Dark Pines

by Will Dean

  ‘Lemon?’

  I nod and he mixes me the drink.

  ‘One hundred.’

  Back in London, one hundred kronor would equal about nine pounds and even for London prices, nine pounds for a glass of water would be fucking outrageous. I pay him and take a seat. I’m frowning because I don’t want people to think I’m here to watch strippers but I know they don’t give a shit why I’m here. The two guys look bored as they watch the equally bored-looking woman on stage rub herself against a steel pole. The music changes and it’s ‘Roxette’ and I’m relieved.

  The girl from the stage steps off and a stunning black girl replaces her. She looks like a model but she can’t dance too well and she seems uncomfortable near the pole. The earlier girl from the stage walks over to me and leans in close to my face. She’s got a thin, Lycra dress on now; the kind of dress that I wouldn’t even wear as a swimming costume.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  I smell fake tan and it’s quite overwhelming. Fake tan and perfume.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘I’m Savanah.’

  ‘Tuva.’

  ‘Would you like me to dance for you, Tuva?’

  ‘Can we just have a chat?’ I say, ‘I’m happy to pay for your time.’

  She says something but I can’t hear it clearly. I cup my ear and she takes my hand in hers and leads me towards an arched doorway next to the stage. Her hand’s smooth and warm and slight.

  ‘Lucky bitches,’ I hear one of the two beer guys say as we walk past their table.

  We go through to the back and the music’s quieter here.

  ‘Private booths,’ she says.

  There’s a bouncer guy leaning against a wall. Savanah winks at him and he goes back to playing some game on his phone. Savanah leads me into a booth with a black, leather chair and a table and an ice bucket. She closes the curtain.

  ‘It’s a thousand for fifteen minutes,’ she says.

  I laugh a little conceited laugh that I instantly regret. ‘To talk?’ I say. ‘No, I just want to talk with you. How much for that?’

  She smiles. Her teeth are so white they look weird. They’re white but they have even whiter patches, unnaturally white patches, in the centre of each tooth.

  ‘It’s still a thousand.’

  I look at her and sigh through a smile.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Go ahead and talk,’ she says, turning away from me. ‘I’m a great listener.’

  I see her start to pull down the shoulder straps of her white Lycra dress so I laugh again and stand up. I touch her shoulder, slick with moisturiser or something, and she turns. In one swift move, she removes my hand and guides me back down in the black leather seat. I can see her ribs through her dress.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Please keep your clothes on, Savanah. I just want to talk with you, to have a chat. Is that okay?’

  She looks a little disappointed or maybe annoyed. Then she smiles and sits down on the other armchair in the booth and crosses her legs.

  ‘You wanna buy me a drink, Tuva?’

  ‘You want what I’m having?’ I say, pointing to my glass.

  ‘Sure,’ she says, pressing a button on the table between us.

  The bouncer pops his head in and Savanah starts to say something but I cut her off.

  ‘Glass of water, please. Thank you.’

  He looks at her and she nods and he leaves.

  ‘You a cop?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m a reporter, I work for the Posten.’

  She shrugs, her bottom lip extended.

  ‘ The Gavrik Posten, the local newspaper.’

  She lifts her head. ‘I’m not local, I live in Karlstad.’

  ‘Long commute,’ I say.

  ‘Four-hour round trip. But it’s only three days a week and the mill guys tip real well. I like it up here, we get good regulars. It’s not the mill guys that mess around trying to grab us y’know. It’s the boys, the stag parties and the college pricks. And they tip lousy, too.’

  ‘You get the mill managers up here, I heard,’ I say.

  She shrugs.

  ‘Carlsson’s up here quite a bit, I heard.’

  ‘What do you want, Tuva?

  ‘Freddy Malmström, the man who was shot. Did he come in here?’

  ‘The guy who was killed by that ghostwriter? Yeah, I seen him in here quite a lot but I’m not his girl and I never danced for him. He likes Candy, he’s got a big thing for Candy. Well, he did, before.’

  ‘Is Candy here today? Can I speak to her?’

  ‘She hasn’t worked since it happened and nobody’s seen or heard from her. She spoke to the cops and all, and then she just upped and left.’

  ‘You have any idea why Freddy Malmström was killed, Savanah?’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ she says as the glass of water arrives through the curtain. ‘Cos that ghostwriter shot him in the head and everyone’s saying he stole his eyeballs, that’s why.’

  ‘He was shot in the torso,’ I say. ‘In the chest.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Are you Hannes Carlsson’s girl, Savanah?’

  She snorts and crunches an ice cube between her teeth.

  ‘I wish.’

  I frown and shake my head.

  ‘Daisy’s his girl. He’s the best tipper in Värmland, that’s what they say. He’s a gentleman too, Daisy always tells us so. He comes back here with her few times a week and never lays a hand on her. Not inside the club, anyway. He’s got a good economy, he’s clean and nice, and he smells good.’

  When the fifteen minutes are up, Savanah walks out through the curtain and beckons me to follow. I look down at my phone. Seven missed calls. Five from Lena, one from Thord and one from Mum. The bouncer’s watching TV now, an unbranded flat-screen model bolted to the wall. The sound’s off but he’s reading subtitles.

  I look at the screen.

  They’re reporting from Utgard forest.

  They’ve found another body.

  20

  ‘Them redneck hunters,’ the bouncer says, opening a can of Diet Coke as he looks up at the TV.

  The bouncer doesn’t understand. The hunters are the ones getting killed. Or maybe he does understand. This town feels altogether more dangerous now. Two bodies. I give Savanah my business card and she shows me to a back exit.

  I step outside and the wind catches around my neck and I shiver. As I walk to my truck through piles of sticky leaves, I get glimpses of an image in my head. It’s Dad and he’s lying in David Holmqvist’s spare room, the one I didn’t have time to look in. He’s the new body. In that unseen room. I shake the image away and spit on the ground.

  I drive out of the strip club car park and a beat-up Volkswagen with blacked-out windows passes me on its way in. Two guys, early twenties, heavy metal screaming out of their speakers.

  The southbound lane of the motorway’s quiet. I call Lena.

  ‘You heard?’ she asks.

  ‘Just now. What do we know?’

  ‘Not much. A body was found and Björn tells me Karlstad are all over this now, they’ve taken control of the crime scene. Body was found deep inside Utgard forest, somewhere called ‘Badger Hollow’. You heard of it? Can you get there? I want you there.’

  Fuck. Inside Utgard forest. Deep inside.

  ‘I’ll find it,’ I say. I swallow even though there’s nothing in my mouth. I swallow a big, hard, dry nothing. ‘I’ll use the GPS on my phone.’

  I accelerate and my truck shakes slightly in the crosswind. There’s no traffic, just me and a straight road. I look to my right and see Utgard. The northernmost edge looks like a fortified wall of dark spruce. I jangle my key fob and plug my mobile into the charger.

  Radio on. I scan through the stations and find a newsflash from Radio Värmland mentioning the new body. No gender or identity. They pull up a two-day old soundbite, a chat with the retired librarian from the local school, a snippet where she talks about Holmqvist’s eyes, his guilty lifeless eyes. I turn
it off.

  Closer to Gavrik, I see a police car and slow the truck down to a hundred and ten. I get off the E16 and drive under the motorway and head towards Utgard. I pass a large gravel area I haven’t noticed before. It has a few dozen diggers parked up or maybe it’s a scrapyard. Then I turn right, where Mossen’s grey gravel spills out onto the main road.

  As I pass between the pines, the dash shows the temperature drop from plus three to minus three. I tap it with my finger which is an utterly pointless thing to do with a digital reading, and nothing changes. I open my window a little and feel the cold around my neck like before at the strip club. The track crunches inside my hearing aids. I switch the heated seat to max and drive past Hoarder’s house. His caravan lights are on. I go past Taxi’s house. He’s home, too. It’s Sunday and it’s too late for church so where the hell else would they all be. I drive up the hill and through the swamp and past the wood-carving sisters’ place. They’re sanding and polishing. I get to Ghostwriter’s house and the parking lot’s full of police cars, marked and unmarked; one ambulance and one mountain rescue fire truck. The house itself is dark, and striped crime-scene tape joins each supporting column of the veranda.

  I park half in a ditch because it’s the only place left. They’re all in the woods somewhere so how am I going to find them? In Stockholm or Chicago, reporters locate the crime scene and report and then go back to the office and write it up. Here, I have to find the damn scene in a thousand of acres of dark repetition. I grab my phone and my ski jacket complete with bright colours to show that I’m not a bloody elk, and I take my woolly hat and a bar of Marabou milk chocolate and a torch. I pick up my handbag. Is a handbag the right thing? I feel it should be a backpack with pockets and straps. In my handbag I’ve got a can of bear-spray and a flattened sandwich and my camera.

  I walk over to the other side of the track and peer through the trees, my boots still firmly planted on gravel. I squint into the murk. It smells like old compost, like rotting earth. I can’t see anything. I go back to the other side of the road and stand in front of my truck. It looks exactly the same, a million upright sticks above uneven earth. Some pines have fallen in a storm and lodged against the others, their angles ruining the verticality of the whole. I hear footsteps. No, it’s just the wind. I look around and it’s getting dark even though it’s only five. From the direction of the sisters’ house, I see a figure walking towards me. It’s Frida and she’s lifting one walking pole in the air as if raising a hand to wave.

  ‘Frida,’ I say, some relief in my voice.

  ‘You heard?’ she asks. ‘They found another one.’

  ‘Where are all the police? Have you seen the body?’

  ‘No,’ she says, licking away a bead of sweat from her upper lip and stopping in front of me. ‘The hunting team found him when I was down in Karlstad. I haven’t seen this one. He’s up at Badger Hollow.’

  ‘Where is that?’ I ask. ‘Can you show me on the map on my phone so I can go check it out?’

  Frida looks at me like I’m insane. She doesn’t laugh, she frowns.

  ‘You think you’d find them? You wouldn’t have a chance. Do you really need to get that deep into the woods just to photograph it? Isn’t there someone else at the paper who can do it, someone local?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Well,’ she breathes in hard and puts her hands on her hips with the loops of her Nordic walking poles dangling from her wrists. ‘I guess I could take you but I need to be back home by seven-thirty for Hannes’s dinner. You got proper boots on?’

  I look down at the two-thousand-kronor boots I bought in Karlstad two winters ago.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well I don’t, not for this. Let’s swing by my house on the way out, it’s kind of on the way to Badger Hollow anyway.’

  We walk to her place. It’s the exact same walk we did the last time a body was discovered in Utgard forest. It feels much shorter this time because now I know how long it is. It’s still too foresty for me, but alongside Frida, I’m okay. She emits a confidence that no wild thing would ever question. I walk pretty close to her side, her walking poles clattering against my boots once or twice along the way. She goes into her house and I stay outside. I look at the grey timber outbuilding with the moss roof. The light’s on inside. I can see the hut’s built on a stone foundation, with spaces and gaps for ventilation.

  Frida comes out with boots and a long stick with a ball on the end of it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My elk stick. Carved Norrland oak with a knot at the end, it was my grandfather’s. Never been used on an elk but I reckon it’d make one think twice.’

  She slaps an orange neon band around my arm and puts one on herself. She presses mine at a certain point and it starts to flash.

  ‘Have we got torches?’

  ‘Better just to use your eyes,’ she says, not looking at me. ‘They’ll soon adjust and then you’ll see fine. You got a torch, you got a thousand mosquito bites, that’s what I say.’

  She walks fast and I have to slow-jog to keep up. We traipse through her waterlogged back garden and over a rocky slope and out onto a patchy gravel track. I have to concentrate when she speaks because it’s difficult to lip-read or see her facial expressions out here in this murk. She tells me all about her day. Church, then delivering frozen meals to the local elderly, then a few hours in Karlstad to shop at the department store. Same routine every Sunday. She tells me Saturdays are for cleaning up and cooking.

  ‘Do both your parents live in Karlstad?’ she asks.

  ‘Mum lives there, Dad’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Frida.

  I wave it away with my hand. ‘Long time ago.’

  ‘At least your mum’s not too far away, does she pop up to see you often?’

  My throat feels tight and I can’t swallow.

  ‘Mum’s not well, so it’s me that visits her. I go whenever I can.’

  I look around. We’ve been walking for a few minutes, that’s all, maybe five minutes, and I’m completely lost. I can’t see a single sign of humanity, except for Frida. No lights, no cars, no houses. It’s dark but not completely dark and the strip of sky above our heads is pale grey and starless.

  ‘Wait one second,’ I say.

  ‘What is it, Tuva?’

  I look around me, staring into the black pines, turning on my heels, trying to see things. The beasts are out there and I’m trying to spot them behind the trunks and the rocks.

  ‘I’m not good with nature, Frida. I mean, I really hate it. I mean, I really, really don’t like this right now.’

  ‘I know . . .’

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ I say, placing my hand on her forearm. ‘See, I’m actually shaking, I’m not faking that.’

  ‘I see that,’ says Frida. ‘Tuva, listen to me.’ She stares into my eyes and I see blue, and it’s comfort right there, something that’s not dark green or earthy. Her eyes are blue and clean and sharp. ‘I grew up in Norrland,’ she says. ‘And compared to Norrland, this is a walk in the park. Up there we have wolves, bears, lots of bears, and we have big country, not like this, I mean vast wilderness. And I was always fine. As a kid, with no stick and no knowledge and no police that, by the way, are only about two kilometres away, I was always fine. This all looks scary but the animals are so spread out and so petrified of us, we have nothing to worry about. Listen, sweetie. Follow me, stay close behind and focus on my armband or my jacket. Keep up and we’ll get you there real quick and then we’ll get you back out to your truck.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’m okay now. Thank you.’

  She says nothing, just walks off. I concentrate on her armband and block out everything else. I’m deaf but I hear everything, every twig snap, every owl hoot, every branch creak. I thought it was eerily silent in these places but I was wrong. It is eerily fucking noisy.

  I speed up and walk so close behind Frida I’m almost touching her.

  ‘Tell me some mo
re about Norrland,’ I say. ‘Why did you move here?’

  ‘Because of Hannes. He got a good job at the mill, straight out of school, so we moved down here. He’s from up north as well.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you two were high-school sweethearts?’

  ‘Oh, but I will tell you,’ she says, pride in her voice. ‘I used to work in the Sibylla hot dog stall on the main street of our little town. Was a nice job for a teenager, they paid pretty good. Hannes was popular with all the girls in school and he messed around a lot. Anyway, one day his parents told him he had to take responsibility and grow up. So when he approached eighteen, he started dating me. It was all dances and flowers and moonlit walks on the rocky hills outside of town. He was so romantic, I was swooning about with a massive smile on my face.’

  I feel slightly queasy at this story and all its eighteenth-century faux-romantic chauvinist bullshit but I don’t say anything. I’m at work.

  ‘Then he got the job and bought a car and drove it over to my hot dog stall. He told me, I’ll never forget it, he told me, ‘Frida, you’re too beautiful to serve people hot dogs. It breaks my heart to see you working here in a uniform and a hat. You’re too good for this. I want you to be my wife.’ He thought I was too pretty to hand out ketchup. He’d got the job at the mill that very morning. So we got married and moved down here and this is where we’ve been ever since. It’s like something out of a movie, really.’

  There’s a noise to the right of us. Frida stops walking and that freaks the hell out of me so I stop and kind of hide behind her like a kid.

  ‘It’s a bird,’ she says. ‘It’s just a bird.’

  She strokes my shoulder and I’m placated like a kitten. My breathing slows and her hand on my shoulder makes all the difference in the world.

  We walk on.

  ‘Is it much further to Badger Creek?’ I ask.

  ‘Badger Hollow,’ she corrects me. ‘We’re over halfway there.’

  The gravel’s gone now. I’m walking over rocks and through boggy grass and over knotted tree roots designed specifically to hold on to my boots and trip me up. I’m warm except for my cheeks and my nose. My pulse is beating loud in my ears.