We Know You Remember (73)

“What the hell are you suggesting?”

“Nothing,” she said. “But that’s clearly what the detectives thought at first, until you and your friends pointed out Olof Hagstr?m. Did you do it to protect Magnus?”

“There were five of us who saw them,” he said. “It wasn’t just me.”

“I read who was there, Ricken. The others were at least a year younger than you . . .”

“What is this, a fucking interrogation? Shouldn’t you read me my rights?”

Ricken got up, or rather leapt to his feet, and started walking barefoot towards the river. Tense shoulders, nervousness, wiry muscles beneath tanned skin.

Eira put down her cup.

She had lost her virginity in an abandoned oil cistern. There had been a time when she thought that was something remarkable, something utterly unique, shameful, and incredibly arousing—particularly as she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about it.

He forbade her.

One afternoon many years ago, in early spring, she was sixteen at the time. Ricken had pulled up in their yard, the crunch of brakes on gravel. He was twenty-four. How long had she secretly been in love with him? Two years, three? Long before she understood what things really meant.

Magnus wasn’t home, probably with a girl or at some temp job. Eira didn’t care which, because Ricken hung around and she got to try out the lines she had been practicing beneath the covers in her room.

“I can come with you instead.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere I’ve never been before.”

His arm resting in the open window, cigarette in his hand. She did the same, blew the smoke outside.

The two enormous oil cisterns were on one of the islands in the shadow of the Sand? Bridge, nestled between the overgrown trees. Rusty metal. The last remnants of the sulfite factory that had been torn down during the seventies. Ricken knew which door to take.

An empty cistern, fifty or one hundred meters of enclosed space over their heads. The place was full of junk, bottles, and a sleeping bag, a sleeping mat. They ran around, through the echoes of each other’s voices, shouting and singing, until eventually she let herself fall and dragged him down with her.

“Magnus is going to kill me,” he mumbled during their very first kiss, but they had kept going, despite the floor being filthy and hard.

The echo of the sounds he’d made was still inside her. She had kept quiet, trying not to embarrass herself, too scared to say that it was her first time.

He probably knew.

“You’re not going to say anything about this, are you?” he asked as he dropped her off afterwards, down by the road in case Magnus was already home. “He needs to hear it from me. He’ll kill me otherwise. You promise?”

It felt strange to place a hand on his shoulder. His sun-warmed skin. So long ago now. Ricken flinched at her touch.

“I just want to know,” said Eira.

The lawn sloped sharply towards the edge of the river. He had a small jetty, with a wooden rowing boat.

“Once they closed the case,” he said, “it was like we never talked about Lina again. Magnus couldn’t handle it. It was forbidden territory, a minefield, if you know what I mean. And I couldn’t talk to you about it—that would’ve been like betraying him . . .”

“I understand.” Their friendship came before all else, she knew that. Always had.

“He was at my place whenever he wasn’t at the station, couldn’t stop shaking. He thought they were going to frame him.”

“Was he really in love with her?”

Ricken nodded. “Lina wasn’t as innocent as she looked in the pictures, she really messed with his feelings, broke up with him and then wanted to keep seeing him anyway. That whole game, you know? Magnus was a complete wreck when it turned out she was dead, he cleared off and didn’t say where he was going, didn’t even tell your mum. I don’t know where he slept.”

Eira tried to remember, but all she could recall was a general sense of anxiety for Magnus, shouting and screaming at home. Though that could have been any year back then.

Drugs being found, skipping school, money disappearing.

“A new witness has come forward,” she said softly. “Someone who claims to have seen Lina later that evening, in a boat on the river.”

Ricken turned around, his eyes boring into her, green shifting to brown, a color she could never forget.

“That’s impossible,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Olof confessed.”

“Over a month later,” said Eira. “After the interviewers fed him every last detail from their own theories.”

“What are you getting at?”

“When the police search started, you didn’t get in touch to say you’d seen her straightaway. Why did you wait until they were tipped off?”

Ricken slumped down to the grass.

“Because that’s what I decided,” he said. “And I told the others to keep their mouths shut, otherwise we’d all be in trouble. I was terrified of what they might tell the cops. We’d been smoking up there, and I was the one who got the hash. I sold it by the joint to anyone who couldn’t afford any more. I was an idiot back then.”

“You’ve always been an idiot.”

A crooked smile. “I know. And I let them look at my porno mags, too.”