We Know You Remember (106)

Junking a mobile phone was pretty simple, all you had to do was get it wet. Eira had done it herself a few times.

“No, no one knows anyone called Simone,” the waiter told her when he came back to clear the table. “Are you sure she works here?”



By the time she got to the third place, Eira switched to coffee. She couldn’t face any more wine. That was fortunate, because it was a café, full of teenagers half sprawled across the sofas as the clock approached midnight.

She spent a while watching the dark-haired woman serving the overpriced grilled sandwiches. From behind she could easily have been twenty-five, but when she turned around the years were visible on her face. The dim lighting in the café made it impossible to see the color of her eyes.

“What’s the girl over there called?” Eira asked when another waitress—short haired and slightly plump—squeezed between the tables, stacking the empty mugs into a wavering tower. “I think I recognize her.”

“Who?”

“Over there, she’s just going into the kitchen, with the dark hair.”

“Ah. Kaitlin, maybe. Or Kate? I’m not sure, there are so many people working shifts here, new ones every week.”

The woman wiped the table in one fluid motion, sweeping the crumbs to the floor.

“Do you know Simone?”

“Who?”

It was difficult to hear what anyone was saying over the din, the chatter of too many people who had drunk too much and wanted to avoid going home alone.

“Simone,” Eira repeated. “I heard she worked here. She’s a friend of a friend.”

“I know who she is,” said the waitress, picking up the tray. Her eyes scanned the tables nearby, looking for more dirty cups. “But I haven’t seen her in a while. Want me to pass on a message if I do?”

“Sure.”

Eira wrote her name and phone number on a napkin. She knew Simone was unlikely to call her, but that didn’t matter. She blew her nose on the other napkin and balled it up in her pocket, saving the waitstaff from having to deal with it. Lina, she told herself, is probably lying on the bottom of the river. You can’t solve this on your own. Stop mixing your private life with your working life, and don’t drink any more wine. Eira got up to leave, almost treading on someone’s foot. Alone in the crowd, she thought. Magnus’s life was his own. He was the one who had told her to stop caring.

That last thought was painful.

“You forgot this,” said the waitress, passing her the book as she turned to leave.





Chapter 63





“Your brother has confessed.”

The lawyer’s feeble voice, floating somewhere in the distance.

“Hold on.” Eira got up to leave the quiet carriage, where she had sat down to get some sleep. She had a splitting headache. The train was just leaving Hudiksvall.

“What exactly has he confessed to?”

“To killing Kenneth Isaksson.”

Hills and green valleys swept by at increasing speed outside. The strange rocking of the high-speed train made her feel like throwing up.

“How?”

“It was a fight, out by the sawmill,” said the lawyer. “He acted out of jealousy. Magnus claims there was no intent. If the court sees things our way then we can get the charges reduced to manslaughter.”

Eira clung to one of the handrails by the doors to stop herself from falling as the train tilted.

“And Lina?”

“I’ve had no indication that they’re planning to bring up that case.”

Eira went into the toilet to splash her face and hold her wrists beneath the cold tap, the way she had after stealing too much booze from the drinks cabinet as a teenager. The tap wouldn’t work. She walked through to the buffet car instead and bought a cola, swallowed two painkillers. Then returned to the vestibule between the two carriages and called GG.

“Thanks for interrupting me,” he said. “Looks like I’ve got my holiday after all.”

“Are you investigating the Lina case?”

“No,” he said. “The prosecutor has decided not to reopen the investigation. Why?”

“I’m in Sundsvall,” said Eira. “And it’s a pretty long wait for the next train. Do you have time?”

The train had started to slow into the station, people lugging their bags into the passageway where she was standing.

“I have time,” said GG. “Three weeks to be precise. I’d planned to be on a boat in the archipelago, but I’m not. There are people who claim Sundsvall doesn’t have an archipelago. How many islands does it take, exactly?”



He lived precisely how Eira had imagined, in a grand turn-of-the-century building on the central esplanade.

“Wine?” he asked.

“I think I had enough yesterday.”

GG topped up his own glass from a half-empty bottle of red and said he knew she must be finding it tough.

“We’re only human,” he said. “It’s hard when it hits close to home, when things get personal.”

“Was it you my brother confessed to?”

“No.”

He insisted on going out onto the balcony, sitting down with a cigarette. Dressing for the holiday seemed to consist of undoing the top button of his shirt. Eira had never seen him without shoes on before. There was something intimate about a man in stockinged feet.