You Will Never Be Found, page 9
Different, in any case.
“How are you?” she asked once the guard had stepped back.
Her brother shrugged. His shoulders seemed broader than usual. He looked healthy, fit, and for some reason she felt shy.
“I’m OK,” he said. “The grub’s not too bad. I’m working in the woodshop, making chairs. And I’ve started studying philosophy.”
“That’s great,” she said. “I’ve heard there’s a real shortage of philosophers in the job market.”
“Just what Kramfors needs.”
A moment of smiles.
“Mum’s in the home now,” said Eira.
Magnus took her hand. His touch made her feel like crying.
“Thank you for sorting everything out,” he said. “For being there for her.”
Eira pulled away.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said. “You could retract your confession. We’ll get you a good lawyer and petition for a new trial, you could say . . .”
“Stop.”
“Mum is always asking after you, every time I go to see her.”
This time it was Magnus who pulled away, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back, rocking on his chair as though to increase the distance between them in the cramped room.
“I’ve told you why I did what I did,” he said, his voice firm. That tone always made her anxious, its roots going deeper than she could remember. “We agreed that we wouldn’t bring it up again. If you’re just going to keep nagging me about it then there’s no point you coming out here.”
You agreed, thought Eira. My opinion didn’t count. Magnus had told her what really happened the evening Lina Stavred disappeared, why he was taking the blame for a murder he didn’t commit. He had threatened to confess to worse if she didn’t keep her mouth shut, and despite her better judgment, despite being a police officer, Eira had done as he asked.
Every night since had involved an endless monologue, thoughts of what she should have said and how she could have acted, but those were words she never actually said aloud.
“Mum might be completely lost in the fog by the time you get out of here, Magnus. You might not be able to get through to her. She’s going to forget who you are.”
“I’ve been on my best behavior,” he said, running a hand through his short hair, making it look a little messier, more like the brother she knew. “They’ll give me day release soon. I’ll go down and see her then.”
“OK.”
He had children, too. Two sons who lived with their mother in Gothenburg. Eira was on the verge of mentioning them, but she knew it would only make him angry.
“What kind of philosophy are you studying?” she asked instead. He spent the rest of her visit explaining that while we think we are seeing the real world, it is in fact nothing but a shadow.
Before she caught the early-evening train home from Umeå, Eira had time to speak to the friend Hans Runne had called just a few days before he disappeared. They met over soup in a cozy book café in one of the grand wooden buildings in the same area of town as the photographer’s studio. When Eira arrived, the man—Göran, an old acting buddy—was busy flicking through Lars Norén’s last diary, and he immediately began telling her what a talent Hasse had been.
“Though to be honest with you he sometimes flinched at the real depths, the sore points in himself.”
Who doesn’t, thought Eira, struggling to concentrate. Lina Stavred was still on her mind. It was over twenty years since she vanished, at just sixteen years of age, and everyone was convinced she had been murdered. Her own parents had had her declared dead once enough time had passed.
But Eira had discovered that she was still alive. Magnus didn’t want to know, and when she tried to bring it up with GG, he had told her that the case was closed. The whole thing had been a mess, with her trying to protect her brother, crossing the line.
But who was she if she didn’t protect her own brother?
“Hasse had no idea, I would’ve noticed if he had,” the friend continued. “He didn’t seem down or anything like that. He was actually on good form. Had a job on the go in Umeå, asked if he could crash at my place. When he didn’t get in touch I assumed it was all just talk, that he hadn’t got the part after all. That kind of thing happens so often, the film industry’s a jungle.”
He grabbed a napkin from the table and blew his nose.
“But he was already dead. I mean, Christ.”
Hasse Runne, who had always been such a survivor, constantly pushing forward. They had joked like always on the phone. He’d started dating again, his friend laughed at the memory; Hasse had never had any problems as far as women were concerned—not in getting them interested, anyway. It was hanging on to them he struggled with.
“There was something flighty about him, like it was himself he couldn’t keep hold of. I don’t really know where that came from. A sense of abandonment, maybe? An absent father?”
“Do you know if he was seeing anyone in particular?”
“I doubt it. Hasse was a romantic. If he’d fallen in love he would’ve been shouting her name from the rooftops.”
As the train carried Eira south along the Norrland coast, speeding into the bluish-black dusk, she attempted to summarize the meeting. But it was as though her notes seemed to lose all meaning. She closed the document and took out the list of earlier kidnappings instead.
They needed to make the perpetrator their starting point, she thought, not the victim. She was increasingly convinced that Hans Runne had bumped into the wrong people after staggering out of the bar in Härnösand. There was simply nothing in his life or his character that pointed to anything like this. Not unless he was an incredibly skilled actor.
Thanks to an electrical failure just south of Örnsköldsvik, it was after nine by the time Eira arrived in Kramfors. Too late to pop in and see her mother as planned. She would just have to wrestle with her guilty conscience until tomorrow. She had off-loaded all responsibility onto the local authorities, there had been no other option. But it wasn’t just that, it was the relief she felt. Days that passed without her finding the time to visit Kerstin. Eira’s stomach ached when she thought about it.
Getting into the car and driving home to the quiet, half-empty house in Lunde didn’t feel like an option right now. Her trip to Umeå had dredged up something inside her; the palpable closeness of death, the sheer scale of the loneliness that preceded it.
Magnus, returning to his cell.
She desperately wanted a glass of something alcoholic, anything would do. Ideally three or four. Good old-fashioned drunkenness, laughing and forgetting for a while.
There was only one person who came to mind.
“Fancy a beer at Kramm?” she wrote.
“Come over instead,” he replied.
During August’s last posting in Kramfors, he had rented one of the many empty apartments in the public-housing blocks on Hällgumsgatan. He had moved up in the world now, she thought as she walked through the private homes by the railway, beautiful old 1930s villas with neat piles of raked autumn leaves on their lawns.
He pulled her into the hallway, no need for any artifice, no explanations. Eira found it liberating not to have to say anything. They both knew what “a beer at Kramm” really meant, that was how it had all started. August paused as they backed into the bedroom, Eira’s hands fumbling with the knot on his sweatpants.
“I’ve got a sauna,” he said.
“You’re not serious?”
“Just switched it on . . . if you . . . what do you think?”
And so they drew it out until every last cell was crying for release. Eira probably wouldn’t recommend a sauna in that context, particularly not one that had been heated to almost 100 degrees. She had thought she was about to fall back onto the red-hot rocks at one point, but August’s grip had tightened. Her body felt slightly tender where his hands had been. A heat that didn’t want to fade.
They slumped onto the tired old sofa in the lounge afterwards.
“Nice place,” she said.
“I’m renting it cheap over the winter. The owner’s kids haven’t decided whether to sell or not.”
Strange how easy it was to slip back into old habits. To rediscover the contours of his body. The simplicity, the lightness she remembered.
“Do you ever think about anyone else?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re having sex.”
He had a girlfriend, she knew that, just as she knew they had a liberal attitude to love, that they were allowed to sleep with other people, to fall in love if it happened.
“Of course I do,” he said. “But I didn’t just now, if that’s what you’re asking. I was only thinking of you.”
“That’s not what I meant, I mean more generally.”
His hair tickled her skin.
“So who do you think about, Eira? When you’re not thinking about me?”
“Do I really have to tell you?”
“No, only if you want to.”
Eira clambered out of his arms and into the shower, let the water run cold. The cramped sauna must have been built sometime during the seventies. She could tell from the plastic floor and the brown wet-room wallpaper that had started to come loose at the joins, revealing the chipboard beneath.
She checked that the ancient heater was properly switched off before wrapping a towel around herself and heading back upstairs. They drank beer in the kitchen and she told August about her day, about the autopsy and how she imagined those four weeks in the basement must have been. It felt good to get it out of her system.
August had been sent out to deal with a shoplifter at Willys. A six-pack of lager.
“Just another day in Kramfors.”
It wasn’t until they were getting into the old woman’s narrow bed and August reached for something from the nightstand that she noticed his ring. Thin and golden.
“Did you get married?”
“No, not yet, we’re just engaged.”
“You and Johanna?” Eira had met his girlfriend once, over coffee, when she came up to visit. Johanna sold beauty products and drank green smoothies; she was warm and enthusiastic and likable. “Are you going to keep . . . ?”
“Sleeping with other people?”
August fiddled with the ring. Strange she hadn’t noticed it at the station or while they were in the car together. Maybe he took it off at work, like he had taken it off earlier. Was it so that it didn’t burn his finger in the sauna, or because she was coming over?
“It doesn’t change our approach to love,” he continued. “I do what I want and so does she. It just means we’ve decided to stick together. I felt like it was probably time. A fixed point, you know? Something that isn’t changing all the time.”
“Well, congratulations,” said Eira.
She lay awake for some time after he dozed off.
Twice in her life she had believed in a love that might last, if not forever then at least for the foreseeable future.
The first was her foolish, immature love for Ricken, her brother’s friend. He probably could have convinced her to stay in Strinne for the rest of her life, surrounded by junk cars, if he hadn’t broken up with her instead.
The second was a man she had met in a bar during her time in Stockholm, just after she finished her police training. After their third night together—an experience that surpassed almost anything else—Eira had decided that he really saw her, that he liked what he saw, and she had started to dream about the future. The fact that he wanted to see her again was proof that he felt the same way. Surely there was no way emotions could be quite so overwhelming if they weren’t mutual? Whenever he canceled a date or failed to get in touch, she always made excuses for him. He was afraid of making the leap, unsure of himself, and that meant she needed to be more open with her love, to make him feel safe. Or maybe he was struggling to process the fact that she was a police officer, and she would have to be softer and more vulnerable around him. When he told her he couldn’t get into a relationship right now, she had thought that “right now” was relative, what did it really mean? A week, a month, six? She could wait, no problem; she was from Norrland, stubbornness was in her blood.
In the end he told her that he liked her, she was a nice girl, but that it was all a bit much. As far as he was concerned, it had never been love.
The darkness she found herself falling into then, the jet-blackness enveloping her. It was a bottomless pit, no light whatsoever. How stupid, to imagine that someone loved you. She became more cautious when it came to her feelings—they only made her see things that weren’t really there. In her next relationship, she was the one who hadn’t been in love.
She curled up against August’s body and gave herself over to the calmness of sleep. He was getting married, and that was well and good. She didn’t need to worry about him.
There were no messages waiting for Eira when she got to the station the next morning, no particular tasks for her to do. Nothing but a group email from GG, saying that they could have their meeting later, unclear when.
She sat down at a free computer and continued where she had left off the day before. Her body was tender after her night with August, a slight headache from too little sleep.
The list of kidnappings was much longer than she had expected. The trainee officer in Sundsvall who compiled it had included every case from across the country over the past year, painstakingly and in chronological order, both those that had led to charges and others that had been dropped.
Eira skimmed through the summaries, filtering and ruling out as she went.
Kidnapping was a crime that had become increasingly common in recent years. The motive could be to scare someone into silence or to squeeze money out of the victims’ relatives over an unpaid debt. Some of the more sadistic cases involved grievous bodily harm and humiliation, often carried out by younger perpetrators who uploaded the footage to social media. Most common of all were the robberies, however. Thieves adapting to an era in which people no longer walked around with wallets full of cash. There were gangs that systematically kidnapped their victims, driving them around or taking them to a bike storage facility, abusing and threatening them until they gave up the PIN for their bank cards or transferred money online. In a handful of cases, the victims had actually been forced to go to the bank and withdraw the money themselves.
An unsettling development, but hardly relevant in this particular case. Not a single attempt had been made to rinse Hans Runne’s paltry accounts.
Then there were the sexual motives, of course. Eira skipped over a kidnapped girl and a raid on an apartment brothel in which kidnapping was one of several charges. No, there was no sign of sexual violence in Hans Runne’s case.
She had worked her way back a whole year in time when a strange case from Norrbotten caught her eye. A forty-three-year-old man found locked in a basement, badly traumatized and in need of medical attention.
Eira was in the process of searching for more details when Anja Larionova, the local investigator, appeared in the doorway.
“Do you know where George Clooney is?”
“Who?”
“The hottie from Sundsvall, your new boss.”
“They don’t look alike, do they?”
“I think I’ve found something.”
There was a general consensus that Anja Larionova was the sharpest mind in the Kramfors Police District and that she would be in charge if she weren’t quite so uninterested in climbing the career ladder. Focusing on the minor crimes in the area was her own choice. “That’s where the rift in society stems from,” she always said. “Granny’s stolen dinner service.”
The two women grabbed a coffee and went through to her office. Things were pretty quiet at the moment, Anja explained. Winter was coming, which meant the local thieves had started checking in to rehab centers. Not a single summerhouse had been raided all week.
“So I offered to do some digging into this.” Anja Larionova pushed a document from the National Land Survey towards Eira, her long fingernail pointing to the name. High Woods Holdings, the company that had bought the abandoned house in Offer four years earlier. “Judging by the name, you’d think they were after the felling rights.”
“Yeah, well, it was hardly the house they wanted. The place had been empty for over a decade, since the old Bäcklund couple died.”
“At the same time?”
“Three months apart,” said Eira. “She followed him.”
“A lot of people can’t handle the loneliness.”
“Or maybe she’d been clinging on because she had someone who needed her.”
Eira found herself thinking about the trees growing around the old house, how close they were, practically wound around one another. She had heard that trees could actually communicate via their roots, sharing water and nutrients, choosing closeness over more light.
“And then it took six years for the kids to sell up,” said Anja Larionova. “Sounds like an inheritance dispute. If people could just make a bit more of an effort to get on, we wouldn’t have all these places left to crumble everywhere.”
“So why did someone pay”—Eira peered down at the sheet of paper—“ninety-two thousand for it if they didn’t want to move in or cut down the trees?”
“I’d say that’s a pretty good price for an address where you can register a company that then goes on to rent it out to another fifteen or so other businesses.”
Eira flicked through the sheets, printouts of articles and excerpts from various registers. Her eye was drawn to words like Russian organized crime, barons, dummy companies.
“What is this?”
Anja Larionova got up and closed the door. She stood quietly for a moment with her hand on the handle. Eira hesitated. Whenever a conversation petered out suddenly, her grandmother always used to say that an angel had just walked through the room—this felt like it could be an entire army of them.
“Do you know how I got the surname Larionova?” Anja asked.
“I heard you were married to a Russian,” said Eira. “And that you may or may not have killed him.”
“How are you?” she asked once the guard had stepped back.
Her brother shrugged. His shoulders seemed broader than usual. He looked healthy, fit, and for some reason she felt shy.
“I’m OK,” he said. “The grub’s not too bad. I’m working in the woodshop, making chairs. And I’ve started studying philosophy.”
“That’s great,” she said. “I’ve heard there’s a real shortage of philosophers in the job market.”
“Just what Kramfors needs.”
A moment of smiles.
“Mum’s in the home now,” said Eira.
Magnus took her hand. His touch made her feel like crying.
“Thank you for sorting everything out,” he said. “For being there for her.”
Eira pulled away.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said. “You could retract your confession. We’ll get you a good lawyer and petition for a new trial, you could say . . .”
“Stop.”
“Mum is always asking after you, every time I go to see her.”
This time it was Magnus who pulled away, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back, rocking on his chair as though to increase the distance between them in the cramped room.
“I’ve told you why I did what I did,” he said, his voice firm. That tone always made her anxious, its roots going deeper than she could remember. “We agreed that we wouldn’t bring it up again. If you’re just going to keep nagging me about it then there’s no point you coming out here.”
You agreed, thought Eira. My opinion didn’t count. Magnus had told her what really happened the evening Lina Stavred disappeared, why he was taking the blame for a murder he didn’t commit. He had threatened to confess to worse if she didn’t keep her mouth shut, and despite her better judgment, despite being a police officer, Eira had done as he asked.
Every night since had involved an endless monologue, thoughts of what she should have said and how she could have acted, but those were words she never actually said aloud.
“Mum might be completely lost in the fog by the time you get out of here, Magnus. You might not be able to get through to her. She’s going to forget who you are.”
“I’ve been on my best behavior,” he said, running a hand through his short hair, making it look a little messier, more like the brother she knew. “They’ll give me day release soon. I’ll go down and see her then.”
“OK.”
He had children, too. Two sons who lived with their mother in Gothenburg. Eira was on the verge of mentioning them, but she knew it would only make him angry.
“What kind of philosophy are you studying?” she asked instead. He spent the rest of her visit explaining that while we think we are seeing the real world, it is in fact nothing but a shadow.
Before she caught the early-evening train home from Umeå, Eira had time to speak to the friend Hans Runne had called just a few days before he disappeared. They met over soup in a cozy book café in one of the grand wooden buildings in the same area of town as the photographer’s studio. When Eira arrived, the man—Göran, an old acting buddy—was busy flicking through Lars Norén’s last diary, and he immediately began telling her what a talent Hasse had been.
“Though to be honest with you he sometimes flinched at the real depths, the sore points in himself.”
Who doesn’t, thought Eira, struggling to concentrate. Lina Stavred was still on her mind. It was over twenty years since she vanished, at just sixteen years of age, and everyone was convinced she had been murdered. Her own parents had had her declared dead once enough time had passed.
But Eira had discovered that she was still alive. Magnus didn’t want to know, and when she tried to bring it up with GG, he had told her that the case was closed. The whole thing had been a mess, with her trying to protect her brother, crossing the line.
But who was she if she didn’t protect her own brother?
“Hasse had no idea, I would’ve noticed if he had,” the friend continued. “He didn’t seem down or anything like that. He was actually on good form. Had a job on the go in Umeå, asked if he could crash at my place. When he didn’t get in touch I assumed it was all just talk, that he hadn’t got the part after all. That kind of thing happens so often, the film industry’s a jungle.”
He grabbed a napkin from the table and blew his nose.
“But he was already dead. I mean, Christ.”
Hasse Runne, who had always been such a survivor, constantly pushing forward. They had joked like always on the phone. He’d started dating again, his friend laughed at the memory; Hasse had never had any problems as far as women were concerned—not in getting them interested, anyway. It was hanging on to them he struggled with.
“There was something flighty about him, like it was himself he couldn’t keep hold of. I don’t really know where that came from. A sense of abandonment, maybe? An absent father?”
“Do you know if he was seeing anyone in particular?”
“I doubt it. Hasse was a romantic. If he’d fallen in love he would’ve been shouting her name from the rooftops.”
As the train carried Eira south along the Norrland coast, speeding into the bluish-black dusk, she attempted to summarize the meeting. But it was as though her notes seemed to lose all meaning. She closed the document and took out the list of earlier kidnappings instead.
They needed to make the perpetrator their starting point, she thought, not the victim. She was increasingly convinced that Hans Runne had bumped into the wrong people after staggering out of the bar in Härnösand. There was simply nothing in his life or his character that pointed to anything like this. Not unless he was an incredibly skilled actor.
Thanks to an electrical failure just south of Örnsköldsvik, it was after nine by the time Eira arrived in Kramfors. Too late to pop in and see her mother as planned. She would just have to wrestle with her guilty conscience until tomorrow. She had off-loaded all responsibility onto the local authorities, there had been no other option. But it wasn’t just that, it was the relief she felt. Days that passed without her finding the time to visit Kerstin. Eira’s stomach ached when she thought about it.
Getting into the car and driving home to the quiet, half-empty house in Lunde didn’t feel like an option right now. Her trip to Umeå had dredged up something inside her; the palpable closeness of death, the sheer scale of the loneliness that preceded it.
Magnus, returning to his cell.
She desperately wanted a glass of something alcoholic, anything would do. Ideally three or four. Good old-fashioned drunkenness, laughing and forgetting for a while.
There was only one person who came to mind.
“Fancy a beer at Kramm?” she wrote.
“Come over instead,” he replied.
During August’s last posting in Kramfors, he had rented one of the many empty apartments in the public-housing blocks on Hällgumsgatan. He had moved up in the world now, she thought as she walked through the private homes by the railway, beautiful old 1930s villas with neat piles of raked autumn leaves on their lawns.
He pulled her into the hallway, no need for any artifice, no explanations. Eira found it liberating not to have to say anything. They both knew what “a beer at Kramm” really meant, that was how it had all started. August paused as they backed into the bedroom, Eira’s hands fumbling with the knot on his sweatpants.
“I’ve got a sauna,” he said.
“You’re not serious?”
“Just switched it on . . . if you . . . what do you think?”
And so they drew it out until every last cell was crying for release. Eira probably wouldn’t recommend a sauna in that context, particularly not one that had been heated to almost 100 degrees. She had thought she was about to fall back onto the red-hot rocks at one point, but August’s grip had tightened. Her body felt slightly tender where his hands had been. A heat that didn’t want to fade.
They slumped onto the tired old sofa in the lounge afterwards.
“Nice place,” she said.
“I’m renting it cheap over the winter. The owner’s kids haven’t decided whether to sell or not.”
Strange how easy it was to slip back into old habits. To rediscover the contours of his body. The simplicity, the lightness she remembered.
“Do you ever think about anyone else?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re having sex.”
He had a girlfriend, she knew that, just as she knew they had a liberal attitude to love, that they were allowed to sleep with other people, to fall in love if it happened.
“Of course I do,” he said. “But I didn’t just now, if that’s what you’re asking. I was only thinking of you.”
“That’s not what I meant, I mean more generally.”
His hair tickled her skin.
“So who do you think about, Eira? When you’re not thinking about me?”
“Do I really have to tell you?”
“No, only if you want to.”
Eira clambered out of his arms and into the shower, let the water run cold. The cramped sauna must have been built sometime during the seventies. She could tell from the plastic floor and the brown wet-room wallpaper that had started to come loose at the joins, revealing the chipboard beneath.
She checked that the ancient heater was properly switched off before wrapping a towel around herself and heading back upstairs. They drank beer in the kitchen and she told August about her day, about the autopsy and how she imagined those four weeks in the basement must have been. It felt good to get it out of her system.
August had been sent out to deal with a shoplifter at Willys. A six-pack of lager.
“Just another day in Kramfors.”
It wasn’t until they were getting into the old woman’s narrow bed and August reached for something from the nightstand that she noticed his ring. Thin and golden.
“Did you get married?”
“No, not yet, we’re just engaged.”
“You and Johanna?” Eira had met his girlfriend once, over coffee, when she came up to visit. Johanna sold beauty products and drank green smoothies; she was warm and enthusiastic and likable. “Are you going to keep . . . ?”
“Sleeping with other people?”
August fiddled with the ring. Strange she hadn’t noticed it at the station or while they were in the car together. Maybe he took it off at work, like he had taken it off earlier. Was it so that it didn’t burn his finger in the sauna, or because she was coming over?
“It doesn’t change our approach to love,” he continued. “I do what I want and so does she. It just means we’ve decided to stick together. I felt like it was probably time. A fixed point, you know? Something that isn’t changing all the time.”
“Well, congratulations,” said Eira.
She lay awake for some time after he dozed off.
Twice in her life she had believed in a love that might last, if not forever then at least for the foreseeable future.
The first was her foolish, immature love for Ricken, her brother’s friend. He probably could have convinced her to stay in Strinne for the rest of her life, surrounded by junk cars, if he hadn’t broken up with her instead.
The second was a man she had met in a bar during her time in Stockholm, just after she finished her police training. After their third night together—an experience that surpassed almost anything else—Eira had decided that he really saw her, that he liked what he saw, and she had started to dream about the future. The fact that he wanted to see her again was proof that he felt the same way. Surely there was no way emotions could be quite so overwhelming if they weren’t mutual? Whenever he canceled a date or failed to get in touch, she always made excuses for him. He was afraid of making the leap, unsure of himself, and that meant she needed to be more open with her love, to make him feel safe. Or maybe he was struggling to process the fact that she was a police officer, and she would have to be softer and more vulnerable around him. When he told her he couldn’t get into a relationship right now, she had thought that “right now” was relative, what did it really mean? A week, a month, six? She could wait, no problem; she was from Norrland, stubbornness was in her blood.
In the end he told her that he liked her, she was a nice girl, but that it was all a bit much. As far as he was concerned, it had never been love.
The darkness she found herself falling into then, the jet-blackness enveloping her. It was a bottomless pit, no light whatsoever. How stupid, to imagine that someone loved you. She became more cautious when it came to her feelings—they only made her see things that weren’t really there. In her next relationship, she was the one who hadn’t been in love.
She curled up against August’s body and gave herself over to the calmness of sleep. He was getting married, and that was well and good. She didn’t need to worry about him.
There were no messages waiting for Eira when she got to the station the next morning, no particular tasks for her to do. Nothing but a group email from GG, saying that they could have their meeting later, unclear when.
She sat down at a free computer and continued where she had left off the day before. Her body was tender after her night with August, a slight headache from too little sleep.
The list of kidnappings was much longer than she had expected. The trainee officer in Sundsvall who compiled it had included every case from across the country over the past year, painstakingly and in chronological order, both those that had led to charges and others that had been dropped.
Eira skimmed through the summaries, filtering and ruling out as she went.
Kidnapping was a crime that had become increasingly common in recent years. The motive could be to scare someone into silence or to squeeze money out of the victims’ relatives over an unpaid debt. Some of the more sadistic cases involved grievous bodily harm and humiliation, often carried out by younger perpetrators who uploaded the footage to social media. Most common of all were the robberies, however. Thieves adapting to an era in which people no longer walked around with wallets full of cash. There were gangs that systematically kidnapped their victims, driving them around or taking them to a bike storage facility, abusing and threatening them until they gave up the PIN for their bank cards or transferred money online. In a handful of cases, the victims had actually been forced to go to the bank and withdraw the money themselves.
An unsettling development, but hardly relevant in this particular case. Not a single attempt had been made to rinse Hans Runne’s paltry accounts.
Then there were the sexual motives, of course. Eira skipped over a kidnapped girl and a raid on an apartment brothel in which kidnapping was one of several charges. No, there was no sign of sexual violence in Hans Runne’s case.
She had worked her way back a whole year in time when a strange case from Norrbotten caught her eye. A forty-three-year-old man found locked in a basement, badly traumatized and in need of medical attention.
Eira was in the process of searching for more details when Anja Larionova, the local investigator, appeared in the doorway.
“Do you know where George Clooney is?”
“Who?”
“The hottie from Sundsvall, your new boss.”
“They don’t look alike, do they?”
“I think I’ve found something.”
There was a general consensus that Anja Larionova was the sharpest mind in the Kramfors Police District and that she would be in charge if she weren’t quite so uninterested in climbing the career ladder. Focusing on the minor crimes in the area was her own choice. “That’s where the rift in society stems from,” she always said. “Granny’s stolen dinner service.”
The two women grabbed a coffee and went through to her office. Things were pretty quiet at the moment, Anja explained. Winter was coming, which meant the local thieves had started checking in to rehab centers. Not a single summerhouse had been raided all week.
“So I offered to do some digging into this.” Anja Larionova pushed a document from the National Land Survey towards Eira, her long fingernail pointing to the name. High Woods Holdings, the company that had bought the abandoned house in Offer four years earlier. “Judging by the name, you’d think they were after the felling rights.”
“Yeah, well, it was hardly the house they wanted. The place had been empty for over a decade, since the old Bäcklund couple died.”
“At the same time?”
“Three months apart,” said Eira. “She followed him.”
“A lot of people can’t handle the loneliness.”
“Or maybe she’d been clinging on because she had someone who needed her.”
Eira found herself thinking about the trees growing around the old house, how close they were, practically wound around one another. She had heard that trees could actually communicate via their roots, sharing water and nutrients, choosing closeness over more light.
“And then it took six years for the kids to sell up,” said Anja Larionova. “Sounds like an inheritance dispute. If people could just make a bit more of an effort to get on, we wouldn’t have all these places left to crumble everywhere.”
“So why did someone pay”—Eira peered down at the sheet of paper—“ninety-two thousand for it if they didn’t want to move in or cut down the trees?”
“I’d say that’s a pretty good price for an address where you can register a company that then goes on to rent it out to another fifteen or so other businesses.”
Eira flicked through the sheets, printouts of articles and excerpts from various registers. Her eye was drawn to words like Russian organized crime, barons, dummy companies.
“What is this?”
Anja Larionova got up and closed the door. She stood quietly for a moment with her hand on the handle. Eira hesitated. Whenever a conversation petered out suddenly, her grandmother always used to say that an angel had just walked through the room—this felt like it could be an entire army of them.
“Do you know how I got the surname Larionova?” Anja asked.
“I heard you were married to a Russian,” said Eira. “And that you may or may not have killed him.”
