We Know You Remember (76)

“When I was younger, we used to go out to places like this. All a bit out of the way, somewhere where you could feel free.”

“What did her parents say? Where did they think she was?”

“Lina had told them she was staying over at a friend’s, but she never showed up. She must have had a reason to walk all the way over to Marieberg—I mean, it’s a few kilometers away.”

“To meet boys?”

“Then why wouldn’t she just stay by the road where the whole gang was hanging out?”

“What did the police make of it?”

“They lost all interest in where she was going the minute they turned their attention to Olof Hagstr?m. It wasn’t important anymore.”

GG spun around in his chair, eyes panning out across the flat roofs of central Kramfors, a prolonged silence.

“I spoke to a doctor in Ume? yesterday,” he said. “He’s got a lung infection and a fever, but it’s going down. His pupils react, he responds to touch.”

“Do they think he’ll wake up?”

“They’re like us—they try not to second-guess.”

Eira waited out yet another silence.

“There’s a moment,” she eventually said. “In the interviews with Olof Hagstr?m.”

“Mmm?”

“Do you have time? It’ll only take a few minutes.”

“What’s this about?”

“I’d like you to see it for yourself.”

GG got up with a certain listlessness, filled his mug with coffee on the way. He grabbed a handful of jelly sweets from a plastic tub, the kind parents buy from children collecting for a school trip. There was a whole stack of them in the cupboard.

They squeezed into the cramped TV room. Eira had watched the video again, and had fast-forwarded to the right place.

The image appeared on the screen: Olof on the vinyl sofa, his eyes on the floor.

“It wasn’t like I told them . . . She pushed me and I fell . . . The ground was dirty. All kinds of muck.”

“Why didn’t you mention any of this before?”

“Because . . . because . . . She’s a girl. It’s just, I wasn’t expecting it. That must’ve been why I fell . . .”

GG munched on sweet after sweet as the disjointed story rolled towards its end. They heard the interviewer’s increasingly forceful exhortations that Olof should stop lying, the part where he asked for his mother.

Eira hit STOP.

“What if he’s telling the truth?” she said, ignoring the familiar deep-seated urge to keep quiet. “If Lina left on her own, then Nydalen’s statement could be true. Maybe there was someone waiting for her down by the river. Why else would she take that path?”

“Play it again.”

Eira rewound the tape, knew the time stamps by heart now.

“And then she grabbed some nettles, like this . . . And shoved soil in my mouth, said it was my fault she was dirty, that I’d ruined everything.”

GG took the remote control from her hand, pressed PAUSE.

“Is that a common reaction to being raped?”

“What?”

“Worrying about being dirty—in the literal sense, I mean.”

Before the segment had finished again, GG was on his feet. Pacing back and forth in the corridor outside. Eira let the video keep rolling. None of the boys she had known growing up would have told his friends if he had been pushed over and humiliated by a girl. Who wouldn’t have said what Olof was reported to have said: “Man, Lina was great. Fuck me, she was great”?

From the corridor outside, she heard snatches of a telephone conversation every time GG came closer or raised his voice.

“I’m not saying we should reopen the investigation, but if mistakes were made . . . No, I can’t do that, he’s in a coma as you know . . . Yes, I’m aware that it was over twenty years ago, but before some reporter from Sveriges Television catches wind of this . . . No, we don’t let the media steer us, that’s not what I’m saying, but if there’s a new witness statement surely we should take the initiative and put a few people on it, just to take a closer look at the area . . . ?”





Chapter 42





The man who had taken it upon himself to show her the way pushed back the branches ahead of him. There was something special about the light filtering through the birch trees that had been left to grow in peace on the old industrial land, something magical. They waded through the ferns.

“You need to know where you’re going if you want to find your way,” he said.

They were almost on top of the old sawmill in Locke when it emerged from the dense greenery ahead of them, great chunks of crumbling plaster, bricks, and cracked mortar. The forensic technicians had been working for twelve hours now, and still hadn’t reported a single find.

Eira stepped over a pile of broken bricks. The door was hanging at a forty-five-degree angle. Where there had once been windows, there were now nothing but gaping holes. A technician was moving methodically inside, carefully lifting scrap metal, sweeping away mortar. A rusty oven of some kind, fallen beams. You could see straight through the building; half the wall to the rear had collapsed.

The forest was making its way inside.

“This was the boiler house and the forge,” said the older man. He had been standing by the side of the road when Eira climbed out of the car, and had volunteered to join her, had noticed the activity in the area. “Used to be full of Norwegian refugees, they worked here during the war. Have you ever heard of Georg Scherman, the foreman who shot live rounds in the courthouse in Sollefte?? People had been cheating him out of money and the entire thing was about to go down the drain. This was before the big sawmill boom in the early twentieth century; it was like the Wild West round here . . .”