Until Thy Wrath Be Past Part 23

She turns her head and points. Adds in a calm voice: "The ones I killed are over there. And there. But Thomas Soderberg isn't buried here."

"You were acquitted," he says.

"Yes," she says. "They said it was self-defence."

"How did you feel?"

He stresses the "you". Looks her in the eye. Then looks down at the snow as if he were standing in front of the altar at church, showing due deference.

What does he want? Martinsson wonders.

"I don't know," she says hesitantly. "At first I didn't feel anything much. I didn't remember much either. But then things got worse. I couldn't work. I tried to get a grip, but in the end I made a mistake that cost my firm lots of money and prestige they had a good insurance policy, but still . . . Then I went on sick leave. I hung around the flat. Didn't want to go out. Slept badly. Ate badly. The flat was in a terrible mess."

"Yes," he says.

They fall silent as someone else approaches. She nods as she walks past. Martinsson nods back. Hjalmar doesn't seem to have noticed.

It occurs to Martinsson that he might be going to confess. What the h.e.l.l should she do if that happens? Ask him to accompany her to the police station, of course. But what if he refuses? What if he confesses and then regrets having done so and kills her instead?

She looks him in the eye for a while. And she recalls one of Meijer & Ditzinger's clients, a prost.i.tute who owned a number of flats. She made no attempt to hide her profession, having commissioned the law firm to sort out a tax problem. Mns Wenngren had been drunk on one occasion when they had gone out for an afternoon drink, and quite irresponsibly had started asking her if she was ever afraid of her clients. He had been flirtatious, flattering, fascinated. Martinsson had been embarra.s.sed, had looked down at the table. The woman had remained friendly but never wavered in her integrity it was obvious that she was used to this kind of curiosity. She said no, she wasn't afraid. She always looked new clients in the eye long and hard. "That way you know," she had said, "if you need to be frightened or not. Everything you need to know about a person can be seen in his eyes."

Martinsson looks Hjalmar in the eye long and hard. No, she doesn't need to be afraid of him.

"You ended up in a psychiatric ward," he says.

"Yes, in the end I did. I went out of my mind. It was when Lars-Gunnar Vinsa shot himself and his boy. I couldn't cope with another death. It sort of opened all the doors I was trying to keep closed."

Hjalmar finds it almost impossible to breathe. That's exactly what it's like, he wants to say. First Wilma and Simon. That had been bad enough, although he managed to cope. But then there was Hjorleifur Arnarson . . .

"Did you sink all the way down?" he says. "Did you hit rock bottom?"

"I suppose I did, yes. Although I don't remember much of the worst part. I was so poorly."

They gave me electric-shock treatment, she thinks. And they kept me under close supervision. I don't want to talk about this.

They stand there, Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula. For him it is so difficult to ask questions. For her it is so difficult to answer. They battle their way forward through the conversation like two hikers in a blizzard. Heads bowed, struggling with the wind.

"I don't remember," she says. "I sometimes think that if you recall a situation in which you were really depressed, you feel all the sorrow flooding back when you think about it. And if you recall a situation in which you were really happy, the happiness comes back to you. But if your memory of a situation fills you with anxiety, the feelings you had don't come back, no matter what. It's as if your brain simply goes on strike. It's not going to go back there. You can only remember what it was like. You can't experience how it felt."

Depressed? Hjalmar thinks. Sorrow? Happiness?

Neither of them speaks.

"What about you?" Rebecka says eventually. "Whom have you come to visit?"

"I thought I'd come and say h.e.l.lo to her."

She realizes that it's Wilma he's talking about.

"Did you know her?" she says.

Yes, his mouth says, although no sound is produced. But he nods.

"What was she like?"

"She was O.K.," he says, and adds with a wry smile: "She wasn't very good at maths."

Wilma is sitting at Anni's kitchen table with her maths textbook open in front of her, tearing her hair in desperation. She has to read up on maths and Swedish in order to be able to apply to grammar school. Anni is at the sink washing up, watching Hjalmar Krekula through the window as he clears away the snow from the parking area in front of the house with his tractor. Anni is his aunt, after all.

The air turns blue as Wilma curses and swears over her maths book. G.o.d's angels come out in goose pimples when they hear her.

"h.e.l.l, d.a.m.nation, s.h.i.t, f.u.c.k, c.u.n.t," she says, snarling.

"Hey, calm down now," Anni says disapprovingly.

"But I don't want to," Wilma says. "I'm thick, I can't understand a thing. b.l.o.o.d.y algebra s.h.i.t-talk. 'When we multiply a conjugate pair, the radical vanishes and we are left with a rational number.' I've had enough of this c.r.a.p. I'm going to ring Simon, and we can go out on the snow scooter."

"Do that."

"Aaaargh! But I really have to learn this stuff!"

"Don't ring him, then."

Anni sees that Hjalmar has almost finished. She puts the coffee pan on the stove. Five minutes later he sticks his head round the door and announces that it is all done. Anni will not let him go. She tells him she has only just put the coffee on. She and Wilma will not be able to drink it all themselves. And she has thawed out some buns as well.

He allows himself to be persuaded and sits down at the kitchen table. Keeps his jacket on, only unzipping it halfway as a sign that he does not intend to stay long.

He says nothing. He hardly ever does; people are used to it. Anni and Wilma take care of the talking, know better than to try to include him by asking lots of questions.

"I'm going to ring Simon," Wilma says in the end, and goes out into the hall where the telephone stands on a little teak table with a stool beside it and a mirror behind.

Anni gets up to fetch a 50-krona note from an old cocoa tin standing on the edge of the cooker hood. It is part of the ritual: she will try to persuade Hjalmar to accept the money for clearing the snow. He always refuses, but in the end he usually takes a bag of buns, or some beef stew in a plastic jar. Or something of the sort. While Anni fumbles around in the cocoa tin, Hjalmar pulls over Wilma's maths book. He glances quickly through the text, then in about a minute flat he solves nine algebraic equations, one after the other.

"Wow," Anni says. "Fancy that, I'd almost forgotten. You were very good at maths when you were at school. Maybe you could help Wilma? Her maths is driving her up the wall."

But Hjalmar has to leave. He zips up his jacket, grunts a thank you for the coffee and grabs the 50-krona note in order to avoid arguing.

That evening Wilma turns up at Hjalmar Krekula's house. She has her maths book in her hand.

"You're good at this stuff!" she says without preamble, marches into his kitchen and sits down at the table. "You're a genius, after all."

"Oh, I don't know . . ." Hjalmar says, but is interrupted.

"You must teach me. I can't understand a d.a.m.ned thing."

"No, I can't," he says, and starts struggling for breath, but Wilma has already wriggled out of her jacket.

"Oh yes!" she says. "Yes you can!"

"Alright," he says. "But I'm no schoolmistress."

She looks at him entreatingly. She positively pleads with him. So he feels obliged to sit down beside her.

They slog away together for more than two hours. She shouts and moans as she usually does when things are not going well for her. To her surprise, he shouts as well. He slams his fist down on the table and says that for G.o.d's sake she must stop gaping out of the window and concentrate on her maths book. Is she meditating? What the h.e.l.l is she doing? And when she starts crying, worn out by second-order polynomials, he taps her awkwardly on the head and asks if she would like a soda. And so they drink Coca-Cola together.

In the end she understands how to solve "those b.l.o.o.d.y quadratic equations".

They are both utterly exhausted. Washed out. Hjalmar warms up some Russian pasty, which they eat with ice cream.

"My G.o.d, but you're a clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she says. "Why are you driving lorries? You ought to be a professor."

He laughs.

"Professor of cla.s.s-nine maths!"

How could she possibly understand? Ever since he finished reading the maths books he stole from Herr Fernstrom's car, he has been doing his sums. He has ordered books from university book-shops and antiquarian booksellers. In algebra he is busy with Lagrange's theorem and groups of permutations. He has been taking correspondence courses for years, and not just in maths. Driven down to Stockholm in order to take the exams at Hermod's Correspondence College. Pretended that he was going to Finland to do some shopping. Or to Lule to collect an engine. When he was twenty-five he took the high-school leaving examination at Hermod's. He drove out to his summer cottage the following weekend. He had bought a bottle of wine. Not that he was much of a drinker, and especially not of wine. But he sat there with a Duralex gla.s.s of red. It tasted foul. Hjalmar smiles at the memory.

They work for a bit longer, but eventually it is time for Wilma to go home. She puts on her jacket.

"Don't tell anybody about this," he says before she leaves. "You know. Not Tore . . . Not anybody. Don't tell them I'm good at maths and all that."

"Of course not," she says with a smile.

She is already elsewhere in her thoughts. Presumably with Simon Kyro. She thanks Hjalmar for his help, and leaves.

Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula are standing in the cemetery. Martinsson has the feeling that she is sitting in a boat and Hjalmar has fallen into the water. He's clinging on to the rail, but she doesn't have the strength to pull him into the boat. He will soon be dangerously close to hypothermia. He will lose his grip on the rail. He will sink. There's nothing she can do.

"How are you?" she says.

She regrets it the moment she's said it. She doesn't want to know how he is. He's not her responsibility.

"I've got heartburn or something," he says, thumping his chest with his fist.

"Really?"

"I have to go," he says. But he shows no sign of moving.

"I see."

She has the dog in her car. She ought to go too.

"I can't stop wondering what I should do," he says. His face is twitching.

She looks away in the direction of the trees. Avoids looking him in the eye.

"When I felt at rock bottom, I used to go out for a walk in the country. Sometimes that helps."

He trudges off.

Impotence weighs her down.

Martinsson arrived back at the police station at 2.15 in the afternoon. In the entrance she b.u.mped into Anna-Maria Mella. Vera, overcome with joy, jumped up to greet Mella. Left wet paw marks on her jeans.

Mella's eyes were shining and full of life. Her cheeks were red. Her hair seemed to be longing to be free; strands were working their way loose from her plait and looked as if they wanted to fly away.

"Have you heard?" she said. "We've had a report from the lab. There was blood from Hjorleifur Arnarson on Tore Krekula's jacket."

"Wow," Martinsson said, feeling as if she had been jerked violently out of a dream. Her thoughts had been totally immersed in the meeting with Hjalmar Krekula at the cemetery. "What are you . . ."

"We're going to arrest Tore Krekula, of course. We're about to set off for his house right now."

Mella paused. She looked guilty.

"I ought to have rung you. But you've been busy with proceedings all morning, haven't you? Do you want to come with us and help nail him?"

Martinsson shook her head.

"Before you go," she said, placing a hand on Mella's arm to hold her back, "I was at the cemetery."

Mella made a heroic effort to hide her impatience.

"And?" she said, pretending to be interested.

"Hjalmar Krekula was there as well. To visit Wilma's grave. I think he was on the brink of . . . well, I don't know what. He's not well. I had the feeling he wanted to tell me something."

Mella became a little more attentive.

"What did he say?"

"I don't know. It was mainly a feeling I had."

"Don't be angry," Mella said, "but don't you think your imagination might be running away with you? All this business might have triggered memories of your own experience. How you felt bad when you . . . you know."

Martinsson could feel her emotions tying themselves in knots.

"That's a possibility, of course," she said stiffly.

"We can talk more about it when I get back," Mella said. "But keep away from Hjalmar Krekula, O.K.? He's a dangerous swine, remember that."

Martinsson shook her head thoughtfully.

"He would never hurt me," she said.

"Famous last words," Mella said with a wry smile. "I'm serious, Rebecka. Suicide and homicide have a lot in common. We had a bloke last year who ran amok in his cottage out at Laxforsen, releasing first his wife and then his children aged seven and eleven from the sufferings of this world. Then he succeeded in taking his own life with an overdose of ordinary iron tablets. His kidneys and liver gave up the ghost. Mind you, it took more than two months for him to die. He was in hospital in Ume with tubes wherever you looked, under arrest for murder."

Neither of them spoke. Mella wanted to bite her tongue off. She thought about when Martinsson had shot those men at Jiekajarvi. The circ.u.mstances had been quite different, of course. And how she had lost the plot and wanted to kill herself. But those circ.u.mstances had also been quite different. Why was everything always so complicated? The ground around Martinsson was a minefield. Why the h.e.l.l did she have to b.u.mp into her in the doorway?

Rantakyro and Olsson came charging down the corridor. Greeting Martinsson hurriedly, they looked questioningly at Mella.