The Sins of our Fathers

Book 6: The Arctic Murders

by Åsa Larsson

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Forensic pathologist Lars Pohjanen only has a few weeks left to live when he asks prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson to investigate a murder that has long since passed the statute of limitations. A body has been found in a freezer in the home of a dead alcoholic. It has been identified as a man who disappeared without a trace in 1962: the father of the famous Swedish boxing champion Börje Ström. Rebecka, who recently went through an abrupt break-up and is in a smoldering fight with friend and colleague Anna-Maria Mella, wants nothing to do with a fifty-year-old murder case - she already has enough to worry about. But how can she ignore a dying man's wish?

Rebecka convinces recently retired police officer Sven-Erik Stålnacke to help her look into the case. What she doesn't tell him is that she has a personal connection to the case. An old woman named Ragnhild Pekkari found the dead body in the freezer while she was cleaning out her brother Henry's house. Rebecka Martinsson's mother was a foster child in the Pekkari home and had been like a sister to Ragnhild before she broke with the family. Rebecka feels an inherited animosity toward the people who once treated her mother poorly - and her personal feelings may be clouding her professional judgement.

Henry Pekkari had lived alone out on a river island and neighbors report having seen snowmobiles drive across the frozen water shortly before he was found dead. When Rebecka and Sven-Erik visit the man's house, there are signs that suggest someone had been living out on the island with the old man. But who?

Rebecka Martinsson begins to suspect that Henry Pekkari was murdered. When forensic pathologist Pohjanen's examination confirms her suspicions, Rebecka's spare-time work with a cold case turns into a red-hot murder investigation. What could Henry Pekkari's murder have to do with the body of a man that was kept in his freezer for decades?
As Rebecka and the team with the Kiruna police start digging into the case, they are led to the Lingonberry King - a man, now in his nineties, who was once the region's organized crime leader. He is now surrounded by Russian-speaking muscle-men and a house that is protected like a fortress. The whole city of Kiruna is being torn down and moved a few kilometers east to give room to the mine that has been eating up the city from underneath. In the wake of the city move, the tentacles of organized crime are slowly taking over the city...

Former boxer Börje Ström may have been searching for the truth about his father, but in the process, he is faced with the truth about himself, his life, and the choices he has made in order to become heavyweight champion of the world. In flashbacks, we follow his life as a young man coming of age. In the present tense, Börje Ström and Ragnhild Pekkari, two tough pensioners scarred by a hard life, find one another. A beautiful and unexpected love story unfolds and when the truth of the dead boxer in the freezer, the Lingonberry King and the violence on the Pekkari island homestead finally comes to light, it is transformative for the gray-haired couple - as well as for Rebecka Martinsson, who will finally be given the key to the mysteries of her own mother's childhood.

The sixth and final book in Åsa Larsson's beloved crime series brings the story of fragile yet fierce heroine Rebecka Martinsson to a spellbinding end. The Sins of Our Fathers was named Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year by the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy.

Release date: March 30, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 240

Sample

Tuesday 26th April

Living became a bit easier once Ragnhild Pekkari had made up her mind to die.

She had a plan. To ski across the crust the night frost left on the snow, a two-­hour trip unless you broke through it. When she got to the spot, a jokk across which a snow bridge would always form, she would light a fire and enjoy one last cup of coffee. Afterwards she would melt snow and pour it into her rucksack to make it heavy and wet and to push any air out. Then she would ski onto the snow bridge. There would be open water flowing beneath. If all went to plan the bridge would collapse. If not, she would push herself over the edge with a quick thrust of her ski poles.

It would happen incredibly quickly. No chance to change your mind, not with skis on and a sodden rucksack that refused to float.

And then it would finally be over.

 

She had made an appointment with death. And meet it she would – on the very day she had chosen – but not in the way she had imagined.

Once the appointment had been made, the worst of the weight was lifted. Her being grew tall like the birches in the woods. The winter snow had hunched them into frozen arches. Now that winter was giving way to the mildness of spring they were straightening up, shifting from grey to violet, the liturgical colour of penance.

She had begun her retirement in June the previous year. The head of the clinic gave an obviously unprepared speech, getting the number of years she had been employed there wrong, even though it would have been so simple to check. That little shit. He was the kind of doctor who felt threatened by her height. His right hand, Elisabeth from the management team, had shopped for the present: a bottle opener in the shape of a silvery dolphin. That was it, after all those years. Elisabeth had been working in admin for more than twenty years and was completely out of touch with what the other nurses actually did on the wards. She was firmly on the side of management and kept piling on the pressure with additional duties and mean-­spirited schedules. And then, to top it all off, a silver dolphin. Ragnhild managed to squeeze out an insincere thank you, which made her feel like going home and cleaning out her mouth with wire wool.

The entire farewell do, with its cheap paper serviettes and shop-­bought cake, was enough to make her sick. Some of the doctors had come into the break room and then left. Ragnhild had exchanged looks with the other nurses: odd the doctors never came when paged if a patient was ill but would always move faster than light towards anything sweet. “What are we celebrating?”, one of the junior doctors had asked with his mouth full.

When her last shift was over, there was a round of hugs with her colleagues. She stood for a while in front of the locker that had been hers for almost thirty years, shut it for the very last time and left the hospital with a sense of unreality and that bloody dolphin in a bag.

After that, summer had gone by as usual; it had just felt like a really long holiday. Autumn arrived, and she established new routines. She signed up for an advanced course in weaving together with a retired former colleague. She exercised every day, went to the gym or hiking in the woods. She read books, of course, almost one a day.

The first half of winter passed. She knew that they were short-­staffed at work, but no-­one called her to fill in. Elisabeth hated her and clearly did not want her back.

She spent Christmas on her own. It was astonishingly lonely. She had always worked the major holidays before.

A memory from childhood came to her at the beginning of March, one Monday as she was on her way back from the shop, bags in hand.

She can’t have been that old, six maybe. She had gone out on the ice with one of her uncles who was chucking an old boat engine through a hole he had sawn out in the surface. Her aunt had been rinsing the sheets there that very day, so he was taking the opportunity to get rid of a load of junk. Pushing old fridges and so on out onto the ice was not unusual at the time. They would sink to the bottom once the ice had melted. But since there was a hole there anyway, you could chuck stuff in before it froze over. She had stood at the edge of the hole. Her uncle had not warned her to keep away. She watched the heavy engine splash into the water and sink slowly, almost drifting, until it reached the bottom with a soft thud.

She was remembering the dizzy feeling when she looked into the depths. The danger of standing that close, the slow hypnotic downward dance of the engine in the sunbeams. It felt like she was being drawn in, as though she was going to fall and drift down herself. The cloud of mud when the engine landed ever so quietly.

And that was how it felt. She had been walking along holding the plastic bags after doing her weekly shop when her engine had thudded to the bottom. Nine months after retirement she found herself thinking: I’ve had enough.

The relief was enormous. She decided to go on living until the end of winter. Then stop before the season changed into the one known as “the sigh”, when the snow lay in a thick blanket that would neither take your weight nor give way completely but fall apart every now and then with a muffled sigh.

She went skiing in the woods in March and April. Every day, in sunshine or a blizzard, it made no difference. She would light a fire on the sunny days and sit on the mat made of the skin from a reindeer’s skull and have coffee and a sandwich. She didn’t read books anymore. She looked inwards and marvelled at the stillness. At the strange power to almost completely dispel the muddy turbulence inside her that had come with her decision.

At the end of April she began death cleaning. But not too thoroughly. The cleaning was not supposed to make it clear she’d committed suicide. The very thought of people cocking their heads and saying, “She must have been so lonely.”

No, it needed to look like an accident. There would be fresh produce in the fridge. She took her winter jacket to be cleaned. Would anyone planning on killing herself take clothes to the dry cleaner’s? She left the pink ticket in plain sight on the counter beside the kettle.

Outside, water was dripping off the icicles hanging from the gutters, a monotonous plinking sound that sped up as spring drew closer. Snow was slipping off the roofs in a rush and melting off the asphalt streets. The day was fast approaching. The night crust was still skiable and that was a crucial requirement.

During the cleaning she gave a lot of thought to the photos of her daughter. They couldn’t remain in their usual places, inserted in Ragnhild’s favourite novels on the bookshelves. There was a risk the books would end up at the charity shop for next to nothing. In that event the pictures of Paula couldn’t be allowed to fall out. The talk that would give rise to. “Why did she keep pictures of her daughter in her books? What a strange person . . .” They would pity her. And that was not going to happen, under any circumstances.

So what to do? Should she frame them and set the photos out? Burn them? She held them for a while. Here was Paula at the age of two, beaming hugely with ice cream all over her face and a tiara on her head. At five on her first mountain walk to Trollsjön, a warm day, the fell was covered in flowers and all she had on was pants and a cloth hat. She rolled around in the patches of snow. Ragnhild had carried her on her shoulders when she got tired.

I was as tough as a mountain birch tree, she was thinking. Backpack and a kid going up the mountain. That was really something.

She picked up a summer photo from the seaside at Piteå that showed Paula hugging her grandmother, and then there were the usual school snaps with that dull blue background and a smile that wasn’t a smile, just the distended mouth of a child, and something akin to fear in her eyes.

Ragnhild looked warily through the pictures, taking short shallow breaths and sitting very still. There was a beast still living inside her that could stir. She had to be on the lookout. She was afraid of the mother beast. It could come crawling up from its lair, rolling its eyes and brist­ling all over. Angry, hurt, and completely indiscriminate. Filled with a desire to explain, to put right, to seek forgiveness, to point the finger at any accomplices. Make phone calls.

In the end she put the photos of Paula in a drawer in her desk.

The windows needed cleaning; but this wasn’t that kind of clean. Only things that were private needed to be got rid of. Besides, a home that was too clean could also make her seem like some poor soul without a life. No, someone else would have to deal with the windows.

When the last day arrived she went ahead exactly as planned. In the evening she packed her rucksack with the kind of heavy objects that would seem natural for her to have brought along: a Trangia stove, an old winter tent, a bottle of wine, her winter sleeping bag, a reindeer pelt, a down jacket.

She gave the plants an extra watering. They hadn’t done anyone any harm, after all.

She pulled the Bible off the bookshelf.

“In case you’ve got something to tell me,” she said to God.

She let it fall open at random. And found herself reading a chapter in the Book of Judges where Jael kills the military commander Sisera. While he is sleeping she takes a tent peg and creeps up on him with a mallet and drives the peg through his temple hard enough to pin his head to the ground.

“You’re a real laugh, you are,” Ragnhild said gruffly to Our Lord. “Like some grumpy old sod in the attic who has an opinion about everything but does nothing.”

She shut the Bible on those meaningless verses.

When the nightly detonation in the mine occurred at one o’clock, a faint tremor ran through the building. She lay down on her bed at that point and dozed for a bit.

At 2.30 a.m. she closed the door to her flat for the last time. She didn’t feel anything in particular. In her mind she went through her usual refrain, “nothing running, nothing burning”, and turned the key in the lock.

She stowed her skis and rucksack in the car. The true midnight sun would not arrive for another three weeks, but even now there was a feeble brightness to the nights. Kiruna was silent apart from the noises from the mine that could be heard even more distinctly at this time of night when there was no traffic to drown them out. There was the screech as the ore trains braked, the thud when the brakes were released and the laden trains rolled away. The sonic overlay of the fans at the shaft.

Though the sounds were still surprisingly subdued now that the mine was devouring this bloody town from below.

She didn’t see another human being as she drove out of Kiruna. It felt like it had been abandoned, depopulated. Like it had already been evacuated.

Before long she was on the E10. She thought for a bit about how long it would be before they had to call in a locksmith to break into her flat. She no longer had any colleagues to ask after her, but she had her weekly hobbies, yoga, exercise class and the tail end of her weaving course. It shouldn’t be more than two weeks before someone noticed she was missing.

She turned east towards Vittangi. The road followed her home river, the Torne. She was thinking about the thaw, the trees coming into leaf, the chatter of birds, the midnight sun. She cast around inside but was unable to detect any desire to be part of that; there was nothing she wanted to experience yet again.

She did not turn on the car radio; the only other vehicles she encountered were a few ore trucks. The asphalt was dry and full of potholes from frost damage over the winter.

 

She parked in a spot the ploughs had cleared. She carried her skis and walked along the main road, looking for a place where the bank of cleared snow was a little lower so she could wriggle over its frosty uneven ridge. All she bloody needed was to break her arms and legs and be left lying there.

The moment she had crossed the ridge she was in the woods. She looked behind her, but the car and the road were hidden by the embankment of snow, they were gone.

The bramblings were already at it. Lots of them this year. The sound made you feel like you had stepped into a tropical rainforest. It made the feeling she always got on entering the woods, that she was leaving one world behind and entering another, more intense. And as always she felt the forest was like a mother. A female divinity, the Sami goddess Máttáráhkka maybe, who was bidding her welcome. Like running home from the roughhouse of the school yard to a mother who quietly closed the door of a refuge where no-­one could get to you.

Just her and the forest now. The copper sheen on the pines. Tall old fir trees and their grey underskirts. With the low morning sun pale in the south east and the white full moon in the north west, the sky ranged from pink to light blue. They were shining at each other, entwining their lights like the wire the Sami made from pewter.

She fastened her cross-­country skis and with a light shove of her poles slid away across the crust the night had frozen. It was hard and shiny. Staying upright when your skis kept slipping to the side required a good deal of skill. Below the trees where melting snow had dripped the crust was extra hard, like thick granular glass. If the sun got too hot this morning, breaks in the surface would form, and she would be forced to ski over the patches that were still frozen.

The crust could still take her weight though, and it was wonderfully easy to ski on. The steel edges of her skis left barely a trace. She could hear a few ravens. At a distance you could easily confuse the sound with the barking of a dog. Just a little while later and they came flying into view above her, scouting the ground and cawing to each other.

 

She lost any sense of the passage of time and was surprised when she heard the sound of rushing water. Was she there already? She looked at her watch. Half past five. She skied the last bit through pussy willows and osiers, their woolly catkins already out.

She followed the jokk downstream until she reached the snow bridge. It was still there. Like a handsome span of snow and ice thrown across the torrent.

She was going to have her coffee first though. There was a little hillock just twenty metres from the bridge. At its top was a lovely mountain pine, a gnarled dwarf variety. Enough bare soil had emerged from the melted snow around the trunk for her to sit there and make her fire.

She gathered deadwood and some bits for kindling: grey pine twigs, birch bark, beard lichen and juniper branches. She made a hole in the frozen crust and filled the coffee pot and the pan with water. She didn’t dare make her way over to the jokk to get water; the banks were too icy. She had no intention of falling in. The flaw in the logic of her caution made her smile and shake her head. But she was going to do this her way.

She got the fire going by striking her flint. She was proud of that, of her ability to light a fire anywhere and in any weather, without having to get a matchbox out. She had had the same box of matches for over five years now. How ridiculous, though: bragging to yourself about something like that.

 

Her phone rang just as the coffee started to boil. She could have keeled over in surprise. She lifted the coffee pot off the stove and extricated her phone from her inner pocket. It was three minutes past six. The number was a landline. Who rang from a landline these days? And it was an 0981 number, the area code of the village she grew up in.

She stared suspiciously at the phone. It was several years since she had spoken with anyone from there. But it kept ringing. And finally she answered.

A man was on the other end. From his voice he sounded young.

“You Ragnhild Pekkari?” he asked. “No sitten . . . Well then,” he said in Torne Valley Finnish, her own mother tongue. “I’ve got what I think might be some bad news.”

1

The man at the other end told her his name and explained that he owned the village shop in Junosuando.

“I’m ringing about your brother,” he said, “Henry Pekkari. He hasn’t been to the shop for the last three weeks.”

Ragnhild realised she ought to say something. But that notion went weak at the knees, it had to try and fumble its way to the front of her brain like a patient on Valium. Not a word passed her lips. The shop owner continued:

“It could be nothing though. Only, Henry usually comes in every Thursday when we get the weekend deliveries from the alcohol monopoly. Hello, oletko sielä?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Ragnhild managed to say.

“Oh right, I thought we’d been disconnected. Anyway, there have been times he hasn’t turned up of course. Like now when the ice is getting a bit iffy. He might be stuck on the island. And that could last for weeks. It’s just in that event he’d call as a rule. He’s out there in that house all on his own, isn’t he, so when he can’t make the trip, he phones to let us know. The people here in the shop are the only ones he gets to meet and talk to after all. I’ve been trying to get through to him, yesterday and this morning. But he isn’t answering.”

“Is that right?” Ragnhild said in a tone of voice she knew made others feel as though they were a Jehovah’s Witness on the porch, holding out a colour pamphlet announcing the imminent advent of the kingdom of God.

A tone she had occasionally used on relatives who were being difficult, on the head of the clinic and his team rather frequently.

She looked at the pot. The coffee was already cold. She could re-­boil it but it would taste like cat’s piss.

Serves me right, she thought. My last cup will be one of those iced coffees.

“In any case,” the shop owner said, “I thought you might have heard from him.”

“I haven’t had any contact with Henry for thirty-­one years,” Ragnhild Pekkari said. “You must know that. Like everyone else in Junis.”

“You’re brother and sister all the same, so I thought I should ring you anyway,” the shopkeeper said defensively.

She noticed that he said “I thought” in every other sentence. Even though he couldn’t really think past the end of his nose.

“Well, sorry for disturbing you,” the shopkeeper said in conclusion. “I actually rang the police in Kiruna first. But they said there was no way they could land a helicopter on the island when the snow’s like mashed potato.”

He was about to hang up. She could imagine him saying to the people who worked with him: “That Ragnhild Pekkari’s not bloody right in the head, it was like she couldn’t care less.”

Then she heard herself asking:

“There’s just one thing . . . when Henry came over to do the shopping, did he usually buy dog food?”

“Not a clue,” the shopkeeper said. “I hardly ever work the till. Hang on and I’ll ask the wife. Don’t go away.”

To judge by his voice he seemed happier for not having been completely dismissed. Ragnhild regretted her question. She considered hanging up, turning the phone off and pretending the call had been disconnected. But then the shopkeeper was back on the line.

“Yes, he did,” he could tell her now. “Henry used to buy dog food.”

And Ragnhild turned her face to the pale-­blue sky. She tried to ward off the memory of Villa, the bitch whose name meant wool in the language Ragnhild spoke as a child.

Villa who had small kindly eyes and a white star on her breast. Villa who could flush birds, track elk, who herded the cows and spent the summer nights hunting field mice. Villa who slept at the foot of her bed in the winter.

Villa who had stayed on the island with Henry. That would have been, Good Lord she had to work it out, fifty-­four years ago. When Henry was eighteen and was left in charge of her island home. When she was twelve and had to move to the town with her mother and father and her foster sister Virpi. Ragnhild had wept and begged for Villa to come with them but what she wanted counted for nothing. “Villa cannot live in a flat in town,” her father had said. He had not realised that applied to all of them. None of them were made for flats or the town. As it would turn out.

Ragnhild failed to keep the memory at bay. A wodge of tears was swelling in her throat. Over Villa, who had been dead for so long.

The shopkeeper was speaking at the other end. Ragnhild hawked up some kind of thank you. A phrase that sounded odd in her mouth. Then she ended the call.

She poured coffee over the hissing flames. The grounds looked like an anthill on top. She tore up some moss from a patch of bare soil under the pine tree and cleaned the coffee pot. Then she packed her things into the backpack and put her skis back on.

The snow bridge would still be here. You could still ski over the crust for another week. She would be coming back. Only now there was that dog on the island. She couldn’t abandon it to its fate.

Henry, you drunken bastard, what did you need with a dog?

As she was skiing back she came across a hen capercaillie. It was in season and completely unafraid of people, the way they are at that time. It ran across her skis, followed her tracks, and kept rising into the air with a flap of those heavy wings so as not to be left behind. Maybe it was Ragnhild’s ski poles that stirred the mating drive in the poor bird. Anything that moved and flapped would seem like a cock playing the same game. It wasn’t unusual for game birds to end up in the school yard during mating season. They were drawn to all those lively kids at play. Ragnhild’s mother used to say the birds were drawn to children as though they possessed maternal instincts that applied to human kids as well. Ragnhild had dismissed any such notion as completely idiotic. The capercaillie accompanied her for almost two kilometres, a helpless prey to its feelings.

“Just stop,” Ragnhild said aloud. “It’s not worth it.”

Ragnhild skied on. Death behind her for the moment, she thought. But death is always waiting ahead of us. It was so very close now.

2

Ragnhild Pekkari arrived in the village of Kurkkio just after nine in the morning. She parked outside Fredriksson’s old shop, took her skis and poles under her arm and made her way down to the river. The snow had been cleared all the way to the sauna on the shore. She peered across at the island. It was a lot warmer now, several degrees above zero. The ice was treacherous, that she knew; it might be metres thick but it was soft. If you broke through, you’d sink into a quagmire of snow and slush.

There were old snowmobile tracks running here and there across the river to the island though. In the sun they shone like streets of glass. They might be able to take her weight. Otherwise she would have to wait until the next morning and ski over the frozen crust formed in the night. But she didn’t want to wait, she couldn’t. She was thinking about the dog. About Henry too, of course, but he was dead. She was certain of that. It was about bloody time.

Over there, just two hundred metres away, was her childhood home. Although it looked much the same from a distance, she could see, even from this far away, that half the barn roof had fallen in.

The rucksack had to be left in the car; she wanted to be as light as possible for this. She didn’t dare click her shoes into the fastenings. She did not want to be trapped by her skis if she broke through. After an experimental shove with her poles she was off, sliding along a snowmobile track that led to the island.

The ice in the track was wet and slippery; the skis kept wanting to veer away and her feet kept trying to slip out of them. This was a really bad idea, but once you’ve let the devil into your boat you have to row him to shore. She used her poles to move forward, keeping one of the skis in front of the other to distribute her weight as much as possible.

She peered at the holiday cottages along the shore. If there was anyone inside they would be watching her through binoculars and wondering who that lunatic was.

She was sweating profusely beneath her cap; so much salt was running off her forehead and into her eyes that they stung. But she didn’t dare stop to take it off; that would mean standing still and putting all her weight on a single spot. You had to keep moving.

Now, halfway between the island and the mainland, the crust of ice on the track was getting thinner. The shadow off the edge of the wood and from the banked shore failed to reach this far and it had had sunlight shining on it day after day. She could hear the ice cracking under her skis, the thin sharp sounds of it splitting hammering wedges of terror into her resolve. The main current ran here somewhere as well, which made the ice under the tracks even thinner.

Only it was too late to turn back now, she’d have to get out of her skis for that and would be bound to fall through. She forced down images of cold black water and snowy slush closing over her head. Just keep going.

Forty metres from the island one of her skis went through the crust. There was a plopping sound and her leg disappeared beneath her as she tumbled to one side. An involuntary scream came from her throat, piercing and lonely. She crawled like an insect, pulling her leg out of the melting snow, feeling as if she was going to sink helplessly beneath it at any moment. The fear of death felt like a hare trying to escape from her chest.

She got onto all fours, not daring to stand up, and crept forward instead, one knee on the remaining ski, leaving the poles behind.

She swore her way forward.

“Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell.”

When she reached the shore she was hit by a wave of fatigue so power­ful she could have fallen asleep sitting there in the snow. It was the second time that morning the fear of dying had caught her by surprise.

After all that was what she had been planning. Cold black water. But when it came down to it, she had fought her way to shore like a beetle whose legs have been chopped off.

So you may be a tablet-­and-­alcohol type after all, she thought, playing the contemptuous devil’s advocate. The coward’s way.

No, she defended herself against that accusing voice. Just not here. Not now. Not on my way to Henry.

Ragnhild trudged up towards the house. The sun was burning like a welding torch, a thousand reflections sparkling off the chalk-­white snow. The moisture in the snow was forcing its way into her outer clothing and there was slush in her shoes.

She look around with a heavy heart. Thirty-­one years since she was last here. She had been to see her brother then to tell him about their mother’s death. She had tried ringing, but he had failed to answer. In the end she had driven here. A neighbour had taken her across in his boat.

The human misery that Henry wallowed in had left her cold. She told him he was welcome to attend the funeral but only on condition he was sober, no ifs or buts. He had snivelled something or other with the self-­pity typical of an alcoholic and promised. A promise he had of course failed to keep. Someone from the village had dumped him outside the church in Junosuando. He looked like a rubbish heap in a suit that had seen better days. And there had been no shirt beneath his tie. They had persuaded the priest to delay the ceremony while someone went home to fetch one that might fit. The coffin went into the ground, and there and then beside her mother’s grave Ragnhild broke off all contact, with phrases such as “never again” and “you aren’t my brother anymore”.

She hadn’t managed to get rid of him though; she had thought of him with rage at some point every day. He kept a spacious two-­bedroom apartment in her mind.

Virpi had not attended the funeral. Olle came, neatly pressed and polished to a shine with his stick-­thin wife, the chief secretary of the local council. He had not been as unwilling to forgive Henry. Then again, it wasn’t Olle who had spent his youth coming out here with Äiti to clean the house and wash Henry’s filthy clothes every other weekend. In the end – she was over twenty by then – Ragnhild had refused to go with her. But Äiti kept at it. Until illness stopped her.

My bitter heart, Ragnhild thought. What am I supposed to do with you now Äiti and Isä are dead? Virpi too. Olle, God damn him, is in the best of health. So I’m not going to call him to let him know that Henry is dead.

Though maybe Henry wasn’t dead. She might find him inside, drunk and incontinent.

She had reached the house now. It was still painted Falun red though there wasn’t much paint left on the sunny side. Äiti had paid for it to be repainted in the last year of her life. The roof on the northern side buckled inwards like a hammock. A row of sticks as long as your arm stuck out of the gutter, and it took Ragnhild a while to realise they were birch saplings that had taken root and grown out of the muck because it never got cleaned.

The hay sheds were still there in the fields but the doors had fallen off and the snow had collected inside. They looked like dark, rickety creatures; the black holes where the doors had been like mouths open in a soundless scream. Once, in another life, they had been well maintained and stood in the fields packed with dry fragrant hay. She and Virpi used to play inside them. They made cribs for themselves in the hay and read books for girls in the faint light that filtered through the cracks between the timbers. They used to jump around inside too, even t