.
“You’re not to give him anything when he comes begging,” he began.
“If he’s not allowed to eat, then you keep him away from here. If he comes in, he can eat. If he eats, you pay.”
From then on, he paid up. Paid Micke too, if he was doing the morning shift.
Now he was even smiling at her, ordering coffee and pancakes for himself. He stood at the side of the table where Nalle and Rebecka were sitting. Couldn’t decide where to sit. In the end he sat down at the table next to them.
“Come and sit here,” he said. “Perhaps the lady wants to be left in peace.”
The lady didn’t answer, and Nalle stayed where he was. When Mimmi brought the coffee and pancakes, he asked:
“Can Nalle stay here today?”
“More,” said Nalle, when he saw his father’s mound of pancakes.
“The apple first,” said Mimmi, immovable.
“No,” she said then, turning to Lars-Gunnar. “I’m up to my eyes in it today. Magdalena are having their autumn dinner and planning meeting in here tonight.”
A shiver of displeasure ran through him like a draft. As it did with most men when the women’s group came up in conversation.
“Just for a little while?” he ventured.
“What about Mum?”
“I don’t want to ask Lisa. She’s got such a lot to do before the meeting tonight.”
“One of the other women then? They all like Nalle.”
She watched Lars-Gunnar consider the alternatives. Nothing in this world was free. There were women he could ask, no doubt about it. But that was just the problem. Having to ask a favor. Bother people. Owe someone a big thank you.
Rebecka Martinsson looked at Nalle. He was staring at his apple. Difficult to work out if he felt as if he were a nuisance, or if he just felt it was hard to be forced to eat the apple before he could have more pancakes.
“Nalle can stay with me if he’d like to,” she said.
Lars-Gunnar and Mimmi looked at her in surprise. She was almost surprised at herself.
“I mean, I wasn’t thinking of doing anything special today,” she went on. “Maybe go for a bit of a trip… If he’d like to come along, then… I’ll give you the number of my cell phone.”
“She’s staying in one of the cottages,” Mimmi said to Lars-Gunnar. “Rebecka…”
“… Martinsson.”
Lars-Gunnar nodded a greeting to Rebecka.
“Lars-Gunnar, Nalle’s father,” he said. “If it’s no trouble…”
Obviously it’s trouble, but she’ll brush that aside, thought Mimmi angrily.
“No trouble at all,” Rebecka assured him.
I’ve jumped from the top board, she thought. Now I can do whatever I want.
I
n the conference room at the police station, Inspector Anna-Maria Mella was leaning back in her chair. She had called a morning meeting as a result of the letters and other papers found in Mildred Nilsson’s locker.
Apart from herself, there were two men in the room: her colleagues Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson. Twenty or so letters lay on the table in front of them. Most were still in their envelopes, which had been slit open.
“Right then,” she said.
She and Fred Olsson pulled on surgical gloves and began to read.
Sven-Erik was sitting with his clenched fists resting on the table, the great big squirrel’s tail under his nose sticking straight out like a scrubbing brush. He looked as if he’d like to kill somebody. Eventually he pulled on the latex gloves as if they were boxing gloves.
They glanced through the letters. Most were from parishioners with problems. There were divorces and bereavements, infidelity, worries about the children.
Anna-Maria held up one letter.
“This is just impossible,” she said. “Look, you just can’t read it, it looks like a tangled telephone wire sprawling across the pages.”
“Give it here,” said Fred Olsson, stretching out his hand.
First of all he held the letter so close to his face that it was touching his nose. Then he moved it slowly away until in the end he was reading it with his arm stretched right out.
“It’s a question of technique,” he said as he alternated between screwing his eyes up and opening them very wide. “First of all you recognize the little words, ‘and,’ ‘I,’ ‘so,’ then you can move on from them. I’ll look at it in a minute.”
He put the letter down and went back to the one he’d been reading before. He enjoyed this kind of work. Searching databases, getting hits, linking registers, looking for people with no fixed abode. “The truth is out there,” he always said as he logged on. He had a lot of good informers in his address book and a wide network of social contacts, people who knew about this and that.
“This one’s not very happy,” he said after a while, holding up a letter.
It was written on pale pink paper; there were galloping horses with flying manes up in the right-hand corner.
“ ‘Your time will soon be UP, Mildred,’ ” he read. “ ‘Soon the truth about you will be revealed to EVERYONE. You preach LIES and are living a LIE. MANY of us are tired of your LIES…’ blah, blah, blah…”
“Put it in a plastic pocket,” said Anna-Maria. “We’ll send anything interesting to the lab. Shit!”
“Look!” she said. “Look at this!”
She unfolded a sheet of paper and held it up to her colleagues.
It was a drawing. The picture showed a woman with long hair, hanging from a noose. The person who had done the drawing was talented. Not a professional, but a skillful amateur, that much was obvious to Anna-Maria. Tongues of fire curled around the dangling body, and a black cross stood on top of a grave mound in the background.
“What does it say down at the bottom?” asked Sven-Erik.
Anna-Maria read out loud:
“ ‘SOON MILDRED.’ ”
“That’s…” began Fred Olsson.
“I’ll send it to the lab in Linköping right away!” Anna-Maria went on. “If there are prints… We must ring them and tell them this has to have priority.”
“You go,” said Sven-Erik. “Fred and I will go through the rest.”
Anna-Maria put the letter and the envelope in separate plastic pockets. Then she dashed out of the room.
Fred Olsson bent dutifully over the pile of letters again.
“This is nice,” he said. “It says here she’s an ugly man-hating hysteric who needs to be bloody careful because ‘we’ve had enough of you, you fucking slag, be careful when you go out at night, look behind you, your grandkids won’t recognize you.’ She didn’t have any children, did she? How could she have grandchildren, then?”
Sven-Erik was still staring at the door Anna-Maria had disappeared through. All summer. These letters had been lying in the locker all summer, while he and his colleagues fumbled around in the dark.
“All I want to know,” he said without looking at Fred Olsson, “is how the hell those priests could not tell me Mildred Nilsson had a private locker in the parish office!”
Fred Olsson didn’t reply.
“I’ve got a good mind to give them a good shaking and ask what the hell they’re playing at,” he went on. “Ask them what they think we’re doing here!”
“But Anna-Maria’s promised Rebecka Martinsson…”
“But I haven’t promised anything,” barked Sven-Erik, slamming the flat of his hand down onto the table so hard it jumped.
He got up and made a hopeless gesture with his hand.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to run away and do anything stupid. I just need to, I don’t know, sort myself out for a bit.”
With these words he left the room. The door slammed behind him.
Fred Olsson went back to the letters. It was all for the best, really. He liked working alone.
B
ertil Stensson and Stefan Wikström were standing in the little room inside the parish office looking into Mildred Nilsson’s locker. Rebecka Martinsson had handed in the key to the house in Poikkijärvi and the key to the locker.
“Just calm down,” said Bertil Stensson. “Think about
He ended the sentence with a nod in the direction of the office where the clerks were sitting.
Stefan Wikström glanced at his boss. The parish priest’s mouth contracted into a thoughtful expression. Smoothed itself out, contracted again. Like a little hamster mouth.The short, stocky body in a beautifully ironed pink shirt from the Shirt Factory. A bold color, it was the priest’s daughter who kitted him out. Went well with the tanned face and the silvery, boyish haircut.
“Where are the letters?” said Stefan Wikström.
“Maybe she burned them,” said the priest.
Stefan Wikström’s voice went up an octave.
“She told me she’d kept them. What if somebody in Magdalena’s got them? What am I going to say to my wife?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Bertil Stensson calmly. “I need to get in touch with her husband. To give him her jewelry.”
They stood in silence.
Stefan Wikström gazed at the locker without speaking. He had thought this would be a moment of liberation. That he would hold the letters in his hand and be free of Mildred for good. But now. Her grip on the back of his neck was as tight as ever.
What is it you want of me, Lord? he thought. It is written that you do not test us beyond our capability, but now you have driven me to the limit of what I can cope with.
He felt trapped. Trapped by Mildred, by his job, by his wife, by his vocation, just giving and giving without ever getting anything back. And after Mildred’s death he had felt trapped by his boss Bertil Stensson.
Before, Stefan had enjoyed the father-son relationship that had grown between them. But now he recognized the price that would have to be paid. He was under Bertil’s thumb. He could see what Bertil said about him behind his back from the way the women in the office looked at him. They put their heads on one side, and there was just a hint of pity in their eyes. He could almost hear Bertil: “Things aren’t easy for Stefan. He’s more sensitive than you’d think.” More sensitive as in weak. The fact that the parish priest had taken some of his services hadn’t gone unnoticed. Everyone had been informed, apparently by chance. He felt diminished and exploited.
I could disappear, he thought. God takes care of the sparrow.
Mildred. Back in June she was gone. All of a sudden. But now she was back. Magdalena, the women’s group, had got back on its feet. They were vociferously demanding more women priests in the parish. And it was as if Bertil had already forgotten what she was really like. When he spoke about her nowadays, there was warmth in his voice. She had a big heart, he sighed. She had a greater talent as a pastor than I myself, he maintained generously. That implied that she had a greater talent as a pastor than Stefan, since Bertil was a better pastor than Stefan.
At least I’m not a liar, thought Stefan angrily. She was an aggressive troublemaker who drew damaged women to her and gave them fire instead of balm. Death couldn’t change that fact.
It was a disturbing thought, that Mildred had set damaged people on fire. Many might say she’d set him on fire too.
But I’m not damaged, he thought. That wasn’t why.
He stared into the locker. Thought about autumn 1997.
* * *
Bertil Stensson has called Stefan Wikström and Mildred Nilsson to a meeting. Mikael Berg, the rural dean, is with him in his capacity as the person responsible for personnel issues. Mikael Berg sits bolt upright on his chair. He’s in his fifties. The trousers he’s wearing are ten to fifteen years old. And at that time Mikael was ten to fifteen kilos heavier. His thin hair is plastered to his skull. From time to time he takes a deep breath. His hand shoots up, doesn’t know where to go, smooths his hair down, drops back to his knee.
Stefan is sitting opposite him. Thinking he’ll remain calm. During the whole conversation ahead of him, he'll remain calm. The others can raise their voices, but he’s not like that.
They’re waiting for Mildred. She’s coming straight from a service in a school and has let them know that she’ll probably be a few minutes late.