We Know You Remember (111)

“Just lying there, staring straight into fucking nothingness.”

“So it was her,” said Eira. “It wasn’t you.”

“I told her I’d take the blame, but Lina refused. She started screaming at me, saying her life would be over if I snitched, that they’d send her away and lock her up. She was jumpy, obviously high on something, shouting that it was all my fault, that we’d both get locked up for years and that she’d rather kill herself.”

Magnus sniffed and wiped his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Eira couldn’t quite tell in the dim light, but she thought he might be crying.

“It was true,” he said. “She never would’ve survived. Lina wasn’t the kind of person you could lock up, she always had seven different thoughts swirling round her head, at least half of them dark; I think she drank to get away from herself. Her parents tried to keep her in, but she’d climb out through the attic if she had to. And she was so good at playing all saintly, lying about what she got up to—they definitely didn’t know she was having sex, and she wore long sleeves at home so they wouldn’t see her tattoo.”

“What tattoo?” Eira had read through the description of Lina again before she caught the train to Stockholm. “There was nothing about a tattoo in the missing-person report.”

“No, exactly. It was her parents who gave the description, and there was a lot they didn’t know. I was with her when she got it.”

Magnus ran a hand over his own left arm. He had filled it with a number of classic designs at some point during his twenties, the kind sailors often had.

“A heart and a couple of birds. I convinced myself it was a symbol of me, of our love. What a fucking idiot.”

He kept talking, returning to that night when they had struggled to drag the body down to the river from the forge, but Eira barely heard a word he said.

She saw the heart right in front of her, on a forearm, two birds flying up towards the crook of an arm. A waitress clearing cups from a table in a Stockholm café. She had been staring right at that very tattoo and hadn’t realized a thing. The woman had been slightly too plump, her hair slightly too short; she hadn’t believed that that was how Lina would have chosen to look. Want me to pass on a message? Eira had given the waitress her name, she must have understood—if not right there and then, then later, once she looked her up, realized whose sister the woman in the café was.

“I have to go to the toilet,” she said, taking her phone inside with her.

As she peed, she searched for the woman who called herself Simone, but she was no longer there.

The profile was gone.

Magnus was sitting with his head in his hands when she came back out.

“I spent so long waiting for someone to find him, for the river level to drop, for his body to float to the surface. Every day when I woke up, I was ready for it.”

“You shouldn’t have confessed to something you didn’t do,” Eira told him.

“It was all my fault—I went there looking for trouble. I should’ve just let them go wherever the hell they wanted to go.”

“You said he was raping her.”

“That’s what I thought, but Lina said she wanted it, to try some rougher stuff, I don’t know. The whole thing was just such a fucking mess.”

Lina had changed her clothes. She had taken them over there the day before, when they were planning their escape. Then she had driven away on the motorbike. Magnus rowed the boat down to Lunde, where they had met again. He found a few more things for her to wear, and emptied the kitty.

“Mum wasn’t home,” he said. “And you . . . I guess you were asleep.”

Lina had then climbed back onto the motorcycle. Magnus pointed to the spot where it used to stand by the garage wall. He didn’t know which way she was going, where she was heading. They had agreed that she would dump the motorbike after a couple of days.

Gone forever.

Without a trace.

“How could you keep quiet when they arrested Olof Hagstr?m?” asked Eira. “You let a fourteen-year-old take the blame.”

“He was all over her in the woods. Lina told me, after we’d dragged the guy down to the river and I was busy dumping planks and other junk on top of him, crying my eyes out; she told me she’d had a really shitty day.”

Magnus got up. It felt like he was trying to look at Eira, but couldn’t quite manage it.

“He was never convicted though, he went free. I spent that summer blind drunk, barely knew what was happening.”

“Free?”

“He never should have confessed,” said Magnus.

“No, the two of you should have confessed, you and Lina.”

Eira saw that his face had hardened and knew she had found his limit.

“I’ve confessed now,” said Magnus. “I’ll do my time. I’m going to hate it, but at least I’ll have done it.”

“That doesn’t help Olof Hagstr?m.”

“If you say a word about any of this,” he said. “I’ll confess to killing Lina, too.”

“She’s alive,” said Eira.

“Maybe, maybe not. I tried to convince myself that she died that night too, so hard that I almost started believing it. It made it easier to lie.”

“Don’t you want to know where she is?”