We Know You Remember (71)

Clouds had gathered overhead, the water darkening, and the wind had picked up. The surface of the river rippled, small waves with white crests breaking in the distance.

Eira looked around. The spot where they were standing was obscured by the huge shed, but still—the fact that there wasn’t a single eyewitness to the murder itself?

On a warm summer’s evening?

“Was this where they found her things?”

GG pointed to a scrap of beach nearby, some twenty or so meters away. They climbed down from the quay.

“Keys and a makeup brush,” said Eira. “That was all.”

A few meters of sand among clusters of reeds. Sharp, rotting wooden posts stood in the water, the remains of an old steamboat quay. Just twenty years earlier the small headland behind them had been densely wooded, but the vegetation had since been cut back, leaving the view clear. There were three small boats moored to the rocks, bobbing gently with the movements of the river.

“What was the weather like that day?” asked GG.

“Nice. Warm. She went out late in just a thin cardigan.”

“We had a cabin by the sea,” said GG. “And if there’s one thing people kept an eye on, it was the boats that came and went. Two girls in a rowing boat on the river, past ten in the evening? Someone else must have seen them.”

Eira thought about the small communities dotted like pearls along the riverbank: Marieberg, Nyhamn, K?ja. Virtually every house had a veranda that stretched down to the water and the evening sun, each one bigger than the last; this was the sunny side of the river.

“Maybe they did,” said Eira, trying to remember everything she had skim-read, the tips that had been phoned in, the door knocking, everything that was done while the case was still being treated as a disappearance. “I seem to remember someone claiming to have seen her in a boat, but people said they’d seen her all over the place—in forest collectives, at campsites, across half the country . . .”

“Missing-people cases.” GG sighed.

“And then they got hold of Olof Hagstr?m.”

“So it was never followed up?”

“It’s possible,” said Eira. “I didn’t go through everything.”

GG scanned the river. The line of trees on the other shore seemed a long way away, like a watercolor foreground with the mountains beyond.

“It could have been another day,” he said. “Or another girl. Nydalen was talking about bare shoulders and what she had between her legs, but did he actually see her face? And even if we assume that he wants to tell the truth now, it could be that his memories have since changed.”

A dog appeared, making its way between them. Its owner came strolling after it, shouting hello from a distance. Eira called back. She didn’t recognize the man. He threw a stick, let the dog swim. From the beach, the ground sloped up towards the forest. It was steeper than she had imagined, a longer walk.

“The dogs followed the scent from over there,” she said, pointing out the direction as she remembered it from a map in the preliminary investigation, the crosses and lines.

“Nothing beats a walk in the woods,” said GG.

Eira took the lead through the wild grass and relics from the golden years of the sawmill. They clambered over broken steps leading nowhere and through the foundations of a house, past a couple of brick buildings belonging to the mill. She remembered them being pointed out to her once, years ago, by her father or her grandfather. There was the forge and the workers’ bathhouse, so small that it could surely fit only a few tubs, the machine hall that still seemed to be in use somehow—there were a couple of threadbare armchairs outside, a new-looking barbecue. The building known as the Stronghold loomed overhead, as white and stately as a manor house, albeit fairly down at heel. It was from there that the bosses and officials from the sawmill had reigned, watching the ships come and go.

The views from the top of the hill were magnificent.

The place had changed hands a few times over the years, its incredible views luring in newcomers with business plans and dreams of new lives. They renovated one room, possibly even two, and found themselves with fourteen still to go. The large wooden houses of the ?dalen Valley didn’t really lend themselves to harmony. Marriages crumbled and budgets followed suit, or maybe it was the other way around.

“Did anyone live here back then?” asked GG.

“I don’t know,” said Eira. “No one seems to have seen anything if they did. From the moment Lina entered the forest to Olof reemerging on his own.”

The spruce trees took over.

Nature vanquished all evidence, the moss thick and shimmering green. Eira spent a while calculating steps and distances, imagining the weight of a body, before eventually giving up. It was pointless trying to guess which towering spruce Olof had caught up with Lina Stavred behind, which glade.

“So this is where they last saw her?”

They had reached the road. The patch of gravel outside the old co-op was overgrown with grass. But someone seemed to be living there now, at least during the summer months. There were curtains in the windows, plastic chairs against the gable end, a trike that had toppled over.

“There was a group of five boys hanging out here that night, with Olof,” said Eira. “They all gave roughly the same version of events.”

“Did they know her?”