We Know You Remember (95)

“Sometimes you just have to admit that you’re wrong. That’s a lesson too. Cheers!”

Yet another whisky disappeared.





Chapter 55





A blood alcohol level of 0.8 per mill. Magnus Sj?din had been pulled over in a routine traffic stop just south of H?rn?sand.

“Was that why you tried to call me yesterday?” asked Eira.

“I thought you would want to know,” said August.

She had had three missed calls from him the evening before, but Eira hadn’t called back. She had assumed August wanted to meet and didn’t have the energy to fix herself up, to act sexy; she had thought it would do him good to experience a bit of resistance.

That was why she had only just found out, at work, when he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her into an empty meeting room.

“What were you doing there, south of H?rn?sand?” she asked.

“I did an extra shift yesterday, they needed people. We were the closest car when the call came in for help transporting the person they’d apprehended.”

“How did you know he was my brother?”

“He said.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, or . . . he shouted it really, that his sister was a cop.”

Eira slumped into a chair. The conference table stretched out in front of her like an ocean. Someone had left a few half-empty bottles of sparkling water behind.

“I’m sorry,” said August. “I didn’t even realize you had a brother.”

Because I didn’t tell you, she thought, because no one needs to know.

She had spent the night awake, wondering if he was dead. Whether he had slammed into a rock face somewhere, anywhere; the whole of the ?dalen river valley was full of rock faces to smash into. Or maybe he had jumped from the High Coast Bridge or sped off the end of a jetty and was sitting in a car thirty meters below the surface, fish swimming around him.

Images like that.

No, she had thought. Magnus would never kill himself, he loves his kids, his beautiful boys, despite being a useless father. As though people who committed suicide didn’t love their children. It was themselves they couldn’t stand.

But he was alive.

Unbeknownst to her, her brother had been sitting in a cell in the county town all night. Magnus, who couldn’t handle being shut in, who ran the minute a woman tried to pin him down.

Eira remembered his girlfriend in Nordingr? and sent her a quick message to say that she knew where Magnus was but that she couldn’t talk now.

It struck her that there were only twenty or so kilometers between the woman’s house and where he was arrested, yet he had been missing for almost forty-eight hours.

“Did Magnus say where he’d been?”

“I don’t know,” said August. “He was coming from the south. Said he was going home, that he didn’t want to go into fucking H?rn?sand.”

“Home? Home where?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He called us fascist pigs and stuff like that. Said he needed to talk to his sister, because she was a real cop, not an idiot like the rest of us.”

Eira had to laugh. “That’s my brother.”

Then she had to cry. An awkward hand on the back of her neck, August pulled her in close. He smelled like hand sanitizer and soap, his hands soft, no calluses or hard skin.

“Hey,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I’m OK.”

Eira pulled away and got up, wiped her face on her sleeve. “Isn’t there anything going on here? Has the criminal world gone on holiday?”



No one was willing to admit it, but police officers wanted things to happen. They hadn’t joined the force to be called out over false alarms or breakins that had happened months earlier.

They wanted to go all in, to use their full capacity; they wanted to feel their hearts racing, adrenaline pumping—which isn’t to say that they advocated crime.

It was the same as surgeons getting off on complex operations, actors on Hamlet and King Lear.

Eira took one last look at the records scattered across the floor.

“Those bastards,” said the man who had just come up to his cabin for a much-anticipated break. “They’ve nicked my entire Bowie collection.”

“You might want to consider having an alarm fitted,” said Eira.

“Should that really be necessary? In the countryside?”

“Bowie’s on Spotify these days,” said August, a remark that made the owner of the cabin look like he wanted to kill someone.

As they drove away, they passed the road to Lockne for the third time that day. Eira felt a powerful urge to turn off.

She hadn’t heard whether the technicians had found anything else.

Surely she would have heard if they had?

On the radio, if nowhere else. She had stopped August when he tried to change to a better music station, forced him to listen to the local radio all morning. The police had released Kenneth Isaksson’s name and picture, that was the latest development. Eira guessed the investigators must be snowed under with tips by now, the majority of which would prove utterly worthless.

Their focus would be on Magnus. That was certainly how she would have looked at it. Someone who could be definitively linked to the crime scene, who had relations with the same woman as the victim, intimate relations; she worried they would throw everything into that line of inquiry.