Authors: Åsa Larsson
All of a sudden he can see Eva, Nalle’s mother, standing in front of him. He’s just got home from work. He’s been on the evening shift and it’s dark outside, but she hasn’t put the lights on. She’s standing quite still in the darkness right next to the wall in the hallway when he walks in.
It’s such peculiar behavior that he’s forced to ask her:
“What’s the matter?”
And she replies:
“I’m dying here, Lars-Gunnar. I’m sorry, but I’m dying here.”
What should he have done? As if he weren’t tired to death as well. At work he was dealing with all kinds of misery day in and day out. Then he came home to take care of Nalle. He still can’t work out what she did all day. The beds were never made. She hardly ever cooked dinner. He went to bed. Asked her to come up with him, but she didn’t want to. The following morning, she was gone. Took nothing more than her handbag. She didn’t even think he was worth a letter. He had to clean her out of the house. Packed her bits and pieces in boxes and put them in the attic.
After six months she phoned. Wanted to speak to Nalle. He explained that it just wasn’t on. She’d only have upset the boy. He told her how Nalle had looked for her, asked about her and cried at first. But things were better now. He told her how the boy was getting on, sent her his drawings. He could see people in the village thought he was being too soft. Too indulgent. But he didn’t wish her any harm. What would that achieve?
The old biddies from social services kept on about Nalle going to a residential center.
“He can stay there from time to time,” they said. “It’ll give you some respite.”
He’d gone to have a look at their bloody residential center. Just walking through the door made you depressed. Everything was depressing. The ugliness of it all, every single object screamed “institution,” “storeroom for loonies, the retarded and the crippled.” The ornaments that had been made by the inmates—plaster casts, tiles covered in beads, vile pictures in cheap frames. And the way the staff chattered on. Their striped cotton overalls. He remembers looking at one of them. She can’t have been more than one meter fifty. He thought:
Are you going to intervene if there’s a fight?
Nalle was big, that was true, but he couldn’t defend himself.
“Never,” Lars-Gunnar said to social services.
They tried to insist.
“You need respite,” they said. “You’ve got to think about yourself.”
“No,” he’d said. “Why? Why have I got to think about myself? I’m thinking about the boy. The boy’s mother was thinking about herself, tell me what good came of that.”
* * *
They’re home now. Lars-Gunnar slows down as he approaches the entrance to his property. He checks out the yard. You can see quite well in the moonlight. In the trunk of the car is his elk rifle. It’s loaded. If there’s a police car in the yard he’ll just keep on going. If they notice him, he’ll still have a minute. Before they manage to start the car and pull out onto the road. Well, thirty seconds anyway. And that’s enough.
But there’s nothing in the yard. Highlighted against the moon he sees an owl on a low reconnaissance flight along the riverbank. He parks the car and lowers the back of his seat as far as it will go. He doesn’t want to wake Nalle. The boy will wake up anyway in an hour or so. Then they can go in and go to bed. Lars-Gunnar is just going to close his eyes for a little while.
YELLOW LEGS
Yellow Legs trots out of her own territory. She can’t stay there. Over the border into another pack’s territory. She can’t stay there either. It’s extremely dangerous. A clearly marked area. Fresh scent markings are like a barbed wire fence between the tree trunks. A wall of scents runs through the long grass sticking up through the snow; they’ve sprayed here, scratched with their back feet. But she has to get through, she has to go north.
The first day goes well. She’s running on an empty stomach. Urinates low, pressing herself to the ground so the smell won’t spread, maybe she’ll make it. She’s got the wind behind her, that’s good.
The next morning they pick up her scent. Two kilometers behind her, five wolves are sniffing at her trail. They set off after her. They take turns to lead, and soon make visual contact.
Yellow Legs senses their presence. She has crossed a river, and when she turns she can see them on the other side, less than a kilometer downstream.
Now she’s running for her life. An intruder will be killed immediately. Her tongue is hanging outside her mouth. Her long legs carry her through the snow, but there is no well-trodden track to follow.
Her legs find the tracks of a scooter, going in the right direction. The others follow it, but not so quickly.
When they are just three hundred meters behind her, they suddenly stop. They’ve chased her out of their territory, and a little bit further.
She’s escaped.
One more kilometer, then she’ll lie down. Eat some snow.
The hunger is gnawing at her stomach like a vole.
* * *
She continues her journey northward. Then, where the White Sea separates the Kola peninsula from Karelia, she turns northwest.
The early spring keeps her company. It’s hard to run.
Forest. A hundred years old and older. Conifers halfway to the sky. Naked, spindly, bare of needles almost all the way to the top. And right up there, their green, swaying, creaking arms build a roof. The sun can hardly penetrate, can’t manage to melt the snow yet. There are just patches of light and the drip of melting snow from high in the trees. Dripping, trickling, dribbling. Everything can smell spring and summer. Now it’s possible to do more than merely survive. The beat of heavy wings from the birds in the forest, the fox out of its den more and more often, the shrew and the mouse scampering along the icy crust of the snow in the mornings. And then the sudden silence as the whole forest stops, sniffs and listens to the she-wolf passing by. Only the black woodpecker continues his constant hammering on the tree trunks. The dripping doesn’t stop either. The spring is not afraid of the wolf.
* * *
Bog country. Here the early spring is a torrent of water beneath a mushy, sodden covering of snow that turns to gray slush under the slightest pressure. Every step sinks deep. The she-wolf begins to travel by night. The icy crust on the snow will bear her weight. She settles in a hollow or under a pine tree during the day. On her guard even when she’s asleep.
* * *
Hunting is different without the pack. She catches hares and other small wild animals. Not much for a wolf on a long journey.
Her relationship to other animals is different too. Foxes and ravens are quite happy to be with a pack of wolves. The fox eats the pack’s leftovers. The raven prepares the wolf’s table. He shouts from the trees: There’s prey over here! It’s a rutting deer! Busy rubbing his antlers against a tree! Come and get him! A bored raven can sometimes plump down in front of a sleeping wolf, peck its head and take a few hops backwards, looking slightly ridiculous and clumsy. The wolf snaps at it. The bird takes off at the very last second. They can entertain each other like this for quite some time, the black and the gray.
But a lone wolf is no playmate. She doesn’t turn down any prey, doesn’t want to play with birds, isn’t willing to share.
One morning she surprises a vixen outside her earth. Several holes have been dug in a slope. One of the holes is hidden beneath a tree root. Only her tracks and a little bit of soil on the snow outside gives away its location. The vixen emerges from the hole. The wolf has picked up the acrid scent and taken a slight diversion from her route. She moves down the slope into the wind, sees the fox poke her head out, the spindly body. The wolf stops, freezes on the spot, the fox has to come out a little bit further, but as soon as it turns its head in this direction it will see her.
She pounces. As if she were a cat. A fight through the bushes and the branches of a fallen young spruce. Bites the fox right across her back. Snaps the spine. Eats her greedily, holding the body down with one paw as she rips the flesh, gulping down what little there is.
Two ravens immediately appear, working together to try to secure a share. One risks its life, coming dangerously close to make her chase it so that its companion can quickly steal a morsel. She snaps at them as they dive-bomb her head, but her paw doesn’t leave the body of the fox. She gobbles every scrap, then trots around all the other holes, sniffing. If the fox had cubs and they’re not too far down, she can dig them out, but there’s nothing there.
She returns to her original route. The legs of the lone wolf move restlessly onward.
M
ONDAY
S
EPTEMBER
11
“It’s just as if he’s been swallowed up by the ground.”
Anna-Maria Mella looked at her colleagues. It was the morning meeting in the prosecutor’s office. They had just established that they had no trace whatsoever of Stefan Wikström, the missing priest.
You could have heard a pin drop for the next six seconds. Inspector Fred Olsson, Prosecutor Alf Björnfot, Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Inspector Tommy Rantakyrö looked distressed. That was the worst thing imaginable, that he actually had been swallowed up by the ground. Buried somewhere.
Sven-Erik looked particularly upset. He’d been the last to arrive at the prosecutor’s morning service. It wasn’t like him. There was a small plaster on his chin. It was stained brown with blood. The sign that a man is having a bad morning. The stubble on his throat below his Adam’s apple had escaped the razor in his haste, and was protruding from his skin like coarse gray tree trunks. Below one corner of his mouth were the remains of dried-up shaving foam, like white adhesive.
“Okay, so far it’s still just a missing person,” said the prosecutor. “He was a servant of the church, after all. And then he found out we were onto him about that trip he went on with his family with the wolf foundation’s money. That could well be enough to make him run. The fear of his reputation being ruined. He might pop up somewhere like a jack-in-the-box.”
There was silence around the table. Alf Björnfot looked at the people sitting there. Difficult to motivate this shower. They seemed to be just waiting for the priest’s body to turn up. With clues and proof to give the investigation a new lease on life.
“What do you know about the period just before he disappeared?” he asked.
“He rang his wife from his cell phone at five to seven on Friday evening,” said Fred Olsson. “Then he was busy with the youngsters in the church, opened up their club, held an evening service at half nine. He left there just after ten, and nobody’s seen him since.”
“The car?” asked the prosecutor.
“Parked behind the parish hall.”
It was such a short distance, thought Anna-Maria. It was perhaps a hundred meters from the youngsters’ club to the back of the parish hall.
She remembered a woman who’d disappeared some years before. A mother of two who’d gone out one evening to feed the dogs in their run. And then she was gone. The genuine despair of her husband, his assurances and everybody else’s that she would never leave her children of her own free will had led the police to prioritize her disappearance. They’d found her buried in the forest behind the house. Her husband had killed her.
But Anna-Maria had thought exactly the same then. Such a short distance. Such a short distance.
“What did you find out from checking phone calls, e-mails and his bank account?” asked the prosecutor.
“Nothing in particular,” said Tommy Rantakyrö. “The call to his wife was the last one. Otherwise there were a few work-related calls with various members of the church and the parish priest, a call to the leader of the hunting team about the elk hunt, his wife’s sister… I’ve got a list of the calls here, and I’ve made a little note of what the calls were about.”
“Good,” said Alf Björnfot encouragingly.
“What did the sister and the parish priest have to say?” wondered Anna-Maria.
“He called the sister to tell her he was worried about his wife. Worried she was going to be ill again.”
“She wrote those letters to Mildred Nilsson,” said Fred Olsson. “Things seem to have been pretty bad between the Wikströms and Mildred Nilsson.”
“So what did Stefan Wikström talk to the parish priest about?” asked Anna-Maria.
“Well, he got a bit worked up when I asked him,” said Tommy Rantakyrö. “But he told me Stefan was worried because we’d borrowed the accounts for the wolf foundation.”
An almost imperceptible frown appeared on the prosecutor’s brow, but he didn’t say anything about improper conduct and seizing items without permission. Instead he said:
“Which could indicate that he disappeared of his own free will. That he’s staying away because he’s afraid of the shame. Believe me, the most common reaction to this sort of thing is to bury your head in the sand. You say to yourself ‘can’t they see they’re just making things worse for themselves,’ but often they’ve gone beyond sensible logic.”
“Why didn’t he take the car?” asked Anna-Maria. “Did he just walk off into the wilderness? There weren’t any trains at that time. Nor any flights.”
“Taxi?” asked the prosecutor.
“No pickups,” answered Fred Olsson.
Anna-Maria looked at Fred appreciatively.
You stubborn little terrier, she thought.
“Right, then,” said the prosecutor. “Tommy, I’d like you to…”
“… start knocking on doors in the area around the parish hall asking if anybody’s seen anything,” said Tommy with resignation in his voice.
“Exactly,” said the prosecutor, “and…”
“… and talk to the kids from the church youth club again.”
“Good! Fred Olsson can go with you. Sven-Erik,” said the prosecutor. “Maybe you could ring the profiling group and see what they’ve got to say?”
Sven-Erik nodded.
“How did you get on with the drawing?” the prosecutor asked.
“The lab is still working on it,” said Anna-Maria. “They haven’t come up with anything yet.”
“Good! We’ll meet again first thing tomorrow morning, unless anything major happens in the meantime,” said the prosecutor, folding his glasses with a snap and pushing them into his breast pocket.