The Blood Spilt

16

In 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 St?lnacke 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 Link?ping 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 f*cking 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.