The Second Deadly Sin Read Free Page A

also dreaming about all the local bitches responding to all the bewitching love-letters he peed onto every available blade of grass during the day.
    But when the King of Kurravaara woke up, nobody called him anything but the Brat. And no bitches queued up outside his door.
    Martinsson’s other dog never lay in her bed. Never sat in her lap as the Brat frequently did. Vera the mongrel might allow herself to be stroked very briefly, but there was no question of longer spells of tenderness.
    She slept under the table in the kitchen. Nobody knew her age, nor her pedigree. She used to live with her master in the depths ofthe forest, a hermit who made his own anti-mosquito balm and pranced around naked in the summer. When he was murdered, his dog ended up with Martinsson. If she hadn’t taken her in, she would have been put down. Martinsson wouldn’t have been able to cope with that, and so she had taken Vera home with her. And she had stayed there.
    In a way, at least. She was a dog who knew her own mind. Who left it up to Martinsson to track her down when she wandered off along the village road, or went off to explore the potato patch down by the boathouse.
    “How on earth can you let her wander off like that?” said Martinsson’s neighbour Sivving. “You know what people are like. Somebody will shoot her.”
    Please look after her, Martinsson prayed. To a God she sometimes hoped existed. And if you can’t do that, let it happen quickly. Because I can’t stop her. She’s not my dog in that sense.
    Vera’s paws never twitched when she was asleep, nor did she go hunting after tempting scents in her dreams. What the Brat dreamed about, Vera did while she was awake. In the winter she would listen for sounds made by field mice under the snow, pounce down upon them and break their backs just as foxes do. Or stamp down with her front paws and kill them off like that. In the summer she would dig out mouse nests, gobble up the naked youngsters and eat horse dung in the pastures. She knew which farms and houses to avoid. She would run past those places, skulking down in the ditches. But she knew where she would be treated to cinnamon buns and slices of reindeer meat.
    Sometimes she just stood there, staring into the north-east. On such occasions Martinsson would get goose pimples. Because that was where the dog’s original home was, on the other side of the river, up in Vittangijärvi.
    “Do you miss him?” Martinsson would ask on such occasions.
    And was pleased that only the river could hear her.
    Now Vera woke up, sat on the floor next to the head of the bed and stared at Martinsson. When Martinsson opened her eyes, Vera started wagging her tail.
    “You must be joking,” Martinsson groaned. “It’s Sunday morning. I’m asleep.”
    She pulled the covers up over her head. Vera lay her head on the edge of the bed.
    “Go away,” Martinsson said from under the covers – although she knew it was too late now: she was wide awake.
    “Do you need to pee?”
    Whenever she heard the word “pee”, Vera usually sat down next to the door. But not this time.
    “Is it Krister?” Martinsson asked. “Is Krister on his way here?”
    It was as if Vera could feel when Krister Eriksson got into his car in Kiruna, fifteen kilometres away from the village.
    In reply to Martinsson’s question, Vera walked over to the door and lay down to wait.
    Martinsson collected her clothes that were hanging over a chair back next to the sofa bed, and lay on them for a few minutes before getting dressed under the covers. It was freezing cold in the house after the minus temperatures of the night, and you couldn’t just leap out of bed and put on icy cold clothes.
    As she sat on the lavatory, both dogs assembled in front of her. The Brat put his head on her knee and insisted on being stroked.
    “Time for breakfast now,” she said, reaching for the toilet paper.
    Both dogs dashed out into the kitchen. But when they noticed that their food bowls