by Will Dean
A suspect? ‘Someone’s been arrested?’ I say. And then I mouth the word, ‘Who?’
He mouths the word, ‘No.’
I raise my eyebrows.
‘You have information for me,’ he says.
‘Has someone been arrested?’ I whisper.
‘I told you already. No.’
‘Is the new policewoman here?’
‘Noora? Out dealing with the crime-scene guys. Not easy to seal an area and keep the factory working, but we’ve managed it. Why?’
‘I wanted to ask some questions about Gunnarsson and I thought you’d be too busy as you’re a senior officer here now.’
He straightens his back and thinks about that. Then he takes a bite and chews and holds up a hand like, ‘gimme a sec, sorry about this’.
‘Your leaving drinks are on Thursday, right?’ he says when he’s done chewing. ‘Should I bring her along?’
‘Only if you want to.’
He nods and swallows and licks his lips.
‘We’ll all need a drink by then, the way this week’s going.’
‘The couple’ I say. ‘The old couple found dead up near the mill. Any police comment for the paper?’
He licks his lips some more.
‘I’ve been tied up, what with the murder right here on my doorstep, but our message is the same every year, Tuvs. If you go out, check the weather forecast first, don’t go out if you’re not sure, tell someone which route you’re taking, be equipped if you do travel, make sure your vehicle is roadworthy, never leave your vehicle.’
‘Those two didn’t leave their vehicle,’ I say. ‘Didn’t help them.’
He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head.
‘They were too old to be out in February. The daughter’s in hospital with some kind of bronchitis, bad economy that one. Anyway they thought they’d drive up north and they’d never driven much these past ten years. Not the brightest matches in the box. So they get off the E16 way too early, don’t know if they had the dementia or what, but all they’d took with them was some car sweets and thin blankets. Their ’87 Volvo skidded straight off the road, which was ploughed and gritted but apparently that didn’t help them, and went down a ditch. Dead within two hours, I’d say. Noora found them like two ice lollipops, still looking straight out the windscreen.’
‘That’s my quote right there.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ he says, one hand on his cuffs.
‘I’m going to drive up and photograph the scene if I have time. It’s close to the old farmhouse, the one with the grain silo, right?’
He nods.
‘Take your phone and your—’
I cut him off. ‘I will.’
‘You still got that Hilux?’
‘Extending the rental contract tomorrow.’
He nods. ‘Mind how you go out there, Tuvs.’
I walk out and the sun worshippers have gone back inside now. There are three TV journalists recording short pieces and there’s a photographer I know from Göteborg Posten taking shots of the factory arch. I grab my Coke and my pastries and drive by Gunnarsson’s apartment building. He lived on the first floor and I try to get in but there’s a key-code lock. Can’t see anything from street level so I talk to a neighbour briefly and leave.
The E16 is busy as ever. Gavrik is a place the world never really sees, but this motorway links more important towns like Karlstad to the south and Östersund to the north. We’re just the liquorice coin on the side of the road that trucks pass by loaded with pine trunks for the pulp mill.
I pass the corrugated-steel strip club and pop two paracetamol from their foil wrapper and swallow them.
The Q8 gas station’s doing brisk business. I fill up with a third of a tank of petrol, no sense in gifting money to the rental place when I hand it back, and buy two boxes of tampons and a bag of wine gums and some bright blue antifreeze windscreen-spray.
‘Everyone’s jabberin’ about this ferry-boat driver on the run,’ says the woman in the poodle sweater serving me. ‘But you heard about that poor old couple?’
‘Just up the road,’ I say. ‘Sad business.’
‘Makes you think,’ she says, bagging up my purchases.
‘Yes, it does,’ I say.
I drive up to the exit munching wine gums as I go, sometimes savouring and letting them melt, especially if it’s pear, a white one, and sometimes chewing two or three for a non-alcoholic cocktail. I can’t quite remember how I got home last night except I know Tam was there. She looked after me. I’m going to miss her so much I don’t know how I’ll bear it.
Radio Värmland talks about Per Gunnarsson. All about his age and his hobby researching important family histories, and his job as a quality-control supervisor. There isn’t much else to say about the guy. And then they issue some kind of long-term weather warning for the coming week: possible blizzards and ice storms blowing in from Russia, maybe hitting Wednesday or Thursday. Reminders to stock up on firewood and candles.
I pass the farm with the silo. The car’s gone but it’s left its mark. There are tyre tracks all over, broad ones with a visible tread from rescue trucks and tractors, and normal ones from cop cars and ambulances. And then narrow ones, almost invisible amongst the others, from an ’87 Volvo. They look like bike-tyre marks. Could their Volvo have been run off the road by someone? Is that possible?
The grass revealed by the crash scene is dead. It’s yellow and flat and the ground is deep-frozen like it’ll never be green again. But it isn’t really a crash scene, they just drove into a ditch at low to medium speed. And then stopped. And then died. My Hilux would have been out in about five seconds flat but they stayed and maybe they talked about leaving and finding help, or discussed whether to stay, argued or agreed; and maybe they kept the engine running or maybe they didn’t. I hope they held hands. I hope they were not afraid. And then they quietly died. Eighty-four and eighty-nine.
I get out of my truck but leave the engine running. There’s a wooden cross that someone’s driven into the snow but it’s leaning because really it needs to be pushed into the earth but that’s hard like concrete so whoever left it here must have thought ‘best I can do’.
My cheeks burn with cold and my exhaust fumes are lingering low in the air like dry ice in a nightclub. I see two bunches of flowers still in their Q8 cellophane wrapping, both discount-price bunches. Small roses in one packet, a mixed bouquet in the other. I see a roll of something under the mixed bouquet and I step over for a better look, my right foot down on the steep white bank of the ditch. It’s a pack of Grimberg salt liquorice. The old folks around here love it, they’re the main customer base for the company, Anna-Britta told me so.
I photograph it all. Alone. Just my engine noise and my breathing.
Everything here is milky white and the only thing I can see, the only standout feature, is a passenger plane. I can tell by the contrails: four engines, a jumbo, passing silently and smoothly overhead where it’s even colder than down here. It’s noiseless. There’s no air-travel noise in Gavrik because the planes are too high. In a real place like Chicago or Manila or Johannesburg you hear plane noises all day long because important places have airports. We don’t. The planes are always high above us and they are always silent as they pass over this unknown liquorice town.
There’s a moment where I almost slip. That may not seem like a big deal but slipping somewhere like this can be a death sentence. A man died last year on a farm not far from here when he broke his ankle on black ice, out near his chicken sheds. Had no phone with him. The man was alone at the time; his girlfriend was visiting friends in Munkfors. It was about twenty below. He popped out for five minutes to check on his birds. Just a broken ankle, nothing more dramatic than that, not a single drop of blood spilt, but he was frozen solid when the girlfriend got back home the next day. Mixture of shock and exposure. He shut down. She said he looked like a frightened scarecrow left out in a field over winter; his expression, his posture, slumped and alo
ne, wearing just a robe. A frightened, fallen scarecrow.
I look down and there’s a single purple glove at the bottom of the ditch and its fingers are covered in ice crystals and they’re hard and frozen and bent this way and that and I have to look away.
I keep Radio Värmland off on the way home and my headache’s almost gone now. It’s the noise that gets to me. And the lack of it. The quietness of their death, those two elderly lovers, the man in the old factory with the neck wound, his black-covered eyes, his obstructed throat; and the noisiness of Gustav Grimberg’s suicide jump, that watermelon crack. People talk a lot about dignity in death and how some folk fight and battle with cancer and I’m not sure Mum fought it exactly, it’s more nuanced than a fight, and I don’t see how she lost. It’s not a win or lose thing. It’s not a sport. She had a miserable life but cancer’s a mean twisted fuck and it came to her and then it left her alone and then it took her so fast at the end that I didn’t even have time to tell her I’ll live on for her, or that I enjoyed my early childhood or that I forgave her. That I loved her. Maybe love’s the wrong word. I should have told her that I understood her. That I would survive on my own.
I head to the factory because the family and workers are my best chance for information about Gunnarsson and potential suspects. I decide I’ll treat myself to a drive-thru double cheeseburger after my lunch-hour interviews with the Grimberg women and that puts a smile on my flaky little face.
The factory is almost business as usual although trucks aren’t allowed through the sealed arch and so they’re loading up in the factory lot in front of the cameras. I climb the stairs to the Receiving Room. Some of the faces in the photographs look familiar so I pause. I don’t know these people. I’ve never met them. But I recognise them from the canteen and the factory floor because, I guess, they’re the mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers of Red and Great White and Per Gunnarsson. They all stayed here in Gavrik.
I head into the office area.
‘No, the incident didn’t happen anywhere near our production area,’ says Agnetha Hellbom. She mouths ‘out’ to me and I read her clear as day but I shrug like ‘what? Sorry?’ and keep on listening. ‘It was in a totally different building.’ She pauses. ‘Yes, we’re working around the clock to make up for the disruption. Grimberg Liquorice would like to offer you a fifteen per cent discount on your March order by way of a goodwill gesture . . .’ She pauses, her nose wrinkling then says, ‘Well, really, I don’t think that language is called for.’ She puts down the phone.
‘Hi, I—’
‘You’re not supposed to be in here,’ she says.
‘I’m Tuva Moodyson. I have an appointment . . .’
‘I know who you are. You’re the newspaper girl.’
‘Customer problems?’ I ask.
‘Go wait in the Receiving Room, that’s what it’s for, receiving, and I’ll see if Mrs Grimberg is available.’
Okay, so she is a bit Pissy Knickers after all.
I walk back to the elegant room with its flickering chandelier and tiled fireplace. The door to the private residence cracks open. I see a striped sleeve and a wrist covered in bangles of different widths and a watch the size of a teacup and nails painted midnight blue.
Then she steps in.
17
Her hair is as tall as a pineapple but silver-grey. She moves to me with a smile in her eyes and she says, ‘Come on, then.’ I let her lead me to the door of the residence and she opens it and stands behind me and then she holds her hands firmly over my eyes and pushes me through the curtain.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Don’t you want to?’ she says.
I don’t want to be in this building at all, especially not with hands over my eyes. But I need information from her. I need insights. My senses are on high alert and I can’t see much through the uneven wrinkles of her fingers. Her hands smell strongly of lemon. The room is large. I think it’s a living room or a drawing room, about the size of my whole apartment, no, wait, it’s bigger I think, twice the size. The Grand Room lives up to its name.
‘Cici,’ she says under her breath. ‘You can all me Cici.’
‘I’m Tuva.’
‘Of course you are, I’ve been watching you for years. You’re one of my favourites.’
‘Is all this necessary?’ I ask, my headache starting to return. I know I can slip her pensioner hands off my face whenever I want.
‘They don’t want you in here,’ she says. ‘But my attics are my attics and I can invite whomever I please.’
We’re are at the far end now and I’ve managed to see a dining table and a huge apothecary cabinet the size of a squash-court wall, and a cage in the corner. But I have no details and I’m disorientated. I can hear a high-pitch drone and it sounds like a newborn screaming in the distance.
‘What’s that noise, Cici?’
‘The whine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ventilation system,’ she says. ‘Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.’
I’m straining to see paintings and ornaments but her hands are too tight to my face. Something’s gleaming next to the table, perhaps a silver punchbowl? She turns me to the left by steering my shoulder.
‘You can look,’ she says, dropping her hands. ‘No peeking back.’
Stairs. She moves to lead the way.
‘Come on,’ she says, taking me by the hand and walking up.
She’s wearing a striped long-sleeved T-shirt with ten or eleven necklaces and a bear-claw brooch pinned in the centre of her back, and a skirt or tutu thing with layers and layers of organza, and spiderweb tights and black boots with a small heel. Her hair is amazing, a kind of ’60s beehive, but twisted, with pins and butterfly grips and one of those crazy helter-skelter straws stabbed in the top.
We get to the top of the stairs.
‘Welcome to Cici’s,’ she says, waving her arm around.
I just stand there with my mouth open and gawp. The attics run the full length of the factory, the size of a football field. There are dozens of faded mannequins clustered in groups like they’re chatting at a memorial service. Every single one’s wearing gloves. Some lace, some velvet, some silk. Apart from a small room at the far end, the only things dividing up the space are the two chimneys at the one-third and two-third points. The chimneys are round like lighthouses.
‘Look around,’ says Cici. ‘Take a tour while I change.’
Change? She heads off to the area between the chimneys, the area above the arch, and I try to take it all in. I’ve walked past this building a hundred times and I’ve looked up at this place, and all the while I expected paint pots and foldaway chairs and old ski gear because that’s what people store in their attics, isn’t it?
There are eight windows pointing forward toward Storgatan, and eight pointing backward to the yard and the root barns. I’m near the end window, the large sloping window I saw from the graveyard, and as I look out now I can see the family plot. Someone’s down there, someone in black, probably a hack working on his Ferryman article, photographing the fresh mound of Gustav Grimberg.
‘No need to change for me,’ I shout.
‘It’s not for you,’ she shouts back.
The place is like the inside of a barn, all exposed pine and rafters and beams that must weigh a ton each. There’s no insulation up here but there are dozens of old electric radiators wired in beneath the windows. It’s cold, but not freezing cold.
I count fourteen lemons and then stop counting. They’re hanging from twine tied over rafters and they’re joined by papery garlic bulbs pierced with brass drawing-pins, and horseshoes hanging upward. Obviously. By the slanting window sits a grave candle, the weatherproof kind, and it lights an antique Punch-and-Judy style puppet show complete with painted Gavrik background. I can make out the twin chimneys. Next to it are a pair of vintage ice-skates, red hair twisted around the blades so tight they look like copper coils.
‘What do yo
u think?’ asks Cici as she walks toward me.
She struts like a sixteen-year-old. I want to ask her about Gunnarsson, and about her own son’s suicide, but I force myself to wait. Cici sashays down what must be a homemade catwalk, a length of chessboard linoleum stuck to the floorboards, and she bares her teeth and smiles and turns.
‘Couldn’t resist,’ she says. ‘KK’s my only audience since my husband passed and even she doesn’t come up here much anymore.’
‘KK?’ I ask.
‘Karin, my granddaughter.’
‘You look amazing,’ I say, and she does. A floor-length orange jacket with a jagged fringed bottom and blue jeans ripped at the knee and a necklace that looks like three black Christmas-tree baubles, and the same pineapple hair as before.
‘Business-casual,’ she says, and then smiles again and smacks me on the arm. ‘Come on.’ She leads me around the attic, her arm entwined in mine. ‘This is half my lifetime collection. I’ve given away the rest. This is my capsule up here, about five-thousand pieces.’
‘Your capsule?’ I say, and she slaps me again and winks.
‘Nothing expensive,’ she says. ‘If this stuff had been expensive I’d have a three-door pine wardrobe like everyone else. No, this is all beautiful junk, second-hand value: approximately zilch.’
‘Well, I love it,’ I say.
She bares her teeth and blows me a kiss. ‘Knew you would. Can I get you a drink?’
She walks over to a radiator, one of many, and takes the thermos pot sitting next to it.
‘Collected it all on my travels over the years. The excellent thing about liquorice, don’t touch the stuff myself,’ she grimaces, ‘is that it grows in the most wonderful places.’
‘You travel?’
‘Did, darling. My husband Ludvig and I travelled three or four times a year. Egypt, Persia, Turkey, China, Indochina, Syria – just the most wonderful places on Earth. To source growers and sign deals, you see. No email back then, Tuva. No fax machines back then.’
I look at her dressmaking tables. At the array of sewing needles and crochet hooks and sharp rotary-cutters. I see her yarn and her felt shears.