Hidden in Memories (The Åre Murders), page 1
Also by Viveca Sten
Still Waters
Closed Circles
Guiltless
Tonight You’re Dead
In the Heat of the Moment
In Harm’s Way
In the Shadow of Power
In the Name of Truth
In Bad Company
Buried in Secret
The Åre Murders
Hidden in Snow
Hidden in Shadows
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022, 2025 by Viveca Sten
Translation copyright © 2025 by Marlaine Delargy
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Botgöraren by Forum in Sweden in 2022. Translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2025.
Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
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ISBN-13: 9781662529825 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662529818 (digital)
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover image: © Edmund Lowe Photography / Getty; © Maridav / Shutterstock
For Mischa, the whole family’s little Easter darling
Contents
Map
Prologue
Saturday, March 27, 2021
1
Sunday, March 28
2
3
4
5
6
Monday, March 29
7
8
9
10
11
Then: December 21, 1973
12
13
14
15
Then: December 23, 1973
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Tuesday, March 30
23
24
25
26
Then: December 24, 1973
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Wednesday, March 31
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Then: December 25, 1973
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
Then: December 26, 1973
53
54
55
Thursday, April 1 Maundy Thursday
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Then: December 28, 1973
64
65
66
67
68
Friday, April 2 Good Friday
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
Then: December 30, 1973
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
Saturday, April 3 Easter Saturday
93
94
95
Then: New Year’s Eve 1973
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
Then: 1985
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
Monday, April 5 Easter Monday
123
124
125
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Translator
Map1 extended description.
Map2 extended description.
Prologue
Aada Kuus, the cleaner, is standing in the bathroom of room 633 at Copperhill Mountain Lodge in Åre. She has just hung up two towels when she hears a noise from the Silver Suite next door.
Was that someone groaning . . . ?
It is late, after midnight. She was just about to finish her shift when she noticed that 633 needed clean towels. She had to sort it out before she went home—guests are due to check in first thing tomorrow morning.
Now she is standing there as if she has been turned to stone, her eyes fixed on the bathroom wall adjoining the large suite.
A woman screams, her desperate cry slicing through the night. Then comes a curse from a deep voice, followed by a muted thud, almost as if a lamp has been knocked onto the floor.
What is going on?
Aada hears a whimpering sound, and something within her reacts. A paralyzing horror takes over, as it had in the past when her stepfather was drunk and used his fists to beat her mother black and blue.
She is seven years old again.
Fear floods her body. Her blood turns to ice.
Aada meets her own terrified gaze in the mirror above the washbasin. There is silence next door now, but she has adopted a defensive stance—shoulders up, body hunched. Her nerves are exposed, on the outside of her skin.
Her breathing is jerky, her mouth open. Should she go and knock on the door? Call reception?
Raise the alarm?
She doesn’t know what to do, it is becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. It is as if the oxygen is getting jammed in her throat; her tongue is sticking to the roof of her mouth. Her brain is telling her to do one thing, but her body wants her to hide. Nobody must find out you are here, a voice yells inside her head. Something bad might happen to you too.
Aada stares at a fixed point on the tiles until her eyes sting.
The feeling that she has to get away picks up speed like an avalanche; in the end it is so strong that her muscles actually cooperate. Legs trembling, she edges into the hallway and fumbles for the black door handle.
That is when she catches a glimpse of him.
Just as he is on his way out.
She has opened the door a tiny fraction, her hand is still on the latch, but she instinctively recoils when a man rushes out of the Silver Suite clutching a shiny, bloodstained object.
His cap is pulled well down over his forehead, and he is wearing a black mask over his mouth and nose. Aada can see only his burning eyes.
A second later she closes the door for her own protection.
Her mind whirling, she stands there frozen to the spot. She is so frightened she cannot move. In the end she drops to her knees and puts her head in her hands. Tries to suppress the nausea as she rocks back and forth in shock.
Something terrible must have happened in the Silver Suite.
The man was covered in blood.
Is he still out there?
What if he tries to get into this room to attack her too?
Saturday, March 27, 2021
1
It looks like the place that God forgot.
Charlotte Wretlind knows that she ought to be horrified, standing here in front of the Storlien mountain hotel. It is Easter season, but the sky is overcast. The afternoon light is gray. The whole area is enveloped in a desolate mist.
And yet Charlotte sees something else. She doesn’t care about the shabbiness or the general decay, the sense that time has left the hotel behind. Instead she sees it as it used to be during its golden age, when she was a child and her family spent every Christmas holiday here.
When she was a little girl, her body tingling with excitement and anticipation.
She remembers the almost ceremonial atmosphere as the night train from Stockholm pulled into the station on December 23 and they were collected by a horse-drawn sleigh. There was a huge Christmas tree in the elegant foyer when they arrived, and sparkling garlands hung from the ceiling.
Charlotte recalls the feeling on Christmas Eve as they walked up the imposing staircase to the restaurant. How the hem of her mother’s full-length velvet gown brushed each step, how beautiful she was with her red lips
In Charlotte’s memory those Christmases at Storlien are still surrounded by a magical glow. For many years she has dreamed of building a new exclusive mountain hotel here, just like her father always talked about.
And now it is going to happen.
It took a great deal of persuasion to convince her business associate, Henry, to come on board with the project, but at long last she has a partner who is prepared to supply the necessary capital. For decades she has worked on realizing others’ projects in the property and financial sector, but now it is time to carry through her own plans. She is fifty-six years old, and she wants to build something that she will be remembered for.
Daddy would have been so proud, if only he could have been here.
She can see it now: the new main building, the wing housing a luxury spa, the panorama windows. The footprint will be twice as big. There will be exclusive suites and specialist restaurants offering top-class gastronomic experiences.
Storlien will spring back to life, and the guests will come flocking, just as they had when she was a child. When she is done, the mountain hotel will be the destination of choice for premium international visitors. Tourists from the Arab countries, from China—she has already begun sketching out a marketing strategy to attract them all.
She smiles to herself and heads for the car to return to Åre. She is spending the whole of Easter week at Copperhill Mountain Lodge, with the intention of doing some skiing when she isn’t working. It is only a forty-five minute drive from Storlien to Åre.
She has been preparing herself for so long; she has dreamed of this for years and years. It has taken countless hours of planning, meeting after meeting. She has had to cajole and threaten in order to secure all the necessary permissions. On Monday she has one last important meeting with the local council to finalize things, followed by a press conference at five o’clock in the afternoon.
Bengt Hedin, the council’s representative, will be there too, and Henry is flying up. Charlotte frowns. She must remember to call him this evening—she needs to keep him sweet.
As she slides in behind the wheel, she can’t help taking one last look at the building on the mountainside. If only Daddy were here to share her triumph, but he passed away some years ago, and her mother is in a home, suffering from advanced dementia.
Daddy will never be able to rejoice in Charlotte’s greatest success, even though she has spent her whole life proving her capability to him. However, she is looking forward to showing the plans to Filip, her beloved son, who has promised to come to Åre next week.
She can’t wait to see him.
Darling Filip.
She is doing this for his sake too. He is her only child, and she has raised him on her own since she divorced his father, Mats, when Filip was little.
Secretly she dreams of working with Filip, so that one day he can take over. Admittedly they have fought quite a lot over his failure to stick to any kind of study program, but she is hoping that a few days together in the mountains will make everything better.
He has just dropped out of yet another course, this time at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and the news made Charlotte both angry and upset. They had a huge quarrel a couple of weeks ago, and she said things that she deeply regrets.
Since then he has barely responded to her text messages.
All she wants is to support her son, but she finds it so hard to understand why he doesn’t make more of an effort.
Charlotte rests her hands on the wheel.
She hates to see Filip wasting his talents. He is intelligent and quick thinking. He could achieve so much if he would just take things seriously. Which is why she can’t keep quiet when she sees him playing computer games twenty-four seven.
At the same time, she hates the tension between them. She has never been afraid of conflict, but being at odds with your only child is another matter.
Filip means the world to her, she can’t bear his silent remoteness.
When he comes to Åre, she must try to fix their relationship. She has already made an attempt to compensate by inviting his sweet girlfriend, Emily, but that’s not enough to salve her guilty conscience.
It is warm inside the car, and Charlotte lowers the temperature. Her phone on the passenger seat buzzes, the display glowing in the darkness. It is a message from Bengt Hedin, the chair of the town council’s planning committee.
We need to talk about the land purchase. The opposition is asking questions and I don’t know if it’s going to go through.
Charlotte manages to hold back an angry exclamation. She has paid a great deal to secure Hedin’s support. He must realize it’s too late to back out now. He can’t change his mind just a few days before they go public.
The entire project in Storlien depends on Charlotte being able to buy the land for the expansion. Releasing the necessary acreage has been a complicated process, and some council officials have fought her every step of the way. First of all they insisted that she renovate the dilapidated existing hotel; then they refused to approve the new architectural drawings. They had the nerve to claim that the design didn’t fit in with the general ambience of Storlien.
After many lengthy and fruitless discussions, when it finally became clear that the council did not share her vision, she realized she was going to have to use more unorthodox methods to achieve her aim.
She glances at her phone again. Everything is due to be signed on Monday, then the project will be revealed at a press conference. No way is she going to allow Hedin to sabotage things at the last minute. Obviously she has meticulously documented all the payments he has received from her.
That is her insurance, in case he gets cold feet.
Slowly she types a response that leaves no room for misunderstanding.
That is not my problem, it’s yours. The press conference is on Monday and it is too late to postpone.
She presses send. That will have to do. She puts down her phone and is about to drive off when it buzzes once more.
What does he want now?
She picks up the phone and sees that she has received a text message from an unknown number.
Get out of here, or you’ll regret it.
She sighs wearily.
This isn’t the first threatening message she has had since her plans became known in the area. And it probably won’t be the last. There are reactionaries everywhere who don’t like change, who want things to remain the same as they have always been. A Facebook group has also been set up, where people spew their hatred of her and the hotel project.
She will have to call Stefan over the weekend and ask him to sort this out. He is one of Sweden’s most skilled lobbyists, a former agriculture minister with contacts throughout the community. That’s the advantage of being a well-known ex-politician. He has worked on the project from the very beginning, and has helped to smooth the way for the new hotel.
And that isn’t his only talent.
Charlotte smiles at the memory of their most recent night together.
With a shrug she decides to ignore the troll, then pulls out onto the slush-covered road. Her phone buzzes again, but she takes no notice. She has no intention of letting herself be scared by cowards who refuse to reveal their identity.
Sunday, March 28
2
Detective Inspector Hanna Ahlander is having an early dinner with her older sister, Lydia, at the restaurant known simply as the Wine Bar; the place is packed. It is just after seven, and they have ordered coffee and dessert. Both have had a mild dose of COVID; otherwise they wouldn’t have dared venture out to this kind of environment.
They are sitting at a round table in the corner. At the long bar a few yards away, the bartender is busy preparing a tray of liqueur coffees for another party.
Lydia pushes back her blond hair and picks up her glass of Italian Ripasso. The large diamond in her wedding ring sparkles in the candlelight. She is a successful lawyer and owns a huge house in Sadeln, an area a few miles outside Åre. That was where Hanna sought refuge the Christmas before last, when she was dumped by her partner Christian and sacked from her job with the Stockholm City Police on the same day.
Lydia, who is ten years older, has always been Hanna’s rock. She and her family have arrived in Åre to celebrate the Easter break, and the sisters have sneaked away to spend some time on their own.
“How’s work going?” Lydia asks, taking a sip of her wine. “I guess it’s been pretty quiet lately.”
Hanna nods. During the winter she has been mostly investigating narcotics crimes, and one or two cases of extortion. She is usually in Åre for a couple of days each week, and works from Östersund the rest of the time, where she is attached to the Serious Crimes Unit—just like her colleague Daniel.
