We Know You Remember (33)

When someone finally raised the alarm and Anette was taken to hospital, she was still unconscious. With a blood alcohol level of 0.4 percent.

She had no idea what had happened to her.

Adam Vide and five of the others were sentenced to one year in prison for sexual abuse. In the eyes of the law, it wasn’t rape, because the girl hadn’t put up any resistance. The youngest was also convicted of aggravated assault and handed over to social services.

Eira got up and boiled more water for tea.

Something was niggling away at the back of her mind, a detail from a legal course she had once taken. The law had been tightened following a heated debate around this very subject, and wasn’t it in the early nineties? She googled around a little and found a parliamentary text in which the assault in J?vredal was mentioned in connection with the proposed bill. These days, the seven rapists would hardly have got away with only a year in prison.

She sat back down to the part she had been waiting for with near unbearable patience, like a child who slowly learns not to sneak a glimpse at her Christmas presents.

Eira returned to the transcript itself, to the details of each of the accused. Names were easy enough to change in Sweden, but a person’s ID number followed him from cradle to grave—assuming nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened, in which case the state might permit someone to be freed from his past.

That hardly applied to a man convicted of sexual abuse.

The full-time investigators were the only ones with official laptops they could take home. Eira couldn’t access the various registers and databases unless she went to the station, but there were several public access sites that enabled a search of ID numbers. She wouldn’t be able to get at the last four digits that way, but that didn’t matter too much.

She entered Adam Vide’s ID number. Born August 1959. It was almost his birthday, in fact; Happy birthday, dear Adam, she thought as she typed in Nyland—the postal address covering Kungsg?rden and the surrounding area.

One hit.

Jesus Christ, she thought, doing a lap of the kitchen and sitting down again, staring at the name that was flickering on the screen.

Erik Tryggve Nydalen.

How could she have missed it? It was right there in the transcripts, in the box containing the accused’s full name.

ADAM Erik Tryggve Vide.

He had ditched the “Adam” and taken his wife’s surname when they got married. Not exactly the most advanced of disguises.

But what did this mean?

She thought back to how Tryggve Nydalen had greeted them with a firm handshake in the yard. He was certainly tall, with plenty of hair, but were his eyes blue? Eira suspected she would make a terrible witness if she was ever put on the spot. Whenever she met another person’s eye, she was usually focused on trying to see what was going on behind it.

Tryggve Nydalen had come across as the levelheaded member of his agitated, at times almost hysterical family, the most reasonable one.

Eira realized that she could no longer hear the TV; the episode of Shetland had finished. Kerstin peered up as Eira came in. She had dozed off, was confused.

“Oh, hello, is that you?”

Undressing, nightgown, brushing her teeth. There was something Eira enjoyed about the routine. A serenity, a minor victory. They had survived another day.

As her mother got into bed with her book, the same one as the day before, Eira drew up a timeline on the back of a flyer.

The month of May, a brief spring that passed in a flash between the ice melting and summer. It had only just begun when Sven Hagstr?m heard the gossip about a sex offender living in his immediate surroundings.

The month of May. That was also when he had made contact with the library. Eira may have been bad with eye colors, but dates were one thing she could remember. On the fourteenth and sixteenth of May, the murder-victim-to-be had called for help searching for something in the newspapers from up north. Old papers, from the eighties.

She made a note to call the other librarian, she might know more. Eira pulled a cardigan over her shoulders and went outside. The smoke from the fires had formed a thick, yellowish haze that obscured the forests on the other side of the river.

There had been a call to the police, too. On 3 June. Perhaps Sven had intended to file a complaint, or inquire about something, shout at someone, only to change his mind and hang up.

Perhaps he didn’t trust the police.

The old man wasn’t exactly a pro at gathering information—he owned neither a computer nor a mobile phone. On the other hand, it had taken Eira roughly sixty seconds to link Adam Vide to Tryggve Nydalen. Didn’t that mean there was a chance that even Sven Hagstr?m, who had several weeks, a month, oceans of time on his hands, had somehow managed to do the same?

Late spring, Karin Backe had said. That was when she’d last seen her old odd-job lover. That must mean the end of May. He had been standing by the shore, looking up towards his house on the other side of the bay. And he had been crying, the man who never spoke about his feelings. Something about double truths, whether two truths could exist simultaneously.

She could wait until the next day, of course. As soon as the archive opened, she could request the investigation from over twenty years ago, one that hadn’t yet been digitized, that had never reached trial and therefore remained sealed, buried under decades of other crimes.

Instead she brought up a number, one she had saved in her phone but hadn’t called in a long time.