We Know You Remember (77)

Eira watched the technicians’ glove-clad movements, studying the objects they picked up, old tools and levers, a rusty chain.

Twenty thousand men had worked in the forestry industry in its heyday, and there had been sixty sawmills in the valley. The only one still in operation—in Bollstabruk—now produced more than those sixty mills combined, with fewer than three hundred employees.

Those who didn’t know better called the area sparsely populated, rural, but the truth was that the ?dalen river valley was, at heart, an industrial area. And though the industries were long gone, they still lingered, like phantom pains.

Scattered stories from someone who had heard it from someone else. A slow recovery, nature eating its way in.

The man was still behind Eira, peering over her shoulder. He had fallen quiet when she failed to respond to his knowledge of former sawmill bosses.

“Do you get a lot of kids hanging around here?” she asked.

“Not these days. They’ve probably got better things to do. Netflix and that kind of thing, I suppose, the few still living in the area.”

“Were you here in the midnineties?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Arrived in the seventies, from Arboga. It wasn’t anywhere near as dilapidated back then, of course—I think the walls were still intact, but I’m not sure. You stop paying any notice once you’ve seen it a few times; you look past it all. But this place has never drawn a lot of visitors, it’s so inaccessible, barely even visible from the road—or the river, for that matter.”

The forensic technician spotted them and came over with a brick in one hand. They introduced themselves through the empty window.

“What a place,” he said. “Strange that people haven’t made off with everything. It’s like an archaeological dig, except everything’s already lying out in the open.”

It was OK for her to come in, there was hardly likely to be any evidence that the local wildlife and the weather hadn’t already destroyed. Eira thanked her guide and was just about to climb the half-meter to the door where the steps had rotted away when her phone rang.

A prepaid number she knew by heart.

She pushed through a tangle of nettles and sat down on the stone foundation of something long gone.

“What are you lot up to?” asked Magnus.

“Why don’t you ever pick up?” She had tried to call him several times. It irritated her when he made himself unreachable.

“Sorry for not constantly being on my phone,” he said. “What did you want?”

“To talk.”

“About something that happened twenty-three years ago?”

He knows, thought Eira. He picks up when his friend calls. It’s me he doesn’t want to speak to.

“Why didn’t you ever mention that Lina Stavred was your girlfriend?”

“I heard you were sniffing about in that,” said Magnus. “What’s the point?”

The wind whispered in the trees, a cuckoo calling in the distance. If only it was possible to isolate the sounds of the forest from those of her body, her pulse, the beat of her heart, it would have been idyllic.

“I’d rather not do this over the phone,” said Eira.



Barely fifty meters from the old forge was a yellow wooden house dating back to the sawmill’s heyday. It looked like it had once been a manager’s villa.

That was where the old widow once lived, the one who had called in the complaints. One of her daughters had since taken over the family home, and offered Eira a glass of rhubarb juice in the garden.

“I remember it very well,” she said. “Mum wanted me to come up here virtually every five minutes—I was living down in H?rn?sand at the time. She was so shaken up by what happened.”

Ingamaj was long dead, of course. She was already over eighty when Lina Stavred vanished.

“Why are you getting in touch now? Mum said no one even bothered to call her back, that no one wanted to listen to an old woman.”

Eira considered her words. There wasn’t a person in Lockne who didn’t already know that the police were sniffing about the old mill, but they hardly had any reason to link that to Lina’s disappearance.

“We’ve received a new tip,” she said. “So we’re also going through a number of old ones. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anyone. It’ll just make our work harder.”

“No, no, of course,” said the woman, pouring more juice. It was made according to her mother’s recipe, and her grandmother’s before her.

She remembered parts of what Ingamaj had talked about, back in the nineties.

That there were some teenagers hanging around in the old forge. She had noticed the smell first, when they lit a fire. The ground was so dry at the time, there was a real risk of it spreading.

Ingamaj had walked to the edge of the property and shouted at them, but they just laughed. She had later seen one of them washing in the river, when she went down there to rinse her rag rugs—something she insisted on doing despite having had a washing machine for decades.

He looked like a bum.

“Mum’s words, obviously.”

Unless she was mistaken, someone else had also pulled up on a motorcycle.

“This is more than your mother said over the phone,” said Eira.