We Know You Remember (107)

“I’m not going to lie to you, I’d like to reopen the Lina Stavred case, but the prosecutor doesn’t think we have enough to go on. We’ve called off the search in Lockne.”

“Lina didn’t die there,” said Eira.

“That’s possible. Or maybe she did. Maybe she died in the woods in Marieberg after all, just like they thought back then.”

“Do you really believe that?”

He tapped his cigarette into a flowerpot. It looked like there had once been a geranium in it, but now it was nothing but a stick with a few clumps of withered brown petals hanging from it.

“I hoped we’d be able to get to the bottom of it,” he said. “I fought for it, as you know—we wouldn’t have found Kenneth Isaksson otherwise. You were probably right, to a certain degree. That investigation was done in a different time. If Olof Hagstr?m had been convicted back then, he might have been given a new hearing now, but he wasn’t. The case was closed and it’s going to remain closed. It would be a different story if we’d found Lina’s body. Your brother might be looking at a double murder charge right now.”

Eira leaned against the railing and looked down at the treetops lining the middle of the broad boulevard. She could hear a lone saxophone over the murmur of the people sitting outside the bars and cafés. The jazz club was just a few blocks away.

“If I can give you one piece of advice for the future,” GG continued behind her, “it’s to let a case remain closed. You can’t let it keep niggling away at you. Let bygones be bygones, as they said in Vietnam.”

She heard the glugging of wine as he topped up his glass.

“Did you hear that Olof Hagstr?m has woken up?”

Eira wheeled around and stared at him. “Really?”

“Yup,” said GG. “Looks like he’ll make a full recovery.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“We’ll be interviewing him in relation to the arson case, but they can deal with that from Ume?. There are no real question marks left there.”

“He should know,” said Eira.

“Know what?”

“What really happened to Lina Stavred.”

GG turned his empty glass in his hands, squinting into the afternoon sun as he studied her.

“And what are you thinking now?”

“I think I’ll have a glass of wine after all.”

“Bring another bottle out,” said GG, telling her where to find a glass. “And the corkscrew,” he called after her.

The kitchen was full of dirty plates, a genuine mess that grated against the professional image she had of him. If GG were a suspect, she would have wondered why he was drinking alone on the first day of his summer holiday, thought that something didn’t seem right.

Eira sat down beside him, in a cane chair that was much too low.

“Did you grow up in Sundsvall?” she asked as he opened the new bottle.

“Mostly,” said GG. “When we weren’t out in the archipelago during the summer. If it even exists.”

She held out her glass.

“When you grow up like I did,” she said, “it’s all about how to get to the next town or beyond, how to get home or away. From the moment you get your first bike, to a moped or an EPA tractor, and so on. Life only starts once you get your driving license. It’s all about vehicles.”

“OK.”

“And what I couldn’t stop thinking about was how they got there and how they got away.”

“Are we talking about the Lina case again now?”

“If Magnus went to Lockne that evening, he would have gone on his motorbike.”

“Yeah, that’s what your brother says,” said GG. “He wanted to see what the two of them were up to, but when he got there Kenneth Isaksson was alone. He didn’t see Lina that evening, never saw her again. Jealousy is a terrible bloody thing.”

“So if Lina wasn’t there, who took the motorbike and who rowed away?”

“The case is closed,” said GG.

Maybe it was because her superior was in stockinged feet, or because he was tipsy and the red wine had stained his teeth, but Eira no longer felt any respect for his authority. She no longer housed any illusions of becoming part of what he was. Being a police assistant in Kramfors wasn’t so bad.

For the next thirty years. Assuming they were willing to keep her.

She pulled out her phone. The email from Anja Larionova had arrived that morning, just before the train left Stockholm.

A blue Suzuki. It had been found by the freight yard, just a hundred or so meters from the train station in H?rn?sand on July 6, 1996. The owner: one Magnus Sj?din. “Though he didn’t report it missing until two days later,” according to Anja Larionova.

Eira brought up a map of the area. GG didn’t argue. In fact, he leaned in close.

“The boat was found here,” she said. “In Spr?ngsviken, which is just below Lunde, over ten kilometers away. There’s no way it drifted that far on its own. And I don’t think Lina rowed it there. I think she was terrible at rowing—why else would she have sat back while the kid from Stockholm made a fool of himself at the oars?”

“OK?”

“I think Magnus lent her his motorbike,” Eira continued. “And he rowed the boat back himself. We live in Lunde, we grew up there. I’ve played by the river ever since I was a little kid who wasn’t allowed to go down to the water. If he pushed the boat back out once he came ashore, that’s probably where it would’ve ended up, in Spr?ngsviken. Then he gave her a few days to disappear before reporting his bike stolen.”