“RING
And WAIT.
It takes ages for me to get to the door.
I AM at home.”
Mella rang the bell. And waited. A few ravens were frolicking in the thermals above the lake. Black and majestic against the blue sky. Their cries filled the air. One of them was wheeling round and round in concentric circles. Without a care in the world.
Mella waited. Could feel every nerve in her body itching to hurry back to her car and drive away. Anything to avoid coming face to face with another person’s sorrow.
A cat came strolling across the parking area, caught sight of Mella and quickened its pace. Stålnacke was a cat person. Mella’s thoughts turned back to him. He was good at this kind of thing. Telling people what they least wanted to hear. Hugging and consoling them.
Damn him, she thought.
“Damn,” she said out loud, in an attempt to banish her depressing thoughts.
At that same moment the door opened. A thin, stooped woman in her eighties was clinging on to the handle with both hands. Her white hair hung down her back in a string-like plait. She was wearing a simple blue dress buttoned up to her neck and a man’s cardigan. Her legs were encased in thick nylon stockings, and her pointed shoes were made of reindeer skin.
“Sorry,” Mella said. “I was lost in my thoughts.”
“Never mind,” the woman said in a friendly tone. “I’m pleased that you’re still here. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t have the patience to wait, despite the note I pinned to the door. I struggle this far only to see them driving away. I’m always tempted to shoot them. I look forward to a nice little chat, then find myself cheated. Mind you, the Jehovah’s Witnesses always wait.”
She laughed.
“I’m not so particular nowadays. They’re welcome to stay for a chat. But you’re not religious, are you? Are you selling raffle tickets?”
“Anna-Maria Mella, Kiruna police,” Mella said, showing her I.D. “Are you Anni Autio?”
The smile disappeared from the woman’s face.
“You’ve found Wilma,” she said.
Anni Autio supported herself against the walls and held on to strategically placed chairs as she shuffled to the kitchen. Mella took off her winter boots and left them in the vestibule, which was almost completely filled by a large, humming freezer. She accepted Anni’s offer of coffee. The kitchen gave the impression of having been untouched since the 1950s. The tap shook and the pipes shuddered as Anni filled the coffee pan. The conifer-green cupboards reached all the way to the ceiling. The walls were crammed with photographs, poems by Edith Södergran and Nils Ferlin, children’s watercolours now so faded that it was impossible to see what they were meant to represent, miniature prints of birds, framed pages torn out of old flower books.
“We haven’t managed to find her mother,” Mella said. “According to the electoral register, Wilma lived with you, and the police report on her disappearance names you as next of kin. She was your granddaughter…”
“My great-granddaughter, in fact.”
Anni hunched over the stove as she waited for the water to boil. Listening to Mella’s account of how Wilma had been found, she occasionally lifted the saucepan lid with an embroidered pot-holder.
“Tell me if there’s anything I can do,” Mella said. Anni made a dismissive gesture.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked when she had finished pouring out the coffee.“I know it’s dicing with death, but I was eighty last January, and I’ve always smoked. Some people look after their health… But life isn’t fair.”
Tapping her cigarette against the glass jar she used as an ashtray, she said again, “Life isn’t fair.”
She wiped her nose and cheeks with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Cry as much as you like,” Mella said, just as Stålnacke used to do.
“She was only seventeen,” Anni said with a sob. “She was too young. And I’m too old to have to live through all this.”
She looked angrily at Mella.
“I’m totally fed up,” she said. “It’s bad enough outliving nearly everyone my own age. But when you start outliving the youngsters, well…”
“How come she lived with you?” Mella asked, mainly to have something to say.
“She used to live in Huddinge with her mother, my granddaughter. Went to grammar school, but was having trouble getting through all the work. She insisted on taking a break and coming up here to live with me. She moved in last Christmas. She worked for Marta Andersson at the campsite. And then she met Simon. He’s a relative of Kyrö who lives in the red wooden cottage over there…”
She gestured towards the building.
“Simon thought the world of Wilma.”
She stared hard at Mella.
“I’ve never been as close to anyone as I was to Wilma. Not to my daughters. Certainly not to my sister. Mind you, here in the village nobody has much time for anybody else. But Wilma gave me a feeling of freedom, I don’t know how to explain it. My sister Kerttu, for instance – she’s always been better off than me. She married Isak Krekula. He runs the haulage firm.”
“I recognize the name,” Mella said.
“Anyway, none of them have exactly been pals with the police. It’s his sons who run the firm nowadays, of course. That Kerttu is always annoying me. All she wants to talk about is money and business and what big shots her boys keep meeting. But Wilma used to say, ‘Take no notice. If money and that sort of stuff make her feel good, then fine. You don’t need to be any less happy on her account.’ Huh, I know it sounds simple and straightforward – but last summer… I’d never felt so liberated and so young. You can think whatever you like, Ann-Britt, but…”
“Anna-Maria.”
“But she was my best friend. An eighty-year-old and a teenager. She didn’t treat me like a useless pensioner.”
It is the middle of August. Blueberry time. Simon Kyrö is driving along a forest track. Wilma Persson is in the passenger seat. Anni Autio is in the back, her walker beside her. This is the place they were looking for. Blueberries and lingonberries growing right by the track. Anni wriggles out of the car unaided. Simon lifts out her walker and her basket. It is a lovely day. The sun is shining, and the heat is squeezing threads of attractive scent from the forest.
“I haven’t been here for years,” Anni says.
Simon gives her a worried look. Of course not. How on earth could she have negotiated any kind of rough terrain with her walker?
“Would you like us to come with you?” he says. “I can carry your basket.”
“Just leave her,” Wilma says, and Anni emits a loud expletive in Tornedalen Finnish, shooing him away as if his interpolation were a fly buzzing around her. Wilma knows. Anni needs to be alone in the silence. If she finds it impossible to move around and does not manage to pick a single blueberry, that will not matter. She can sit down on a rock and just be herself.
“We’ll come back and collect you in three hours,” Wilma says.
Then she turns to Simon with a cheeky smile.
“I know how you and I can figure out how to spend the time.”
Simon’s face turns as red as a beetroot.
“Stop it,” he says, glancing over at Anni.
Wilma laughs.
“Anni’s nearly eighty. She’s given birth to five children. Do you think she’s forgotten what people can get up to when they’re on their own?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Anni says. “But stop embarrassing him.”
“Make sure you don’t die while we’re away,” Wilma says chirpily before she and Simon get back into the car and drive off.
They do not go far. The car stops. Wilma sticks her head out of the window and shouts so loudly that her voice echoes through the forest, “Mind you, if you do die, it’s a fantastic day and place for it.”