Red Snow

by Will Dean

  The bell tinkles and I step into warmth.

  Lars isn’t in, he’s part-time and he’ll be in tomorrow. Nils is back in his office slash kitchen on the right selling ad space to the same people he’s been selling ad space to for the last twelve years. Lena’s in her office on the left fixing for the print.

  I kick off my boots, my stomach queasy, my legs unsteady, and then pull off my coat and gloves and hat. I hang up the coat on its reinforced hook and place the other woolly stuff in my basket.

  Lena opens her door. Jeans and a ski undershirt. She has more grey in her afro than when I arrived here in Toytown and I think it suits her.

  ‘Something happened?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I pull off my fleece and lay it down on my desk.

  ‘Grimberg jumped,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Climbed up the factory chimney and jumped off. He’s dead.’

  She covers her mouth with her hand. I’m always surprised and impressed by how affected she gets by bad news, the amount she’s seen in her life, in Nigeria, in New York, in Gavrik. There is no blasé in Lena Adeola.

  She shakes her head. ‘You see him do it?’

  I nod and she steps closer and puts her arm around me. Maybe it’s because of what I’ve been through these past six months or maybe because of Mum or maybe because I’m leaving in ten days or maybe it’s all of it. She’s not normally a hugger.

  I shudder at the thought of Grimberg hitting the cobblestones. That noise.

  ‘Get you a coffee?’ she says. ‘You need a break?’

  ‘I need to give a statement. Tell Thord what I saw and who was around.’

  She heads into Nils’s office slash kitchen and I catch sight of his tube-socked feet up on his desk and then she pours coffee from the machine into two chainsaw store freebie mugs and hands one over to me.

  She sips and looks back to her office.

  ‘We’ll have to move things around now,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll work tonight,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll have enough for the front page.’

  ‘If that’s alright,’ she says.

  I nod and take my winter cream and spread it onto my chapped hands and work it into the valleys where my fingers meet, and my knuckles, and then onto my cheeks and eyelids. My lids are the worst, weeks of dry and cold. The February air can’t hold humidity. I look at the clock, ten past four, and I think about that noise. That crack. Why did he jump? What could be so awful that you’d climb up a chimney in February and then end it all? I pull out my aids and switch on my microwave-sized PC and open my stories.

  Six leading headlines that will now be trumped by the factory suicide. Valentine’s dinner at Hotel Gavrik next week with a secret special guest. That will be dogshit deluxe, make no mistake. I think of the man’s head on those cobbles, the snow, the dash of colour, the sound, the life leaving him right then, the exact pinpoint moment of death. I cringe and rub my eyes and open the next story. The local council have called for a Kommun-wide roof clearance effort this coming weekend. They’re worried about collapses. They’re also warning trespassers not to approach the abandoned black warehouse behind the Toyota dealership because with all the recent weather they say it could fall down any minute. The pulp mill an hour or so north of here is sponsoring the annual Gavrik vs Munkfors ice hockey match on March 13th. It sponsors the match every year and in most towns this wouldn’t be a news story but this isn’t most towns. Björnmossen’s, Gavrik’s largest gun store, is starting its sale on March 3rd. All ammunition half price. Next story: there was a scare last week when a little girl skated into an ice-fishing hole on the reservoir so the owners have cordoned off an area exclusively for skating. Fishing trumps skating, or at least it does here in Gavrik. And finally, perhaps the biggest story until the grisly events of today: the sole full-time reporter at Gavrik Posten, yours truly, is leaving after next week’s issue to start work at a bi-weekly publication down near Malmö. I got my golden ticket.

  I try to dodge the indoor puddles of water that mark every entrance area this time of year, and pull on all my Gore-Tex fleece-lined gear. This is the deal in February in central Sweden. You spend half your time pulling on gear or taking it off, and the other half’s spent either digging out your truck or else scraping it.

  My hearing aids are still on my desk so I reach over and pull them on, each one uncomfortable on account of my dry crocodile skin, and then head back out onto the street.

  It’s cold and there’s nobody around. The ambulance is gone, the cops are gone, the body’s gone. But the factory’s still there. Oh yeah, it’s still up there on its granite hill, looking down over the whole of Toytown and casting its shadows all the way out to McDonald’s.

  The cop shop’s empty and the new girl’s nowhere to be seen. I ring the bell on the counter and Thord wanders through.

  ‘You wanna do this back there where it’s warm?’ he asks.

  ‘You bet.’

  He opens the heavy code-locked door and I step through. I’ve been back here one time before, when I was interviewing sources about the Medusa murders last October. Place hasn’t changed much. Filing cabinets and six desks, three occupied. A kitchenette and a rack for police coats, and photos on the wall of Chief Petterson, Thord’s late father.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m good, thanks.’

  This is February and that means peak coffee and peak booze and peak TV and peak online poker and that’s about all there is until the snows melt away in late April.

  ‘Horrible thing,’ Thord says, sitting down at his desk and pointing to the chair on the other side.

  I sit down. ‘Horrible.’

  ‘What happened before we arrived? Can you tell me in your own words?’

  His cheeks are red and sore and his lips are peeling like old bark from a log.

  ‘I arrived about three-thirty and there were maybe six or seven people looking up at the old chimney, the one on the right that never smokes. I got out my truck and looked up. Mr Grimberg was climbing that rusty metal ladder that runs up one side of each chimney, he was close to the top, just past the faint G of the Grimberg Liquorice lettering that runs down to the factory roof.’

  ‘He was the only one on the ladder?’

  ‘I think so. Didn’t see anyone else, but it all happened very fast. He got to the top and then, real quick, he jumped off. It was silent and then I heard a crack and he hit the cobbles by that arch tunnel that runs through the middle of the building. Then you came.’

  ‘Anyone talking to him from below? Any arguments? Raised voices? He look scared?’

  ‘Don’t think so, it all happened so quickly.’

  ‘We heard he was being spoken to. That he looked terrified climbing that ladder, almost like he was being chased. Nobody else around?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Spoken to?’ I say. ‘Chased?’

  Thord hasn’t made a note of anything I’ve said, even though he has a chewed biro and a pad of paper in front of him.

  ‘Horrible thing to happen in your last week,’ he says.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You recognise any of the other witnesses? I saw most of them myself, but two old-timers were walking off as I arrived.’

  ‘There was Linda from the newsagent and a woman with bright scarlet red hair. And there was Bertil with the bad knee, used to work out at the sewage works.’

  ‘Bertil Hendersson? The bee man?’

  I nod.

  ‘Okay, that’s helpful,’ he says, standing up. ‘Thanks for coming by.’

  ‘Quote for the paper, Thord?’

  ‘Say what now?’

  ‘I’ll be needing a quote from the police, please.’

  He swallows hard and looks over toward Chief Björn’s desk. There’s a speedboat brochure laying open by the telephone.

  ‘Well, this ain’t like other things, you know that.’

  ‘I still need a quote.’

  ‘I don’t mean
the . . .’ he hushes his voice and sits back down, ‘. . . suicide, I mean the family, the Grimbergs. They’re discreet people and they wouldn’t want me saying too much if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ll be respectful. But I need a quote.’

  ‘Let me talk to the Chief and I’ll call you first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Need it for the print, Lena’s over there right now waiting for it. Just give me a soundbite.’

  ‘Police say . . .’

  I wait but he keeps on looking over at the direction of the factory and then at Chief Björn’s desk. There’s a stack of cruise holiday brochures next to the speedboat one.

  ‘Police say . . .’ I say.

  ‘This was a tragic incident. Our thoughts are with the Grimberg family at this time.’

  ‘That it?’

  He frown-nods.

  ‘Okay then, that’ll have to do.’

  ‘Don’t go meddling with the Grimbergs, Tuvs. They’re private people and the whole town relies on them.’

  ‘We have to tell the news, Thord.’

  ‘They’re private people and they’re not like me and you. They’ve been in that factory as long as my family’s been in Gavrik, since 1840 or some such, and they pretty much built the whole town. If it wasn’t for Grimberg Liquorice there’d be no Gavrik so we owe them the courtesy. They’ve had more than enough tragic deaths over the years. Blighted, they are. Leave them be.’

  3

  I step out of the cop shop and ice-cold wind blasts my face.

  Why did Gustav do it? Why end it all? And why kill yourself in front of the whole town?

  Shuffling, I cross Storgatan, empty of cars and people, and head back to the office. Snow is falling in sporadic flakes, floating down slowly and gently. I look to my left toward the factory and see a flash of warm colour up at one of the top windows. Then it disappears. I cup my hands over my ears to protect my aids, each one worth a month’s salary here, or three weeks’ worth at my new job, and then I run like anyone runs on an icy road. Ronnie’s Bar, now refurbished, opened last week for the first time in years. A new place in a town with nowhere else to go. The office bell tinkles and Nils steps in from his office slash kitchen holding a bunch of white helium balloons.

  ‘Kid’s birthday. Happy Meal and all these and a tricycle. Nice day for it.’

  I’m not sure if he’s being sarcastic about the chimney death, or sincere.

  ‘Have fun.’

  He sets the balloons down. They have a lead weight to keep them from escaping Gavrik town, from leaving all this behind, and then he pulls on his huge jacket and hat and mittens.

  ‘See you in the a-m.’

  Lena’s door’s ajar so I stick my head around.

  ‘Thai?’

  She signals her approval.

  I sit down at my desk, a pine catalogue thing from the early nineties, and pick up my phone and dial.

  ‘Print night?’ asks Tammy.

  ‘Good memory,’ I say. ‘You should count cards in Vegas. Two pad thais, please, fierce as you are, pick up in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Got it.’

  I google Gavrik and there are chimney jump headlines in the regionals and even some of the nationals are running with it. Wermlands Tidningen talks about the family and how important they are to the community but they spell Anna-Britta, the widow, they spell her name wrong, and that really pisses me off. Göteborg Posten focus on Grimberg Liquorice, Sweden’s third largest producer of salt liquorice and seventh largest producer of sweet liquorice. Lots of talk about heritage and secret recipes and other impersonal filler. Nothing much about the man who actually died or the grieving people he left behind.

  My right hearing aid beeps so I pull it off and pop out the battery and take a new one from my key fob and then I pull off its sticker and wait a few minutes: a neat trick that gives me extra battery life. I drop in the new one and close it up. The aid plays a jingle as I switch it on.

  I look at Gavrik on Google Maps because I want to see the factory’s location relative to everything else. The building has an extra pull tonight. It’s always had its own special feel, an ancient superiority, but now it’s more intense. I zoom into Sweden and into Värmland and into Gavrik and there it is. An industrial lot of three acres or so at the top of Storgatan, north of the cop shop and Hotel Gavrik, its nearest neighbours, and south of St Olov’s church ruin.

  My Hilux’s door is frozen shut so I tug on it gently remembering what Janitor Andersson said about cables snapping. If I lose this vehicle I am one hundred per cent fucked, especially in February. The thing about being a small town reporter in the north pole is that you need a good reliable truck to get you to stories – and even more importantly, to get you away from them.

  I pull the door and snow from the roof falls in and settles on my seat. Thord asked if someone was chasing Grimberg up the chimney. Was that even possible? I turn the key in the ignition and switch on the blower, full speed, full heat, all of it focussed on the windscreen, and then set the heated seat to max, and then grab my scraper. It’s a routine, like a fighter pilot’s pre-flight checks. I scrape the windscreen and mirrors and front windows and spray blue antifreeze on the rear ones. Then I get in and turn the wipers on and release the handbrake and set off. There is no noise and the dash says minus twenty-two.

  Three-minute drive to Tammy’s van on the edge of ICA Maxi’s supermarket lot and I don’t see a single person on the way. Not one. Her van’s steaming and lit up and it’s probably my favourite place in town and the only place I’ll really miss.

  Everything’s white. It looks like God poured a bottle of correction fluid over the whole town, and who the hell could blame him.

  Tammy’s there leaning out of her hatch with her lumberjack hat tied under her chin, a bag of delicious food in each hand. I stand on tiptoe and kiss her cheek and stick two hundred kronor on the counter and grab the bags and run back to my truck.

  I pass seven snow-topped For Rent signs on empty shops on the way back to the office. Seven.

  Lena and I eat in silence at her desk. My noodles are glistening and ferocious with chili flakes and they are good. Really good. We both have a can of red Coke from the newsagent across the road and I wish mine had some rum in it. Fifty-fifty would do me just fine. We eat from the plastic containers. I have crackers, Lena doesn’t.

  ‘Hell of a day,’ she says.

  I have a mouthful of shrimp and peanuts so I just nod.

  ‘You ever been inside there?’ she asks.

  ‘The factory?’

  Lena nods, chopsticking noodles into her mouth.

  ‘Just into the modern bit at the back when they launched some new flavour years ago. Seemed normal enough back there, just with that old building stuck on the front.’

  Lena pulls a thread of spring onion from her teeth and picks up her Coke.

  ‘They’ve got vermin trouble,’ she says. ‘Monster rats out in the liquorice root barns. God help them if they ever get inside.’

  I wipe my mouth.

  ‘Did you meet Gustav Grimberg, the man that died today?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ve never actually talked to him. Seen him in the bank I think, but no.’

  ‘His dad died the same way,’ she says.

  ‘Off the chimney?’

  ‘No,’ she shakes her head. ‘They say Ludvig Grimberg poisoned himself but that was maybe twenty years ago and you know how these stories get out of hand.’

  I take a swig of Coke.

  ‘Couldn’t stand the girl his son chose to marry. That’s the hearsay. Old man Ludvig blamed her for the business getting into trouble. That place has seen more than its fair share of death over the years.’ She sucks a noodle into her mouth. ‘You all packed?’

  ‘Flat’s ready pretty much. I kiss goodbye to the Hilux next week. Then I got to visit . . .’ I pause and swallow hard, ‘. . . Mum’s grave, I haven’t been since the day itself, and then I’ll be gone to the south where the girls are pretty and the boys are
even prettier.’

  ‘Nice life.’

  I throw my food carton into the bag it came in and tie a knot in the end.

  ‘Gonna send this to the printers in thirty minutes,’ she says. ‘You gonna have the front-page suicide ready?’

  ‘Will do.’

  I head to my desk and my ears are quite painful now, all dry crusty skin at the top where there’s not enough fat. I write for twenty minutes. Turns out it’s not easy to distil what I saw, what I heard, into headlines and copy. The watermelon crack, the two screams, one from a passer-by, all the sharper for it being so alone, so completely from just one person, and one from Gustav Grimberg’s wife. It’s not what I’m used to. I wrote about murder a lot last year. Medusa. The deaths in Utgard forest just outside town. This is totally different. A man jumped. There will be unanswered questions and guilt and thoughtless whispers of ‘there’s always another option’ and ‘took the easy way out’ and there’ll most likely be some distasteful chat in the haberdashery store over the road.

  I write with an eye on the victims. His family. According to the official online records, God love Sweden for making all this stuff public, Gustav had a daughter, Karin, aged twenty, and a wife, Anna-Britta, the woman I saw, the second scream, aged fifty-three, and a mother, Cecilia, aged eighty-two. I have to be mindful of them. When Dad died the papers made mistakes and that pained Mum for the rest of her life. They said he died on June 26th when in fact he died on June 25th. These mindless errors made things worse for Mum. And, consequently, for me. When Medusa was stopped back in October there was all sorts of nonsense printed. Online and traditional papers. Good ones, even. Mistakes and lies and sloppy journalism and bullshit alluded to, but never quite clearly enough for anyone to sue.

  I finish up and fact-check and read it through out loud and then I send it to Lena. She says thanks and I say goodnight.

  There’s a white taxi outside when I get to my building, a Volvo with its engine idling. Is it Viggo Svensson, the dangerous creep from Utgard forest? I speed up and lock myself into my flat and place a kitchen knife next to the door and then I double-check the locks. Most of my belongings are packed into three big suitcases for me to take on the night train down to Malmö. The train will take eleven hours whereas a flight would take one, but airports and planes are hell on earth if you’re deaf. The announcements, the rotten acoustics, everyone in a rush, me trying to hear scary security and police people. I vote trains.