The Second Deadly Sin (10 page)

“You’re good at what you do,” she said.

“Yes, I’m good at what I do.”

“I knew your mother. We used to go out dancing together. She was good-looking. She had loads of admirers. Then she met your dad and they got married and I moved away, so we lost contact. Sol-Britt used to come with us sometimes, although she was younger than we were. But she was my little cousin after all. Then she got a bun in the oven, and had her little boy, Matti, when she was only seventeen. The father did a runner before Matti was a year old. I don’t even remember what the bastard was called anymore. He moved away, and things went pretty well for him. He got a job with Scania as a lorry driver. Anyway, Sol-Britt met somebody else, but then that didn’t work out either. So she found another man, but he drank too much. He used to bring his mates back home with him, and they kicked up a row until all hours. So she kicked him out. And that was that. Matti’s schoolmates used to tell him that his mother was a whore and a drunkard.”

“Did she drink?”

“Yes, she did. Far too much. But do you know what: lots of people drink too much. Still, she ended up as somebody all the other bloody losers could think they were better than. All the women in this
village who think they are pretty well off. I think they feel it’s a bit more bearable living with an idiot of a man if you make up your mind that the worst thing that can happen to you is having to live without one. So they can say everything in their garden is lovely – and they can drink with a good conscience as well, because they’ve all decided that Sol-Britt drinks more than they do. And when she wanders round the village after having downed a glass or two, she’s drunk and a pain in the neck. All the others chat and pretend to be normal, no matter what state they’re really in. Sol-Britt was one of those people men went to visit when they were drunk, when they’d had a row with the wife or been left on their own. They would stagger round to her house. And she would serve them coffee. That was all. I know that for a fact. Not that I think it matters, but that’s the way it was. Then they would stagger back to their wives or to a neighbour or to one of their mates, and boast that they’d screwed her. All bloody lies. Wishful thinking. Anyway, quite a few people called her a whore. I don’t understand why she carried on living here. And I don’t understand why you’ve come back here.”

Martinsson looked out of the window. Was it snowing? A few isolated flakes were floating around in the air, as if they couldn’t make up their minds whether to fall or to go back where they had come from.

She did not want to listen to all this. She did not want to hear about her parents. And she did not want to hear the truth about a Kurravaara that was not the one she knew.

It is easier to keep all that at arm’s length, now that I’m grown up, she thought. I do not need to have anything to do with people like that. It was different when I was small. And we were all in the same class. You did not have a chance in those circumstances.

“Was there anybody threatening her?”

“Marcus gets bullied by some of the youngsters in the village. They all share the same school bus into Kiruna. Sol-Britt took that
up with the headmaster. The other parents were up in arms. With Sol-Britt! Because she dared to accuse their children. Sol-Britt stood her ground and stuck up for herself when Louise and Lelle Niemi turned up at her front door and started shouting and screaming. They did the kind of things the police can’t catch them for. Like switching on full headlights to dazzle her. And yes, they called her a whore. Mouthed the word whenever they met her in the shops in town. And Marcus begged his grandma not to do anything or say anything because that only made things worse for him. And so their little boy would push Marcus into the ditch or into snowdrifts whenever he bumped into them. Pinch his things. She bought him three new rucksacks last year. Marcus said he had lost them, but he doesn’t just lose his belongings.”

She lifted all the dirty crockery and cutlery out of the sink, put the plug in and started running hot water as she put plates, glasses and cutlery into the foaming hot water.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. They’re idiots – but they didn’t kill her.”

She washes up in the old-fashioned way, Martinsson noted. She rinses everything in a plastic bowl, rather than under a running tap – it’s important to save hot water.

“Where do they live?”

“In the big yellow house further up the creek. Are you saying you didn’t know that? Don’t stir up trouble with them and their gang. That’s my advice if you want to carry on living in this village.”

Martinsson allowed herself a wry smile.

“I’ve stirred up trouble with people before. I don’t let people scare me.”

Now it was Larsson’s turn to smile, just as wryly. A hasty smile. It didn’t last long, frightened off by something – sorrow and death, perhaps.

“That’s true. I’ve read about it. And heard about it as well, of
course. There’s a lot of talk about what you do. You killed those pastors – that was not far from here, in the Kurravaara district.”

And somewhere in Sweden those children are growing up, Martinsson thought. Without a father. Hating me.

She looked down at her empty notebook

“Is there anything else you want to tell me? About Sol-Britt. What sort of state was she in when you last saw her? Was there anything she was worried about?”

“No. Or rather, to be honest, not that I know of. I wouldn’t have noticed if there was. I sit with my mother and try to feed her. Keep an eye on her. She did a few jobs here not long ago. Mending things and cleaning.”

She looked around the room.

“But now she’s just a little bird. You are like your mother.”

Martinsson felt herself stiffening.

“Anyway, thank you for your time,” she said in a friendly voice, giving nothing away.

Larsson stopped washing up and turned to face her. Martinsson felt the woman’s gaze penetrating deep inside her.

“Oh, so that’s the way it is, is it? But your mum wasn’t a bad person. And your dad wasn’t a victim. If you ever want to talk about it, you’re welcome to call in for a coffee one of these days.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Martinsson said, rising to her feet. “We’ll be in touch about Marcus.”

She looked at the clock. It was time to go to the postmortem.

As always it was very cold in the autopsy chamber. Martinsson and Mella made no move to remove their outer garments. The faint smell of decomposing bodies and the more evident smell of strong cleaning materials and surgical spirits were relegated to the background by the tobacco smoke produced by the Dr Pohjanen.

He was sitting on his working chair, a cigarette in one hand and a dictaphone in the other. The chair was made of metal and had small wheels – a sort of skeleton desk chair without a backrest. Mella assumed that he rarely stood up nowadays. She had heard that he had given up driving last year – excellent! No doubt he was highly dangerous in traffic. He seemed always to be tired out, and spent at least half his working day lying on his back on the sofa in the coffee room. Less and less Pohjanen, more and more cancer. She found herself feeling angry with him, for some reason she could not identify.

Underneath his unbuttoned green smock he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Madonna. The image of the fit-looking singer wearing a top hat over her blonde hair provided a sombre contrast to his own lifeless skin. The rings under his eyes were dark, almost blue.

Mella wondered how on earth Madonna had found her way onto his body. No doubt he had been given the T-shirt as a present. By his daughter. Or maybe his granddaughter. She couldn’t believe for the life of her that he had the least idea who Madonna was.

Sol-Britt Uusitalo was lying on her back on a steel bench in the
middle of the room. Pohjanen’s bloodstained latex gloves were lying beside the opened-up corpse.

A few metres further back an assistant, Anna Granlund, was sawing through the skull of another dead body. The sound from the motorised circular saw made Mella shudder. She gestured to Granlund, who gestured back: she would soon be finished. Sure enough, after a moment she switched off the saw, removed her protective goggles and greeted the visitors.

She’s the one who does everything now, Mella thought, looking at Anna Granlund. Everything apart from the actual thinking.

“What’s all this?” Martinsson said as soon as the saw had fallen silent. “Smoking in here? You’ll get the sack.”

Pohjanen managed a raucous “ha ha” by way of reply. Everybody knew he could have taken early retirement years ago. He was allowed to do whatever he wanted – provided he stayed on for at least another day.

“Are you thinking of grassing me up?” he croaked, with a self-satisfied smile.

“I hoped you might be able to give us a few details,” Mella said, nodding towards the dead body.

“O.K., O.K.,” he muttered.

He waved his hand, indicating that they could cut out the obligatory song and dance that ensued whenever she came and started asking him questions before he was ready. All the fussing around because he was annoyed by being interrupted and unable to work in peace. And then she would flatter him, and he would allow himself to be appeased.

“At first I thought it might be a nail gun,” he said, “I’ve seen a couple of cases of that, and the nails generally disappear underneath the skin. And there’s very little bleeding, as in this case. Assuming that some of the first shots were fatal. But there are no nails in the wounds. And so …”

He put on another pair of latex gloves and produced a tray carrying skin samples cut into thick slices. Mella thought it might well be some considerable time before she ate bacon again.

“Here,” he said, pointing, “you can see the penetration in the surface skin, and then the tiny holes in the corium and below that – very little damage to the tissue. And look here: the surface penetrations are quite round, and they go deep.”

“An awl?” Mella wondered.

“Close.”

“A nail through a piece of board?” suggested Martinsson.

Pohjanen shook his head.

He pointed to Sol-Britt’s body with his left index finger and his right thumb and index finger, so that the fingers reproduced three holes in a row in several places.

“Orion’s belt, Orion’s belt, Orion’s belt,” he said, pointing out several similar places. “You don’t notice it at first because there are so many wounds.”

“What, then?” Mella said.

“A hayfork,” Martinsson said.

Pohjanen gave Martinsson an approving look.

“Yes, that’s what I think as well.”

He lifted up Sol-Britt’s hands.

“No wounds due to attempts to protect herself. And as there was so little bleeding, I’m inclined to think that the very first stab was fatal.”

Martinsson frowned. Pohjanen glanced at her, and explained.

“If you die, if your heart stops beating, no blood is pumped into your body. If there is no blood being pumped into your body, you don’t bleed. Jesus on the cross is an example of that. It says in the Bible that the soldiers broke the bones of the others who were crucified beside him, but they didn’t break Jesus’s bones because he was already dead. Then they stabbed a lance into his side. And blood and
water came gushing out. Which means that he wasn’t already dead, but probably died at that moment. I’ve had a lot of discussions with churchgoers about that: they want to believe that he gave up the ghost when the Bible said he did.”

“Churchgoers don’t like people like you,” Mella said in order to cheer him up. “Only the other day Mari Allen at the Rudbeck Laboratory revealed that the skulls of Saint Birgitta and her daughter Katarina in the shrine at Vadstena are not related.”

Pohjanen chuckled in satisfaction – which sounded like an engine that was reluctant to start.

“And not only that, there was an age difference of two hundred years between the skulls,” Mella said.

“Huh,” Pohjanen said. “Throw the holy bones to the dogs.”

“She looks to be at peace,” Martinsson said. “Do you think she was asleep when she was killed?”

“All dead people seem to be at peace,” said Pohjanen drily. “No matter how painful their death was. Before rigor mortis sets in, all their muscles, including the muscles in their face, relax.”

Martinsson shifted fractionally. Pohjanen noticed it at once.

“Are you thinking about your father?” he asked. “Forget it. If you look peaceful, the odds are that you were at peace. That is a possibility, believe it or not. Anyway. Lots of blows are fatal.”

He pointed to a wound between Sol-Britt’s navel and her pubic bone.

“This stab penetrated her aorta. That’s where the samurai used to strike when they committed
seppuku
. She has a bleeding in her pericardium, and if you want me to guess I would say that could well have been the first blow. I examined the wound and found traces of rust – I’m almost certain of that. I can send it for analysis if you like.”

“An old hayfork, then,” said Martinsson.

“I don’t suppose there are any new ones – does anybody use a hayfork nowadays?”

“And she was lying in bed …” Mella began.

“Yes, quite definitely. We haven’t started turning her over, but there are some stabs which went right through her body – this one here above her collarbone, for instance. There is matching damage to the mattress.”

“The murderer must have stood on her bed, over the top of her,” Mella said. “Or at the side of the bed. It must have been hard.”

“Very hard,” Pohjanen agreed. “And he was stabbing through bone as well. But if you try something like this – it seems such a reckless thing to do, somehow – then your body is going to be full of adrenalin. A state of mad fury, or perhaps ecstatic elation. And note that the murderer didn’t stop, but went on and on long after the victim was dead. That often indicates mental derangement.”

“Obviously, we’ll check whether any of the mental hospitals have released any loonies lately,” Mella said.

Oh, shit! She could have bitten her tongue off. Shit, shit, shit! Why was her mouth always quicker than her brain? Martinsson had been sent to a mental hospital – she had been in such a state that they had to give her electric shock treatment. She had been hallucinating and screaming. That was after Gunnar Vinsa had shot himself and his son. Mella had never spoken to Martinsson about that. It had been beyond her comprehension. She had not even known that they still gave electric shock treatment. She thought that was what happened in prehistoric times. As in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.