We know you remember, p.27
We Know You Remember, page 27
The woman glanced at Eira’s nails. They certainly didn’t look like they regularly saw the inside of a salon. Unpainted, cut short.
“Do you really have to bother her with all that stuff again? You have no idea how long it took for Elvis to dare to think to the future again. Years and years. She and Lina had known each other all their lives. I held that girl in my arms myself. He’s the one who did it, Hagström’s lad, it was solved, it’s just the papers speculating like usual, isn’t it?”
The woman was anxious, that much was clear. Perhaps not even she fully believed what she was saying.
“Who cuts the grass?” asked August.
“If you let the forest take over, that’s it. At least this way people can see that there’s someone here from time to time. That’s not a crime, is it?”
They had made it only a few kilometers when Eira’s phone pinged with a message.
Where are you?
She pulled over to the side of the road. It was from GG. She wrote back to say that they were in Bjärtrå, on their way in.
Got time to swing by Kungsgården?
Eira’s pulse picked up. No new alerts had come in from the command center in Umeå, so an afternoon coffee at the station was virtually all that was beckoning.
OK, why? she wrote, waiting for a horse box to pass before she pulled back out onto the road. She drove slowly, clutching her phone to the wheel, saw a new message come in.
Ask Nydalen if this could have been the person he saw.
Ping. Ping.
A face appeared on her screen.
Long, dark hair. Narrow face, softish features. Eyes staring, like the majority of people in a passport photograph. The young man looked to be in his twenties.
“What’s this about?” August asked, for the second or third time.
“Looks like they’ve identified the body in Lockne.”
“Oh shit.”
Her phone beeped again with two other images. The same face, slightly younger in one of the shots; the same long hair, but in a green-and-white Hammarby football jersey this time. A Stockholm team. As Eira pulled into the Nydalens’ yard, she realized she had been right: he was from elsewhere.
There were two cars parked outside the garage, one gleaming and new, from a rental company. A young woman came out onto the porch. She was wearing a pair of rolled-up jeans, and put down a black rubbish bag.
“That’s our daughter Jenny, she came home,” Tryggve explained as he walked towards them, hesitant, suspicious. “From Australia. Do you really have to cause a fuss with her too?”
“I just wanted to ask you to take a look at a couple of pictures,” said Eira.
“Will this never end?”
Eira brought up the first image and held out her phone.
“Could this be the person you saw on the river the night Lina Stavred went missing?”
Tryggve patted his pockets and excused himself, heading into the house to fetch his glasses. The young woman slammed the lid of the bin and came towards them, stopping at a safe distance. She looked younger than her twenty-seven years.
“What do you want?” she asked, shoving her hands into her pockets, defiantly hunching her shoulders.
“It’s to do with another case.”
“Right.”
Jenny lingered, as though she was expecting questions.
“It must’ve come as a real shock to you,” said Eira, hearing just how pathetic the words sounded. What were you supposed to say to someone whose mother had confessed to murder? Who had just found out that her father wasn’t who she thought he was?
“I came back to go through my stuff,” she said. “I only took a backpack when I left. I thought there might be something from my childhood that I wanted to keep, before Dad sells up, but what would that be? Memories of what?”
“Is he going to sell?”
“He can do what he wants as far as I’m concerned.” She looked over to the house. Her father had just reemerged, glasses in one hand. “Looks nice on the outside, huh?” she said. “God, they worked so hard on the house and the garden, trying to make everything perfect.”
Eira wanted to ask more, but that wasn’t why they were there. She was no longer investigating the murder of Sven Hagström. Not everything could be explained. They had the confession, the murder weapon, and a motive. The evidence against Mejan was strong; there was no reason for the police to delve into her psyche or her background. That was the defense team’s problem now, if they chose to pursue that angle. Or the court’s, once it handed down its verdict.
Jenny turned and walked away as her father approached, kicking a football into one of the lovingly planned flower beds. She turned her head as they passed.
Tryggve watched his daughter for a moment before putting on his glasses and taking Eira’s phone.
“Who is this?” he asked, studying the image.
“You said the person rowing the boat had dark hair hanging over their face . . . ?”
“Yes . . . I remember the hair, it was down to her shoulders like that, and I remember she was a useless rower. Women in boats, you know?” He laughed, hoping for August to join in, then lowered his eyes when he got no response.
“But you think it could’ve been him?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” He paused on the photograph with the football shirt. “He does look a bit like a girl. Skinny, not much of a bloke . . .”
“I know it must be hard to tell this long after the event,” said Eira.
Tryggve handed back her phone.
“Yeah,” he said, his intonation betraying his northern roots. Eira found herself wondering if that was where he would go now, whether those towns and villages had the ability to forget. “It could’ve been someone else, but it also could’ve been him.”
Chapter 49
It was thanks to his teeth that they had been able to identify him so quickly.
Kenneth Emanuel Isaksson.
“We found him in the missing-persons database,” said Silje, who was temporarily back in Kramfors. She turned her laptop for Eira to see.
Born 1976 in Hägersten Parish, Stockholm. Kenneth had just turned twenty when he was reported missing in early June 1996.
Eira counted forward and back. That was less than a month before Lina vanished, not even four weeks—twenty-six days, to be precise.
“He ran away from the Hassela Collective in northern Hälsingland,” said Silje.
“Is that place still open?” Eira recalled a treatment home for young addicts 150 or so kilometers south, on the other side of the county line.
“There’s something else there now, but back when our guy was there, their comradely support in the spirit of Marxism was still in full swing.”
“I remember the place was pretty controversial.”
“Collective child-rearing,” said Silje. “They achieved quite a lot, but they also got a load of criticism—for encouraging the kids to inform on one another, among other things.”
Silje scrolled through the material, a summary of the police investigation into Kenneth Isaksson’s disappearance in 1996.
“They thought he’d run off to Stockholm. He’d done it a few times before, but the police always found him in the city in one or the other usual places.”
“Have you managed to speak to any of his relatives?”
“His dad is dead and his mum broke off all contact with him the year before he vanished. Kenneth stole pretty much everything he could sell from their house.”
“So what was he doing in Ådalen?”
“Hiding? Maybe he didn’t want to get caught again. Or reported.”
“He could’ve been making his way somewhere else,” said Eira. “To Norway or Finland . . . He could get hold of drugs pretty much anywhere.”
“The people at Hassela said he’d been clean for a while.”
“And no one knew where he was going?”
“Apparently not,” said Silje. “I guess he’d kept his mouth shut around his friends this time.”
Eira read through the relatively short text again.
“If it was him out on the river with Lina Stavred,” she said, “then it can’t have been the first time they met. She hardly walked down to the river on a whim; they must have agreed to meet.”
“Hmm,” said Silje. “Some would say it’s too early to be drawing conclusions like that.”
Eira turned back to the image of Kenneth Isaksson. His messy hair, the elusive look in his eyes.
“If you were sixteen or seventeen,” she said, “would you have been into this guy?”
Silje looked into the boy’s piercing eyes.
“I would have liked the fact he was on the run, or maybe it would’ve scared me. God knows which would’ve won out. I guess I’d have thought he looked like a rock star.”
“Lina walked all the way down to Marieberg,” said Eira. “That’s over a kilometer from her house, almost two. She was dressed up, didn’t want to get dirty . . .” Eira was now back in the woods, among the nettles, on the trail leading down to the water. She pictured the boy in the boat. Where had he got hold of it? Stolen, of course. Dozens of rowing boats could go missing in a single season. The beach, that was where the last sign of Lina had been found.
“The makeup brush,” she said.
“What?”
“It was found in the sand. Lina put on makeup before he arrived.”
Chapter 50
The air was thick with acetone and perfume. Calling it a salon was probably a bit of a stretch—it was in the basement of an ordinary residential building—but Elvira Sjögren had done her very best to make it look like one.
Posters of French landscapes on the walls, mirrors with golden frames, candles on every free surface. Sandalwood and rosemary.
“My God, woman,” she said, studying Eira’s hands. “When did you last have your nails done?”
“I just want something simple,” said Eira.
“You don’t want to treat yourself? I think you deserve it.”
The woman known as Elvis dug out some boxes of artificial nails painted in every color under the sun, long and pointed, rounded and shapely, as Eira debated how honest to be. As a police officer, she was walking a fine line—assuming she hadn’t already crossed it—but no one could hold it against her for wanting to look nice.
She pointed to a near-white shade with a hint of pearlescent shimmer.
“And we’ll build them up a bit, too,” said Elvis, gently rubbing Eira’s fingers between her own.
“Not too much,” said Eira. “Having long nails is no good in my job.” That wasn’t strictly true; plenty of her fellow officers wore bright pink fake nails to compensate for the masculine uniform.
“God, that’s a shame, what do you do?”
“Police.”
“Ooh, that sounds exciting, you must see so much.”
“Just keep it very simple, like I said,” Eira told her. Elvira gave her a sad smile, as though she pitied her for not thinking she was worthy of more.
She was led over to a chair, and Elvira started filing and moisturizing, talking about different ways to strengthen her nails or build them up using some kind of gel-like material.
“I think I recognize you,” Eira said after a round of chitchat about the weather and holidays. “Weren’t you friends with Lina, the girl who went missing?”
“I was. She was my best friend.”
Forty minutes, Eira thought. That was how long it would take to do ten nails. Thirty-five to go.
“It must’ve been awful—for you too, I mean.”
Elvis adjusted the bright lamp above the table.
“You just want to forget, but you can’t. The whole thing actually came up again recently, when the papers started saying they might have found her body . . . You start thinking, OK, so there’ll be a funeral. They only had a memorial back then, but it was still nice, they played her favorite music and talked about what a great person she was and could have been . . .”
Working on Eira’s nails, the woman had no choice but to look down, though perhaps she would have avoided making eye contact anyway. There was a certain weightlessness to words that weren’t deeply rooted.
“I didn’t know her myself,” said Eira. “I was too young. But my brother did. They were dating, actually.”
The tool in Elvis’s hand slipped, something sharp hitting the cuticle. She looked up.
“Sjödin! God, that never even occurred to me. Are you Magnus’s sister? Of course you bloody are, I knew his little sister was in the police now.”
The air suddenly felt slightly easier to breathe, despite the candles, as Elvis dropped the usual salon chat about what a woman was worth, what she should treat herself to.
Eira dodged a few questions about Magnus, about how he was these days, what he was up to, who he was seeing.
“What was she really like, Lina?”
“What has Magnus said?”
“Nothing,” said Eira. “You know what brothers are like.”
“He probably just wanted to forget too.” Elvis put down the nail file. Picked up one of the small bottles she had brought over and applied a neat layer of undercoat, holding Eira’s hand steady. “People only ever talked about how nice and beautiful she was. You couldn’t disagree with them—you’d look like a terrible person.”
“Do you remember Ricken?”
“Of course I do.”
“He said that Lina was just messing with Magnus.”
“She was the worst,” said Elvis. “Sorry, I’d never say that to anyone else, but you are his sister, you might as well know. Lina broke up with him and then took him back, she was seeing other people but claimed she still had feelings for him—you know how it is, the person who’s in love practically loses their mind. You don’t think you can live without them in the end.”
She pushed Eira’s hand beneath a heat lamp and left it to rest there for a while.
“I was actually kind of into Magnus myself,” she said. Her cheeks flushed slightly, or maybe it was just the heat of the lamp. “Not that I told the police or anything, they probably would’ve thought I killed her in some fit of jealousy. But I never stood a chance against Lina, not in anything. I sort of started seeing him after she disappeared, I guess it was a comfort thing, or I don’t know . . . I couldn’t be like her. Magnus changed too, I noticed that. He was always pretty lively before, I’m sure you know. Someone who slaloms through life, this way and that; the type of person everyone loves because he’s so handsome and nice. And kind too, I always thought he was kind, but then . . . Sorry to have to say this, but he wasn’t so kind to me. Told me to stop being so clingy when I just wanted to hang out . . . Well, you know. When you get too keen. I thought he was sad and that I was the only person there for him, that he needed to be comforted. Love, you know? Ugh, God, sorry, I forgot . . .”
Elvis turned off the lamp and got to work on the next coat. Some of the varnish ended up on Eira’s skin, but she wiped it away. Did the same thing again.
“So he’s OK these days?” she asked, voice hesitant.
“Magnus? Yeah, yeah, he’s got a girlfriend over by the coast.”
“I hope she’s good to him.”
“I think she is.”
“He could be jealous, too,” Elvis continued. “Not with me, but with Lina. Properly green with envy, you know? To the extent that he would spend half the night standing outside her house just to see whether she brought anyone else home. I lived really close by. I used to hear him pull up on his motorbike.”
“Was he right? Do you know whether Lina was seeing anyone else?”
“She’d kill me if I told you.”
Eira smiled. “Well, she can hardly do that now.”
“No, but . . . All that stuff about how bloody saintly she was, that’s still there. You don’t talk crap about the dead, you know? You’re supposed to rise above all that. Start sobbing and going on about how she was the most amazing friend ever.”
“But . . . ?”
“She could be so mean. One minute she wanted me to come over because I was her best friend in the whole world, and then she’d call me a retard—all because I wasn’t as smart as her. Just because she read these fancy books, French authors and that kind of thing, books you could barely even understand. I’m sure she just pretended to read them, as though anyone actually cared.” Elvis looked up again. “I would never use that word, ‘retard,’ I mean. But that’s what people said back then. You wouldn’t do it now. Or no one with any sense would, anyway. It’s a handicap—though you’re not meant to say that either. I should know, I work as a care assistant too. ‘Functional diversity,’ that’s the term. Still, that’s what Lina called people when she thought they were being idiots. And I just kept on hanging out with her.”
Elvis reached away from the table and grabbed some paper from a holder, blew her nose. She wiped her hands on a wet wipe.
“You should try a bit more color, if you ask me.”
“Maybe next time.”
Eira studied her as she screwed the lids back onto the bottles, put everything in order.
“Who was Lina seeing? The person you weren’t allowed to talk about?”
“I know I should’ve told the police, but I was only fifteen . . . If the police had found them, Lina would’ve hated me forever. She’d lied to her parents and said she was hanging out with me, that’s why they never asked. Lina’s folks were so strict, teetotalers, they went crazy when she snuck out to go drinking and that kind of thing. One time it got so bad they said they were going to send her off to live with relatives in Finland, or to some school somewhere, with super-strict rules and curfews . . .”
“So what was Lina really doing that evening?”
“She was going to leave,” said Elvis. “Clear off for good with that guy. I thought that was what she’d done, so I didn’t say anything, and then all that stuff about Olof came out, about what really happened . . .”
“Who was he?”
