We Know You Remember (40)

“Are you sure?”

“Nothing bigger than a wood mouse.”

He turned to the devastation, they all did. Walls that had collapsed into heaps of jet-black lumber. The sky overhead was blue and indifferent. Costel was one of the technicians who had worked the scene after the murder. Ardelean, that was it, his surname that meant “forest.” Eira had seen his name in the report.

“It helps,” he continued, “that I know what it looked like before.”

They were still in the process of mapping the fire’s progression, establishing how and where it had started, its furious route through the property. He talked about the shards of glass they had found inside, scattered across the floor in such a way that suggested the windows had been smashed from the outside. There were also a couple of broken bottles and a rock that hardly had any place in the middle of a living room.

Bosse Ring stepped to one side to call the regional command center and request details of when the call had come in and who had raised the alarm. Eira heard barking, but she didn’t immediately react. A few curious onlookers had gathered nearby, beyond the cordon. Dogs were always barking, everywhere. But then she realized how close it was, and spotted the creature. Tied to a tree not far from the house, the same shaggy black dog as before. It was whimpering and chewing on the rope, spinning around.

“So the dog made it out,” she said.

“A neighbor found it deeper in the forest,” said Costel. “A bit farther down the hill. It was all tangled up in a rope, tied to a tree. Someone will have to take it away.”

“Do we have any idea where Olof Hagstr?m is?”

“He’s not answering his phone, it’s switched off. And both cars are still here. His father had an old Toyota in the garage. Not much of it left now.”

Eira took a few steps in an attempt to think, a semicircle around the house. To the rear, the plastic roof over the porch had fallen in and melted onto the blackened wood and ash.

There was one possible explanation: that Olof had done it. Led the dog to safety and then set his childhood home alight.

The shadow of a cloud drifted slowly over the ground.

“Are we going to look for him then?” Eira asked once she had rejoined the others. Bosse Ring told her they were waiting for more people.

“And there’s a dog handler coming down from Sollefte?. They’ll be here in half an hour.”

“Do we have to wait?”



The forest didn’t put up any resistance. Eira ducked beneath low-hanging branches and jumped over fallen trees without a second thought. Behind her, Bosse Ring swore to himself, stumbling and getting caught on branches, the kind of thing that happens when a person grows up on city streets, away from the mountains, on flat ground with views for miles. She assumed he had, anyway. Her colleague never revealed a thing about himself. Unlike many of the others, he didn’t spend his time talking about where he was from or how things were at home. Eira found that quite refreshing after GG’s slightly overfamiliar baby chat.

The lead pulled tight as Rabble darted beneath a spruce. Elk droppings. The dog was a useless tracker, kept running around in circles. Maybe he was still looking for the old man. Bringing it along might not have been the best idea.

Maybe the pooch thought it was all just a game.

A phone started ringing behind her, and Bosse stopped to take the call, seemingly unable to talk and navigate the terrain at the same time. Eira peered between the trees. Trying to spot any broken branches, trampled moss, that kind of thing. She wished she knew how to read the forest better. She recognized the plants but got their names confused; she saw the age of the different trees and noticed the parasites clinging to them, but was ignorant of the connections in that ingenious ecosystem. At some point, while she was still fairly young, the forest trails had ceased to be hers. Pointing out edible plants and studying the insects’ lives had been replaced by things you could do at home, like baking and crafting. Her father had continued taking Magnus into the forest, because he was older and had to learn how to hunt and handle a chainsaw.

In fairy tales, the boys went out into the forest and learned to be men. But the girls who did the same were either kidnapped by trolls or eaten by wolves.

“Hold on, they’re here now,” Bosse Ring groaned behind her. “They’ve got proper dogs. We’ll be more use back at the station.”

You might be, thought Eira. She had just spotted a couple of broken branches, an opening right in front of them. It was obvious that someone or something had passed through. An elk, Olof Hagstr?m. She took another few steps and spotted a sock on the ground, half hidden by a few dead twigs, a fallen spruce. She handed the lead to Bosse and broke off a branch, carefully picked up the knitted item. It looked to be well over a size forty and had a hole in the heel, but otherwise it wasn’t overly dirty.

“This can’t have been here long.”

“He ran out without shoes?”

Her colleague took care of the find while Eira kept looking, slowly moving forward, crouching down. She was thinking about Olof Hagstr?m’s build and any possible routes he might have taken. Moving was much easier without the unruly dog. She zigzagged between trees, no longer caring whether her colleague could keep up. In the distance, she could hear barking and voices, the sounds echoing between ravines and hollows. Troll country, that was what she had called this type of landscape when she was younger, rocks carved by the inland ice, embraced by ancient trees. She followed the trail of destruction left by the previous spring’s storms, cutting between fallen trunks and avoiding the open pits left behind wherever the trees had fallen with their roots intact.