We Know You Remember (11)

This was probably the end of the driving for him. It was the best job he’d ever had—on the road all by himself, better than both the lumberyard and the warehouse. There was always someone checking up on him there, bossing him about and giving him orders in a way that made him make mistakes.

In the end he closed his eyes. The door rattled and the guard strode in. Olof rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows.

“What now?”

The guard was the pumped-up type, with a shaved head and Schwarzeneggeresque muscles. It looked like he was smiling. Probably laughing at him. Olof was used to people staring.

“You can keep the clothes,” said the guard.

“What else would I do? Go to the pisser naked?” Olof tugged at the sleeve of his sweater, which was a little too short, the tracksuit bottoms they’d pulled from a box when they booked him in. His own had probably been sent off for analysis. To be scrutinized, studied under a microscope. He wondered whether they would find any blood they could use to send him down. He hadn’t seen any blood. If there had been any, it must have washed away.

The guard was still standing in the doorway, may have said something else.

“What?”

“I said you’re free to go.”





Chapter 5





A suspected drunk driver in Bollstabruk, a car that had left the road on the bend. A number of different calls, the same vehicle. The driver had destroyed the barriers but missed the rock face, a wrecked Saab smoking by the side of the road.

“Oh, shit, you’re Mange Sj?din’s sister,” the man groaned as they pulled him out.

Eira vaguely recognized him from high school, one of the handsome kids a year or two ahead of her. She grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed the smoke as she racked her brain trying to remember whether they had ever made out.

“I was on my way home,” he slurred. “My girl broke up with me on Saturday, you know what it’s like. I thought the boys were giving me low-alcohol beer, I swear, I just swerved to avoid some idiot driver, swerved on the curve, ha-ha.”

The Breathalyser gave a reading of 2.0 per mill.

“How’s Mange doing these days? Been ages since I saw him. Come on, Eva, you know me.”

His rant continued from the back seat as they drove him to Kramfors. All deceitful buddies and feminists and closures, everything that could happen to an innocent man. The dimensions of the bend in the road were all wrong; they should take it up with the authorities, not him.

“Can’t be easy to lock up your old friends,” August Engelhardt said once they had dumped him in custody.

“He’s not my friend.”

“But it must happen all the time in places like this.”

“You just deal with it,” Eira muttered, sounding more irritated than intended. “It’s not a problem so long as you’re professional.”

She asked August to write up the report and took her coffee over to her desk. He wouldn’t be around for long. Three months, that was Eira’s guess. He wouldn’t last six.

She had two messages. Someone called Ingela Berg Haider had tried to get in touch, and Georg Georgsson, the murder detective from Violent Crimes, wanted a chat. Eira had caught a glimpse of him down the corridor, just before the call came in from Bollstabruk. Six foot five and slightly scruffy, in a tailored jacket that showed he came from the city.



“Ah, good, we meet at last. Eva Sj?berg, right?”

Georg Georgsson put his newspaper to one side as she stepped into the room. His handshake was strong, eager. They had met at least three times before, while investigating an arson the previous winter, and at a conference where he gave a talk.

“Eira,” she said. “Sj?din.”

“Right, right, me and names. Great you could come by.”

He sat down on the edge of the desk. The room was sterile, with two hardy potted plants in the window. No family photographs or children’s drawings on the walls; it was an anonymous space for visiting detectives to work. She had heard that in Sundsvall, they called him GG.

“Good work on Friday. That was no small guy you took on.”

“Thanks, but there were two of us.”

“So if it wasn’t the son going all Oedipus and killing his father, what have we got?” GG drummed his pen against his palm, as though to raise the tempo. He probably wants to get home within the next few days, thought Eira, to escape the mute loneliness of a room at the Hotel Kramm. Assuming he wasn’t commuting back and forth, of course. “Some people want to believe that we don’t prioritize this kind of thing,” he continued. “That we’re far too willing to release suspected criminals, that the old folks who live out in the sticks aren’t our priority.”

“As far as I know, he wasn’t even in the area at the time.”

Though Eira wasn’t involved in the investigation, she had heard the prosecutor’s justification for releasing Olof Hagstr?m. They weren’t talking about a perfectly doable detour of a few miles—it was a distance of five hundred kilometers. And his claims had been carefully verified by the technicians.

According to the preliminary report, Sven Hagstr?m had died at some point on Monday. Olof had been at home at the time, in Upplands Bro, a suburb of Stockholm. He hadn’t taken the train north until Wednesday, traveling to Harads to buy a car. The journey took him eighteen hours, with various changes along the way, and the digital ticketing system had tracked his movements on each leg of the journey.