Red Snow

by Will Dean

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘He’s a good kid.’ She looks disappointed with me, like there’s even more distance between us. ‘Let’s give him the benefit.’

  I head back to my desk, subdued, a bad taste on my tongue. I print off all the latest work I’ve done for Holmqvist’s book and then I write up everything else that’s happened – the fire and what I’ve found out about Cici’s life and the lake house. The fact they never found Ludvig’s body. Every time I type a word starting with the letter ‘N’ it turns into ‘Noora’. I see her name all over my screen. I say her name noiselessly in my head, rolling it over my tongue, pressing it to the roof of my mouth. Tasting it.

  I’m giving Holmqvist most of what I have. The remainder I keep to myself. I’ll hold it on trust for the Grimberg family, private matters and details that have no place in the end product.

  And then I remember the letterhead in Anna-Britta’s office. That publishing house, the one Holmqvist described as an imprint for one of the big New York outfits.

  Third Way Publishing.

  Google is my friend. Third Way have a nice corporate website; fancy photos morphing into each other, you know the type. I can see they’ve printed plenty of memoirs, many of them so-called ‘misery memoirs’. I could write half a dozen.

  There are testimonials on the site and they all look decent enough. I search for them on Amazon and see plenty of their books for sale and the pages look professional but the rankings suck. I mean, none of them are in the top ninety-thousand. That can’t be a good sign.

  I dig deeper. The first page-and-a-half on Google is all Third Way sponsored corporate crap and linked blogs. Then I find the negative news. The site is a self-publishing scam, according to a self-styled ‘crusader’, a guy with a penchant for semi-colons and capital letters. He calls Third Way a ‘subsidy publisher’ and ‘essentially a vanity press’. I google ‘Vanity Press’. He’s basically saying they’re not a real publishing house. He’s basically saying that rich dudes pay Third Way Publishing to edit and format and print the books all for an outlandish fee.

  Can’t be. Holmqvist is paying me but they’re paying him back. And they paid out an advance to Gustav Grimberg. Holmqvist said so.

  I dig some more. I find some people who like dealing with Third Way; happy with their book and the service they got, nice cover designs. Maybe Holmqvist got a proper deal out of them because he’s got such a strong track record?

  One of the photos on the Third Way website is a dog book: How to Train Big Breeds – a non-fiction thing, and the photo that keeps attracting my attention is that of a German shepherd with an orange collar, heeling to its out-of-shot trainer.

  I google ‘dog breeders in Värmland’. I refine to German shepherd breeders and find two close to Munkfors, both in rural locations looking at their contact details. I call the first.

  ‘Hello,’ says a woman.

  ‘Hi, I’m calling about your German shepherds.’

  ‘We don’t have none left, the last litter’s all been taken.’

  ‘Can I ask you, please, did you take in an adult German shepherd earlier this year or late last year?’

  ‘Adult?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We don’t take in no adult dogs, we’re not a kennel. We got Kalle the Giant and we got Macy-Anne Flop Ears and that’s all the adults we need, all we can afford to feed, the amount them two eat.’

  ‘Okay, sorry to bother you.’

  ‘You want me put you on the waiting list?’

  ‘No thanks. Bye.’

  I call the other breeder and the line rings and rings and rings and then it sounds like a dog picks up. It’s all barking and growling.

  ‘Fredrik, that you?’ asks a woman.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘My name’s Tuva Moodyson and I—’

  ‘Hold on a sec.’ I hear dogs, sounds like fifty of them, barking and hollering and the woman who picked up is trying to calm them down and then I hear a door slam.’

  ‘You say your name’s Tuvasson?’

  ‘Moodyson,’ I say. ‘Can I ask you about your adult dogs, please?’

  ‘What for, you from the welfare? You an inspector, we gone finished our inspection in December, we got all signed off.’

  ‘I’m trying to track a dog. I think he was adopted by you earlier this year or late last year.’

  ‘You mean Philip?’

  ‘Did you take him this year or last year?’ I ask.

  ‘First week in January, but he weren’t no unwanted Christmas present. Fine dog.’

  ‘I think my friend owned him before you. Did you take Philip from David Holmqvist up in Gavrik?’

  ‘That’s the one. He couldn’t handle Philip eating up his nice car and such. Did us a big favour, truth be told. And he’s gonna be a pappa later this year, how about that.’

  ‘Philip, or David Holmqvist?’

  She laughs. ‘Philip got my new bitch pregnant almost soon as she got through the door; gonna be good strong pups I’d say. You want to go down on the list, better get in quick. Eight-thousand kronor and I ask a ten per cent deposit if it ain’t no inconvenience. What’s your name again, Tuvasson?’

  I thank her for her time and end the call and hate myself. I suspected Holmqvist could have, I don’t know, planted the dog tooth? For years, for most of his life, Holmqvist has been persecuted and bullied for being a weirdo. There are more rumours about him in this town than about anyone else, all because he looks and acts a bit different. I had images of him roasting his damn dog, eating the gourmet choice-cuts and somehow getting that tooth into Gunnarsson’s neck. Now I feel sick. And guilty. And I need a drink.

  Outside there’s a man in a black suit with a long coat. He peers through the office window. Then he walks away and I go to the door and open it and cold air gusts around my neck. It’s Henrik Hellbom, the lawyer. I can see his face clearly. It looks like his skin’s been poured onto his skull in liquid form and then left to set. He passes a file to Anna-Britta and then he walks, his back stooped, through the gates of the factory.

  44

  Powder snow blows in through the open office door and melts on my indoor shoes. They look blotchy, sick, pocked. The thermometer on the window reads minus twenty-six and I can still see Anna-Britta and Facelift. He’s wearing those tight calf-leather gloves and he’s holding a battered briefcase. They walk through to the rear yard and there’s something about the way they look at each other, the way they walk next to each other, their body language. There’s an intimacy there. The iron hook above looks like a ‘come hither’ crooked finger, drawing people through that brick archway like an industrial pied piper.

  I say bye to Lena and she asks if I’ll pop by tomorrow and I tell her I’ll try. She looks disappointed like this is not how she imagined my exit.

  My right ear aches. I’ve been lucky with infections this winter, touch wood, but now I can feel one coming. The sofa surfing doesn’t help. I tweak my aid and that relieves the pressure a little on my raw skin. I need new creams; something expensive from a Swiss laboratory.

  There are no cars on the roads. People have left their dead Christmas trees in their gardens because it’s too cold to deal with them and anyway, who gets visitors in February? Outside the Lutheran church there’s a digger scooping up old snow and dumping it into a big ten-wheel truck ready to be carted away and left in some bleak permafrost field. I count six houses with casserole dishes outside their front doors as I drive out of town to the reservoir. Six. Probably sausage stew or slow-cooked pulled pork or maybe spare ribs, sticky with some kind of glaze. Moose-proofed. I need to start cooking once I get down south. One of about a hundred resolutions I’ve vaguely made to myself.

  I leave Gavrik in my mirrors and the road is apocalypse empty. The night is black but it also has a grey glow to it, the snow reflecting what starlight can creep through the thick ice-clouds above. I park by the reservoir. Just me and one other truck.

  The water’s frozen and you’d think it was safe to dri
ve on, or at least walk on, but you’d be dead wrong. We’ve had a quick freeze-thaw-freeze in the past week and the ice-fishermen and the hockey kids will wait another day or two before venturing onto the glistening flats.

  I think about that couple, the couple Cici talked about, her best friends. They drowned together under this water all those years ago, the water I’m staring at now, the water beneath the untrustworthy ice; a couple weighed down with bricks and chains and with the sadness of their final bedtime embrace.

  This is the closest thing to a sea or a horizon in Gavrik Kommun. Tam told me she overcame her fear of swimming in open water here one summer. Since then I’ve adopted it as my own. I’ve been here at least ten times since Mum died. Probably came five times in that first week. It’s more relevant somehow than those side-by-side graves down in Karlstad cemetery. I always look up when I think of Dad, when I need a jolt of reassurance. But when I think of Mum, I look outward. I look at the water. At the distance. At the ice.

  I’m here to say goodbye to Toytown for good.

  There’s a pain inside my chest. Something pulling. The lights come on inside the owner’s house. They’re faint and the smoke from the chimney’s rising straight up, like a pencil line into a windless sky.

  I need to make it up with Tammy. I’ve been a solid-gold bitch and she didn’t deserve it. I need to lay it all out and apologise and hug the hell out of her. It feels good just acknowledging it.

  There’s a man on the edge of the reservoir walking his dog. I can see his breath.

  I think about Noora, and stroke the inside of my forearm, the soft hairless skin under my wrist, and I’m back under those blankets. Her breath. Her fingertips gliding over me, over the unseen skin of my forearms and my lower neck and my legs. I need to see her again. In my mind’s eye we meet and I tell her who the Ferryman is, along with some snippet of evidence everyone else has missed. I leave with a good taste in my mouth because I do my bit. I help stop the man who slit a jugular vein and jammed a fist-sized ball of liquorice into a dead man’s mouth.

  And then there’s a wisp.

  I sit up straight like a young me at the zoo. The northern lights flicker and go, thick cloud guarding them from mortal eyes. It was emerald green. I stare out and even with the blower on full and my goose-down jacket and fleece underlayers, it is cold. And then they flare up. I don’t see much, just a fine spray between clouds, luminous and brightest green, the whip of a celestial horse’s tail as it gallops away.

  I look for more but get nothing. The man with the dog is getting close. He’s wearing a heavy wool coat and backpack.

  I pull back my gearstick to reverse and swing around and drive off toward the road. The man with the dog gets into his truck and blue-green lights flash in my rear-view mirrors; the Gods, my parents, a magnetic charge, the solar wind dancing and teasing, not showing itself straight to my face. I take my foot off the accelerator and watch the show. In my left mirror, green strips light up the sky, the clouds thinner now, the stars there as backdrop. The green reflects on the ice and snow, the whole scene glowing in my mirror. I turn my head and it dims so I look forward again, away from it, at my mirrors and only my mirrors and then it leaps, three bold stripes, curtains of electric light, swinging and cascading across the horizon. I think of Dad and the fact that I can’t imagine reaching old age because he never did. I can’t see that in my future. The green flashes leave me and everything darkens and I drive away, my chest at peace, my hands loose on the wheel, my breathing slow.

  It’s 6pm and one of the householders I passed before is retrieving his casserole from his garden. His snow shovel rests next to the wall ready for tomorrow. He’s wearing huge, unlaced lumberjack boots and he’s knocking off the brick securing the pot’s lid and taking the thing inside to heat up in his warm kitchen with his loving nuclear family.

  I drive past St Olov’s, that darkest of places, and past the factory, the chimneys high and almost invisible in the night sky, and carry on up Storgatan. The man with the dog’s close behind in his black SUV but he’s keeping a good distance. The neon sign of Ronnie’s Bar is dim. It is very faint. When it gets this cold the gases inside don’t work as they’re supposed to. The signage looks weak. It’s straining. The blue has turned almost white and it’s hardly glowing at all.

  Tam’s van has no queue, which is odd on a Sunday evening. ICA Maxi’s quiet, but there’s a dark green 4x4 in the far corner with its engine running. I drive past and park next to Tammy’s van. It’s locked. I have never once known her to close on a Sunday night, not once. Must be the extreme cold.

  I park outside ICA Maxi, my tyres scratching along the hardened ice ridges. I lock up. This is an okay place for me. I’ve been shopping in ICA since I was fourteen, since Dad died, since Mum stopped being able to do it. I learned how to shop and how to budget and how to heat tinned food. I managed. But I never told Mum how I managed. I never told her I was sorry for her loss and for what became of her life. I should have said sorry for her silent bleakness, her angst. I should have told her I was sorry and thanked her for doing the best she could even though that wasn’t much, and I should have given her some peace even though she never offered me any. I should have forgiven her for her sake. And for mine.

  The doors whoosh open and hot air flattens my hair and pushes loose strands all over my face. I pick up a basket.

  Four cinnamon buns, a princess torte cake, three bunches of roses, a scented candle, albeit a cheap chemical one made by the same company that manufactures toilet hook-ons. Goodbye gifts for Cici. For all the Grimberg women. To make their home a little more bearable. Three-hundred and fifteen kronor.

  I drive to Tam’s flat but she’s not in. Maybe she’s met someone? I try her phone just to check she’s alright but it’s switched off. I park back at the office and walk over to the factory gates and through the arch and up to the brown rectangle by the wall. I say goodbye to the cat that used to hiss at me and then I walk past the charred remains of the liquorice-root barns and into the building.

  Skeleton staff.

  Mainly clipboards and stirrers. One cutter and one stamper. The canteen’s being cleaned, tables upturned on tables, mops and buckets and two twins with earphones doing their best to clean up. Bleach fumes burn the sensitive pink flesh inside my nostrils. I walk upstairs. Anna-Britta’s in her office on the phone. The door to the residence is unlocked so I walk in and push past the velvet curtain. Cici’s in bed asleep, her door ajar. It’s cold up here. The vents are screaming their faint distant screams, whining and wailing up by the ceiling, and the refectory table has a box perched on the end of it. I walk past the cabinet of life, its doors wide open, some of its drawers pulled out by their milk-tooth handles. The box on the table is a red-wine box but someone’s written ‘red evil’ on it in marker pen. I lift the lid of the box. The foil bag inside has been cut and resealed. Smells like vodka. The bag’s empty.

  ‘Karin?’ I whisper, walking through to the kitchen. But she’s not there. I place the roses and the cake down on the table and the rabbit-hutch door is wide open. They let it exercise in the evenings. Karin’s bedroom door’s ajar but I knock on the frame to announce myself and there’s an envelope on her bed. I hear water in the bathroom but it’s not a shower running or a tap dribbling. This is different. I knock on the door and it creaks open a little and there’s water all over the floor.

  ‘Karin,’ I call out, louder this time.

  I knock again and then push the door.

  She’s in the bath and the water is red.

  45

  Her tattooed chest is rising and falling and red streams are running down her forearms.

  I plunge my hands into the hot water and drag her up the bath. She’s so heavy. My sleeves take on the colour of the bathwater.

  ‘Help,’ I scream, my voice breaking toward the end of the word. ‘Help us!’

  My ears buzz from my screech. I pull a towel from the rail and lift Karin’s left arm and push the towel hard onto the vertic
al wound running up her skin. The towel reddens. Everything white to red.

  ‘Help us, we need help!’ I shout. ‘Help us!’

  And Karin looks at me and she doesn’t smile exactly, but she closes her lips.

  ‘Stay with me, Karin,’ I say. ‘Karin, you’re going to be fine. It’s okay. I’m here now, Karin. Stay with me.’

  But her weight is pulling her back down into the water. I heave her up but she’s slumped like a drunk or a newborn baby; some absurd and terrible creature, leaching out blood, her tattoos shimmering under the pink water, her fingers wrinkled.

  ‘Help us!’ I scream.

  I can hear Cici, and she’s crying and yelling something.

  ‘Get help,’ I shout. ‘Cici, get help. It’s Karin.’

  Karin blinks but I can feel the life leaving her as the bathwater darkens incrementally with each second. I can’t lift her out of the bath so I stretch my arm and pull the plug.

  The water gurgles through the old pipework and the red drains away and Karin looks even more startling, even more fragile without the water to keep her warm. I take a new towel and press it to her other wrist.

  ‘You’re okay,’ I say, my voice a mess, not enough hope in my tone, the towel’s red, the left one more so than the right. ‘I need to call help. I’ll be back.’

  I run through to the Grand Room and Cici’s there on the floor.

  ‘Is she alive?’ she asks.

  I nod and call 112.

  ‘I’ll get Anna-Britta,’ she says.

  ‘Hello, ambulance, right away, the factory, first floor.’ They tell me to stay calm and ask the nature of the incident. ‘Slit wrists,’ I say. ‘It’s bad, come now,’ and then I end the call. I want to run to Cici, sprawled there on the floor, dragging herself toward the Receiving Room, toward that curtained door. But I run back to the bathtub.

  Karin looks so cold.

  I take another towel, a large one with frayed edges, and lay it over her and keep pressure on the wrists. The knife’s taunting me on the side of the bath. It’s the antler one from beneath the table, the one with the Grimberg ‘G’ on its end. The blade’s sitting there between a tea-light candle and a pair of liquorice coins.