We Know You Remember (10)

“Have they found anything else?” she asked, slumping into the hammock. It creaked, and she lowered her feet to the ground to stop it swinging.

“Not much more than yesterday,” said August. “They’re still waiting for the phone provider and the train company and the traffic cameras, all that stuff, but they had more than enough to hold him. Risk of hindering the investigation, flight risk.”

“Is he talking?”

“Still denies it. They’re taking him to Sundsvall tomorrow morning so they can keep questioning him there.”

And so the lead interviewer can get home in time for dinner with the family, Eira thought.

She pictured Olof Hagstr?m in the cramped interrogation room, the way he’d seemed to completely fill it during the first interview she had conducted the day before.

The strain stemming from the knowledge of what he had done. A killer could act in rage or panic, but rape was something else entirely. She had been determined not to let him get to her when he did eventually look up. His breathing. His huge hands, resting on the table. Eira had fixed her eyes on his enormous wristwatch, an analog thing with a compass and various other features built in—you rarely saw anything like that these days—watching the second hand complete rotation after rotation as she waited for him to speak.

All interviews followed a strict pattern. If a suspect started talking freely, she was supposed to interrupt him to prevent him from saying too much before his lawyer arrived. But with Olof Hagstr?m, that hadn’t been a problem. He kept quiet as Eira read him his rights, explaining why he was there, what he was suspected of. She had just one question for him: How did he plead?

She had found his silence obstinate, almost aggressive, and had to repeat the question. The mumble that followed was faint, reeled off like a prayer.

I didn’t do it.

I didn’t do it.

How many times had he repeated those words?

“Thanks for calling,” said Eira, crushing a mosquito that was feasting on her ankle.

She spent a while in the hammock, heard the creaking and the wind, noise from a porch somewhere nearby. Her mother’s voice inside, anxious and weak.

“Hello? Is there someone out there?”





Chapter 4





Their words seemed to follow him. Voices seeping into his cell, penetrating his skull, the woman’s in particular. Hot-tempered and pushy, the kind of person who wanted to root around in him.

Poking about in things she should leave the fuck alone.

How do you plead to that?

Blah, blah, blah.

Olof paced around his cell, five steps forward, five steps back: he was nothing but a caged animal. It was as though he were back in the past, even though it was all so long ago. He’d had a more normal room then, in the place where kids like him were sent, but it still felt the same. He was locked up. Served lunch and dinner on a tray. Not that there was anything wrong with the food—beef and potatoes with sauce. It was the lack of air, the heat, making him sweat more than usual. The hole they had told him he could drink from stunk of piss. They wanted to make him drink piss. Claimed he killed his own father.

As though he’d had a father.

It almost felt easier to keep quiet in front of the male officer, from Sundsvall. Men understood something about silence. They knew it was a strength not to blabber unnecessarily. A battle to see who would cave first. Power, being measured out. Who was bigger, what you were capable of.

Olof lay down on the floor again. It wasn’t comfortable, but he would rather lie there than on the bed. It was too small for him. He glared up at the ceiling. Saw a chink of sky through the window. If he closed his eyes, he could see his father’s aged body and was reminded of all the years that had passed.

His father, getting up from the shower and coming towards him.

In this family, we don’t lie. Haven’t I taught you that? A man takes responsibility for the things he’s done.

Then he had hit him.

You tell the truth now, you little shit.

In his head, his father’s voice didn’t sound old, there was nothing pathetic or weak about it.

They’re waiting. Are you going to walk out there like a man or do I have to carry you? Well? Just how ashamed does your mother have to be of you? Don’t you have legs? Get out there now, for God’s bloody sake . . .

He didn’t remember his mother’s voice at all. A memory of being in the back seat of a car, turning around to see his home disappear through the rear window. No one standing outside.

Olof kept his eyes open for as long as he could.

The clouds raced by overhead. One looked like a spaceship, and there was a dragon, or possibly a dog. What had they done with the pooch? Shot it, sent it to a kennel somewhere? He wondered about the car, too. Was it still parked by the house, or had they taken it too—like they had taken his phone and his driving license and the clothes off his back? He didn’t want to think about what the boss would say. How many times he must have screamed into his voicemail by now, asking where the fuck the Pontiac was. Or maybe he was celebrating Midsummer, telling himself it would show up when it showed up. Olof had always done a good job on the drives, that was why he got a decent cut. And he hadn’t actually said a word to the police about where the car was going, just that he’d bought it from a private individual in Harads. That was technically true, though the money wasn’t his.