We Know You Remember (17)
“Seriously, do they have to cycle on the road?” Eira braked to avoid a young girl teetering on a bicycle, giving her a wide berth as she passed. “No,” she said. “No rush.”
“I’m just wondering,” GG continued, “because my girlfriend’s about your age . . . When we first met I was clear that I didn’t want any more kids, but then we got together and it turned out she hadn’t closed that door after all, which really leaves you with a dilemma.”
Eira came to a halt at the end of the Hammar Bridge, at the crossroads. If she had been in the car with a twentysomething police assistant, she would have told him to leave his private life at home and focus on the job.
“Shall we continue with the neighbors?” she asked instead.
GG checked his list. “Nydalen,” he said. “Patrik, the son, came in to give a statement, but the parents were only spoken to at the first stage. Saw nothing, heard nothing.”
He sighed.
“And this Patrik guy has been in touch asking what we’re doing to protect his family now that Olof Hagstr?m has been released.”
Eira pulled up at the stop sign and allowed a German caravan to pass, heading down towards the coast from Sollefte?. She made a mental note to contact the J?mtland district, assuming it hadn’t been done already. To check whether they had seen any aggravated breakins, whether any known violent offenders had been released or let out on day leave. They had checked their own area, but the county line was only one hundred kilometers inland, where the mountains and the reindeer pastures took over. Beyond that: the border with Norway. That couldn’t be ruled out either. If Hagstr?m had emerged from the shower and startled him, or if he wasn’t your typical kind of intruder. She remembered the forensic report, what she herself had noticed: there was nothing obvious missing from the house. The TV was still there, a worthless old lump. The radio, too. There were several beautiful antique barometers and compasses, china and paintings. All the kind of thing the local thieves liked to load into their cars and sell at less scrupulous flea markets.
“I really didn’t plan to do it all again,” said GG, still lost in thought. “My kids are already grown up—I’m actually going to be a grandfather this autumn . . . But then you realize it’s a second chance, and those are pretty rare.”
Eira held back behind a timber lorry and tried to think of something to say. About how people changed their minds all the time, said one thing and meant another, and how we just had to count on being dragged into something other than what we had planned. Perhaps that was one of the very foundations of love.
She didn’t manage a single word.
“Last time I was far too busy with work and my career,” GG continued, “but now I could be present in a completely different way . . .”
He trailed off and swore as a car overtook them, swinging into a side road. The bright red logo on its side revealed it was from a radio station.
GG hit the car door.
“What are they after now, making the sex offender speak out? Can we take a different route? There’s a chance they might recognize me.”
Eira did a U-turn, aiming for a gravel track a kilometer or so back. Nydalen’s house wasn’t particularly far from it, so they should be able to get pretty close. If nothing else, it would give GG a chance to test out his dress shoes on the rough terrain.
They had managed to keep the name Hagstr?m out of the press so far. Everyone in the area knew, of course, but on TV and in the newspapers, the reports were still talking about “the elderly man who was killed . . .” They hadn’t yet made the connection to “the fourteen-year-old” whose name had never been made public and didn’t appear in the archives. They weren’t under too much pressure. It was too long ago, the area too sparsely populated. The national media had combed through earlier cases involving older men who were killed in their own homes, in Rosvik and Kalamark, an elderly skier in Kivikangas. They had started asking questions about just how dangerous it was to live alone in the more rural parts of the country, and concluded that it was worse to leave the pub in town, or to be involved in organized crime.
With any luck the reporters were simply heading to Hagstr?m’s house in order to say a few words about the area, possibly even record a segment from the place where the crime occurred. Standing here, with views of the ?ngerman River glittering in the sunlight, it is hard to imagine such evil. And yet an old man was murdered in his home here a little more than a week ago. Fear is now spreading among the elderly in the area. What are the police doing, they ask; has society abandoned us?
Something like that.
The homestead occupied a magnificent position at the top of the hill. If it hadn’t been for the forest around it, the Nydalen family would have had views in every direction, but as things stood they could see only a thin sliver of the river at its widest point and the mountains on the horizon, created by the remarkable postglacial uplift along the High Coast.
A well-tended main building, a paddling pool on the lawn, pots of geraniums outside the old bakehouse.
Tryggve Nydalen was almost as tall as Georgsson, with a slightly heavier build and a handshake that showed no hesitation whatsoever.
“I don’t know that we have anything else to add,” he said. “But it feels reassuring to see you working. My son is very upset, I’m sure you can understand. He’s just thinking of the kids.”