We Know You Remember (59)

“On the things you found in the forest?”

“Mmm. And you?”

“More summer visitors on their way in,” Anja replied with a deep sigh. “They’re coming to look at the pictures of the stolen goods we found in Lo. They’ll spot their things and I’ll have to explain that they won’t necessarily get them back. I had a couple in yesterday who’d had a pair of folding Japanese screens with a cherry blossom pattern on them stolen. You can guarantee there’s only one pair of those in the whole of ?ngermanland, so it was tricky to make them understand why we couldn’t just go and seize them.”

“No other distinguishing features to prove the screens were theirs?”

“Nope. A bit of cherry blossom doesn’t warrant a raid.”

Eira rinsed out her mug and said goodbye. She sent a message to GG, asking him to call her whenever he had a moment. The morning meeting had been canceled because he was at the custodial prison in H?rn?sand, and the others were likely busy with other things. He called her back half an hour later, from the car on the way to Sundsvall.

“Nydalen’s keeping mum,” he told her. “Hasn’t said a word since we showed him the pictures of the things we found buried in the forest.”

“Is there anything particular you want me to do?”

“We’re still waiting on the forensic reports, but they probably won’t come in before tomorrow—at the earliest. Are we behind on any reports?”

“I was wondering if I should take a look at the old preliminary investigation,” said Eira. “To make sure Nydalen’s name doesn’t crop up anywhere.”

“Just don’t kick up a load of old dust,” said GG. He sounded slightly absentminded, as though his thoughts were already elsewhere. “And for God’s sake don’t let any reporters cotton on to what you’re doing. They get a hard-on from old cases; they think it’ll win them an award or something.”



It took Eira almost three hours to track down the old preliminary investigation, buried deep in the archives. The caretaker who was temping over the summer carried the boxes from the lift for her.

According to the paperwork, no one had accessed the material since it was archived in 1996. A handful of journalists had requested it over the years, but they had been refused every time.

It ran to many thousands of pages, mostly printed transcripts from the interviews. Boxes full of videotapes, blocky VHS cassettes bearing witness to another era.

A dead beetle dropped into Eira’s lap as she lifted the folders from a box.

That smile. So bright, forever frozen in what would be the enduring image of Lina.

The background was bluish and artificial, a school photograph, the one that had popped up everywhere that summer. Her hair in soft waves over her shoulders; long, medium blond, almost certainly curled ahead of the shoot. The papers had also published a few more relaxed images, private family photographs and snaps they had either begged or bought from friends, but the picture that fell out of the preliminary investigation was the familiar one: Lina Stavred with her head turned half towards the camera, smiling.

Taken a few months before the end of term in her first year of senior high school.

Now comes the time for flowers.

For joy, for beauty great.

Like every other child in Sweden, she must have sung that old hymn, about the gentle sun’s warmth coaxing fresh growth from everything that was dead.

As soon as she approaches, reborn life lies ahead.

Eira was almost trembling as she opened the files, her heart pounding. She was assisting in a murder inquiry, she was the nine-year-old creeping along the beaches, looking for evidence.

The files smelled dry, like old paper.

She barely even noticed the afternoon pass, the daylight growing cooler outside. She was working in a different era now. Days that dragged on. That went round in circles, always returning to the same point.

The third of July, a warm summer night. It had been sunny, the air almost breathless, the night Lina Stavred disappeared.

No one had noticed until the next day. It was the summer holiday, after all, and Lina had said she was staying over at a friend’s. She wasn’t reported missing until late in the evening on the fourth.

The tips had quickly come flooding in. Eira skimmed through a number of pages, days in which the police had bounced around like balls in a pinball machine, looking into reports that Lina had been seen here and there. One person claimed she was with the “tree huggers” in the collective up by N?s?ker, another that they had seen her among the prostitutes on Malmskillnadsgatan in Stockholm, in a boat on the river, on the sea, outside a pub in H?rn?sand and at a party at the foot of Skuleberget; one man even claimed to have had sex with her in his dreams, and wanted to report himself. On top of that, there were countless tips about suspicious men in the area, various foreigners in particular—people from Russia and Lithuania and Yugoslavia, “Though you’re meant to say Serbia now, aren’t you? Or Bosnia, I don’t bloody know where they’re from, it’s all the same to me.” Neighbors who had been seen naked in their own homes and young men roaming around, up to no good.

In the end she found Tryggve Nydalen’s name in connection with the door knocking. The police had spoken to the people living in the surrounding communities, trawling the houses for anyone who might have seen something.