Deep Harbour, page 13
Would that really be such a bad idea?
She wouldn’t even need to make use of August’s time in the housing queue. Like so many other Swedes, Eira had joined Stockholm’s never-ending housing queue when she graduated from high school, as she started to think about what she wanted to do with her life. She hadn’t logged in to check on it in a while, but as she got into her car she decided to do just that.
Fourteen years in the queue. That could be enough for something in a decent suburb, possibly even in Västertorp.
A place without any memories, where no one knew who she was, without any roots getting tangled in everything she did. She had a vision of freedom, an absence of everything. Plain walls where nothing had ever hung before, rooms that had never been used for anything.
… a dream, a breath in the wind.
There were traces and fragments of a person in so many things. An advert for trips to Vietnam, the scent of a particular tobacco. A report from the local housing committee on the development of the Öd’s Wharf.
Which of them had made her think of Terry last winter, after all this time?
Kicki Frånlund had slumped down into her armchair and poured herself a whisky. Aged in Swedish oak, from their very own barrel at the distillery upriver. She savoured every drop of it, not just for the taste and the alcohol but because of the sense of pride she got from the label. They certainly knew their whisky, these local distillers.
Just because she was retired didn’t mean she had left the party, that she was no longer engaged; she was still a part of everything, not some lonely woman who spent her time tracking down old flames on Facebook.
Kicki had been happily married to her second husband for years, thank God, but this was something other than a longing for the wildness of her youth.
An epoch.
So much bigger than her own personal story, and yet also utterly intertwined. It could be the seed of a book, if she ever got round to writing it all down. A Country Girl Takes the Throne: Memories from a Life in Politics.
Well, maybe not everything, and above all not the part involving Terry. That had become painfully clear when she found herself thinking about him last winter.
There were multiple Terry Andersons on Facebook, but judging by his age and the place where he was born Kicki had quickly worked out which one was him. She could see that he now lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, but most of his page was private. Kicki had poured herself a glass of whisky that evening, too – possibly a couple – and then she had sent him a friend request. A short message explaining who she was, that her surname had been different back then, not to mention her looks.
‘I don’t know if you remember me,’ she wrote, attaching a photo of herself as a young woman. Hitting send had given her a flutter of excitement, a quick rush of heat. A brief moment in which she was still that girl, memories of something ground-breaking and physical. She hadn’t been all that sexually experienced at the time, but looking back now she could see that what she’d had with Terry had been special. He went for it as though his life depended on it, without any declarations of love. For some reason she had found that liberating.
Terry had accepted her friend request, and with that the door to his world was flung open. It turned out to be a nightmare – a Mordor, as her son would probably put it – and she felt disgust at the thought of his hands on her body.
Despite that, Kicki had kept reading.
There were posts claiming that the CIA had a base on the moon, that vaccines were deadlier than the viruses they claimed to prevent. That a worldwide network was trying to brainwash people into becoming zombified armies, or to get them hooked on drugs. Queen Elizabeth was apparently one of the leaders of this conspiracy, controlling the drugs trade across the world.
Kicki’s immediate impulse was to delete Terry before anyone noticed they knew each other, and yet she hadn’t done that. It didn’t matter that over half a century had passed, that she had been someone else back then. A person was forever bound to their past; it was inescapable. The person you were remained inside you.
And so she had entered his dark world, googling some of the things he had written in an attempt to understand. A quick search for Terry Anderson + Florida + a few key words threw up hundreds of hits. All Kicki could do then was pour herself another whisky, forgetting to add a few drops of water this time.
The conspiracy theories he shared stemmed from someone called Lyndon LaRouche, a political idiot who had founded a movement in the late sixties. The Swedish branch went by the name of the European Workers’ Party.
She remembered them well. A combination of inverted class warfare and right-wing extremism, famous for their awful caricatures of Olof Palme. The party had only ever received a handful of votes in the parliamentary elections, but they had also featured in the investigation into Palme’s murder. One of the early suspects, the so-called thirty-three-year-old, was found to have some of their materials at home. He was quickly released, but it was broadly agreed that their unreasonable hatred of the prime minister had played a part in what had happened.
Kicki’s head had been spinning as she read on. How did this fit with Terry’s left-wing beliefs from the sixties, with the twenty-year-old she thought she had known?
She had gone down a rabbit hole of Lyndon LaRouche interviews on YouTube that evening, many of which made her think of horror films. He claimed that everyone had been tortured by their mothers, that his devotees would be trained in martial arts and that a new human species would be created. She had also found a number of articles on the foundation of the European Workers’ Party in Sweden. That was where Terry Anderson’s name cropped up, along with a number of other deserters. He seemed to have returned to Stockholm after his time in Kramfors, joining the American Deserters Committee, which later splintered. The deserters had begun to get themselves a bad reputation. A few too many had been arrested for drugs offences, while others – Terry among them – wanted to see more political action and travelled down to Germany to infiltrate the American military bases there. At a political café in Frankfurt, they met LaRouche and found themselves a new sense of purpose.
How was that possible? Kicki had spent a long time sitting with her eyes shut that evening. She had even played music from those days in order to get a clear view of him. Had Terry really been so lost that he was willing to go along with anyone and anything just to find something to believe in?
Had all of this been in him back then? Something she hadn’t seen or understood?
Two people’s paths had crossed that summer. One ended up where Terry ended up and the other had become a politician in Kramfors. Kicki herself hadn’t stayed on the far left for all that long; there were too many weighty theories and letters from the leadership in Stockholm. You’re lazy. Call a meeting and go through your shortcomings. The Social Democrats were also the only party with any real power in Kramfors, and she didn’t see the point in wasting her time.
It had been years since she was in the political fray. These days she spent most of the time with her plants, their scents bringing back memories from childhood. Her garden was well on its way to becoming the most beautiful in the area, with rockeries and English roses that weren’t the easiest to grow this far north.
She had sent a reply to Terry when he wrote back to her. So great to hear from you. Of course I remember. But since then, things had been quiet between them. Kicki had muted him on Facebook and managed to forget about the whole thing – until the police officer knocked on her door.
She closed her eyes and felt everything start to spin, unsure whether that was because of the whisky or the world, time dragging everything out of joint.
There was a frantic tapping sound somewhere overhead. Probably a black woodpecker, she thought, on the wall beneath the eaves. Eira knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, so she reached for her phone to google how to get rid of woodpeckers before they do any damage. As she did so, she was overcome by a sudden weariness.
Taking care of a house.
There was so much that could go wrong.
The facade would need a fresh coat of paint next year at the very latest, a couple of the windows too – at least on the south-facing side, where they got most sun. One of the planks was rotten on the veranda, and what about the chimney? When was the last time they’d had it swept? All these thoughts raced through her head as she reached for her phone, but then she saw that she had two messages and forgot all about them.
She clearly wasn’t the only one struggling to sleep.
Kicki Frånlund.
Silje Andersson.
She opened Silje’s message first.
‘They’ve found him.’
The baby stirred, and a fist – or maybe it was a heel – made her stomach bulge. She pressed gently on her belly as she read.
The American police had acted quickly once they had the dead man’s name. Silje evidently didn’t switch off when she left the station, because their reply had arrived just before midnight. John Lorenzo Aiello, born 1948 in Long Beach, California.
There was a photograph of him attached to the email, from his army days. John’s hair had been cropped short when he was conscripted, in May 1966, and the truth was that his face was more like the CGI image than the real one, the wilder one, from her mother’s photo album.
That blank expression.
Just one year later, in September 1967, he had been reported missing from the U.S. military base at Kaiserslauten in West Germany.
His parents were both dead, but he had three brothers and two sisters. A couple of local officers would be visiting them to break the news in the morning.
Eira opened the second message.
‘There’s one more thing I didn’t mention yesterday,’ wrote Kicki Frånlund. ‘Terry Anderson is alive and living in Florida. I don’t want anything to do with him – I think you’ll see why. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t share this information.’
She had attached a number of screenshots from the man’s Facebook page, and Eira immediately understood why the former politician wanted to distance herself from him. On the basis of what she read, Terry Anderson could easily have been one of those who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump’s election defeat. She kept scrolling through the posts, pausing when she reached the last screengrab, a thread of messages.
Kicki Frånlund had written to her ex-boyfriend late the night before. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the Swedish police, which was probably wise. Considering the circles Terry Anderson seemed to move in, he likely wouldn’t have responded if she had.
‘You don’t know what happened to Steve Carrano, do you?’ she asked after a few general questions about how he was.
‘No, sorry, haven’t been in touch with him since the early seventies.’
Eira read that line again. So, Steve had been alive after 1968.
‘What about the other guy? John, was it?’
‘Sorry, no idea.’
There was a brief pause after that. Eira could see from the timestamps that his next message had taken a minute or so to arrive.
‘I think he stayed up there,’ the American wrote. ‘Or it’s possible the CIA lured him back. That happened to a few of us. From what I heard they ended up in prison in Morocco or at their former bases. Idiots didn’t realize it was a trap.’
Their messages got longer and more rambling. Terry wrote that the three Americans hadn’t had much in common other than their opposition to the war. John was a recluse and Steve was a bit of a basket case, always so uptight. The guy did a load of drugs, he said. And all that sex and leftist crap too, you remember?
‘I do.’ Kicki Frånlund had sent a few laughing emojis then. She knew what she was doing. ‘So do you know if Steve is one of the guys who went back to the U.S.?’
‘Like I said, I haven’t heard from him since the seventies, but I think he went back up to Norrland, some collective there. They were super popular in those days. What was it called … Skog-something. That’s one bit of Swedish I do remember. Man, you guys have so much forest up there. Skog everywhere …’
‘Could it have been Skogsnäs?’ asked Kicki.
‘Yeah, think so.’
And with that, their conversation was over. At least in the screenshots Eira had been given.
The Norrland air. So crisp and fresh, full of oxygen. It smelled like pine and damp earth and the murky water where the algae formed a layer of green sludge.
Lina splashed her face, beneath her arms, between her legs. It was cold as hell and made her fingertips go numb, but as she had once told a man who wanted to warm her up: I was born frozen.
She crouched down to pee. The risk of being spotted out here was fairly low; the ratio of people to trees in Norrland was something like one to a hundred thousand. She used her foot to dig a hole for her tampon and toilet paper, her dirty knickers, then kicked dirt and twigs over the top.
Her new knickers were black, lacy at the back, stolen while the assistant went off to look for another size. She caught a whiff of sweat as she pulled her top back on and realised she would have to find somewhere she could stay a while.
Warm water.
Washing that actually dried.
Cash.
Life had been easy enough while she was living off men with Visa cards, but ever since Täby she had been drifting around without a plan. Northwards, that was her only thought, because of the forests and the solitude. Pitstops among the hopeless people living on the fringes, in tents, and caravans with broken wheels, tiny cabins or boats that were barely afloat, stuck in the ice. But that always came to an end whenever some jogger or dog owner called the authorities to report it; they didn’t want to see the suffering first-hand.
She had only just made it out of the last place in time. Stood and watched as the police car pulled up between the trees. Hunting for people to haul in and lock up, checking ID and all that crap. Lina Stavred hadn’t had any ID since she burnt it at a rest stop over twenty-five years ago.
No, she avoided society as far as she could. Whenever she needed to steal food or tampons, she preferred to stick to the medium-sized towns. They were less risky. People there didn’t care as much; they didn’t know everyone else.
There were also libraries with computers that anyone could use.
Free toilets and internet access.
She had spent two hours in the last one she had passed, made it a rule never to stay any longer than that. There were always old ladies who got curious in places like that. Who started asking questions, remembered her picture. Lina recognised the type from her childhood, at the library in Kramfors. Damn, hadn’t Magnus’s mum worked there? What was her name? The one who always used to pass her books with a smile and a whisper, as though Lina was carrying humanity’s future inside her and only a librarian could coax it out. Virginia Woolf and Cora Sandel and Simone de Beauvoir. They all wrote about women who wanted to break free, who were meant for something bigger. She’d probably been in the first year of senior high school when she started to see the pattern. The librarian wanted to mould Lina into the person she wished she could have been.
Kerstin, that was her name.
Old paper, weariness. All libraries smelled the same. The letters might as well have been carved into stone tablets in Mesopotamia. As stationary and unchanging as Kramfors itself – not to mention the hamlet where Lina had been forced to live, even after she started high school in town. And all because the Stavreds wanted to keep an eye on their daughter.
Sobriety. No boys or sex. A mouth that should keep quiet and which shouldn’t do any of the other things it was made for. God forbid.
No one could climb out of a window as quietly as Lina, sneaking off to the crossroads where the boys were waiting, first on mopeds and later on motorbikes. And together they had done all the things her parents wanted to shield her from.
‘I’m just a bit tired today,’ she would say when her mother woke her up in the morning, not long after Lina had climbed back in. ‘I think I’m getting a headache.’
She entered her own name in the search bar.
It had been a few weeks since she last found a computer to use, possibly even a month. Only idiots carried a phone around when the police might be looking for them.
She scrolled past one hit after another, headlines screaming her name. The photograph of the schoolgirl from years ago smiling out at her.
Lina rolled back in her chair and looked around. No one was watching her. She made the window smaller and leaned in to the screen, preventing anyone who sneaked up behind her from seeing what she saw.
BODY FOUND IN LUNDE – IS IT MISSING LINA?
Didn’t they get bored of this?
They had found some poor fucker on the bottom of the river and immediately assumed it must be her. Dredged that old story back up.
The one about Lina Stavred, who disappeared one night in July 1996, likely murdered. About the boy who was thought to be guilty, the body that was never found. A wound that wasn’t allowed to heal, a darkness that lived on. People she didn’t recognise saying they would never forget. But there was nothing about what happened in Täby, nothing about the fact that Lina was actually still alive.
Her mind started racing. She couldn’t allow herself to be lulled into a false sense of security.
She had made mistakes at the villa in Täby, of course she had. Left evidence. The neighbours had seen her, said hello though she rarely replied. Lina had been living with that bastard for almost three months, calling herself Alberte, until one day he went too far. He thought he could control where she went and what she did, and all because he was the one paying the bills. Assumed that she would do whatever he wanted. The police surely had her fingerprints and DNA. They might even be able to tell that she had been holding the knife, though she had tossed it into a lake as quickly as she could. Worst-case scenario, they were sitting on a match for her teenage fingerprints.
