The Second Deadly Sin Read Free

awful.
    Some of the men take an involuntary step back. They know what’s inside there. The remains of Johansson’s Norwegian elk-hound. The inspector knows that as well.
    “Ah well,” he says. “Berries and meat. Fur and skin.”
    He pokes around in the slushy mess. His face suddenly assumes a suspicious expression.
    “But for Christ’s sake, this isn’t …”
    He falls silent. Picks up a few pieces of bone with his right hand, which is protected by a plastic glove.
    “What the hell is this it’s been eating?” he mumbles as he pokes around in the slush.
    The huntsmen come closer. Scratch at the back of their heads so that the peaks of their caps slide down their foreheads. One of them takes out a pair of glasses.
    The inspector straightens up. Quickly. Takes a step backwards. He’s holding a piece of bone with his fingers.
    “Do you know what this is?” he asks.
    His face has turned grey. The look in his eyes sends shivers down the spines of all the others. The forest has fallen silent. There is no wind. No birdsong. It seems that it is refusing to reveal a secret.
    “It’s not a dog in any case. I can assure you of that.”

SUNDAY, 23 OCTOBER
    The autumnal river was still talking to her about death. But in a different way. Before, it was funereal in tone. It used to say: You can put an end to it all. You can run out onto the thin ice, as far as you can before it breaks. But now the river said: You, my girl, are no more than the blinking of an eye. It felt consoling.
    District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson was sleeping calmly as dawn began to break. She was no longer woken up by angst poking away at her from the inside, digging into her, scratching around. No more night sweats, no more palpitations.
    She no longer stood in the bathroom, staring into the mirror at black pupils and wanting to cut off all her hair, or to set fire to something – preferably herself.
    It’s good now, she said instead. To herself or to the river. Sometimes to another person, if anybody dared to ask.
    And it
was
good. Good to be able to do her job again. To tidy up her home. Not to feel her mouth constantly parched, not to break into a rash after taking all her medicine. To sleep soundly at night.
    And occasionally she even laughed. While the river flowed past as it had done for generation after generation before her, and would continue to flow long after she was no more.
    But just now, for the blinking of an eye she would be alive, she could laugh and keep her house tidy, do her job properly and occasionally smoke a cigarette in the sunshine on her balcony. Then she would be nothing, for a very long time.
    That’s the way it is, the river said.
    She liked to have the house clean and tidy. To keep it as it was in Grandma’s time. She slept in the alcove in the varnished sofa bed. The floor was covered by rag mats made by her grandmother. Wooden trays hung from wall hooks in embroidered slings.
    The drop-leaf table and chairs were painted blue, and worn and shiny wherever hands and feet had rested. Crammed onto the metal ladder shelves were volumes of low-church pastor Laestadius’s sermons, hymn books and thirty-year-old copies of magazines from another time –
Hemmets Journal
,
Allers
and
Land
. The linen cupboard was full of threadbare mangled sheets.
    Lying at Martinsson’s feet was the puppy Jasko, sniffling away. The police dog handler Krister Eriksson had given it to her eighteen months ago. A handsome sheepdog. He would soon be lord of all he surveyed – at least, that’s what he himself thought. Raised his leg high when he peed, and almost fell over. In his dreams he was the King of Kurravaara.
    His paws twitched and trod in his sleep as he chased after all those annoying mice and rats that filled his days with their tempting scents but never allowed themselves to be captured. He yelped and his lips twitched when he dreamed about clamping his teeth into their backs with a satisfying crunching noise. Perhaps he was