We know you remember, p.7
We Know You Remember, page 7
Her laugh, reserved for him.
Olof had the sense that no one had walked along the trail since. The police had, of course; they had scoured the entire forest and the area round about, sent out dogs to look for her. And later, the reconstruction. When they brought him out there and told him to point. There was a glade, a fallen tree. He couldn’t see either now. The birches were so much taller, the trail so much narrower, eventually disappearing completely. Overgrown, of course, hidden beneath the bilberry bushes and nettles. He could taste soil.
What did you do to her, Olof?
And then, down by the river, behind the brick shed known as Meken. At the edge of the beach where the remains of the old timber quay still rose up out of the water like rotten piles. That was where they had found her things.
Was this where you threw her in? Or was it farther down?
Past the huge metal warehouse that had started to rust, between the concrete pillars in the deepwater harbor.
Sometimes we don’t want to remember, they had told him; the brain represses awful things.
That was why they had returned to the place, to help him remember.
You want to remember, don’t you, Olof?
It’s right there inside you, everything you’ve ever done and experienced.
Was it here? Was she still alive when you threw her in? Did you toss her over the edge, did you know that the water is thirty meters deep here?
You remember, Olof. We know you remember.
Chapter 10
Out of sheer habit, Eira took a detour on her way to the library. It meant she could avoid the blustery open square where everything was visible, the benches around the fountain where she might run into her brother.
She wasn’t in uniform, which was good because it made her less noticeable, but it was also bad. It increased the risk of him being overly familiar. Wanting to borrow money. Asking how their mother was.
It was worth the longer walk around the block.
GG had gone back to Sundsvall, and she had spent a few hours making routine calls to addiction treatment centers in neighboring districts, trying to find out who might have been released recently.
“Hello, Eira, lovely to see you.” The librarian’s name was Susanne, and she had worked there for the best part of twenty years. “You must tell me how your mother is.”
“Good, but not so good.”
“It’s an awful disease. I know all too well, my dad . . .”
“She still has lucid moments.”
“Are you getting any help?”
“You know Kerstin, she wants to manage on her own.”
“This part is the worst, the transition. When you have to respect everything they think they can manage, knowing they can’t. Is she still reading?”
“Every day,” said Eira. “But it’s often the same book.”
“Then let’s hope it’s a good one.”
They laughed, but in a way that was dangerously close to tears.
“I’m actually here on duty,” said Eira. “I’m sure you’ve heard about Sven Hagström in Kungsgården.”
“Of course, what an awful thing. But how can I help?”
“Did he ever borrow books from here?”
Susanne thought for a moment, then shook her head. She could certainly check the records, but she knew her customers, particularly the older ones. He may have used the library at some point, but not over the last few years. That corroborated the picture Eira had of him. She hadn’t seen any library books lying around his house, and she had checked the photographs. Surely no one kept their library books on their shelves; they were guaranteed to forget about them.
“He called the library in mid-May,” said Eira. “Several times. Do you remember whether you spoke to him?”
“Oh, of course, why didn’t I think of that?” Susanne slumped into her chair. “He was looking for a couple of articles, of course that was him!”
Eira felt a pang of grief. The librarian possessed that special kind of memory, almost like a living catalog. Her mother had been the same until very recently; she always knew what every borrower wanted, the books they didn’t yet know they would enjoy. Just the previous year Kerstin would have been able to remember a specific phone call among hundreds of others, too. Assuming they actually got that many—perhaps people didn’t borrow so many books anymore. During the fifteen minutes she had been there, Eira had seen only three other people come into the building, and one of them was to use the toilet.
“But we don’t have access to the newspaper archives here,” Susanne continued. “And the papers were from up in Norrbotten, or maybe it was Västerbotten, from back before everything was online. I told him he was welcome to come in and use one of our computers if he didn’t have his own, and I could help him make contact.”
“Did he?”
“He might’ve been in when one of my colleagues was working, but he never came to see me. I would have remembered if he did.”
“I’m sure you would,” said Eira.
“Say hello to your mum, if she remembers me. No, say hello anyway.”
August Engelhardt was sitting at her desk when she got back to the station. Strictly speaking, they didn’t have fixed seats in the office, and Eira was technically on loan to another department, but she still thought of it as hers.
“I think you’re going to want to see this,” he said, rolling back slightly in his chair.
As Eira leaned in, she found herself extremely close to him. A sensation she didn’t want to acknowledge raced through her.
“My girlfriend saw it in her feed,” said August.
It was a page from social media, comments filling the entire screen.
The name Olof Hagström flickered by in post after post.
They should castrate him and everyone else like him and it’s a fucking outrage that people like that get to walk free and the police are protecting rapists because they’re rapists themselves and that’s why all these sick bastards should be named and shamed and all power to anyone brave enough to do it, and so on, and so on.
Eira swore to herself.
They had tried to keep his name out of the news, though naturally everyone on the force knew it. There were a thousand possible sources for this leak, on top of which everyone in the area also knew who he was.
August reached out, his arm brushing against her hip.
“It’s been shared over a hundred times,” he said, scrolling down. “Seven times just while I’ve been sitting here.”
We should tell everyone where they live, read one of the posts. We have to warn one another. The media is keeping us in the dark. It’s our right to know.
“And your girlfriend,” said Eira. “Has she written anything?”
“She just shared it.”
“Maybe you should ask her to stop.”
Chapter 11
The lucid moments often occurred in the morning, at some time between five and six, when Kerstin Sjödin got up and put the coffee on.
At times it was strong, occasionally much too strong, but Eira never said a word. The mornings were a refuge, before all the sights and sounds of the day complicated things. When the meadow down by the old dock in Lunde lay still and silent. It had once been so busy down there, with ships arriving from all over the world. The dock was also where the demonstrators had been brought to a halt almost ninety years earlier. Their society had frozen in that moment, as the army’s bullets whizzed through the air, as friends hit the ground. Five fatalities within the space of just a few seconds.
“Here lies a Swedish worker”: that was the inscription on their common grave. Their crime was hunger, never forget him.
Those shots in the Ådalen Valley forever echoed through Lunde. The Events in Ådalen, as many preferred to call them—it sounded more neutral, as though the sharp edges of reality could be ground down by words. The state, protecting the strikebreakers, shooting its own workers. The blood that day. The trumpeter blowing cease-fire. It was a story too powerful to escape. It never ceased to matter who had taken part in the demonstration and who had not, whose parents, grandparents. People preferred not to talk about it, yet couldn’t bear for it to be forgotten.
“A flea market in Sörviken?” Kerstin looked up from the newspaper. She read it from cover to cover, but would soon forget the majority of it. “Yes, of course I know. It’s in the white house when you reach the bend. I used to go there to buy fabric. But what was her name . . .”
Eira knew she could pull over anywhere in Sörviken and find out the name of the woman who ran the flea market, Hagström’s odd-job lover, but it was something to talk about, a way to make Kerstin remember. Over the past year it had often struck her just how much revolved around that: Do you remember him or her, do you remember that song, that film, that book; do you remember what we did, which year was it again?
“Karin Backe,” Kerstin called out just as Eira was about to leave. “That’s her name! Maybe I could come along to see if she has anything new in?”
“I have to go there for work,” said Eira. “It’s to do with Sven Hagström’s death. Do you remember we talked about that? You read about it in the paper.”
The news was no longer news, it had slipped off the front page and the coverage was now largely focused on the fact that the police were keeping quiet, that they didn’t have any new leads. Online, she had read that they had ignored a tip about a foreign gang of thieves.
“The thought of you doing that stuff,” said Kerstin. Eyes anxious again. Worry constantly lurking beneath the surface, fingers searching for something to fiddle with. “You’re careful, aren’t you?”
She passed Eira a scarf, as though she were still a child.
As though it were winter.
Eira tossed the scarf into the car and called the station. GG was waiting for one of the other investigators; they were going to track down a couple of Lithuanian construction workers living in a campsite seven kilometers from the scene of the crime.
“Public tips,” he said, “can never be ignored.”
He had full confidence in letting her deal with Karin Backe.
The house in Sörviken was small and cluttered, but in a different sort of way. It wasn’t like Sven Hagström’s place, where the junk was piled up in layer after layer. Eira could see several overarching themes: floral vases, blue ceramic, countless glass birds.
“I’ve stopped selling,” Karin Backe explained, “but I keep buying anyway. People talk about having a clearout so that whoever’s left behind doesn’t have to deal with it after they die, but I can’t stop myself going around and looking for things. What else would I do?”
She was white-haired, with a graceful way of speaking and moving, a little like the kind of delicate coffee service people used to bring out for guests.
“Do you know what’s happening with the funeral?” she asked, making a slight gesture towards the newspaper on the kitchen table. “I haven’t seen an announcement yet. It would be so awful if the church was empty. Will it be at the church?”
There was the bubbling of the percolator, the view across the water, an audiobook paused on her phone. Pictures of children and grandchildren on the sideboard, a late husband, a black-and-white wedding photograph and faces from several earlier generations, the people who had once surrounded this woman, but still. All the kitchen tables across the country, in houses someone had departed, where another was left behind.
Eira explained that Sven Hagström couldn’t be buried yet, that it might still be a while before his body was released.
“He used to come out here to the barn nine or ten years ago,” the woman told her as they sat down. “Looking for specific objects I helped him to find. An old barometer, a compass from the war years—he was really interested in that kind of thing. And then I suppose we sort of knocked about together for a while. It was always him who came here, always at dinnertime. I cooked for him, and he helped me with various jobs about the house. Changed the washers in the tap. There’s always something breaking. We used to watch a bit of TV together too, mostly documentaries. But then it just didn’t work anymore. He was too gloomy. You don’t want that kind of gloominess in your house. I do sometimes miss it, though. Having someone else breathing beside you.”
“Did you ever talk about what happened, with his son?”
“No, no, that was off limits. What do they call it—a no-go zone. I asked once, but he got angry. You don’t want that either, not after a long life.”
Eira ticked off the usual questions. When did you last see him, did he have any enemies . . . Though did normal people really have enemies?
Was he on bad terms with anyone? she asked instead.
“Most of Ådalen,” said Karin Backe. “That’s probably how he saw it, anyway. Like everyone was against him. Thought it was all down to him, that he’d raised his son to do all that stuff. But I doubt even Sven thought he’d be killed for it. How did he die?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say.”
Karin Backe dug out a photograph of her old odd-job lover, from the racetrack five years earlier. Sven Hagström had a dogged look on his face, yet he seemed more alive than in his seven-year-old driver’s license picture.
She had taken the photo one day when she joined him at the racetrack, thinking they could have a nice dinner together.
“But he was only interested in the races. Wanted to stand down by the track with all the other old blokes; you get a better view from there, and you can really feel the speed, the thud of the hooves.”
They hadn’t stayed in touch, though of course they ran into each other from time to time. She saw him not long before, in fact, in late spring, once the last few stubborn ice floes had finally drifted off towards the sea. Sven Hagström was walking Rabble, and Karin spotted him through the window, decided to go out.
“Is that its name, the dog?”
She laughed. “Sven thought it suited it. He got it from the pound, it had a terrible background, but he was good with dogs. They don’t ask you to spill your heart and all that.”
The strange thing about that final meeting had been that he had cried. They stood out on the jetty, down by the water’s edge. From there, you could see right up to Hagström’s house, clinging to the slope on the other side of the bay like a lonely nesting box in the middle of the forest. Maybe it was the distance, or the fact that, for a brief moment, he had really understood his place on earth. What it had become.
It wasn’t just that the earth was turning, he said; that wasn’t the only reason they had brought him before the Inquisition.
Karin had realized he was talking about Galileo. They had watched a documentary about him together. Sven was interested in the history of science and often said that everything we really know is ancient knowledge, that most of what has come since is a false doctrine. Not that Karin agreed, but she knew what he was talking about.
“It was the whole idea that two truths can exist in parallel,” she remembered he went on. “That was what they couldn’t tolerate, the church and the Inquisition. When Galileo discovered that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, the thing the sun and the stars revolved around, they finally reached their limit. They could only handle one truth: the Bible’s. They couldn’t allow him to nudge them into uncertainty. It was the confusion that terrified them.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“I asked if he was OK, of course.”
“And?”
Karin Backe shook her head. A lock of silver hair came loose, falling over her forehead, and she pushed it back into the clip. It was decorated with a small feather.
“He just called for the dog.”
Chapter 12
He waited until as late in the day as possible to go down to the river and wash, once the sun took its own dip below the treetops and the chatter of the birds was the only sound he could hear. The dog swam in circles, paddling frantically as though it were afraid of drowning.
Beads of water flew from its coat as it shook itself off. On the way back it leapt a few meters away, panting like the air was something fun. Jumping and snapping at blackflies.
Suddenly it stopped, sniffing the air. Olof noticed movement on the other side of the house. The car that had been parked there during the day was gone, and now there were other people peering through the trees. He saw a bicycle catch the light.
“What do you want?”
Olof took a few steps towards them, making sounds that would frighten them away. He heard rustling among the trees, scrambling up ahead.
His heart was racing, his body temperature rising.
“Get out of here!” He raised his arms and took another couple of steps. You had to show you were willing to fight, that was what he had learned in the place he was sent, you had to get bigger and heavier if you wanted to be left in peace. His body had grown and grown until he filled every room, until the others no longer dared enter.
The staff at the juvenile detention centers were bound by confidentiality, but that didn’t help him. The other boys always knew he had killed. He told them himself, whenever anyone messed with him. It had been a long time since he was last beaten up.
As the little brats scrambled out of the forest with their bikes, he saw there were three of them. Small and scrawny, barely even teenagers, they disappeared in a flash.
Olof headed inside and locked the door behind him. Heard a screech from the gulls on the roof. He had discovered that they had a nest in the chimney, and for a while he had considered lighting a fire. Not because he needed the heat, but to get rid of the birds—it was a pain if they returned year after year, he remembered his father saying that—but he didn’t have the energy. A memory of him secretly, without his father’s knowledge, balling up sheets of newspaper between the firewood, in order to start a fire. A grown man didn’t need any paper to help him.
He didn’t turn on any of the lights in the house. Had drawn the curtains on the ground floor where he was sitting, eating straight from a plastic tub of meatballs and mash. There was no silence in this house. Branches hitting it, something creaking. Maybe the wind had picked up outside. A mouse scrambled inside the walls, scurrying away. A man could die, but his voice remained. Footsteps stomping across the floor upstairs. Thud, thud on the ceiling above.
