by Will Dean
I walk out into the sun and a message vibrates on my phone. It’s from Aunt Ida. It says ‘We missed you yesterday. Hope to see you soon’. She missed me. It’s the kind of message I never once received from Mum. Because she didn’t have a mobile phone and couldn’t text, but also it’s not the kind of thing she found easy to say. I stroke the screen of my phone with my finger. My heart lifts inside my ribcage. She actually missed me.
The back door to the cop shop bursts open.
Thord runs out into the secure police car park with his phone to his ear. The gates open and he drives out at speed, blue roof lights flashing, the tyres of his Volvo squealing on the pavement.
I run to my Hilux and drive straight after him.
37
Three police cars. One unmarked. And then me.
They race out in the direction of the Toyota garage and I follow. Is she there? Is Tammy being held there? Lisa Svensson? In the abandoned black building behind the garage? They’re not dead. We are not driving towards bad news, please no, not towards bodies.
The cops drive at ninety on these winding country roads and I just about keep up with them. I pass Midsommar poles still erect in peoples’ gardens, the greenery withering, the birch leaves brown and limp.
The cars slow.
The Volkswagen in front of me hits the brakes and I do the same. They turn off. Not the Toyota garage. They’re driving to the town sewage-treatment plant.
Bad taste in my mouth. Tammy? Here? Bertil Hendersson used to manage this place. Must be something else, something unrelated. I’ll check with Thord then drive back to Gavrik.
The car park of the sewage plant is full.
I park on the verge and jump out of my truck.
Four people walk to the one-storey brick building. Three women and Thord.
‘Thord,’ I say.
He turns.
Then he shakes his head and mouths the word, ‘No.’
I mouth the word ‘What?’ and he steps inside the building and turns and faces me through the glass doors.
He says, ‘Not now.’
I try to swallow but my mouth is too dry. He bolts the doors.
Then another cop car pulls up.
Chief Björn.
‘Chief,’ I say, as he walks towards the locked doors of the building. ‘Tell me.’
Thord opens the doors up for Chief Björn and the Chief turns to me and he doesn’t say anything but his eyes say ‘it’s not good news, Tuva’.
The doors bolt shut again.
The air smells like bad drains on a hot day.
Another car and a van with a dish on the roof. Reporters.
‘Locked doors,’ I say.
‘Freedom of speech,’ says some twenty-year old intern wearing a suit a size too big for him. The rest of us look at this kid like who the hell employed you.
I talk to the hacks and they try calling the treatment works office on their phones. One of the others tries calling the head office of Värmland sanitation. A woman starts climbing a fence but it has barbed wire on the top. She cuts her arm and gives up.
Faeces in the air. Waste.
The fence woman licks a line of blood from her forearm.
The doors open.
It’s Chief Björn standing there wearing thin latex gloves.
‘Moodyson,’ he says. He never calls me Moodyson.
I walk up to the doors and he lets me through and the other journalists queue up behind like normal people following a semi-celebrity into a nightclub. Using me for cover.
‘Just Moodyson,’ says the Chief.
The intern kid in the suit says, ‘What have you found, officer?’ And his colleagues look like they might smack him round the ear.
Another hack, a guy with teeth so bright I need sunglasses, he says, ‘Could you let me in as well, Chief Björn?’
‘No,’ says the Chief.
I stand just inside the hot reception area of the treatment plant.
It’s hushed inside. No bad odours.
Sound of fans whirring.
‘That’s not right, Chief,’ says the teeth guy behind me.
‘Moodyson’s assisting us with our inquiry,’ Chief Björn tells him. ‘Not in her professional capacity. You don’t like that, I suggest you leave my town by whichever method you came in on.’
He locks the doors.
The offices are sweltering. Tile carpet and tile ceiling. An artificial plant in one corner leaning in its pot like even it can’t survive in here. We walk through more doors, down a corridor.
I don’t like this.
On the other side of the glass wall there’s an office desk covered with newspaper and plastic. There are scraps of paper on the table and there are four painted yellow stones.
I can hear someone crying in another room.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask. ‘Have you found her?’
‘I’ll let Constable Thord tell you,’ says the Chief, walking away to join a suit in another room.
‘Thord?’ I say. ‘What is it?’
Thord walks to me holding an iPad.
‘Out there,’ he points to the circular sewage pools where long arms churn the slurry of Gavrik town. ‘One of the supervisors spotted something earlier today lodged in a filter. One of these.’
He shows me a photo on his iPad. It’s one of the yellow stones.
‘And?’
‘It’s one of them egg things, Kinder makes them. This is the plastic egg you get with your toy inside.’
‘And? Is Tammy okay?’
Thord wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.
‘We hope so, Tuvs. Inside the plastic egg was a message. We found four messages, one in each egg, but Tammy wrote five.’
My lungs almost burst out of my chest. ‘She’s okay? Tam’s alive?’
‘We don’t know nothing concrete yet, nothing for certain. This is all off the record at the moment, you understand that don’t you?’
‘Sure.’
‘The eggs were weighed down. One message per egg written in biro on paper torn out of a crossword-puzzle book.’
‘What does she say? Can I see them?’
Thord shakes his head. Can’t see the actual messages. They’re isolated. Need to run prints, forensics. But I’ll show you high definition photos. Here’s the first, you see it’s dated two days ago and it says 1/5.’
I stare at the screen as he swipes to the next photo. I’m hungry for her words. For a sign she’s healthy.
I’m okay, she writes and tears fall from my eyes. I know this is an old message, a lot could have happened in two days, but at least she was okay then. She still might be.
Trapped. Have food. Don’t know location. Not far.
‘That’s it?’ I say.
‘That’s message one,’ says Thord. ‘Look.’
He swipes to the next photo. It says 2/5.
Put gun to my neck.
‘Oh, God,’ I say. ‘Oh, Jesus.’
Thord touches my shoulder and says, ‘Read.’
Two of them. Never saw faces. Bag over head. Tied my hands. Talked through a machine. Voice disguiser. Smells of smoke.
‘What?’ I say.
‘I know,’ says Thord. ‘They sound like professionals to me. Like they’ve done this kind of thing before.’ He swipes to message 3/5 and I think to myself what an all-round spectacular woman Tam is and how lucky I am to be able to call her my friend. A gun to her neck? I’d have died. Given up and died. Not Tam. She smuggles messages out of her captor’s house by flushing fucking Kinder eggs down the toilet. I almost smile at the thought. Almost.
‘Number three,’ says Thord.
I’m kept in a box.
I take a sharp intake of breath and my heart stops functioning. I can’t breathe out. A box?
‘Keep on reading,’ says Thord.
I can move around. I think I’m upstairs. Fed through a pipe in the top of the box. They give me water. Talk through pipe. They’re filming me.
Filming her?
‘
Thord we have to help her, we have to find her.’
He nods and swipes his finger and says, ‘last message.’
I love you Mum.
My knees buckle. Why isn’t her mum here yet? Does this mean Tam doesn’t think she’ll get out alive? Or just a standard message to a mother? What would I write if I was locked in a box? To whom?
Love you Tuva.
I place my hand on the screen of the iPad and the image distorts under my fingertips. My tears splash the touchscreen. ‘We have to find her,’ I say.
Thord says, ‘We will.’
I read on.
Tell Dad he’s a ratshit and I love him.
I almost laugh at ratshit. But then I realise she’s giving up hope. Making peace with him before it’s too late.
Thord and I stand together in a godforsaken sewage plant, both with red eyes. I read the rest of the note.
Find me. Hurry.
38
The other journalists scowl at me as I step back out through the sewage plant door into the car park.
‘Local bias,’ shouts one pinhead.
‘I’m not local,’ I mutter under my breath.
Before today I didn’t know what to think, I just knew I had to keep on hoping. I wasn’t sure if Tam was dead or alive, injured or healthy, hiding or kidnapped. I didn’t know if she was still in the country, if she was afraid or working on an escape plan. And now I still don’t know what to think.
Some cruel bastard is keeping her locked up and filming her? In a box? To what end? Is this part of some S&M thing? Voyeurs? And if so, what do they intend to do with her now? We know they have at least one gun, and that there are at least two of them. Smell of smoke? If police find Tammy alive I will never let her out of my sight again, not for one minute. That is my oath for you to bear witness to. I will protect her like she has always protected me.
I drive away.
Numb.
More hopeful than before but not by much. I know she was alive two days ago and that’s something. My hands are sweaty on the steering wheel and the ditches are empty as I pass them by; empty of water and baked dry like parallel gullies each side of Satan’s own bowling alley.
The twin chimneys of the Grimberg Liquorice factory grow taller as I approach. Toytown looks empty, deserted, forgotten. A man is at work outside the high school, on the border fence, and he is dressed in what looks like military hazmat gear. The man has a white full-body suit and mask with some kind of filtration device. Thick rubber boots. Could be Bertil the bee guy but it’s difficult to tell. He has a large tank strapped to his back with some warning labels visible even to me in my Hilux. He’s spraying weeds. Scorching them with poison. The man looks like a soldier from the next war or maybe from the last one. Eviscerating flowering weeds because some fool long ago had the audacity to label them such.
Where are you, Tammy? Are you still in this godforsaken little town? Are you being held in a house or a boat up on stilts covered with a tarp? Are you alive, my friend?
Back at the office I answer Facebook messages and conduct two interviews with out-of-town hacks. They’re keen to know what I saw in the sewage-treatment plant. They wouldn’t ordinarily interview another journalist. I tell them nothing of what I saw. I use the chance to beg the public for more information. Whatever you have seen – and one of you has seen something, at least one of you – please call the hotline. Which is in fact the telephone number of the Gavrik Posten. Tam and Lisa HQ. Lisa’s relatives run the searches because they’re good it at. And we, well really it’s Sebastian, runs the social media campaigns and the phones. There’s a shipping-container conversions catalogue on the floor under Sebastian’s desk, under my old desk. I guess he’s been investigating just like I have.
The bell above the door tinkles and Noora stands there.
‘What?’ I say, getting up from Lars’ desk. ‘What is it?’
‘No news,’ she says, her hands up to quieten me. ‘I have to take a thirty-minute break, the Chief insisted. Thought you might want a quick walk. We can talk. Might do you some good.’
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I need to answer messages, help man the phones.’
‘Go!’ shouts Lena from her back office. She must be yelling loud for me to hear the words from back there. ‘I’ll do it,’ she yells. ‘You go.’
Noora smiles and I get up and walk to Lena’s open door.
‘I won’t be long,’ I say.
Lena says, ‘Go clear your head. I need you thinking straight.’
Noora and I walk out and turn left on Storrgatan and head down towards ICA. There’s a clothes rack outside the charity shop, only the rack is empty. Save for one item. A pale yellow dress on the kind of wire hanger that always ruins the lines of the shoulders. The dress hangs limp from the rack like a person who’s given up on their future. There are a hundred black bugs attacking the dress and I wonder what a tourist might think if they saw it. I reckon they might just turn around and head back onto the E16.
We don’t talk, we just walk. I glance at her from the corner of my eye and she is still the person I’ve been thinking of and dreaming about these past months. She still has the shiny hair and the self-done French manicure. When the wind blows the right way I can just make out her scent. If it’s perfume then she doesn’t wear much of it.
We pass Paradise Spa and turn and walk past Systembolaget, the town’s only alcohol store. It’s closed. Shuttered. The old stationery shop over the way still doesn’t have a new tenant. We turn left onto Eriksgatan and head back up towards the factory.
‘Let’s talk in there,’ says Noora, pointing to the ruin of St Olov’s.
We walk through the low arch into the graveyard. The twisted yew trees and the skeletal ruin of the church offer shade. And it is private. Like being inside a small walled garden.
‘We have a big team working on this, I want you to know that,’ she says.
‘I’ve seen.’
‘Specialists, too,’ she says, putting her hand out to touch my wrist. Her fingertips land on my skin as lightly as sycamore seeds floating down from a high branch. Her skin on mine. Four fingertip pressure points. Then her thumb rests on the underside of my wrist and now, even with all this horror, perhaps because of it, I want to kiss her.
‘We know the abductor has a gun so we’re going through our database. We’re drawing up a list.’
‘How?’ I say.
‘Well, we know there are at least two people involved in Tammy’s abduction. So we can cross-reference any known crime partnerships with registered gun owners. We know from Tammy’s notes that they haven’t taken her far so we’re starting with a 50 km range outside from her food van.’
‘That’s a lot of land,’ I say. ‘Elk forests. Lots of desolate fields.’
‘That’s a good thing,’ she says. ‘Not too many people. It’s a good thing, really.’
I bite my lip and she lets go of my hand.
‘I’m worried about you as well,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m fine. Focus on Tammy and Lisa. They’re keeping her in a large box, large enough to move around inside. At least she can move. Can you check the shipping containers at Snake River? Sally Sandberg’s rooms? Can you raid them?’
‘They’re on our radar,’ she says. ‘Along with a lot of other people who don’t look weird or act strange but nevertheless could still be dangerous. We need to act on evidence, on quality information.’
I’ve heard this before. From the local cops, from lawyers, on movies. The need for quality evidence. Doesn’t work quite the same way for me. My weapons are circumstantial evidence, hearsay and gossip, rumours and bitchy neighbourhood spats and family grudges. They are the vital corner pieces that allow me to complete each puzzle.
‘What about the voice synthesizer,’ I say. ‘That must be a good thing, right? they wouldn’t bother disguising their voices if they were going to kill her, would they?’
Noora blows a hair from her face.
‘Let’s hope
so,’ she says. ‘But if it’s some kind of game, or some kind of club, it could be part of what gets them off. We’ve found a shop in Karlstad that stocks distortion equipment and we’ll cross-reference their customer list with our own. Unfortunately you can buy anything online these days and we can’t trace it.’
I think of Sally’s snake products. About the live-streamed birth of a hundred baby boa constrictors from one of her locked rooms. Who’d pay to watch that? Are there people in France, in Indonesia, in Brazil paying to watch it? Watch Tammy? Watch her doing what?
‘And she says she’s being filmed,’ I say.
‘Everyone has a camera,’ says Noora. ‘GoPro, from your phone, or a handheld HD thing. Doesn’t help us much.’
‘If it’s being live streamed, though?’ I say. ‘If Tam is being shown somewhere on the web?’
Noora nods and says, ‘We have IT specialists using face recognition software, but they’re not hopeful. That kind of thing would be on the dark web. Something we can do, or try to do, is find out how those Kinder messages got to the sewage treatment plant.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Through the main Gavrik sewer or if the sewage was sucked out from a septic tank. The Chief’s talking to people about this now. If it was sucked then we’ll investigate the Kommun trucks and map out their routes for the past few days. May help us narrow down.’
‘Good,’ I say.
‘Lots of ifs,’ she says. ‘But I wanted to give you a proper update. We are prioritising this.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and right now, in this corpse of a church, I just want to fall into her and for us to collapse into a heap on the dry grass. I want for us to take five minutes, entwined, looking up at the sky.
‘Gotta get back now,’ she says. ‘The Svenssons aren’t happy we haven’t found any Kinder messages from Lisa.’
‘And nothing in Tam’s messages mentioned her?’ I say. ‘Could there be more abductors in Gavrik town? Maybe the cases aren’t connected?’
‘Probably kept in separate locations,’ she says. ‘Or in separate boxes. Lisa’s family are scared. Angry.’
‘Angry?’
She looks around like there could be anyone within earshot in this ruin, and she says, ‘Boyfriend of one of Lisa’s second cousins, he lives up in Dalarna, he thrashed out and called me a raghead desert rat.’