here are two and a half of us working in this area. Two and a half cops in an area the size of Holland and Belgium together. When I get off duty now, around four o’clock, there will be no one. Usually there are no cops around during weekends either. There aren’t that many serious crimes in Laisvall. We don’t get that many calls from there at all, so we don’t go there very often. There are some burglaries and some scooter accidents.

There are also some Norwegians that we have to go pick up every now and then. We’ve had some fatal accidents by scooter and a couple of cases of people brewing moonshine. A while ago we had to fetch some Dutch guy who went for a hike in the mountains. There are emergency phones placed out there in the wilderness, and we received a call from him. It was scratchy but we could distinguish an SOS, so we got a helicopter and went to pick him up. He was one of those health nuts who had gone for a round of snow walking, and then the temperature dropped to –30°C. He was out there on the bare mountain. He had walked 30 kilometres to get to the phone, so he had pretty severe hypothermia. We got to him just before nightfall. If it had gotten dark we wouldn’t have had a chance of finding him.

We also had a fatal accident with a member of Parliament a while ago. There is no mobile network coverage around here, so he had gone up on a mountaintop to make a call. He had parked the scooter on the mountain crest, got off, and went and stood right below it. The scooter overturned, rolled down and over him. It rolled over his chest and he died.

A while a go we caught a guy who was about to start a liquor factory in the old school in Laisvall. He had 800 litres of yeast brew [the basic ingredient in moonshine]. We had a tip-off from Laisvall, so we just went there and took him in. He didn’t even try to come up with any apologies. He knew he was going down.

Oh, and then there were the North Koreans! There were about 15 or 20 of them. North Koreans, can you imagine? They were sent here to buy some old parts from the mine. They stayed for about one month in a rented house in Laisvall. A couple of them went out in the forest and made a moose trap. They managed quite well, and they actually snared a moose! Since it wasn’t hunting season, it was considered poaching. The investigation was a total confusion of languages. But we got hold of an interpreter by phone so the case got solved. I don’t even know what they did with the moose. They ate it, I think.

MARTIN LESTANDER