We Know You Remember (12)

Being a detective today was child’s play: that was what one of her older colleagues would have said if he hadn’t already retired. In the past, when the conductors clipped the tickets by hand, you just had to hope they could remember a particular face in the crowd.

The widow who’d sold the Pontiac online had also identified Olof Hagstr?m. She described it as a day of relief; the car was useless in the winter and took up all the space in the garage. Her husband was dead, and you couldn’t take anything with you—not even a Firebird.

Using traffic cameras, they had been able to follow his journey south along the E4 motorway, all the way to Docksta. His phone had then pinged off the only telephone mast in the Kramfors area as Olof Hagstr?m approached his childhood home at around midnight on Thursday, almost four days after his father died.

“You were there, what impression did you get of him? Did he do it?”

“There doesn’t seem to be anything to support that idea.” Eira chose her words carefully.

“You’re young,” said GG, “but you’ve been here a while, and you and I both know that it’s almost always someone close to the victim. Families are bloody dangerous.”

Eira weighed up the possible answers: agree or disagree, speculate or not, come to much too speedy a conclusion, not particularly professional, a suspect she herself had arrested, watch out for personal prestige.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“You asked what we’ve got—if it wasn’t Olof Hagstr?m. Next to nothing, as far as I know. The shower washed away any evidence. There are a few unidentified fingerprints in various places around the house. No murder weapon, but according to the pathologist we’re looking at a big knife with a blade measuring around 110 millimeters. That could be the type of hunting knife practically everyone around here has.”

“Including Sven Hagstr?m,” GG agreed. “But his was safely locked away in the gun cabinet under the stairs.”

There was something restless about the lead investigator, a tendency to constantly glance out through the window or into the corridor.

“And no witnesses,” Eira continued. “But this is ?dalen. People don’t always come forward to talk to the police, especially not if the detectives aren’t local.”

GG frowned slightly. That was probably a smile passing over his face, though his mouth remained straight. He was at least twenty years older than Eira, but attractive in a confident and fairly irritating way.

“Could’ve been a kitchen knife, too,” he said. “A decent one, sharpened.”

“I want to assist on the case,” said Eira.



No one could take the sunset away from her. Her evening swim down by their secret beach, as the kids called it.

Sofi Nydalen fetched her towel and toilet bag, as she did every night once the kids had settled down in front of a cartoon and her parents-in-law had gone back to the bakehouse. She kissed Patrik, who was hunched over his computer, and didn’t say a word about her fears.

“You don’t want me to go with you?”

“Honey,” she said with a laugh. “Do you really want to swim? In seventeen-degree water?”

They had to keep the laughter alive, though it wasn’t easy. Her husband, who was so brave but preferred to keep his feet on dry land. He put a hand on her waist, trying to make her stay.

“Given everything that’s happened, I mean.”

“It’s fine; it’s all over now.”

Sofi decided to take her usual shortcut straight through the forest. She wouldn’t give in. Her fear of the dark was irrational, all nonsense and childish ghosts, figments of her imagination lurking in the shadows. Besides, it never really got dark. The light simply faded and took on different tones, shimmering in the evening.

She could barely hear her own footsteps in the soft undergrowth.

The forest is a safe space for me: that was what Patrik had said during their first summer there, when he was so eager to share everything that made him who he was.

The nature. The river. The open expanses.

And the forest, above all the forest. The huge, occasionally impenetrable forest, trails she would never manage to find but that were engrained in him, graying trunks that made her think of old age.

The forest doesn’t want to hurt you. It protects. And if there was ever a bear or anything out there, the forest would warn you. You can hear it in the leaves if there’s a threat, in the dry branches on the ground, in the birds and the tiny creatures; if you listen carefully, the forest will speak to you.

Were there bears?

For a long time, she had thought she could see them whenever she went outside, lurking in the darkness beyond the trees.

Statistically speaking, Patrik had told her, it’s a hundred times more dangerous to walk through town on your own.

Or to be married to a man, said Sofi.

Then they had made love. In the forest, with the trees arching overhead, the moss rising and falling. She wanted to believe that that was when Lukas was conceived.

She scanned her surroundings more carefully now, of course, before dropping her dress to the sand. Gliding out into the water. The only thing that existed was her body breaking the surface, the depths beneath her. A few black birds soaring high above, possibly crows, or ravens. The sound of a motorboat in the distance, lonely houses on the other side of the bay.