We Know You Remember (92)

“Like what?”

“Like sleeping with other people, for example—which I’m not. Who could it even be? I spend all my time in the workshop and the gallery.”

“You said a few days ago, but can you be more exact?”

“It wasn’t even evening. I mean, who starts drinking in the middle of the day? And when I woke up this morning he was gone. I always get up before him.”

Eira forgot all about the blackflies, barely even felt them biting. She managed to get the woman to tell her when it had started.

“But he was pretty jumpy even before that, ever since you were here actually . . .”

It could be a coincidence. The woman had probably wanted them to have a glass of wine, a cozy evening together, but Eira knew it wouldn’t be cozy. Marina Arnesdotter was likely one of those people who had one glass and ended up drinking the entire bottle, but if Magnus did the same he might keep drinking for weeks. Eira tried her best to convince herself that it was the woman’s fault, with her ceramic hearts and the natural wines she almost certainly drank, but there was no escaping the facts.

It had started the same day the news of the find in Lockne broke.

“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. Imagine if he’s hurt himself . . .”

At lunchtime, on that very day. Eira could no longer feel the hand gripping her phone; it was ice cold.

“Call me the minute you hear anything.”

“You too.”





Chapter 52





They were just back from a car chase that had taken them north of Sollefte?, almost all the way up to Junsele. The carjackers had driven off the road and been apprehended.

Known couriers from the criminal underworld, transporting drugs from the south of the country to the roads of Norrland, via Sundsvall. Now they were in custody, had been dropped off at the cells, and Eira was standing by the coffee machine.

“Do you have a minute?”

The voice was GG’s, behind her back. Eira accidentally pressed the wrong button and a beige cappuccino the color of pale sludge started streaming into the mug instead of her usual extra-strong filter coffee.

“Absolutely,” she said, turning around with a smile.

GG nodded for her to follow him, closed the door behind them.

“We’ve got a match on her DNA,” he said.

“Lina’s?”

“You were right. It was her dress. She obviously wasn’t in the database, given that she disappeared before DNA analysis was really a thing, but they managed to match it to the cardigan.”

Eira slumped into an armchair.

“So we’re expanding the search,” said GG. He was facing the window, away from her. “Bringing in more people. If she’s there, we’ll find her.”

Eira had left her coffee at the machine, and her body was screaming for caffeine after that morning’s lengthy call out. The headache started at the base of her skull, spreading upwards. A weariness in her body after the adrenaline of the chase.

“That clears Olof Hagstr?m, in any case,” she said.

“Steady on,” said GG. “We still don’t have a body. Theoretically, she could have dumped the dress on another occasion.”

“And left there naked?”

“We found DNA from the dead man too, Kenneth Isaksson, on what looks like it might’ve been his sleeping bag—though some animal seems to have eaten most of it. A badger, that’s what forensics thought.”

“Is there anything linking him to Lina?”

“Yup. Both their DNA on the remains of a rucksack.”

“So they were there together.” Eira saw the same image in her mind again, of Lina walking into the woods. Summer dress, yellow cardigan, a small rucksack. The kind she used to carry to school, though that wasn’t where she was going. It was like a film clip playing on repeat.

“The old forge is obviously full of DNA,” GG continued. “God knows if they haven’t also found the DNA of whoever used to make tools or whatever they did there.”

He took a seat in the armchair opposite her.

“But they also got a hit on someone else,” he said. “From a condom, of all places. There were a couple of them there.”

“Yeah, I saw,” said Eira, recalling the objects on the floor as she noticed the shift in his tone.

“One Magnus Erik Veine Sj?din.”

The Erik was after their grandfather, Veine after their dad; names that had been passed down through the generations, so you knew where you came from and where you belonged.

“That’s my brother,” she said. “My older brother.”

The air in the room was as stuffy as ever. No, worse than usual. Suffocating.

“I know,” said GG. “His name came up immediately because we already had him on file. Nothing serious, but a few thefts, an assault . . .”

“OK.”

“There were traces of Lina Stavred there, too. On the same object.”

Eira felt herself falling, through the armchair and down to the ground floor. She saw herself running away.

They had been to the forge in Lockne, she thought. They had sex. But that doesn’t prove anything. All it proves is that they had sex.

You bastard, she thought. What the hell have you done?