We Know You Remember (57)

Eira closed the app as it flashed up with another match.

“I’m in Stockholm,” she said. “I can rent a car, drive you out there.”



Ingela Berg Haider was waiting in the car park outside the Sveriges Television building. Eira never would have recognized her if they hadn’t arranged to meet, yet there was definitely still something of the seventeen-year-old she had spied on as a child in there.

Her hair was dyed black and cut in a short, blunt style. She was wearing a man’s jacket, cinched in at the waist with an orange belt, and had a pair of small guitar earrings hanging from her ears.

“I still don’t know where I’m going to put everything,” she told Eira. “We live in a flat, we have two square meters of space in the storeroom. I don’t have room for all this.”

“We’ll take a look,” said Eira, typing Olof Hagstr?m’s address—or former address—into the GPS in the rental car. “We’ll make an assessment. Maybe we’ll be able to persuade the landlady to take it easy.”

“I haven’t seen him since he was fourteen. Most people don’t even know I have a brother.”

They pulled out onto Valhallav?gen and drove towards the motorway heading north, inching forward in the busy rush-hour traffic. The radio had been pretuned to a station playing bluegrass from the American South. Before she left the hotel, Eira had splashed her face and pulled on the same shirt as earlier. She had forgotten all about any possible dates.

The traffic came to a standstill just after Norrtull. The sun set faster here, farther south, glittering on the endless line of cars. Eira told Ingela about Olof’s condition, what the doctors had said, the uncertainty. They had managed to remove the blood from his lungs and around his liver, but he still wasn’t reacting to pain.

They crept forward at a snail’s pace.

“What does Olof actually do?” asked Ingela. “Or what did he do, before all this?”

“For work, you mean?”

“I don’t know anything about him. Dad declined all contact, but Mum started writing to him once they got divorced. Olof never replied. I dug out his address when she was ill, but he didn’t reply then either. Didn’t even come to her funeral.”

“He picks up cars from the countryside,” said Eira. “A dealer finds them online and sells them on for a profit in the city. All off the books, of course—Olof doesn’t seem to have had a regular job.”

They had managed to get hold of the dealer from his call list. He had been furious at first, demanding that they return his car, but once he’d realized it was connected to a murder inquiry he had changed his tune and denied all knowledge of a Pontiac Firebird.

“What’s he like?” asked Ingela.

“Olof?”

“Yeah, you met him, didn’t you? Before the other stuff happened.”

“Hard to say. It was a pretty intense situation.” Eira tried to recall the impression he had made on her when she first walked up to the car outside Hagstr?m’s house that morning, but all she could remember was the unease. The knowledge of what he had done.

And then, by the river, once they had caught up with him: the strange stillness.

“Reserved,” she said. “I had the feeling I wasn’t really getting through to him. Confused, but that’s not exactly surprising. I think he was scared.” She thought of his huge body, but struggled to find the right words to describe it. “He mentioned a boat that used to be kept on the shore.”

“I remember it. I remember that boat.” Ingela peered out through the window as the enormous oaks in the royal park slowly sailed by. For a moment or two she didn’t speak. The screeching of fiddles was replaced by a peaceful tune, a clear voice singing about going down to the river to pray.

“We used to go rowing, just the two of us, in the shallows along the shore. Looking for beavers or just paddling about. The trees grew right out into the water there. I remember all that, but I can’t remember what he looked like when we were young. Isn’t that weird?”

The traffic had finally started to move, and they passed the streamlined blocks of the social housing estate, the green expanse of the J?rvaf?ltet nature reserve.

“It’s like all that’s left in me is a kind of presence. A sense that my brother was there, and then he wasn’t. I’m screaming at him, but I only remember that internally, I don’t actually see him. ‘You sick fuck, freak, don’t touch me,’ that kind of thing; how the hell was I meant to deal with it? I was only seventeen. I didn’t understand a thing. Everyone stared at me at school, wanted to know if he’d ever tried it on with me. I remember Dad dragging everything out of his room, getting rid of all his stuff. Everything that was him. I don’t know how much time had passed by then. I can’t get the pieces to fit.”

She trailed off. The roads ahead cleared out as they approached Upplands Bro.

“What do you mean, you can’t get the pieces to fit?” asked Eira.

“It was all such a mess, everything. I couldn’t handle it. Had to change school, moved around.”

The address took them to the edge of the suburbs, past an industrial area and down a winding road towards Lake M?laren, through what had once been a farming district.

They pulled up outside a large red-painted villa with an outhouse and an apple tree in the garden. The woman who came to meet them was in her fifties, wearing a pair of dungarees and a vest, her hair tied back. She smiled and pulled off her gardening gloves.