We Know You Remember (41)

She heard twigs snapping, the sound of quick footsteps nearby.

Then a bark and a shout.

“Over here!”

The dog patrol had approached from another direction, and Eira didn’t spot the man until she was almost on top of him. He was crouching down, bent over at the foot of a tree. His dog was sitting patiently a few meters away, panting, its tongue lolling.

“I’ve called for a helicopter and whatever the hell else they can get out here.”

Eira tried to make sense of what she was seeing. A leg, a bare foot sticking up out of the ground. Dark with mud, possibly also blood. The earth all around it had been disturbed, as though someone had been digging and then refilled the hole. The other officer, whose name she hadn’t caught, was gripping the sturdy ankle, feeling for a pulse. The tree almost seemed to be growing over the body, like whoever it was had burrowed beneath it or been buried there, roots snaking around their foot as though . . .

“This can’t be happening,” said Eira.

“What?”

“An uprooting. Everyone knows not to climb into the pits. The tree can spring upright again, closing the hole. It’s the kind of thing people say to scare children. I didn’t think it ever actually happened.”

“He’s alive,” said her colleague. “He’s got a fucking pulse.”

“That’s impossible.”

The man got to his feet and gripped the trunk, trying to shift it.

“Some air must be getting in if he’s still breathing—between the roots, through the soil . . . what the hell do I know. We have to get this off him.”

They both put everything they had into pulling the trunk backwards. The tree had been lopped in places, its thickest branches gone, but still it resisted, wouldn’t budge, as though its roots had dug deep into the earth once again.

“How is this possible? It was on its side not long ago.”

“I think it creates suction, a kind of vacuum.”

Eira dropped to her knees and started clawing at the ground. Judging by the angle of his foot, she realized he must be lying head down. Somewhere beside her, her colleague’s phone rang; he was busy digging from the other side.

“What are they saying?”

“They can’t bring the loader out. Some kind of ban . . . Fire risk. They can’t use any of the forestry machinery, even the slightest spark could set . . .”

“Tell them to bring the bloody fire service along, then.”

She reached something soft. A hand. It was completely limp, but Eira gripped it anyway. It was warm. Big and soft. His pulse was quick and weak, but it was there. Eira felt the watch around his wrist, managed to dig out more earth.

A watch with an inbuilt compass and a barometer.

“It’s him,” she said. “That’s his watch.”

They kept digging, fistful after fistful of earth, until they heard the sound of rotor blades in the distance and the air ambulance swept overhead.





Chapter 21





As afternoon moved imperceptibly towards evening, Eira was alone in the office overlooking the railway tracks. She still had dirt beneath her nails.

They had managed to bring out a small skidder after all, and had dragged the tree away. Olof Hagstr?m was now at the university hospital in Ume?. He still hadn’t woken up. The doctors said he had a contusion on his skull and some bleeding on the brain, they were preparing him for the operating room. He had other injuries, too—broken ribs and blood in both lungs—and the medics couldn’t say whether or not he would pull through.

The murder case had forked off in several new directions, and resources had been redirected to the arson attack.

Eira had been working for almost twelve hours straight, not including her visit to the crime scene early that morning, but someone needed to summarize the material, to find any contradictions, and GG had left it to her—or had she offered? Either way. She was surrounded by their voices, the printouts from the interviews.

Three people, one family.

Like a fracture developing, cleaving one rock mass from another.

Patrik’s voice in her ears.

“You’re wrong, you’ve got him mixed up with someone else. My dad would never do something like that. You’re so fucking wrong. Seriously, what are you lot even doing? What kind of backwards officers do you have working up here? I get it. You’re the people they scraped off the bottom of the barrel, the ones who couldn’t find posts anywhere else. Who the fuck is Adam Vide?”

The crash of something being slammed down or breaking.

Bosse Ring’s calm, methodical voice stood in sharp contrast to Patrik’s outburst. He sounded warm and friendly, almost fatherly—something she had never heard from him before.

“Did you notice anything unusual when you came to stay this time? What was the mood like in the house? Have you ever seen your father resort to violence?”

Patrik’s voice was incredibly strained, an octave higher than when Eira had heard him speaking earlier. He swore that everything had been the same as ever. Just a few niggles between Sofi and his mother, over the kids’ clothing or something.

“I honestly don’t remember what Dad was doing. He usually makes himself scarce when that happens. But we had a beer together on the porch later. The kind of thing you do when you’ve just killed your neighbor, don’t you think? This is insane. What you’re claiming right now, it’s insane.”