We Know You Remember (97)

It really was high time they sorted out the garden. The flower beds and vegetable patch were Kerstin’s pride and joy—on par with her book collection—yet somehow they had been neglected over the summer.

Eira knew it was entirely her fault. All it would have taken was for her to say, “Let’s do a bit of work in the garden today” and Kerstin would have been out the door in a flash, remembering exactly where she had left her gardening gloves.

Taking the initiative was a complex process for the brain, one of the first things to go.

Kerstin was now on her knees, yanking goosefoot out of the potato patch, pulling up the hops snaking around the red currant bushes.

“I just don’t understand how it could have spread so much, I only weeded it recently.”

Eira loosened the soil, turning it over and making the worms and wood lice wriggle and scuttle in the light of day. She tried to remember the flower beds in their glory, to distinguish the weeds from whatever had simply finished blooming.

“Careful!” Kerstin shouted as Eira tugged on something with a thick stalk and dense leaves. “That’s a fire lily, can’t you see?”

“And this?”

“No, no, no, a daylily. I got that cutting from your granny. And be careful with the Finnish rose—it only flowers for a week, but oh, what a lovely smell.”

And so on.

When her thoughts became too much, Eira started the strimmer and shut out the world with a pair of ear defenders. That meant she didn’t notice someone was approaching until Kerstin straightened up and pulled off her gloves, hitting them together to get rid of the soil and raising a hand to shade her eyes.

Eira felt an immediate sense of danger, a premonition of misfortune, when she saw who it was.

Silje Andersson, strolling towards them in a white shirt. Her mouth moved, she said something. Eira turned off the strimmer and took off the ear defenders as her colleague greeted her mother.

“Sorry, I can see you’ve got your hands full here, but could I borrow Eira a moment?” The breezy tone only reinforced the sense that she was intruding.

“That’s OK, isn’t it, Mum?”

“Yes, yes, you go, I’ll soldier on. You have to pull up the roots with the thistles, you know, otherwise they’ll split and triple by next summer.”

She seemed so happy, so comfortable and content. Eira glanced back as she made her way to the other side of the house, wanted to see her like that again.

Silje paused once they had rounded the corner of the building.

“I could have just called,” she said. “But I thought it would be better to come and talk to you in person. I heard you were off duty.”

“Is it about Magnus?” said Eira. “Have you questioned him?”

“The prosecutor has decided to remand him in custody.”

“For drunk driving? The reading was only zero point eight, surely that should only be a fine . . . ?” She knew she had said “only” twice in quick succession, that she shouldn’t play down a crime in that way; drunk driving was drunk driving, even if it wasn’t serious.

“For murder,” said Silje. “Or the manslaughter of Kenneth Isaksson.”

Eira instinctively cast a glance over to the road. She could see a man washing his car. The people next door were oiling their garden furniture on the lawn.

She fled into the house and gestured for Silje to follow her.

Closed the door.

“There’s no way,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I knew he’d be questioned because of the DNA they found, but . . .”

Eira gripped the edge of the chest of drawers. The rest of the house was spinning, but the pale green chest of drawers and its iron hardware was steady. An heirloom from someone who had died long before she was even born.

“What does he say?” she asked.

“He denies it.”

“Was it you who interviewed him?”

“GG started this morning, but then he had me take over.”

“I see.”

Silje Andersson, who could make a man’s jaw drop just by entering a room.

“And Lina?”

“So far our suspicions only concern Kenneth Isaksson,” said Silje.

“So far?”

“You know I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.”

“Have you found her?”

“They’ve expanded the search area.”

The investigator was standing less than two meters away from Eira, trying to be compassionate while paying attention to her every reaction. The porch was too small for both of them.

“We’ll need to talk to you too, but we can do that at the station tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know.”

Silje opened her diary and started talking about penciling something in, about things like mornings and afternoons and times.

“Who is his lawyer?” asked Eira.

She wrote down a name she vaguely recognized on an envelope in the hallway.

“See you tomorrow, then,” said Silje.



They always used to burn the weeds in the garden, but that was typically earlier in the spring. There was a ban on fires across the entire country right then.

Eira shoved everything they had pulled out into black rubbish bags. She had a memory of her mother cooking goosefoot from time to time, boiling it in cream and serving it with salmon.