The Second Deadly Sin by Asa Larsson Read Free Book Online

seat and we can leave the door open. And you can tell us all you know about Sol-Britt.”
    Sivving sat down and mopped his brow. Martinsson almost felt like doing the same.
    “Anyway, when her son died. Inevitably the locals wondered if somebody in the village might have done it. Everybody knows there’s a few blokes who drive when they’re drunk. They might have panicked and driven off. Or not even noticed.”
    Bella and the Brat were scurrying about in the dog cage – they’d been told they were going for a walk in the forest. Vera lay on the back seat, sighing.
    “And then there was Sol-Britt’s dad,” Sivving said. “But you know all about that, no doubt.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Come off it, of course you do. He was mauled by a bear. Oh, for God’s sake, when was it? My memory’s useless! Yes, the beginning of June! It was in the newspaper! He was old, they thought he’d got lost. And then, it can’t be more than two months ago, they shot a bear not far from Lainio. It had killed and eaten a guard dog that was tied up on a running lead. And in the bear’s stomach they found bits of the old man, Frans Uusitalo, Sol-Britt’s dad. The bear had spent the whole of the summer gobbling him up, bit by bit. Ugh!”
    “Ah yes, I read about that. So that was Sol-Britt’s dad, was it?”
    Sivving looked accusingly at her.
    “I’ve just said it was. Have you forgotten already?”
    He sat quietly for a while. Martinsson wandered off into a world of her own. She remembered the man mauled by a bear in Lainio. When they found a bone from one of his hands inside the belly of the bear, they started searching the area. They eventually found the body. Or what was left of it.
    It did happen occasionally that people were mauled by bears upin these parts of the far north. If they found themselves between a female bear and her cubs. Or if they had a stupid dog that chased after the bear and then came hurtling back to its owners with the beast at its heels.
    “And his mum as well,” Sivving said. “Sol-Britt’s grandma, that is. She was murdered too.”
    “What?”
    “She was a teacher in Kiruna. When was that, now? Er, she must have arrived just before the First World War. My uncle had her as a teacher. He always used to say she was as sweet as a sugar lump. Nice to the children. She had a little boy, although she wasn’t married. He was Sol-Britt’s dad, the one that was mauled by a bear. She was murdered when he was only a few weeks old. A horrific story. She was beaten to death in her own classroom one winter evening. But that was a long time ago.”
    “Who killed her?”
    “Nobody knows. Her friend looked after the little boy and brought him up as if he’d been her own child. It wasn’t so easy in those days.”
    He glared accusingly at her as he said that.
    Martinsson thought about Sivving’s mother, who was widowed early on and had to bring up the children by herself.
    I know I’m very lucky, she thought. I could have children and we’d survive without any problems. They would have a roof over their head, food in their bellies and they could go to school. I wouldn’t need to give them away.
    She looked at Sivving. She knew he had stared real poverty in the face. “We could easily have ended up in a children’s home,” he sometimes used to say.
    Not everything was better in the good old days, she thought.

It is 15 April, 1914. Schoolteacher Elina Pettersson is on the train from Stockholm. She’s going to Kiruna. The journey takes thirty-six hours and twenty-five minutes, according to the timetable – but there is a delay due to all the snow on the lines. She has spent two nights on the train, and her backside is giving her hell after having to sleep in a sitting position: but soon she will reach her destination.
    When she looks out of the window she sees an endless expanse of stunted trees, laden with snow. Snow-covered bogs and lakes. Herds of reindeer, staring wideeyed but apparently without