Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Åsa Larsson Page B

a cheeky smile.
    “I know how you and I can figure out how to spend the time.”
    Kyrö’s face turns as red as a beetroot.
    “Stop it,” he says, glancing over at Autio.
    Persson laughs.
    “Anni’s nearly eighty. She’s given birth to five children. Do you think she’s forgotten what people can get up to when they’re on their own?”
    “I haven’t forgotten,” Autio says. “But stop embarrassing him.”
    “Make sure you don’t die while we’re away,” Persson says chirpily before she and Kyrö get back into the car and drive off.
    They do not go far. The car stops. Persson sticks her head out of the window and shouts so loudly that her voice echoes through the forest, “Mind you, if you do die, it’s a fantastic day and place for it.”
    It was five thirty in the afternoon when Mella entered the autopsy unit of Kiruna’s hospital.
    “You again?” was her sardonic greeting from the pathologist Lars Pohjanen.
    His thin body always looked frozen inside his crumpled green autopsy coat.
    Mella’s mood improved immediately—here was someone who still pulled her leg just as in the old days.
    “I assumed that you just couldn’t wait to see me again,” she said, giving him a one-hundred-watt smile.
    He chuckled, though it sounded as if he was simply clearing his throat.
    Wilma Persson was lying naked on the stainless steel autopsy table. Pohjanen had cut away her diving suit and underclothes. Her skin was grayish-white and looked bleached. Next to her was an ashtray full of Pohjanen’s cigarette butts. Mella did not comment—she was neither his boss nor his mother.
    “I’ve just been talking to her great-grandmother,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’d be able to tell me what happened.”
    Pohjanen shook his head.
    “I haven’t opened her up yet,” he said. “She’s a bit of a mess, as you can see, but all this damage happened after she died.” He pointed to Persson’s face, her missing nose and lips.
    “Why is her hair all over the floor?” Mella said.
    “Water rots the roots, so the hair becomes very loose.”
    Holding up Persson’s hands, he contemplated them through narrowed eyes. The little finger and thumb of her right hand were missing.
    “I noticed something odd about her hands,” he said, clearing his throat. “She’s lost a lot of nails, but not all of them. Take a look at her right hand—oops! I have to be careful, the skin detaches itself from her fingers before you know where you are. As you can see, the little finger and thumb are missing from the right hand, but the middle and ring fingers are still there. Compare that with the other hand . . .”
    He held up both hands, and Mella leaned forward somewhat reluctantly to take a close look.
    “The nails on her left hand, the ones she has left, are polished black and neatly filed—they’re in quite good shape, don’t you think? But the nails on the middle and ring fingers on her right hand are broken, and the polish is almost scraped away.”
    “What does that imply?” Mella said.
    Pohjanen shrugged.
    “Difficult to say. But I scraped the underside of the nails. Come and see what I found.”
    He laid Persson’s hands down with care, then led Mella to his workbench. On it were five sealed test tubes labeled “right middle,” “right ring,” “left thumb,” “left middle,” “left index.” In each of the tubes was a flat wooden toothpick.
    “Under both the nails on her right hand there were flakes of green paint. That doesn’t necessarily mean it had anything to do with the accident—she might have been scraping window frames, or painting, or something of the sort. Most people are right-handed.”
    Mella nodded and glanced at her watch. Dinner at six, Robert had said. Time to go home.
    A quarter of an hour later, Pohjanen was standing once more with Persson’s hand in his. He was taking her fingerprints. This was something he always did when identification was difficult due to intense facial