“Good. There’s never anyone there in the winter. Take Sara and Lova. You remember where the key is. Get the fire going. I’ll be there this afternoon. Can you manage until then?”
Rebecka stared at the telephone when she had put the receiver down. She felt empty and confused.
“Unbelievable,” she said to Maria Taube in an exhausted voice. “She didn’t even have to ask me.”
Rebecka looked down at her watch. Then she closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose and straightened her head at the same time, then breathed out through her mouth and let her shoulders drop. Maria had seen her do it many times. Before negotiations and important meetings. Or when she was sitting working in the middle of the night with a deadline hanging over her.
“How do you feel?” asked Maria.
“I don’t think I want to find out.”
Rebecka shook her head and let her gaze fly out through the window to avoid Maria’s troubled eyes. She bit her lips hard from the inside. It had stopped raining.
“Listen, kid, you shouldn’t work so bloody hard,” said Maria gently. “Sometimes it’s a good idea just to let go and scream a bit.”
Rebecka clasped her hands on her lap.
Let go, she thought. What happens if you find out you keep on falling? And what happens if you can’t stop screaming. Suddenly you’re fifty. Pumped full of drugs. Shut up in some mental hospital. With the scream that never stops inside your head.
“That was Viktor Strandgård’s sister,” she said, and was surprised at how calm she sounded. “Evidently she found him in the church. It seems as if she and her two daughters could do with some help right now, so I’m going to take some time off and go up there for a few days. I’ll take my laptop and work from up there.”
“This Viktor Strandgård, he was something big up there?” asked Maria.
Rebecka nodded.
“He had a near-death experience, and then there was a kind of religious explosion in Kiruna.”
“I remember,” said Maria. “It was in the evening papers. He’d been to heaven, and he said that if you fell over, it didn’t hurt; the ground just sort of received you into its embrace. I thought it sounded lovely.”
“Mmm.” Rebecka went on, “And he said he’d been sent back to this earthly life to tell everyone that God had great plans for Christianity in Kiruna. A great revival was coming, and it would spread from the north over the whole world. Wonders and miracles would happen if the churches would only unite and believe.”
“Believe in what?”
“In the power of God. In the vision. In the end all those who believed in everything joined together to form a new church, The Source of All Our Strength. And then the whole of copper red Kiruna turned into one big revivalist meeting. Viktor wrote a book that was translated into loads of languages. He stopped studying and started preaching. They built a new church, the Crystal Church; it was supposed to make people think of the ice church and the ice sculptures they build in Jukkasjärvi every winter. Above all, it wasn’t meant to remind anyone of the Kiruna church, which is really dark inside.”
“And what about you? Were you part of all this?”
“I was already a member of the Mission church before Viktor’s accident. So I was there from the start.”
“And now?” asked Maria.
“Now I’m a heathen,” said Rebecka with a mirthless smile. “The pastors and the elders requested that I leave the church.”
“But why?”
“It’s a long story; some other time.”
“Okay,” said Maria hesitantly. “What do you think Måns is going to say when you tell him you’re taking some leave at such short notice?”
“Nothing. He’s just going to kill me, tear me limb from limb and feed my body to the fish in Nybroviken. I’ll have to talk to him as soon as he gets in, but first I’ll ring the police in Kiruna so they don’t pull Sanna in for questioning; she won’t be able to cope with that.”
Assistant Chief Prosecutor Carl von Post stood at the door of the Crystal Church and stared at the people who were getting on with the business of packing up Viktor Strandgård’s body. The police surgeon, Senior Medical Examiner Lars Pohjanen, was drawing heavily on a cigarette as usual, mumbling orders to Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, and two burly men with a stretcher.
“Try and loop his hair up so it doesn’t get caught in the zip. Pull the plastic round