We know you remember, p.23
We Know You Remember, page 23
“The people you bought the hash from?”
“Mmm. But I talked to some friends anyway, and that obviously got back to the cops somehow.”
“Because you wanted to draw their attention to someone else?”
“Not just that.”
Eira sat down beside him. She wanted to talk about something else, about the weather or how his parents were doing, she wanted the silence to last, for the questions to be forgotten, as though she had never asked them. Her thoughts drifted to Ingela, Olof’s sister, who had snapped up the rumor and taken it home with her, set everything in motion.
“It obviously wasn’t Magnus,” said Ricken. “I never thought it was. You get that, right? But he was a complete mess—first Lina was gone, then the cops came after him. I guess I thought they might as well question someone else instead.”
“A fourteen-year-old?”
Eira glanced at her old boyfriend, at his familiar profile. It had become more accentuated over time, more finely tuned. His jaw was tense, his hands clutching the grass. Even after all these years, she still thought she could tell what he was thinking, as though the boundaries between two people didn’t exist. No skin, no secrets. As though it was her job to carry his pain, his love, his inability, whatever the hell it was.
“We made Olof do it,” said Ricken, his voice muted. “That’s another reason I didn’t want anyone to talk to the cops. I was the one who was always coming up with stuff to do, the others just did what I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was taunting him, and the others joined in—all, ‘Come on, aren’t you gonna follow her? Have you ever fucked anyone? Do you even know what to do with a girl?’ The kind of meaningless stuff we used to say. I was pissed off with Lina, too. Said some horrible stuff about her. But then he actually did it, he followed her into the forest. I never thought Olof would try it on, he wasn’t the type . . . I didn’t believe it when he came back out either, even though he was dirty, his face all red. I knew what Lina was like, so goddamn self-centered, she would never . . .”
“So what type was Olof?”
“Insecure and cocky. Big for his age, but immature. Not that I really knew him, but . . .”
“I read parts of your interview. You didn’t seem to have any doubts back then.”
“I guess it was all that stuff . . . with Magnus . . . The cops were all over him . . .”
“So you sounded more sure than you were?”
“I just said what we saw. And no matter what Olof did or didn’t do, I knew Magnus was innocent.”
“Because?”
“Because he was at home.”
“Was he?”
“Come on, he’s your brother. I’ve known him all my life.”
Eira looked out at the water, the steady flow of the current. It’s always someone’s brother, she thought, though she couldn’t bring herself to say it. That would mean following the thought to its conclusion, getting into an argument. Ricken would defend Magnus until the last, she knew that; he had broken up with her to avoid ruining their friendship, or at least that was what he had told her at the time. Maybe he just hadn’t loved her, but still. Their brotherhood came first.
“If this witness is telling the truth,” she said softly. “If he saw what he thinks he saw, that means Lina was alive when Olof came out of the woods.”
“So where’s she supposed to have gone?”
“Out in a boat,” said Eira. “Two girls rowed past this witness over by Köja, in towards the island, where they turned off.”
“This way?” said Ricken. “Into the bay?”
The very same one they were looking out at then. Strinnefjärden was its name, at least if you lived on this side of the water. Eira had heard that those on the other side called it Lockneviken. It was all a matter of perspective.
“Where were they going?” asked Eira. “What was out here twenty-three years ago?”
“Nothing. Houses. That’s pretty much it.” Ricken squinted across the river, as though he might spot something else. “You might come out here to visit someone, I don’t know what other reason you could have.”
Eira moved closer to the water’s edge and heard him follow her. Soft footsteps in the grass.
“What’s on the other side?” she asked.
“Farmers,” Ricken said to the back of her head. “A few nice old places from the sawmill years, the manor in Lockne. Horse paddocks. I don’t know whether there are any horses now, but there might’ve been back then.”
“And there?”
Eira pointed to a cluster of poles sticking up out of the water. The beach was overgrown, the trees spilling out into the river. There was a beaver’s dam, a sliver of roof visible beyond the greenery. Farther back, the landscape rose steeply, dramatic rocks rising up out of the water.
“Lorelei,” said Ricken.
“What?”
“People call it the Lorelei rock.” His eyes were fixed in the distance, on the steep gray slope. “You know, after the woman who sat on top of a huge rock by the Rhine, singing and combing her golden hair. She bewitched the sailors, made them forget to keep watch for dangerous reefs.”
“I mean there,” said Eira. “By the old quay.”
“Ah, the mill,” said Ricken. “Some of it’s still there, but it’s been falling apart for decades; that place shut down back in the forties.”
Eira thought about the places he had taken her. The oil cistern wasn’t the only one. They had gone to empty houses and the abandoned ruins of factories, the kind of thing Ådalen was full of. Places where no one would see them. She would never be able to find her way back to most of them, had been focused on everything other than the geography.
“Did you and I ever go over there?” she asked.
“Nah, damn, must’ve missed that one.” He was laughing, she was sure of that. Or smiling at the very least. “But it’s not too late.”
She gently stroked his arm before she left.
“Thanks for telling me.”
Chapter 41
There were seven tips about a boat on the river. Several could be dismissed out of hand, but three were a fit for both the time and the location.
Just outside Nyhamn, an elderly couple who were sitting on their veranda. They had almost certainly passed away. Nyhamn was midway between Marieberg and Strinnefjärden. They thought it had been around ten o’clock, just after the late shipping news on the radio.
Over by Köja, a few teenagers who were drinking beer on a jetty. They weren’t sure of the time. Only one of them actually remembered the boat, she had waved because she thought it was someone she knew inside, but she had been mistaken.
The third tip came from a fisherman who had been somewhere downstream of Litanön and thought he saw someone row into Strinnefjärden. It caught his eye because the person was so terrible at rowing; he’d probably reacted more to the sound of the oars than anything. He didn’t have his glasses with him in the boat—could fish perfectly well without them—and couldn’t be sure whether it was the girl or not, but he had heard laughter carrying across the water, and it was from a young lady.
All of the witnesses had been contacted, their statements taken down, but Eira couldn’t find any further action after that.
Sheer routine.
“There was one more thing,” she said.
“What?”
GG seemed annoyed, replying curtly to everything she said. They were no longer a team, to the extent they ever had been. It had been days since she last saw Bosse Ring. He was probably on another case, or possibly on leave. Silje Andersson, too. Still, Mejan Nydalen had confessed and been remanded in custody, the forensic evidence was solid, so why else would GG have driven the one hundred kilometers to Kramfors?
For coffee?
He knows, thought Eira. He either feels or suspects that there really is something in this. For the first time, she saw something of herself in him. A stubbornness, something niggling away inside.
“It was more a complaint than a real tip,” she continued. “But no one seems to have looked into it or even called back. There wasn’t anything to directly connect it to Lina.”
“But?”
“A widow, in Lockne. She said she was calling for the third time.”
Eira read aloud from the transcript of her phone call. They had taken such care with that kind of thing twenty-three years ago, making sure nothing fell between the cracks. Everything had been documented and filed away. She felt an urge to slip into the woman’s Ångermanland accent, a blending of several old dialects you rarely heard anymore; she associated them with her grandparents, with a bygone world. Instead, she translated for GG:
“There are people in the sawmill again. God knows what they’re up to, but the police haven’t been over yet.”
“Sorry, but where are you talking about?”
“Over here, in Lockne. The door’s wide open, so anyone and their mother can walk straight in. Doesn’t feel good not knowing what kind of folk are running around. And now with everything with that girl. Nasty business.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Don’t dare go down there with those types hanging about.”
The person who took the call then said “if this isn’t about the missing girl, Lina Stavred, I’d advise you to call on a different line . . .” and the woman launched into a general rant about the authorities turning their backs on the community just because it wasn’t on the coast.
GG had taken a seat and was drumming his pen on the edge of the desk.
“I’m not quite sure I follow,” he said. “How is this interesting?”
Eira put down her iPad and brought up a map.
“It’s just a thought,” she said. “But if you look at the area here . . .” The narrow inlet was five kilometers long, like a tributary with no destination. She pointed out the old sawmill in Lockne, halfway in.
“Why would they row up here?” she asked. “If they were going to visit someone, shouldn’t that person have come forward . . . ?” Neither vocalized the thought that followed, but she could see it in his eyes: unless that person was the killer.
“Who could the other person in the boat have been?” GG asked instead. “Surely they can’t have failed to notice another missing girl?”
Eira enlarged the satellite image. Blurry greenery and spots that could be roofs were all that was visible of the area beyond the poles in the water by Lockne.
“When I was younger, we used to go out to places like this. All a bit out of the way, somewhere where you could feel free.”
“What did her parents say? Where did they think she was?”
“Lina had told them she was staying over at a friend’s, but she never showed up. She must have had a reason to walk all the way over to Marieberg—I mean, it’s a few kilometers away.”
“To meet boys?”
“Then why wouldn’t she just stay by the road where the whole gang was hanging out?”
“What did the police make of it?”
“They lost all interest in where she was going the minute they turned their attention to Olof Hagström. It wasn’t important anymore.”
GG spun around in his chair, eyes panning out across the flat roofs of central Kramfors, a prolonged silence.
“I spoke to a doctor in Umeå yesterday,” he said. “He’s got a lung infection and a fever, but it’s going down. His pupils react, he responds to touch.”
“Do they think he’ll wake up?”
“They’re like us—they try not to second-guess.”
Eira waited out yet another silence.
“There’s a moment,” she eventually said. “In the interviews with Olof Hagström.”
“Mmm?”
“Do you have time? It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“What’s this about?”
“I’d like you to see it for yourself.”
GG got up with a certain listlessness, filled his mug with coffee on the way. He grabbed a handful of jelly sweets from a plastic tub, the kind parents buy from children collecting for a school trip. There was a whole stack of them in the cupboard.
They squeezed into the cramped TV room. Eira had watched the video again, and had fast-forwarded to the right place.
The image appeared on the screen: Olof on the vinyl sofa, his eyes on the floor.
“It wasn’t like I told them . . . She pushed me and I fell . . . The ground was dirty. All kinds of muck.”
“Why didn’t you mention any of this before?”
“Because . . . because . . . She’s a girl. It’s just, I wasn’t expecting it. That must’ve been why I fell . . .”
GG munched on sweet after sweet as the disjointed story rolled towards its end. They heard the interviewer’s increasingly forceful exhortations that Olof should stop lying, the part where he asked for his mother.
Eira hit stop.
“What if he’s telling the truth?” she said, ignoring the familiar deep-seated urge to keep quiet. “If Lina left on her own, then Nydalen’s statement could be true. Maybe there was someone waiting for her down by the river. Why else would she take that path?”
“Play it again.”
Eira rewound the tape, knew the time stamps by heart now.
“And then she grabbed some nettles, like this . . . And shoved soil in my mouth, said it was my fault she was dirty, that I’d ruined everything.”
GG took the remote control from her hand, pressed pause.
“Is that a common reaction to being raped?”
“What?”
“Worrying about being dirty—in the literal sense, I mean.”
Before the segment had finished again, GG was on his feet. Pacing back and forth in the corridor outside. Eira let the video keep rolling. None of the boys she had known growing up would have told his friends if he had been pushed over and humiliated by a girl. Who wouldn’t have said what Olof was reported to have said: “Man, Lina was great. Fuck me, she was great”?
From the corridor outside, she heard snatches of a telephone conversation every time GG came closer or raised his voice.
“I’m not saying we should reopen the investigation, but if mistakes were made . . . No, I can’t do that, he’s in a coma as you know . . . Yes, I’m aware that it was over twenty years ago, but before some reporter from Sveriges Television catches wind of this . . . No, we don’t let the media steer us, that’s not what I’m saying, but if there’s a new witness statement surely we should take the initiative and put a few people on it, just to take a closer look at the area . . . ?”
Chapter 42
The man who had taken it upon himself to show her the way pushed back the branches ahead of him. There was something special about the light filtering through the birch trees that had been left to grow in peace on the old industrial land, something magical. They waded through the ferns.
“You need to know where you’re going if you want to find your way,” he said.
They were almost on top of the old sawmill in Locke when it emerged from the dense greenery ahead of them, great chunks of crumbling plaster, bricks, and cracked mortar. The forensic technicians had been working for twelve hours now, and still hadn’t reported a single find.
Eira stepped over a pile of broken bricks. The door was hanging at a forty-five-degree angle. Where there had once been windows, there were now nothing but gaping holes. A technician was moving methodically inside, carefully lifting scrap metal, sweeping away mortar. A rusty oven of some kind, fallen beams. You could see straight through the building; half the wall to the rear had collapsed.
The forest was making its way inside.
“This was the boiler house and the forge,” said the older man. He had been standing by the side of the road when Eira climbed out of the car, and had volunteered to join her, had noticed the activity in the area. “Used to be full of Norwegian refugees, they worked here during the war. Have you ever heard of Georg Scherman, the foreman who shot live rounds in the courthouse in Sollefteå? People had been cheating him out of money and the entire thing was about to go down the drain. This was before the big sawmill boom in the early twentieth century; it was like the Wild West round here . . .”
Eira watched the technicians’ glove-clad movements, studying the objects they picked up, old tools and levers, a rusty chain.
Twenty thousand men had worked in the forestry industry in its heyday, and there had been sixty sawmills in the valley. The only one still in operation—in Bollstabruk—now produced more than those sixty mills combined, with fewer than three hundred employees.
Those who didn’t know better called the area sparsely populated, rural, but the truth was that the Ådalen river valley was, at heart, an industrial area. And though the industries were long gone, they still lingered, like phantom pains.
Scattered stories from someone who had heard it from someone else. A slow recovery, nature eating its way in.
The man was still behind Eira, peering over her shoulder. He had fallen quiet when she failed to respond to his knowledge of former sawmill bosses.
“Do you get a lot of kids hanging around here?” she asked.
“Not these days. They’ve probably got better things to do. Netflix and that kind of thing, I suppose, the few still living in the area.”
“Were you here in the midnineties?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Arrived in the seventies, from Arboga. It wasn’t anywhere near as dilapidated back then, of course—I think the walls were still intact, but I’m not sure. You stop paying any notice once you’ve seen it a few times; you look past it all. But this place has never drawn a lot of visitors, it’s so inaccessible, barely even visible from the road—or the river, for that matter.”
The forensic technician spotted them and came over with a brick in one hand. They introduced themselves through the empty window.
“What a place,” he said. “Strange that people haven’t made off with everything. It’s like an archaeological dig, except everything’s already lying out in the open.”
It was OK for her to come in, there was hardly likely to be any evidence that the local wildlife and the weather hadn’t already destroyed. Eira thanked her guide and was just about to climb the half-meter to the door where the steps had rotted away when her phone rang.
