We Know You Remember (34)

Seven rings, then she heard his voice, raspy and familiar.

“Sorry, did I wake you?”

“No, no, good grief, I was practicing my salsa footwork,” said Eilert Granlund.

“Congratulations,” said Eira. “Sounds like you’re really enjoying life.”

“Enormously,” her old colleague replied, yawning loudly. “So I hope whatever you’re bothering me with is interesting.”

“Sven Hagstr?m,” she said. “I guess you’re still reading the paper, even though you said you were going to stop?”

“I listen to the radio,” said Eilert. “Was almost surprised he was still alive. What a bloody business with his son. Hard to believe a man could ever get over something like that.”

“A question came up during the investigation,” said Eira. “If it’s OK that I’m bothering you?”

“So you’re an investigator now, are you?” He congratulated her on her progress, which she found touching. Eira occasionally missed his slightly bullish way of sharing his knowledge, the depth of experience carved into his body. “The crooks must be quivering in their boots,” he shouted, so loud that she had to hold the phone away from her ear.

Eira tried to come up with a funny response, something to match the banter, but all she could find was a stupid feeling of wanting to cry. Maybe it was just the tension that had been weighing on her for the past week. None of the investigators from Violent Crimes had questioned her competence. She was the only one who did so; she always was.

“Anyway, what a bloody thing that was,” Eilert said with a cough. Eira remembered the smoke from his cigarillos and hoped it wasn’t lung cancer she could hear.

Her old colleague had said he was looking forward to retirement, to being able to sleep whenever he wanted, without being woken up by some damned alarm. To teaching the grandkids the names of the birds, all that stuff, but Eira thought she could hear a hint of doubt. Now she felt guilty for not having called sooner. Strange how people you once saw every day could so quickly drift out of focus.

“You were involved in the investigation back then, weren’t you?” she asked. “Do you remember interviewing someone called Tryggve Nydalen?”

“We interviewed a lot of people, asked them what they’d seen and heard, but it was over twenty years ago now. You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t remember them all off the top of my head.”

“He had a prison sentence for sexual abuse in his baggage—by the legal standards of the time. I’ve read the court transcripts. The girl was unconscious, her vaginal wall split, seven guys; once you’ve read something like that, you don’t forget it.”

“Christ. No, I don’t remember that, us interviewing anyone . . . I think I do remember the case, though. Up north somewhere? Led to a change in law, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. Are you sure?”

“Pretty much.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“What you need to understand is that the investigation into Lina Stavred’s death wasn’t your typical murder case,” he eventually said. “We had no body, no crime scene. For the first few days, it was a missing-person case. It wasn’t until we received information pointing to Olof Hagstr?m that it became a murder investigation, and the evidence was overwhelming. What we had to do was get a confession, bring things to a close. I was there when we told the girl’s parents, so you can be sure I remember that . . . What exactly are you hoping to find here?”

“I don’t know,” said Eira. “His name just cropped up in this investigation . . .”

She suddenly regretted calling him, heard her own words as though they were echoing back across the river from Eilert Granlund’s cottage.

She heard that they sounded like suspicion.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “Sorry for bothering you so late.”

“No problem,” he said cheerily, though a faltering note had appeared in his voice, the same way it did when he spoke about retirement or the birds. “You can call me anytime, you know that.”





Chapter 17





The rumble reached him through his dreams, shaking him back to life. His head had slumped forward onto his chest. In front of him, the door to the porch was wide open, and the air was thick with smoke. The lightning must have struck somewhere nearby.

Olof had dragged the sofa over so that he could watch the lightning as it crossed the wide sky above the river. Waiting for the rain that never came.

A lightning headache rose up from the base of his skull, pulsing through his head. That was what his mother had called them, Olof remembered. Her joints had always ached too, whenever it rained. She was like a human weather report. Sunshine was the only thing that didn’t hurt.

He peered around for the dog, thought it might have been sleeping in a corner somewhere. Unless it had snuck out. It had been sitting in his lap when the thunder was at its loudest, trembling and whimpering, but Olof had stroked its back.

Thunder had never scared him. He enjoyed the spectacle of the lightning crossing the sky, counting “one pilsner, two pilsner . . .” to determine the number of seconds separating the flash from the rumble, gauging the distance. His father had taught him that a second was longer than you thought. That was why you had to say “pilsner,” so you didn’t count too quickly. Because it sounded funny, too. And if you divided the total by three, that gave you the distance in kilometers. It was magical, as though he could control the supernatural power of the storm. Then there was the excitement as it drew closer. They used to sit together, measuring and counting—was the storm over Pr?stmon now, or was it closer to Nyland?—until the sky lit up and a sudden clap made the windows rattle. Olof always waited for that moment, then cried out when it came.