We Know You Remember (28)

“The guy from Psycho?” suggested Bosse Ring. He was someone Eira had met on a number of occasions, a veteran with thirty-two years of service beneath his belt, a military career before that. Crooked nose like an old boxer, thin glasses.

Voices were deceptive. They typically had video functionality in their meetings, but few actually bothered to switch their webcams on. Judging by Silje Andersson’s deep, slightly husky voice, Eira had expected a middle-aged woman who dyed her gray hair and needed reading glasses, not a busty, platinum blond beauty who probably had the criminals voluntarily following her to the station. It bothered her that she noticed that kind of thing.

“Actually, what was the story there?” Bosse Ring continued. “He didn’t kill his mum, did he?”

“Who?” asked GG, glancing up from his computer.

“The guy in Psycho. He just hid her in the attic and used her rocking chair, didn’t he?”

“I found a few reports about Olof Hagstr?m, by the way,” said Silje. “One from an institution he was sent to when he was younger. He hit some of the other boys on a few occasions, no serious injuries. From there he seems to have ended up in a foster home in Upplands Bro. No final grades from school, various jobs over the years, including at a timber yard in the same area. Different temporary addresses, but no criminal record.”

“Maybe he just never got caught?” said Bosse Ring.

“But I’m wondering about the method,” Silje continued. “A knife wound like that doesn’t require a lot of force, but it does take some skill. It suggests self-confidence, an iciness. A nervous attacker would have kept on stabbing to make sure the man was definitely dead. And if they wanted revenge or were emotionally wounded somehow, personally involved, they would’ve taken out their rage on him.”

Eira pictured the pale body and swallowed her nausea.

“His GP called back,” she spoke up. “He confirmed a broken femur four years ago, after Sven Hagstr?m fell from a stepladder. The shower seat was only ever supposed to be a temporary loan, but no one seems to have asked for it back.”

“Please promise you’ll shoot me the day I have to sit down in the shower,” said Bosse Ring.

Eira sipped the coffee she had managed to pick up en route. It tasted awful paired with the minty gum. GG turned to her. She thought he looked tired, his eyes red, as though he hadn’t managed to get much sleep.

“We were talking about the information you got from the races earlier. What do you make of it?”

“Not sure,” said Eira, embarrassed to have arrived late. “The source seemed credible, but it’s third-or fourth-hand information.”

“Thinking freely for a moment here, could it have been Sven Hagstr?m that the woman saw in the ironmonger’s? Who used to call himself . . . what was it?”

“Adam Vide.”

“There’s nothing in Sven Hagstr?m’s past to suggest he ever changed his name,” said Silje Andersson.

“That could’ve been what he called himself when he was picking up women,” said Bosse Ring. “People can call themselves whatever they want out there. A friend of mine asked what tricks we have for finding out who someone really is; he was chatting to some woman who called herself Big Tits.”

“A friend?” Silje said softly. “You know that means the same thing on social media as it does on the psychiatrist’s couch, don’t you? No one ever really asks on behalf of a friend.”

“Silje, you go with Eira,” said GG. “Pay the woman a visit, find out whether there’s anything in this. Talk to the others in the chain of gossip if you need to.”

He and Bosse Ring would be checking in on the building site, putting a little pressure on them. The Lithuanian builders who were busy renovating an old school into a B&B insisted that they started work at six every morning.

“We’ll find out if that holds water. Some information about unpaid taxes and wage dumping has come to light, and that usually makes people talk.”

They also planned to bring in a few characters with shady histories from the area, names from a list Eira had produced.

“Those men have all been either convicted of assault or tried for it at some point,” she said, “but none of them have ever been suspected of murder or manslaughter.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” said GG. “And if nothing else, I’m sure they’re sitting on information of some kind. They snap up any gossip about what people have stashed away in their cabins, who’s on holiday; they’re always out and about at uncomfortable hours.”

“Sven Hagstr?m rarely traveled anywhere,” said Silje. “His passport expired at the end of the last century.”

“Maybe they’ll confess to something else,” said GG.

We’re going down a dead-end alley here, thought Eira. No one actually thinks it will lead anywhere; we’re just doing it because we have to, pretending to be hopeful.

“Has anyone considered whether this might actually be about money?” asked Silje, reeling off a few facts about the victim’s finances. A meager pension after a lifetime of seasonal work in the forestry industry, a house with a ratable value of 19,000, savings of 13,700 kronor. “For his own funeral, I bet. He was part of the generation that doesn’t want to be a burden.”