We Know You Remember (87)

Either that or he was simply slow.

“Lina, you mean?”

“Mmm.”

“Hasn’t anyone else lived here since?”

“They moved to Finland pretty soon after, wound everything up. Her dad worked with agricultural machinery and I think her mum was a teacher.”

She saw the curtains still hanging in the windows. That wasn’t unusual. People didn’t always know whether they would be coming back.

“Once a year had passed, they asked for her to be declared dead—as soon as they could, in other words, considering there was no body.”

August walked along the fence, pushed open the gate. The hinges creaked softly.

“How could anyone just leave a house like this?” he asked. “It’s the value they’re destroying.”

“I guess they didn’t really think about that.”

“I don’t just mean this cottage, everywhere. Why don’t people buy them up—OK, not this one, but all the others—and renovate them, sell them to people from Stockholm or Germany? You could do good business like that.”

“If you renovate somewhere up here,” said Eira, feeling irritated that he had called it a cottage when it was actually a fairly grand ?ngermanland-style building over two floors, “then it’s because the house needs it, or because you want to make things nice round about. You’ll never get your money back. It costs far more to renovate than you can squeeze out of the property market.”

“That’s just because people haven’t discovered the area yet. Once they see how beautiful it is . . .”

She felt his breath on her neck, his arms around her waist.

“My, my, what’s going on here?”

Eira struggled out of August’s embrace and turned around. An elderly woman in shorts and a sun hat was standing on the gravel track, clutching a lead in one hand. Her dog was likely running loose somewhere nearby.

“For all this business to be dredged up again,” she said.

They moved closer and introduced themselves. There was something about the woman’s surname that sounded familiar. Nyberg was fairly common, but still.

“There have been journalists snooping about out here too, filming things, ever since you found that body in Lockne. But it wasn’t Lina, was it? They said on the news that it was a man, do you know who . . . ?”

“Not yet,” said Eira.

The woman squinted in the sun. “So what are you doing here, at the Stavreds’ place? Surely there’s nothing left to see here. The police asked around back then, they investigated all sorts. They were good people who just wanted to pay their way.”

She turned towards the house, perhaps more than to Eira, as though the Stavreds were still present and could hear her words.

“Did you know them?”

“Yes, oh yes, of course. I live just over there.” She pointed to a red semidetached house no more than two hundred meters away. “The girls were always out playing when they were little—and after that, too. Once they found other games to play, I suppose you could say.”

Nyberg, Nyberg . . . Names and statements from the witness interviews tumbled through Eira’s head. Neighbors, friends.

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Elvira, though people have always called her Elvis. Why do you want to know?”

“I think I recognize the name.”

“Yes, she’s got the nail salon in Kramfors, maybe you’ve met her there? Though she’s called Sj?gren now, that’s her married name . . .”

The woman glanced at Eira’s nails. They certainly didn’t look like they regularly saw the inside of a salon. Unpainted, cut short.

“Do you really have to bother her with all that stuff again? You have no idea how long it took for Elvis to dare to think to the future again. Years and years. She and Lina had known each other all their lives. I held that girl in my arms myself. He’s the one who did it, Hagstr?m’s lad, it was solved, it’s just the papers speculating like usual, isn’t it?”

The woman was anxious, that much was clear. Perhaps not even she fully believed what she was saying.

“Who cuts the grass?” asked August.

“If you let the forest take over, that’s it. At least this way people can see that there’s someone here from time to time. That’s not a crime, is it?”



They had made it only a few kilometers when Eira’s phone pinged with a message.

Where are you?

She pulled over to the side of the road. It was from GG. She wrote back to say that they were in Bj?rtr?, on their way in.

Got time to swing by Kungsg?rden?

Eira’s pulse picked up. No new alerts had come in from the command center in Ume?, so an afternoon coffee at the station was virtually all that was beckoning.

OK, why? she wrote, waiting for a horse box to pass before she pulled back out onto the road. She drove slowly, clutching her phone to the wheel, saw a new message come in.

Ask Nydalen if this could have been the person he saw.

Ping. Ping.

A face appeared on her screen.

Long, dark hair. Narrow face, softish features. Eyes staring, like the majority of people in a passport photograph. The young man looked to be in his twenties.

“What’s this about?” August asked, for the second or third time.