We Know You Remember (65)

Perhaps it was only a matter of hours now, or would she have another day? Mejan knew roughly how long those kinds of analyses could take—she read thrillers and watched crime dramas like everyone else, and had planned her activities accordingly.

She divided the cinnamon buns into bags. Loaded servings of lasagna into the freezer. Broccoli soup, sausages and mash; Wiener schnitzel with sauce, peas and potatoes. All portioned out into decent meals. The potatoes would turn floury and dry in the freezer, but Tryggve would still appreciate having everything ready for him when he got home. Mejan labeled every plastic dish and freezer bag.

He would be able to survive on what she had prepared for a few weeks. Would have to go to the supermarket in Nyland only to buy any extra fresh produce he needed.

Their daughter would probably arrive by then.

Jenny, who had been in Australia for so long, who almost never got in touch. That was no place to live, not with all the fires everywhere. And now that her father would be all on his own, surely it was high time she came home?

You’re going to hear things about both me and your dad, Mejan wrote.

Don’t judge him. He hasn’t been a bad father.

Do you remember when he built you a doll’s house?

Her letter grew long, asking Jenny to think things through and understand, telling her it was time to think of someone other than herself.

At the end of the day, family is all we really have.

Mejan had also started several letters to Tryggve, but that proved trickier. She balled up each sheet of paper after just a few lines, burning them in the fireplace and then allowing it to go out, so that there weren’t any embers.

In the end, she just wrote him a brief note.

There’s food in the freezer.

Hugs and kisses,





Mejan





By the time the patrol car pulled up in the yard, she was sitting on the porch with a thermos of coffee. She had saved two of the cinnamon buns for herself. Mejan was dressed the way she had decided to dress. Simply and respectably, yet still suitably elegant in a pair of black trousers and a rust-colored pussy bow blouse—something that had largely hung in her wardrobe since she found it on sale in Kramfors.

What looked good in the shop often felt a bit much at home.

She had been sitting outside for an hour or two, despite the stiff breeze and the biting rain blowing into the open porch.

They had talked about having it glazed, possibly that autumn.

She wondered whether Tryggve would bother now, or whether he would simply give up and let the house fall into disrepair, like so many others in the area. Decaying in plain sight. For some reason she found herself thinking about the house where Lina Stavred once lived, just a few kilometers away. No one had moved in since the family left. A few of the windows were broken and the chimney had started to collapse; the entire facade looked frightful. Mejan understood that the family had suffered terribly, but still.

She brushed a couple of crumbs from her lap before getting to her feet. Everything was so visible against the black fabric.

“Marianne Nydalen?”

Two officers in uniform cut across the lawn.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“We need to ask you to come with us to Kramfors.”

Mejan was already on her way down the steps. She didn’t want them traipsing up there with muddy shoes. One of the officers moved to take hold of her arm.

“I can walk on my own, thank you.”

As though from a distance, she heard them saying something about the prosecutor and fingerprints and DNA, that she wasn’t under arrest, she was simply being taken in for questioning. Beyond that, she heard the breeze in the trees and felt the rain on her face. It all felt so fresh.





Chapter 37





Eira would sort through the folders and put everything in the right order, that was all. Make sure the old case files were lugged back down to the archive, where they probably belonged.

“Beyond all reasonable doubt,” as they would have said if it had ever gone to court.

There had been seven police officers at the core of the Lina Stavred investigation. Several of them were the most experienced on the force, and they had been backed up by forensics and psychologists and God knows what else.

Eira was only thirty-two. She had been a police assistant for almost six years and an investigator for just over two weeks, so who was she kidding?

The videotapes wouldn’t fit back into their box, and Eira had to repack them to get them inside.

GG hadn’t exactly been explicit about what he wanted her to do, but his hints were more than enough. An unwillingness to listen. A suspicion that she was digging into Olof Hagstr?m’s past because she felt guilty.

He was right. Olof Hagstr?m was the ghost of her childhood. That feeling had been there when she first walked over to him in the car, when she caught up with him in the forest, sat in a cramped interrogation room with him; it was in the smell of his sweat.

It wasn’t just unease, it was stronger than that. It was disgust and contempt and a kind of curiosity that made her stray beyond the strictly professional.

Interviews. Witness statements. Crime scene investigation.

She just needed to sort through it all first.

Some of the material had been mixed up when she found it. The least she could do was leave it in a better order. That was why, although it took time, she checked every cover page—even on the stacks of paper she hadn’t read. Dates and contents, names and personal details.