The Blood Spilt

30


SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 9

Anna-Maria Mella looked out through the kitchen window. The woman next door was wiping the windowsills outside her house. Again! She did it once a week. Anna-Maria had never been in their house, but she could imagine it—formidably tidy, not a speck of dust in sight, and nicely decorated.
The neighbors worked hard on their house and garden. Constantly crawling around uprooting dandelions. Carefully clearing away the snow and building perfect banks at the side of the path. Cleaning windows. Changing curtains. Sometimes Anna-Maria was filled with a completely unreasonable irritation. Sometimes with sympathy. And at the moment with a kind of envy. To have the entire house clean and tidy at some point, that would really be something.
“She’s wiping down the windowsills again,” she said to Robert.
Robert grunted from somewhere around the bottom of the sports pages and his coffee cup. Gustav was sitting in front of the cupboard where the pots and pans were kept, taking everything out.
Anna-Maria was overcome by a slow wave of revulsion. They were supposed to be making a start on the Saturday housework. But she was the one who had to take the initiative. Roll up her sleeves and get the others started. Marcus had stayed the night at Hanna’s. Dodging out of his duties! She should be pleased, of course. That he had a girlfriend and mates. The worst nightmare was for your children to be different, to be outsiders. But his room!
“Can you tell Marcus today that he needs to clean his room?” she said to Robert. “I can’t keep going on at him.”
“Hello!” she said after a while. “Am I talking to myself?”
Robert looked up from the paper.
“Well, you could answer me! So I know whether you’ve actually heard or not!”
“Fine, I’ll tell him,” said Robert. “What’s the matter?”
Anna-Maria pulled herself together.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just… Marcus’ bloody room. It frightens me. I really think it’s dangerous to go in there. I’ve been in junkies’ squats that have looked like something out of Ideal Homes compared with that.”
Robert nodded seriously.
“Talking hairy apple cores…” he said.
“They frighten me!”
“… dancing in a drug-induced trance brought on by the fumes of a fermenting banana skin. We’ll have to buy some hamster cages for our new friends.”
Best strike while the iron’s . .
“If you do the kitchen I’ll make a start upstairs,” suggested Anna-Maria.
It was best that way. Upstairs was total chaos. Their bedroom floor was covered in dirty washing and half-full plastic bags and cases from their driving holiday that still hadn’t been unpacked. The windowsills were speckled with dead flies and leaves. The toilet was disgusting. And the children’s room…
Anna-Maria sighed. All that sorting and putting away wasn’t Robert’s strong point. It would take him forever. It would be better if he could clean the oven, get the dishwasher going and vacuum downstairs.
It was so damned depressing, she thought. They’d said a thousand times that they’d do the cleaning on a Thursday evening instead. Then everything would be clean and tidy for Friday afternoon, when the weekend started. They could have a really nice meal on Friday, the weekend would be longer, Saturday could be spent doing something more enjoyable and everybody would be together and ecstatically happy in their nice clean house.
But it always turned out like this. On Thursday everybody was completely shattered, cleaning didn’t even come into the equation. On Friday they shut their eyes to the mess, rented a film that always sent her to sleep, then Saturday had to be spent cleaning, half the weekend ruined. Sometimes they didn’t get around to it until Sunday, and then the housework usually started with her having a complete fit.
And then there were all the things that never got done. The piles of washing waiting to be done, she never caught up, it was impossible. All those disgusting wardrobes. The last time she’d stuck her head into Marcus’ wardrobe, helping him look for something or other, she’d lifted up the pile of sweaters and other stuff and some little insect had crawled out and disappeared into the lower layers of clothes. She didn’t even want to think about it. When had she last taken off the bath panel? All those bloody kitchen drawers full of crap. How did everybody else find the time? And the energy?
Her work phone played its little tune out in the hallway. A zero-eight number she didn’t recognize was showing on the display.
It was a man who introduced himself as Christer Elsner, a professor of the history of religion. It was to do with the symbol the police authorities in Kiruna had asked about.
“Yes?” said Anna-Maria.
“Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find this particular symbol. It’s similar to the alchemists’ sign for a test or an examination of something, but the hook that carries on down through the semicircle is different. The semicircle often represents something incomplete, or sometimes it represents humanity.”
“So it doesn’t exist?” asked Anna-Maria, disappointed.
“Oh, well, now we’re getting into difficult territory straightaway,” said the professor. “What exists? What doesn’t exist? Does Donald Duck exist?”
“No,” said Anna-Maria. “He only exists as a fantasy figure.”
“In your mind?”
“Yes, and in others’ minds, but not in reality.”
“Hmm. What about love, then?”
Anna-Maria laughed in surprise. It felt as if something pleasant was spreading through her body. She was exhilarated by thinking a new thought for once.
“Now it’s getting tricky,” she said.
“I haven’t been able to find the symbol, but I’ve been looking at historical sources. Symbols do originate somewhere. It might be new. There are many symbols within certain musical genres. Similarly certain types of literature, fantasy and the like.”
“Who’d know about that sort of thing?”
“People who write about music. When it comes to books, there’s a very well-stocked bookstore for science fiction and fantasy here in Stockholm. In Gamla Stan, the Old Town.”
They ended the conversation. Anna-Maria thought it was a shame. She would have liked to carry on talking. Although what would she have said to him? It would be nice to be able to turn herself into his dog. Then he could take the dog out into the forest for walks. And talk about his latest ideas and thoughts, lots of people did that with their dogs. And Anna-Maria, temporarily transformed into his dog, could listen. Without feeling pressured to come up with any intelligent answers.
She went into the kitchen. Robert hadn’t stirred.
“I’ve got to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
She wondered briefly whether she ought to ask him to make a start on the cleaning. But she left it. He wouldn’t do it anyway. And if she’d asked him, she’d have been furious and disappointed when she came back and found him sitting here at the kitchen table in exactly the same spot as she’d left him.
She kissed him good-bye. It was better not to fall out.
* * *

Ten minutes later Anna-Maria was at work. In her mailbox was a fax from the lab. They’d found plenty of fingerprints on the sketch— Mildred Nilsson’s fingerprints. They’d keep trying. It would take a few days.
She rang directory inquiries and asked for the number of a science fiction bookstore somewhere in Gamla Stan. The man on the other end of the line found it straightaway and put her through.
She explained what she wanted to the woman at the other end, described the symbol.
“Sorry,” said the bookseller. “I can’t think of anything at the moment. But fax the picture over and I’ll ask some of my customers.”
Anna-Maria promised to do that, thanked her for her help and hung up.
Just as she put the phone down it rang again. She picked up the receiver. It was Sven-Erik St?lnacke.
“You need to come,” he said. “It’s that priest Stefan Wikstr?m.”
“Yes?”
“He’s disappeared.”