“He’s not very old, that one,” someone said. “Just a boy.”
“He was new,” said another. “Hadn’t been here very long. But he was helpful. Strong, he was, and he shared what he had. You say he took off? I’ll be damned.”
Siri jotted down some inconsequential notes. The encampment was damp and stuffy, the air still. It smelled so sour that she felt ill; she began to sweat and her palms grew slick. They worked in the woods until darkness fell and the moon shone lonely and full up in the treetops.
When she arrived home, she took a long shower, then sat down at the kitchen table and stared out at the late-summer night, lost in thought.
—
That autumn she began to search the records of known disappearances. There was something about him, the young man in the forest. Maybe it was his age, or that he’d looked healthier than the others, more alert—at least from a distance. And maybe it was how confidently he had fled, without hesitation. As though he didn’t quite belong in the encampment, as though he had something worse to hide than everyone else.
The missing-persons cases in Halland were plentiful, with the very young and old starkly overrepresented. The vast majority were found within a day or so, and almost everyone else shortly thereafter, most often alive. A few were found dead, and a small number of unfortunate souls remained missing, as though time had simply decided to swallow themup.
One of those was Hampus Olsson.
—
Siri remembered him. It was his face she’d seen on the front pages just as Skavböke’s fifteen minutes of unwanted fame began to abate. Skavböke. That was how she thought of it all, she realized. It had been three years now; had so much time really passed? She read the old reports about Hampus Olsson, her stomach slowly turning to ice.
He came from Rydöbruk, about forty kilometers outside Halmstad, and had been seventeen that Christmas. He was a smart kid who liked hockey and cars but had been on a downslide since high school, was seldom home and hardly ever showed up to school. Instead, he spent much of his time with a group of similar types from around the area. On Christmas Eve of 1999, he had tried to make it through theholiday within the walls of his house, since his mother, a welfare case from Knäred, had begged and pleaded with him to stay home.
At last, apparently, he could stand it no longer. According to his mother, it was around seven o’clock when he grabbed a mostly full bottle of Zaranoff vodka from the counter and headed into the dark, and that was the last anyone had seen of him.
He had been wearing baggy black jeans, a large navy-blue hoodie,and a black puffer coat. On his head, as always, he wore a burgundy Colorado Avalanche cap—his favorite team. Witness statements suggested he’d hitchhiked out of Torup; someone had seen a guy standing at the side of the road with his thumb out, but no one had been able to confirmit.
Given that Hampus was who he was, the search lasted for a long time, and the assumptions about what had happened grew increasingly pessimistic.I’m sure he’s lying dead somewhere,one of Siri’s colleagues in town said in a dull voice when she called to check on the case.
Seventeen when he disappeared, which would make him about twenty now, if that was Hampus Olsson she’d seen in the woods. Maybe. Yeah. She was pretty damn sure it was him.
Siri put everything aside and moved on; she had stressed-out bosses and piles of cases to deal with. The days progressed as usual, but at night that figure at the edge of the forest came back to her. She considered taking the matter to a superior but decided againstit.
Instead, she moved forward in silence, as though she were searching for an answer she didn’t really want to find. She tracked down Hampus’s old high-school teachers at Kattegat School and let them describe what kind of student Hampus had been, the few times he showedup.
“I always thought it would have been better for him to attend a different school,” said John Lundström, who’d had Hampus in Swedish. “Considering he lived so far from here, I mean. I suggested it to him more than once, to try to get him to cut class less. For a guy like Hampus there was, how to put it, so much temptation along the way to school. But neither he nor his mother did anything about it, so nothing happened. Which was too bad; he wasn’t a dumb kid. But he had a lot of bad luck.”
Bad luck, indeed. Siri visited his home village of Rydöbruk, met his mother at a treatment home outside Falkenberg, and spoke to Hampus’s old friends, the ones who could still be located.
Siri just wanted to find him. That was all. She thought hedeserved to be found. If you’re seventeen and you go missing, there has to be someone to look for you, and everyone else seemed to have givenup.
She studied maps to figure out which roads he might have taken. After work she often kept her uniform on and, instead of going home, headed out to the forests of Halland. She would park her car out of sight so no one would wonder why she wasn’t driving a patrol car. She knocked on doors and showed people photographs, asked questions. Folks shook their heads and apologized, sorry they couldn’t be of more help.
She took short naps in her car, then droveon.
—
He must have left an impression somewhere. There always is one, if you know what you’re looking for.
At last, she foundit.
One month later, she quit.
4
The inspector from the Environmental Protection Agency was a conscientious man. He was in the habit of collecting even the tiniest pieces of litter in a bag and tossing it all at the trash station behind Vallås on his way home, but he knew he should turn in the empty shell he’d just happened across in an out-of-the-way part of Långhultamyren Nature Reserve. He put the shell in the bag and drove straight to the police station.
There the bag with the empty shell made its way to a young officer who was working with Siri out in Oskarström that week. They’d both been in Halmstad to drop a wino off at lockup and were now discussing Sweden’s new import: Halloween. It seemed to have really taken off up in Stockholm in recent years, and soon it would probably reach Halland too.
“Imagine having to chase after drunks dressed like Spider-Man, theScreamkiller, and Gandalf,” said Siri. “Jesus.”
