by Will Dean
I step back outside and walk to a lamp post a little way down Storrgatan. There are seven flyers taped to it. One of Tam. Three of Lisa. One from the Lutheran church about a summer loppis bric-a-brac sale. And two advertising the public Midsommar celebrations down by the reservoir tomorrow night. And then I look past the lamp post. To the window. The shoe-shop window. And the moonfaced man staring right back at me, a vague smile on his face. Freddy’s measuring a petite woman’s feet on an angled block. He’s staring right back at me but he’s dragging a narrow measuring tape gently over her foot. Tenderly. And then he looks up at her and nods.
I walk back to my truck, a tiny shard of crisp bacon stuck between two of my back teeth.
Viggo Svensson’s white Volvo taxi drives past me as I exit Gavrik and head on through the underpass. I sync my hearing aid to my phone as I drive towards Snake River. I want to push the residents harder. I want to tell eBay Karl-Otto and young Viktor and the cousins what was in that hollow beech tree and I want to look into their eyes and I want to judge them.
My phone rings.
It’s my new boss, Anders.
‘Hej, Anders,’ I say.
‘Hej Anders?’ he says. ‘Tuva, where the fuck are you?’
21
‘I’m still here,’ I tell Anders. ‘I’m still up in Värmland.’
‘And what about your job down here, the articles you’re working on, do you think they’ll just magically get written?’
I can imagine his face red and blotchy. That vein in the centre of his forehead busting out like it’s alive in its own right.
‘Anders,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. But my best friend’s still missing.’ He starts to bark something but I cut him off. ‘As is another young woman. And we discovered a body last night.’
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ There’s a pause and then he says, ‘I’m very sorry about your friend. Shit.’
‘Police haven’t identified the body yet,’ I tell him. ‘Good chance it isn’t Tammy. Good chance she’s still out there somewhere so I need to keep searching. I hope you can understand that. Could I take holiday? Unpaid leave?’
‘How long for?’ he says.
‘I can’t say. I hope we’ll find her, find both of them today. But I can’t say.’
‘I’ll talk to HR,’ he says. ‘And I’ll get Erik to cover you for the next few days. But you have to keep me in the loop.’
‘Okay,’ I say, Utgard approaching on the horizon like a weather front, like a storm cloud, like a dark void.
‘Do what you need to do, and then get back to work.’
‘I will.’
He grunts and ends the call.
There are scarecrows in the fields on the way out to Snake River. Seems like more scarecrows are appearing each day. The swimming kids were prodding the scarecrow with a stick before the search yesterday. Knocked his top hat off. They were prodding it the way a group of children approach something they’re scared of. Their numbers affording some extra bravery. And I can see exactly why they were afraid. I’m not sure if it’s the farmers up here, the fact they make so little money they have to recycle their own clothes, or if farmers all around the world do the exact same thing. But the scarecrows look like dead men. Left out in the unrelenting sun, alone. Never at the end of a field, always at its centre. Left alone to burn up and dry out in clear sight. Old hats and coats and trousers stuffed with straw. Strung up. Crawling with bugs. And the way these scarecrows are abandoned, pegged up against a vertical stick. Like they’ve been crucified.
I pass Utgard and turn right into Snake River Salvage. It’s windy today and the dust from the track is swirling and eddying, child-size tornados blowing themselves out before they get going.
The road curves left round to the twelve o’clock position.
Some people call Sally Sandberg ‘Sally Snakes’ rather than ‘The Breeder’. I was eavesdropping yesterday at the base camp. Kid said, ‘Sally Snakes grows pythons longer than a bus and then she leaves them in beds. Under the sheets all coiled up.’ Sally Snakes is a good name for her. I can see why it sticks.
I slow my truck outside her deck and get blinded by the midday sun. There’s a drying rack on Sally’s deck covered in laundry and there’s a pair of trousers left hanging on her pine wall. I get out of my Hilux and walk over.
‘Sorry about your friend, friend,’ she says, walking out towards me with her phone in her hand. ‘Saw it on the Facebook. You have my condolences for what they’re worth to you.’
‘I don’t think it’s Tammy,’ I say.
She scratches her neck and says, ‘It’s Lisa? From ICA? Well that’s too bad. Real nice girl, I always liked her. Heard she was gonna be a TV star.’
I want to tell her, no, the body in the hollow beech has been there a while, months or more, but I don’t. It’s not public information. She steps to her drying rack and I look at what she’s looking at and my hand rushes up to my mouth.
Sweet Jesus.
They’re not socks and T-shirts drying on the rack. No, not here. Oh my Lord. Sally is looking at half a dozen snakeskins carefully splayed and folded over the wire runners of her drying rack.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Beauties, ain’t they,’ she says. ‘You think that lot are tasty, take a look at the twins back here.’
She points to two snakes longer than I am tall. They are pinned to vertical clapboards. Drying on the siding of this Snake River shack. I thought they were trousers and I was dead wrong.
‘Articulated pythons, same mamma,’ she says. ‘Can’t say for sure same pappa because she bred with two and, well, it’s not as simple as us Homo sapiens.’ She takes a seat on her swing chair, her scarlet-painted toenails shining in the sun. Eight in total. ‘One litter of baby snakes can have more than one pappa. Fascinating, ain’t they?’
‘They are,’ I say.
‘Yes, they are,’ she agrees.
‘I try to hold as much control as I can over the litters, it’s my livelihood after all. You gotta make sure your grandchildren turn out the way you always dreamed of.’ She wrinkles her nose and starts rocking forward and back in the swing seat, the metal squeaking like the call of a distressed songbird. ‘Just like people, truth be told. I mean, take my boy over there.’ I look to where she’s pointing but Karl-Otto isn’t there, just his warehouse and his smouldering firepit. ‘I dreamt he’d get together with Lisa from the ICA store. They did date I think, and they’d have produced the sweetest little kiddies. But she didn’t like him. No chemistry, she told him.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Shame – now look how she’s ended up. Same goes for Petra from the Q8 petrol station. The one with the jet black hair. You know the one I mean. She wasn’t such a good-looking specimen but she was strong and kind. Healthy parents. Good genes. She don’t live local anymore. Haven’t seen her for months. Moved away, I heard.’
‘Karl-Otto dated my friend for a while,’ I say, stepping up onto her deck.
She looks at me suspiciously, like why are you stepping up to my level before you’ve been invited? But then she smiles and says, ‘Beer? Got them chilling in the stream.’
I look down and see the drainage gulley and the bottles, their metal tops glinting from the sun’s reflection in the ditch-brown water.
‘I’ll take a soda if you have one?’ I say.
‘Just got beer,’ she says.
‘No thanks, then,’ I say, tasting the beer on my tongue already. The flavour morphing into tequila and then rum. The mixture. The potential. The memory of waking up on the bedroom floor of my London flat-share covered in my own vomit with some stranger fast asleep on the bed. ‘I’m driving,’ I say. ‘Get you a beer?’
She nods.
I trot down to the stream and pick up a chilled bottle. There’s something being dragged along by the current in the drainage water. Pinkish. Bloody. Something long and glutinous like a thin lumpy sausage skin.
I step closer.
‘Python guts, all fresh,’ says Sa
lly behind me. ‘They’ll wash out to the river if you leave them be.’
I hand her the beer.
‘They didn’t really date, you see,’ she says.
‘Sorry?’
‘My boy Karl-Otto and your friend. They wasn’t actually compatible. Scientifically, I mean. More friends than anything, but don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she was a decent person.’
‘She is a decent person,’ I say.
‘That’s what I said. Just not the right genetic match for my boy.’ She drinks her beer.
‘Mind if I walk back to the river? I’ve never seen it up close.’
‘Sweden’s a free country, friend. Just don’t fall into a bucket, wouldn’t be pretty.’
I walk around the shady side of her shack peeking under the deck into the crawl space. Nothing down there. I walk over a manhole cover with a heavy concrete block sitting on top, then check out whatever windows I can reach. All covered. Not with wood. Not with blinds or curtains. It looks like they’re covered over with brown paper. There’s a noise so I step away. Don’t want to get caught snooping but I do need to snoop. I have to. The river’s quiet, which is a relief. I’ve stood close to white-water rapids and to waterfalls on my travels and they play havoc with my aids to the point where I have to turn them off. Snake River is broad and it snakes, hence the name. The water snakes and its banks are teeming with vipers. Bog snakes. The shape reminds me of the Thames, only with zero embankments or bridges or expensive apartment buildings. This river is nettles and inlets and abandoned jetties that look like they weren’t built too well in the first place. Death traps. I can see burrows of some kind in the banks. Mink? Beavers? Some of the burrows and holes are big enough to fit children inside. And at the place where the drainage gulley leaks into the main river the colours mix like a fancy cocktail, tea-brown into martini clear.
There are six giant buckets and together they each smell like the worst thing imaginable.
Three of the buckets are paddling-pool size and three are just huge. I look into one and there are furry animals in there. Fizzing. There’s a warning label on the side with some chemical codes and hazard signs. The furry animals, I have no idea what they used to be, are decomposing at a rate of knots. Smells of rotting meat and bleach. The next bucket contains snake bones. I can tell it’s a snake because it’s one long vertebrae and a thousand fine ribs. There is no fizzing here, no appreciable reaction. Just clean white bones getting even whiter with every passing acidic minute.
Two of the paddling-pool-size buckets have their lids on and they have padlocks securing them. I cover my fingers with my jacket and try to pry open a lid to see what’s inside. I curl my fingers under the edge and heave.
‘You don’t wanna do that, friend,’ says Sally behind me. ‘You’ll get yourself burnt.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Just curious.’
‘Just curious,’ she says, pointing to the cuff of my long-sleeve T-shirt. ‘Look what curiosity done for you.’
The edge of my sleeve where my fingers curled under the bucket lid has turned white. Navy to white.
‘Good luck finding your friend,’ says Sally, minty steam flowing from her nostrils. ‘All the best with that.’
Her face and her crossed arms make it clear I am no longer welcome so I climb back into my truck. The tips of my fingers burn. When I rub them together it’s like I have no fingerprints left, like they are completely smooth now, unidentifiable if the worst was to happen.
I drive round past the firepit and the doors of the warehouse are locked shut but I can feel the music booming out from inside.
I park.
It’s house music, some kind of happy hardcore stuff I’d guess, although I can’t hear it clearly through the loading doors. I look at the wolverine mouth, at its razor-sharp teeth, and push my bleached fingertip into the mouth, past the incisors, and press the bell.
Nothing.
I wait for the track to end, a white butterfly fluttering around my neck, and then I press the bell again.
Voices.
The doors open.
‘Oh, look,’ says Karl-Otto. ‘It’s you again.’
I peek into the warehouse space and the ’74 Mustang is gone. It’s been replaced by a pickup truck. A dark red pickup truck with no number plates.
Karl-Otto looks at me then the truck.
‘Wanna buy it?’ he asks. Viktor approaches from the bank of computer screens. ‘Ain’t got it listed for sale yet. Young Viktor will wash it for you. Better than your Hilux out there – this one’s Swedish.’
What do I do now? Photograph the truck? There are no number-plates. Call Thord?
‘Can I take a look at it first?’ I ask, smiling, walking in the direction of the dark red truck.
‘No, you can’t,’ says Karl-Otto standing in my way. ‘It was a joke. Ain’t for sale. What do you want?’
I look at the truck some more. Can’t see any blood, any dents, any suspicious features.
‘I wanted to tell you about the big search tomorrow. As it’s Midsommar and everyone’s off work.’
‘I’m not off work,’ he says.
‘You knew Tammy well and yet you missed the Utgard search yesterday.’
He stretches his arms up showing me both his sweat-drenched armpits.
‘Okay, so now you told me,’ he says, then he turns to Viktor. ‘Vik, go get me a Coke, in a glass, ice and lime.’
Viktor runs off to do as he’s told and Karl-Otto steps closer to me.
Sweat and engine oil.
‘What do you really want?’ he says.
I swallow a big hard dry nothing.
‘I want to see the rest of this building.’ I don’t want to say this. I don’t want to push him too far in a place like this, so far away from safety. But I have to find Tam. I need to eliminate suspicious people and places. Lena knows where I am and I have a stun gun in my handbag. ‘I want to see that room back there, and I want to see your home upstairs.’
Karl-Otto looks at me like I’m insane.
‘Well, we don’t always get what we want now do we?’ He looks me up and down. There’s a long-handled wrench or spanner thing right next to me and I’m tempted to smash it into his kneecap.
‘Show me,’ I say. ‘Then I’ll leave you alone. You have my word.’
He grins. ‘I have your word?’
Viktor arrives and with his hammerhead eyes I reckon he can watch a tennis match sat by the net without ever having to move his head.
Karl-Otto drinks the Coke and sighs with relief.
‘You can see my studio,’ he says, pointing to the curtained-off area at the back. ‘Vik can show you that. And then you can leave my property once and for all.’
‘Deal,’ I say.
I walk with Viktor back into the cool depths of the warehouse. At the two-thirds point the ceiling drops and the spiral staircase leads up to Karl-Otto’s home. The curtain runs the full width of the warehouse. It’s actually three or four curtains duct-taped together and connected to the rod above with shower rings. A leather leash of some kind hangs from the rail at the far end. Viktor pulls the curtain a little to let me through.
It’s a photographic studio.
Looks professional.
There are light boxes and umbrella lamps and three tripods with different cameras. There are huge rolls of white and grey paper that extend over the concrete floor and up the back wall. On the paper stands an engine block. Looks ridiculous in this studio set-up. Next to the computer is a foldaway make-up kit and a hairdryer and a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. There’s a box of disposable latex gloves and a bottle of industrial-strength pipe unblocker. Viktor sees me looking and pulls me by the arm towards the engine.
‘Karl-Otto photographs parts,’ Viktor says.
‘Parts?’ I say.
‘Not body parts.’ Viktor blushes bright red. ‘I didn’t mean that. Just car parts. For eBay and Blocket. Nothing illegal about that. Just car parts is all.’
22
There’s a brown Volvo estate half in and half out of the crusher and it looks like a maimed rodent caught in a trap and left that way to starve.
I drive slowly round from Karl-Otto’s warehouse at the three o’clock point towards the cousins’ containers at six o’clock, down nearest the road. I let the truck move at its own pace with my boot off the accelerator. Trundling and watching. Are you here in this unseen place, Tammy? The weird thing about small towns is just when you start to think the townsfolk are odd and hostile, you drive outside the small town and realise it just gets worse. Much worse. Gavrik is a goddam megacity compared to this. I hope you’re not here someplace, Tam.
The containers grow bigger in my windscreen, like a freighter ship hit the rocks after a hurricane and spilt its guts all over the shore. They gleam in the sun.
I get out of my Hilux and the heat seems to have intensified in the last ten minutes, the sun weighing down on us. I look for Axel or Alexandra, either one. But nobody’s here.
Time to search the dark places.
I keep my voice down but I say, ‘Hi, it’s Tuva. Anyone around?’ and then I look round the back of the containers. A septic tank and an outdoor ecological cold store like the one in Viggo’s garden. These things are getting as common as basement dig-outs in the fancy parts of London. I used to see them visiting friends at Imperial College. Smart homes in south Kensington, one after the other with skips outside and people down there excavating, burrowing, desperate to eek out a little more space where space is at a premium.
No premium here I can tell you.
No basements, either. The water table’s too high, at least in the autumn time. And that’s a good thing. It’s one less nightmare I have about Tammy. It is statistically unlikely that my best friend is locked in a dingy basement and that is some relief.
‘Hello,’ I say in a meek voice. ‘Anyone home?’
Then I try to open a shipping container. They seem to come in two sizes: large and massive. The massive ones are twice as long as the large ones. I pull on a stiff steel door and it opens. Stairs up. I take them, not talking, not announcing myself. I expected a room behind the door but I’m walking up a narrow steel staircase.