Red Snow

by Will Dean

  The food is lukewarm and under-seasoned. It’s godawful. But in a strange kind of way this feels like a family. Somehow I belong at this table with this sausage stew and since I had Christmas lunch on my own last year, in bed, most of it from a bottle, this feels okay.

  There’s more bindweed hanging from the lamp than before. It looks like blonde winter hair, my winter hair. The strands hang limp in the damp, cool air and they sashay gently in the breath breeze every time someone talks.

  Karin reaches for her contact lens box. She unscrews the two lens-compartments: one blue, one white. I stare, I can’t help it.

  ‘Salt and pepper,’ she says, showing me.

  After she’s doused the stew with her own personal seasoning she takes another pinch of salt and throws it over her left shoulder.

  ‘Thank all the precautions the fire was just a small one, and just the root barns,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘And we hope our dear taster makes a swift recovery.’

  Karin rubs her eyes and I can see ink all up one arm, not tattoo ink, she has that too, but it’s further up where her mum can’t see it. This is fresh ink.

  ‘Have you been writing?’ I ask, pointing to her arm.

  Karin covers her wrists, pulling the sleeves of her creped, black dress down all the way to her first set of knuckles, the veins and tendons of her hand protruding like blue vines coiled around branches.

  ‘Sculpting and painting,’ she says. ‘Something for Granny.’

  ‘Can you set up the mirrors in the morning, Karin?’ asks Anna-Britta. ‘Cecilia needs to be able to see the family.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Karin, pushing her half-finished plate aside.

  ‘I’ll deal with these,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘Why don’t you two go sit by the candle.’

  I realise that when Anna-Britta says she’ll ‘deal with these’ it’s not like when a normal mum or dad would ‘deal’ with dirty plates on a kitchen table. She doesn’t load a dishwasher or don Marigold rubber gloves, she simply stacks up the trays with all the leftover food and completes Karin’s door charade in reverse. She opens the door and takes through a tray and closes the door. Four times.

  We walk to the cold, unlit fireplace and I can see the rabbit cowering with fear under the cabinet of life, the soft flaps of his enormous ears shaking as Karin approaches.

  The room’s cool. I’m wearing long johns and a thermal long-sleeved T-shirt, a good one from the cross-country ski store, and tube socks and a micro fleece and a proper fleece and I am still cold. I think it’s probably twelve degrees in here.

  ‘Is Cecilia warm enough?’ I ask.

  Karin nods. ‘Warmest room in the place, it’s the heat memory of the chimney; it lingers in the old bricks. She’ll be fine.’

  Heat memory?

  ‘What a night,’ I say.

  Karin stares at where a fire should be. ‘Did you know Mother keeps her watch set at the exact moment my brother passed on. The precise second. This place is going to destroy her and she doesn’t even know it.’

  ‘Things will improve,’ I say. ‘Spring will be here soon.’

  ‘Spring will not be here soon, it’ll be here in three months and Mother may well be in the plot with the rest of the family by then. Which means it’ll just be me.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ she says, the seven flames from the seven-wick candle moving over her pupils. ‘If I tried to sell this place then news would get out. It’d leak. Then this place, the workers, they wouldn’t let me go, they wouldn’t let me sell, they wouldn’t let me leave the building. There’s no way I’d make it out of this factory alive.’

  40

  I keep my scarf wrapped around my face on the drive to Tammy’s flat. Streetlights bleed into the empty, sparkling townscape. There’s a murderer in Gavrik, a man or a woman with a weapon and a motive and it could be anyone. Locals are staying indoors. They’re cancelling dates and they’re sleeping with loaded guns hidden beneath their beds.

  Gavrik is deserted considering it’s a Saturday night, no queue outside Ronnie’s, no cars driving thru McDonald’s, no teenagers making their way to some house party intoxicated with what could happen.

  Tam’s not home. She’ll be in her van, an electric blanket over her knees when she’s not serving, some hacked TV show streaming on her iPad, fan heater whirring, her knives sharp and clean, her ingredients chopped and ready, her sauces steaming into the dry winter air. And a pistol by her lap.

  I lock the Tacoma and then I realise I’ve left my phone inside. I’m not sure how it would cope with minus thirty so I unlock the door, the key sliding in with no problem, and then lift the plastic door-handle. Nothing. There’s no resistance, just a flaccid flap of plastic rising and falling on its hinge. The cable connecting it to the door mechanism has snapped in two.

  ‘Fuck.’ I say, my face wrinkled into a knot. ‘Fuck you, Arctic, Shitmobile potato-head piece of Toytown bullshit.’

  And then I take a deep icy breath and feel better. I sidle round to the passenger side, a rock hard mound of gritty snow on this side, and gently open the handle. No problem. I take my phone and leave the truck unlocked like, ‘oh, you’re a thief in Gavrik in February with no key, good luck mate, she’s all yours, you’re very welcome, take her, be on your way, all the best, love, Tuva’.

  The apartment’s neat so Tam’s been back since this morning. The blankets on the sofa are folded the way they always are, the frilly tasselled ends poking out. I sit down. My hand glides over the soft cashmere weave and then I lift it to my face and maybe I’m imagining it, who cares, but I can smell Noora’s warm spiced perfume. I hold the pale blue blanket to my face, smothering my nose and mouth, and breathe her in, as much as I can get.

  I take the rum from a cupboard and stuff it into a suitcase.

  This place couldn’t be more different from the Grimberg residence. This is normal size and it’s filled with actual possessions and soft things you want to sit on and be close to after a tough day. There’s a fitted kitchen with a half-fancy stereo attached to the wall. There’s a TV for God’s sake. I walk over to Tammy’s bed and the top of my chest feels wrong. My eyes sting. There are three photos on her bedside table. One is of her mum and dad when they were young. It’s a great shot of them on bikes in some Bangkok suburb outside their first house. It looks like a professional picture, but it was taken by Tam’s uncle, the light was perfect, it was just one of those things, a quick snap by an amateur but the faces were pointed just right and the love was there and the image is beautiful. One of Tam and her mum from a few years’ back, them out picking mushrooms together in Utgard forest, a short curved knife in Tam’s hand, a basket in her mum’s. It’s a self-timed thing with the camera resting on a tree trunk. And then finally there’s me. The smallest photo of the trio is me and her, our arms around each other, taken last summer down by the reservoir, the water twinkling in the background, best mates taking a true-love double selfie.

  I ponder waiting for Tam to get home and I ponder apologising and talking it through but she’s always so tired in the evenings. I’ll see her tomorrow. I’ll prioritise her and patch things up before I leave. I need Tam and I think she probably needs me.

  My wash bag’s still in the bathroom so I stuff it into one of my three black suitcases, all three now waiting by the door where Tam left them.

  The tasselled blanket draws me back to the sofa. I sniff it one last time and it feels like I’m saying goodbye to all the good things in my life. I start to cry and the soft blue threads take in my salt tears. I see a face and it’s simultaneously Tammy and Lena and Noora in my mind’s eye, all disappointed, all turning away. And then the face turns back to me and it’s Mum and she has liquorice coins for pupils.

  I fold up the blue blanket and take my cases, pushing one with my foot, and place my key on her coffee table. The door closes with a solid clunk. No way back.

  The hotel door is locked and shuttered. I’m standing with three suitcases lik
e a tourist who got the time zones mixed up. I feel lightheaded. The only person around is the old hunched guy with the heavy stick and the oversize hood and he’s on his way up to St Olov’s with his Husky wolf-dog and an ICA plastic bag full of cans. Probably extra strong Norrland beer. I google Hotel Gavrik on my mobile and call and finally the owner-receptionist-waitress picks up and comes down to let me in.

  ‘We don’t admit guests after ten,’ she says by way of greeting. I can’t remember her name but she’s wearing a onesie or a super long cardigan wrapped around her like a robe, and she’s wearing sheepskin slippers and there’s a pair of earmuffs loose around her neck like a lumberjack taking a pee break.

  ‘It’s me, Tuva, from the Posten. Sorry it’s late but I need a room for two nights. I can pay up front.’

  She sucks air through her pursed lips.

  ‘Any room is fine,’ I say.

  ‘Police told us to be extra careful,’ she says. ‘Vigilant.’

  ‘It’s me. Tuva,’ I say again.

  She sniffs. ‘We’re refurbishing some of the rooms and most aren’t made up. We don’t get walk-ins, not in February, not even in summer, people usually book ahead over the telephone or the email address.’

  ‘Can I come in, it’s freezing out here.’

  ‘Ain’t much warmer in here,’ she says. ‘Twenty-nine under tonight and it may get colder still.’

  She allows me in and then she shuffles off in her slippers to stand behind the counter.

  ‘I’ll see what I got.’

  What you’ve got? How many people can be staying here?

  ‘Choice of two,’ she says. ‘Either got the honeymoon suite – ain’t really a suite, just a really long room – or I got a standard single with limited view.’

  ‘I’ll take the second one,’ I say.

  ‘Ain’t been refurbished,’ she says. ‘I’m just being up front with you. I can do it for one-thousand-two hundred per night.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I say. ‘You won’t sell that room tonight. Please, how about two-thousand for the two nights.’

  ‘Got a hotel in Munkfors you could try, they’re cheaper than us.’

  I glower at her.

  ‘Got the telephone number right here.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, handing over my visa card. ‘I’ll take it.’

  She checks me in and tells me the room’s on the second floor at the back, and then she tells me not to open my door without checking who it is first. She says Gavrik’s unsafe. I ride the tiny lift with my cases jammed in beside me. I slide my key card into the door and the light turns green and I sigh with relief and walk in. The cases pretty much fill the room. There’s an empty minibar, warm, and a TV with a crack in its screen. The bathroom’s a linoleum disgrace with one of those clingy shower curtains mottled with mould spores. It smells. I check the lock and I check the fisheye security lens, but someone’s installed the damn door back-to-front so I can’t see who’s out there but they can see me. Tomorrow I’ll stick a piece of gum over it. I double-check the internal door in the corner – I guess these are interconnecting rooms – and it’s locked.

  I take my rum from my case and climb into bed and pull over the extra blankets provided. They don’t seem too clean but they might keep me alive tonight if the heating breaks.

  From my bed I drink in smooth gulps, not sips, and look out of the window at the liquorice factory. I’m in the middle of the action. I’m sleeping between my office, or rather my ex-office, and the cop shop – Noora in there, doing whatever she does – and the factory. I’m in the Toytown Bermuda triangle. And then there’s a scrape at the door.

  41

  I check the hall and there’s nobody there. Must be mice. Or rats. Vermin. It’s that time of year.

  I sleep heavily and wake just after nine. The low sun’s streaming though my window, beams of light cutting between the brick Grimberg chimneys and pinning me to my plywood headboard.

  I stretch for a glass of water but there’s just the rum bottle. I stay still, face screwed up tight against the light, my fingertips caressing the curved glass. But I’m not there yet, I’m not in that kind of trouble.

  My skull’s too tight. Doesn’t fit. I rub my eyes and get up and open the triple-glazed window and freezing air pours inside like seawater into a breached submarine. I shower, if you can call it a shower, more like an anaemic tap spitting at my head, and then I take the lift down for breakfast with my aids turned low. A family of two extremely calm beige-wearing people, a red-faced man and a small no-make-up woman, take their temper-tantrum child, drag her, really, and leave soon after I arrive. Thank the lord.

  The buffet is a joke, a crime, a lie. Tiny glasses of watered-down juice, packets of cereal so small a hobbit would need four; sliced bread, the cheapest kind from ICA Maxi, the kind with no crust; maybe it’s created that way, not baked, just somehow created.

  I lost a clump of hair this morning when I brushed it. A big clump. I could really do without that two days before I start my new job. Down south I’ll eat some raw green vegetables and drink gallons of water. Worth a try. At least I booked the sleeper carriage. Eleven hours on a night train rattling me from Toytown to the civilised, cosmopolitan south, eleven hours from minus thirty to about minus five, from relative darkness to relative light. I’ve checked the sunrise times online. There’s an appreciable difference.

  I have today to find a firm lead, something to help the police. Because if they don’t make progress soon there will be another screaming, bled-out corpse found in this town, I can feel it.

  There must be something to link Hellbom to Gunnarsson. I need to find out who’s leaving the snow skulls around town. And who else was Gunnarsson bullying twenty years ago? Were there any other girls he was talking to?

  Interviewing the Grimbergs is still my best bet. They have more to say, much more. Then tomorrow I’ll tell the police whatever I’ve found out and I’ll present my research to Holmqvist; emailed and in hard copy as requested. I’ll say goodbye to Tam and Noora. Tomorrow night a taxi will pick me up and drive me to Karlstad station so I can catch the train at eleven-thirty. Yeah, I know a taxi’s an extravagance but it’s also my dream exit. It’s what I’ve fantasised about for nearly four years, me in the back seat, everything I own in the car, one-way ticket. It’s not Viggo driving me, don’t worry. It’s his new colleague.

  I see Noora as I leave the hotel but she doesn’t say hi. She’s walking with Thord. I collect my interview gear and head through the iron gates of Grimberg Liquorice. There are other police here, police I don’t recognise, and Janitor Andersson’s shaking a shovel loaded with grit to make the ground safe to walk on.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says as I walk over to him.

  ‘Awful night,’ I say.

  ‘Them old root barns should’ve gone years ago,’ he says. ‘And now the fire hoses made it so Gavrik ice-hockey squad can practice back there; just look at it.’

  The yard through the arch is a black mirror; white clouds dancing on its surface.

  ‘All that hose water and almost minus thirty, look at it,’ he says. ‘The state of the place. More work. But it’s the old mog-cat I feel for.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You didn’t hear? The old mog-cat met its maker last night. We found him this morning, blackened little thing, all bone and singed tufts. He was about twenty, maybe older, so it was about his natural time.’

  ‘But what about the taster? The injured woman?’

  ‘Oh, her,’ he says, cringing. ‘She’s alive. Not good, but alive.’

  Was the cat that awful high-pitched scream I heard? Or was that Great White?

  ‘Bad way to go, fire,’ he says. ‘Bad way.’

  I nod and I can almost taste the salt in his shovel grit. He’s got his passport in his coat pocket, I can see the top of it poking out. Burgundy with gold lettering. A woman walks past us wearing thin latex gloves and then as she gets closer to the staff entrance she removes her hat. It’s Red.

  �
��Hates this place,’ says Janitor Andersson, gesturing toward her.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Told me once. She said how come Ma’s sick and the Grimbergs still live here in luxury. She said it should be Grimbergs fading away not her ma who spent most of her life working her fingers to the bone here. But she can’t quit because where else would she go? You know any other firms round here needs a liquorice stamper?’ He shakes his head. ‘Supporting her whole family she is. Making liquor on the side to top things up. Sells it in them foreign wine-boxes. Lethal stuff. Liquorice and liquor. One time someone tried to rob her, decent amount of cash she has on the weekends I expect, and she smacked him round the head with a sock full of pool balls. Almost killed the lad. Anyway, she’s not got many good things to say about Grimberg Liquorice, that one.’

  ‘Did she know the dead man, Gunnarsson?’

  ‘Them two wasn’t talking,’ he says.

  ‘They knew each other?’

  ‘Could say that,’ he says. ‘She was the one that caught him talking to young Karin Grimberg years ago. She was the one that reported it.’

  ‘Do the police know?’ I say.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘But you know the Grimbergs well. You have a business relationship with them.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, looking up toward the Grand Room and then down toward his basement. ‘They told you, did they? Oh, that worked out real nice for them. They told you all about it, eh?’

  ‘Would you prefer if someone new—’

  He interrupts and bangs the wooden handle end of his shovel down on the cobbles.

  ‘If they’re moaning because I live down here then you can tell ’em . . .’ He’s almost shaking with anger. ‘Forget it. Don’t matter.’

  ‘Go on,’ I say, edging close to him.

  ‘If they ever paid what I’m due,’ he’s almost whispering now. ‘Then I’d be moving out double-quick to live someplace hot. With palm trees and outdoor dinners. They think I want to live down there?’ He looks at his basement and then up to the Grand Room. ‘I’ve had just about enough . . . They saying I chose it this way?’