Dark Pines

by Will Dean

  The steering wheel’s cold. I set out from the centre of the forest, from Frida’s place, and the track feels much shorter than when I drove in. I keep to about thirty kilometres an hour and drive past the ghostwriter’s house and it’s all dark. The police and ambulance are gone. I continue past the carpenters’ workshop. All dark, except for the smouldering fire. Then I drive through the bog and down the long, steep hill and past the torp where I saw the child’s face at the window. When I reach the first house I notice the light I saw earlier comes from a caravan parked in the garden. I approach the main road and accelerate and the road widens and I bump up onto the smooth asphalt and I’m pleased to leave that dark village behind in my mirrors.

  I get home just before midnight. First thing I do is email Lena and tell her what I saw and what Frida Carlsson told me. Then I bolt my door, and change into a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a cotton lumberjack shirt. I plop the glutinous kalops stew into a small saucepan, my only saucepan, and slide it onto the hob. I take out the bread, it’s a small rye loaf, home-made, with a cracked crust along its top. I tear off the Sellotape from the other small pot Frida gave me and sniff the pale contents. Some kind of sour cream thing with lemon and parsley. When it’s hot, I pour the stew into a bowl and take a spoon and a chunk of the bread and move over to the sofa. No ping meal tonight. Meaty steam hits my face and the tension in my shoulders disappears. I take off both hearing aids and place them on my table.

  Silence.

  Blissful, natural, personal, silence.

  I spoon the food into my mouth and it is good. Home-made, slow-cooked, family food, and it tastes like Frida Carlsson’s made it a thousand times before, like she’s unknowingly improved her recipe on every attempt. I made all our meals growing up and let’s just say I don’t have a gift for it, but this is bloody delicious. The meat falls apart as I spoon it up and then it melts on my tongue; the carrots are as sweet as candies. I dip the bread into the dark, viscous sauce and chew it, and feel my stomach start to fill.

  I’m finally warm inside now from the stew. From that hellhole of a forest, not even a proper village, back to Gavrik town and to my rented, fully-furnished apartment, and to my sofa, and now to this. I’m nourished and I feel at home and I’ve never really felt like that here, not really. Home could be a proper newspaper in London or Chicago, but not here, not in Toytown. But Gavrik, especially after today, needs a decent reporter and I’m it. At least Frida’s food makes it all better for a moment. No hearing aids, no rain, no cold inside my chest.

  I take my iPad and walk over to my unmade bed. On the bedside table sits a photo of Mum and Dad, from before, from when Mum still managed, from when I didn’t worry about her, from when we weren’t completely failing each other. I focus on Dad, on his easy smile and oversize ears. I never really look properly at her because it’s unnerving. She’s me but with green eyes. Lazy journalists knocked the life out of Mum and they’ll never even know it. Lies about Dad, rumours and gossip, misquotes and bullshit. He was never drunk that night, he’d stopped by then. So when I write, I always focus on the people hurting because that was Mum and me. I wish I could visit her right now, a midweek impromptu surprise thing, but those days are long gone. She falls asleep early now, a side effect of all the medication. It’s weekends only and that doesn’t feel like enough. I rub my eyes and force myself to glance at her side of the photo. Mum’s the reason I can’t imagine having kids of my own.

  I collapse face first onto my duvet. I’m too full to move and too tired to game; I just want to read a little and then sleep. I browse the websites of two nationals and then turn to Wermlands Tidningen, the regional paper. They all have the story but none of the local specifics. It’s all just filler and historical crimes and speculation and geographical details. One of the nationals has spelt Utgard forest wrong and that really irritates me. I google ‘Medusa murders’ and get a Wikipedia article as the first search result. Three murders just like I remembered. 1991, 1993 and 1994. A paper mill worker, a technician, and the assistant manager of the local hotel. Three men, all mid-thirties, all shot in the torso. And then I see it, the thing that connects them all. The Medusa nickname is misleading, The name, it makes little logical sense. In fact, it makes no fucking sense whatsoever, but that’s nicknames for you, they stick.

  The corpses. They’d all had their eyes removed.

  Wikipedia says that all three victims had their eyes taken after being shot dead. ‘A neat job’ the then-district coroner is quoted as saying in a press conference in ’94, much to the outrage of relatives and local councillors. I find no photographs of the bodies or of the injuries, just of the woods. I load a map of the murders and they’re pretty well spread throughout Utgard forest, kilometres apart from each other, in every direction from Mossen, the string village running through the woods. Half the town was questioned in the early ’90s. An eighteen-year-old from the area, Martin Farsberg, was arrested, but then released without charge.

  I pick up my aids and open the battery compartments and drop them into a jar of desiccant to dry out overnight. Then I take my wand from the bedside drawer. I think about a girl I studied with in London. I come. I close my eyes to sleep, but see the image of an eyeless man in my head, each socket pale and empty to the bone.

  5

  My pillow alarm shakes me awake at six.

  The room lacks air and I need to change my sheets. I hook on my hearing aids and get up to open a window, and the chilled air slaps me in the face. I retreat back to warmth.

  My iPad’s almost dead so I plug it in and scan the Swedish print news and TV. Most of the interesting chat’s on social media, and the hashtag #MedusaMan is starting to trend.

  Shower. Clothes. Change battery in left aid. There’s lint in the transparent tubing connecting the earpiece to the aid itself so I take off the tube and blow down it and wash it under the tap and wait for it to dry and then I push it back on. When I open a box of Coco Pops and pour them into a bowl, a bat falls into the centre of the cereal and makes me jump. Was the gunshot that scared away that elk the one that killed someone?

  I drive the five-minute walk to the office – which is ridiculous, especially here, where locals cycle everywhere – but I’ll need the truck later.

  Lena’s Saab is parked outside the office in her spot. She’s the ‘first in, last out’ type. I walk into Gavrik Posten and the bell chime rings above my head. It sounds like glass breaking.

  ‘I’m gonna put Lars on your usual work, on the articles for tonight’s print,’ says Lena, appearing as soon as I walk into the office. ‘So you can concentrate on the murder. You’re okay with that, aren’t you?’

  I nod.

  ‘Reckon the nationals will be here in force by lunch and then it’ll be a shitshow deluxe so do as much as you can before then.’

  I nod. ‘I’ll talk to the cops this morning, then head back to Mossen village to interview the other residents.’

  ‘This could be the thing that I was telling you about,’ Lena says. ‘This could be your story. Medusa, if this is Medusa, could be the making of you, so keep your head down and your ears open and your wits about you, you hear me?’

  She doesn’t think of me as a deaf person or she wouldn’t have said the last three words and I love her for that.

  ‘This my Pulitzer?’

  ‘You’d like that now, wouldn’t you?’ she says with one hand on her hip. ‘You wanna leave me up here all alone with Tweedledee and Tweedledum? Not yet, you don’t. You get any stick from them about your Medusa assignment, just send them my way. I’ll be fixing for the print, but you need me, you got me.’

  She’s why I’m here. Lena’s an award-winning reporter who ended up specialising in embezzlement and organised crime cases on the US east coast, and then had the misfortune to fall in love with Johan, a hydro-electric engineer from a small Swedish town. This small Swedish town. Still, she seems content enough to live here although she’s never said as much.

  I sit down and email all m
y stories over to Lars. There’s a body lying in a morgue someplace near here. What if Nils is right and Medusa has come back? Or we have a new Medusa? What if the new body doesn’t have any eyeballs? How the hell do you take the eyes from a corpse? I look at my screen and the headlines about faulty apartment facades look plain ridiculous.

  I call the police station over the road. Nobody picks up. My phone has an octagonal stick-on pad to minimise feedback and it works pretty well. I keep hitting redial as I google Mossen village to get the names and details of the five households. That’s the peachy thing about Sweden: tax records, addresses, telephone numbers – they’re all public information.

  Redial. The first house is owned by a Bengt Gustavsson, the man with the caravan. Redial. Second house, Viggo Svensson, the local taxi driver, I recognise the name. Third house, the carpenters’ workshop, but I just get two female residents, Alice and Cornelia Sørlie, a Norwegian surname. Redial. It’s engaged now, someone else trying to get through, some other hack with wet hair and a triple-shot morning latte. Redial. Then the ghostwriter, David Holmqvist. And then Frida and her husband, Hannes. Redial. I add their numbers to my phone’s contacts list. Redial.

  ‘Gavrik Police department, Thord Petterson speaking.’

  ‘Hej Thord, it’s Tuva. Morning. It’s not too early to ask you a few questions, is it?’

  ‘It is. Chief wants to hold a press conference at noon. Some of your colleagues from Karlstad and Stockholm are driving up. Can’t do anything much until then, I’m sorry to tell you.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say in a disappointed voice. ‘Was the victim a local guy? Would I know him?’

  ‘You’ll find out plenty about him at noon.’

  So now I know it’s a ‘him’.

  ‘I read online that no gun’s been found yet, that right?’

  ‘I ain’t falling for that one, Tuvs, and I don’t appreciate you trying to play me. Now, you do your job and I’ll do mine. I’ll see you at lunch.’

  He hangs up.

  Lars walks in fifteen minutes late. It is the most important news day in Toytown since 1994 and he’s fifteen minutes late.

  ‘You’re taking over my stories today, I’ve been told to focus on this shooting. They’re all in your inbox, any questions just ask Lena.’

  ‘I knew it,’ says Lars, with a smile that shows too much gum and not enough teeth. ‘Fine with me. Old news, slow news, that’s my speciality, has been for thirty years.’

  He hangs up his coat and unzips his boots like a glacier stuck in neutral. He puts on his unbranded sneakers and Velcroes them up and then he walks to Nils’s office-slash-kitchen.

  I join him.

  ‘What were the last murders like? Medusa. In the ’90s. From your perspective.’

  Lars turns around as he fills the old percolator from the tap next to Nils’s yuppie Rolodex.

  ‘You looking for an exclusive?’

  I perch on the edge of the desk.

  ‘It was godawful, that’s what I remember. That’s number one. Small town like this lost three good men and that’s the main thing to keep in mind here, Tuva. Three good men died. They had mothers and neighbours and friends and if I remember correctly, they all had wives and kids too. They all read this very newspaper every Friday and they all walked these very streets. It was a sad thing and it’s still a stain on our town.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But what should I be prepared for in the coming days?’

  ‘Stay human, that’s what’s really important if you ask me. Let the victim’s family and friends have their say in their own time and in their own words. Don’t rush them, they’ll get enough of that from the nationals and, God forbid, the TV leeches. Those parasites have got manpower and they’ve got sway. We haven’t. I remember back in the ’90s, some of them pulled strings in Karlstad with the politicians and even with the coroner. They might have got the scoops back then, but we had the local angle. Remember that. We’re on the inside, and we know everybody and how they all connect up. That also means that we have to stay here in Gavrik once this has all blown over, whereas the Stockholm clowns will just up and leave. They leave, we stay, and we have to shop next to the families and park next to the relatives and that’s another reason why we have to report this in the proper way.’

  Nils walks in and stands in the doorway to his office.

  ‘What’s this, then?’ His spiked hair glistens with wet-look gel. ‘You two think I could get to my desk? Some of us got work to do.’

  I move and take his place in the doorway, but Lars carries on making his coffee at his own speed.

  ‘What you heard?’ Nils asks me. ‘What you find out?’

  ‘So far, not much. I suspect the victim is male but that’s about it. Heading back to Mossen village in a while, then we’ve got the cop show over the road at noon.’

  ‘And you call yourself a professional reporter,’ he says, reclining his leather office chair and grinning. Through his pale yellow shirt, I can see halos of wispy chest hair circling each nipple. He turns his head to Lars. ‘What about you, old-timer? You know who met his maker yesterday?’

  We both stare at Nils.

  ‘Oh, wait, but I’m just the ad man around here. I just pull in all the money so you two no-hopers can get paid a pretty penny each month, that’s all, no big deal, I’m just a dumb salesman, what the hell would I know?’

  Lars takes his coffee and walks out back to his desk in the main office.

  ‘Talk,’ I say, focussing on Nils’s thin, chapped lips.

  ‘Freddy Malmström, at least that’s what they’re all saying. Lotta’s badminton partner lives next door to the Malmströms down by the cross-country ski trail. Freddy’s a nice guy, teaches maths, I think, maybe science. Well, he didn’t come home last night, did he? Went out hunting with his dog but he never made it back home. Him or the dog. So I reckon it must be him.’

  ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘A schoolteacher?’

  ‘You gonna quote me on that, Little Miss Hotshot? That’s on the record just for you that is, it is on the record.’

  I walk out and knock on Lena’s door. ‘You got a sec?’

  She’s seated at her computer, arranging obituary and birth captions for tomorrow’s paper. Symbols of flowers and angels that we use for either type of notice.

  ‘Freddy Malmström?’ I ask.

  ‘Name rings a bell. Phil Malmström’s boy?’

  I adjust the volume on my right hearing aid. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Used to be talk that Phil Malmström was in the local poker game. Died a few years before I came to town, but people still talked about him. Head of the council or something, must have been important to get a seat at that table. The poker game ended years ago but maybe this Freddy is his son.’

  ‘I’m gonna drive into Mossen village and see who’s around. I’ll ask the locals about Freddy and see what I can get.’

  ‘Watch your back up there, okay?’

  ‘Cos there’s a murderer on the loose? Thanks, I know.’

  ‘I remember going to that forest to pick mushrooms a few years back with Johan,’ Lena says. ‘It’s well known for foraging, and professional pickers use it this time of year. It was September when we went, lighter than it is now, and not so wet. Well, we drove all the way in and then we drove all the way the hell back out and we never even got out of the car.’

  6

  The display on my dash reads three degrees above zero. I pass between McDonald’s and ICA Maxi, the two landmarks signalling the start and end of Gavrik town, and take the exit. I drive under the E16 motorway, under the lorries feeding paper mills and the towns further north. There are no longer any other cars around, and there are no longer any cat’s eyes in the asphalt.

  The sky’s as white as printer paper. In the distance I can see the wall of spruce trees marking the edge of Utgard forest. There is no fence, they’re enough on their own.

  It’s just after 10am when I make out the weed-covered signpost to Mossen village and take the ri
ght turn onto the gravel track. It’s less weird in the daylight, at least this section is, the wide part where two trucks can just about pass each other. After a few kilometres I see the first house in the village and hope Mr Bengt Gustavsson, sixty-nine, retired, is at home. The house is clad in vertical white boards and they’re frosted with something green. I think it’s pollen but it might be some kind of mould or rot. Ivy curls up from the ground, from between uneven concrete paving slabs, some of them cracked, and up each side of the house. I stay in the truck for a while and eat the three wine gums left in the packet, two orange and one yellow, not bad, and then shove my phone down into my jacket pocket. From my driver’s seat, I look the place over. Can’t see anyone. To my left, the ivy-smothered entrance has a set of wind chimes hanging from a porch roof. To my right, a caravan on bricks, a henhouse, and a neat, fenced-off vegetable patch. The chickens look like they live better than their owner. The vegetables are immaculate and thriving. Ahead is a woodshed or a potting shed or something, a hut with a heart carved into its door.

  I hop down from my truck and land in mud, the splash coating the bottom of my jeans. The air is more damp than cold, and it is completely still here in the woods; there is no breeze whatsoever.

  ‘Hello,’ I call out. ‘Mr Gustavsson?’

  My hearing aid echoes so I adjust it. There’s no answer apart from the jagged caw of a crow, so I approach the front door. The chimes are just dangling there, vertical metal rods hanging motionless in damp air. I guess it’s some kind of doorbell so I jangle it. The noise is ungodly. Sharp dings and resonating gongs attack my hearing aids and hurt the inside of my head. The door’s open, well it’s not open, but it’s not locked. I knock on it and then push it, but it stops. I can just about squeeze my boot through the gap and that’s all. I push the door and there’s something heavy on the other side resisting me. Something’s pushing back. It’s open enough for me to stick my head through the gap, so I do.