The Farm (20 page)

I’d never been upstairs in that house before. What did I discover? Fetch a brochure for any mid-range furniture store and I could show you Håkan’s bedroom. It was neat and proper with a pine bed, pine wardrobes, immaculately clean, no clutter on the bedside tables, no pills, no books, no piles of dirty clothes. The decorative touches were few and inoffensive, as if decided by a committee, acceptable local artists framed on the wall. It was a furniture showroom, not a real bedroom, and I say my next remark carefully, not as a criticism, but as an observation from someone married for forty years – I was quite sure, standing in the middle of this bedroom, next to a vase filled with painted wooden tulips, that no one was having sex in here. It was a sexless space, and yes, you’re right, I don’t have evidence for that, but a person can tell a lot from a room, and it’s my unsubstantiated observation that Håkan was looking elsewhere for his sexual needs. Elise must have surrendered to that fact, and for the first time I felt pity for her, loyal Elise, a prisoner of that pine bedroom. I’m quite sure the inelegant solution of sleeping around wasn’t open to her. She was his. He was not hers.

By deduction the last room on the landing belonged to Mia. I peered inside, certain there was some mistake – this couldn’t be Mia’s room. The furniture was identical to the previous room, the same pine wardrobe, even the same pine bed as her parents. Mia hadn’t personalised the room except for an elaborate mirror. There were no posters, no postcards and no photographs. It was a room unlike the room of any teenager I’ve ever seen. What a lonely room it was, not a space where Mia had been given freedom, no, it was decorated and cleaned according to Elise’s standards. The room felt like an order – a command, she should become one of them. Mia might have slept in that room but it didn’t belong to her, it didn’t speak of her personality. It was no different from a comfortable guest room. Then it struck me – the smell! The room had been professionally cleaned, the bed had been made, the sheets were fresh and pressed, they were new, they hadn’t been slept in, the room vacuumed – it smelled of lavender. Sure enough, in the plug socket was an automated air-freshening device turned to its highest setting. If forensics were called in to make an examination I was sure that they wouldn’t find even the smallest particle of Mia’s skin. This was cleanliness to a sinister degree.

I checked the wardrobe. It was full. I checked the drawers. They were full. According to Håkan she’d packed two bags. With what? I asked myself. Nothing much was missing. I can’t say how many clothes were in the wardrobe before she left, so can’t compare, but this didn’t feel like a room that had been ransacked by a girl on the run. There was a Bible on the bedside table – Mia was a Christian. I have no idea if she believed in God or not; certainly she hadn’t taken the Bible with her. I checked the pages: there were no notes, no pages ripped out. I turned to the verse from Ephesians that Anne-Marie had stitched in the days before she killed herself. It was unmarked. Underneath the Bible was a diary. Glancing through, there were events listed, there were homework assignments, no references to sex, no boyfriends, girlfriends, no frustrations. No teenager in the world keeps a diary like this. Mia must have known that her room was being searched. She was writing this diary in the knowledge it was being read – this was the diary she wanted Elise and Håkan to read. The diary was a trick, a diversion to pacify a snooping parent, and what kind of teenager produces such a clever decoy document except someone with a great deal to hide?

I’d vowed to stay for no more than thirty minutes, but thirty minutes goes quickly and I’d found no evidence. I couldn’t leave empty-handed. I decided to stay until I found something, no matter the risk! It occurred to me that I’d overlooked the mirror. It stood out as different, not an antique, not from a furniture store, but a piece of craftsmanship, handmade and ambitious – shaped like a magic mirror, wood swirled around oval-shaped glass. Standing close, I noticed that the glass hadn’t been glued to the frame: there were steel clips at the top and bottom. They turned, like keys, and the glass fell cleanly from the frame. I jolted forward to catch it and prevent it smashing on the floor. Behind the mirror, carved into the wood, was a deep space. The person who’d crafted this unusual mirror had an ulterior motive. They’d created a hiding space, custom-made for Mia. This is what I found inside.

• • •

M
Y MUM HANDED ME
the ragged remains of a small diary. There was a front and back cover but the inside pages had been torn out. For the first time I experienced a powerful emotional response to my mum’s evidence, as though this object retained some undeniable trace of violence.

Imagine the perpetrator in action, their powerful hands ripping the pages, the air full of words. Fire would have been a surer way to destroy this evidence, or tossing it into the depths of Elk River. This wasn’t a rational attempt at concealment. It was a savage response to thoughts written in these pages, an expression of hatred carrying with it the implication of a crime to come, or a crime already committed.

Examine it for yourself.

Almost nothing remains, none of the written entries, only jagged fragments along the spine, paper teeth spotted with partial words. I’ve counted exactly fifty-five scattered letters and only three complete words.

Hans
, the Swedish word for ‘his’.

Rök
, the Swedish for ‘smoke’, and please consider who smokes, and who doesn’t.

Räd
, not a complete word, caught on the rip, and there’s no such Swedish word as
räd
, I believe the second ‘d’ was torn off, it should have been
rädd
– the Swedish for ‘scared’.

The diary was too important to put back. But stealing the remains of Mia’s journal was a provocation, an unmistakable signal of my intention to pursue the culprit and do whatever was necessary to discover the truth. When Håkan returned and found it missing, the most suggestive piece of evidence that Mia hadn’t run away from home, he’d sweep through his farm burning incriminating clues. Logically, this had become not my first but my only chance of collecting evidence. I couldn’t leave. Standing in Mia’s bedroom, wondering where to search next, I stared out across the fields, seeing the bump in the land, the underground shelter where Håkan carved those obscene trolls, the location of the second padlocked door. Tomorrow the shed might be emptied or razed to the ground. I had to act now.

With the remains of Mia’s journal in my pocket, I found a hand-carved key cupboard on the hallway wall. On farms there are always a vast number of keys, for various barns and tractors. I was going through them one by one, none of them were marked, it would take hours to try them all, so I ran to the toolshed, right next to the farm, stealing Håkan’s bolt cutters. Still wearing my red mittens, leaving no fingerprints, I hurried to the underground shelter, cutting the first padlock and opening the door, fumbling for the light cord. The sight awaiting me was so disturbing I had to fight against my urge to run away.

In the corner of the shelter was a stack of trolls, piled up like a heap of bodies, horrifically disfigured, cut in half, eyes gouged out, decapitated, smashed and splintered. It took a few seconds for me to muster the willpower to walk past the mound of trolls, trampling on the woodchips, arriving at the next door, secured with a second padlock. It was a different kind of lock to the one on the external door, a far tougher brand. Finally, after a great effort, the blades sliced through the steel, I gripped the second door and pulled it open.

Inside there was a plastic table. On top of the table was a plastic case. Inside the case was a digital video camera. I checked to see if there was anything on the memory. It had been wiped. I was too late. The answers were gone. In their place were just more questions. The room was fitted with power sockets – five in a row. What for? The walls were covered with soundproofing foam. What for? The floor was spotlessly clean. Why, when next door was a mess? Before I could examine any further, I heard Håkan’s voice calling out urgently across the farm.

I put the camera back and hurried to the outer door, opening it slightly and peering out. The shelter was visible from the farm. I was trapped. There were no trees nearby, no shrubs, and nowhere to hide. I could see Håkan at the toolshed. Foolishly I’d left the door open and he was examining the premises, no doubt wondering if he’d been robbed. He’d quickly notice his bolt cutters were missing. He’d call the police. There was very little time. As soon as Håkan’s back was turned I ran towards the fields, as fast as I could. Reaching the edge of the wheat, I threw myself down to the ground, waiting among the crops, catching my breath until I found the courage to look up. Håkan was walking towards the shelter, only a hundred metres away. When he entered the shelter I took my chance and crawled away, flat on my stomach, using my elbows to pull me along.

Reaching the edge of our land, I realised that for some reason I’d kept both padlocks, so I buried them deep in the soil, took off my mittens, stuffed them into my pocket on top of the diary, and walked back, brushing myself down. I picked up the basket I’d left by the vegetable patch ready filled with potatoes, and entered my farm, saying aloud that I’d picked some fine-looking potatoes for dinner! Except Chris wasn’t at home, so my alibi – they’d used a salmon as an alibi, why shouldn’t I use a potato? – was wasted. I set about washing and peeling the potatoes, a huge number, trying to finish as many as possible so I could explain what I’d been doing this morning should I be asked.

An hour or so later, with a mountainous heap of potatoes beside me, enough for ten hungry farmers, I heard Chris at the door and turned to tell him the innocent story of my morning, only to see the tall solemn figure of Stellan the detective standing at the entrance.

• • •

M
Y MUM WASN
’
T DONE
with the mittens. She picked them up, pushing them into her jeans pocket so that part of the material was poking out.

The detective wanted to question me and the mittens were still in my pocket.

Like this!

With one bright red fingertip hanging over the lip, and underneath them was Mia’s stolen diary. I’d buried the padlocks but forgotten about the mittens, and it was the middle of summer, so there was no reason to have them in my pocket. If they saw them I’d be caught because the mittens would lead to the diary. If they asked me to empty my pockets I’d be going to jail.

Stellan didn’t speak much English. In this instance he needed to communicate in Swedish to be absolutely confident of what he was saying and what he was being told, so I asked Chris to hold off while we spoke. I’d translate at the end. I sat at the kitchen table with Stellan seated opposite me and Chris standing. Somehow it had taken on the appearance of an interrogation, these two men against me. Chris wasn’t by my side, but next to the detective. I asked if this was regarding Mia. The detective said no, it wasn’t about Mia – he was categorical about that, describing the break-in on Håkan’s farm. Some one had cut his locks to the troll shed. I must have said something like, ‘That’s terrible,’ before asking what had been taken, and he told me nothing had been taken, the locks had been cut but nothing was missing except the padlocks. I said that was curious, very curious, maybe the thieves were looking for something specific, angling Stellan towards a discussion of that second room, as sinisterly clean as Mia’s bedroom, but he didn’t take the bait. Instead, Stellan the detective leaned forward and told me that they didn’t have theft in this part of Sweden. Incidents such as this were exceptionally rare. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. There was accusation and aggression. I didn’t like the reference to ‘this part of Sweden’, talking about it as though he were a guardian of this realm and I was an outsider to be mistrusted, as though I’d brought crime into this area by the very fact of my foreignness, even though I’m Swedish born! I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him, no matter his physical size or status, and so I mirrored his posture, also leaning forward, feeling the dense clump of mittens press against my upper leg, asking how he could be sure a crime had been committed when nothing had been taken. Stellan said that clearly there’d been an intruder since two padlocks were missing. And I retorted, pleased with my logic, that something being missing isn’t proof of a crime. A young girl was missing – a beautiful young girl, Mia, was missing – but they didn’t believe a crime had been committed. Why should this be any different? Why should they take the disappearance of two padlocks more seriously than a missing girl? Why was the case of the missing padlocks definitively and absolutely a serious crime the likes of which had never been seen around here? And the other, a girl gone in the middle of the night, with no trace of her, that was a family matter requiring only a few minutes of their investigative time? I didn’t understand, two replaceable padlocks, which could be bought anywhere, two worthless padlocks no one loved, and they were acting as though we should be scared in our homes because a padlock had never gone missing before in these parts. Perhaps that was true, perhaps this was the safest place in the world for padlocks, but I couldn’t help them with the mystery of the missing padlocks, as serious as the case might be. If they wanted my advice, I told them to dredge Elk River or dig up the land, search the forests, we had no missing padlocks here.

What were they going to do? Arrest me?

• • •

I
WATCHED MY MUM DELICATELY
remove a matchbox from the smallest pocket of the satchel. She balanced it carefully in the palm of her hand. With a push of her finger she opened one side. I saw a golden chanterelle mushroom cradled on a bed of cotton wool:

‘A mushroom?’

‘It’s only one half of the evidence.’