We Know You Remember (72)

“They knew who she was.”

Eira could just picture them now, leaning over their mopeds or motorbikes, cigarettes and beers in hand. Just like the groups of boys she had seen at every crossroads, outside every petrol station growing up.

Bored, waiting for something to happen, on the lookout. She could almost hear their wolf whistles as Lina appeared. Was that why she had turned off into the forest?

Ricken must have known more about her than he had let on in his police interviews—weren’t he and Magnus already best friends then? They always had been, thick as thieves, blood brothers, for as long as she could remember.

“Were there any other suspects?” GG asked as they turned to walk away, along the edge of the ditch, round the curve, and back to the car.

Eira looked down at the tarmac. She could hear his footsteps, her own, out of sync. The road was full of potholes and cracks, damage caused by the ground frost.

“I don’t know. Like I said, I haven’t gone through everything.”





Chapter 40





The old preliminary investigation could wait. It wasn’t exactly going to gather much more dust overnight.

“We’re not going to move heaven and earth,” GG had told her as they made their way back to the car, “but I want to know if there’s anything concrete in this boat thing.”

He cut across the tarmac to his car, heading back to Sundsvall. Eira paused with her keys in her hand, watching him go. Something in his tone told her he was taking this seriously; he sounded dogged, possibly resigned. He had probably thought he was done with Kramfors now, that he could spend the rest of the summer making babies.

Eira set off, back over to the sunny side of the river. Ricken was busy digging in the garden as she pulled up among the wrecked cars.

“Magnus isn’t here,” he said.

“Where is he?”

“You tried ringing him?”

“He never picks up,” said Eira. That wasn’t quite true. She hadn’t even tried to get hold of him, because she didn’t want to talk over the phone. She needed to see her brother’s reaction when she brought up Lina’s name.

“He’s got a girl over by the coast somewhere,” said Ricken, brushing the soil from his hands; he had been digging without gloves. Eira had never thought of him as a gardener, but she could actually see some beautiful roses. There were even a few potato plants sticking out of the earth.

“Where by the coast?”

“Not sure. Nordingr? maybe. Loads of shit-hot girls over there, if you ask me. The place has been crawling with Stockholmers since it became a World Heritage site.”

“Why didn’t you mention that you were one of the last people to see Lina Stavred?”

Ricken looked up at the sky, among the crowns of the trees. Following a plane making its way south.

“You were just a kid back then, sweetie.”

“I mean later, when we . . .” She felt like grabbing him, shaking him, taking hold of his evasiveness and gripping it tight, but she had tried that before. “You were the ones who put the police on to Olof’s scent. You were heroes, I don’t get why you never bragged about it.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts, a pair of cutoff jeans.

“If you’re going to have a go at me,” he said, “I’m going to need a cup of java first.”

Eira sat down in a vinyl car seat leaning against the wall of the house, one of many assorted bits of furniture scattered around the yard. This was probably Ricken’s idea of freedom, she thought, always being able to choose a different place to sit. As she listened to him rattling around behind the mosquito net over the open kitchen window, she realized that he might well have talked about Lina back then. It wasn’t the summer warmth making her face hot, it was embarrassment. Ricken just hadn’t talked to her. She had blown up their brief love affair into something far bigger than it was. A few months, in secret—almost a year if she included their trysts once it was over—that had come to define the concept of love. Its brokenness and heat, its forbidden nature.

Opening yourself up the way you don’t to anyone else.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to think about,” Ricken told her when he came back out, handing her a chipped mug of coffee. “It was horrible, like being in the middle of a horror film.” He sat down in the grass, as he had the last time she was there. “That’s why I didn’t want to talk to you about it.”

“So it didn’t have anything to do with Magnus?”

“How d’you mean?” Ricken watched a couple of small white butterflies dance across the grass.

“I just found out my own brother was seeing Lina Stavred,” said Eira. “Twenty-three years later. In an old preliminary investigation, because I happen to be in the police.”

“Ah, OK. But it was over between them when it happened . . .”

The coffee was sweet. Did he really think she still took sugar like she had back then, a hundred years ago, when she had to add spoonful after spoonful just to be able to bear the taste, to grow up faster?

“I don’t know the stats off the top of my head,” said Eira. “But one of the most dangerous things a woman can do is break up with a man who still wants her, who’s angry to have lost his power.”