We Know You Remember (22)

“Here lies a Swedish worker”: that was the inscription on their common grave. Their crime was hunger, never forget him.

Those shots in the ?dalen Valley forever echoed through Lunde. The Events in ?dalen, as many preferred to call them—it sounded more neutral, as though the sharp edges of reality could be ground down by words. The state, protecting the strikebreakers, shooting its own workers. The blood that day. The trumpeter blowing cease-fire. It was a story too powerful to escape. It never ceased to matter who had taken part in the demonstration and who had not, whose parents, grandparents. People preferred not to talk about it, yet couldn’t bear for it to be forgotten.

“A flea market in S?rviken?” Kerstin looked up from the newspaper. She read it from cover to cover, but would soon forget the majority of it. “Yes, of course I know. It’s in the white house when you reach the bend. I used to go there to buy fabric. But what was her name . . .”

Eira knew she could pull over anywhere in S?rviken and find out the name of the woman who ran the flea market, Hagstr?m’s odd-job lover, but it was something to talk about, a way to make Kerstin remember. Over the past year it had often struck her just how much revolved around that: Do you remember him or her, do you remember that song, that film, that book; do you remember what we did, which year was it again?

“Karin Backe,” Kerstin called out just as Eira was about to leave. “That’s her name! Maybe I could come along to see if she has anything new in?”

“I have to go there for work,” said Eira. “It’s to do with Sven Hagstr?m’s death. Do you remember we talked about that? You read about it in the paper.”

The news was no longer news, it had slipped off the front page and the coverage was now largely focused on the fact that the police were keeping quiet, that they didn’t have any new leads. Online, she had read that they had ignored a tip about a foreign gang of thieves.

“The thought of you doing that stuff,” said Kerstin. Eyes anxious again. Worry constantly lurking beneath the surface, fingers searching for something to fiddle with. “You’re careful, aren’t you?”

She passed Eira a scarf, as though she were still a child.

As though it were winter.

Eira tossed the scarf into the car and called the station. GG was waiting for one of the other investigators; they were going to track down a couple of Lithuanian construction workers living in a campsite seven kilometers from the scene of the crime.

“Public tips,” he said, “can never be ignored.”

He had full confidence in letting her deal with Karin Backe.



The house in S?rviken was small and cluttered, but in a different sort of way. It wasn’t like Sven Hagstr?m’s place, where the junk was piled up in layer after layer. Eira could see several overarching themes: floral vases, blue ceramic, countless glass birds.

“I’ve stopped selling,” Karin Backe explained, “but I keep buying anyway. People talk about having a clearout so that whoever’s left behind doesn’t have to deal with it after they die, but I can’t stop myself going around and looking for things. What else would I do?”

She was white-haired, with a graceful way of speaking and moving, a little like the kind of delicate coffee service people used to bring out for guests.

“Do you know what’s happening with the funeral?” she asked, making a slight gesture towards the newspaper on the kitchen table. “I haven’t seen an announcement yet. It would be so awful if the church was empty. Will it be at the church?”

There was the bubbling of the percolator, the view across the water, an audiobook paused on her phone. Pictures of children and grandchildren on the sideboard, a late husband, a black-and-white wedding photograph and faces from several earlier generations, the people who had once surrounded this woman, but still. All the kitchen tables across the country, in houses someone had departed, where another was left behind.

Eira explained that Sven Hagstr?m couldn’t be buried yet, that it might still be a while before his body was released.

“He used to come out here to the barn nine or ten years ago,” the woman told her as they sat down. “Looking for specific objects I helped him to find. An old barometer, a compass from the war years—he was really interested in that kind of thing. And then I suppose we sort of knocked about together for a while. It was always him who came here, always at dinnertime. I cooked for him, and he helped me with various jobs about the house. Changed the washers in the tap. There’s always something breaking. We used to watch a bit of TV together too, mostly documentaries. But then it just didn’t work anymore. He was too gloomy. You don’t want that kind of gloominess in your house. I do sometimes miss it, though. Having someone else breathing beside you.”

“Did you ever talk about what happened, with his son?”

“No, no, that was off limits. What do they call it—a no-go zone. I asked once, but he got angry. You don’t want that either, not after a long life.”

Eira ticked off the usual questions. When did you last see him, did he have any enemies . . . Though did normal people really have enemies?

Was he on bad terms with anyone? she asked instead.

“Most of ?dalen,” said Karin Backe. “That’s probably how he saw it, anyway. Like everyone was against him. Thought it was all down to him, that he’d raised his son to do all that stuff. But I doubt even Sven thought he’d be killed for it. How did he die?”