We know you remember, p.15
We Know You Remember, page 15
“I’m working. Not right this second, but otherwise.”
“Lucky for us.” He laughed. Eira had always loved his laugh. It was so big, it spread right across the room. When Magnus laughed, so did everyone else. “What the hell though, sis. It’s July, are they really driving you that hard?”
“I like my job,” said Eira.
He raised an eyebrow. She expected a cutting remark or a lecture about how the cops spent their time chasing small-time crooks while the real criminals went free, the financial sharks and the corrupt politicians who let them wreak havoc, but he didn’t have time. Rickard shouted through the kitchen window, asking if she wanted coffee or anything. Eira said yes to coffee, asked for some water, too.
“I’m driving,” she added, as though she had to explain why she wasn’t drinking beer on a summer’s day when everyone else was taking it easy. Excusing herself for being so boring and conscientious all the time.
“Mum makes an effort when you’re there,” she said. “Can’t you see that? She doesn’t want you to notice anything.”
“So what do you want me to do about that? I can’t exactly rock up there and say ‘Hey Mum, you’re sicker than you think you are.’ That’d be lousy.”
Bees buzzed around them, happy in Ricken’s overgrown garden. He had a full-blown wildflower meadow sloping down towards Strinnefjärden, a narrow channel of the river snaking between two hamlets.
Eira told Magnus that Kerstin had wandered off. About the bad days when she didn’t know where she was, the dangers filling an average home. She told him all of this.
Magnus tapped the ash into his can; the cigarette burnt out and hissed as he dropped it inside. He leaned back again, either nonchalant or relaxed, and looked up at the sky. Clouds drifting slowly overhead, silvery streaks.
“I don’t get why you moved home,” he said. “Mum doesn’t either. Says you’re constantly watching over her like she can’t take care of herself.”
“She can’t take care of herself.”
“You should’ve stayed in Stockholm, that’s what Mum thinks. You were supposed to make something of yourself. You were so good at school.”
“Stop. You’re not listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re the one she asks after. All the time.” Eira regretted sitting down where she had, wanted to stand up, move closer to her brother, get through to him, possibly take his hand, pinch him and make him wake up, knock him to the ground and wrestle in the grass, tickling him or whatever else they hadn’t done in twenty years. But instead she just slumped ever deeper. “How often do you even go over there? Once a month?”
“You can’t force her to move, not against her will.”
“We,” said Eira. “The two of us need to deal with this together. She can’t make that kind of decision anymore.”
“A person’s life is their own business,” said Magnus. “Right down to the last fucking second. No one has the right to take that away from them.”
“She wets herself sometimes. She panics when she doesn’t know where she is.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to hang out with a bunch of old fogeys, watching sing-along shows on TV. What happens if it’s awful there, if we’ve already sold the house and can’t do anything about it? Christ, haven’t you read about what goes on in places like that? How they lock them up and leave them in shitty nappies, how they’re not allowed out.”
“That was somewhere else, not here. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
“And you can guarantee that, can you?”
“She likes those sing-along shows. We watch them every Tuesday.”
“Seriously?”
Ricken came out with a chipped mug of coffee for her, interrupting their conversation. He had forgotten the water.
“I heard you guys picked up a bunch of people in Bjärtrå this morning,” he said, tossing a new beer to Magnus and opening one himself. “I heard you were there.”
“Don’t bring that up now,” said Magnus. “You know Eira can’t talk cop stuff.”
Ricken sat down in the grass. The insects seemed to hush, and everything went quiet. Eira saw a rowing boat glide out into the bay. Her brother had never found out about their relationship, the whole thing had played out in secret.
“I’m sure you lot have already made your minds up,” Ricken continued, ignoring Magnus. “Once a person’s done one thing, that means they must be guilty of another. That’s the way you think.”
“You don’t need to tell her how she thinks,” said Magnus.
“Those idiots have been bragging all over the place about burning down that house, so I know you’ll get them for it, they’re too dumb to keep their mouths shut, but they weren’t trying to kill him. I know the dad of two them. They’re just little brats.”
“If you really have something to tell me,” said Eira, “then it’d be better if I came back with a colleague. Either that or you should call the station.”
“We haven’t forgotten what Olof did to Lina Stavred,” said Ricken. “So if a couple of little kids want to save Ådalen from the guy, I don’t have anything against it. But fair is fair.”
“Cut it out.” Magnus threw the half-empty can at him. It missed his friend’s head but showered him with beer all the same. “When she’s sitting here, Eira isn’t a cop; she’s my sister.”
Ricken threw the can back at him, missing too. Fooled about trying to lick the beer off himself.
Eira laughed. She liked that Magnus was taking her side and emphasizing that she was his sister, that Ricken wanted to tell her something. The whole thing made her feel warm inside, made her long to share a beer with them and remember the old times, to laugh at stupid jokes and lean back in the rickety damned chair that almost collapsed when she finally managed to get up.
“OK, I have to go,” she said, lowering her cup to the grass. It tipped over, and the dregs of the coffee spilled out onto her shoe.
“I’ll look in on Mum tomorrow,” Magnus called after her. “Or the day after. I swear, I’ll do better.”
Chapter 27
“Let’s go over everything we’ve got,” said GG, standing with his back to the window, the sky and the coastal city. The buildings behind him had eight, nine stories, stepped blocks of flats climbing up the hillside.
For some reason their meeting was in Sundsvall that day. GG hadn’t explained why and Eira hadn’t asked.
She just got in her car and drove down.
“Everything we’ve got on what?” asked Bosse Ring. “Are you talking about the murder or the arson and attempted murder?”
“All of it. Every bloody case that so much as mentions the name Hagström. We should probably put our hands together and pray we’re not dealing with two murders soon.”
“Is it looking bad?” Silje Andersson looked up from her laptop.
“What?”
“Olof Hagström’s condition.”
“No change there. He’s still hooked up to tubes and machines, the whole shebang. One of our colleagues in Umeå swung by this morning.”
“What are they saying?”
“Want me to translate?”
“From doctor’s speak? Please.”
Olof Hagström was sedated and on a respirator following his operation. The bleed in the membranes surrounding his brain had clotted slightly during his time in the forest, but they had managed to remove the worst of it, ditto the blood in his lungs. They had also discovered a small hemorrhage in his liver. The doctors couldn’t say how serious the damage would be. Nor whether he would wake up.
“The boys deny chasing him into the forest,” GG continued. “They claim they got scared when the fire took hold. They saw him run out of the house and then they cleared off.”
“But they did take care of the dog,” said Bosse Ring. “Don’t forget that.”
The dog had come bounding out of nowhere. It went crazy when it saw the fire, but two of the boys had managed to catch it. One had wounds on his arm, bite marks, and had pulled back the dressing to show them—not without a certain amount of pride.
“‘We couldn’t just let it run off,’” Bosse Ring read from the interview transcript. “‘It could’ve been run over or something.’”
“How considerate,” said Silje.
One of the boys had made an anonymous call to the emergency services when he got home. He hadn’t told his friends. When it came to which of them had thrown the burning bottles through the windows, their stories diverged wildly. Other than the thirteen-year-old, who claimed it was him, the others all blamed one another.
“He’s probably been watching YouTube videos about how real gangster kids behave,” said Silje. “Taking the blame to keep his older friends out of prison.”
“Maybe he wants to impress his brother,” Eira mumbled.
She had been to the station in Sundsvall many times before, but never in this role, as part of the team. As she stepped into the building, she had a vision of herself staying there. Applying for a position with Violent Crimes. It was only an hour away by car, easily commutable until she sorted things out with her mother.
“Or maybe it really was him,” said Bosse Ring.
Sighs took hold throughout the room, the weight of four teenagers who had strayed so far over the line.
“But they could be telling the truth about the attack in the forest,” GG continued, nodding to the crime scene technician he had asked to join the meeting.
It was a relief not to have to search for the test results on their computers. To be able to look one another in the eye over the table. That didn’t happen too often.
“An unusual crime scene, I must say,” Costel Ardelean spoke up as he connected his laptop to the system. “You learn something new every day.”
Images of the fallen tree filled the screen on the wall. They had called out a forest ranger to inspect the uprooting late the night before. Nature’s recovery: in the absence of branches, the power of gravity. Costel explained that the thickest branches had been sawn off, as had the crown. Someone had been collecting wood, doing the same to several other trees that had toppled during the powerful spring storms. It meant the equilibrium had been upset, enabling the fallen tree to spring upright again, helped along by the weight of Olof Hagström when he stumbled.
Parts of the tree had now been dug up and sent off for further analysis.
“Apparently it’s happened before,” said Costel. “At least one known fatality, in Blekinge in 2013. It’s especially dangerous once the last of the ground frost has thawed and the spring rain loosens the earth.”
“You’d have to be bloody mad to get out in nature,” said Bosse Ring.
“Was it the tree that caused his head injury?” asked GG, accidentally kicking Eira beneath the table. She pulled her feet towards her. GG didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s possible,” said Costel. “According to the medical examiner, the wound was caused by a powerful blow with a heavy branch. Traces of blood suggest it could’ve been the root plate. They found bark in the wound, too.”
In the brief silence that followed, Eira found herself thinking about what Ricken had said about the fire and the teenage boys. The physical evidence seemed to confirm their version of events. That meant she didn’t need to bring it up; she could keep the messy parts of her life separate from her professional life, where everything was clear and pure.
She leaned back and stretched out her legs, making sure to check that no one else’s feet were in the way.
“In any case,” said GG, “there’s not much more we can do now but wait. On the test results, on Olof waking up—if he wakes up. The kids have already confessed; they were there, they’ll be charged with arson regardless.”
“Confusing business, this,” said Costel Ardelean. “Two different investigations at the same crime scene, but both so different. Father and son. One house, one ruin.”
“No doubt,” said GG.
With that, they turned their attention to the murder.
They had twenty-four hours until the prosecutor would have to request that Tryggve Nydalen be remanded in custody if they wanted to hold him any longer.
“Which means driving to Härnösand and going through the whole security rigmarole, taking off our belts and emptying all the coins out of our pockets the minute we want to ask a question.”
“Who has coins in their pockets these days?” asked Silje.
That was assuming they even had enough to remand him in custody.
The crime scene had burnt to the ground. They had fingerprints proving he had been in the house, but not when. The medical examiners had said all there was to say, and had released Sven Hagström’s body.
Tryggve Nydalen was still maintaining his innocence. He may well be a bad person, but he hadn’t had any quarrels with his neighbor.
“OK, so what have we got? First and foremost, a possible motive. Sven Hagström found out that his neighbor was a convicted sex offender and Nydalen felt like he had to silence him.”
“Do we know that Sven actually threatened him?” asked Silje. She hadn’t had time to go through all the material yet. “I can’t see anything confirming that here.”
“All we know for sure,” said GG, turning to Eira, “is that Sven knew there was a sex offender in the area and that he was trying to find out more. But did he manage it?”
“It’s definitely possible,” said Eira. “He read articles about the assault, he seems to have been searching. His ex claims that he’d changed.”
She knew how flimsy it sounded. The whole thing had seemed so solid a few days earlier, but was it really? Or was it nothing but a pattern she was trying to conjure up, the kind of images you see when you think you can glimpse the truth?
No, Sven Hagström had known. It was too much to be a sheer coincidence.
“There’s something else I want to show you,” said Costel Ardelean.
He pressed a couple of buttons, and the image of the uprooting was replaced by one of a hunting knife. The knife that had been seized from the suspect’s gun cabinet. Its measurements corresponded with the wound, as did the shape of the blade. The technician talked at length about the model, the handle—made from curly birch and oak, with leather elements—and the sharpened, gently curved blade. Above all, he talked about the traces of dried blood they had found between the blade and the handle, barely visible to the naked eye. The location was one in which evidence might be preserved, even if you cleaned the knife.
“The DNA analysis isn’t finished yet, but what we can say is that the blood isn’t human.”
“Is it elk?” asked GG, rocking back in his chair. “Or has he felled a bear? Don’t tell me you’ve managed to date it back to September last year?” That was when elk hunting season got underway in that part of the country, an occasion more important than Christmas to many people.
“We’ll know soon.”
“And is it possible that these traces of . . . nonhuman blood could still be there even if you’ve used the knife since, and cleaned it thoroughly?”
“It depends what you mean by thoroughly.”
“Why would someone lock the murder weapon in their own gun cabinet?” asked Silje.
“So no one notices it’s missing,” said Bosse. “Round here, a person without a hunting knife is more suspicious than one with.”
The room fell silent. Someone ate the last of the cheese sandwiches. The phrase “murder weapon” had gained particular significance in the Swedish language since the murder of Olof Palme. The ongoing investigation, stretching across decades. Every single police officer, and the majority of ordinary citizens, knew that the murder could have been solved if they had just managed to find the murder weapon. It was a lingering trauma, proof that Sweden had changed. A country where you could get away with shooting the prime minister, where security no longer really existed.
“So what did he do with the knife?” asked GG. “Did he throw it in the river? Bury it?”
“If we hadn’t caught those kids,” said Bosse Ring, “I would’ve said that Nydalen started the fire to get rid of the evidence. It bothers me that it burnt down that night, just before we arrested him.”
“Maybe he knew one of them? Have we checked where they got the idea?”
“Facebook, they said.”
“Worth looking into?”
“That kind of thinking is everywhere out there. People have been getting worked up on various threads ever since we released Olof Hagström.”
“Who knew we were on to Nydalen?”
GG turned to Eira. She thought for a moment, feeling a deep sense of unease. Had she blabbed to someone? No, she couldn’t remember doing anything like that. The only person she had mentioned the name to was her old colleague, who was hunkered down in his cabin, pretending to enjoy his retirement.
“It’s a pretty long way down to the river,” she eventually said. “I doubt he would’ve chosen to dump the knife there.”
“It’s a bloody thicket,” Bosse Ring agreed. “And he was in a hurry—a weekday morning, he could’ve bumped into anyone. Plus his wife was at home. She’s still backing him to the hilt, by the way.”
“Their accounts of what they were doing that morning differ slightly,” said Eira. “But they were also in separate buildings. Tryggve could easily have snuck off for a while and come back without her noticing—assuming he didn’t walk right past the bakehouse.”
“Can we see a map?” asked GG.
Someone found one and brought it up on the big screen. The image kept jumping around, taking them up to Jämtland for a moment before zooming in on the area around Kungsgården.
Eira compared the map with her memories of the terrain. The Nydalen homestead was slightly higher than the Hagström house, and there was little other than forest in between. Spruce trees, the odd pine, quite a few aspen. Bilberry and lingonberry bushes. It was rocky in places, the earth couldn’t be particularly deep. Other than the road, which it seemed logical to rule out, there was a snowmobile trail, plus a couple of half-overgrown paths that weren’t visible in the satellite images.
