Dark Pines_A Tuva Moodyson Mystery 1

by Will Dean

  The internal organs look small but I can see them easily; the carcass is well-lit by the fluorescent striplights of the workshop. The quiet sister steps away to the fire and pushes in a couple of logs. The talking one uses her bare hand to pull out intestines and other soft, gloopy tubes of flesh. Then I see the liver, glistening and almost black. They leave it in. The quiet sister tugs out the lungs, throwing each one into the darkness of the pines. The talking sister joins her and they walk to the entrance of their house. They’re talking but I can’t read lips from this distance in the dark. They close the front door.

  Business or pleasure? Troll parts or dinner?

  I try to look through the windows but they’re lit by dangling pendulum lights which blind me from seeing anything beyond the bulb. I let the binoculars hang around my neck. Then I walk past the workshop, the folk music still playing, me two trees deep, and past the discarded organs and on towards Ghostwriter’s house.

  A cobweb hanging between two trees hits me square in the face. I pull it from my eyebrows and eyelashes, spitting and gurning even though nothing went inside my mouth. I jump out towards the track and hop the ditch. It’s full of stagnant water. I walk along the track pulling fine strands of spider wool from my hair and my chin. Even when it’s all gone I can still feel it, and I’m sure strands are lodged on my nose or somewhere behind my ears. I walk faster now. It’s cold. The topography changes towards Holmqvist’s house. On my right, on the side where he lives, it’s still wall-to-wall spruces, but on the left there is a steep escarpment lined with pines and beech trees. It’s quite scenic in the daytime, relatively speaking.

  I hop the ditch and climb up the escarpment. The trees are smaller and more sparse, with rocky outcrops in between them. I see the corner of his house and the edge of a veranda post; there’s something shiny wrapped around it.

  The ground’s more slippery up here, wet rocks and mossy crags. I hear a noise like a howling beast caught in a trap. I think it’s a wolf and I fall to the ground in a ball, my chin between my knees. I haven’t pulled my knife or my bear-spray, I’ve just given up. Just like that. The howls carry on. There aren’t many wolves in Värmland, but there are some. I bring my binoculars to my eyes. Outside Holmqvist’s house is a wire fence, a chain-link barrier running from one veranda post to the next. It’s a dog pen and there’s a massive Alsatian, or German shepherd, I forget the difference, and it’s looking out and barking. The noise is enormous and it’s booming through the trees and travelling up the escarpment.

  Okay, so he bought a big dog. But it’s fenced in. I’m fine. Maybe I’d buy a big dog if the whole damn town hated me and if everyone I met in Gavrik whispered behind my back the moment I walked away. I stand up and it keeps on barking, its whole body rigid and ready. I touch the knife in my left pocket and the phone in my right. I have no idea what time it is. I reach back and pull the balaclava out from the backpack’s side pocket. I pull it on, no reservations, and start walking across the escarpment parallel with the road. It doesn’t feel like Utgard forest just here, it’s lighter and more open. Less cover, but less menace too. It’s almost normal. Almost. The dog never stops barking. I walk to a broad beech tree and its bark is plastered with moss, and with pale patches of lichen like photographic negatives of the liver spots on Mum’s hands. I lift my binoculars.

  Holmqvist has fenced in the entire ground floor. He’s surrounded himself with a ring of steel, a wall of twenty-four hour Alsatian protection. The dog can run around the entire house, it has three hundred and sixty degrees of freedom. It’s stopped barking now. It’s lying down where I first spotted it and gnawing on a bone the size of a table leg. The bone has a hoof.

  It’s an elk bone. The dog’s chewing on a moose shin. I look around. Holmqvist’s windows are all mirrored so I can’t make out much. I can hear the dog moan with pleasure as it chews the bone inside the skinny leg, silvery dribbles of saliva reflecting in the moonlight. I scan from left to right and see Holmqvist’s car connected to an outdoor post: a device to keep the battery charged during winter. Useful if you don’t drive often. My face is warming up a little in the ski balaclava. It smells musty from skiing because I don’t think I’ve ever washed it.

  The dog goes quiet. I can just see inside the ground floor and there’s no activity, no movement at all. I move the binoculars up to the first floor and aim them at the window I think belongs to the second guest bedroom, the one I never had time to look inside. From this angle, the mirrored glass reflects everything. I scan right and see another window. Nothing. I scan right to the final window and pass a blur as I move the binoculars. I move them back a little and it’s him standing on the veranda looking straight back at me.

  36

  I don’t flinch and I don’t curl up in a ball like before, I just watch him watching me. He’s wearing a pink polo-shirt under a grey jumper, and beige chinos. He’s holding a large glass of white wine and he’s looking right at me. The dog’s chewing fuck-knows-what downstairs and he’s drinking white wine upstairs and I’m about twelve kilometres from the edge of the forest. He’s watching me down the optics of my own binoculars. I look him up and down. For some reason he’s wearing plastic shoe covers on his own veranda. And then he looks away and up at the sky. My heart starts working normally again and I blink, and then I drop the binoculars and let them hang by their string. I look up as if Holmqvist’s staring at something specific, but it’s just sky. And it is beautiful. I can see more than I’ve been able to see since entering Utgard forest with Tammy. A ceiling of milky sky, dazzling puddles of stars and soft-focus splodges of galactic light. I’m looking at what I think is the Milky Way and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it and it really is milky. It’s calming. So, as the dog chews, it’s me and David Holmqvist, the man arrested not once, but twice, for the Medusa forest murders, staring up at an unreal sky. Then he turns, walks inside, and closes the door.

  I think I see another man in there with him, someone his height, but it’s just a reflection from the mirrored glass.

  I stumble through the trees, the steepness of the slope causing me to trip and rest against stumps along the way. The damn dog starts to bark again like it wants to kill me. I stagger through and the slope flattens out and then I’m past Holmqvist’s house and back on the track again. My hearing aid beeps.

  The dog stops barking and I worry maybe both my aids have died. But no, just paranoid, my other aid has a good battery. The dog just stopped barking, that’s all.

  I keep the balaclava on because the temperature’s fallen. I walk down the track to Frida’s house and it’s barely wide enough for a car. It loops back on itself like one of those ski slopes for people like me who can’t really ski. It’s more twisty than the main track, it sweeps over rocks and down between old Scots pines, their trunks sloping away to find the sun. But it’s darker here. There’s less sky to help me out. I walk fast, almost a jog, left hand on the bone handle of my knife, right hand on my phone. I can see eyes, or maybe they’re just bits of wood, holes in trunks where birds might nest. I’m heating up and my breath is collecting in small puffs in the air in front of me. I’m leaving scared clouds of cashew-scented breath along the last bit of track in Mossen village. Something rustles but I think it’s the wind. Left hand, knife.

  I walk up towards their house and see the security lights on in the garden. Their plot of land is larger and flatter than the neighbours’ – with a hill directly behind and a lawn in front. One house with a mansard roof, and one hut on the right-hand side. Two cars. His and hers.

  The ground’s wet. I skirt the edge of the garden and squelch through boggy grass and the foul water around my boots is starting to make my feet cold. I hate not being able to see what’s beneath me. It’s shitty land and I don’t know what I’m walking through. I want a thousand ceiling spotlights right now, a helicopter overhead with searchlights, a dozen torches, and an asphalt runway lit up with landing lights, thank you very much. I want lights to lead me to the hill at the back of F
rida’s house. Because Hannes’s study is at the back.

  I get to the rocky slope, and although my feet are wet from the deeper puddles I’m happy to be on solid ground and approaching the one house I feel almost comfortable with. I perch on a grey granite rock the size of a blue whale, a vein of sparkling quartz running diagonally through it, mirroring the Milky Way above. I take a breath, suddenly thirsty from all the walking and all the breathing. The lights are on in every room of the house. It’s not a scary place, with its well-maintained garden and modest conservatory and security lights and tasteful furnishings. There are no wolf-dogs here.

  I scan the ground floor quickly and see Frida with an apron tied around her cinched waist. She’s washing up in the kitchen, scrubbing saucepans and leaving them to dry on a rack beside the sink. Then she unties her apron, and I notice the light go out in the kitchen. I scan up and see Hannes in his study, sitting at his desk. Then I see Frida crack open the study door and say something to him. Then she leaves, closing the door behind her. I see her in the bathroom, slipping out of her clothes, and suddenly I’m a guilty pervert wearing a mask, so I look away.

  Hannes checks his door. I think he locks it, but he has his back to me so I can’t be sure. I watch him bend over the sofa in his room, the one next to the stuffed brown bear. He pulls on it and it turns into a bed and suddenly I’m shocked. More shocked than I was about the hare guts or Holmqvist on his balcony or the pile of dead mice near Viggo’s wall. Hannes is a man who sleeps in his study.

  He turns his light off and then from the corner of my eye, I see Frida’s bathroom light switch off as well. I feel like a kid looking into a doll’s house. He moves to his desk, the stark glare from his computer the only thing lighting the room. His monitor is as big as a flat-screen TV and it’s pointed right at me. I watch Hannes sit at his desk and pull on a headset, the kind you see telemarketers wear all day long, microphone at his mouth, earphone against one ear, metal band across his silvery hair.

  He types something on the keyboard and a woman appears on his screen. I wonder if it’s Daisy, but I’ve never met her or seen a photo. I adjust my zoom. Could just be a porn movie but it doesn’t look like it. The woman’s sitting on a bed. I can see it all clearly: Hannes oblique at his desk and her on a bed. She’s good-looking, brunette, maybe my age or a little younger. I watch as he puts his socked feet on the desk and spreads them apart. I see her laugh at this. His socks are white and they glow bright in the glare from the screen. I see him unzip his jeans and then I look away.

  All the lights are off in the house. The only thing I can see is screen-glow from the centre of the first floor. I bring up my binoculars and he’s changed position thank God, so I can only see his back now and one foot with its white sock. He’s shaking. But I can see her pretty clearly on the monitor. She’s still dressed from the waist up. She’s sitting up on her bed with her knees up by her chest and there’s a noose tied around her neck.

  My right hand leaves the binoculars and finds my phone in my pocket. I call the police now, right? He seems to be controlling her and this must be illegal in some way, conspiracy to murder or incitement or something? But before I even touch the phone, I know this is not what I should do, or what I will do. This could be a recording or it could be a staged porn thing. I look back and Hannes is shaking more now. I watch as his foot slips off the desk as the girl on the screen starts to pull at the rope around her neck. She’s turning red. She’s writhing around. Hannes stops shaking. She pulls off the rope and throws it on the bed and then she closes her legs and opens her legs and then closes them again and blows him a kiss. He removes his headset and turns off the monitor and goes to bed on the pull-out sofa.

  I want to get home. I’ve seen too much and I want my truck and I want Tammy and I want to get out of this hellhole. I walk briskly, my ski mask still on, and then I trudge through the wet boggy edge of the garden again. I’m thinking about what I’ve seen and what I can do with it all and who I can talk to. My mask stinks. I take a short-cut just two trees deep to re-join the track because I’ve had enough of wet feet and weird marshy ground. I walk and it’s dark. It’s very dark now and I’m being stalked by a cloud of midges. I turn back to the garden and it’s not there. It’s just trees. I turn around to get my bearings. I can’t be lost here, I’m just two or three trees deep in the forest, and this must be still officially Frida’s garden. But it’s all the same, every point on the compass is dark vertical tree trunks. I look up and there’s no sky at all, no stars or moon or Milky Way, just branches hanging down one on top of the other, sagging low in a hundred shades of black.

  I rip off my ski mask and breathe. The midges come closer. I stare into the gloom and see something, the top of a wall maybe. I swat my hand around and walk towards the wall and within twenty paces I’m back in the main garden. I can see a house and two cars and that’s pretty fucking magic right now, signs of life, human life. I run down the track towards Ghostwriter’s house. No mask, I just sprint as fast as I can. I outrun the midges and get out my phone. Barely any reception. Four missed calls. I call Tammy as I run.

  ‘Where are you?’ I whisper.

  ‘I’m here. I’m where I dropped you off. Where are you?’

  ‘Drive up to meet me. I’m on the track. Drive up.’

  I keep sprinting, cursing myself for not being fitter. I’m twenty-six and I’m fighting for breath like Mum. I run straight past that dog, barking at me every second I go by, and I run up towards the sisters’ workshop. Headlights. I don’t really care if they’re from my truck although I know they must be. Just lights is great. Lights and engine noise and the ground vibrating beneath my feet.

  The truck stops.

  37

  We reverse at speed up the track and Tammy seems to have no problem with this at all. I tell her what I’ve seen and she cringes and screws up her face like she’s smelt something awful. She looks behind with her right hand gripping my headrest, driving my truck backwards with one hand on the steering wheel like a pro rally driver. My feet are damp and cold.

  ‘You been here before?’

  ‘Pick most of my mushrooms here,’ Tammy says. ‘Free produce from about July until November every year.’

  ‘You don’t mind the woods. You come here alone?’

  ‘There’s nothing scary in these woods unless you’re a man and you’re a hunter. I saw the wood-carvers once, they were shooting rabbits or pheasants, but we gave each other a wide berth and I was fine. Mum used to come here a lot before I was born and it saved her a fortune when she set up the food van, so she said. She used to get the same bullshit from locals that I get, only ten times worse. No idea how she managed. Threats, stalkers, dogshit in her postbox, people following her home at night. Cops never listened to her back then, never took her seriously. So she’d come to Utgard all on her own to get away from all that and to forage. Nothing bad ever happened to her here.’

  She looks up at me.

  ‘You need to confront it one day, go deep inside.’

  I turn to her and she looks small driving my truck; she’s low down in the seat with her hands gripping the top of the steering wheel.

  ‘I used to hate lakes,’ she says. ‘I mean, I liked lakes but I really hated swimming out deep in them, you know, to where my feet couldn’t touch the bottom. So I decided I needed to face my fear. I packed a tent and went out to the reservoir, the one with the tourist caravans. Next morning, I psyched myself up, then swam right out to the middle. I was treading water out there, must be ten metres deep or something in the middle, that’s what the locals say, all leeches and pike and God-knows-what down there, and I was pretty much fine. You should try it.’

  ‘Tammy, if I wander off into the middle of a forest and just “let it happen” you’ll never see me again cos I’ll get lost. That’s the difference. With a lake, you know where you are and where you need to get to. Tonight I managed to get lost in someone’s front fucking garden.’

  ‘I’m not saying you do it lig
htly and I’m not saying you do it at night-time, you idiot.’

  We pass under the motorway on the way back to Gavrik.

  ‘Go in the daytime. Let me know where you’re setting off from. Take your phone, some food, use a ball of string if you need to. Tie it to a tree on the edge of the wood and walk as far as the string lasts. Then you’re in but you know you can get back out.’

  When she says string I think of wool, a ball of brightly-coloured yarn, and this makes it all seem possible. Nothing too bad can happen if you’re holding a nice ball of yarn.

  I can see the town’s twinkling lights now, a dull glow against a clear sky. I’ve still got my backpack between my cold, wet feet so I reach back and put it on the back seat and that’s when I see the rifle.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Tammy bends her neck to look back.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Why do you need a rifle?’

  ‘I thought we went through this. I’m a cute young Asian woman living amongst Neanderthal men who see me as sub-human yet still very much fuckable. So that’s why I carry it. It’s just Mum’s old gun.’

  I stare at it lying across my rear seats. Dark varnished wood and a matt-metal barrel with a scope. It has a weight to it. It looks like an older version of the rifle carried by that man who walked into the office, the brother of the ’90s victim.

  I turn to face forward.

  ‘What’s the news on the ghostwriter?’ Tammy asks.

  ‘Nothing new.’

  ‘I had the ambulance driver pick up some food earlier, the one with the limp. Reckons he saw the ghostwriter and Hannes Carlsson in a car on some road. He was out on a call, lights flashing, and he saw them on some little side road and they looked like they were arguing.’