The other journalists scowl at me as I step back out through the sewage plant door into the car park.
‘Local bias,’ shouts one pinhead.
‘I’m not local,’ I mutter under my breath.
Before today I didn’t know what to think, I just knew I had to keep on hoping. I wasn’t sure if Tam was dead or alive, injured or healthy, hiding or kidnapped. I didn’t know if she was still in the country, if she was afraid or working on an escape plan. And now I still don’t know what to think.
Some cruel bastard is keeping her locked up and filming her? In a box? To what end? Is this part of some S&M thing? Voyeurs? And if so, what do they intend to do with her now? We know they have at least one gun, and that there are at least two of them. Smell of smoke? If police find Tammy alive I will never let her out of my sight again, not for one minute. That is my oath for you to bear witness to. I will protect her like she has always protected me.
I drive away.
Numb.
More hopeful than before but not by much. I know she was alive two days ago and that’s something. My hands are sweaty on the steering wheel and the ditches are empty as I pass them by; empty of water and baked dry like parallel gullies each side of Satan’s own bowling alley.
The twin chimneys of the Grimberg Liquorice factory grow taller as I approach. Toytown looks empty, deserted, forgotten. A man is at work outside the high school, on the border fence, and he is dressed in what looks like military hazmat gear. The man has a white full-body suit and mask with some kind of filtration device. Thick rubber boots. Could be Bertil the bee guy but it’s difficult to tell. He has a large tank strapped to his back with some warning labels visible even to me in my Hilux. He’s spraying weeds. Scorching them with poison. The man looks like a soldier from the next war or maybe from the last one. Eviscerating flowering weeds because some fool long ago had the audacity to label them such.
Where are you, Tammy? Are you still in this godforsaken little town? Are you being held in a house or a boat up on stilts covered with a tarp? Are you alive, my friend?
Back at the office I answer Facebook messages and conduct two interviews with out-of-town hacks. They’re keen to know what I saw in the sewage-treatment plant. They wouldn’t ordinarily interview another journalist. I tell them nothing of what I saw. I use the chance to beg the public for more information. Whatever you have seen – and one of you has seen something, at least one of you – please call the hotline. Which is in fact the telephone number of the Gavrik Posten. Tam and Lisa HQ. Lisa’s relatives run the searches because they’re good it at. And we, well really it’s Sebastian, runs the social media campaigns and the phones. There’s a shipping-container conversions catalogue on the floor under Sebastian’s desk, under my old desk. I guess he’s been investigating just like I have.
The bell above the door tinkles and Noora stands there.
‘What?’ I say, getting up from Lars’ desk. ‘What is it?’
‘No news,’ she says, her hands up to quieten me. ‘I have to take a thirty-minute break, the Chief insisted. Thought you might want a quick walk. We can talk. Might do you some good.’
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I need to answer messages, help man the phones.’
‘Go!’ shouts Lena from her back office. She must be yelling loud for me to hear the words from back there. ‘I’ll do it,’ she yells. ‘You go.’
Noora smiles and I get up and walk to Lena’s open door.
‘I won’t be long,’ I say.
Lena says, ‘Go clear your head. I need you thinking straight.’
Noora and I walk out and turn left on Storrgatan and head down towards ICA. There’s a clothes rack outside the charity shop, only the rack is empty. Save for one item. A pale yellow dress on the kind of wire hanger that always ruins the lines of the shoulders. The dress hangs limp from the rack like a person who’s given up on their future. There are a hundred black bugs attacking the dress and I wonder what a tourist might think if they saw it. I reckon they might just turn around and head back onto the E16.
We don’t talk, we just walk. I glance at her from the corner of my eye and she is still the person I’ve been thinking of and dreaming about these past months. She still has the shiny hair and the self-done French manicure. When the wind blows the right way I can just make out her scent. If it’s perfume then she doesn’t wear much of it.
We pass Paradise Spa and turn and walk past Systembolaget, the town’s only alcohol store. It’s closed. Shuttered. The old stationery shop over the way still doesn’t have a new tenant. We turn left onto Eriksgatan and head back up towards the factory.
‘Let’s talk in there,’ says Noora, pointing to the ruin of St Olov’s.
We walk through the low arch into the graveyard. The twisted yew trees and the skeletal ruin of the church offer shade. And it is private. Like being inside a small walled garden.
‘We have a big team working on this, I want you to know that,’ she says.
‘I’ve seen.’
‘Specialists, too,’ she says, putting her hand out to touch my wrist. Her fingertips land on my skin as lightly as sycamore seeds floating down from a high branch. Her skin on mine. Four fingertip pressure points. Then her thumb rests on the underside of my wrist and now, even with all this horror, perhaps because of it, I want to kiss her.
‘We know the abductor has a gun so we’re going through our database. We’re drawing up a list.’
‘How?’ I say.
‘Well, we know there are at least two people involved in Tammy’s abduction. So we can cross-reference any known crime partnerships with registered gun owners. We know from Tammy’s notes that they haven’t taken her far so we’re starting with a 50 km range outside from her food van.’
‘That’s a lot of land,’ I say. ‘Elk forests. Lots of desolate fields.’
‘That’s a good thing,’ she says. ‘Not too many people. It’s a good thing, really.’
I bite my lip and she lets go of my hand.
‘I’m worried about you as well,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m fine. Focus on Tammy and Lisa. They’re keeping her in a large box, large enough to move around inside. At least she can move. Can you check the shipping containers at Snake River? Sally Sandberg’s rooms? Can you raid them?’
‘They’re on our radar,’ she says. ‘Along with a lot of other people who don’t look weird or act strange but nevertheless could still be dangerous. We need to act on evidence, on quality information.’
I’ve heard this before. From the local cops, from lawyers, on movies. The need for quality evidence. Doesn’t work quite the same way for me. My weapons are circumstantial evidence, hearsay and gossip, rumours and bitchy neighbourhood spats and family grudges. They are the vital corner pieces that allow me to complete each puzzle.
‘What about the voice synthesizer,’ I say. ‘That must be a good thing, right? they wouldn’t bother disguising their voices if they were going to kill her, would they?’
Noora blows a hair from her face.
‘Let’s hope so,’ she says. ‘But if it’s some kind of game, or some kind of club, it could be part of what gets them off. We’ve found a shop in Karlstad that stocks distortion equipment and we’ll cross-reference their customer list with our own. Unfortunately you can buy anything online these days and we can’t trace it.’
I think of Sally’s snake products. About the live-streamed birth of a hundred baby boa constrictors from one of her locked rooms. Who’d pay to watch that? Are there people in France, in Indonesia, in Brazil paying to watch it? Watch Tammy? Watch her doing what?
‘And she says she’s being filmed,’ I say.
‘Everyone has a camera,’ says Noora. ‘GoPro, from your phone, or a handheld HD thing. Doesn’t help us much.’
‘If it’s being live streamed, though?’ I say. ‘If Tam is being shown somewhere on the web?’
Noora nods and says, ‘We have IT specialists using face recognition software, but they’re not hopeful. That kind of thing would be on the dark web. Something we can do, or try to do, is find out how those Kinder messages got to the sewage treatment plant.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Through the main Gavrik sewer or if the sewage was sucked out from a septic tank. The Chief’s talking to people about this now. If it was sucked then we’ll investigate the Kommun trucks and map out their routes for the past few days. May help us narrow down.’
‘Good,’ I say.
‘Lots of ifs,’ she says. ‘But I wanted to give you a proper update. We are prioritising this.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and right now, in this corpse of a church, I just want to fall into her and for us to collapse into a heap on the dry grass. I want for us to take five minutes, entwined, looking up at the sky.
‘Gotta get back now,’ she says. ‘The Svenssons aren’t happy we haven’t found any Kinder messages from Lisa.’
‘And nothing in Tam’s messages mentioned her?’ I say. ‘Could there be more abductors in Gavrik town? Maybe the cases aren’t connected?’
‘Probably kept in separate locations,’ she says. ‘Or in separate boxes. Lisa’s family are scared. Angry.’
She looks around like there could be anyone within earshot in this ruin, and she says, ‘Boyfriend of one of Lisa’s second cousins, he lives up in Dalarna, he thrashed out and called me a raghead desert rat.’
‘What? Jesus. What did you say?’
‘Didn’t say anything,’ she says. ‘Arrested him.’ She touches the cuffs on her belt. ‘Hate crime. He’ll get a tidy fine for that one.’
We walk out of the ruin and duck to go through the church arch. I should pay my respects to the Grimbergs, to their family grave, but I can’t face it right now. I’m not good with graves.
As we head down past Hotel Gavrik with its off-centre sign, Benny Björnmossen passes between Noora and me, carrying a toddler-size doll in Swedish traditional costume.
‘Ladies,’ he says.
A homemade sign in the hotel window reads: Special offer: 25% off. Best rates in Gavrik.
Only rates in Gavrik.
‘Tourism’s down significantly,’ says Noora. ‘The woman from Systembolaget was telling me. Down by almost half. Lots of cancelled bookings.’
‘Gavrik didn’t need that,’ I say.
‘Agreed,’ she says. ‘Listen, you want to drop by my place later after my shift? You don’t need to talk, don’t need to do anything. You can game if you want to, my housemate has a PlayStation. What do you say?’
Imagine that. Someone being kind enough to say, you don’t need to do anything, not even talk, you can just game if you want. I look into Noora’s eyes and every cell of my body wants to say ‘yes’ but I say, ‘No, thanks. Not tonight, Noora.’
‘Okay,’ she says, stiffening, turning to walk into the cop shop.
‘Only because I’ll fall too deep,’ I say. ‘I don’t deserve it yet. I need to be thinking about Tam and if I do come by your place I’ll start thinking about you even more than I do now. Do you understand?’
She squeezes my upper arm and her hip bone nudges me as she walks away through the cop shop door. I breathe a long deep sigh and get into my Hilux. I drive around. Looking for missed clues but also just driving. It’s almost as therapeutic as gaming. And gaming’s almost as therapeutic as drinking. For the past months I’ve been gaming like a demon. To get my head straight. To give myself the chance to escape for a while.
There are strawberry sellers outside town past the Q8 gas station and they do not look happy. Two girls: one dressed in grey and one dressed in white. Punnets of unsold strawberries that look like they’ve been cooked in the sun. A baseball bat resting against the side of the table. I pull over.
‘Hej, hej,’ I say.
They both look at me and smile. They’re about fifteen.
‘They look good,’ I say, even though the fruit is starting to rot and soften and the red is darkening in spots to a deep maroon. ‘How much?’
The white dress girl points to their homemade sign.
I hand over the kronor.
The grey dress girl takes it and she puts my rotten strawberries, they smell like some kind of cheap alcoholic cocktail, into a plastic bag.
‘Have either of you seen anyone acting strange this week? Anyone carrying a gun or a camera or some kind of voice equipment? Anyone going about in pairs?’
Both look at me like I’m crazy or drunk or both.
Both shake their heads. The girl in the grey dress checks her phone.
I drive away.
The farmers north of Gavrik are still farming. They work well into the night this time of year, making up for the winter standstill when snow blankets their fields sometimes for five months before a thaw. They look like they’re in a rush. Driving round on their tractors tending to their rocky land and their evil infested scarecrows. Doing their best. Working till eleven at night because the sun lets them.
It starts to rain but then stops abruptly.
What Noora said, what she did, taking some time out for me, it’s helped. I feel less panicked than I did before. Tammy was alive two days ago and I think she’s alive now. Specialists are looking for her, not just Thord with his good intentions. Trained specialists from outside Gavrik, and that makes me feel like there’s some hope.
I park outside Lena’s.
I shower and eat and she texts saying she’ll be home late and I should go to bed. I check the blood splatter on the window of the friggebod and it’s worse. Why do this, little bird? There is dark matter with the blood and it’s either its own brain tissue or else the blood has coagulated and cooked on the glass in this Midsommar sun.
Thank the Lord for my new security bolts. Or thank Lena, more like. I take a snack back over to the friggebod. My hair is wet so I dry it with a towel and I drink a glass of milk accompanied by four digestive biscuits. The blinds need more tape so I fix that and then I secure both bolts and climb into bed. It creaks and the sheets don’t smell as fresh as they did a few days ago. They smell of sweat and fear. Of listless sleep.
I take out my hearing aids and place them on the bedside table and then, thinking of Noora, I fall asleep.
I wake to a bang. Not audible but physical.
My bed shakes.
I sit bolt upright and turn on the light.
Nothing.
The bulb’s out.
I light a match and put it to the candle in the lantern, and then I place one hearing aid in.
My heart’s beating hard.
What was that bang? The dying bird? Or did I dream it?
The room is murky. Shadows dancing from the candle glare.
I check my phone.
Nothing.
It hasn’t vibrated.
Could the bloodied bird be back?
I step out of bed and look around the room and check the compost toilet room and then I get back into bed. I lie down, my face filling the pillow dent I made earlier. My breathing slows. I pull out my hearing aid. I reach out to the candle, to blow it out, and I look down, under my bed, and two cold eyes stare back up at me.