He knew Zana Lilaj had become Hannah Ohlsson.
Knew that Hannah Ohlsson had started asking questions about who she was not long after her placement.
He knew that when she was fourteen, an older boy’s sudden deadly fall had changed everything for her. Or maybe that was just part of the process, when her search for herself accelerated? Maybe one violent experience had triggered other violent memories?
He knew that one night she’d burned every photograph of herself, tried her best to erase Hannah just like Grens once tried to erase Zana.
And then she left, disappeared, never to return.
“How did it go, Superintendent?”
Grens stared straight ahead at the three-lane highway. The chatty cadet had managed to stay silent for almost an hour, which was an eternity in his world—and maybe he just didn’t have any more silence inside him.
“I mean, with the family and all?”
“I’m more interested in how it went for you. Did you find anything?”
“We found something.”
“Like what?”
“Something about a balcony incident. And a police report the adoptive parents filed for their missing daughter.”
Lucas was proud. Wanted to tell. Be praised. And when Lucas was done, Grens did something quite rare, he praised him. Both of them. Because he realized he’d made a wise decision to let them pass their time with his local colleagues—they’d managed to access information he himself wouldn’t have.
First, in the documents from the closed investigation into the boy’s death: there’d been no witnesses to the event itself, the same story the adoptive parents had given him, but several partygoers described how a fourteen-year-old girl named Hannah Ohlsson was seen being harassed by the boy who died. Her boyfriend. Harassment that during that evening on at least two occasions resulted in loud arguments. Grens wondered if the adoptive parents deliberately left those details out, the boyfriend and harassment, or if maybe they never knew.
Then out of the other inadequately prepared documents from another discontinued investigation, the one into the girl’s disappearance: they had found another trace of her path after leaving. At least initially. Which led to a café in Malmö. Where she’d worked under the table for a couple of months after leaving her parents’ home. Until one day she disappeared from there too. The phone call from Albania became the last known contact she’d made.
New information on two fronts that left his mind lingering in a house with no photos, while his body was kept moving at one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. That is until his phone rang in his inner pocket, and he searched for it while the car weaved somewhat worryingly.
“Yes?”
“Hoffmann here.”
Ewert Grens pressed the phone closer to his ear. A voice that under no circumstances should be allowed to leak out. Even in a car surrounded by cadets who’d never heard of a Piet Hoffmann. Their informal collaboration, based out of the detective superintendent’s own apartment, should only be revealed if it became absolutely necessary.
“I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
Grens slowed down five kilometers later and exited the freeway, then drove under it, over to the same rest stop as earlier that day. He left the car and wandered around among the tables and benches and trash cans, while calling Hoffmann back.
“Grens here again.”
“I need your help tracking a call.”
“From your own phone? Or the recipient’s?”
“Neither of the phones are mine. But I want his—because it’s a he, I heard him—I want his position, the man who received the call.”
A family sat down at a table at the far end of the rest area. Coffee thermos and juice packs and sandwiches wrapped in foil. Grens nodded to them and turned toward the thick spruce forest while he spoke.
“It’s hard to get telephone companies to cooperate when it comes to regular crimes. Even official ones. This—well, it won’t be easy.”
“I’m sure you have your ways.”
A large, flat stone. Grens considered sitting on it, letting the sun warm his face, just forgetting this whole investigation for a while, people being executed and others who were at risk of it.
“Yes, I have my ways.”
He sat down. The stone was hard and had a surprisingly smooth surface, as if nature had sanded it down and placed it here for people who need to rest. He just had to make a few more calls. Like at the Tax Agency, he’d developed collaborations at all of the major telecommunications companies over the years.
“I need all the info you have. Send them to this phone.”
“I knew you could solve this, Grens. So I was prepared. It’s all on its way to you . . . now.”
Grens heard his phone ding just as Hoffmann said goodbye and hung up. He stayed there on that flat stone making a few bargains with his contacts at the phone companies, an exchange of favors, and arranged the cell phone tracking that would give Hoffmann, and therefore himself, a new and clearer direction. Then he and the cadets headed out, but only managed to make it another ten or twenty kilometers before Lucas, still in the passenger seat, couldn’t take it anymore.
“Superintendent?”
The young cadet wasn’t content this time to stare straight ahead while he chatted. He turned now until it almost felt like he was sitting between the two front seats staring straight at Grens.
“Yes?”
“I thought of something.”
“You don’t say.”
“You’re burning.”
“What?”
Lucas crept even closer. Though that hardly seemed possible.
“What we talked about on our way here. You know, which didn’t go so well. About your age and about my dad. Well . . . I mean, I had just no idea that after so many years a police officer could still care so much. I can see and hear how you’re just burning, and it makes me so happy. The thought that I might still be burning after a whole life as a police officer. But it also makes me . . . worried. I . . . I mean, surely, you know, right, that she could be dead? Superintendent? You know you have to prepare yourself for that?”
Grens never answered. Because he didn’t want to, and he couldn’t.
He knew deep inside exactly what the cadet was trying to tell him. Her adoptive family’s tearful worry was justified, and it was now his own. When he told them it would be fine, that was just a bad attempt to comfort them. Because the longer he searched for the girl named Hannah Ohlsson, who had disappeared without a trace, the clearer it seemed to him that she might very well be dead.
PART
4
It’s been so long since I felt like this.
Never.
Never like this.
I’m sure of it.
There’s even a stillness there in my chest. Right at the point where my anxiety lives. That solid blackness that’s always pecking at me, screaming at me from inside—I can’t feel it anymore.
I don’t even know how to get where I’m going, now that we’ve landed. But I don’t care! I can see the mountains that encircle Tirana’s airport, the heat haze that seems so amicable here, the clouds that hang so low, and the palm trees lined up in rows, and everything, everything watches me, protects me.
Thomas and Anette tried their best. They surrounded me like those mountains, they were kind like that haze. But it never reached inside. Into me. To a place that was only mine and that could never belong to them. I feel a little guilty, maybe I should have sent them some message, but there was no other way.
To disappear.
To where I’ve always been on my way.
I don’t understand much of the language that surrounds me, a few words, no context. It doesn’t matter. I recognize it. Mom and Dad spoke like that. And Eliot and Julia. I hear sentences pouring out fast, so fast, and they sound li
ke a song that swells inside me.
The taxi I take from the airport smells like cigarettes, and the fabric of the passenger seat has tiny holes on it. At first I sat down on a bus at the exit to the terminal, right next to a bony old woman. Waited. But it never departed. When I asked the bus driver—who didn’t speak English but who eventually understood—he sketched something on a napkin, which meant that the buses follow no particular schedule, he was just waiting for it to fill up, and that could take a while. So I ended up in a taxi to the train station, which costs much more, and I’m trying to be careful with what I managed to save from my job at the café in Malmö. My wages weren’t great, but the tips were okay, and hopefully it will last me two, maybe three months.There aren’t many train stations in Albania except for the one in Tirana and the one in a city in the north called Shkodër. Three and a half hours to go, just one hundred kilometers. But it’s cheap, costs just under a few hundred lek, and from what I’ve heard it’s fairly comfortable, even though it can get crowded. As if any of that mattered. I’m on my way home. That’s how it feels.
The landscape reminds me of a film rolling by.
Scenes I could step straight into.
And only then would they become real.
The train moves so slowly that I have time to visit cafés in small villages and climb high mountains and walk over lovingly cultivated fields. When the rails run parallel to the paved road, I’m even able to see what’s inside the baskets and boxes of the farmers, see how much the pomegranates and cucumbers and beets cost according to their carefully handwritten cardboard signs.
Not long after the first stop at a tiny station that wasn’t much more than a pole with a sign and a bench, a young woman in the seat opposite asks me what my name is. I understand that much even though her English isn’t extensive, but she wants to practice. I reply as I usually do—Hannah Ohlsson. When she doesn’t hear me at first, I try again, but this time I say Zana Lilaj instead. I’ve never said the name out loud before—wasn’t even sure if that was me.
I don’t really remember when the images started arriving.
Maybe I’ve always had them?
First just flashes, puzzle pieces from different parts of my mind about my early childhood. They started not long after I got my new room and new name and even new family. Now and then, often when I was least prepared, a little fragment would come to me, and I was able to put it together with all the others. The images expanded. Got color. Finally even sound and smell. I understood them.
The young woman asks me more, wants to talk, but I don’t. Because I can’t. As I sit here staring out through the train window at the Albanian landscape, so different from the forests around Söderköping, these images, fragments of memory, are becoming larger and more stubborn. They’re pounding inside my head to get out. Or maybe they want to get in? I remember it so clearly. The voices and smells that belong to this place, what I’m seeing and hearing, even though it happened somewhere else. They were in an apartment. Yes, that was it. Dad suddenly blowing out the candles. On my cake. Five candles, red and blue. He blows them out and takes my hand, squeezes it tight. It’s hurry, hurry. As if he already knows they’re on their way. He hides me in the hall, in a small wardrobe, up high on the wall, more like a cupboard than a regular closet for jackets and pants. He pushes me behind some pillowcases and towels, and just as he’s about to close it they arrive. Storm inside. Five of them. Just like the candles on my cake. Men I have never seen before. That’s why Dad only had time to hide me. And he couldn’t even close the cabinet door all the way, so I can hear, even see. When one of the men turns on the TV and raises the volume. When Eliot crawls under his bed. When Dad won’t answer their questions, and they say that in that case it will cost him. When Mom and Dad try to stop one of the men from going into Eliot’s room and pulling him out from his hiding place under the bed. When they shoot him in the head. Strange shots. Barely audible. When they sit down with Mom and Dad in the kitchen, and Dad is so hysterical that you can barely hear what he says. But I can hear what they say. They want Dad to answer a riddle. “Listen: you’re in a boat that’s about to sink. Far out to sea. It’s just you, your wife, and your daughter—yes, we saw her hiding under her bed.” Dad stands up and starts to run toward Julia’s room, but they grab hold of him, push him down, drag him back to the chair in the kitchen and to the riddle that they aren’t done telling. “Okay. We’ll continue. You’re in a rubber dinghy and it’s going to sink if all three of you stay. But—and now here we get to the riddle itself—if you’re only two, you just might make it. And you, my friend, are going to have to answer: Who will you choose to save?” All the men are waiting. For Dad’s answer. They wave the gun that shot Eliot. Wave it in front of Dad’s face and finally he answers. Quietly. Almost a whisper. “Them. I choose them and jump out myself.” The men shake their heads and laugh very loud. “No—that’s not how the riddle works. You have to choose. You have to be one of two left in the boat.” They wave their guns around again, then press one against Mom’s forehead so hard that it starts to bleed, and Dad whispers again. “My wife. So that our child, who has so much more life ahead of her, can live.” “Wrong answer again.” Now the man who’s telling the riddle stands up. And runs into Julia’s room. I can’t see him shoot her, the cabinet door is in my way, but I can hear Julia screaming and then it stops. Everything is silent. He comes back and keeps talking. “Wrong answer. A child is just one child. While you and your beautiful wife can have more.”
“And where are you going in Shkodër?”
The young woman in the seat opposite me, still wants to practice her English.
I smile, she’s friendly, but I shake my head.
“It’s . . . a private matter.”
“You look very thoughtful.”
“The landscape is beautiful.”
I turn back toward the window and the world outside the train, trying to show her I don’t want to talk more.
The images won’t stop.
Pounding and pounding to get in or maybe out of my head.
The image of five men sitting at our kitchen table with their questions and Dad refusing to respond anymore. Because the riddle is complete, now the questions are the same as before—they want to know where Dad hid something, and I don’t understand what that is. Dad stays silent, so they say that Eliot is gone and Julia is gone and soon maybe Mom will be gone too. Dad is crying. “Zoltan. For fuck’s sake. Why?” I’ve never seen Dad cry before. He’s given up. And he’s about to answer when Mom throws herself over the table and screams “Quiet!” It goes almost as fast as it did when they shot my big brother and big sister. But this time Mom starts it. She spits at the man who is talking—straight into his face. Saliva runs down from his sweaty hairline to his cheeks. And when he shoots her I see where the shots hit her head. One a little to the side, the other right in her forehead. Then he turns to Dad. “Now you can’t have any more kids.” They grab hold of Dad’s arms, pull him across the floor. “But you can still meet a new woman, think about that.” Pull him through the hall, all the way to the front door and force him into the chair there. For a moment, almost like a flash, it feels like Dad looks straight at me. From the chair up to the slightly open cabinet door. As if we look at each other, and speak without words. And he says it: “The computer. Everything is in the computer in the second desk drawer in the master bedroom.”
All of it is so crystal clear.
The man who shot Mom goes and gets the computer. Tells Dad to open it, and Dad does so, and they all stare at the screen. Until one of them slams the computer shut and says “good” and someone else is standing in the way so I can’t see what happens, and I don’t really hear what they’re talking about, but I hear the shots. Those strange, muted bangs, two times. Then they go. Take the computer. Close the front door behind them.
That’s it.
That’s as far as I get as I stare out through the tr
ain window.
That’s where my memory ends. I don’t have any more.
After that there’s a long black line. That’s what it looks like to me.
Until I’m standing on the steps at Thomas and Anette’s.
Ipull down the window as we slowly roll into Shkodër’s train station, then, like so many of my fellow travelers, I lean out, hanging there free to wave or call out someone’s name or maybe just feel the wind and cool off a little. The wheels squeal against the rails, and the brakes don’t seem to be what they should, we rock back and forth and slowly rumble to a stop. The platform is soon packed and hot and people jostle and crash into each other, but I barely notice any of it. I’m so happy to be here.
I walk along a river called Drin, then another river called Buna, and the two together form a dirty blue string that wraps the inner city tight and then lets it spread out again. I wander along stone streets, which are so lively and chatty, and I stop at a café with two tables and four chairs, where I’m served black tea in a tiny, filthy cup and a double-decker sandwich on a red plastic plate by a very fat, very smiley man who sings out loud behind the counter, something that sounds like opera but slides from key to key. I’m in no rush, I know where I’m going. When I get to the square, which has two restaurants and a wedged-in grocery store at Rruga Kolë Idromeno, I turn right onto Rruga Kardinal Mikel Koliqi and then almost immediately left onto Rruga Hysej. A street so narrow if a driver turns the wheel too hard or too fast the paint gets scraped off their car. And there, in a building behind a yellow-brown gate covered by the branches of a Mediterranean tree that I don’t know the name of, I’ve rented a room on the second floor with access to a bathroom and a tiny kitchen with an electric kettle and a tabletop dishwasher for four plates and glasses.
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