We Know You Remember (13)

She swam in a small circle, quickly returning to the shallows, where she could feel the clay and the sand beneath her feet. She stood at the edge of the beach, washing her hair, trying to capture the sense of purity and peace. Ordinarily she swam a lap around the entire bay, but today she simply ducked under the water once more, rinsing her hair and drying herself off faster than planned.

The forest felt darker as she walked back. A twig broke, a bird rustled among the leaves. The fear was all around her, the presence of evil. More trees had uprooted, as though the earth itself was screaming. She felt a rage inside her, at the fact that she had allowed it to get to her.

Sofi didn’t like herself when she was anxious and weak. That was why she stopped, as she always did, in her special place, to take a picture of the sunset. The sky beyond the rocks seemed to be burning, the river disappearing to the northwest. The same small segment of the world, night after night all summer long, yet no two pictures were the same. The landscape was constantly changing. The light, the clouds, the time. There was something so fluid yet comforting in that.

Her special place wasn’t far from Sven Hagstr?m’s house. The police tape was gone now, and Sofi could see the shabby cottage from above and the side. The tin roof, with an old-fashioned TV antenna still sprouting out of it. The porch to the rear, and what she assumed had been his bedroom window. She pictured the old man who had lived there, so lonely and humdrum, behind the half-drawn curtains. The absolute silence of death. A never again, a lingering beyond. Thoughts of what could have been.

Imagine if, imagine if.

Imagine if Patrik hadn’t been so quick to act, if Hagstr?m’s sick son had walked free. That it had happened here, so close to them.

The sun dipped behind the trees.

Let’s not think about it anymore, they had said to each other. It all worked out in the end.

It’s over now.

A curtain fluttered, or was she imagining things? One of the windows must be open down there. Sofi thought that was sloppy of the police, if they had left it that way. The curtain seemed to move again, and a fear she was powerless to defend herself against took hold. His spirit, Sofi thought, though she would never say anything like that to her husband; the incomprehensible, the thing we leave behind after death.

A light inside, a shadow, a movement.

Then something more: a darkness filling the entire window. Sofi raised her phone. It was hard to get it to focus, and the image became blurry as she zoomed in, in the soft evening light, but later, once she had shuffled down the rocks and half-run the last few meters home, she would keep studying it.

She really had seen what she thought she had: there was someone there. In the midst of everything, that felt slightly reassuring. Sofi wasn’t imagining things; she wasn’t the one who was confused and crazy.

Her husband agreed, once she showed him the photograph and they talked about how disgusting it was that the police had let that man go, once she was lying in Patrik’s arms and he was stroking her hair, kissing her as she grew ever colder inside. No, she wasn’t the one who was crazy; it was the world they lived in.





Chapter 6





“The countryside,” Georg Georgsson said with a sweeping hand gesture, the smoke of his cigarette swirling across fields and farms. “People get up when the rooster crows round here. They have coffee at six in the morning, they look out, they notice anything unusual.”

“Not many people have chickens anymore,” Eira told him.

“Still. Habits, duties. That kind of thing is deep rooted. So why the hell didn’t anyone see or hear anything?”

They had just been to see the third of Sven Hagstr?m’s neighbors, Kjell Strinnevik, who lived in the house closest to the road. All those living nearby had already been interviewed, of course, but there was a chance they might have remembered something else.

Now that they had a clearer idea about the timeframe.

Sven Hagstr?m had turned on his shower at twenty past seven in the morning. The computerized system the water company had installed measured his usage exactly. The victim typically used around sixty liters every morning, which corresponded to a five-minute shower. On the Monday in question, however, and over the three days that followed, his usage had gone through the roof.

Kjell Strinnevik maintained that his neighbor had gone out to fetch the paper at the usual time that morning, around six.

Yes, he always woke before six himself. It was probably 1972 when he last had a decent lie-in.

But had he heard anything unusual? Seen a car he didn’t recognize around seven o’clock?

No, he hadn’t.

“It could well be the ideal time,” said Eira once the conversation was over and they were standing outside, looking down to the letter boxes and the turnoff onto the main road. “People tend to pay more attention to strange cars at night. There are local volunteers patrolling the area, reporting that kind of thing to us. But in the mornings, no one cares.”

“So you think it was planned?” asked GG.

“I’ve been thinking about the dog,” said Eira. “He or she must have had something edible with them, to distract it, otherwise Hagstr?m would’ve heard it barking. Then there’s the front door. Obviously it could have been left unlocked after the victim brought the paper in, but it was locked when his son arrived. The question is whether he or she knew about the hiding place beneath the rock.”