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disturb her at home. It was strange. When they were working together she felt so close. But outside work he couldn’t think of anything to say. He missed her, but yet he’d only been to visit her once, just after the little boy had been born. She’d called in at the station to say hi once or twice, but then all the girls from the office were all over her, cackling like a flock of chickens, and it was best to keep out of the way. She was due back properly in the middle of January.
    They’d knocked on enough doors. Somebody ought to have seen something. In Jukkasjärvi, where they’d found the priest hanging from the organ loft, and in Poikkijärvi, where she lived. Nothing. They’d gone round knocking a second time. Not a damned thing.
    It was so odd. Somebody had killed her, on the folk museum land down by the river, quite openly. The murderer had carried her body to the church, quite openly. True, it had been the middle of the night, but it had been as light as day.
    They’d found out that she was a controversial priest. When Sven-Erik had asked if she had any enemies, several of the more active women in the church had answered “Pick any man you like.” One woman in the church office, with deep lines etched on either side of her pursed mouth, had practically come out with it and said that the priest had only herself to blame. She’d made the headlines in the local paper when she was alive as well. Trouble with the church council when she arranged self-defense courses for women on church property. Trouble with the community when her women’s Bible study group, Magdalena, went out and demanded that a third of the time available at the local ice rinks should be set aside for girls’ ice hockey teams and figure skating. And just lately she’d fallen out with some of the hunters and reindeer farmers. It was all because of the she-wolf who’d settled on church ground. Mildred Nilsson had said that it was the responsibility of the church to protect the wolf. The local paper had run a picture of her and one of her opponents on its center page spread, under the headings “The Wolf Lover” and “The Wolf Hater.”
    And in Poikkijärvi vicarage on the other side of the river from Jukkasjärvi sat her husband. On sick leave and in no condition to make any sense of what she’d left behind. Sven-Erik felt once again the pain that had filled him when he’d talked to the guy. “You again. It’s never enough for you lot, is it?” Every conversation had been like smashing the ice that had formed overnight over a hole in the ice. The grief welling up. The eyes wrecked by weeping. No children to share the grief.
    Sven-Erik did have a child, a daughter who lived in Luleå, but he recognized that terrible bloody loneliness. He was divorced and lived alone. Although of course he had the cat, and nobody had murdered his wife and hung her from a chain.
    Every conversation and every letter from the assorted lunatics confessing to the crime had been checked out. But of course nothing had come of it. Just pathetic scraps of humanity who’d been temporarily fired up by the newspaper headlines.
    Because there had certainly been headlines. The television and the papers had gone completely mad. Mildred Nilsson had been murdered right in the middle of the summer when the news more or less dries up, besides which it was less than two years since another religious leader had been murdered in Kiruna—Viktor Strandgård, a leading figure in the church of The Source of All Our Strength. There had been a good deal of speculation about similarities in the two cases, despite the fact that the person who had murdered Viktor Strandgård was dead. But that was the angle they took all the same: a man of the church, a woman of the church. Both found brutally murdered in their respective churches. Priests and pastors were interviewed in the national press. Did they feel threatened? Were they thinking of moving? Was fiery red Kiruna a dangerous