by Will Dean
‘It’s those damn heels she wears,’ says Anna-Britta, almost laughing. ‘Heels at eighty-two. Higher heels than I would ever dream of.’
‘It’s that old carpet,’ says Karin. ‘It’s tripped me up a dozen times.’
I suspect it may have been Cici’s layered skirts actually, but I don’t say anything. Her skirts are long and irregular shaped and I wouldn’t be able to wear them. There are two slices of white bread in front of me on a small tray, no plate, and a pair of scissors.
‘What’s that for?’ I ask.
‘For Granny,’ says Karin. ‘We’ll take three hairs from the top of her head and lay them between the slices and then feed it to a dog. It’ll help her regain her strength.’
She says it like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Like she’s saying, ‘oh, it’s just two ibuprofen for the swelling, and a glass of water, we’ll take them through to her soon’.
Anna-Britta sips her tea but before I can digest, bad choice of word, the hair-bread-dog thing, Doc Stina closes Cici’s door and joins us at the table. She’s been inside here before, else she’d be staring at the wet wall like I want to do, or at the knives lined up underneath the table.
‘I’ll leave her to rest for a while,’ says Stina. ‘I’m confident nothing’s broken but she’s badly bruised and I think she’s sprained her ankle. I’ve left anti-inflammatories and painkillers in the room and I’ll be back tonight to check on her. Keep her hydrated and let her rest. It’s a shock when you fall like that. Quite a shock.’
We thank her. Somehow I feel like a family member and although this is the most fucked-up family I’ve ever known, it is touching how gentle they are with each other.
Karin sits playing with a mini-blowtorch-style lighter. She’s burning pine needles, the ones that used to cushion a large snowball, while Anna-Britta and I talk about mundane things.
‘The red liquorice looks delicious,’ I lie.
‘Second busiest time of year,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘After pre-Christmas. Should help make up for all the delays.’
‘Someone mentioned to me, I can’t remember who, that you have an outside investor. I was thinking maybe they could help more now you’re running things on your own, what with Cecilia being bed bound and you being so busy.’
She laughs, no bearing of teeth like Karin and Cici, just a soft laugh.
‘He helps in his own way. But, no.’
‘Could I talk to him?’
Anna-Britta looks at me and realises I don’t know the identity of the investor. Then she bends down and picks at a wad of chewing gum stuck to the floorboards.
‘Who told you we had an investor?’ she asks, rubbing the tacky gum-residue between her fingers. Then, before I can answer, she retrieves a large metal canister of lighter fluid and a ripped cloth from the kitchen. She rubs at the gum with the cloth.
‘I can’t remember off the top of my head,’ I say. ‘It might be in my notes. I can find out.’
She puts the metal canister on the table and looks at Karin and then back at me. The air is thick with fumes. ‘I think we should check on Cici,’ she says, standing back up. ‘Thanks for calling the ambulance earlier.’
‘Oh, that was David.’
She clenches her teeth.
There are two doors next to each other: the bathroom and Karin’s corner bedroom. Anna-Britta opens the bedroom door a crack and I can smell incense. There are posters pinned to the walls: death-metal bands, Trollhunter movie prints, photo collages and a The Towering Inferno promotional movie poster.
‘Do you mind if I pop in to see her with you,’ I say. ‘To say goodbye?’
We knock on the open door and push it and Cici’s propped up in bed playing with her rings and rearranging her bracelets. She looks up at us.
‘I didn’t fall,’ she says in a clear adamant voice, sliding her bangles higher up her wrist. ‘I was pushed.’
33
I walk out through the factory floor and people are whispering and they look afraid. Workers with clipboards are ticking things off and then looking over their shoulders. Quality-control supervisors visit the bathroom in groups. I go past the forklifts and the lines of stampers and tasters and then I get to the stirring tanks. It’s all back to black now. No more red. Today is Valentine’s Day so we’re back to black salt.
Somebody pushed Cici? I don’t like to doubt her because I think people should be believed, they should be listened to, and I happen to like her a lot, but I was maybe ten metres away from that staircase when it happened. I was chatting with Holmqvist and nobody else was around, and who the hell would push an old lady down the stairs?
The clocking-in machine looks like it might clock itself out any minute and I wonder if any other industrial company in Sweden still works with this steam-age technology. Most are all gleaming white offices and free baby crèches and hot-desking and electric company cars and flexitime and Skype meetings. Not here.
The root barns are surrounded by towering piles of ploughed snow, and the vats of waste syrup are an unnatural shade of red. I pass through the arch, a delivery truck squeezing past me, and walk out through the gates. Gavrik looks almost normal. The February chill makes everything sparkle. Easterly wind. I can see women and men on rooftops shovelling snow onto the pavements, safety cones placed beneath them, harnesses looped around chimneys, icicles dangling precariously from gutters like glass daggers.
Instead of going back to work, I turn right. The sky darkens two shades and I open the door to Gavrik police station. The ticket machine reads ‘28’ and the screen above the counter says ‘28’ so I take a ticket and ring the bell.
The door opens and it’s Chief Björn.
‘Twenty-eight?’ he says.
What do you think? I hold up my ticket and Noora walks through from the office behind. Both Björn and Noora are drinking from scarred mugs and they both look exhausted from all the Ferryman work.
‘How can we help?’ says Noora like we’ve never seen each other before. Björn watches every move she makes.
‘I wanted to report an incident at the factory.’
She takes a biro and pad and Björn rests against the wall, his gun stiff on his belt.
‘Go on,’ says Noora, unsmiling.
‘Cecilia Grimberg fell down the stairs earlier today. She’s okay I think, just shaken. But she says she was pushed, that it wasn’t an accident.’
‘She’s okay, you say?’ asks Noora. ‘No knives involved? No blow to the head? Can she come to talk to us herself?’
‘She’s ninety-five,’ says Björn with a bored expression.
‘She’s eighty-two,’ I say. ‘And she’s resting. The doctor will visit her again later tonight. No knives, just a push. What would this be? Attempted murder? Assault? Could it be connected to Per Gunnarsson?’
Björn steps closer and points to the key-code door to the rear office. Noora drops the biro and follows his instructions and leaves us.
‘You say she’s just bruised?’ says Björn.
I nod.
‘Your report has been officially filed. And don’t go spreading rumours we don’t need about this being the Ferryman. Nothing to connect these two incidents and the last thing we need in this town is the hysteria. I’ll talk to Anna-Britta Grimberg and we’ll take it from there.’
‘But—’
He looks at me and I can see dry skin on his neck and on the top of his chest, red scaly winter skin.
‘Between you and me,’ he says, ‘I tell you this because you’re almost out the door and I don’t need any more trouble, so between you and me, Cecilia Grimberg has claimed similar things before. Been pushed, been defrauded over insurance money, been verbally abused in the street. She’s not all there.’
‘She is all there, Chief,’ I say. ‘She’s as clear-thinking as you and me.’
‘Last time she reckoned she got pushed she told me she knew who did it but couldn’t tell me. I said couldn’t or wouldn’t and she said both.’
‘D
id you follow up?’
He sighs and says, ‘She’s looking for attention because she never got much from her husband. That’s about the size of it.’
He drains the last of his coffee and opens the key-code door and leaves me alone in reception with its vertical strip-blinds and the bolted down chairs.
I cross the road and it is vicious cold, like minus twenty, too cold to snow, and I do a I-don’t-want-to-break-my-neck shuffle over to the office.
‘Three hours till the print,’ says Lena, sitting at my desk. ‘You going to file on time?’
‘Sure,’ I say, catching a whiff of last night’s stress when I pull off my ski jacket. ‘I’m here now. Three hours.’
She looks at the clock on the wall and then heads back to her office.
I spend an hour writing up stories a little faster than I’d like. It’s not easy to do Per Gunnarsson justice as he didn’t seem to have much of a life past his schooldays. He had one job and one apartment and no friends or family. So I fill in with details of school achievements and his travels to Norway and Thailand. I fill in with a quote from his elderly neighbour about how he helped her put out the garbage, and about how he drew up comprehensive family trees for the town’s most important families, and about how he once fixed her TV. I try to give him some closure and some justice in my paltry, insignificant way. I try to give him a narrative. A decent send-off.
In between the Ferryman stories and the appeal for information regarding that dark blue 4x4, I insert a slice-of-life piece on a record-breaking pike caught by two teenage girls out ice-fishing on the reservoir. Poor wording by me but Lars’s photos are great and that’s all anyone will really be looking at: the two red-haired girls with broad smiles and the monstrous pike held between them, with its gills flapping open and its lower teeth sticking out of its mouth like some abominable freshwater crocodile. There’s also a broken-pipe story. Damage to an old house off Eriksgatan. Looks like seven ineffective ice-rinks, one in each room. All mediocre Toytown bullshit, but it’s what my readers want. I learnt that last year. They don’t want a paper full of homicide analysis. The front pages, yes, but not the whole thing. They’ll read it and they’ll all mutter ‘must be an out-of-towner, a drifter’ and then they’ll turn to the rest of the news. They need a few articles that make them feel safe and at home here in murder town.
There are questions niggling me. The identity and motive of the Ferryman killer is number one, and whether it is, despite what the Chief says, connected to Cici’s fall. The Grimberg investor is number two, but then also the mobile-phone masts, and the big fire at the lake house, and the real story behind Ludvig’s death. And then there’s Gustav’s suicide. The coroner was too quick. Are these random incidents or is someone behind them all? I cannot leave this town with a killer on the loose. I can’t do that to Lena or Tam or Noora or anyone else.
I try to access the Bolagsverket website, the national record of companies and their shareholders but my password’s stopped working. They say they’ll email me a new one.
‘Lars,’ I say, leaning back in my wheelie chair.
Nothing.
‘Lars,’ I yell.
He looks up, his bifocals not quite straight, his teeth stained grey with liquorice juice.
‘Do you know much about the individual Grimbergs?’
‘Less than you,’ he says.
‘You’ve worked here for twenty-thousand years. If you were still doing my job, who would you talk to about the factory in the eighties and nineties?’
He sniffs and fiddles with the cardboard liquorice box.
‘Svensson.’
‘Which one?’
‘Taxi Svensson, don’t know his first name. Told me once when he picked me up from the airport at Karlstad, it was Lanzarote that year, for my psoriasis, didn’t help it much, haven’t been back, he told me his dad or his uncle used to work there. I’d try him.’
Viggo Svensson? Nope. Not a chance.
‘Anyone else?’
He shakes his head and gets up to start photocopying something.
I cannot interview the taxi driver. I will not.
‘Oh,’ says Lars, turning to me with a handful of warm paper. ‘The ICA Maxi girl, the ex-model one. She’s got some kind of connection to the place. Her mum, maybe?’
I email what I have to Lena to keep her off my back and then drive straight to ICA. I can’t see the parking-space lines under all the white so I just park where I like. The cycle racks are heaving with bikes with spiked wheels and most have red-and-white ICA carrier bags wrapped tight over their seats. Cars and people look the same this time of year: uncared for. Most Gavrik residents don’t shower much in the dark months because it’s too cold to go outside semi-wet, and once your hair’s under a hat who’s going to notice anyway? The plants are dead and the cars have no hubcaps because they have their winter tyres on. Everything’s uncared for.
Extra mats have been laid out in the entrance area. The trolleys are soaking wet and some have icicles. Shoppers look relieved that there are hot dogs for sale here and face cream and DVDs and XL multi-packs of strong Swedish coffee.
‘Can’t talk to you now, I’m with a customer,’ says the pretty cashier when I arrive at her till.
I wait, but then there’s another customer adding pre-shaped taco shells and minced pork to the conveyor so I run off and grab a can of Norrland beer, the 3.5% stuff, the strongest you can buy outside of Systembolaget, and put that on the conveyer.
‘Can we talk?’ I ask.
‘You got a loyalty card?’ she says.
‘No. What do you know about the Grimberg family?’
‘What?’ she looks up at me for the first time. ‘Twenty-nine kronor, cash or card?’
I stick my card in the machine.
‘Someone told me your family know the Grimbergs. Is that true?’
‘Is this about the Ferryman killer? I already told the TV guy and he didn’t even broadcast my clip. It’s an out-of-towner cos there ain’t no ferries in Gavrik town, not a single one.’ She rubs her tongue over her teeth. ‘My mum used to work at the factory before she quit to take care of Dad. A taster, she was. Don’t know who killed that man and put coins in his eyes.’ She shudders. ‘Grimbergs make liquorice, that’s all I know, and it’s too damn salty, I know that too.’
‘Can I talk to your mum?’
‘Better off talking to Uncle Viggo, he knows all about that place.’
‘The taxi driver?’
‘It’s declined,’ she says.
Shit.
‘Sorry, it’s a new card,’ I say, and she looks at me like, yeah, whatever, I’ve heard that one about a hundred times before. I try my other card.
She nods. ‘Receipt?’
I take the receipt.
No way I’m driving back into Utgard forest in the Tacoma on Valentine’s Day, no way in the fucking world. Viggo Svensson is a Class A creep and I will not be alone with him in a private place.
I walk out to my truck and throw the can of beer on the passenger seat. I turn the key and switch on the heat and make the call I don’t want to make.
‘Viggo, it’s me. Tuva Moodyson from the paper.’
‘Hello, Tuva,’ he says in a neutral voice. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Can we talk?’
‘Any time.’
‘McDonald’s at seven?’ I say.
‘It’s a date.’ He calls off and I want to vomit and throw my phone out the window but McDonald’s will be safe. Even if he’s the Ferryman, if he cut Gunnarsson’s vein and stuffed liquorice coins down his throat, McDonald’s is public and it’s the busiest place in town. It’s safe. I’ll be fine.
34
Gavrik’s nine-thousand residents will be reading my words tomorrow morning over their coffee and their salted rye porridge, one day late, an eight-day news week thanks to the printer’s strike. But right now it’s me and Lars typing and it’s Nils trying to finalise wording for Benny Björnmossen’s gun-store promotion and f
or the Toyota garage ad, which is a touchy subject because Jan-Östnäs is late with his payments. It’s that time of year. Bank accounts are lean and old stock needs clearing out. February means the discounting of unsold ammunition and last season’s cross-country skis.
‘I need that wording,’ shouts Lena, and Nils bangs on his side of their partition-wall in response. He’s on the phone so a bang suffices.
‘You got a date tonight, Lars?’ I ask.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, looking over with a broad grin, his bald patch reflecting the fluorescent ceiling strip-lights. ‘Table for one at my sofa, the front door triple-locked, Arachnophobia on Netflix, one of my top fifty, Quorn tacos, tub of Ben & Jerry’s, a six pack of craft beers.’
‘Who says romance is dead,’ I say.
He closes his eyes and kisses his fingertips. I actually love him right now.
I email my final stories to Lena. It’s dark outside already and I’ll leave myself forty minutes to get home and shower before interviewing Viggo.
Lena appears at her door threshold. ‘Where’s the other factory news?’ She looks furious. ‘You’ve written the Ferryman but what about the insider Grimberg stories, that’s the stuff our readers want.’
‘It’s all there,’ I say.
‘No it isn’t,’ she says, her eyebrows high on her forehead. ‘Don’t mind you moonlighting for Holmqvist this last week but I need my fair share, Tuva.’
‘You’ve got the obituary and the truck crash and the red-Valentine’s-liquorice story and the piece about Anna-Britta being nominated for the Gavrik chamber of commerce.’
‘The old lady who got pushed down the stairs?’ she says. ‘Readers want to know more about that family.’
I shake my head. ‘I told you all about it but it’s a private incident inside a private residence, it’s not news.’
‘Will it go inside his book?’ she asks.
‘I won’t be writing about Cecilia’s fall, not for the paper or the book. Off-limits.’
She walks back into her office and slams her door.
‘Don’t upset her on your last week,’ says Lars. ‘References.’
‘I already have a new job, Lars.’