We Know You Remember (16)

“And he didn’t have a mobile phone?”

“Not that we’ve found.”



Rolle Mattsson was busy cutting his lawn, pushing an old-fashioned reel mower in front of him. Bare chest, wiry arms.

Beads of sweat trickled down him as he took a seat on the garden bench.

He asked Eira to go inside and fetch a pilsner or three—assuming they were allowed to drink on the job. Otherwise she would find some squash in the pantry.

There was nothing depressing about his house, nothing sad and old; it was meticulously clean and tidy, and smelled good. The same lush peonies on the kitchen table as in the flower beds outside. She had heard that they used to be known as the poor man’s rose.

“Who would do something like that to an old bloke?” Rolle Mattsson muttered after a few swigs of beer. “It’s a damn shame a man’s not even safe in his own home these days.”

He had known Sven Hagstr?m since the sixties, through work and the union and the bandy team. Sven had even helped him lug the timber he’d used to build the house on a corner of his parents’ land—the lower-quality wood you could buy for next to nothing, not that you could tell. The house was still solid as a rock. It had housed four kids, the wife too. Though she was now in a home.

A flicker of grief passed over his face, but he smiled. “Forty-seven good years. That’s more than most people get.”

He had ended up at the sawmill in Bollstabruk when the log driving dried up and the last float took place. Sven Hagstr?m kept working in the forest. The former workmates hadn’t had much contact over the last few years. Not since all that terrible business with Lina and his son, in fact. In the years that followed, Sven had lost the rest of his family and was left all alone.

“Something breaks in a man when that happens. It’s the point of all this.” Rolle Mattsson used his bottle to gesture towards the garden and the forests.

“Did Sven talk about his son?”

“Never. It was like he didn’t exist. I knew Olof as a lad, he used to play with my boys. It makes you question yourself—how did I miss it? He was awkward and could get angry, the way boys do, never really looked you straight in the eye, but I always thought he was an ordinary kid.”

Rolle Mattsson knocked back the rest of his beer. A few stubborn wasps were circling them, and one crawled into the neck of the empty bottle.

“So was it the son who did it?” he asked. “Or what?”

“We don’t know what happened,” said GG. “That’s what we’re trying to work out.”

“Who else could’ve wanted to hurt Sven?”

“Did Olof want to hurt his father?”

“Sven never mentioned anything . . . But it does make you wonder. Being sent away like that. He was just a lad, that’s what I’ve thought sometimes, though I never brought it up with Sven. You can’t ever escape being your son’s father. I don’t know how you do things in Sundsvall, whether it’s reached there yet, whether men go around talking about their feelings?”

“It happens,” said GG.

Rolle Mattsson opened another pilsner. “All this keeping quiet, bottling everything up inside. Watch out if you ever see anyone raise an eyebrow; he might be bloody furious.”

They took turns asking more questions, about who else Sven Hagstr?m used to spend time with, what Rolle Mattsson was doing that morning.

He’d had the grandchildren over, they could ask the kids themselves—if they were willing to trust the words of a three-and five-year-old. As far as he could remember, they had watched a cartoon and eaten some chocolate cereal. He knew that Sven Hagstr?m had become someone’s odd-job lover in S?rviken seven or eight years back, a widow who ran a bric-a-brac sale over there.

“Maybe she got him to open up a bit, would probably take a woman to do that.”

“Odd-job suitor?”

Rolle laughed. “Nice little arrangement between two lonely people, you know? The bloke goes over to the woman’s place, she makes him dinner and he helps out with all the man’s jobs about the house, then they have a nice time together before he goes home. No staying overnight, no obligations. No putting your eggs in the same basket, mixing everything up.”

Eira thought she noticed a brief glance over to the house she had visited just before his. The widow who likened people to watercolors, a hint of a smile in his voice.

“Sounds like a dream,” said GG.

“It strikes me now,” said Rolle Mattsson, “that Sven never talked about his daughter either, not once she moved away. A tough little girl, if I remember. Rebellious. Don’t know what happened to her. Most people are always boasting about whatever their children get up to.”

“Everyone’s kids are geniuses,” GG agreed.

“She works in TV, lives in Stockholm,” said Eira. “She has a child.”

Rolle caught a wasp in one hand and hurled it away. It buzzed off, confused.

“Then why didn’t he mention that?”





Chapter 8





“You got kids?” GG asked as they drove slowly out of Sandsl?n.

“Not yet,” said Eira.

“And you’re what, thirtysomething?”

“Mmh.”

“Not in any rush, then?”