The Blood Spilt

39

Lars-Gunnar opens his eyes. It’s Stefan Wikstr?m who wakes him through the dream. His pathetic cries, whining and whimpering as he falls to his knees by the lake. When he knows.
He’s been asleep in the armchair in the living room. His gun is on his knee. He gets up with difficulty, his back and shoulders stiff. He goes up to Nalle’s room. Nalle is still fast asleep.
He should never have married Eva, of course. But he was just a stupid man from Norrland. Easy prey for somebody like her.
He’s always been big. He was fat even as a child. At that time children were skinny little sprats chasing after footballs. They were thin and quick and threw snowballs at fat boys lumbering home as fast as their legs would carry them. Home to Dad. Who hit them with his belt if he felt like it.
I’ve never raised a hand to Nalle, he thinks. I never would.
But Lars-Gunnar the fat boy grew up and did very well in school despite the hassles. He trained to be a policeman and moved back home. And now he was a different man. It’s not easy to return to the village of your childhood without falling back into the role you had before. But Lars-Gunnar had changed during his year at the police training college. And you don’t mess with a policeman. He had new friends too. In town. Colleagues. He got a place on the hunting team. And because he wasn’t afraid of hard work and was good at planning and organizing, he soon became the leader of the hunt. The idea had been to make it a rotating post, but it never happened. Lars-Gunnar thinks it probably suited the rest of them to have somebody planning and organizing things. In a little corner of his mind he’s also aware that nobody would have dared to question his right to continue as leader. That’s good. No harm in a bit of respect. And he’s earned that respect. Not exploited it as some would have done.
No, his problem has been that he’s too nice. Always thinks well of his fellow men. Like Eva.
It’s hard not to blame himself. But he’d turned fifty when he met her. Lived alone all those years, because things never worked out with women. He was still kind of slow with them, conscious that his body was far too big. And then there was Eva. Who leaned her head against his chest. Her head almost disappeared in his hand when he held her close. “My little one,” he used to say.
But when it didn’t suit her any longer, she’d cleared off. Left him and the boy.
He can hardly remember the months that dragged by after she left. It was like a darkness. He’d thought people were looking at him in the village. Wondered what they were saying about him behind his back.
Nalle turns over laboriously in his sleep. The bed creaks beneath him.
I must… thinks Lars-Gunnar, and loses the thread of his thought.
It’s difficult to concentrate. But everyday life. That has to carry on. That’s the whole point. His and Nalle’s everyday life. The life Lars-Gunnar has created for them both.
I must get some shopping, he thinks. Milk and bread and margarine. Everything’s running out.
He goes downstairs and rings Mimmi.
“I’m going into town,” he says. “Nalle’s asleep and I don’t want to wake him up. If he comes over to you, give him some breakfast, will you?”
* * *

“Is he there?”
Anna-Maria Mella had phoned the medical examiner’s office in Lule?. Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, answered, but Anna-Maria wanted to speak to Lars Pohjanen, the senior police surgeon. Anna Granlund kept an eye on him like a mother looking after her sick child. She kept the autopsy room in perfect order. Opened up the bodies for him, lifted out the organs, put them back when he’d finished, stitched them up and wrote the major part of his reports as well.
“He can’t retire,” she’d said to Anna-Maria on one occasion. “It’s like a marriage in the end, you know; I’ve got used to him, I don’t want anybody else.”
And Lars Pohjanen kept plodding on. Seemed as if he were breathing through a pipe, sucking out the fluid. Just talking made him breathless. A year or so earlier he’d had an operation for lung cancer.
Anna-Maria could see him in her mind’s eye. He was probably asleep on the scruffy seventies sofa in the staff room. The ashtray beside his well-worn clogs. His green scrubs spread over him like a blanket.
“Yes, he’s here,” Anna Granlund replied. “Just a minute.”
Pohjanen’s voice on the other end of the phone, scratchy and rattling.
“Tell me,” said Anna-Maria, “you know how bloody useless I am at reading.”
“There isn’t much. Hrrrm. Shot in the chest from the front. Then in the head, at very close range. There’s an explosive effect in the exit wound from the head.”
A long intake of breath, the sucking noise.
“… waterlogged skin, but not swollen… although you know when he disappeared…”
“Friday night.”
“I’d assume he’s been there since then. Minor damage to those parts of the skin not covered by clothing, the hands and face. The fish have been nibbling. Not much more. Have you found the bullets?”
“They’re still looking. Any signs of a struggle? No other injuries?”
“No.”
“And otherwise?”
Pohjanen’s voice became snappy.
“Nothing, I told you. You’ll have to ask somebody… to read the report out loud for you.”
“I meant how were things with you.”
“Oh, I see,” he said, his tone instantly more amiable. “Everything’s crap, of course.”
* * *

Sven-Erik St?lnacke was talking to the police psychiatrist. He was sitting in the parking lot in his car. He liked her voice. Right from the start he’d taken to its warmth. And he liked the fact that she spoke slowly. Most women in Kiruna talked too bloody fast. And loudly. It was like a hail of bullets, you didn’t stand a chance. He could hear Anna-Maria’s voice in his head: “What do you mean, you don’t stand a chance, we’re the ones that don’t stand a chance. No chance of getting a sensible answer within a reasonable amount of time. You ask: How was it, then? And then there’s silence, and more bloody silence, and after an interminable consideration the answer comes: Good. Then it’s hell trying to squeeze out anything more— from Robert, anyway. So we have to kind of talk for two. Don’t stand a chance? Do me a favor.”
Now he was listening to the psychiatrist’s voice and he could hear her sense of humor. Although the conversation was serious. If he’d just been a few years younger…
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s a copycat murder. Mildred Nilsson was put on display. Stefan Wikstr?m’s body wasn’t even meant to be found. And no use of violence to relieve tension either. This is a completely different modus operandi. It could be another person altogether. So the answer to your question is no. It’s highly unlikely that Stefan Wikstr?m was murdered by a serial killer suffering from a psychological disorder, and that the murder was committed in a highly emotional state and inspired by Viktor Strandg?rd. Either it was somebody else, or Mildred Nilsson and Stefan Wikstr?m were killed for a more, how shall I put it, down to earth reason.”
“Yes?”
“I mean, Mildred’s murder seems very… emotional. But Stefan’s murder is more like…”
“… an execution.”
“Exactly! It feels a bit like a crime of passion. I’m just speculating now, I want you to bear that in mind, I’m just trying to communicate the emotional picture I’m getting… okay?”
“Fine.”
“Like a crime of passion, then. Husband kills his wife in a rage. Then kills the lover in a more cold-blooded way.”
“But they weren’t a couple,” said Sven-Erik.
Then he thought, as far as we know.
“I don’t mean they’re a married couple. I just mean…”
She fell silent.
“… I don’t know what I mean,” she said. “There could be a link. It could definitely be the same perpetrator. Psychopath. Certainly. Maybe. But not necessarily, not at all. And not to the extent that your grasp on reality has completely lost its basis in reality.”
It was time to hang up. Sven-Erik did so with a pang of loss. And Manne was still missing.