We Know You Remember (78)

“I guess she was nervous about speaking to the police. And she assumed someone would come out here to listen to what she had to say.”

“And you’re sure about the date, that it was around the time Lina Stavred went missing?”

The woman thought for a moment.

“Maybe not sure,” she said. “I know she mentioned it then, of course—I had to leave the kids to drive up here and stay over, so it was definitely something. I offered to go and have a look the next day. She didn’t want me to, but I went over anyway, in the middle of the day. I didn’t see anything. Maybe it was just that everything she was worried about came flooding out, you know how it can be. Something happened then, but other aspects might’ve been ten years old.”

Eira reminded her not to mention their conversation to anyone else, and praised the rhubarb juice before she left.



The landscape became increasingly spectacular as she approached the High Coast. The road wound between soft hills and sheer rock faces rising increasingly sharply above her, lakes and bays, the flat water reflecting the dark forests and the bright sky.

It was like something out of a fairy tale, something enchanted; that was the type of word it conjured up.

Eira had no trouble finding the right address, a farmstead just south of Nordingr?.

FLEA MARKET—GALLERY—COFFEE, read the hand-painted sign. There were several cars parked on the driveway, though not like at Ricken’s place, far from it. These cars were all gleaming, Audis and BMWs. One had German plates, another Norwegian. Tourists making their way through the World Heritage region.

The woman Magnus was currently staying with held out a cool hand. Marina Arnesdotter. She was older than him, somewhere around fifty, and sold her own ceramics from the barn. Fortunately she was busy with customers.

“But take some lime pie in with you,” she said, serving two slices onto a plate from the table outside the gallery. “It’s so nice that you’ve come to visit.”

The word “nice” clung to Eira like a cruel irony as she knocked on the door. Magnus answered, but he didn’t welcome her in, just turned and walked through to the kitchen.

His hair was shorter than it had been the last time she’d seen him. Even during his worst periods, his hair had always looked good. He never had to pay to have it cut.

“Have you been together long?” Eira asked once she had taken a seat, attempting to start somewhere less painful.

Magnus shrugged, his back to her. “It’s nothing serious.”

“She seems nice. Older than you.”

“Marina’s great. She leaves me be, doesn’t nag all the time.”

“I’ve got a meeting with the support officer next week.”

“OK.” Magnus irritably shook a tin of coffee, searching the cupboards for more and closing the doors a little too hard. Eira felt herself flinch inside; it was second nature for sounds like that to leave her uneasy. A sign of arguments brewing. Her brother shouting and screaming, lashing out. At the doors and walls, not his family. Mum crying as the door slammed shut. The sound of his engine, his motorcycle on the gravel, the silence once he was gone.

“What was she like?” said Eira.

“She was asleep last time I went over,” said Magnus. “But everything seemed fine.”

“Come off it, you know who I mean. Lina Stavred. How do you think it felt to find out that she was your girlfriend from the preliminary report?”

“You were still playing with dolls back then.”

“I used to pretend that they’d died,” said Eira. “I threw my Barbie into the river and watched the current carry her away.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Magnus leaned back against the kitchen counter. Ran a hand through his hair, the way he always had.

“What was I supposed to say? I was just a fucking kid back then, I thought she was the love of my life, that the two of us were, like . . .”

He was near a breaking point, Eira had sensed that the moment she stepped inside, a looming eruption, like when the birds fall silent ahead of a thunderstorm, the harsh sun warning of rain. Another person wouldn’t have noticed, all the small signs: the anxious hands, the tense jaw, eyes locked onto the window without really taking anything in.

“Ricken called to say you’d been over,” he said. “So you talk to him about me now, do you? Behind my back.”

“I was looking for you.”

“Say what you wanted to say, then.”

“It’s to do with Lina’s case,” she began. “There are things in the old investigation that . . .” Eira ate a spoonful of lime pie, weighing one thing against another, his anger against being honest, the truth against a longing to avoid a fight. Arnesdotter knew how to bake, she had to give her that. “It might have been another perpetrator.”

“What the fuck.” Magnus didn’t move, which was almost worse than him hitting something. He already knows, she thought, he’s not surprised. But why is he pretending this is news to him? “So the cops are coming for me again, are they? You recording this conversation?”

“No, I’m not.”

“And how am I meant to know that?”

Eira pulled out her phone and pushed it across the table.