We Know You Remember (61)

The sound of a door closing made her jump. She had the investigation piled up all around her, almost like a wall, and hadn’t noticed anyone coming and going. That evening’s patrol was based in Sollefte?, which meant there were no officers on duty in Kramfors. The building was quiet. For a while she thought she must be the only one left, but then she heard something bang, someone swear. It was the temp caretaker, busy emptying the coffee machine. The red light on it had been blinking all day, telling them to change the filter or whatever it was.

“This really isn’t my job,” he muttered. “But there’ll be no decent coffee for people in the morning otherwise.”

“Do you know where I can find a VHS player?” asked Eira.



The fourteen-year-old slumped forward, burying his head in his hands.

An arm reached into the frame, a body leaning in front of the camera and pulling his hands away.

“I’d like to see your face while we’re talking, Olof.”

It was the woman interview leader again. Eira had looked her up online and found an old article about her. She came from down south and was often called in as an expert in interviewing children. By that point it had been over a week since Olof Hagstr?m became the primary focus of the investigation.

“We have five people who claim you were covered in mud and dirt when you came back out of the woods. How does that fit with you not doing anything?”

“I fell over.”

“Were you trying to grab Lina?”

Silence.

“You’re a boy, Olof. Becoming a man. There’s nothing unusual about that. Maybe there are things happening to your body that you don’t quite understand. Take another look at the photograph for me. Isn’t she beautiful? Did you think Lina was beautiful?”

Olof looked away. Repeatedly rubbed his neck. Eira struggled to see his features in the grown man she had met. His eyes, possibly. The boy sitting alone on a vinyl sofa in a bare interview room was tall and thin, and had an awkwardness when he moved, as though his body had grown too quickly. He had broad shoulders, but was a long way off the bulky frame he had since developed.

After almost three hours in a cramped cupboard where the air had quickly become bone dry, Eira realized she would never manage to go through everything.

The first week alone involved around twenty hours of interviews. A few quick calculations told her that she was looking at around one hundred hours of footage in total. Eira rifled through the VHS tapes. Several were marked WALK-THROUGH.

There was a reason investigators weren’t keen to reopen old cases.

There had to be clear grounds, new evidence. The police couldn’t simply take it upon themselves to reexamine a closed case; that was what investigative journalists did, as they had with Swedish alleged serial killer Thomas Quick.

Quick had confessed to over thirty murders and been convicted of eight. Despite walk-throughs of the murder scenes, he couldn’t lead the police to a single body. The only forensic evidence was a fragment of bone belonging to a girl—though it was later found to be plastic. The entire case was built on therapy sessions intended to bring out repressed memories of murders he didn’t even know he had committed.

“Olof, look at me,” the woman insisted. She wasn’t visible on-screen herself. “What did Lina do when you grabbed her? Did she scream? Is that why you wanted to shut her up?”

Eira switched off the VHS player. She needed to eat something, she realized. To call her mother and try to make sure everything was OK. Kerstin told her she had eaten a few sandwiches, had a glass of wine, and was about to go to bed, but Eira was willing to believe her only once she had repeated the same information twice.

She found a few crispbreads in one of the cupboards in the lunchroom, some cheese and butter belonging to someone else. People had only themselves to blame if they didn’t label their food.

Then she called August.



“Why exactly do you want us to go through this?” Her colleague had come in willingly, but he had also grown impatient after just thirty minutes.

Because no one told me a thing when I was younger, she thought. Eira explained that she needed another pair of eyes, that there were certain things that raised doubts. That she had only that evening and night, then the boxes of videotapes would be taken back to the archives and she would be in the patrol car again, driving mile after mile around the area.

She didn’t say that she liked having him there with her, in a room no more than a few square meters in size.

“There he is again, without either of his parents,” Eira said as she fast-forwarded through the footage. “Did you notice that? He’s underage, and he’s all alone.”

“That’s just how it was back then.”

August had swung one leg up onto the table, and his foot was bobbing up and down in front of the steady footage of the boy on the vinyl sofa. Hour after hour, always the same angle. Eira flicked through the transcripts in an attempt to skip to the sections where something happened. They had passed over a whole stack of tapes and were now on to the third week of interviews.

“Hold on,” said Eira. “There’s something here, he actually starts talking now.”

Olof looked down at the floor, his face almost entirely hidden in his hands.

“That’s not how it was,” he said.

“What do you mean?”