The Black Path Read Free

Pudas, who had found the body, was sitting in Abisko tourist station and had already been questioned by the squad car unit who had been first on the scene.
    When Leif Pudas arrived at the tourist station, the reception desk was closed. It had taken a while before the staff in the bar took him seriously. It was Saturday night after all, and they were more than used to unconventional dress at the tourist station; people would take off their snowmobile overalls and sit there drinking beer in their underwear and all sorts. But Leif Pudas had come stumbling in dressed in a ladies’ padded jacket that only reached just below his navel, with a pair of long johns wound round his head like a turban.
    It wasn’t until he burst into tears that they understood something serious had happened. They had listened, then treated him somewhat warily while they contacted the police.
    He’d found a dead woman, he said. He’d repeated several times that it wasn’t his ark. They’d still thought it was probably a matter of a guy who’d killed his wife. Nobody had wanted to look him in the eye. He’d been sitting there all alone and weeping, disturbing no one, when the police arrived.
    It had proved impossible to seal off the area around the ark; the wind had simply snatched the police tape away. Instead they had tied the black and yellow tape around the ark, wrapping it up like a parcel. The tape was flapping angrily in the wind. The technicians had arrived, and were working on the small surface area in the beam of the spotlights and the muted Calor gas light afforded by the ark itself.
    There just wasn’t room for more than two people inside the ark. While the technicians were working, Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke stood outside and tried to keep moving.
    It was more or less impossible to hear each other through the storm and their thick hats. Even Sven-Erik was wearing a hat with ear flaps; he didn’t normally wear anything on his head, even in the middle of winter. They yelled at each other and moved about like fat Michelin men in their snowmobile overalls.
    “Look,” shouted Anna-Maria. “This is ridiculous.”
    She spread out her arms, standing like a sail against the wind. She was a small woman and didn’t weigh a great deal. Besides which, the snow had melted during the day, then frozen again in the evening and turned shiny and icy, so when she positioned herself like that the wind got hold of her and she began to glide slowly away.
    Sven-Erik laughed and pretended to hurry over to catch her before she slid off to the opposite side of the lake.
    The technicians emerged from the ark.
    “She wasn’t murdered here, at any rate,” one of them bawled at Anna-Maria. “Looks like she was stabbed. But like I said, not here. You can take the body. We’ll carry on here in the morning when we can see what we’re doing.”
    “And when we’re not freezing our asses off,” yelled his colleague, who wasn’t dressed nearly warmly enough.
    The technicians climbed onto the sledge and were driven off to the tourist station.
    Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke went into the ark.
    It was cold and cramped.
    “But at least we’re out of that bloody wind,” said Sven-Erik as he closed the door. “That’s better, we can talk normally.”
    The small folding table attached to the wall was covered in a wood-patterned material. Four white plastic chairs were stacked on top of one another. There was a small hotplate and a place to wash the dishes. A red and white checked café curtain and a vase of artificial flowers were lying on the floor beneath the Plexiglas window. A big cushion fixed in front of the window provided a reasonable amount of protection against the wind, which was desperate to get in.
    Sven-Erik opened the wardrobe. The equipment necessary for distilling alcohol was inside. He closed the door.
    “We didn’t see that” was all he said.
    Anna-Maria looked at the woman on the bed.
    “One seventy-five?”