We Know You Remember (60)

A brief note, that was all.

Family dinner at home. Confirmed by wife and sister-in-law. Evening of July 3: fishing trip on the river with his six-year-old son and nephew. No sightings.

That was all.

Eira could have put the folder down at that point. Packed it back into the boxes with all the others.

Let the dust settle again, for good.

But now that she had everything in front of her?

She would never get the chance to look through these files again. However popular it was out there for cold cases to be brought back to life, it wasn’t something the police really spent much time on. Particularly not when they were solved, archived, and marked confidential.



The tip about Olof Hagstr?m had come in on the morning of the sixth of July. “It’s probably nothing, but you know, you want to . . .”

Eira stared at the name for a moment. Gunnel Hagstr?m.

His own mother had made the call.

“It seems like a few people saw the girl go into the woods there, or that’s what they’re saying. I hadn’t heard about it myself, but the teenagers are all saying that Olof . . . Well, that he . . . I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else, for you to think . . .”

Eira tried to picture the house in Kungsg?rden as it might have looked back then, with a tidy hallway and flowers in the kitchen window, thin summer curtains. When it was still home to a whole family. Ingela had come back and blabbed about what she had heard, what the older boys were saying about Olof. About Lina. About what they had done in the woods—or what he claimed to have done.

Gunnel Hagstr?m had waited until morning. Gone to sleep, or not—likely suffered through a terrible night—before getting up and calling the police.

Because she believed it? Or because she didn’t know what to think?

The person who took her call had reacted like any semiattentive police officer would. Whenever they appealed to the public for information, there were always plenty of fools calling up. The craziest were often the most insistent.

More often than not, doubt hid a truth.

The first conversation with the family had taken place around two hours later. The questions were broadly the same ones Eira would have asked, the answers brief. Olof didn’t say much.

OH: No.

OH: Who said that?

OH: Don’t know.

OH: No.

He answered most of their questions with silence.

Then his father spoke up:

SH: Just tell the truth so we can get this cleared up. The police have better things to be doing.

It was a strange feeling to see Sven Hagstr?m rise from the dead—or his words, at least. In black on white, or black on slightly yellow.

SH: Just tell the truth now, lad.

Then, to the police:

SH: That’s what I’ve raised both my kids to do. To stick to the truth.

Eira wondered whether Ingela had been interviewed in the same room, whether Olof knew where the information had come from, whether he knew it was his mother who had called it in.

The police had returned the next day, with a decision from the prosecutor. They had taken his fingerprints and searched the house.

Eira scanned through the report. She could imagine the silence in Olof’s boyhood room as they pulled out the box from beneath his bed. The room was on the second floor. She had never been up there herself, but she knew from the description that it was the narrow box room beneath the sloping roof often found in that type of house.

According to the report, the box was full to bursting.

Comic books. Sweet wrappers. Rotting banana skins. A plane with a broken wing.

A yellow cardigan.

Eira had a handful of memories of the TV news from those days. Her mother hadn’t been able to keep her away from it, however hard she tried.

A breakthrough, that was what they had called it. She remembered that because she hadn’t known what the word meant. She had thought it was something to do with broken bones, and felt stupid in front of her mother’s friend, who was staying with them at the time.

The two women had glanced at one another and considered their words in front of her, but in the end her mother had explained that it meant they had found the person who . . . “That we’ll know what happened to Lina soon, sweetie.”

They still hadn’t come out and said that she was dead, but no child could have failed to notice the whispering. The voices that lowered the minute you came close. Forced reassurances that “there’s nothing to worry about, but no, you can’t go out on your own.”

Perhaps that was the night when they found Lina’s cardigan.

When the investigation entered a new phase.

Eira flicked through to the interviews that had started the very next day. She realized she had hundreds of pages ahead of her. Week after week of questioning.

EG: Could you tell us what happened when you followed Lina into the forest?

OH: [No answer]

EG: Why did you follow her into the forest? Did you like Lina? Look at the photograph. She was pretty, wasn’t she?

OH: [Shakes his head]

EG: You’ll have to speak up for the tape. Look me in the eye when we talk, Olof. Look at me.

OH: Mmm.

EG: that was Eilert Granlund, her old colleague. Eira hadn’t realized he had been so deeply involved, that he had occasionally led the interrogation. Page after page—hours of interviews, day after day for over a month. She dipped into the transcripts here and there, read another segment, saw another interview leader she didn’t know enter the scene, a woman this time. Eira tried to picture Olof Hagstr?m sitting in front of her, the fourteen-year-old boy—what could have been hiding behind “no answer” and “shakes his head”?