by Will Dean
‘I’m staying,’ I say.
Nobody argues with me. Not one person.
There are hugs and quiet words and then everyone else walks back. I watch them, their fluorescent jackets shrinking and fading like boats powering out into a black and unforgiving ocean.
The circle disbands.
Everything has changed. Postures, faces, futures. The air is different.
The ten move towards me and together we stand loosely in clusters around the hollow beech tree. Nobody looks inward. Nobody turns towards that folded body. But I don’t need to look again; the image is permanently engraved on my mind.
She’s two metres behind me.
Her body is folded in on itself.
Scraps of clothes.
The skull, the part I saw, as white as a chess piece.
People are talking a little. Whispers and nods. We drink from our water containers but we do not eat. An owl toots from a place high above, and some part of myself yearns for a proper drink. Some organ, some gland craves the numbing medicinal power of a drink, a queue of drinks, a whole bottle. I am useless here with my ICA boots and my knife that I don’t know how to use. These ten are here and I’m just dead weight. They found the hollow tree, not me. They tolerate my presence. Nothing more.
An hour later the police arrive.
One whole hour.
No chance for helicopters in Utgard. No way to ride a motorbike or a quad through this terrain. They trekked. They arrive with their portable tent and I have no idea how they’ll erect that around a cylindrical beech. They tell us to back off. I ask if it’s Tammy and they ignore me. They ring the scene in police tape, flimsy blue-and-white stripes connecting tree to tree. They switch on lamps. They have cameras and a body bag and a stretcher. They put on outer suits when they get close to the tree. Eleven of us step away. Most of us keep looking out to the vertical pines, some kid’s nightmare of a million sail masts with no ships left to use them. But I turn and look.
The camera lights up the ghostly scene in brilliant white flashes. The police photographer’s pointing his lens down into the hollow. The only thing I see from here is the concave apex of the skull. That patch of black matted hair. The striated bark encircling the fallen human.
Could it be a man in that tree?
My heart lifts.
It might not be Tam or Lisa. It might be someone else, someone from a hundred years ago. A thousand? Why would that be better? It just would. There’d be some distance.
But the clothes I saw, the strips of clothes, the tatters. They looked like a woman’s clothes. The glimpse I stole of this hidden person. It is a woman.
Was a woman.
‘Did they die recently, officers?’ asks one of the ten in camouflage.
Two police look around. One moves her face mask under her chin and says ‘we can’t say anything just yet. Why don’t you all get back to your homes. Let us work. Go on now.’
There’s murmuring amongst the group. A reluctance to leave this person. When do you stop guarding? When do you give up and let the police zip them into a bag?
‘It’s time,’ says a woman in a baseball cap. She has a mosquito bite on her neck the size of a lingonberry. ‘Let’s head back. Might need more searches in the morning.’
We walk away from the camera flashes and the hushed police voices. We walk away from the person in the hollow beech tree. We walk away from the police lights.
The forest is murky and now it’s me who gets encircled by these ten. They know, somehow. The way I step tentatively and tilt my head at every strange noise. They sense my fear and they walk around me so that I’m not trekking through Utgard so much as walking within a ring of strength. I focus on the backs of heads and necks, not trees. Numb. I listen to their breathing, not the toads or the bats. I step where they step.
There’s a convoy of four cars to take us back to the base-camp field. They’re all parked the right way and their engines all start when we emerge from the treeline.
The drive back is hushed.
I’m in a Subaru. The driver is Bertil Hendersson, the bee man, the guy who used to manage the sewage works, the fellow with the bad knee. He keeps looking at me in his rear view mirror but he doesn’t ask us questions about what we’ve seen tonight. I’m exhausted. Broken. Sad to my very core. I feel like the fourteen-year-old me driving in the back seat of my granddad’s car. Away from the church. Sitting next to Mum. Her still in shock. New, ill-fitting clothes. Driving to Karlstad cemetery to bury my dad.
At the base camp there are no children swimming in the lake. There’s nobody grilling prinskorv sausages or removing ticks from sunburnt necks. There is only the cool breeze of a tragic summer’s night.
I get into my Hilux and look at my face in the mirror and burst into tears. I sob and sob. The kind of tears I can find more easily now Mum’s gone. I feel so desperately alone in my car in this field on the edge of Utgard forest. No answers, only more questions.
The road back to Gavrik is empty.
I feel numb to my bones. Nerve endings blunted by exhaustion and sorrow. I pass between McDonald’s and ICA Maxi and on towards the twin chimneys of the liquorice factory. They’ll be closed the day after tomorrow for Midsommar. One of only two days a year they shut down production. I get to Lena’s place and the suburb is neat and at rest. This could not be further from the untamed vastness of Utgard forest – a world where, as if some kind of dark trick, the place comes alive after the sun goes down.
Lena’s lit the cut-grass scented candle in the lantern in my friggebod shed. I can see it from my truck. And then I see her, at the kitchen table, wearing a robe, steel thermos shining from the glow of yet another candle, her face staring out at me. Not smiling. Not waving. Letting me take my own time. She’ll know all the details. She’s there if I want to go in.
I do want to go in.
I fall through the front door and she’s standing there in her robe with her arms outstretched and she lets me hang on her like a scared child. She squeezes me and lets me bury my wet face into her shoulder and she holds me up and I weep.
20
We sit at Lena’s kitchen table. She pours hot chocolate from her thermos.
I tell her what we found. She knows some of the details from Chief Björn but I fill her in on the rest.
‘It might not be Tammy,’ she says. ‘We don’t know anything yet.’
She’s right. But it feels like something’s changed in this town. It feels like my friend is further away from me now. It’s been too many days and I’ve seen too many things.
‘The police will be able to tell you more tomorrow,’ Lena says. We have to carry on searching. We have to keep hope alive. You need to get some sleep now, you hear me?’
I drain the last of the hot chocolate. She makes it with whipped cream and it’s filled me and it’s warmed me.
‘Do you have any masking tape?’ I ask. ‘The light’s so bright at 3 am and if I had some tape I could close the gaps in the curtains. If you don’t mind.’
She gets up and opens a cupboard then closes it and opens another. There are at least ten rolls of tape stacked on the bottom shelf next to a stack of cigar boxes, a multipack of Kex chocolate bars, an ICA Maxi loyalty card and a framed photo of Johan in a hard hat by some kind of turbine or pump.
‘Johan stocked up just last week before his hydroelectric conference,’ she says, handing me a roll.
I thank her and take it and head out to my little shed.
‘One thing, Tuva. I feel bad bringing it up after the awful day you’ve had. But I keep finding a candle lit in the lantern in the friggebod. Just remember to blow it out, would you? When you leave. Last thing we need is a house fire.’
Did I leave the candle lit? I thought Lena lit them? Must be my mind playing tricks. I make a mental note to be a more responsible shed guest. Then I tape up the curtains. I climb into bed and my legs ache, and my ankles and neck are covered in raised bites. I fall asleep almost immediately.
W
hen I wake up everything seems wrong.
No vibrating alarm.
No sunbeams on my face.
It’s greenhouse hot and my phone says 8:25am.
Is the woman in the tree Tammy? I dreamt something terrible last night. I can’t remember the details but I know it was hideous. Tam, injured, bleeding, being forced down into the hollow trunk. Screaming. Begging for her life.
I stand up and stagger to the little compost toilet room. I lift the lid. There’s a bluebottle buzzing around like it can’t believe its luck. There’s no water in the plastic toilet, only a thin layer of dry crumbly compost covering whatever delights are hidden underneath. It smells earthy, not bad. But the whole thing is warm. Body temperature. I like my sanitation equipment white and gleaming and cool and porcelain, thank you very much.
The washbowl is some faux-Moroccan thing. I clean my hands and pull on a sweater and head over to the house.
‘Lena?’ I call out. ‘You here?’
She’s in the kitchen in her jeans and a Breton top. She takes a stack of thick, American-style pancakes and places them down on the table.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I do.’
‘Any news?’
‘Not yet.’
She places a plate of crispy bacon strips down next to the pancakes. A bottle of fancy maple syrup. A bowl of plump blueberries.
‘I’m on my way out,’ she says. ‘Drop by the office later and we’ll go over strategy. And keep an open mind. Tammy could still be out there, we don’t know anything for sure.’
I nod and she leaves. If Lena hadn’t done this, hadn’t gone to this trouble, I’d have had a banana or a few squares of Marabou chocolate and then left. I owe her something.
The bacon is salty and it stays crisp even with syrup. The pancakes have a crust but inside they’re warm and fluffy and full of air pockets. Each mouthful is therapy. I finish most of it and leave the rest in Lena’s fridge. Quick shower. New clothes. Gone.
Lena’s suburb looks Monday-perfect. People leaving for work and blowing kisses to their partners who are left holding chubby kids at the front door. An old man pushing his equally old lawnmower around his already close-shaved grass. A local carpenter driving his truck with his windows down; Bruce Springsteen’s voice drifting from his speakers and from his own mouth in perfect harmony.
I park behind the office but run straight over to the police station.
There’s a journalist outside speaking to a camera lens and I recognise his face from last year’s Medusa investigations. He’s the slick-back from Aftonbladet. Rumour is he’s a letch. He’s never said or done anything inappropriate to me but rumours spread. Women talk. We share information. We protect each other.
‘Tuva,’ he says, wrapping up his piece to camera and surging towards me with a smile on his evenly-tanned face. ‘Ola, Aftonbladet. You remember me?’
His teeth are white and square.
‘Have we met?’ I say, feigning ignorance.
‘Ola,’ he says again, offering his hand. ‘Aftonbladet.’
He’s wearing skinny jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a deep V-neck. This guy is his own number one fan, I can tell. By the looks of it he shaves more of his body hair than I do.
‘See you around.’ I pass him and open the door to the cop shop.
There are press-pass lanyards on the counter. There’s a list. So there’s going to be another conference.
The display above the counter reads nineteen. I take a ticket from the queue machine and ring the bell on the counter.
Thord looks bleary-eyed. Could have been a late night or maybe just his hay fever.
‘I heard you were there last night at that tree,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that.’
‘Was it Tammy?’ I ask, my stomach tight like a knotted rope. ‘Was it her?’
I hold my breath.
He looks down at the counter and sighs and then looks up. ‘We don’t know anything for sure yet. The white coats have retrieved the…’
‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Tell me.’
‘The remains. Mostly just…’ He swallows hard. ‘They’ll be working on getting us a firm ID.’
‘How?’ I ask. ‘How, if there’s no fingerprints or face to recognise.’
He swallows again. ‘Don’t need to get into details but the Linköping white coats can take DNA from… what was left. Not sure how, but they can do it. And the teeth were all in place, I heard. National Forensic Centre can ID through dental records. And they got other tricks that I ain’t been educated about. They’ll get back to us as soon as they can. Which I don’t reckon will be too soon what with Midsommar being tomorrow and all.’
‘Your gut,’ I say. ‘Is it Tammy?’
He leans his head back and he lets out a big sigh up to the ceiling.
‘I’m reluctant to say anything either way, Tuvs. I don’t want to get your hopes up unnecessarily.’
‘So you don’t think it’s her?’ I say, my eyes opening wider. ‘The tree. That was someone else? That what you’re telling me?’
He looks like he just made a mistake.
‘I can’t say anything one hundred per cent, not even fifty,’ he says. ‘I haven’t got that kind of education. But…’ He looks at me and there is warmth in his eyes, there is love of some simple platonic kind. ‘But,’ he says again, ‘I’d say, if you pushed me one way or the other, I’d say it was an older cadaver. More than a year, at least.’
I nod to him, my heart rising up in my chest. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘You’re right. It’s not Tammy, is it? Not the ICA girl, either.’
‘I don’t know anything for sure,’ he says. ‘And if it ain’t neither of them then it’s still somebody. Which makes me worry we got three women missing and not two.’
I look at his uniform.
‘When’s Noora back? She’s not picking up her phone or her messages.’
‘Social-media break,’ he says. ‘No phones or FaceTime or Facebook or nothing.’
‘But she’s definitely in Gotland?’ I say. ‘Noora’s not missing, is she? She’s not ‘woman number four’? She’s just away, right?’
‘She’s just away,’ he says. ‘Called from a landline when she arrived after the news broke. Don’t worry about her. Said she might cut her trip short.’
I want her back here. God knows we need her.
‘I hope she does come back,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You ain’t the only one.’
I walk out and the air is warm but the sky’s a dense ceiling of white cloud. It looks low. The kind of awkward basement ceiling where you might scalp yourself.
I walk past Benny Björnmossen’s place and he’s got the shop door wedged open with his wild-boar sign like he does on warm days. I can see the stairwell leading up to his private office and gun storage lockers. The carpet’s been ripped up and there are two fans whirring on the steps. A rope cuts across the stairs with a sign that reads ‘Private. Strictly No Entry.’
What Thord said has given me some hope. A minuscule lifeline to cling on to. He’s not the sharpest steel in the box but he’s experienced. He’s seen bodies before, I know he has. Over a year old. That’s what he said.
I open the door to Gavrik Posten and the bell tinkles. Lars isn’t in. Sebastian’s sitting at my desk and he’s wearing a pair of glasses. Looks like Clark Kent.
‘You see the body? You see her?’ asks Cheekbones by way of hello.
‘We don’t even know it’s a her,’ I say. ‘And yeah, I saw.’
He looks at me from behind his glasses. The kid manages to make them look good. Or they make him look good. Better. Beautiful people make me sick. If I was to wear a pair of reading glasses I’d look older than a grandma and uglier than a polecat sniffing a nettle.
‘You here to see Lena?’ he says.
I nod.
‘She’s free now, I think.’
‘I walk over to her door and knock.
I
don’t hear the words but I can tell she’s saying ‘come in’ by her intonation.
‘Thanks for the pancakes,’ I say.
‘You’re welcome. I miss cooking for Johan. Be happy when he gets back from Östersund.’
I sit down opposite her.
‘Feel weird being back inside here without your desk?’ she asks.
‘Not really,’ I say. And then I think about her question some more. ‘Yes, to be honest. A bit weird.’
She smiles and says, ‘The Facebook page is getting a lot more traffic, ten times as much after last night’s discovery. More comments than Sebastian can keep track of. He understands social media better than Lars so he’s the admin for the page. We’ve had reported sightings of both Tammy and Lisa, and we’ve passed everything on to whatever police force is local to the sighting.’
‘Good,’ I say.
‘Social media,’ she says. ‘For all its bullshit and its downsides, for all the abusive comments and anonymous misery-mongers, it is unbeatable in this situation. And did you hear about the reward?’
I shake my head.
‘Reward for Lisa is at 50,000 kronor. And ours for Tammy is at 5,000. But Benny Björnmossen, our cantankerous local store-keeper, purveyor of bullets and fishing tackle, has kindly offered to add 20,000 to our reward pot. So now we’re up to 25,000, which is pretty meaningful, don’t you agree?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, in shock. ‘Benny did that?’
‘Yes he did. Gossip is he’s been seeing a new girlfriend recently, though nobody has seen her, so maybe he’s softening in his old age.’
We discuss flyers and what we’ll include in the next copy of the Gavrik Posten on Friday. Lena wants full front page and half the paper. The reward front and centre. I suggest new improved flyers to be delivered with each copy and she says she’ll organise it.
‘Are people out searching now?’ I ask. ‘The rest of Utgard? Other locations?’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Most people have work,’ she says. ‘Can’t just leave all that behind. Some people have taken today off because tomorrow’s a red day for Midsommar. They’ve been sent to the towns and villages where we’ve had sightings. Lisa Svensson’s brothers have been organising all that.’