“And I’ve got to kick her husband out,” Rebecka went on.
“I said you didn’t have to.”
Oh, pack it in, thought Rebecka. You didn’t give me any choice.
Otherwise you’d have got the police to chuck him out of the house.
She put her foot down.
The money comes first, she thought. That’s the most important thing.
“Sometimes it just makes me want to throw up,” she said tiredly.
“Goes with the job sometimes,” said Torsten. “All you can do is wipe your shoes and carry on.”
Inspector Anna-Maria Mella was driving to Lisa Stöckel’s house. Lisa Stöckel was the chair of Magdalena, the women’s group. Her house was in an isolated spot up on a ridge beyond Poikkijärvi chapel. Behind the house the ridge plunged down into huge gravel pits, and the river was on the other side of the ridge.
In the beginning the house had been a simple brown chalet built in the sixties. Later on it had been extended and adorned with ornate white window shutters and an excess of white ornamental carving on the porch. Nowadays it looked like a brown shoebox disguised as a gingerbread house. Next to the house was a tumbledown rectangular wooden building, painted Falun red, with a corrugated roof. One barred window, not double glazed.Woodshed, storeroom and former barn, guessed Anna-Maria. There must have been another house here at one time. And they pulled it down and built the chalet. Left the barn standing.
She drove very slowly into the yard. Three dogs were running to and fro in front of the car, barking. Some chickens flapped their wings and sought shelter under a currant bush. By the gatepost stood a cat in front of a shrew hole, rigid with concentration, ready to pounce. Only an irritated swishing of its tail gave away the fact that it had noticed the noisy Ford Escort.
Anna-Maria parked in front of the house. Through the side window she looked down into the jaws of the dogs who were leaping at the car door. True, their tails were wagging, but even so. One of them was unbelievably big. And it was black. She turned off the engine.
A woman came out of the house and stood on the porch. She was wearing an incredibly ugly Barbie-pink padded coat. She called to the dogs.
“Heel!”
The dogs immediately left the car and raced up onto the porch. The woman in the padded coat told them to lie down, and came over to the car. Anna-Maria got out and introduced herself.
Lisa Stöckel was in her fifties. She wore no makeup. Her face was sunburned after the summer. She had white lines around her eyes from squinting into the sun. Her hair was cut very short, a millimeter shorter and it would have stuck out from her head like a scrubbing brush.
Nice, thought Anna-Maria. Like a cowgirl. If you could imagine a cowgirl in that pink coat.
The coat really was hideous. It was covered in dog hair, and bits of the stuffing were sticking out from little holes and tears.
Girl? Anna-Maria did know women in their fifties who had girly lunches and would carry on being girls until the day they died, but Lisa Stöckel was no girl. There was something in her eyes that gave Anna-Maria the feeling that maybe she’d never been a girl, even when she was a child.
And then there was an almost imperceptible line that ran from the corner of her eye, under the eye and down toward the cheekbone. A dark shadow at the corner of the eyes.
Pain, thought Anna-Maria. In the body or in the soul.
They walked up to the house together. The dogs were lying on the porch, whimpering feverishly, desperate to be allowed to get up and greet the visitor.
“Stay,” ordered Lisa Stöckel.
It was directed at the dogs, but Anna-Maria Mella obeyed as well.
“Are you frightened of dogs?”
“No, not as long as I know they’re friendly,” replied Anna-Maria, looking at the large black one.
The long pink tongue lolling out of its mouth like a tie. Paws like a lion.
“Okay, well, there’s another one in the kitchen, but she’s like a lamb. These are too, they’re just a gang of village louts with no manners. Go on in.”
She opened the door for Anna-Maria, who slid into the hall.
“Bloody hooligans,” said Lisa Stöckel affectionately to the dogs. “Out!”
The dogs leapt up, their claws gouging long marks in the wood as they picked up speed; they took the steps down from the porch in one joyous bound and shot off across the yard.
Anna-Maria stood in the narrow hallway and looked around her. Half the floor was occupied by two dog beds. There was also a big stainless steel water bowl, Wellingtons, boots, tennis shoes and practical Gore-Tex shoes. There was hardly room for both her and Lisa Stöckel at the same time. The walls were covered in hooks and shelves, with several dog leads, work gloves, thick hats and gloves, overalls and all sorts of other things hanging from them. Anna-Maria wondered where she should hang her jacket; every hook was occupied, as was every coat hanger.
“Put your jacket over the back of the chair in the kitchen,” said Lisa Stöckel. “Otherwise it’ll get covered in hairs. Oh, no, don’t take your shoes off whatever you do.”
From the hallway one door led into the living room and one into the kitchen. In the living room stood several banana boxes full of books. There were piles of books on the floor. On one of the shorter walls stood the bookcase, empty and dusty, made of some kind of dark wood with a built-in display cabinet with colored glass.
“Are you moving?” said Anna-Maria.
“No, I’m just… You collect so much rubbish. And the books just gather dust.”
The kitchen furniture was heavy, made of varnished yellow pine. A black Labrador retriever was asleep on a rustic kitchen sofa. She woke up when the two women came into the kitchen, thumping her tail against the sofa in greeting. Then she put her head down and went back to sleep.
Lisa introduced the dog as Majken.
“Tell me what she was like,” said Anna-Maria when they’d sat down. “I know you worked together in this women’s group, Magdalena.”
“But I’ve already told him… a big guy with a moustache like this.”
Lisa measured a couple of decimeters from her top lip with her hand. Anna-Maria smiled.
“Sven-Erik Stålnacke.”
“Yes.”
“Can you go over it again?”
“Where shall I start?”
“How did you get to know one another?”
Anna-Maria watched Lisa Stöckel’s face. When people searched through their memories for a particular event they often dropped their guard. As long as it wasn’t an event they were intending to lie about, of course. Sometimes they forgot the person sitting in front of them for a while. A wry, fleeting smile crossed Lisa Stöckel’s face. Something softened for a moment. She’d liked the priest.
“Six years ago. She’d just moved into the priest’s house. And in the autumn she was to be responsible for confirmation classes for the young people both here and in Jukkasjärvi. And she set about it like a gun dog. Contacted all the parents of the children who hadn’t registered. Introduced herself and talked about why she thought confirmation classes were so important.”
“Why were they important?” asked Anna-Maria, who hadn’t thought they were the slightest use when she’d taken them a hundred years ago.
“Mildred thought the church should be a meeting place. She wasn’t that bothered about whether people believed or not, that was between them and God. But if she could get them to church for a christening, confirmation, weddings and major festivals, so that people could meet one another and feel sufficiently at home in the church so they’d turn to it if life became too difficult, then… And when people said ‘but he doesn’t believe, it seems wrong if he’s studying just to get presents,’ she said it was good to get presents, no young people studied because they liked it, neither at school nor at church, but it was part of their general education to know why we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and Ascension Day, and to be able to name the apostles.”