by Will Dean
Next appointment is with Benny Björnmossen, the local hunting association chairman. I drive at a steady one twenty with my wipers on full. I park outside my office in the usual spot. The town’s quiet. I reach back into the truck and pull on my ski jacket and hook my aids back on and pull my hood over my head.
Benny’s office is located above Björnmossen’s gun store on Storgatan. There’s a sign outside with a wild boar on it and the motto: A Shot Not Fired Can Never Be Regretted. He buzzes me in and I walk through a separate entrance next to the shop door and up a narrow set of stairs that creak with every step. At the top, I see a door slightly ajar. The ceilings are low up here and the place stinks of old cigarette smoke. I knock and walk in.
‘You Tuva Moodyson?’
I nod.
‘Come in and sit down, Tuva. I’m Benny Björnmossen.’
I take a seat. The room’s long with windows front and rear. In the centre is a big old desk covered with papers but no computer. Behind the desk is Benny and behind him there’s a circular card table with a green baize top, and behind that is a row of grey metal gun cabinets all bolted to the wall.
‘Suppose you heard what they’re trying to do to us, you mind if I . . .?’ he holds up a box of Marlboros.
I shake my head. ‘Trying to do?’
‘Hunting rights,’ he says, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. He looks like he’s smoked all his life. ‘The government’s trying to rescind our legal rights, our God-given ancient rights to manage our woodland and preserve our way of life and protect the balance of nature, you gonna write about that in your paper, you gonna write what I just told ye?’
‘I’ll record our conversation, Mr Björnmossen,’ I say, bringing out my digital Dictaphone from my jacket pocket and placing it next to a pile of papers on the desk. ‘It’s all on the record so you have nothing to worry about.’
‘Two men dead and that’s a damn shame. In fact, it’s a crime. But they caught the fruitcake that done it, that ghost-story boy from Mossen village. So now do you think we can get back to doing what we do around here? Oh, no,’ he says in an exaggerated Stockholm accent, ‘we must assess the situation and ascertain the best way forward for the 2016/17 hunting season in Gavrik Kommun. Did you ever hear such a heap of steaming horseshit in your entire goddam life?’
I smile and shake my head.
‘I guess they’re worried about more fatalities,’ I say.
He blows smoke out from his mouth and sucks it up through his nose. ‘Why are they worried now this fruitcake ghost story boy’s locked up over there in the police station, and gonna be in Karlstad court for trial soon? What this town needs more than anything – you should put this down in your newspaper – is to get back to normal. We’re hunting people and we need to hunt. We need to come together and cull the old bulls and the excess calves and we need to manage our land so our grandchildren can live here long after we’re all gone.’
‘So who decides if the hunting licences are revoked?’
‘The bureaucrats, of course, the men in suits, and most of them have never picked up a goddam shotgun in their lives, never mind a rifle. Why the hell should pen-pushing beer-bellies tell us what to do in our own woodland?’
‘Could you offer a compromise? Hunt in the other forests but not in Utgard?’
‘You’re missing the point entirely.’ He stands up and adopts a schoolteacher pose, like I’m a thirteen-year-old pupil. He’s wearing a belt with a steel buckle in the shape of a diamond. ‘Utgard’s the biggest forest around and it’s the best one, too. It has the biggest quotas and it needs the most managing. Carlsson does a good job leading the team and, after me and that taxi driver in Mossen village, I’d say he was just about the best shot around here.’
My hackles rise.
‘The taxi driver? You mean Viggo Svensson?’
‘If that’s his name. Fine shot, I’ve seen him out at the gun club, but no hunting group will have him, none around here anyway. Oddball.’
Could Viggo and David Holmqvist be working together? They’re not welcome in Hannes’s hunt team so maybe they’ve set up one of their own?
‘What do you mean by oddball?’
Benny looks down at my Dictaphone. ‘Listen, what’s important here is that it’s a crime not to continue with the Utgard elk hunt till the quotas have been filled. That would be the real crime.’
‘The quotas are that important?’
‘Sweden has the highest density of elk in any country in the world,’ he says, puffing out his chest like it’s some sort of achievement. ‘That’s a proven scientific fact, watertight and cast iron guaranteed. Elk or moose or Bullwinkle or whatever the hell people call them, they’re everywhere and they munch the pine saplings and they need controlling.’
‘I suppose the police and the Kommun are putting people’s safety before anything else.’
‘Now you get it,’ he says, nodding, his eyes a shade warmer than before. ‘You write that in your newspaper. It’s time we got our priorities straight around here and keep on hunting just like always and that’s a fact.’
I leave, slightly bewildered, with a list of hunting teams and their leaders and their territories, and a chart showing the relevant seasons and the start and end dates, from elk to beaver to wolf to bear to wolverine to wild boar.
Back in the office, Lars and Lena are finalising all the non-murder stories and Nils has a client with him in his office-slash-kitchen. I write for a few hours and try to make sense of the strip club information and why David Holmqvist killed these two men, and if he did it alone. Whatever evidence the police have, they’re keeping it close to their chests. I’ll push for more ballistics detail from Thord when the experts in Linköping have finished their work.
I head home and park up. I walk into my building and pick up my post and walk up the stairs towards my apartment. The light bulb’s still out and the foyer’s shadowy. I climb the final steps and there’s something half-lit in my doorway.
There’s a troll sitting on my mat.
24
The thing’s right here on my mat, it’s right here. I calm myself and hold on to the stair rail and breathe. There’s nobody around. It’s basically just a carved doll. But it’s not. It’s loaded with a thousand bedtime stories and with ancient folklore running rich through my bone marrow. I stare at it. I’m in a building with thirteen other apartments. I’m about twenty seconds from a public street with traffic lights and delivery vans. I approach the troll and it’s as tall as my shin. I look down at its eyes. They’re half closed like it’s drunk or sleepy or high or ill. Its hair is thick and matted. It’s a she. I get to my door and stretch my arm to unlock it, leaning over the troll so as not to touch her. I step over her and into my apartment and turn on the lights and half close the door. Then I reopen it.
I’m looking at her back from inside my apartment, at her stumpy legs and at the sprout of ginger tail coming from her trousers. Not so scary from behind. I’m okay. I can close the door on her any time I want. Except that she’ll still be there. I check my phone in my pocket and approach her from behind, my hands outstretched as if about to lift a baby with a leaky nappy.
It’s cold. She’s cold and hard. I hold her by the waist and slowly turn her around. Her eyes have me, they’re some sort of dolly eyes, the kind where an eyelid moves up and down over a dead eyeball, and she’s got me.
‘That’s enough,’ I whisper. ‘Enough of this town.’
I thrust her down onto my laminate worktop and let the front door close and walk away from her into my living room. What is this? I rub my eyes and scratch an itch just inside my nostril and I turn around and walk back to her. She’s almost my height now.
I inspect her at a safe distance. She has real hair eyebrows, but doll’s eyelashes. Her face is pine, sanded smooth, with red cheeks and freckles painted here and there. She has a wart on her chin, perhaps the nub of a twig once upon a time. I look at her ears. They’re oversized and they have wooden blocks lodged be
hind them. Hearing aids? I see hair sprouting forth, like hair from the ears of an old man. The same ginger hair makes up her tail. Her mouth is sad. She’s dressed in dull grey clothes and she’s barefoot. I touch her feet, then recoil. I’m panting. She has toenails, human. They must be human; curls of yellow nail glued to each wooden toe. Do I confront the sisters? I can’t take this to the police, it’s hardly a crime, it’s a gift, a fucked-up gift, but a gift and probably a valuable one at that.
My throat’s dry. I pour a glass of water from the tap and drink it in uncomfortable gulps. Who orders these? And where the hell do they put them? In a living room on display like a fine piece of porcelain? Or in a private room, to look at and fondle? I step back over to her and tug at her clothes. They’re made of little pieces of old sack but they’re carefully sewed together and hemmed. It’s good work. Neat. Her top has a red stain at its centre. It’s been glued to her pine body but the trousers have a drawstring made of twine, so I undo it. For a moment I’m a five-year-old girl again, and I want to see what’s underneath. I tug down her rough little trousers and see a glimpse of curly dark hair between her pine legs and then there’s vomit in the back of my mouth. I grab my handbag and open the front door and slam it behind me. I run down the steps two at a time with sour images of those sisters in my mind, images that don’t belong there, not now, not ever.
I should have thrown it out of the window. I run onto the street and it’s silent like a movie scene. There’s no wind, just a damp chill in the air, and a faint hint of liquorice every now and then.
I jump in my truck. Feels safe here. My truck with its torque to get me out of trouble and its Toyota toolkit in the back and the canister of Canadian bear-spray beside me on the passenger seat in my handbag. I switch on the engine and jangle the key fob and it rattles, so that’s fine. I get flashbacks of the pubic hair. It’s the real deal, human hair, and the taste of vomit returns to the back of my throat like a burning reflux. I drive off in a skid. Storgatan’s empty, a few cars but the shops are all shut and nobody’s around, probably some reality TV show drawing them all home like moths to a light bulb. Lars told me once that his TV is his best friend and his broadband connection is his family, especially in the winter months. He said they keep him going. TV and coffee and alcohol: the holy trinity of cold countries.
I don’t know where I’m going. In London, I’d head to a friend’s or a pub or a cinema or someplace with crowds, but there’s nobody here. The office is locked and the lights are off. The cinema’s closed tonight because it’s only open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I drive out towards McDonald’s and there are no cars in the drive-thru lane. I pull a left towards Tammy but she’s taken a break and shuttered her van. I call her mobile, no pickup. Now I get a little panicky, like where the fuck is the whole town? Most of the flats and houses I can see from the car park are dark. The acid’s still there in my throat. I floor the accelerator and squeal round a roundabout, hitting about as much grass as tarmac. I head out to the motorway because I need some speed to wind down, but then I change my mind and turn off and drive underneath it. I get to the digger graveyard, or rental yard, or whatever it is, a huge car park for earth-movers in the middle of nowhere, and carry on.
I’m heading for Frida, I realise that now. I’ve tried everybody else I know in Toytown, and if I drove down to Karlstad I wouldn’t get there until midnight. I need ten minutes and a cup of tea with an actual human being. And yeah, I know I’ll have to drive past the wood-carving sisters, but big deal, they’re older than my mum.
Pines. Hoarder’s house, a dim light in the caravan. His solar lights are twinkling like quartz crystals amongst his cabbages and parsnips. Taxi’s house, I see his Volvo with a pop-up kids sign still on its roof. Up the hill, past the marshes and then the sisters. The smell of smoke. I can hear folk music faintly from their workshop. They’re carving and don’t look up as I speed right past them. Ghostwriter’s house is dark, striped blue tape reflecting in my headlights. The tape’s wrapped around his veranda like a gift-wrap ribbon. As I’m looking at it, I sense something ahead of me and slam on the brakes. In my head, it’s an elk as big as a house, the elk that wrecked dad’s car, but no, it’s a tree, a pine laid across the track at an angle. I stop about three metres from its branch tips, my heart pounding, regretting coming here at all, what the hell was I thinking.
I call Frida with my hazards on even though I’m not sure they’re strictly necessary out here. She picks up after one ring.
‘Hej, I was just thinking about you,’ she says.
I can hear music in the background, perhaps she has the radio on.
‘Oh, really?’
‘About your mother. I was wondering if you wanted me to add her to my food roster. I could deliver some meals to her, maybe a bulk delivery of frozen meals once a fortnight or even once a week? I like to get down to Karlstad on Sundays to go shopping so it wouldn’t be a bother.’
‘I . . . the hospital take care of all that.’ It’s hard to say all this out loud. My voice is catching slightly at the back of my mouth. ‘Thanks for thinking of her, though.’ I pause. ‘Frida, I’m here. I’m near your house and there’s a big tree down across the road.’
‘You’re here? Gosh, I wished you’d called first. Hannes is going to slice that tree up in the morning, but there’s not much I can do about it this late. Let me drive and pick you up, I’ll be there in two minutes. Is everything okay?’
‘No, no. I don’t want to put you out. I’ll head back home now. I’m sorry I came straight out here, I should have checked.’
‘Nonsense, it’s always nice to see you. I’ll be there in just a jiffy, hold on.’
I keep the lights on even though my beams get lost in the prickly needles of the spruce. It’s another corpse in a way, a fresh one. Still looks alive to me. I pull my bear-spray close to my thigh and feel safe out in front, in the light, but vulnerable, very vulnerable, from the darkness that is every other direction. I can see the blue police tape at David’s house in my wing mirror, the loose ends fluttering in the breeze around the veranda posts. And I think about that troll and her ears and her . . . hair. My breathing’s almost normal now, but I can see sweat all over the steering wheel, a glistening slug-trail of my own palm sweat.
Headlights are coming towards me from the other side of the tree. I get out of the truck and lock up.
‘Tuva,’ Frida shouts. ‘Best thing is if you climb kind of through the branches and over the trunk, that way you’ll stay in my headlights.’
The route she’s suggesting, straight through the bushy centre of the tree, looks impenetrable. But Frida has a point. The tip of the pine and its upturned roots are not on the track, they’re in the woods on either side, in the darkness. I climb through a tangle of stiff branches. They’re scratchy but not like brambles, they don’t hurt or make me bleed. Then one whips me in the face and I get a cheekful of wet needles. They smell fresh after the grossness of that troll. I climb over the trunk, my jeans rubbing against the rough bark, and fall to the other side.
As I pass the branch tips and see Frida, I almost collapse with relief. She’s holding her arms out wide for a hug and somehow Mossen village, past the marker that is this fallen tree, feels like a different place. It’s okay. The dead spruce divides heaven and hell. I hug her and she smells of lily-of-the-valley.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I’ve got some soup on, let’s get you inside.’
25
Frida’s car is warm and clean and it smells like it’s been valeted.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Tuva. What happened to you?’
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘It’s stupid, really.’
We drive up the track to her clearing and I see the sloping mansard roof of the house. There are lights on in every window, lights near the entrance on wrought-iron posts, and lights beaming out into the woods. They’ve got so many lights that this almost feels like a normal place in the centre of Utgard forest.
‘S
omeone played a trick on me, that’s all,’ I say, an apologetic tone in my voice. Frida looks over at me as she parks in front of the grey outbuilding. ‘Somebody left a troll on my doorstep and I think it was probably made by one of your neighbours.’
‘Eurgh,’ Frida says, and I laugh although I don’t know why and that sets her off laughing too. I laugh harder and I have to stop myself. I’m angry as hell and I’m laughing.
We get out and the front porch is neat with ornamental heathers planted in painted wooden containers. The light inside the grey hut is on. We go into the house. Smoke. I see the fire in the living room log-burner and I see Hannes next to it reading a newspaper. My newspaper.
‘You all right?’ Hannes asks. ‘Driving out here like this, Frida was worried you were in some kind of trouble.’
‘I’m fine, just had a fright, that’s all.’
He folds up his copy of the Posten and shakes my hand. He’s wearing an expensive-looking navy jumper and it’s clinging to his solid torso. It has a little zip open near his neck. He has weathered skin and tiny hairs on his cheeks just above his beard line.
I slide off my shoes and my coat. We head to the kitchen and it smells like a commercial for something wholesome and warm. I see a vat of liquid bubbling on the hob and head over to it, the smell drawing me closer.
‘Chicken soup?’ I ask.
‘Needs a few final touches,’ Frida says. ‘I’ll just be a sec.’
I watch her walk out into the garden and the grey hut’s outer security light switches on. I breathe in the soup, the steam moistening my face, and then Frida comes back into the kitchen and brings Hannes with her.
‘Pheasant plops, I call them,’ she says. I frown and she walks towards me with a blue rubber ice-cube tray. ‘Little blocks of frozen pheasant stock, from birds Hannes brings home. I make concentrated stock and freeze it like this and then when I make a soup I just . . .’ She pushes out three brown ice cubes into the soup. ‘Plop, plop, plop,’ she says. ‘That’s instant depth of flavour right there.’
