We Know You Remember (21)

“Hello, Eira, lovely to see you.” The librarian’s name was Susanne, and she had worked there for the best part of twenty years. “You must tell me how your mother is.”

“Good, but not so good.”

“It’s an awful disease. I know all too well, my dad . . .”

“She still has lucid moments.”

“Are you getting any help?”

“You know Kerstin, she wants to manage on her own.”

“This part is the worst, the transition. When you have to respect everything they think they can manage, knowing they can’t. Is she still reading?”

“Every day,” said Eira. “But it’s often the same book.”

“Then let’s hope it’s a good one.”

They laughed, but in a way that was dangerously close to tears.

“I’m actually here on duty,” said Eira. “I’m sure you’ve heard about Sven Hagstr?m in Kungsg?rden.”

“Of course, what an awful thing. But how can I help?”

“Did he ever borrow books from here?”

Susanne thought for a moment, then shook her head. She could certainly check the records, but she knew her customers, particularly the older ones. He may have used the library at some point, but not over the last few years. That corroborated the picture Eira had of him. She hadn’t seen any library books lying around his house, and she had checked the photographs. Surely no one kept their library books on their shelves; they were guaranteed to forget about them.

“He called the library in mid-May,” said Eira. “Several times. Do you remember whether you spoke to him?”

“Oh, of course, why didn’t I think of that?” Susanne slumped into her chair. “He was looking for a couple of articles, of course that was him!”

Eira felt a pang of grief. The librarian possessed that special kind of memory, almost like a living catalog. Her mother had been the same until very recently; she always knew what every borrower wanted, the books they didn’t yet know they would enjoy. Just the previous year Kerstin would have been able to remember a specific phone call among hundreds of others, too. Assuming they actually got that many—perhaps people didn’t borrow so many books anymore. During the fifteen minutes she had been there, Eira had seen only three other people come into the building, and one of them was to use the toilet.

“But we don’t have access to the newspaper archives here,” Susanne continued. “And the papers were from up in Norrbotten, or maybe it was V?sterbotten, from back before everything was online. I told him he was welcome to come in and use one of our computers if he didn’t have his own, and I could help him make contact.”

“Did he?”

“He might’ve been in when one of my colleagues was working, but he never came to see me. I would have remembered if he did.”

“I’m sure you would,” said Eira.

“Say hello to your mum, if she remembers me. No, say hello anyway.”



August Engelhardt was sitting at her desk when she got back to the station. Strictly speaking, they didn’t have fixed seats in the office, and Eira was technically on loan to another department, but she still thought of it as hers.

“I think you’re going to want to see this,” he said, rolling back slightly in his chair.

As Eira leaned in, she found herself extremely close to him. A sensation she didn’t want to acknowledge raced through her.

“My girlfriend saw it in her feed,” said August.

It was a page from social media, comments filling the entire screen.

The name Olof Hagstr?m flickered by in post after post.

They should castrate him and everyone else like him and it’s a fucking outrage that people like that get to walk free and the police are protecting rapists because they’re rapists themselves and that’s why all these sick bastards should be named and shamed and all power to anyone brave enough to do it, and so on, and so on.

Eira swore to herself.

They had tried to keep his name out of the news, though naturally everyone on the force knew it. There were a thousand possible sources for this leak, on top of which everyone in the area also knew who he was.

August reached out, his arm brushing against her hip.

“It’s been shared over a hundred times,” he said, scrolling down. “Seven times just while I’ve been sitting here.”

We should tell everyone where they live, read one of the posts. We have to warn one another. The media is keeping us in the dark. It’s our right to know.

“And your girlfriend,” said Eira. “Has she written anything?”

“She just shared it.”

“Maybe you should ask her to stop.”





Chapter 11





The lucid moments often occurred in the morning, at some time between five and six, when Kerstin Sj?din got up and put the coffee on.

At times it was strong, occasionally much too strong, but Eira never said a word. The mornings were a refuge, before all the sights and sounds of the day complicated things. When the meadow down by the old dock in Lunde lay still and silent. It had once been so busy down there, with ships arriving from all over the world. The dock was also where the demonstrators had been brought to a halt almost ninety years earlier. Their society had frozen in that moment, as the army’s bullets whizzed through the air, as friends hit the ground. Five fatalities within the space of just a few seconds.