We Know You Remember (45)

One of them was parked on the driveway where they pulled up, a Mercedes with a flatbed where the rear seats had once been, lacquered black and red.

The parents were on annual leave, already up and about, busy renovating the roof. That was fortunate, because their son was a minor, just sixteen years of age.

It took half an hour for his father to wake him and for him to get dressed.

Baggy jeans and an oversized T-shirt, still half asleep. A cup of warm chocolate milk.

“They’re talking to a lot of people,” said his mother, buttering two slices of bread for her son. “That doesn’t mean they’re accusing you of anything.”

“Just tell them the truth,” said his father.

The boy’s name was Andreas, and he already had a record for a couple of petty thefts, a few notifications of concern to his name. Eira had managed to check the database while they were waiting for their colleagues, who were now paying a visit to one of the other boys.

“We were just driving around,” said Andreas.

“Driving where?”

“On the roads, where else?”

GG brought up a map on his iPad and placed it on the table in front of the boy.

“Can you point out exactly where you went?”

“I don’t bloody know.”

This continued for some time, until Andreas’s father ran out of patience and barked at his son: “Just tell the truth, for once in your damn life.”

“I told you, I can’t remember.”

“Your clothes stunk of smoke in the morning.”

“Yeah, so? Maybe we had a barbecue.”

“You think I can’t tell the difference? Do you think I’m stupid?” The man took a step forward, like he was going to shake his son, but his wife grabbed his arm.

“They’re always driving around,” she said. “There’s not much else to do round here. Especially in the summer, when there’s no school.”

“As if they do any different in the winter,” his father muttered. “Up all night, sleeping all day. What exactly do you get up to? You and Robban and the Torstenssons?”

“What d’you mean, get up to?”

“It would be better if you let us ask the questions,” said GG.

“I’ve seen the kind of stuff you look up when you borrow my computer. All kinds of filth and muck, that’s what.”

“Please, stop,” said his wife. “That’s got nothing to do with any of this.”

Another fifteen minutes passed. GG had asked Eira to leave the room with the father, and she returned just in time to hear the boy crack. A whisper, directed towards the table.

“Someone had to get rid of him.”

“Who?”

“That dirty old perve.” The boy raised his chin, looking the detective straight in the eye. “You lot clearly can’t manage it. We have to do things ourselves round here.”

“Are you talking about Olof Hagstr?m?”

“He’ll never do that stuff again. Not to any of our girls, anyway.” Andreas unhappily sought out his mother’s gaze. “Someone had to bloody do something. You’re blind, the lot of you. Can’t you see what they go through?”





Chapter 25





For once, Eira left the station at a normal time that afternoon. No one noticed her leaving; they were all working flat out on the latest task: mapping the four boys’ movements and lives.

In addition to the sixteen-year-old she and GG had brought in, there was another boy the same age—the driver of the other EPA tractor—plus his thirteen-year-old brother and an eighteen-year-old who had borrowed his mother’s car that evening.

The heavy mood followed her out. Three teenagers in custody, plus a fourth who wasn’t even fifteen. That wasn’t what you hoped for from a day’s work. The last thing she had done before leaving was to check the boys’ search histories on the computers they had seized. The images of brutal pornography lingered in her mind.

“They claim they wanted to protect the girls,” Silje had said over her shoulder, “but then they go and watch this crap, about how to best rape someone. How does that make sense?”

It doesn’t, Eira thought as she walked through a cluster of redbrick apartment buildings on the edge of the town center. People don’t make sense.

She tried to take in the everyday life all around her, everything that was healthy and alive. The flowers in the yards. The children playing in a sprinkler.

The woman whose name was on the rental agreement wasn’t someone she knew, but this was the last address at which her brother had been registered. She hadn’t managed to track down a new phone contract for him.

Eira rang the buzzer and was let inside.

The woman’s name was Alice, a midforties beauty who opened the door in a thin summer dress.

“No, Magnus doesn’t live here anymore. We broke up in spring.”

Eira peered down the hallway behind her. There were traces of preteen children, rucksacks and sports shoes. The apartment smelled clean.

“But I told him he could stay registered here,” Alice continued. “Until he finds something permanent. So you don’t have his number?”

“Not the latest one.”

Alice pointed to a small stack of envelopes on the chest of drawers in the hallway.