We Know You Remember (99)

Magnus.

Eira forced herself up to the surface, opened her eyes. She knew the dream so well that she recognized it for what it was even in her sleep. Still, it made her heart race.

Light spilled into the room. It was dawn, just after four o’clock. The blind was up. She had fallen asleep on top of the covers.

There were no scents in her dreams, but she still thought she could smell them, like a taste in her mouth. The slightly brackish water, the decay. She brushed her teeth and reheated an old cup of coffee.

It was just a dream. Any old amateur psychologist would have frowned and said that she felt a need to save her brother, but that wasn’t the thought that lingered, or the feeling of floating freely among the dead.

It was the rowing boat, the one that had washed ashore.

She knew the movements of the river, understood the currents; five hundred cubic meters of water passed through the power stations every second, before continuing out to the Gulf of Bothnia. Was it really possible that an unmanned rowing boat could have meandered past the islands and drifted ashore in Spr?ngsviken, just downstream of Lunde, where she currently was? She sat still for some time, staring at the trees outside her bedroom window as her mind journeyed along the river.

A great tit flapped away as she stood up.

She got dressed and checked in on her mother, who had spent the night asleep on the sofa. Then she went out and started the car.



Lockne was quiet at that time of day. None of the crime scene technicians had arrived yet. Despite that, Eira left her car a little farther along the road, hidden behind an abandoned outbuilding. Vigilant neighbors could easily be up at five in the morning, wondering who she was.

She crossed a line as she ducked beneath the plastic cordon. This was a crime scene, one to which she didn’t technically have access. The morning sun filtered among the trees, glittering in the spiderwebs and the dew. The ground had been dug up in places, and she saw heaps of earth and torn moss. Eira found herself thinking about the dioxin that must have been released into the air.

At the edge of the river, among clumps of reeds and the old pillars of the jetty, the dragonflies were hovering over the surface of the water. Emerald green, translucent wings, a breathlessness to them.

Those few short lines.

Tell my sister I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her.

Magnus had begged for her understanding, that wasn’t so strange, but why had he mentioned only Lina when it was Kenneth Isaksson he was accused of killing?

You don’t do that kind of thing to the person you love. Tell Eira, so she understands.

Eira couldn’t shake the feeling that it sounded like a riddle.

What did he want her to understand?

That he had killed Kenneth Isaksson out of love for Lina?

If Magnus had brought an iron bar crashing down onto Kenneth Isaksson’s head, it would have hardly been because he thought it was fun. He had never even pulled the wings off a fly. That was what their mother had told Eira after she caught her in the act, that Magnus had certainly never done anything like that at her age.

The white morning haze was thick over the river, obscuring the beach on the other side of the bay. Eira could just see them making their way over in the boat, city boy Kenneth, who barely knew how to row, and Lina, sprawled in the stern in her thin summer dress.

If Magnus knew that the girl he loved was coming out here with someone else. If Lina had thrown that fact in his face, trying to make him jealous; if this was their secret meeting place, where she and Magnus had discarded used condoms, then that would have been a brutal provocation.

A real kick in the teeth.

If Magnus had come out here. On his motorbike, of course, the lightweight thing he had back then, the blue one. Eira remembered the vibrations, the dizzying speed from the few times he had let her ride with him. But then it had been stolen, and he had got himself another one, red this time.

They came on motorcycles, too.

That was what she had said, the old woman who lived nearby, she had talked about the damn motorcycle.

If Magnus had parked by the forge. Crept over and saw them together, through one of the many broken windows, Lina with her dress off. If he was wounded and half-mad with envy, and there were iron bars everywhere . . . Or maybe it was Kenneth who spotted him, who started a fight, and Magnus had to defend himself . . .

Eira slumped down onto a rock a few meters from the spot where they had found the first few pieces of Kenneth Isaksson’s body buried beneath the blue clay.

Lina was the only one who didn’t fit into the picture. It was as though she withdrew, out of sight, vanishing into thin air like the mist over the river.

Had Magnus’s fury continued? Had he completely lost his mind, did it happen during the chaos of their fight?

Had he hidden a body beneath the junk in the river and then gone on to dig a grave for her?

Magnus wasn’t the kind of cool, calculating person who tidied up after himself. It was Eira who had inherited those traits. He was all impulse and emotion, a leaf in the wind; Magnus was chaos.

Eira picked up a stick and threw it into the river. A few of the dragonflies careered off to one side, and the rings spread out across the surface of the water. The stick remained where it had landed on the surface, barely moving. The current didn’t reach that far into the bay. A boat would hardly have drifted off on its own, not unless there was a storm blowing. It might have bobbed about by the bank, maybe even moved a short distance in the breeze, but it would’ve caught in the first beaver’s dam.