We Know You Remember (4)

“Sven’s dead.” Something inside him shifted, contracting his throat as he spoke, like tying a knot and pulling it tight. He knew he had to say something else, because the man was now backing away from him, staring at the number plate. Olof saw he had a phone in his hand.

“The key was under the rock,” he managed to blurt out. “I wanted to let the dog out . . . I was just driving by.”

“And who are you?” The man was holding his phone out in front of him. Olof heard a click, then another. Was he taking photos of the car, of him?

“I’m calling,” he said. “I’m calling the police right now.”

“He’s my dad. Sven Hagstr?m.”

The man glanced down at the dog and then up at Olof. His eyes seemed to bore beneath the layers of the person he had become.

“Olof? You’re Olof Hagstr?m?”

“I was going to call, but . . .”

“My name’s Patrik Nydalen,” the man told him, backing away again. “You might not remember me, I’m Tryggve and Mejan’s son, from up there.” He pointed along the road, towards a house farther back among the trees. Olof couldn’t see it, but he knew it appeared in a clearing when you walked along the snowmobile trail. “I can’t say I remember you, but I was only five or six when . . .”

In the silence that followed, Olof could see the cogs turning in his blond head, the flicker in his eyes as the memories returned. Everything he had been told over the years.

“Maybe you should tell them what happened yourself,” he continued. “I’ll dial the number and pass the phone to you, OK?” The man held out the phone to him, stretching his arm as far as he could. “It’s my personal phone. But I have my work phone on me too, I always do.”

The dog was now in the car, nose deep in his bag of food, rooting around in it.

“Or I can call them myself,” said Patrik Nydalen, backing up again.

Olof slumped into the driver’s seat. He remembered a couple of little kids up at the Nydalen homestead. Didn’t they have rabbits, in a cage behind the house? Olof had snuck over and opened it one summer night, luring them out with dandelion leaves. Maybe the fox had caught them.

Or maybe they were finally free.





Chapter 2





With its beautiful traditions of leaf-clad maypoles, nonstop drinking, violence, and abuse, Midsummer’s Eve was possibly the worst day of the year to be at work.

Eira Sj?din had volunteered to take the shift on the brightest of Swedish nights. Her colleagues needed the time off more than she did, people with kids and that kind of thing.

“Are you leaving already?” Her mother followed her out into the hallway, hands wandering, picking up whatever happened to be lying on top of the chest of drawers.

“I have to go to work, Mum, I told you. Have you seen the car keys?”

“When are you coming back?”

Shoehorn in one hand, a glove in the other.

“Tonight, but late.”

“You don’t have to come running over here all the time, you know. I’m sure you have better things to be doing.”

“I live here now, Mum, remember?”

The conversation was followed by a frantic search for the keys Kerstin Sj?din insisted she hadn’t moved—“You can’t claim I’ve forgotten when I know I haven’t touched them”—until Eira eventually found them in her own back pocket, where she had left them the night before.

A pat on the cheek.

“We can celebrate tomorrow, Mum. With herring and strawberries.”

“And a nice glass of schnapps.”

“And some schnapps.”

Fourteen degrees, a thin layer of cloud overhead. The radio forecast was promising sun across the whole of central Norrland; it would be glorious drinking weather by the afternoon. The aquavit would already be chilling in every house she passed, in Lunde and Fr?n? and Gudmunr?, in the summerhouses people returned to for generation after generation, in coolers at the campsites.



The car park outside the police station in Kramfors was half-empty. Most of the force had been concentrated onto the evening shift.

One of Eira’s young colleagues met her in the entrance.

“We’ve been called out,” he said. “Suspicious death, an elderly man in Kungsg?rden.”

Eira glanced down at the name badge on his chest. She had said hello to him the previous day, but they had never worked the same shift before.

“The old man must’ve collapsed in the shower,” he continued, eyes on the report from the control center in Ume?. “It was his son who found him, a neighbor called it in.”

“Sounds like something for the care system,” said Eira. “Why have we been called out?”

“Ambiguities. Apparently the son was about to clear off.”

Eira ran inside to get changed. August Engelhardt, that was it. Yet another newly qualified rookie with a short back and sides, a sweeping fringe at the front. Barely a day over twenty-seven, and looked like he worked out. The kind of police officers you saw on TV, who worked together year after year, seemed more like a fantasy than anything else, a relic of a bygone era.

In reality people graduated from the police academy in Ume? and then fought for the jobs there. They applied to unappealing districts like Kramfors in an attempt to gain experience, staying for a maximum of six months. Drove the 250 kilometers home each weekend until something better turned up in the regional capital, with its cafés and vegan restaurants. This particular kid was different in that he had studied down south. They rarely ever got anyone from Stockholm.