We Know You Remember (15)

“No.”

“Could be a childhood friend, old colleagues . . .”

“No idea. I left home when I was seventeen, three months after everything with Olof. My dad wasn’t an easy man to be around, even before all that, and it just got worse. With his drinking and his anger and everything else. I’ve always felt guilty about abandoning Mum there. It took her two years to break free. Still, at least she doesn’t have to go through all this now; she died of cancer last year.”



GG had finished his salmon and was half-engrossed in the list of whiskies by the time Eira got back to the table.

“Too early in the day for a taster, or what do you think?”

She recapped the phone call, which hadn’t given her anything but an indistinct sense of unease. She had detected a hint of aggression in much of what Ingela Berg Haider had said, something icy cool, as though the things they were talking about didn’t concern her in any way.

“Would be nice to avoid the angry neighbors for now,” GG said as they headed back to the car. “At least while we’re digesting lunch.”

“The old workmate from Sandsl?n?” Eira suggested.

“Do we even have a name for him?”

The list of people who may or may not have known Sven Hagstr?m was short. Irritatingly vague. Still, it was a list of sorts.

Eira brought up the recording from their interview with Kjell Strinnevik, fast-forwarding to the end, where they had tried to get him to remember anything else, anyone who may have known Sven Hagstr?m, anything at all, even if it was from the past.

“. . . an old workmate from the log-sorting yard came knocking a few years ago, but Hagstr?m didn’t answer. The bloke knocked on my door instead, wanted to know if I knew anything. If Sven was ill. His car was there, you see. They’d been trying to reach him for some anniversary, but Sven never replied to the invite.

“Ah, what was his name? He said he lived in Sandsl?n. That’s the kind of thing you remember, but names . . . there are so many names . . .

Rolle!”

Eira reversed out of the parking bay.

“Rolle from Sandsl?n,” she said. “That’s as good as an address.”

GG laughed. “Have I told you I love it out here in the sticks?”





Chapter 7





Sandsl?n was a sleepy little idyll stretched out along the bank of the river. A narrow channel of water divided the community from the island where the timber sorting once took place. During the golden years of the log-driving industry, some seven hundred men had worked in the yard, and the river practically simmered with logs sent downstream for sorting before being sold on to sawmills or paper factories. Sandsl?n was once home to three different supermarkets and a bandy team in the national league, but that was then.

A lone robotic lawn mower moved slowly over a lawn like an overgrown beetle. On the river, two canoeists drifted by. A cartoonist who had grown up in Bollstabruk and recently returned from Stockholm answered the door in the first house. He didn’t know anyone called Rolle, but the widow in the yellow place over there, he said, pointing, had been living in Sandsl?n since the dawn of time.

Eira moved on to the next house while GG made a few calls. She tried to keep it as brief as she could without seeming impolite. The woman was eighty-three and had to sit down while they spoke. Something about her back, but it would pass.

Oh, Rolle, yes. Of course she knew Rolle Mattsson.

They had worked together at the timber-sorting yard. She’d joined after they mechanized the work, once they discovered that young women were best suited to the job. She could have “swift” written on her gravestone—that was the nickname they gave the quick-fingered girls working out in the control tower. Thanks to the latest technology, the job was all about precision and maintaining an overview, and it meant they could avoid having to dash over the floating logs, which were absolutely lethal; you could be sucked in between them in the blink of an eye, and that would be thank you and goodnight. She had an uncle who had gone that way.

Sven Hagstr?m?

Oh yes, she knew the name, she’d heard all about that terrible business, but she didn’t remember him. It was easy to forget people you’d never had any fondness for, the outlines of their faces seemed to seep away like watercolors, and names were even worse. But Rolle Mattsson, he lived three doors down, “in the log house behind the trampoline over there.”

Eira caught up with GG by the car. He had enjoyed yet another last cigarette and called some of the other members of the team in Sundsvall for an update. So much of the job involved sitting indoors, going through call lists and databases, analyzing forensic reports. The detectives were able to eat dinner with their families and keep their overtime to a minimum, but they could still be on the scene within a few hours, if needed.

“Olof Hagstr?m got in touch,” he said as they walked over to the log cabin. The sudden rain shower hadn’t come this way, and the tarmac in front of them was bone dry.

“What did he want?”

“To know what we’d done with the dog. Seems like father and son hadn’t been in touch after all. Sven Hagstr?m only used his landline to complain about the road maintenance in the area. That and to make a few calls to the library and your station, actually.”

“Why did he phone us?”

“No record,” said GG. “The calls lasted less than a minute each. Maybe he wanted to report something and changed his mind.”