For the Missing

by Lina Bengtsdotter

  This place, Fredrik, I think I can be happy in this place.

  But had she ever been happy?

  19

  ‘Hungry?’ Erik asked when Charlie returned to the motel. ‘Your colleague is already seated over there.’ He pointed to Anders, who was sitting at a window table further in. ‘You have a seat and I’ll bring the food.’

  It was not until Anders commented that she’d been gone a long time that Charlie realised she had forgotten to buy cigarettes.

  ‘I drove a drunk girl home,’ she said. ‘Sara Larsson, the thirteen-year-old who was at the party.’

  ‘What?’ she said when Anders gave her a look.

  ‘A drunk thirteen-year-old,’ Anders said. ‘She’s just a child. It’s all so tragic.’

  Charlie agreed. It was tragic.

  ‘She tell you anything new?’ Anders said.

  ‘As I said, she was in a bad way. We’re going to have to interview her again.’

  ‘We’re going to have to interview everyone again,’ Anders said. He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say more, but fell silent when two people sat down at the next table. He looked towards the kitchen and asked why they hadn’t been given a menu, how Erik could possibly know what people wanted to eat.

  ‘I think they only serve one dish at a time,’ Charlie said, ‘at least that’s how it was when I lived here.’

  She would actually have preferred to eat in their room so they could go over the facts of the case more thoroughly. What’s more, she was struggling with a kind of flight impulse. All the people in the restaurant. She didn’t think she recognised anyone, but at the same time, every face she saw seemed familiar.

  Anders started talking about the summer, about his time off, which wasn’t turning out the way his wife wanted. She wanted to visit her parents in Torekov in July and then go to her sister’s; but now that it wasn’t going to be one continuous period, it was going to be much harder and …

  What difference did it make, Charlie wondered, which weeks he got off, since she was on maternity leave anyway?

  Anders launched into a long explanation of how his holiday didn’t line up with his in-laws’ holiday and that Maria had been hoping her parents would be able to relieve them and give them time to themselves and …

  They were interrupted by a woman with a notepad squatting down next to their table. She apologised and said she just wanted to ask a few questions about the investigation.

  ‘No comment,’ Anders said.

  ‘But I …’

  ‘I said, no comment. You’ll have to come to the press conference like everyone else.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about a press conference.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be told when there’s something to tell,’ Anders said.

  The journalist turned hopefully to Charlie, but when she realised that door was closed, too, she stood up abruptly and walked away.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ Anders said, ‘we’re going to have a tough time keeping the vultures at bay if we don’t get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘If we don’t, I suppose they’re within their rights giving us a tough time.’

  Anders looked at his watch. ‘We’ve only been here seven hours.’

  ‘I’m just saying we’d better not fuck this up.’

  ‘Why are you talking like a teenager?’

  ‘I’ll talk whatever way I please,’ Charlie said. ‘And hey,’ she continued when Erik approached with two big plates heaped with chips, steak and béarnaise sauce, ‘good luck with those carbs.’

  ‘Still, it’s weird,’ Anders said with a glance at his plate, ‘that they don’t give us options. Shouldn’t there at least be a salad or something, as an alternative?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Charlie said, because she couldn’t be bothered to explain to him that anyone who tried to offer a wide selection of anything in this godforsaken backwater would probably end up going out of business.

  ‘This is going to be a disaster,’ he said.

  ‘I hope you mean your diet,’ Charlie said.

  The local regulars seemed to have congregated over at the bar.

  ‘What’s with their arms?’ Anders nodded to them. ‘Have they all just come from a knife fight?’

  Charlie looked at their bare lower arms, which were covered in cuts.

  ‘It’s the factory,’ she said, ‘the plywood factory. Most of the locals work there.’

  ‘Don’t they get protective clothing?’

  ‘Sure, but it gets hellishly hot in there in the summer. It’s the lumber; they cut themselves handling the wood.’

  ‘I thought they had machines for things like that.’

  ‘I’m sure they do, but maybe people are cheaper.’

  Anders looked back over at the bar. ‘I would never … I mean, getting cut up in a factory …’

  ‘Not everyone gets the same opportunities in life.’

  ‘You always have a choice.’

  ‘That’s what people who were born lucky like to say.’

  ‘Sure, but you can always …’

  ‘No,’ Charlie said, ‘that’s utter fucking bullshit.’

  They ate in silence for a while. Charlie stared out of the grimy windows. It was still bright out, even though it was almost nine o’clock. The laburnum was still there on the grassy patch between the motel and the smelter. Its yellow flowers were in full bloom. Once, when she was little, she had torn off a whole cluster and started eating it. Shrieking, Betty had prised open her mouth and demanded that she spit. Spit or die. And then, when the pain in her mouth made Charlie cry: Fine, but I had to get it all out, or you would have died. But maybe that’s what you want? Is it? Do you want to die?

  It didn’t matter that Charlie tried to explain later on that she hadn’t wanted to die, that the flowers had simply looked like corn on the cob. Betty still turned it into a story about the world’s youngest suicide candidate. Imagine what could have happened if I hadn’t been there, she would say, retelling the story at parties. Imagine what could have happened if the girl had kept munching down laburnum like it was sweetcorn?

  The din of voices and clutter of cutlery faded into a low background drone. She thought about the house out in Lyckebo, the flowering cherry tree grove, Betty opening the windows and turning on the old record player so they could sing along.

  Charlie was so deep in thought she jumped when Jonas placed two large shot glasses on the table. Before either one of them had time to object, he had moved on to the next table.

  ‘Did you order these?’ Anders said.

  Charlie shook her head; Anders called Jonas back over. There had been a mistake.

  ‘They’re complimentary,’ Jonas explained. ‘On the house for all diners. And I made yours extra large, to make up for the booking error.’

  Charlie looked after him as he disappeared through the swinging doors behind the bar. He seemed stressed, clumsy, nervous.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ she said with a nod to the door.

  ‘I think that’s a topic for another time. But this much we know: he was at the party when Annabelle went missing.’

  ‘We don’t know exactly when she left the party; there’s conflicting information.’

  ‘No, I suppose no one there was really keeping track,’ Anders said. ‘It seems like most of them were more or less comatose. You’re going to drink that?’ he continued when Charlie raised her shot glass.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ she said and took a big swig of the black, viscous liquid, ‘but I’ve always figured that when in Rome …’

  Anders’s phone rang. He checked the screen, stood up and walked off. Charlie knew he was going to be gone for a while. His shot glass was sitting right in front of her, begging to be knocked back. Before she had time to think that she shouldn’t, she had downed it. As though he’d been lying in wait, Jonas appeared, offering a top-up.

  Charlie shook her head. She was there to work.

  ‘I’m sorry about the mix-up with yo
ur reservations,’ Jonas said. ‘I hope it didn’t cause any problems.’

  Charlie looked out of the window where Anders was pacing back and forth, looking upset, the phone pressed hard against his ear.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘We all make mistakes sometimes.’

  Apparently, Anders had no intention of getting off the phone with his wife. Charlie had time to finish her dinner and start browsing the internet on her phone. Both national tabloids were giving the Annabelle story top billing on their websites. One featured a picture of the gravel road it was assumed Annabelle had walked along that night. The photograph had been taken at dawn; the spruces glittered with dew. Charlie mused that a lot of people would not opt to walk down a lonely forest road in the middle of the night, that Annabelle clearly wasn’t afraid of the dark. She took a sip of water and, from out of nowhere, the nausea returned. She stood up and started zigzagging her way to the bathroom. There was a line for the ladies so she went into the gents, which was empty. She quickly locked herself in a stall, bent down over a toilet seat that reeked of ammonia and threw up. She didn’t normally get this hungover. She was reminded of the sertraline again. Maybe she was already experiencing withdrawal symptoms? In fact, when was the last time she had taken a pill? Predictably, she had missed the call from her GP, and then she had forgotten to call back. Tomorrow, she thought. I’ll have to sort it out tomorrow.

  When she left the cubicle, she found herself staring into a pair of brown, smiling eyes in the mirror above the urinals.

  ‘I think you might be in the wrong bathroom.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled and walked towards the door.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Anders asked when she returned to their table.

  ‘The loo.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘There’s a bit of a crisis at home. Stomach pains. Maria thinks he might have colic. He’s been given something for it, but apparently it’s not helping. He won’t stop screaming. Maria’s exhausted.’

  ‘I’d lose my mind,’ Charlie said.

  ‘She has,’ Anders said. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said and wiped his mouth with his napkin, ‘all I meant to say is, who wouldn’t?’

  Charlie looked past Anders. The man from the gents was sitting at a table in the corner by the little stage. He was talking to a man of about the same age, but from time to time he glanced in Charlie’s direction. He was good-looking in that unaware way she liked. His hair was slightly curly and his stubble one or two days too old. Had she not been on the job, she would probably have gone over, but she never mixed working and pulling. It was a rule she had set herself (Hugo was going to remain the one exception). But if she hadn’t had that kind of rule, he was exactly the type she could have used to calm her jittery nerves. She furtively studied his profile. Was there something familiar about it? Was he from Gullspång? She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure. How old was he? Thirty-five? Younger?

  And then he noticed her looking, looked back and she thought she glimpsed an assurance in his eyes, an assurance that he would not object if she decided to cross that boundary.

  ‘Are you done?’ Anders said with a nod to her plate where the chips lay uneaten.

  ‘Yes. I’m trying to cut carbs.’

  ‘I’m going to have to watch what I say around you.’ Anders nabbed a few chips from her plate. ‘Because it all comes back to bite me.’

  Charlie pushed her plate over to his side of the table. Yes, he could have the rest, she was full.

  ‘Do you recognise anyone, by the way?’ he said after clearing her plate.

  ‘It’s been forever since I lived here.’

  ‘What about your mum, where is she now?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes, dead.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I asked if you see her regularly.’

  ‘And I said I haven’t seen her in a long time,’ Charlie said, ‘which is true.’

  ‘Sometimes you’d almost think you have Asperger’s, the way you always take things so literally.’

  ‘I don’t always take things literally. Only when it suits me. There’s a big difference. If I had Asperger’s, I wouldn’t be able to do this job.’

  ‘Why not?’ Anders asked.

  Charlie sighed. ‘You studied psychology, didn’t you?’

  ‘Just one term.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if that’s really true.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’ Because you don’t seem to recall the most basic things, she felt like telling him. ‘You seem to have forgotten quite a bit of it.’

  ‘I wasn’t particularly ambitious. I had just met Maria then, and I suppose my focus was elsewhere.’

  ‘Love,’ Charlie said, ‘it really does make people stupid.’

  She looked out of the window again; a group of teenagers had gathered around a converted tractor in the car park.

  ‘What happened?’ Anders said. ‘What happened with your mum?’

  ‘The usual. She got sick and died.’

  Anders wanted to know what illness she had suffered from, how she had died, how old Charlie had been at the time, but Charlie pointed out that they weren’t there to get lost in childhood memories, they had come to find a missing girl.

  ‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive,’ Anders retorted.

  A folk singer stepped onto the little stage at the back of the bar section of the room. He grabbed the mike and started talking about the day’s search efforts. He had participated himself and hoped that many more would join in tomorrow. Because one thing was certain: they were going to keep looking until they found her.

  A murmur arose: they bloody well were. A middle-aged man raised his glass, but lowered it again as though he had just realised that his attempted toast might not be appropriate.

  The folk singer started playing ‘Living Next door to Alice’. Anders rolled his eyes.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ Anders said.

  ‘I’ll be right up,’ Charlie replied. ‘Oh, come off it,’ she added when Anders gave her a look that said she should be going with him. ‘I just want to hear the rest of the song.’

  A gaggle of inebriated women had started dancing in front of the stage and when the folk singer reached the chorus, the audience belted out in unison: Alice. Alice. Who the fuck is Alice?

  Two young men entered the venue. Heads turned when they walked over to the bar. Charlie recognised their faces from the whiteboard at the police station. The broad-shouldered, blond one was none other than the factory owner’s son, Svante Linder, and next to him was Annabelle’s ex-boyfriend, William Stark. Jonas, who was behind the bar, quickly finished up an order and gave his friends a beer each on the house.

  Charlie studied Jonas. He really did look nervous, tense. Maybe he was concerned about being caught handing out free booze, or did Erik and he have an understanding?

  A woman in her forties suddenly appeared in front of Charlie, saying she was moving the tables, that people wanted to dance. They hadn’t cleared the tables away after the diners were done, as they normally would have. Maybe they hadn’t thought people would be in a dancing mood, things being what they were, but apparently, they had been mistaken.

  ‘Isn’t there enough room anyway?’ Charlie said.

  The woman said it was more for her sake; people were likely to dance into both the table and her if she didn’t get out of the way.

  ‘It’s those bloody liquorice shots. I’ve told my husband to stop serving them, but he refuses.’

  ‘So you’re Erik’s wife?’

  The woman nodded. ‘Linda,’ she said and offered her hand.

  ‘Family business, must be nice,’ Charlie said.

  ‘It’s not. I would prefer to move back to town. I’m from Skövde originally, but Erik refuses to leave this place. He says it’s a safe place for our chi
ldren to grow up and I guess I used to figure he was right. But now … with all this about Annabelle, I don’t know any more. Have you found anything out yet? Do you have any theories?’

  ‘Nothing I can discuss.’

  ‘Of course.’ Linda gave a quick laugh. ‘What was I thinking? I just get worried. It’s all very unsettling. Because everything points to someone … having done something to her. No one thinks she left of her own accord any more.’ She lowered her voice and leaned in closer. ‘It’s terrible to think the perpetrator might be one of us, someone I serve beer and chat with at the bar.’

  ‘Did you have anyone particular in mind?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘No, or I’d have told the police, wouldn’t I? The only thing I was thinking was that there’s a lot of commotion around that girl.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly that. There’s often trouble when she comes in here.’ Linda nodded at Svante Linder and William Stark, who had suddenly found free seats at a table that had been occupied just moments before. ‘The girl certainly knows how to create drama, put it that way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Charlie said.

  ‘I mean that she’s flirtatious, that boys and men are drawn to her like flies to shit, that they puff themselves up around her, competing for her attention.’

  ‘If you’re thinking of something specific, I would really like you to tell me,’ Charlie said. Linda shook her head and said she had nothing more to add. ‘Would it be okay if we just pushed your table to the side a bit, so you can stay?’ she said.

  ‘I was just about to leave,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll go sit at the bar for a bit.’

  She ordered a beer, swivelled around on her bar stool and scanned the room. It was as though they were on a ship in choppy waters. People were swaying and leaning against the walls for support. More young men had joined Svante Linder and William Stark’s table. What was the dynamic of that group anyway? Were they friends, rivals, enemies? Had one of them, in a fit of jealousy, insanity or evil, done away with Annabelle?

  Charlie looked at the time. It was just before eleven. It was really time to head upstairs. She got up, but only made it a few feet before bumping into the man from the bathroom.