by Will Dean
‘You been in a fight?’ I say.
He turns his arms over and looks at the raised red lines.
‘With every tree I ever dealt with,’ he says. ‘Goddam needles don’t let up.’
Diving Board taps Markus on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get back to it.’
I can see a tick in Diving Board’s eyebrow. I thought it was a spider but it’s a deer tick. I go to tell him but then I just let it be. Big bad wolf? Only thing in Sweden that can bring down a wolf, except maybe a bear with young, is a tick. I let it be.
‘Don’t come out here again,’ says Diving Board. ‘I can’t see you when I’m felling. Ain’t safe.’
I walk back towards my truck over the dead branches and hidden brambles. There are small ditches or streams littered around, some hidden by cut branches like the secret drainage gulley beneath Snake River Salvage. And there are boulders designed to make you go over on your ankle. With every sun-dried branch that snaps I imagine my shin doing the same. A dirty break. Puncturing the skin. Me relying on Diving Board and his pal Markus to get me to safety.
The drive back down the hill is a dream. Air-conditioning on max, my mouth full of wine gums and no other cars on the road. I pass the stacked pine trunks and I pass the houses and I pull up onto the smooth asphalt of the main road.
After the scarecrows and the underpass I drive slowly towards McDonald’s, stuck behind some kid in an EPA tractor, some kid with a red triangle in his back window.
There’s also a bumper sticker.
It reads: Missing. Lisa Svensson. Reward 100,000 kronor.
It’s doubled.
The gap between Lisa and Tam is widening by the hour.
24
I should overtake but I just stare at the bumper sticker. The value of Lisa’s life is stated at four times that of Tammy’s. I know it’s not that simple but in a way it is. I hate how Gavrik people think of Tammy as less valuable. Laid out in stark numbers for them all to compare.
I overtake.
There’s a kindergarten further up the road and the kids are out on a walk as the weather’s so nice. There’s about twelve shiny little five-year-olds all slathered in sunblock, all wearing baseball caps. But they don’t look like kids. They’re walking along the side of the road in the heat of the day and they’re holding onto a knotted rope, each child gripping their own knot, walking in single file, their teachers flanking them at the front and rear. The whole scene looks like a chain gang outside a Louisiana state prison. Looks like armed guards leading a gang of convicted felons out into the sun-baked fields to break rocks for an hour or ten. I’ve got my windows wound up and my air-con on but I imagine the kids singing some southern marching song, some melody to keep them walking, to keep their spirits high on the long, hot involuntary trek.
Gavrik comes into view.
The Grimberg Liquorice factory. Two churches on the right: one with a stunted spire, the other with a tower. Both made of timber. Both in competition for the hearts and minds and monetary contributions of local Toytown believers.
I pull into McDonald’s and try not to look over at Tam’s food van. Who’s responsible for it now? Are the ingredients still inside? Still rotting in the June heat? Tam wouldn’t like that. She keeps it so neat.
I get out of my Hilux and the heat hits me like disembarking an airplane in a faraway tropical place. The kind of place where fogs linger every day and nobody says a thing about it.
My phone vibrates. It’s Thord. He says he’ll be ten minutes late. He says he’s sorry about that.
I walk to the shade of the overhang by the main entrance and the big yellow M. There’s a man and a teenage girl and they are not getting on. My hackles raise on the back of my neck not only because I loathe full-grown men talking down to teenage girls, but also because this is a town where young women are going missing. I can’t hear any of his words but I see his body language. I read it. The bent body and the shaking finger. The disgusted expression on his face. The way he moves his head from side to side. I approach and the girl’s looking down at the block paving and he is saying, ‘You need to think about all that before it’s too late. Get some weight off before you miss the boat, look at me when I’m talking to you.’ She looks up and she is me at fourteen. She is most girls at fourteen. I was socially awkward and unsure of just about everything. I had no dad at that point and she only has a sorry excuse for one from what I can see. The girl nods at her father and he says, ‘Wait here and I’ll get us both salads. Small fries. To share.’ He points to her midriff. ‘You need to be conscious of what you’re doing to your body, Margit.’
He goes inside.
She looks down at the ground again and she doesn’t look mortified and I reckon she’s heard this all before. I move to stand a little way from her, facing the same way, facing out away from this town.
‘He doesn’t know,’ I say.
She stiffens up but she does not move away.
‘My friend’s mum once said this to me because my mum couldn’t. She told me, “you get one life and you live it the way you want to.”
I feel Margit half-turn towards me but she says nothing.
‘You’ll be fine,’ I say. ‘You’ll be the star of your own life whether he sees it or not.’ I pause. ‘Most likely he will see it one day. Don’t let men talk down to you. Not even him. You do what you want. Please yourself. Just hang in there, okay, things will get better.’
I look over to her and she has her hands balled into fists. The man comes out carrying a bag of food. He hands it to her and lights up a cigarette and says, ‘Come on, Margit. Move yourself.’
I go inside.
I look around for Tam instinctively. This is our place.
Nothing.
Thord comes in and he looks like he has conjunctivitis.
‘Hay fever’s gonna finish me off,’ he says by way of hello. ‘Goddam pollen can go to hell.’
‘You eating?’ I say.
‘It’s on me,’ he says. ‘What do you want?’
He orders me a Big Mac and six McNuggets for himself. We take our trays and sit outside.
‘Is there any news, Thord?’
He opens his cardboard box of McNuggets and looks down and nods.
‘We’re having a press conference at four. Most of the details will come out then but I can tell you now there have been some developments.’
‘What?’
He bites into a nugget, looks around, and draws himself closer. ‘The deceased in the tree’ he says. ‘Not Tammy. Not Lisa.’ Thank God. My shoulders loosen and I look up to the sky and then back to Thord.
‘Like you thought,’ I say.
‘He swallows and takes a sip of apple juice. ‘More like anthropology than police work, so said the white coats,’ he says. ‘Or did they say archaeology?’
He thinks about that.
‘ID on the body?’ I ask.
‘Can’t say too much before the presser.’ He sneezes into his elbow pit. ‘Suffice to say it wasn’t your friend. That body had been there a fair few years. Almost back to the original Medusa days. You know, I heard this just before I came out to see you. Apparently the girls out on the roads and lanes selling Swedish strawberries from them fold-out tables, they’ve gone and armed themselves.’
‘Good,’ I say.
‘Teenage girls with shotguns and carving knives selling soft fruit is not good,’ he says.
‘Maybe we need more of it.’
He shakes his finger at me and smiles and bites into another nugget.
There are raggare cars parading around the town in convoy. Vehicles with wonderful names like Oldsmobile and Cadillac and Chevrolet and Buick and Thunderbird. Vintage cars low-riding with fancy-font name-banners like Erikson and Henrikson stuck to the tops of their windscreens.
‘You know,’ says Thord. ‘They never cause me no trouble whatsoever, the raggare folk. Outsiders from Stockholm and whatnot, they turn their noses up and moan about them and their rockabilly clothes and their loud mu
sic but in all my days policing they have never caused me bother. Just spend ten months of the year fixing up their junky cars, then when the weather allows for it they drive around, blissful, showing off their chrome.’
‘I like them,’ I say.
‘Decent folk.’
‘Thord,’ I say. ‘What more can I do? I’m starting to feel more powerless, more useless with every day that passes. I can’t help thinking of Tammy out there somewhere in a basement or an attic or elk tower, bleeding, growing weaker, all tied up. What can I do?’
He screws up the cardboard nuggets box and moves his tongue over his teeth and looks out past ICA at Tam’s food van.
‘Just keep doing what you’re doing, Tuvs. We’ve had multiple sightings, multiple snippets of information. Most via the presser and your Facebook page and the flyers all over town. Facebook’s sometimes the key to solving this kind of thing, especially in a small cut-off town. Good that you have Sebastian in the office taking care of it. He’s working real hard on this. You’re both doing your friend proud. Now, it’s Midsommar tomorrow so people will be off work, most’ll be out at their cabins or else celebrating at the reservoir and taking a bath. If you need volunteers to search, I’d start there. If you want to walk around with flyers, I’d do that at the reservoir. Important thing is to not give up hope.’
I nod and finish my burger.
‘I’ve been talking to as many people as possible.’ I say. ‘How many officers have you got on this case?’
‘We have support from two other forces. Suits working non-stop on finding your friend.’
I like how he talks about Tam and doesn’t always mention Lisa. I’m a hypocrite, I know, but Tam needs a little extra focus. Especially with the unequal rewards. She deserves it.
‘I’d like you to take a closer look at some locals,’ I say.
He frowns.
‘The Snake River people. All of them. The Breeder and her son, Karl-Otto, the eBay trader. And the cousins, Alexandra and Axel. Their boy, Viktor, not sure if he’s their boy or just Alexandra’s.’
‘Don’t know much about the cousins but the Sandberg family are popular in the town,’ he says. ‘Old man Sandberg, Karl-Otto’s daddy; he was in the Gavrik town poker game back in the day, along with my uncle.’
‘Talk to Freddy Bom.’
He frowns again.
‘The shoe-shop guy.’
‘I know who he is,’ says Thord. ‘Seems pretty harmless to me, like a stretched-out toddler. My fiancée reckons his mouth’s so small he’d struggle to eat a hard-boiled egg in one go.’
I laugh and then I realise what he just said.
‘Shit, you got engaged?’ I say.
He looks proud of himself.
‘Congratulations,’ I say, and I realise I’m jealous. I have no idea why. I kissed Thord once for about a single drunken minute outside Ronnie’s bar, years ago. I don’t even fancy him. Not really. But now I feel unsteady. It’s not jealousy, I don’t think, more that I feel left behind, that I didn’t know this had happened. The town’s moved on without me.
‘Got a special VIP eye mask as an engagement gift,’ he says. ‘Works in two different ways. At night-time, when the sun’s streaming through the sides of the blinds it’s like a blackout mask. Works real good. Then in the morning I have an extra piece in the freezer, like a gel pack, slips inside the mask and cools down my hay-fever eyeballs. Pretty good gift, I’d say.’
I smile at him with his red nostrils and his big old horse teeth. It feels good to sit here with a friend. Even though the circumstances are abhorrent, the worst, it feels human to share food with a good person.
‘You know in Spain you can buy strong beer in McDonald’s,’ he says, his red eyes wide with wonder. ‘Can you imagine the carnage we’d see in Gavrik if such a thing were permitted here? You imagine my job on a Friday night? Anyways, I gotta get back to the station. I’ll tell the suits what you said about Snake River and the shoe-shop boy. And I’ll see you at the press conference at four.’
‘Thanks for the food,’ I say.
‘Keep safe, you hear. Take precautions and watch your back. Town ain’t safe. Always tell people where you’re going. Talk to Benny Björnmossen or Lisa’s family if you need help searching, if you need backup. You call me if you find anything. Last thing we need is a dead hero.’
I go to walk away when Thord’s phone rings. I hang back just in case. He answers. He nods. He grimaces.
If he was Lena I’d be gesturing for her to tell me but Thord’s a cop. He’s a friend but he’s still a cop. I try to be invisible as he ends the call.
I look at him pleadingly.
‘May as well tell you now. It’ll be all over the TV in ten minutes.’
‘What is it?’
He swallows. ‘Body of a young woman found in the woods outside Östersund. Police up there think it’s a strangulation case.’
‘Is it…’
‘Local woman from up north,’ says Thord. ‘It’s not Tammy or Lisa. Body found in a shallow grave out by some fresh stumps. Dog walker found her. Police up there say that patch of forest was felled just last month.’
25
Thord warns me not to put two and two together and make five. I tell him to check the Utgard lumberjacks and he says he knows what he’s doing and I’m not to follow him. Just let him do his job.
I park behind my office. Sebastian’s BMW’s got a kitesurf sail on the back seat alongside about six rolls of black bin liners and a coil of green rope. A shallow forest grave outside Östersund? That poor woman. What she must have gone through.
I cross the road and walk to the shoe shop slash health-food store.
The door has a closed sign but it’s not locked and there’s still a woman inside clearing things away.
‘Sign’s up,’ she says. ‘Closed now for Midsommar.’
‘I’m looking for Freddy?’
She frowns at me like nobody’s ever come into the store looking for Freddy ‘Baby Face’ Bom.
‘His summer caravan,’ she says. ‘Up by the reservoir, used to be his mamma’s, no idea which one is his though.’
So, now I know he isn’t home in the burbs.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘Happy Midsommar,’ she says.
Not for me it isn’t.
I drive to Freddy’s house and park outside. The Christmas-tree hedge is dense with needles and it is alive with flies and wasps. I think about the body up north. Buried between fresh stumps. Probably unrelated. Please God, let it be unrelated. I look through the impossibly narrow gap in the spruces and there is no car in his driveway. No sign of his BMX. Looks deserted.
The gate squeaks on its hinge as I push through.
No cats.
Covered sandpit to my left with a wooden pallet and a pile of bricks on top securing the lid. Were they on top before? The curtains are closed. Garage to my right. Padlocked.
I walk up the path.
The garage door won’t budge so I call out, ‘Tam?’ and then I knock and say, ‘Tammy?’
A hint of cat urine in the still, warm air.
‘Tammy?’
‘She’s in the house,’ says a voice right behind me.
I turn on my heels and it’s Freddy standing there in pale blue shorts and a white polo shirt. His fingers look like claws and his face is as round as a dinner plate.
‘What do you mean?’ I say.
‘I mean Tammy’s inside.’
I slide my hand into my handbag and feel the weight of the stun gun.
‘I want to see her. Now.’
His lip curls up on one side and he leads me to the front door. I check around to see if people are nearby.
Nobody.
At least my phone works here. At least I can scream and run to a neighbour.
‘Is she alright?’ I ask, but he doesn’t answer, he just steps inside.
There are no feet under the rug this time.
‘Let me get her,’ he says.
Get he
r?
I’m still holding my stun gun, my hand inside my bag. Must be careful not to electrocute myself by accident. Last place in the world I want to be left incapacitated and writhing on the floor.
There’s a bookshelf on the far wall. My senses are on high alert – I can see medical encyclopaedias and books on podiatry and chiropody. Then there’s a whole shelf on feet binding. There’s a book on the Song dynasty and lotus feet. Thinner books on foot partialism and foot jewellery.
‘Here she is,’ he says, walking to me with a Persian cat in the crook of his arm. ‘Tamsin the half-Persian. Just look at her paws.’
‘Tamsin?’ I say.
‘Tamsin,’ he says. ‘Tammy for short. Oh, no,’ he looks horrified. ‘You didn’t think. Oh, my goodness me, no. Tamsin’s my cat. Fifteen years next January.’
I nod, the rise in hope, and at the same time in terror, too much for my body to process. I have a strange mixture of adrenalin and fear and relief.
‘Have you seen my friend?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. ‘I’m very sorry, I have not.’
I check the front door, my exit.
‘Interesting library you have here.’
‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘The library’s upstairs.’ He gestures with his big toddler head to the staircase covered with dark red carpet, a pattern from the seventies, the kind of carpet you might find in a pub or a skip.
‘You like feet?’ I ask. ‘You like small feet? Bound feet?’
He looks pained at my question, stroking the cat’s paws with his slender fingers to the point where the cat looks uncomfortable with it.
‘Not like,’ he says. ‘Fascinated. I don’t agree with the old practices, of course not. But as a historical subject, encompassing feminism, eroticism, class boundaries, anatomy.’ He points to his books. ‘I find the subject interesting.’
‘Have you–’
He interrupts me. ‘Did you know they started the process with young girls well before they were aged ten. Did you know that? It was often the mother that performed the procedure, the girl’s own mother. She’d take her daughter, her own flesh and blood.’ The cat squirms in Freddy’s arms and he tightens his grip. ‘The mother would do it all in the mid-wintertime when the feet would be at their most numb, and she’d soak her own daughter’s feet in a mixture of herbs and animal blood to soften them. Then the mother would break each toe in turn. Snap, snap, snap. And then she’d bend them underneath the child’s foot, and bind them with cotton bandages soaked in the same herbal blood mix. The arch of each foot would be cracked again and again if necessary. Can you believe––’