Read Online Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Åsa Larsson - Free Book Online Page B

Mella, who stood up and went into the kitchen.
    “Are you still there?” Pohjanen said grumpily. Then he cleared his throat.
    “Yes, I’m still here,” Mella said, sitting down on a kitchen chair and trying to ignore Pohjanen’s phlegmy wheezing.
    “I . . . khrush, khrush . . . I sent the samples to the Rudbeck Laboratory in Uppsala. Told Marie Allen to push them through rapido . They . . . khrush . . . did a sequential analysis of the samples. Very interesting.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, this is cutting-edge technology. You can identify the genetic material in anything living in water. Bacteria, algae, that sort of thing. As you probably know, everything is made up of four building blocks. Even us humans. A person’s DNA has three million of these building blocks in a particular sequence.”
    Mella looked at the clock. First a profound film in German, then a DNA seminar with Lars Pohjanen.
    “Anyway, I don’t suppose you’re all that interested in such things,” Pohjanen said with a rattling squeak. “But I can confirm that the water in Wilma Persson’s lungs had entirelydifferent algae and microorganic flora from the water in the river where she was found.”
    Mella stood up.
    “So she didn’t die in the river,” she said.
    “No, she didn’t die in the river,” Pohjanen said.

Saturday, April 25
    Sven-Erik Stålnacke was woken up by his cell phone.
    Feeling the familiar wave of early-morning fatigue flow through his body, he answered the phone.
    “It’s me,” Anna-Maria Mella said, sounding chirpy.
    Holding the phone at arm’s length, he squinted at the display. Twenty past seven.
    Mella was an early bird. He was a night owl. They had always had an unspoken agreement that it was okay for either of them to call and wake the other one up. Stålnacke might think of something at one in the morning and phone Mella. She might phone him bright and early, already in her car and on the way to pick him up. But that had been then.
    Then, before Regla, Stålnacke would have said, “Are you up already?” and Mella would have said something about having to drag Gustav out of bed and take him to day care during the week, while on the weekend he would be jumping up and down on her head at dawn, begging her to turn on the kid’s shows on TV.
    “Sorry to disturb you so early,” Mella said.
    She regretted having phoned him; she had done it without thinking. But things were not as they had been.
    Stålnacke could hear the change in her voice and felt a mixture of regret and bad conscience.
    Then he became angry. It was not his fault that things had turned out as they had.
    “Pohjanen called me late last night,” Mella said, as if to stress that she was not the only one who phoned colleagues at odd times.
    In bed next to Stålnacke, Airi Bylund opened her eyes. “Coffee?” she mimed. He nodded. Bylund got up and pulled on her red terrycloth robe. Boxar the cat, who had been fast asleep on Stålnacke’s legs, jumped eagerly down from the bed and tried to grab the belt of Bylund’s robe as she tied it around her waist, making it jiggle up and down irresistibly.
    “He’s taken samples of water from Wilma Persson’s lungs and from the river, and that’s not where she died,” Mella said.
    “You don’t say.”
    “You thought that business of the car with no gas in the tank was odd. Why venture into the middle of nowhere without enough juice to get them home again? Now we hear that she didn’t die in the river. So how did she get there?”
    “You tell me.”
    Neither spoke for a while. Finally she said, “I’m going to drive out to Piilijärvi today and ask if anybody there knows where the kids intended to go diving.”
    Now was his chance, his opportunity to say he would accompany her.
    “Didn’t they ask questions like that when she disappeared?” he said instead.
    “Yes, no doubt they asked the people closest to her. But the situation has changed. Now I’m going to ask everyone.”
    “Fair