We Know You Remember (70)

Tryggve seemed annoyed to be questioned. Eira noticed GG glance over to her. He doesn’t know, she thought. The papers had all reported on what Lina Stavred was wearing the night she went missing. The description issued by the police had mentioned the yellow cardigan. This was before they found it under Olof Hagstr?m’s bed.

“I don’t suppose you remember whether she had a bag with her too?”

“I couldn’t just keep staring at her . . . But I think she did. She had it down here . . .” Another gesture, between his legs. So that was where he had been looking, thought Eira, while the two young boys watched for fish. “She reached into it and lit a cigarette just as the boat passed, and then I could only see her back.”

He made a spiral motion in the air and breathed in, the smoke that hung over the river all those years ago.

“I was surprised when I saw her in the paper later, but like I said . . .”

“Whereabouts on the river were you?”

“By K?ja, just drifting slowly with the current . . .”

Eira fished out her phone and brought up a map, handed it to him. Tryggve used two fingers to zoom in. She leaned closer.

“Just west of the island there,” he said, turning it so she could see. “You don’t want to go too far out with two little monsters in the boat. Just there, right before the inlet.”

Eira dropped a pin on the map and took a screenshot of the image, though she knew she would never forget the location he had pointed out. The narrow bay cut in behind the island like an appendix. Strinnefj?rden.

“You didn’t say a word about any of this twenty-three years ago,” said GG, leaning back in his chair. “Even though the search for Lina Stavred went on for days, and even though your closest neighbor’s son was accused of her murder. Why should we believe you now?”

“Believe what you want.”

“And why today, right after we released you, while your wife is sitting in custody . . . ? What do you stand to gain from this?”

“I need to go,” said Tryggve. He got up, supporting himself against the back of his chair. His legs seemed stiff, his back crooked, as though old age had suddenly caught up with him. “So could you leave me in peace now? Or do you want to stay and watch me take a shit?”





Chapter 39





Lorries. A caravan, a tractor with machinery in tow and cars bobbing in and out of the lane while they waited to overtake.

“He’s trying to mess with us,” GG said as they got stuck at the fork in the road. “A girl in a boat on the river? What does that even mean?”

Eira switched off the engine. It was too stressful to watch for a gap in the traffic while her mind was racing.

“The missing-person report said Lina was wearing a dress and a yellow cardigan,” she said. “If he’s making the whole thing up, why wouldn’t he just say that? If he’s going off what he read in the paper?”

“Maybe he forgot,” said GG. “It was an eternity ago.”

“So why bring up Lina’s case at all?”

“He wants to make himself look like the good guy. Nydalen has to live with everyone knowing what he did—and what his wife did—for the rest of his life. Where’s he meant to hide now?”

“The timeline was vague . . .” Eira was lost in several trains of thought, comparing Tryggve’s words with what she remembered from the preliminary report. “It was entirely based on witness statements from a group of teenagers who saw Olof follow Lina into the woods. They didn’t care what time it was; they didn’t have anywhere to be. It doesn’t even get dark at midnight in early July.”

“I was on the force back then,” said GG. “But I was working down in Gothenburg. I only followed the case from a distance.”

“They found her things down by the beach, pretty close to the jetty where he supposedly dumped her body.”

“And how far is that, in relation to this fishing spot?”

“Two kilometers upstream, maybe more like three. Don’t ask me how long that takes to row.”

Another caravan passed.

“And from here, by car?”

“Ten minutes, max.”



They parked the car in an overgrown field, wandered through the near-desolate landscape. The sawmill in Marieberg had been in operation for one hundred years before it closed down in the early seventies. Several of the buildings were still standing. The timber warehouse was the most striking: a corrugated metal behemoth almost two hundred meters in length. A group of enthusiasts had attempted to make the old wood-drying building into an artists’ studio a few years back, but it soon transpired that the dioxin levels in the ground were far too high to be safe.

The poison, the same substance used by the United States in World War II and later on the forests of Vietnam under the name Agent Orange, originated from an American chemical weapons factory. Between the wars, it had been used to keep mold and pests away from the timber in Swedish sawmills.

The end of the quay still looked the same as it had in the videotape, the one filmed on a shaky handheld camera when Olof Hagstr?m was brought to the area. The concrete had started to crack, weeds poking through.

GG peered over the edge. “Thirty meters, did you say?”

“Down to one hundred meters a bit farther out. And with the currents and the fact that it’s not too far to the coast . . .”