We Know You Remember (66)

She flicked through them fairly quickly, but still managed to catch some of the detail in passing—the fact that a significant number of the addresses were in Marieberg, for example. They must have interviewed everyone living in the area around the crime scene. Many of the witnesses had been born around 1980, making them roughly the same age as Lina at the time, sixteen or seventeen. Her friends and schoolmates.

One of the birth dates stopped her in her tracks. The familiar structure, the order of the digits.

And then the name.

Everything seemed to go silent around her, assuming there had even been any sound.

It wasn’t strange, she told herself. A girl had gone missing, and the police wanted to talk to as many people as possible. They had been at the same school in Kramfors; what choice did they have?

There were no other names, he wasn’t part of the group of schoolmates interviewed in case they knew her, in case they had seen anything and so on.

It was just him. Alone, for page after page.



Interview with Magnus Sj?din

EG: When did you last talk to Lina Stavred?

MS: I don’t know where she is, I’ve told you.

EG: Just answer the question.

MS: A week ago, maybe.

EG: It’s important you try to be precise.

MS: I told you, we broke up. We’re not going out anymore.

EG: How did you feel when she broke up with you?

MS: How would you feel?

EG: I think I’d be pretty upset. Angry, even. That I’d struggle to accept it.

MS: It just ended.

EG: We’ve spoken to Lina’s friends. They say you have very strong feelings for her, but that she doesn’t feel the same way.

MS: They don’t know how I feel.

EG: Did you want her back?

MS: I’ve told you, I don’t know where she is.

Eira couldn’t remember how her brother sounded when he was seventeen; the voice in her head belonged to the grown-up Magnus, the one she had spoken to a few days earlier. Eilert’s creaky voice came through loud and clear.

EG: Where were you on the evening of July third?

MS: I was at home.

EG: What time was it when you got home?

MS: Maybe around nine or so.

EG: Was anyone else there? Anyone who can confirm that?



Kerstin had the radio on when Eira got home. It felt like she had just stepped onto a stage set. The house where she grew up, her family, everything she thought she knew, the security and strength.

She drank a glass of water and turned down the volume.

“Just turn it off,” said Kerstin. “It’s all doom and gloom anyway. You don’t want a coffee?”

“Sure.”

The thermos from that morning was empty. Eira spilled the ground coffee as she went to fill the percolator.

“I’ll clean that up,” said her mother. “You sit, you’ve been working all day.”

“Thanks.”

“And I’ve got plenty of sandwiches, too.”

Eira sat down, searching for somewhere to start. Magnus, Lina, Lina, Magnus, the evening of July 3, 1996. Kerstin took over. Making coffee still came naturally to her, though she did sometimes make mistakes: miscalculating, adding the wrong amount.

“Do you remember the summer when Lina Stavred went missing?”

“Uff, yes. When was it again? It must’ve been nineteen—”

“Ninety-six. They interviewed Magnus about it, several times.”

“Is that so?”

Eira caught a hint of something in her mother’s voice. A way of avoiding the subject, withdrawing, that wasn’t down to her usual forgetfulness.

“You must remember that, Mum? Them taking Magnus in for questioning? Why didn’t you tell me Lina was his girlfriend?”

“Ah, well . . . Was she?”

Dementia, the doctors at the hospital had told her, didn’t mean that everything would vanish. The memories were still there, they were just harder to grasp. As a family member, Eira could help by keeping them alive—though they probably meant by playing old songs and looking through photo albums rather than this.

“Lina broke up with Magnus a week before she went missing,” Eira continued. “They interviewed you too. Right here. You must’ve sat in the kitchen? Where was I? You confirmed that Magnus was at home on the night she disappeared.”

Kerstin had paused with the cheese in her hand, as though she couldn’t quite remember what it was for.

“But Magnus was never at home in the evening,” Eira went on. “The two of you were always fighting about it. So why that particular night, when his girlfriend was murdered?”

Perhaps it was Kerstin’s illness making her gaze slip away. “It was a boy who did it, what was his name . . .”

“Olof Hagstr?m.”

“Yes, that was it . . .”

“Did you both go to Lina’s funeral, too?” It struck Eira that she didn’t know whether there had been one. Her body had never been found, after all. A fragment of a memory came back to her, TV footage of a ceremony. “How could you keep quiet about something like this all these years?”

A clumsy hand reached out, veined and slightly wrinkled, stroked her hair.

“Oh, love . . . You were so young.”

Eira brushed off her hand, as irritated by her mother’s touch as she had been in her teens. Her tone, her manner, at once tender and strained; not even five terms at police college could overcome that. Whatever you do or don’t remember, she thought, there’s something you’re trying to protect me from.