We Know You Remember (29)

“We’ll look into everything,” GG told her in a somewhat sharper tone. “Which means we’re not ruling out anything until it can be completely ruled out. With every day that passes, another old person grows more anxious. Someone will start locking their door. Someone else will write that the police aren’t doing their job.”

It was two weeks to the day, almost the hour, since someone had driven a knife into Sven Hagstr?m’s abdomen, severing an artery.

They still didn’t have a murder weapon, no key witnesses.

Did he really need to remind them of that?



Eira swigged from the bottle of cola she had bought to help with the nausea and slowed down as they drove through Bollstabruk, past the sad, boarded-up shops of the shrinking sawmill town.

Conversations with a new colleague were always the same, practically following a template. How long have you been on the force, how did you end up here? The answers were the only thing that differed slightly, but then again Silje Andersson wasn’t exactly fresh out of the police academy.

“I actually wanted to be a geologist,” she said. “All the other girls were into horses and dogs and boy bands, but I was obsessed with rocks. My therapist said it’s linked to my childhood.”

Rocks were something constant in a world that seemed so unreliable. They took thousands of years to be worn down and transformed. The information made Eira see her colleague in a different light. Silje had also completed half a psychology degree before deciding to become a police officer.

They fell silent as the news bulletin began on the radio.

The murder had slipped from the local headlines a few days back, and the focus now was on the revelation that rich Stockholm councils had secretly been sending welfare recipients to poorer regions in Norrland. Organizing leases wherever there were empty apartments, paying their train fares and one month’s rent before washing their hands of them. The Kramfors authorities had discovered what was going on only when the new arrivals showed up at the welfare office.

“So how do you like working with GG?” asked Silje.

“He’s OK, I guess,” said Eira. “Experienced.”

“Why do you think he put the two of us on this?”

“Seems pretty logical—we’re going to talk to a woman about a sexual assault.”

Eira was just grateful she didn’t have to hunt down any local addicts who were guaranteed to tell her to say hi to Magnus, but she didn’t mention that. Nor did she mention that the hill they had just passed was the infamous B?lberget, where more women had been beheaded and burnt as witches than anywhere else in the country. Over the course of one June day in the late seventeenth century, one in four women in the parish had been executed.

“Or maybe it’s because his girlfriend doesn’t like him being alone with me,” said Silje, casting a glance at Eira. “So watch yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s pretty tasty, don’t you think? GG has a bit of a reputation, but maybe it hasn’t reached this far north yet?”

“I try to avoid having affairs with people at work,” Eira told her, turning off towards the woman’s address in Pr?stmon. “And with men who are already spoken for,” she added. It was only afterwards, following a moment of silence, that she realized just how quick and easy it was to become a hypocrite.

“No, of course,” Silje said with a smile. “That’s what we all say, until it happens.”



The woman’s name was Elsebeth Franck. She was in her early fifties, but as she sat down and Silje asked her to tell them what happened, it was like she became sixteen again. She clamped her hands between her thighs, pushed back a nonexistent fringe, and seemed much slighter than she had a moment earlier.

“Why do you want to know about that?”

Her husband squeezed her hand.

“Has he done it again?” she asked. “Is that why?”

“It would be great,” said Silje, “if you could just tell us what happened.”

Their house, which her husband had inherited from his parents, had been tastefully renovated. Perhaps it stood on foundations from the seventeenth century. Maybe one of the witches had lived in it then. It had oiled floorboards and an enormous wood-burning stove, pale lilac curtains blowing softly in the breeze. On the expanse of lawn outside, two small robotic lawn mowers whizzed about, plowing away any unevenness. Elsebeth was wearing a pair of wide-legged trousers and a matching top, both from an expensive Swedish brand. They spent their winters in Gothenburg, her husband explained, but his wife was from even farther north.

“J?vredal, if you’ve heard of it.”

Between Skellefte? and Pite?, on the border between the two most northerly counties, that was where the community Elsebeth Franck would never again set foot lay.

“At first I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I heard a man’s voice behind me, and it was like my body knew before I even had time to process it. I started shaking, can you believe that?” She glanced outside, pausing, forcing back the tears or whatever else she didn’t want to come out.

The sky had darkened to the northwest, a storm on its way down from the mountains.

“You think you can forget. You don’t think about it for so long, then you meet a wonderful man, get married and start a family, you have a good life, and you start to think that maybe it’s gone for good, that things disappear, but they don’t. They never do.”