by Will Dean
I get to the top of the stairs and look over.
It’s an above-ground swimming pool.
More like a horse’s drinking trough on steroids.
It takes up the whole container apart from the end I just walked up.
Someone bursts out the water and I almost fall back down the stairs. I steady myself on the steel bannister.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
It’s Axel. Swimming. Nothing illegal about that.
He looks at me, water streaming down his head and off the tip of his nose and I feel like I just walked in on him in the shower. Is he naked in the pool?
‘God, I’m so sorry,’ I say.
‘You ever think of knocking?’ Axel stares, blows water from his nose. ‘Give me ten minutes.’
I walk down the stairs and leave him to it, the sound of splashing following me out.
‘Hello Tuva,’ says Alexandra as I emerge. She’s wearing a thick leather apron and a welding mask.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I just met your cousin.’
She removes her mask and smiles. I’m not sure what her smile means.
‘You get a good eyeful, did you? See what you wanted, did you?’
I frown and say, ‘Do you mind me asking you a few more questions?’
‘About the body?’
‘About your neighbours, people close by.’
‘Wouldn’t call them neighbours exactly,’ she says, gesturing with her mask towards Karl-Otto’s warehouse and Sally’s shack. ‘But family is family and they gave us a decent rate when we moved here.’
‘You’re related to them?’ I ask.
‘What do you need to know?’ she says. ‘I haven’t got long.’
‘Is there anyone around here you think I should interview about Tammy and Lisa? Anyone you have a gut feeling about?’
‘You mean intuition?’
I nod.
‘Half the town,’ she says. ‘Three-quarters of it.’
‘Any names?’ I say.
She moves off towards the storage container I saw last time I was here.
‘Manager of McDonald’s. Middle daughter of Bertil, the bee guy. Gave me a hard time when I tried to set up my food business a few years back. Same with Ronnie, you know, from Ronnie’s bar.’
I take out my digital Dictaphone. ‘Mind if I record?’
She cringes.
‘As I’m deaf.’
She looks like she just remembered. She nods.
‘You had a food business?’ I say. ‘When was this?’
‘Years back. Didn’t end well and now I’m stuck out here in the crap shop welding secure containers and fitting out kitchens.’
‘You don’t like it?’ I say. ‘Seems like a booming business.’ I want to know if they’re making money. If they are under any stress.
‘We do alright,’ she says. ‘The one-off bespoke jobs pay well. We make a living. But at heart I’m a chef, always have been.’
‘What kind of food?’ I say.
She looks at me and there is bitterness in her eyes. An ice-cold look of regret.
‘I need to get back.’
‘Your son,’ I say. ‘Viktor. Where does he go to school?’
‘Doesn’t,’ she says. ‘We took him out, Axel and me. Got too easily led by the other kids, especially the older boys. They’d talk him into stuff. He’s easily led, our Viktor. He does some work for Karl-Otto with the cars and the eBay auctions, and he does babysitting and odd jobs around town. Sometimes in the next village over. Helps old Bertil out with his honey harvest each year. Bottling it all up. Recently been decorating a spare bedroom for some man in Gavrik, can’t remember the name, building some kind of special room. He’s got his own little truck now, though he’d prefer a real one like yours. Advertises for odd jobs on index cards in ICA, in the haberdashery store. Even put a little ad in the Posten paper one time. Viktor’s helped build friggebod outhouses, he’s finished three now. He’s done some work for Benny Björnmossen, too, worships the man, would do anything for him. Big into hunting, you see. Just finished repainting above Benny’s shop. You know, the gun store on Storrgatan?’
I nod for her to continue.
‘Some work for…’ she rubs her forehead with her gloved hand. ‘For the factory, the janitor. Helping pull down the root barns they had out back. What was left of them after that fire.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘You looking for weirdos?’ she says.
‘No, it’s not that…’
‘Cos if you are I’ve got two for you, well, three I suppose.’
My eyes plead for her to tell me.
‘Two lumberjacks out in Utgard causing trouble with their feral cat. More like a wolverine it is. Made our Anna-Marie pregnant it did, evil bastard, she’s only ten months old herself.’
At the mention of the cat I look into the storage container, but the cat litter is gone. Sixty or more sacks. All gone.
‘Your cat litter?’ I say.
‘Anna-Marie will have them some time next month. Let me know if you want a kitten.’
‘No, your cat litter,’ I say, pointing to the container.
She looks at me angrily again and gestures to my Dictaphone and I read her lips and they say, ‘Off.’
‘Sorry?’ I say out loud.
She moves her welding mask towards my Dictaphone so I fake turning it off and place it in my jeans pocket instead.
Alexandra swallows.
‘Cat litter’s all gone,’ she says.
‘You used it?’
Her breathing quickens.
‘No,’ she says.
I look at her and she searches around for an answer.
‘We sold it,’ she says, and she looks relieved to hear these words escaping her mouth. ‘Sold it all. Cash in hand so you’re not to tell nobody. Shoe-shop Freddy bought half of it off Viktor.’
‘Okay,’ I say, making a mental note to tell Thord. ‘Who’s the third weirdo?’
‘What?’
‘The lumberjacks and someone else.’
‘I just said.’
I frown.
‘Fredrik Bom. Don’t look much older than my boy, lives out near the cross-country ski trail, you probably seen him.’
‘Shoe salesman,’ I say.
She nods. ‘Viktor worked for him a few months back in his Easter break. Clearing out the basement after his mamma passed on. Or was it the attic? Well, you would not believe the way that man lives.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Cats, dozens of them. All over the worktops and in the bathrooms.’ She cringes. ‘Unclean. Well, at least he has decent litter now. Odour-free. And then there’s his garage, you ask him about that?’ Her eyes light up. ‘Even better, you ask to look in there. Look for your friend. And Viktor was never allowed inside the upstairs rooms at Freddy Bom’s house. You know, the one with the big pine-tree hedge that the neighbours complain about. Made him stay on the staircase. No wandering. Viktor told me Freddy’s obsessed with hurt feet. Reckons he showed him photos of women with their toes all bust up and folded under their feet. You ever hear of such a thing?’ She shudders. ‘You look upstairs if you can. But if that man tells you to take your shoes off when you step inside you look him in the eye and you tell him to go straight to hell.’
23
I exit onto the main road and the asphalt’s shimmering like a Death Valley highway.
I call Thord.
‘Tuvs,’ he says. ‘Any news? You find anything?’
‘Was about to ask you the same thing,’ I say. ‘The hollow tree body.’
‘Oh,’ he says.
Oh? What does that mean? How can he talk about that person with such casual disregard? Is that a police thing? Too many years in the job?
‘ID?’ I say.
‘It’s complicated,’ he says.
‘Complicated?’
I start sweating.
‘We should meet,’ he says.
‘What is it?’
‘Lunch? Quick burge
r?’ He shouts to someone and then says, ‘One o’clock?’
‘Okay.’
Toytown’s so small we don’t need to specify which restaurant. We both know. There won’t be any parking issues or reservations needed.
What does he mean by ‘it’s complicated’?
The outer edge of Utgard forest glows like a cold-war thermonuclear experiment gone wrong. The sun picks out light green spruce growth and the whole thing looks all the bigger for being lit up. I slow and turn left onto the Mossen village track.
Insects everywhere.
Winged critters kamikaze-bombing my windscreen on their way from sucking the blood of one defenceless mammal to finding the next. A life of bloodlust. A billion of those lives.
My Hilux radio crackles and hisses as I pass the hoarder’s tumbledown house. I wonder if it’s still full of his stuff. Last time I peered inside it had mountains of garbage stacked inside. Some piles reaching all the way up to the ceiling. I pity the team tasked with emptying that nightmare house. Then I pass Viggo’s red torp cottage and his Volvo taxi’s parked there in his driveway, a silver-foil antiheat sheet stuck to the underside of his windscreen.
I drive on.
The hill looks like one of Sally’s dried out snakeskins, a winding brown-grey line ahead of me up to the deepest part of the village.
My radio turns to white noise so I turn it off.
Dry bogland. Crispy reeds and sedge grasses. An elk-hunting tower standing proud in the distance like a lighthouse stranded in a long-ago evaporated sea.
I pass the wood-carving sisters hard at work in their workshop: carving and sanding and tailoring their expensive, hideous trolls. The talking one raises her hand as I pass and the quiet one just smiles.
Two houses left.
A large, green plastic gravel bin looks like it’s spewed up its guts; fine grains sprayed all around. They look more like sand or drain-unblocking granules than gravel.
I switch off my engine. Cousin Alexandra said the lumberjacks are working this area and that their caravan is parked just off the track.
I trek through the pines following old boot prints.
The caravan is white and it has shade awnings, homemade things made of old sailcloth and tarps, jutting out from its sides. There are gas canisters littered about under the awnings and water tanks resting next to the fibreglass door. The smouldering remnants of a bonfire, ringed by large rocks. A fire extinguisher on standby. The whole area stinks of cat urine and bonfire smoke.
I step closer to the caravan and look through the windows but they’re taped-up just like my window at Lena’s friggebod guest cottage. But these have been heavily taped with dark brown packing tape. And there are no curtains or blinds – this tape isn’t covering gaps. The loggers have ripped up cardboard boxes by the looks of it, and taped the pieces inside the windows. For privacy? Or to keep out the sun?
I try the door but it’s locked. Something dark red smeared on the doorframe. No noises from within, just a pair of mayflies mating in mid-air, floating between my eyes and the caravan door, performing the most intimate of aeronautical displays. Buzzing. Connected. I leave them be.
There’s a Portaloo up on bricks but the door’s tied shut with ropes. Scattered around it are loose pages from some kid’s book. There’s a clear bin liner full of takeout cartons and crushed beer cans. They look like Tammy’s cartons.
I should be able to track the lumberjacks by the noise they make. In theory, at least. If my ears worked better I’d just listen out for the chainsaw attached to the pincer-like front end of the felling machine. I’ll do my best. I will not get lost out here today. I have my stun gun and I’m covered in insect repellent. I’ll be okay.
The area they’ve already felled is clear. There is no forest here. But that doesn’t make it easy to navigate without falling and breaking my pelvis. There are trunks everywhere. Trunks and dead branches stripped weeks ago from freshly cut pine and discarded like cut hair in a salon. The stacks of branches are a metre deep in places. Hidden traps. Imagine all the snakes down there. Vipers. Rats as big as furry newborn babies. Streamlined, rabid, with fur and sharp protruding teeth and tails as long as violin bows. Arachnid nests right under my boots. Spiders and centipedes, the Jurassic variety that could swallow your cocker spaniel in the depths of the night. I try not to stumble. I couldn’t imagine being stranded out here. Injured and helpless.
The noise of the machines grows louder.
I trek and my face is turning red, I can feel it. Sun damage. Soon the skin will peel off and the whole charade will begin again. Tanning? Don’t make me laugh. I’m more reptile than human when the sun gets strong. I shed myself.
There are treetops in the distance. I can’t see the Norwegian spruce trees themselves but I can see their tops. They shake. A treetop moves and chainsaws scream. I hear the sound of living wood cracking, and then the treetop sways to one side and disappears. Like this whole place is a church on a Sunday morning. Everyone standing for a hymn and then, at the far end of the nave, during the most climactic part of the song, an elder faints from the heat. You don’t see him fall, just his head sway, and then he disappears from view.
A cloud of midges emerge from my side so I speed up. I’m not exaggerating when I say a cloud, this pack are dense and they are on the hunt. I start to jog and they sense my fear. Is it my sweat? Pheromones? The smell of my blood so close to the surface of my sunburnt forehead? They catch me up and I run for my life towards the lumberjacks, paying scant regard for branches or roots or elk dung. They catch me as I run and they feed on me as I go. Into my ears and up my sleeves. I scrape at my burnt face with my nails and I curse at these determined little fuckers but they keep on feasting. I scrape them off me and smack my face with my hands and I sprint faster and faster but I cannot outrun them.
I make it to the shade of the pines.
Who would have thought this dark shade could ever feel safe? But the shade is a shelter of sorts and the midges have moved on to their next victim. A gang of outlaws with no apparent enemy save for the inevitable deathly chill of next winter.
I see the machine.
Two machines.
One insect-like harvester. An articulated mechanical beast that pivots in the centre: the front half is an air-conditioned cab and a hydraulic pincer claw containing a giant chainsaw, and the back half is the engine powering the thing. Caterpillar tracks and horse power. The harvester moves to the next seventy-year-old pine and saws off its thick lower branches. Then it grabs the pine by the base of its trunk like a man’s hand might grip an upright flagpole. It pulls its pincer claw up and down the trunk, shedding any smaller low branches, and then it grips the base and it saws through the tree in a matter of three seconds. The mighty tree is amputated from its roots. It looks alive but it is not. The harvester lifts the tree and tilts its pincer claw and the tree crashes to the forest floor. The pincer pulls the tree through its claw, shedding whatever branches are left, and slicing the length of the pine into three distinct sections. Five minutes ago the tree was a living breathing thing. An old man of the forest with root systems feeding it water, and needles turning sunlight into sugar. But now it’s destined for the SPT Pulp Mill. A commodity rather than a life.
The second truck is a more normal looking tractor with a grabber and an open-sided rear. It lifts the three trunk sections and places them down with the others to be removed to the Mossen village track and stacked for mill trucks to take them away.
I wave my arms around at the first machine and eventually the driver cuts his engine.
A man wearing a baseball cap leans out of his cab, which must be over two metres above the forest floor, and shouts, ‘Go.’
I shout, ‘hello,’ and he shakes his head like who is this city fool and what does she want.
He climbs down from his cab and the other man in the other tractor stops his engine as well.
We walk towards each other. I try to look approachable while he looks down at his boots.
I jog to meet up with him.
‘Hi, I’m Tuva Moodyson,’ I say, holding out my hand.
‘And I’m the big bad wolf,’ he says, ignoring my hand. ‘Now what do you want?’
He has one tooth missing at the top and the tooth next to it sticks out almost horizontally like a miniature diving board. When he closes his mouth the tooth still sticks out a little.
‘I’m looking for the two missing women, Tammy Yamnim and Lisa Svensson.’
He frowns and looks around to his left and his right.
‘They ain’t here.’
‘Have you seen anything strange recently. Anything out of the ordinary?’
He runs his tongue over his diving board tooth and says, ‘Most things.’
‘Like?’
‘Seen an elk calf dead in a puddle. Thing was still in its sack, you know, its sack from inside its mamma’s belly. Looked like a perfect calf, it did, inside the membrane, just resting there. Like a miscarriage, or a stillbirth, I expect. Wasn’t no flies. Must have seen it directly after it happened.’ He swallows and scratches his chin. ‘Ain’t never seen nothing like it.’
I nod. ‘Have you seen any strange people? Anyone suspicious looking?’
He turns round to his colleague who is now walking towards us. ‘What about him?’
I smile.
‘I ain’t joking,’ he says, with no smile.
The man walks to us and shakes my hand and says, ‘Markus.’
‘Hi, I’m Tuva Moodyson. I’m a reporter looking for the missing women.’
Markus looks at Diving Board Tooth and then he looks at me and he sticks out his chest.
‘We don’t see many women in our line of work.’
‘How long have you both been in Utgard?’
Diving Board sniffs and says, ‘Five weeks. Got three more to go. Which reminds me, we gotta get back to work. On a contract. Can’t stop unscheduled like this.’
‘Them the girls from the flyers?’ asks Markus.
‘Yes,’ I say.
I notice Markus has cuts to his arms and wrists and a red-raw scratch across his neck.