You Will Never Be Found, page 14
He couldn’t shake off the dirt from the house in the woods, almost as though death itself was clinging to his back. Stop being so goddamn melodramatic, he muttered to himself.
Pathetic.
His phone was dead, too. He plugged it in and took the bottle of whisky and carton of noodles over to the sofa. The police apartment he had borrowed was full of things that meant nothing to him: bare tabletops, a medium-firm bed, all bought from IKEA. There was something nice about spending time there, a sense of not quite being fully present.
The truth was that he hadn’t slept in his own bed since the night he dragged Eira Sjödin around the bars and restaurants of Härnösand.
It had been idiotic to track her down on her day off. How could he justify it, on work grounds? Personnel grounds?
He couldn’t. He had stood there like an idiot in her kitchen, unable to give her anything concrete. The only thing he had done right was to resist the urge.
GG filled his glass and stared at the picture on the wall, a framed photograph above the TV. For some inexplicable reason, it was of a bridge in New York.
He remembered a conversation he and Eira had once had in the car, back when they first started working together. He had asked the police assistant, a complete stranger at the time, about children—and he had done it pretty abruptly, he now realized. His first impressions of her were still clear in his mind. Integrity and warmth, a rare understanding that he perceived as mutual. She looked straight into him while she listened to him talk, as though the words mattered less than where they were coming from.
But how had she answered his question that day?
GG tried his best to remember. Yes or no or maybe? It made no difference. What mattered was that he never ended up there again, particularly not with a colleague. That was a road he had already been down.
A road to hell, he thought, an old song he couldn’t quite remember popping into his head. He ate some of his cooling noodles and felt his blood surging, or maybe it was the whisky galloping through his veins, making him change into one of his new pairs of trousers, a shirt that smelled like chemicals.
GG regretted his decision the minute he climbed the stairs to Stadt.
The bar was already packed, far too many people. He should have gone to bed, or at least somewhere else, someplace where the hunt wasn’t quite so obvious.
He was sick of pulling himself together and showing off the best version of himself. Just last week he had made a huge blunder, one he hoped no one would ever find out about. But despite all that, his damn gaze began to wander.
What about her, pretty but boring, or her, far too young, stay away from her, Jojje, you’ll only end up on your own again. He spotted another woman, plainly pretty in a way he thought he could like, no artifice, she actually looked vaguely familiar. She smiled at him. GG turned around to see whether there was anyone else around him. He couldn’t remember where he had seen her before, but he desperately hoped she wasn’t someone he had slept with during a particularly irresponsible period of his life. There had been times when he gave himself over to love, others when he fell into self-loathing.
He knew exactly what time it was now.
Time to support a local business and alternate between whisky and gin, time to think about what loneliness could do to a man.
The least he could do was smile back when someone noticed him in the crowd.
November
Lugnvik was still home to the low background hum of powerful engines and other noises, heavy industry clinging on. The sawmill had been closed for years, but hulking great tin sheds still hugged the shoreline, and the dock was still in use. An enormous cargo ship was currently moored there, stacks of timber from the mill in Bollsta waiting to be shipped.
“So, what do you think?” asked Silje, rummaging through her bag with one hand as she checked her messages with the other. “Is he someone you’d hire if you wanted your house painted?”
Eira gazed over to the old wooden shed that the painting and decorating company had taken over and tried to come up with something that didn’t feel right.
Some sort of dissonance, something false or evasive.
It had been her idea to visit to the company Hans Runne occasionally worked for. She would have liked to discuss it with GG first, but he had a few days off. Instead she had sat down with an investigator from the Corruption Unit, who took her through the way the construction industry worked—and above all its dark underbelly. She had read reports and scrolled through documents about bribes and buying contracts. Subcontractors who paid to win jobs could fly beneath the radar when it came to certain checks, making it easier for them to use undeclared labor and make money at the other end. The painting firm in Lugnvik seemed too small for that type of corruption, though there were, of course, plenty of small firms that operated on the fringes. A summerhouse owner in the area had been given an invoice for three hundred thousand kronor, covering work that hadn’t actually been carried out, including an antique hand-planed floor that didn’t even exist.
There was no sign of anything like that going on at the painting firm in Lugnvik, but Eira also wasn’t the type to let something go too soon. In that sense, she realized, she was just like the dog, sinking her teeth into a stick and refusing to give it up.
The wind was coming from the east, carrying salt and sea air.
“I don’t think they’re involved in bribes or dirty money,” she said after a moment. “Or not in any serious way, at least.”
“What about locking their employees in abandoned buildings?”
“None of that either.”
“Damn it,” said Silje. “I must’ve left my snus at home.”
She excused herself and went over to the minimarket to buy more. To deal with her missed calls, too.
Eira stayed where she was by the cars, trying to summarize everything they had learned.
The painter was a man approaching pension age. His business partner had moved north a year earlier, to Arjeplog. It was the snow that appealed to him, because you could no longer be sure there’d be enough to go skiing in Ångermanland, even in December. The painter had put an ad in the local paper, and Hans Runne was one of the people who got in touch.
“He didn’t know how to do much, but he was a good listener and he was willing to get stuck in. Nice bloke, too. Plus he could come in at short notice. Terrible thing, what happened to him. Awful. Lock up the bastards who did it, will you promise me that?”
Someone from the unit had already spoken to him over the phone, just after Runne’s body was found. A nice young man who wanted to know about Hasse’s state of mind, whether he had any personal issues. But he didn’t know about anything like that. That officer had been polite, thanked him; he hadn’t started casting suspicions and implying things like these two.
“We pay what we’re meant to pay, and you can be damn sure not everyone does that. Taxes and statements of income, the whole lot. I got into a bit of trouble when I was younger, but I promised my wife it’d never happen again. Lost my driving license and everything. That’s the kind of thing you can never shake off. It’s always there, festering away on your record. Did you sniff that out? Is that why you’re here? Why don’t you pay this much attention to the real criminals taking over out there?”
When he offered to ask his wife to come down and show them the books for the last five years, so they could see how easy it was to run a business in the sticks, they had thanked him and left.
Silje was back, a pouch of tobacco beneath her lip. It made her even more beautiful, strangely enough. A subtle disharmony that emphasized her perfect face.
“Have you heard from GG?” she asked.
“Isn’t he off today?”
“That never usually stops him from picking up,” said Silje, waving her phone in the air. “That was the third time the switchboard has directed people to me, and I’m left standing here like an idiot with no idea what they’re talking about.”
A timber lorry sounded its horn behind them, and they waited until it had passed and the rumbling had faded. Eira hadn’t spoken to GG since he showed up in Lunde two days ago.
“What were the calls about?”
“There’s a defense lawyer who’s been calling and leaving messages. GG was supposed to talk to his client in Saltvik, apparently. Do you know anything about that?”
Saltvik was the prison on the outskirts of Härnösand, one of three highest-security facilities in the country. GG had mentioned it, Eira was sure of that, while she was visiting her mother. Standing in the noisy corridor with the confused old women, trying to hear what he was saying.
“He’d found someone there he thought might talk,” she said. “I thought it had something to do with money laundering, but then he seemed to have dropped that angle.”
“This is just so fucking typical of him, isn’t it?” Silje was clearly angry, and Eira subconsciously took half a step back. “Why doesn’t the idiot write these things down? He roams around like a lone wolf, not reporting to anyone, but this job just doesn’t work when the lead investigator thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. We should have a prosecutor actively leading the case—I know, I know, there’s no need for that when we don’t have a suspect, but everyone knows that GG wants all the power for himself, and they just let him get away with it.”
“I saw him the day before yesterday,” said Eira. “In the evening. He came over.”
“To your house?”
Another lorry wanted to squeeze down to the dock, trailer after trailer as she tried to remember what GG had actually said.
“He’d been up to Offer, to the crime scene,” she said once she could make herself heard. “But he didn’t mention Saltvik, he didn’t say anything specific about the case.”
All he said, she thought, was that he was glad I was involved.
What else?
He had been sitting in the abandoned house, in silence, asking himself . . . what?
Whether it was worth it?
“I’m not the kind of person who cleans up after others,” said Silje, opening the car door. “GG can deal with this himself once he’s back.”
She picked up her mother just before dinner. The carers had helped Kerstin get ready, and her hair was curled in a way Eira wasn’t used to. Her mother had always worn it straighter, tougher, different.
“I bought some food from the deli counter,” said Eira, “so we don’t have to worry about cooking anything.”
Kerstin fastened her seat belt, an anxious smile on her face.
“That must have been expensive?”
“I didn’t buy the most expensive things, you know that.”
This anxiety about money had been one of the first signs of her illness, long before any forgetfulness became obvious. Eira was living in Stockholm at the time, which was one of the reasons it had taken her so long to realize that her mother hadn’t just become stingy, an obsession with the price of everything that drove her to madness, cut-out coupons and tablecloths Kerstin would force onto Eira because she had got such a good deal through the book club. It was a trait that had always been there, an undercurrent of anxiety that simply got worse over time. Kerstin was more than comfortable living on her pension, as she had been on her librarian’s salary before that; they had never wanted for anything at home. But it wasn’t about the figures in her bank account. It made no difference how often Eira reassured her that they could afford things, that it wasn’t an issue, Kerstin became increasingly anxious because she saw it as proof that her daughter couldn’t be trusted. There was the future to worry about, no one knew what that had in store. The fear of becoming dependent, of having to beg and borrow and get into debt. And then there was the fact that it was rude to ignore the cost of things, to forget where you came from, to take your comfortable life for granted.
They drove under the road bridge where an artist had installed a pink neon sign reading My Dreams, Your Longing.
“You can start going through the books,” said Eira, “while I get dinner ready.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To see whether you want to take any of them with you. We’ve talked about this.”
“No, I don’t think there’s any need for that.”
Eira put the potatoes on to boil and mixed the salad, opening the salmon and preparing a starter plate—antipasto, ham and salami, the shaved parmesan she knew her mother loved. She also dished out the shop-bought chocolate mousse into bowls, rather than leaving them in their plastic pots. She had been slightly shocked when she saw the price of a piece of smoked salmon—the river was full of fish.
It’s in me too, she thought as she went through to the living room to bring her mother to the table. Remnants and traces, of you.
Kerstin was busy flicking through a poetry collection by Birger Norman. Poetry, thought Eira. Of course! Short lines, space between the words. You didn’t even need to remember the start of the poem as the end approached. She had been bathed in poetry since she was a baby. Her mother couldn’t sing, but she was a firm believer in exposing children to rich language and melodies, particularly in a place whose impoverished past was just a few generations back, and so she had read poems instead of singing nursery rhymes.
That was just the kind of thing Kerstin should take back to the home. Perhaps Eira could read to her, whenever her mother stopped reading herself, a rhythm that carried a certain comfort in it.
She felt an overwhelming sense of weariness at the thought of everything hidden away in the attic and the basement of the house, remnants of so many lives. How was she ever supposed to be able to clear it out without Magnus, deciding what to keep or throw away, what was worth something or not?
She left the radio on while they ate. The silences could get so long otherwise. Once they had finished eating, she switched on the TV, though she regretted it the minute the news started, reports of a man who had been murdered in a villa in Täby, an earthquake somewhere, scores of people killed. As Eira searched for something more enjoyable on SVT Play, she realized she was doing the very thing her mother had when she was younger: protecting her from the awful news out there, choosing the good. She found a quiz show, that could work; they always used to compete to recognize places from every corner of the world, to know the names of French Nobel Prize winners and Chinese delicacies. Kerstin was usually the winner, but she now sat quietly. Eira tried to get her into the spirit of the game, to search her memory for the answers, things she had heard once or knew she was supposed to know, but instead her mother’s eyelids drooped, her head growing heavy, a jolt passing through her body. Confusion when she realized where she was.
“Where’s Magnus? Did he go out?”
“He’s not here, Mum.”
“He’s never been any good at keeping time. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that boy.”
Eira topped up her wineglass a little, though it only seemed to make her sleepy.
Everything you were afraid of has already happened, she thought.
“Magnus is fine.” That was the response she chose this time, for the sake of calm, for the unfamiliar feeling of having done something nice for her mother. “He’s just a bit busy at the moment.”
She helped Kerstin to the bathroom, up the stairs, to her bedroom. Nothing had changed in there. Eira had been extra thorough with her cleaning, carrying in a couple of potted plants she hadn’t yet managed to kill.
A pat on the cheek goodnight. She was surprised, touched, and a little concerned when Kerstin gave her a long hug.
Have you forgotten that we’re not huggers, Mum?
Eira had left both doors open, and she lay awake for a long time, listening to the sound of snoring from the next room. She dozed fitfully, then got up to check on her mother, almost as though she were a new parent. Is she still breathing, has she fallen out of bed? She wished there was a formula she could use to calculate how much more the disease would have taken from her in a year’s time, in four, by the time her darling child had served his sentence. Eira tossed and turned, sweating. She got up to open the window, saw a few veils of cloud illuminated by the moon.
Come home, you bastard, she muttered into the darkness, as though Magnus could hear her behind the prison walls 250 kilometers away. Come home.
She woke to noises from the ground floor. It wasn’t yet six a.m., but Kerstin was already up, rattling around in the kitchen.
The percolator was on, bubbling and hissing. Eira resisted the urge to check if her mother had added enough coffee. She didn’t say anything about her bed either, the sheets damp with urine. She just crept down to the utility room with the bedding and dumped it in a heap on the floor. She would buy a new washing machine today, she decided, trying not to rush her mother with her breakfast. Kerstin kept pausing midchew, a half-eaten sandwich in her hand for a full minute or two.
On their way out to the car, Kerstin spotted their neighbor. They stopped to chat over the fence, as they always had, and Rabble began jumping up and down with excitement.
“Have you got yourself another dog, Allan?”
“He’s lovely, isn’t he,” said Allan Westin, keen not to embarrass her.
Eira stepped to one side when her phone started buzzing in her pocket. A message from Silje.
Where are you?
Eira replied that she was on her way to Kramfors, glancing back over to her mother, who was still chatting away.
Has something happened?
She tried to work out how long it would take her to drop off Kerstin at the home and felt her conscience tugging at her. Hours and minutes and her responsibilities at work; a man was dead, and it was down to her—well, not just her—to get justice for him. She would have to deliver if she ever wanted to get out of this place where as a child she used to play, a microcosm where time dragged on as two old people chatted about things that would be forgotten by morning.
“I’m really sorry, Mum, but I have to get to work, we need to go.”
