We Know You Remember (101)

“Have you entertained the thought that it might have been Kenneth Isaksson who killed Lina?”

Silje looked down at her iPad, searching for something.

“Magnus has a record for assault,” she said. “Five years ago . . .”

“A drunken brawl,” said Eira. “An ordinary fight outside Kramm.” She knew how wrong it sounded, but the words just spilled out of her. Brawling didn’t feature in the penal code. The term was assault, even if it was the other man who started it. Even if Magnus had received a beating himself.

Silje asked her several more questions, but looking back later Eira would barely remember any of them. What stuck with her was what she had said herself. You didn’t expose those closest to you like that. Telling an outsider that Magnus was actually a sensitive soul, weak, that he had never quite managed to make sense of life.

She wanted to give a truthful picture of who he was, beyond the police reports and rumors and problems, and she knew he would hate her for it if he ever found out.

“Are we almost done here?” she asked. “I told GG I would send him some files . . .”

“Absolutely,” said Silje. “I won’t bother you anymore.”

“It’s OK.”



Out of sheer habit and aching fatigue, Eira headed straight for the coffee machine, but she turned around when she saw a couple of colleagues chatting next to it.

August was one of them.

She wished she could put on her uniform, making everything feel clear, but she wasn’t working, was free to go home.

It wasn’t OK. She had failed both to protect her brother and to give a stable impression, to keep her professional life separate from her private life the way everyone said you had to.

She had never understood how. You took all your personal qualities to work with you, and the work followed you home. It was still the same brain, it kept ticking over; sleep knew no such boundaries.

She wondered whether August was able to keep his professional life separate from his private life.

When he came home to his girlfriend.

She wondered whether he had driven her around the area, possibly stopping off at the monument in Lunde, googling the shooting in ?dalen in 1931.

Johanna, that was her name. Eira studied her profile picture on the page she had saved. She seemed chilly, with long glossy hair and white teeth.

An agent for a line of skincare products.

August’s girlfriend had been one of the first people to share the hate-filled posts about Olof Hagstr?m, number three in the chain that started with Sofi Nydalen. Maybe the two women used the same skincare line.

Hated the same things.

Eira was meant only to be gathering the material she had and sending it over to GG, but she found herself getting sucked into the thread again. This Johanna wasn’t just cool and beautiful, there was another side to her, one that shouted about cutting the dicks off men like that. Yet again we see a rapist walk free while no one listens to the girls. She supported the idea of publishing their names and pictures online, locking them up for life, and even gave a thumbs-up to the prospect of their being gang-raped in prison.

Eira wondered how August dealt with that side of her, though they likely didn’t talk about the rule of law in the bedroom. As she read on, more comments emerged, each one sharper than the last, as though it was spotlit.

You’re such sheep . . . Have none of you read The Scapegoat? No, sorry, thought not.

Do you even know how to read, you fucking retards?

Eira recognized that post. She and August had noticed it because it stood out, didn’t follow the current in the same direction as the others.

There were likely thousands of people who used that phrase—people who refused to stop using offensive language.

Simone, that was the poster’s name.

Eira scanned through the rest of the thread to see if she popped up anywhere else. She did, on one occasion.

He was such a loser, he really only had himself to blame.

She read the two posts over and over again, until she thought she could almost hear the girl’s voice. She couldn’t see her face. Simone had Daphne Duck as her profile picture. It wasn’t uncommon for people to use strange images like that on Facebook; not all people wanted to show their real face.

He was such a loser.

That made it sound like the poster had known Olof Hagstr?m back in the day. Plenty of people had, of course. Scores of classmates. It simply suggested that Simone came from the area.

You’re such sheep . . . Have none of you read The Scapegoat?

Something else Elvis had said came back to her: that Lina read fancy French books, or pretended to—whichever it was. Eira brought up an online bookshop and searched for the title. Found a couple of thrillers and a book by a writer with a French-sounding name.

Expulsion and victims are a way of stabilizing society, in which violence is channeled through sacred rituals . . .



Eira returned to the thread. Aside from one man who thought political action was required to transform the justice system rather than hanging people out to dry, Simone seemed to be the only person going against the flow.

Do you even know how to read, you fucking retards?

Eira couldn’t make sense of her argument. Was she defending Olof Hagstr?m? It sounded like Simone thought she was smarter than everyone else, that she knew something no one else knew.

Since it was only a screenshot, she couldn’t click through to her page, so Eira logged in to her own account instead—a profile without a photograph that she only ever used for work. August’s girlfriend’s page was private. Eira searched for Simone and found herself staring at a list of countless users, clicking through thirty or so of them until she spotted the picture of Daphne Duck.