Red Snow

by Will Dean

  ‘Get back in your truck and find an alternative route,’ says Noora.

  ‘I’m Tuva,’ I say.

  ‘This road won’t reopen for at least another hour, maybe more. You’ll have to reroute.’

  She goes to her police Volvo and takes a roll of police tape, blue and white, and ties it around a pine. Lucky the truck didn’t hit that tree. Fortunate.

  ‘Tuva?’ she asks. ‘You said your name’s Tuva?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tuva, do me a favour and return to your vehicle, and if I was to advise you I’d say turn around and drive back home. It’s getting late and there’s nothing good out here. Go on now.’

  Her skin looks moist, not dry like mine. I do as she says.

  I complete a three-point turn, my tyres crunching through hardened snow on each verge, and leave the police Volvo in my mirrors. But then I realise I’ve not asked for a quote or recorded any details or done anything I’ve been trained to do. I reverse back slowly on the ice and I hate it, somehow anxious I’ll hit the accelerator instead of the brake and run Noora over. Injure her. Kill her.

  I get out of my truck.

  ‘Sorry, I should have introduced myself,’ I say.

  She looks at me like I’m high.

  ‘I’m Tuva Moodyson, reporter at the Gavrik Posten.’

  ‘I know who you are, Tuva. Just didn’t know what you look like.’

  I think I’m blushing but I should get away with it. Could be frost burn for all she knows.

  ‘Thord and the Chief told me all about you,’ she says. ‘I got a scene to organise and paperwork to do.’

  ‘Can I get a quote for the paper please and then I’ll leave you, I promise.’

  ‘Nope.’

  She has a small hole under her lower lip. Old piercing scar.

  ‘The delivery driver gonna be okay?’ I ask.

  I can’t see red in the snow but there are holes, fine holes, where warm body temperature drops of something have melted through to the permafrost below.

  ‘I hope so,’ she says, blowing a loose strand of black hair away from her face. ‘Listen. Off the record.’ She pauses and pulls the tape tight around the delivery truck. ‘Driver . . .’ she says, ‘. . . this is off the record, okay? Driver wouldn’t take responsibility. Reckoned his truck’s been tampered with.’

  She finishes taping up the scene and sticks the roll in her jacket pocket.

  ‘Tampered with?’ I ask.

  She looks at me like she regrets ever opening her mouth.

  ‘Off the record,’ she says again.

  ‘Who complained about Gunnarsson harassing a minor seven years ago? Do you have a name? Is that an active lead?’

  ‘Can’t discuss her,’ she says.

  Now I know it was definitely a her.

  ‘Anything else?’ I ask. ‘Any details? Anything I can actually use?’

  ‘Quote you can use?’ she says. ‘How about reduce your speed by thirty per cent in winter. Driving at night time or in adverse conditions should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. End quote.’ She points to my pick-up truck. ‘We’re done.’

  As I walk, I detour around the delivery van. The front passenger side is destroyed, caved-in, and the sign above the windscreen reads ‘No 1’.

  I feel nauseous.

  I should have been in that delivery truck tonight. Down in the ditch. In the caved-in side of the number one truck. If it wasn’t for the thirst I inherited from Dad I could have been killed.

  I get home and take my bottle of rum to bed.

  The morning’s dark. The recycling bags take three walks to the bins and I’m left with old beer juice on my hands from a micro-leak. I dry-retch but I don’t throw up. They’re so heavy I have to drag them down the stairs and across the gritty slush to the recycling containers. I push the glass through and it smashes inside and this is why my aids are turned down low The cardboard is a challenge because the whole goddam container is crammed full with bag-in-box wine cartons, boxes of cheap wine, not even screw-cap wine, that my fellow countrymen live off all year round but have a special affection for during the white months.

  I get to work and Lena’s in. I say good morning and pour myself a coffee and grab a plastic box full of profiteroles from the fridge below the drainage rack. My mouth’s dry and my head’s throbbing. I’m a wreck. I take a plastic fork and pierce them one by one and eat them standing next to Nils’s desk.

  I settle down at my PC and pick up the phone and dial.

  ‘Gavrik Police.’

  ‘Morning, Thord, it’s me.’

  ‘Tuvs.’

  ‘Do you have anything on that delivery truck crash last night? Status of the driver?’

  There’s a pause on the line like he’s got his palm over the receiver and talking to someone else.

  ‘Say what now?’

  I reposition my ear over the octagonal anti-feedback pad that I attached to the phone the first week I worked here.

  ‘The truck crash last night,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, he’s alive. It was Andersson, he’s the uncle of my neighbour, the kid with the Frisbee thing lodged in his ear lobe. Shaken and beat up, some internal bleeding, I’m afraid to say. Needed putting back together. You was out there at the scene wasn’t you?’

  ‘Janitor Andersson?’ No, it can’t have been. Driving? ‘It was the janitor?’

  ‘They got a run of bad luck in that factory.’

  ‘It was the janitor?’ I ask again, my heart racing.

  ‘Ran tests at the hospital,’ he says. ‘Because Noora couldn’t breathalyse him last night. Sober as a judge.’

  ‘But was it the factory janitor?’

  ‘One of his brothers so the Chief reckons. Uncle of my neighbour. Bad luck.’

  I stare in the direction of the factory. Did someone run that truck off the road? I asked Thord earlier if he thought the old couple had been pushed into the ditch and he told me there was no evidence of it. Just that time of year, he said. But this is too much of a coincidence. And did someone think I was in the delivery truck asking Andersson questions with my digital Dictaphone tight in my hand? Was I a target?

  ‘Bad luck,’ I agree, shaking the thought from my head. I’m being paranoid. It’s the hangover. ‘The lead you never told me about. The complaint brought by a minor against Gunnarsson.’

  ‘Was never brought by the girl,’ he says, cutting me off. ‘Complaint got made by an employee who thought she saw something. The girl and her parents cleared Gunnarsson of any wrongdoing. Black gossip, that’s all.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You know I’m leaving on Monday, don’t you?’

  ‘I ain’t going with you if that’s what you asking. I’m a Gavrik fella born and raised and I can’t stand them big city ways.’

  I smile and feel a little better.

  ‘You’re not going to elope with me? Imagine how cute our kids would be?’

  I hear the same muffled sound as before, his hand over the receiver.

  ‘Gotta go, Tuvs.’

  I write up the crash story and jot down a few sub-par headline ideas. The bell over the door tinkles so I look up and it’s Nils wearing one of those waxy camouflage baseball-caps with fleece lining and big old ear flaps, they sell them in Björnmossen’s right now for 299 kronor on sale.

  ‘Nice headwear,’ I say.

  He looks up and pulls off his cap revealing a gel-slicked nest of dishevelled, dyed black hair.

  ‘Like it?’

  He starts to tussle his hair into spikes.

  ‘When you gonna put away them dusty old Christmas decorations from the window?’ he says. ‘Get the creeps every time I see them.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I ask.

  He sticks his chest out and walks over to his office, the salopette shoulder-straps of his outer trousers hanging down by his knees.

  ‘I’m the one who pulls in the dough to pay you three, remember?’

  I rub my temple with an extended middle finger and he smiles and sh
ows me gun fingers and then he closes his door and I get back to work organising stories and building a to-do list. His door flies open.

  ‘You ate my chocolate balls?’

  I break out into a grin at that.

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ I say. ‘They’re called profiteroles.’

  He shakes his head and slams the door to his office slash kitchen.

  Number one on my list is ‘Gunnarsson allegations’ because I still want to find out who made the complaint and who the minor was. Number two is ‘post-mortem results’ because I still don’t have any details as this one hasn’t been fast tracked.

  It’ll help that my next Grimberg interviews will be conducted in the private residence, the Grand Room, because if things start to stall I can refer to an object or a photo, one of Lena’s many tricks, and that usually gets people talking. I might be able to corner them, to get them to open up. The Grimbergs know more than they’re letting on.

  Lunch is that five-minute drive-thru double cheeseburger I promised myself yesterday. Then I pull up to my parking place and walk over to the factory holding my laptop and Dictaphone.

  Parked beneath the arch is another out-of-town police Volvo. Specialist homicide investigators from Karlstad. The car’s covering the door to the old factory. I skirt past it and try to open the archway door to the staircase and the canteen, but it’s bolted shut and someone’s stuck a ‘Strictly No Entry’ sticker to it so I walk on to the delivery trucks and root barns in the rear yard. The main employee entrance is wide open.

  The stampers are working and Great White smiles at me with her screw-ins as I walk by. Her teeth are stained grey with liquorice juice. Red doesn’t acknowledge me at all, she’s too focussed on her work, head down, hand-punching coins at such a rate it almost blurs. She looks less put together than normal. I realise why. She’s just lost both her grandparents. The old Volvo in the ditch. That single purple glove. The fact they weren’t speaking for the past six or seven years. I want to reach out and place my hand on her shoulder but I don’t. I head through the canteen and up the stairs and into the Receiving Room. Gavrik looks sinister from the window, a lonely Swedish Toytown going about its Tuesday lunchtime business; women on bicycles and men buying ice-fishing magazines and Snus tobacco; a vicious murderer still walking the streets. I turn and approach the door to the private residence and knock.

  Nothing.

  I knock three times, good hard knocks, and wait with my ear close to the door.

  ‘We’ll be talking in here today,’ says Anna-Britta from the top of the stairs. ‘We’ll use the Receiving Room.’

  ‘Must we?’ I say.

  ‘He’s told you to ask us personal things, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Holmqvist?’

  Her face screws up as I say the name.

  ‘Here’s the thing.’ She walks closer to me, her eyes red in the corners, her rose perfume coming off in waves. ‘We know the deal Gustav arranged. We’ll honour it. The book needs to be a full and frank account. I’ll cooperate. But there are some things where I’ll draw the line and you must respect that.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘You know we’ve got the police in again downstairs, don’t you?’

  ‘I saw the car.’

  ‘My daughter can’t sleep in her own bed, she’s beside herself with worry, exhausted, and I had sixteen staff members call in sick today. Sixteen. They’re not sick, they’re terrified.’

  ‘Can I make notes as we talk? Can I record?’

  She frowns.

  ‘Sometimes I can’t hear everything the first time it’s said, even when it’s someone talking who speaks clearly like you.’

  Anna-Britta cringes. ‘I’m so sorry, I forget that you’re . . .’ She touches her earlobe. ‘Of course you can record it, go ahead.’

  We sit at the desk and I switch on my digital Dictaphone.

  ‘Do you know who would have a grudge against Gunnarsson? Did he have any enemies to your knowledge?’

  She holds up her hand. ‘I’ll talk about the factory, for the book, but not about what happened downstairs. I’ve told the police all I know. Retelling it’ll make me ill.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Let’s talk about your parents-in-law.’

  She nods.

  ‘Cecilia and Ludvig Grimberg.’

  She nods again and her eyelashes are as short and bristly as the fur of a short-haired rat.

  ‘What was your father-in-law like?’

  ‘Ludvig was a complex man.’ She says this like it’s rehearsed. ‘He studied medicine at Lund and then when his father passed away he moved back to Gavrik and expanded the factory building to the rear. He was a man of action despite his back problems.’

  ‘You two were close?’

  ‘My father-in-law didn’t approve of me. Ludvig was very protective of his son, you see, because Gustav’s schooldays were so troubled. But Gustav made it clear to his father that his approval was not required.’

  There’s a bone-handled letter opener on the desk and its pointed end glints in the chandelier light. Anna-Britta takes a jug of water, one of the chipped enamel ones from the canteen, it looks so out of place in this beautiful room, and pours us both a glass. Her cuticles and nails are red raw like they’ve been grated.

  ‘He was Managing Director until the nineties?’ I ask. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Correct,’ she says. ‘Until his passing.’

  ‘What did he die from?’

  She drinks half her water, her eyes on mine.

  ‘Accidental overdose,’ she says. ‘We’re not sure Ludvig even knew he’d taken too much medication. We were at the lake house. He took the pills and then wandered off and died. My late husband found the empty bottles.’

  ‘You think it was really an accident?’

  ‘I don’t think it was, I know it was,’ she says, uncrossing and crossing her legs; the black and grey skirt of her two-piece rides up a little to reveal high-denier black tights. ‘Gustav was almost destroyed by his leaving us all like that.’

  ‘Did your husband question whether the overdose was an accident?’

  ‘It was warfarin for goodness sake,’ she says to me. ‘You don’t poison yourself with heart medicine and walk off into the sunset, it’s not done. It’s not easy or painless; you do it with painkillers and sleeping tablets.’

  ‘Okay, sorry to bring it up. Let’s move onto your mother-in-law. Do you two have a good relationship?’

  She moves in her seat.

  ‘We’re too different for that. We’re both very strong-willed people. Cecilia lives in her own world up there, plays by her own rules. When her husband was running things the company did very well. She’s never really known difficult times.’

  ‘How is she coping with Gustav’s suicide?’

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘She’s not coping?’

  ‘I will not have that word used in my home.’ Anna-Britta stands up and walks over to the cold, tiled fireplace and fondles the pine cone and the blood-tipped feather sitting on the mantle. ‘I will not have that word . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘How is Cecilia coping these days, with the Gunnarsson incident and all?’

  Anna-Britta turns to me. ‘She manages in her own way as must we all. We don’t live the same life as other people in Gavrik. We have a lifelong responsibility, all of us, to keep this place alive.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘To support the town and make liquorice the same way we have for over a hundred-and-fifty years. We owe it to the people.’

  Agnetha Hellbom pokes her candyfloss head around the door at the top of the staircase. She has a needle-shaped silver hairpin stabbed through her perm, like someone’s attacked her.

  ‘Sorry, Anna-Britta, the police need two minutes.’ She holds up two bony fingers as she says this.

  Anna-Britta looks red in the cheeks, heat-rash bumps on one side of her neck.

  ‘Coming,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks for talking,’ I say. ‘W
ould it be possible to speak with Karin tomorrow, please?’

  Anna-Britta looks at the locked door to the residence and then looks back at me.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she says. ‘Karin’s not herself.’

  21

  When I get back to work there’s a box of Grimberg salt liquorice sitting on my desk next to my keyboard. I open the lid. There are two black coins rattling around in the box.

  ‘Who left this here?’ I ask Lars.

  ‘You don’t want it, I’ll take it,’ he says.

  Someone passes the window wearing a balaclava and stares in. ‘Who left it?’

  ‘You don’t like the salt?’

  The figure at the window’s gone. Nobody there.

  I throw the box over to Lars and he catches it. Two-hander. Closed eyes. But he makes the catch and looks pretty happy with himself.

  Grab some falafel, apparently, from the newsagent across the road but if this is a falafel then I’m a bear hunter with a beard and a Husky and a range of gutting knives.

  I write up my Anna-Britta notes. Not sure if the truck crash was her fault in any way – corporate negligence – or if it’s just an accident. I told Thord that I was due to ride in the van last night, interviewing the driver, shadowing him for a delivery, and he told me it must have been my lucky day.

  ‘Tuva,’ says Lena. ‘Sebastian’s dropping in after two for a pre-induction chat. That’s okay, yes?’

  Sebastian? I’m judging this guy already. The name. I’m hating him. ‘Can I join at the end? I need to drive up to the truck rental place outside town and extend my Agreement.’

  ‘Your truck can wait.’

  I call the rental place out by the sewage treatment works and tell the kid answering the phone, a kid in need of a semester in enthusiasm school, that I’ll be thirty minutes late. You might not think an appointment would be necessary for this kind of thing, you might think a garage or car dealership would be open all day, but that’s where you’d be wrong. In Sweden these places often close for an important fika coffee break and when they’re closed they’re closed.

  The bell over the door tinkles and a young Dolph Lundgren walks in and smiles and for some illogical reason Lars and I both sit up straighter in our seats and stick out our necks and smile back.