We Know You Remember (42)

A longer silence. This was where her colleague had allowed Patrik to read what his father had been convicted of.

Another clatter, from a chair tipping over as he got to his feet.

“Are you telling my mum about this right now? How the hell is she supposed to live with this?”

It sounded like the words were being forced out of him, one drop at a time, like someone wringing out a near-dry rag.

“The people who did that . . . what it says there . . . They should’ve been locked up for good, people like that shouldn’t be allowed to go free, they should’ve thrown away the key . . .”

Another pause, possibly following the realization that he would never have been born if that had happened.

“Jesus Christ, what a bastard. The thought of him with Mum . . . I can’t believe I never saw it. A person can’t change that much, it’s impossible; you are who you are. So are you telling me he killed that old bloke because of this . . . ?”

The creaking of Patrik’s footsteps as he paced back and forth across the wooden floor, the thick boards.

Mejan’s statement was still fresh in Eira’s mind. She had forgiven and reconciled, swore her husband was a different man now. Eira found herself thinking about the esteemed poet whose husband had become infamous for being unable to keep his hands to himself before ultimately being convicted of rape; she had strenuously defended him and accused the eighteen women who testified against him of being liars.

She batted that thought away. This was something else. Every case was unique, every person had to be heard individually. Every truth set against another.

“And to think I’ve been bringing my kids up here.” That was the last thing Patrik said before the conversation ended. “Never again, I’ll tell you that. Never again.”

Eira turned her attention to the transcript of the interview with Tryggve Nydalen that was spread out on the desk in front of her. She had already listened to the whole thing, but seeing it on paper gave her a different kind of overview. The long pauses were gone, and she could skip over the endless sections in which he tried to explain what had happened almost forty years earlier. The parts where he broke down repeatedly, blaming himself for what he had put his family through, for his son finding out this way. He had been afraid for so long, then the day finally came, in the ironmonger’s, when someone had called him by his old name and he had fled. And yet: there had been moments when he had longed for that very thing. These days he had to drive twenty kilometers to Kramfors if he needed so much as a screw. He should never have had children, things would have been far better that way.

But he hadn’t killed Sven Hagstr?m.

“That’s not who I am. I could never. I completely understand why you think I did, and I’m sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

With that, he was back in J?vredal again.

Tryggve Nydalen came across as honest, but he was also a little too . . . Eira couldn’t quite put her finger on it. A little too eager, prepared? And was Mejan really as comfortable with her husband’s past as she claimed, or was she a classic case of an abused woman denying and defending?

Then there was Patrik’s rage. Where did that come from? Hadn’t it been there the very first time she met him, the morning they were called out to Sven Hagstr?m’s place, when he was irritated with the speed of the police? Had he wanted to frame Olof Hagstr?m, did he suspect his father, did he know more than he was letting on?

Eira got up and filled her mug at the coffee machine. It was too late in the day for caffeine, but she already knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Tryggve Nydalen had been in custody since lunchtime. That gave them three days. Or more like two and a half now.

She splashed her face with cold water before sitting down again.

GG hadn’t given her this task for her psychological analysis, she didn’t imagine that for a moment.

The fact that Tryggve’s fingerprints were a match was the main reason the prosecutor had been able to request that he remain in custody. His thumb and index finger prints—fairly fresh—had been found in the house, in the kitchen and on a doorframe in the hallway.

Eira needed to find similarly concrete evidence. The kind of thing it was difficult to lie your way out of.

She noticed the small contradictions between Tryggve’s statements and his wife’s, about what he had been doing that morning. Cleaning the drain or tightening the leg on the bed. It could easily be the kind of thing a person forgot or mixed up, of course. Both had claimed he was chopping wood. That was something you could hear across a yard, but perhaps Mejan hadn’t actually been able to see what he was doing indoors, and was choosing to protect him.

And if she was lying about a detail like that, other details fell down.

The forest road, she thought. Tryggve said he had visited Hagstr?m to talk about the road. Eira found the name of a council worker who dealt with that kind of thing, and thought they should probably ask the other neighbors about it.

The murder weapon. They had seized a hunting knife, safely locked away alongside two guns in the cabinet. Finding Hagstr?m’s DNA was probably too much to hope for, but the members of a hunting party were close, they saw different sides of people. Tryggve had bought the knife two years earlier but perhaps he had another, an older one. Was it the kind of thing people threw away?

“Looks like you’ve had a rough day.”