The Blood Spilt

34

At quarter past four in the afternoon Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik were flying north by helicopter. The river Torne meandered below them like a silver ribbon. A few isolated clouds were casting their shadows on the mountainsides, but otherwise the sun was shining down on the golden yellow terrain.
“You can see why they’d want to stay out here picking berries instead of coming in and ruining their trip,” said Anna-Maria.
Sven-Erik had to agree, and laughed.
“What is it with people?”
They looked down at the map.
“If the cabin’s here at the northern end of the lake, and the shot came from the south…” said Anna-Maria, pointing.
“He thought it sounded really close.”
“That’s right, and further down you’ve got some cottages right on the shoreline. And they heard a car. It can’t be more than one, at the most two kilometers, starting from the cabin.”
They’d circled an area on the map. The following day the police would start searching the area, along with the local military.
The helicopter began to drop. Followed the long oval shape of the lake, Lower Vuolusj?rvi, northward. They located the cabin where the berry pickers had been staying.
“Go lower and we’ll check it out as best we can,” Anna-Maria yelled to the pilot.
Sven-Erik had the telescope. Anna-Maria thought it was easier without. Birch trees, lots of marshy ground. The forest road, following the edge of the lake almost to its northern point. The odd reindeer gazing stupidly at them, and a female elk with a calf, galloping off into the undergrowth.
But still, thought Anna-Maria as she squinted, trying to see something other than mountain birches and brushwood. You can’t bury somebody without leaving some kind of trace. Roots, shit like that.
“Wait,” she suddenly shouted. “Look over there.”
She pulled at Sven-Erik’s arm.
“See?” she said. “There’s a boat just there, down by the reindeer pen. We’ll check it out.”
* * *

The lake was over six kilometers long. A track led down to the lake from the road through the forest. There were planks over the last section. The white plastic skiff had been pulled ashore. Turned neatly upside down so it wouldn’t get filled with water.
They turned it over together.
“Nice and clean,” said Sven-Erik.
“Very nice and clean indeed,” said Anna-Maria.
She bent down and examined the bottom of the boat carefully. Looked up at Sven-Erik and nodded. He bent down too.
“That’s definitely blood,” he said.
They looked out across the lake. It was smooth and calm. A ripple on the surface. Somewhere a black-throated diver was calling.
Down there, thought Anna-Maria. He’s in the lake.
“We’ll go back,” said Sven-Erik. “No point trampling around and annoying the scene of crime team. We’ll get Krister Eriksson and Tintin here. If they find anything, we’ll send for a diver. We won’t use the track, there could be traces or something.”
Anna-Maria Mella checked the time.
“We can do it before it gets dark,” she said.
* * *

It was half past four in the afternoon by the time they gathered at the lake again, Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik St?lnacke, Tommy Rantakyr? and Fred Olsson. They were waiting for Krister Eriksson and Tintin.
“If he’s anywhere round here, Tintin will find him,” said Fred Olsson.
“Although she’s not as good as Zack,” said Tommy.
Tintin was a black Alsatian bitch. She belonged to Inspector Krister Olsson. When he’d moved up to Kiruna five years ago, he’d brought Zack with him. A male Alsatian with a thick coat, black and tan. Broad head. Not exactly a show dog. A one man dog. It was only Krister who mattered to him. If anyone else tried to say hello or pat him, he turned his head away indifferently.
“It’s an honor to be allowed to work with him,” Krister himself had said about the dog.
The mountain rescue team had also sung his praises, loud and long. Zack was the best avalanche dog they’d ever seen. He’d been good at searching as well. The only time Krister Eriksson was to be seen in the staff room at the station was when Zack was treating everyone to cakes. Or to put it more accurately, when some grateful relative or somebody who’s life he’d saved was buying the cakes. Otherwise Krister Eriksson spent his coffee breaks walking the dog or training.
He just wasn’t the sociable type. Maybe it was because of the way he looked. According to what Anna-Maria had heard, his injuries had been caused by a house fire when he was a teenager. She’d never dared to ask, he just wasn’t the type. His face was like bright pink parchment. His ears were two holes that just went straight into his head. He had no hair at all, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing.
There wasn’t much left of his nose either. Two oblong holes right through his skull. Anna-Maria knew his colleagues called him Michael Jackson.
When Zack was alive, people had joked about the dog and his master. Said they sat together in the evenings, sharing a beer and watching the sport. That it was Zack who picked most of the winners.
Since Krister had got Tintin, she’d heard nothing. Presumably the jokes were still going on, but as Tintin was a bitch they were probably too coarse to repeat when Anna-Maria was around. “She’ll be fine,” Krister always said about Tintin. “She’s a bit too overenthusiastic at the moment. Too young in the head, but it’ll sort itself out.”
Krister Eriksson arrived at the scene ten minutes after the others. Tintin was sitting in the front seat, fastened in with her own seat belt. He let her out.
“Has the boat arrived?” he asked.
The others nodded. A helicopter had dropped it at the northern end of the lake. It was orange, made for the shallows, equipped with spotlights and an echo sounder.
Krister Eriksson put on Tintin’s life jacket. She knew exactly what that meant. A job. An exciting job. She sniffed eagerly round his legs. Her mouth was open and expectant. Her nostrils were twitching in all directions.
They walked down to the boat. Krister Eriksson positioned Tintin on the small platform and pushed off. His colleagues stayed where they were, watching them glide away. They heard Krister start up the engine. They were searching in a headwind. At first Tintin was moving her feet up and down in excitement, whimpering and dancing. At last she settled. Sat in the prow, seemed to be thinking of something else.
Forty minutes passed. Tommy Rantakyr? scratched his head. Tintin was lying down. The boat moved to and fro across the lake. Working north to south. The detectives moved along the shoreline.
“Bloody mosquitoes,” said Tommy Rantakyr?.
“Men with dogs. That’s your sort of thing, isn’t it?” Sven-Erik said to Anna-Maria.
“Pack it in,” growled Anna-Maria warningly. “It wasn’t even his dog, anyway.”
“What’s this?” wondered Fred Olsson.
“Nothing!” said Anna-Maria.
“But if you’ve started…” said Tommy Rantakyr?.
“It was Sven-Erik who started,” said Anna-Maria. “Go on then, tell them. You carry on and humiliate me.”
“Well, it was when you were living in Stockholm, wasn’t it?” began Sven-Erik.
“When I was at the police training college.”
“Anna-Maria moved in with this guy. And it hadn’t been going on for very long.”
“We’d been living together for two months, and we hadn’t been going out for that much longer.”
“And one day when she got home, correct me if I’m wrong, there was a leather thong on the bedroom floor.”
“And it was just like the ones you see in porn movies. It even had a hole at the front. It wasn’t too difficult to work out what was meant to be sticking out of that.”
She paused and looked at Fred Olsson and Tommy Rantakyr?. She’d never seen them looking so happy and expectant in her life.
“And,” she said, “there was a sanitary towel on the floor as well.”
“Get away!” said Tommy Rantakyr? attentively.
“I was really shocked,” Anna-Maria went on. “I mean, what do we really know about another person? So when Max got home and called out in the hallway, I was just sitting there in the bedroom. He just said ‘How’s things?’ And I pointed at the leather underwear and said ‘We need to talk. About that.’
“And he didn’t even react. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it must have fallen off the wardrobe.’ And he put the thong and the sanitary towel back on top of the wardrobe. He was completely blasé about the whole thing.”
Then she grinned.
“It was a pair of dog’s underpants. His mother had a boxer bitch that he used to look after sometimes. And when they went out she used to wear the underpants with the towel in, and the hole was for her tail. It was that simple.”
The laughter of the three men echoed across the lake.
They went on giggling for a long time afterward.
“Bloody hell,” said Tommy Rantakyr?, wiping his eyes.
Then Tintin got to her feet in the boat.
“Look,” said Sven-Erik St?lnacke.
“As if any of us would even consider not looking at this particular moment,” said Tommy Rantakyr?, stretching his neck.
Tintin had positioned herself. Her body was completely rigid. Her nose was pointing in toward the lake like the needle of a compass. Krister Eriksson slowed the boat so that it was barely moving, and steered in the direction indicated by Tintin’s nose. The dog began to whimper and bark, walking round and round on the platform and scratching. Her barking became more and more agitated until the front part of her body was hanging down over the water. When Krister Eriksson picked up the lead-weighted buoy to mark the spot, Tintin couldn’t control herself. She jumped into the water and swam around the buoy, barking and sneezing from the water.
Krister Eriksson called her, grabbed the handle on the life jacket and pulled her out. For a while it looked as if he might end up in the water himself. In the boat Tintin carried on whining and whimpering with pleasure. They could hear Krister Eriksson’s voice above the noise of the engine and the dog’s yelping.
“Well done, girl. Good girl.”
When Tintin leapt ashore she was as wet as a sponge. She shook herself vigorously, making sure everybody had a good shower.
Krister Eriksson praised her and stroked her head. She was only still for a second. Then she shot off into the forest, shouting out loud how bloody wonderful she was. They could hear her bark coming from different directions.
“Was she supposed to jump in?” asked Tommy Rantakyr?.
Krister Eriksson shook his head.
“She just got so excited,” he said. “But when she’s successful and finds something she’s looking for, it has to be an entirely positive experience for her, so you can’t tell her off for jumping in, but…”
He gazed in the direction of the barking with a mixture of immeasurable pride and thoughtfulness.
“She’s bloody amazing,” said Tommy, impressed.
The others agreed. The last time they’d met Tintin they were looking for a seventy-six-year-old woman with senile dementia who’d gone missing; Tintin found her in the forest up beyond Kaalasj?rvi. It had been a huge area to search, and Krister Eriksson had driven a jeep very slowly along old logging tracks. He’d fixed a bath mat on the bonnet for Tintin so she wouldn’t slip. She’d sat there like a sphinx, her nose in the air. An impressive performance.
You didn’t often get to have such long conversations with Krister Eriksson. Tintin came back from her victory lap, and even she was affected by the sudden feeling of group solidarity. She even went so far as to scamper among the detectives and have a quick sniff at Sven-Erik’s trousers.
Then the moment had passed.
“Right, well, that’s us done, then,” said Krister almost crossly, called the dog and took off her life jacket.
It was getting dark.
“All we can do now is ring the technicians and the divers,” said Sven-Erik. “They can get up here as soon as it’s light tomorrow morning.”
He felt both happy and sad. The worst had happened. Another priest had been murdered, they could be more or less certain of that now. But on the other hand, there was a body down there. There were traces of blood in the skiff, and there were bound to be some on the track as well. They knew it had been a diesel car. They had something to work with again.
He looked at his colleagues. He could see the same electricity in them all.
“They can get themselves up here tonight,” said Anna-Maria.
“They can at least make an attempt in the dark. I want him out of there now.”