by Will Dean
Praise for Dark Pines
‘Dark Pines crackles along at a roaring pace . . . This is the first in a series, and Moodyson, whose deafness is handled sensitively by Dean, is a character whose progress is worth following.’ Observer, thriller of the month
‘The tension is unrelenting, and I can’t wait for Tuva’s next outing.’ Val McDermid
‘The best thriller I’ve read in ages.’ Marian Keyes, author of Anybody Out There
‘A remarkably assured debut, Dark Pines is in turn, tense, gripping and breathtaking, and marks out Will Dean as a true talent. Definitely one to watch.’ Abir Mukherjee, author of A Rising Man
‘Dean never lets the tension drop as his story grows ever more sinister.’ Daily Mail
‘Bravo! I was so completely immersed in Dark Pines and Tuva is a brilliant protagonist. This HAS to be a TV series!’ Nina Pottell, books editor for Prima Magazine
Praise for Red Snow
‘For all those who loved Dark Pines by Will Dean I can tell you that the forthcoming sequel, Red Snow is even better. Scandi noir meets Gormenghast. Just wonderful. Can’t get enough of Tuva Moodyson.’ Mark Billingham
‘In Red Snow, Will Dean has proved again that he is a master of suspense. This is a crime novel of poise and polish, peopled with utterly compelling characters. Claustrophobic, chilling and as dark as liquorice. Brilliant.’ Fiona Cummins, author of Rattle
‘Will Dean, you just pulled my heart out of my rib cage. Bravo! What a rollercoaster . . . I absolutely loved it. Super characterization and enough intrigue to keep me up at night. Loved the weirdness. So bloody good. Who will play Tuva in the TV series?’ Liz Nugent, author of Skin Deep
‘This Swedish-set thriller reminds me of Anne Cleeves’ Shetland series . . . Tuva Moodyson is uncompromising, dogged and vividly drawn.’ Francesca Haig, author of The Fire Sermon
‘Thoroughly enjoyed Red Snow . . . Great Scandi noir with an excellent heroine. Though beware – liquorice will never taste the same again.’ Ruth Ware, author of In a Dark, Dark Wood
RED SNOW
WILL DEAN
For Alfred. Always.
Contents
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54
1
There’s a Volvo down in the ditch and I’d say it’s been there a while.
I touch the brakes and my truck comes to a stop nice and easy; studded tyres biting into ice and bringing me to a silent standstill. It’s all silent up here. White and utterly, utterly silent.
The display on my dash reads minus nineteen Celsius. I pull on my hat and move the earflaps so they don’t mess with my hearing aids and then I turn up the heat and leave the engine idling and open my door and step down.
The Volvo looks like an ice cube, all straight lines and sparkling crystals, no signs of life, not a colour or a feature to look at. It’s leaning down hard to the right so I’m roughly level with the driver’s side window. I knock. My gloved knuckle sounds dull on the frosted glass so I rub my hand over the window but it’s blasted solid with ice.
I step back, cold air burning my dried-out cheeks. Need more creams, better creams, prescription winter-creams. My mobile has no reception here so I look around and then head back to my pick-up and grab my scraper, one from a collection of three, you can never be too careful, from my Hilux door well.
As I scrape the Volvo window the noise hits my aids like the sound of scaffolding poles being chewed by a log chipper. I start to get through, jagged ice shards spraying this way and that. And then I see his face.
I scrape harder. Faster.
‘Can you hear me?’ I yell. ‘Are you okay?’
But he is not okay.
I can see the frost on his moustache and the solid ice flows running down from each nostril. He is dead still.
I keep scraping and pull the door handle but it’s either locked or frozen solid or both. My breath looks nervous in front of my face; clouds of vapour between me and him, between my cheap mascara and his crystallised eyelashes. I’ve seen enough death these past six months, more than enough. I knock on the glass again and strain at the door handle. And then his eyes snap open.
I pull back, my thick rubber soles losing purchase on the shiny white beneath.
He doesn’t move. He just looks.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
He stares at me. His body is perfectly still, his head unmoving, but his grey-blue eyes are on me, searching, asking questions. And then he sniffs and shakes his head and nods a kind of passive-aggressive ‘thanks but I got this’ dismissal which is frankly ridiculous.
‘My name’s Tuva Moodyson. Let me drive you into Gavrik. Let me call someone for you.’
The frozen snot in his moustache creaks and splinters and he mouths, ‘I’m fine’ and I can read his lips pretty well, over twenty years of practice.
I pull on his door handle, my neck getting hot, and then it starts to give so I pull harder and the ice cracks and the door swings up a little. It’s heavy at this angle.
‘You trying to snap my cables?’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s about minus twenty out here I’d say and you just yanked my door open like it’s a treasure chest. Best way to break a door handle cable.’
‘You want to warm up in my truck?’ I say. ‘I can call breakdown?’
He looks out toward my truck like he’s deciding if it’s a suitable vehicle to save his life and I look at him and at the layers of clothes he’s entombed himself in: a jacket that must contain five or six other jackets judging by its bulk, and blankets over his knees and thick ski gloves and I can see three hats, all different colours.
He coughs and spits and then says, ‘I’ll come over just to warm up, just for a minute.’
Well, thanks for doing me that favour mister Värmland charm champion.
I help him out and he’s smaller than me, half a head smaller, and he’s about fifty-five. There’s a pair of nail scissors on the passenger seat next to a carrier bag full of canisters, and there’s a bag of dry dog food in the footwell. He locks his Volvo like there are gangs of Swedes out here just waiting to steal his broken down piece of shit car, and then he trudges over to my pick-up truck.
‘Japanese?’ he says, opening the passenger side.
I nod and climb in.
‘Ten minutes and I’ll be out your hair,’ he says.
‘What’s your name?’
He coughs. ‘Andersson.’
‘Well, Mr Andersson, I’m Tuva Moodyson. Nice to meet you.’
We look out of the windscreen for a while, side by side, no talking, just staring at the white of Gavrik Kommun. Looks like one of those lucky blanks you get in a game of scrabble.
‘You that one that writes stories in the newspaper?’ he says.
‘I
am.’
‘Best be heading back to my car now.’
‘If you go out there again you’re gonna end up dead. Let me drive you into town, your car will be fine.’
He looks at me like I’m nine years old.
‘I’ve driven more tough winters than you’ve had hot lunches.’
What the hell does that even mean?
‘And I can tell you,’ he says, rubbing his nose on his coat sleeve. ‘This ain’t nothing. Minus twenty, maybe twenty-two, it ain’t nothing. Anyhows, I texted my middle boy three hours ago, told him my location, and when he’s done up at the pulp mill he’ll come pick me up. You think I ain’t spent time in ditches in winter?’
‘Fine. Go,’ I say, pausing for him to think. ‘But I’ll call the police and then Constable Thord’ll have to come by and pick you up. How about we save him the bother.’
Mr Andersson sighs and chews his lower lip. The ice on his face is thawing, and now he just looks flushed and gaunt and a little tired.
‘You gonna be the one driving?’ he says.
I sigh-laugh.
He sniffs and wipes the thawed snot from his moustache whiskers. ‘Guess I don’t got much choice.’
I start the engine and turn on both heated seats. As we pass his frozen Volvo he looks mournfully out the window like he’s leaving the love of his life on some movie railway platform.
‘Why don’t you buy Swedish?’ he asks.
‘You don’t like my Hilux?’
‘Ain’t Swedish.’
‘But it goes.’
We drive on and then he starts squirming in his seat like he’s dropped something.
‘My seat hot?’ he says.
‘You want me to switch it down a notch?’
‘Want you to switch the damn thing off cos I feel like I peed my pants over here.’ He looks disgusted. ‘Goddam Japanese think of everything.’
Okay, so I’ve got a racist bore for a passenger but it’s only twenty minutes into Gavrik town. It’s never the cute funny smart people who need picking up now, is it?
‘Where do you want dropping off, Mr Andersson? Where do you live?’
‘Just drop me by the factory.’
‘You work there?’
‘Could say that. Senior Janitor. Thirty-three years next June.’
I pull a lever and spray my windscreen and the smell of chemical antifreeze wafts back through the heating vents.
‘How many janitors they got up there?’ I ask.
‘Just got me.’
‘You get free liquorice?’
‘I ain’t got none so don’t go asking. I’m the janitor and that’s it.’
I drive up to an intersection where the road cuts a cross-country ski trail marked with plastic yellow sticks and they look like toothpicks driven into a perfect wedding cake. The air is still and the sky’s a hanging world of snow and it is heavy, just waiting to dump.
‘You did the Medusa story, eh?’
I nod.
He shakes his head.
‘You just about ruined this place, you know that? Good few people be quite pleased to see you run out of town, I’m just saying what I heard.’
I get this bullshit from time to time. As the sole full-time reporter here in Gavrik, I get blamed for bad news even though I’m just the one writing it.
‘I’d say it was a job well done,’ I say.
‘Well, you would, you done it.’
‘You’d rather elk hunters were still getting shot out in the woods?’ He goes quiet for a while and I switch the heat from leg/face to windscreen.
‘All I know is we lost some hard-won reputation,’ he says. ‘And thank God we still got the factory and the mill to keep some stability. That’s all I’m saying and now I done said it.’
As I get closer to town, the streets get a little clearer, more snow-ploughing here, more yard shovelling, and the municipal lighting’s coming on; 3pm and the streetlights are coming on. Welcome to February.
‘Suppose you were just doing your job like anyone but we’re a small town and we’re cut off from everywhere else so we’ve learned to stick together. I got eight grandkiddies to worry about. You’d know if you were from these parts.’
I drive on.
The twin chimneys of the factory, the largest employer in town, loom ahead of me. It’s the biggest building around here save for the ICA Maxi supermarket. Two brick verticals backdropped by a white sheet.
‘Say, you hear me pretty good for a deaf person, don’t mind me saying.’
‘I can hear you just fine.’
‘You using them hearing aid contraptions?’
I feel his eyes on my head, his gaze boring into me.
‘I am.’
‘I’ll be needing them myself pretty soon, sixty-one this coming spring.’
I drive past the ice hockey rink and on between the supermarket and McDonald’s, the two gateposts of Gavrik, and up along Storgatan, the main street in town. I head past the haberdashery and the gun shop and my office with its lame-ass Christmas decorations still in the window, and on toward the cop shop, and then I pull up next to the Grimberg Liquorice factory ‘Established 1839’ – or so it says on the gates.
‘This okay?’ I ask.
He gets out without saying a word and I look around and there are five or six people scattered about all looking up to the sky. This doesn’t happen, especially in February. A hunched figure in a brown coat slips on the ice as he walks away. I try to look up through the windscreen but it’s frosted at the top, so I open my door and climb out onto the gritted salted pavement. I can hear mutterings and I can sense others joining us from Eriksgatan.
They’re looking up at the right chimney, the one I’ve never seen smoke coming out of. There’s a man, or I think it’s a man, a figure in a suit climbing the ladder that’s bolted to the side of the chimney, climbing higher and higher past the masts and phone antennas attached to the bricks. He’s in a hurry. No hat or gloves. I look up and the sky is blinding white, dazzling, and the pale clouds are moving fast overhead, the wind picking up. As I stare up it’s like an optical illusion, like the chimneys are toppling over onto me. And then the man jumps.
2
He hits the cobbled area in front of the factory, in front of the arch, and his head breaks like a watermelon.
One person screams.
One.
A singular howl from a woman standing behind me.
‘Get Thord,’ I say to Janitor Andersson. ‘Get the police.’
But he just stands there looking down at the man on the cobbles and then up to the chimney and then back down to the man. More people are coming out now, fastening coats and adjusting hats and gasping as they work out what just happened.
I see someone head off to the police station all of one minute away so I run into the factory lot and the snow is turning red.
‘Stay with me,’ I say, louder and more forcefully than I’d expected, but it’s no use, he is the most dead person I have ever seen. His limbs are twisted and his arms are pulled in tight to his cracked head like a child in deep sleep. I feel useless. I can’t help this broken man, I can’t do anything for him.
Thord arrives at my side and takes the man’s pulse and moves his cold ungloved hands toward the man’s head but then stops because what good would it do?
He leads me away from the body and turns around and after a while an ambulance pulls up.
‘Out of our way,’ says one of two paramedics.
They get to work and I stagger a few steps back toward the iron gates and half of Gavrik has turned out now; took some of them a while to get their outdoor gear on I guess, their boots and their mittens and their jackets and their bobble hats. But they’re here now.
I feel faint so I let my back rest against the railings. I slouch down and notice a speck of pink snow on my boots and I think I’ll pass out but I don’t. And then I hear scream number two.
A well-dressed woman runs out through the factory arch and throws herself down
next to the dead man. The paramedics retreat for a moment like they know who she is and they can’t do much anyway.
‘Step back, everyone,’ says Thord, his arms outstretched, walking toward the street, toward the crowd of ski jacket people. ‘Best thing you can all do is step back and return to your offices and your homes. Step back, please.’
And they do. Because they’re Swedes and because they can’t see much now that the ambulance is blocking their view, and also because it’s minus nineteen, maybe less.
An old couple walk off up the street consoling each other.
Constable Thord looks at me.
‘You alright, Tuvs?’
I nod.
The woman who threw herself down at the dead man, I’m pretty sure he was the boss of the factory and she’s his wife, Anna-Britta I think her name is, she’s wailing now, quietly sobbing from behind the ambulance. Chief Björn turns up and says something to Thord and then heads over to the body and pulls off his hat. It’s getting dark now, whites turning into greys.
A Volvo taxi drives past slowly and another cop arrives. The new one. She started last week and that story made my front page. I can only see her back right now, black hair under her police hat, a tortoiseshell grip holding it all together. She turns and I see her face in this dull light and her eyes flash to me.
‘We’re gonna close up the gates,’ Thord says, frost in his eyebrows, a red-haired woman passing behind him. ‘Need to take photos and whatnot, and also talk to witnesses so maybe you can help me get a list together, seeing as you were here?’
I nod to him. ‘Sure. Now?’
‘Head over to the station in, I don’t know, about an hour, an hour-and-a-half.’
‘Okay.’
‘Best if you get back to your office now. Sorry you had to see that.’
I photograph the chimney and the ambulance on my phone. After I turn my back on the scene, on the frozen weight of what has just happened, I can still feel the power of it behind me. It’s uncomfortable to turn my back, to shun it, the brick factory and those two chimneys and the dead man broken in the snow. The shadow, the shadow of all of it, is stretching down Storgatan, and I follow it for a few minutes, a black Mercedes 4x4 skidding away as if to escape the chimney’s darkness, and then I turn left and open the door to Gavrik Posten.