We Know You Remember (27)

Eira knocked back the last of her beer.

“Well, cheers to that,” said August, getting up to buy them another round.

Three beers later, possibly four, she was standing in front of the hotel, dialing the number for Kramfors Taxis. August had gone to the bathroom. The neon sign on the roof blinked on the metal of the cars. She heard him come out behind her and turned around, and suddenly he was far too close. Somehow she ended up in his arms, pressed up against his mouth. It came out of nowhere, she hadn’t seen it coming.

“What are you doing?” she mumbled.

She couldn’t understand. Her tongue was already deeply involved, but he was too young, too handsome. I’m starved, she thought, it’s been too long.

“We have to work together,” she said. Her words came as they gasped for air.

“Could you just be quiet?”

“You said you had a girlfriend.”

“It’s not that kind of relationship.”

The taxi never had time to arrive, Eira forgot she had even called it. His temporary apartment was too far away; heading back into the hotel reception was far easier. She let him book the room in his name, paying with his card, “the winnings from Dannero,” they laughed as he pushed her up against the wall of the lift, against the buttons, making the damned thing stop on the wrong floor. The night porter was from Syria, one of those who had stayed behind after the latest wave of refugees. He had no idea who she was, wouldn’t spread any gossip.

It’s just one night, she thought as August fumbled, dropping the key card. If that. It’s nothing.





Chapter 15





It was quarter past four in the morning, and the sun hit her square in the face. August was asleep on his front beside her, arms outstretched like some kind of Jesus figure.

She quietly got dressed, quietly tiptoed out. There was no sign of the night porter. Kramfors was sleeping soundly, but the central taxi office in Ume?, or possibly Bangalore, was open.

Twenty minutes later, she was in a car on the way to Lunde, filled with a growing sense of panic over what she might come home to.

The yellow house was still standing as it always had. The door wasn’t open. Her mother hadn’t wandered out and fallen into the river. There was no hint of smoke in the air, no one lying on the floor with a broken hip.

Eira had managed to arrange brief but regular visits from a carer during the day. They warmed food, checked in on her mother, and administered medicine, even helping out with her shower twice a week. If Eira ever needed to be away from home for longer, she could always call a neighbor or one of the few friends her mother had left. The number was growing smaller and smaller. If they hadn’t moved away for work, they had been swept up in the great grandmother migration—women whose children had stayed put in the big city, who had followed them there in order to be closer to their grandkids.

She found her mother in her bedroom, on top of the bed. Kerstin had fallen asleep in her clothes, the reading light still on, glasses askew on her face. Her book had fallen to the floor, The Lover by Marguerite Duras. The pages were stained and the glue had started to crumble on the spine. A couple of lines caught Eira’s eye:

He tells me to wait awhile. Talks to me, says he knew right away, when we were crossing the river, that I’d be like this after my first lover, that I’d love love . . .



The bookmark fell out as she closed the book, and Eira pushed it back in at the wrong place. She felt a childish sense of shame at having discovered her mother reading something erotic.

It struck her, perhaps because the evidence of a lover was still so fresh in her own body that a forensic technician could have easily secured it, that she knew nothing about her mother’s love life over the past nineteen years. Nor before that. Her parents had come to a kind of strained agreement to get divorced, and her father had remarried barely a year later, leading her to suspect that he had been the reason. But what if it actually had been the other way around?

She left the book on the bedside table and promised herself she would read it someday. It would be something to talk about—possibly even every morning, since Kerstin seemed to forget what she was reading. Eira wondered whether she still found the same joy in the language and the stories, or whether she simply read in bed because it was what she had always done.

She went through to the bathroom and took a shower. Her body felt both present and absent, stinging in certain places. She brushed her teeth three times, but the taste refused to subside.

Of drunkenness, of him, of everything.



The meeting had already started by the time she arrived, slightly late. Eira discreetly popped a piece of chewing gum into her mouth and held her breath as she greeted her colleagues.

She still hadn’t quite managed to come to grips with exactly who was involved in the investigation. In the past they had always worked in more coherent teams, but these days people drifted in and out depending on what was needed and who brought them in from elsewhere. Everything was flexible, in motion. In a way, it resembled the wider changes in society; a group was now a fluid concept. Information spread among large numbers of people, and the knowledge base grew and grew, but the connections became increasingly difficult to grasp. Eira didn’t know which of them would still be around the next day, which she might never see again.

“But let’s say you found your father dead, brutally murdered,” said Silje Andersson, an investigator whose voice Eira had only ever heard via internet link from Sundsvall, “or drove the knife into him yourself. Why would you hang around in the house? What kind of person would want to be there?”