Free The Black Path by Åsa Larsson Page A

arrangements. He lay down on the end of my bed. Grandmother didn’t allow the dogs on the furniture. But what could she do? The child slept soundly with the dog on the bed, lying there chattering to him while Grandmother took care of the milking in the evening.
    Mummy made the beds on the trains, and moved up to work in the restaurant car. She swapped our three-room apartment in town for one with two rooms. I must have stayed there with her sometimes even before Daddy died, but I don’t remember it at all.
    And those memories you do have, thought Rebecka. Do they really help? It’s just a few pictures in an album in your head, after all. In between those scenes you do remember there are hundreds, thousands, of scenes you’ve forgotten. So are you remembering the truth?
     
     
    Grandmother in Mummy’s little apartment. She’s wearing her best coat, but Mummy is still ashamed, thinks Grandmother ought to buy a new one, she’s told Rebecka that. However, now it’s Mummy’s turn to feel ashamed. Grandmother is looking around. From where she’s standing, you can see right into the bedroom. Mummy’s bed is unmade. There are no bedclothes on Rebecka’s bed. Mummy is exhausted all the time. She’s phoned in sick to work. In the past Grandmother has turned up and cleaned the whole place. Washed the dishes, done the laundry, done the cooking. Not this time.
    “I’m taking the girl with me,” she says.
    Her voice is friendly, but there is no contradicting her.
    Mummy doesn’t protest, but when Rebecka tries to give her a hug to say goodbye, she pushes her away.
    “Hurry up now,” she says without looking at Rebecka. “Grandmother hasn’t got all day.”
    Rebecka can see her own feet on the way down the staircase. Thud, thud. Her feet are heavy. Big as blocks of stone. She should have whispered in Mummy’s ear: “I love you the best.” Sometimes that helps. She collects good things to say. “You’re just the way a mummy ought to be.” “Katti’s mummy smells sweaty.” Look at her for a long time, then say: “You’re so lovely.”
    I’ll ask Sivving to tell me, thought Rebecka. He knew them both. Before I know it, he’ll be gone as well, and then there’ll be nobody left to ask.
    She opened up the computer. Inna Wattrang in yet another group picture. This time wearing a helmet and standing in front of a zinc mine in Chile.
    Peculiar job, thought Rebecka. Getting to know dead people.

 
     
     
    M ONDAY M ARCH 17, 2005
     
    R ebecka Martinsson met Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke in the conference room at the police station at eight-thirty on Monday morning.
    “How did it go?” said Anna-Maria by way of greeting. “Did you manage to watch TV last night?”
    “No,” said Rebecka. “How about you?”
    “No, I fell asleep,” said Anna-Maria.
    In fact, she and Robert had done something completely different in front of the television, but that was nothing to do with anybody else.
    “Me too,” lied Rebecka.
    She’d sat up and gone through the Kallis Mining group and Inna Wattrang until half past two in the morning. When the alarm on her cell phone rang at six, she’d felt that familiar faint nausea that comes with too little sleep.
    It didn’t matter much. In fact, it didn’t matter at all. A slight lack of sleep was nothing, really. Today she had a packed schedule—first the meeting with the two police officers, then the criminal court all day. And she liked to be busy.
    “Mauri Kallis started with nothing,” said Rebecka. “He’s the American dream, but in Swedish. He really is. Born in 1964 in Kiruna—when were you born?”
    “Sixty-two,” replied Anna-Maria. “But he must have gone to a different senior school. And at high school you don’t know the younger kids.”
    “He was taken into care when he was little,” Rebecka went on, “foster home, arrested for a break-in when he was twelve, too young to be charged, but that’s where things turned around; the social worker