The Farm (19 page)

That’s what he said, in English, shaking his head slowly from side to side, as though he could only possibly want the best for me.

One of these men is in London, right now, with Chris, chasing after me.

• • •

J
UDGING FROM THE ENERGY WITH
which she described him, I guessed:

‘The doctor?’

Dr Olle Norling. Why is he here? Having failed in Sweden to institutionalise me, their plan is to try again. They haven’t changed strategy; despite my release from the asylum and the real doctors declaring me fit and well, they’re sticking to their approach to have me locked up, numbed by drugs, and my credibility destroyed. They’re too late to stop you hearing the truth. Their only option is to break our relationship and compel you to join their group – to finish me off as a force that can bring them to justice. The conspirators rightly doubt your father’s ability to get the job done. I don’t know whether Norling originally came up with the idea of bringing my sanity into question. Norling was certainly the first to say it aloud, using his reputation and medical knowledge against me. The question of my state of mind was raised only when I refused to accept their explanation of what happened to Mia.

After midsommar I hoped to talk to Mia about that disturbing day. But there was no sign of her. I was scared. It was the summer holidays. She should be outside, on the land. I took to walking through the fields in the morning, at night, staring at Håkan’s farm, hoping to see Mia on the veranda or at the bedroom window. But I never did.

A week later the answer finally came. I was awake early, working on our guest lodgings, painting the barn walls on top of a tall ladder, when I saw Håkan’s gleaming silver Saab driving at great speed. Håkan isn’t a brash and dangerous show-off. I’d never witnessed him reckless on the roads before. There had to be an emergency. I was expecting the car to race past our farm, stunned when it swung into our drive and he jumped out, running into our farmhouse, missing me altogether. I tightened my grip on the ladder, fearful I’d fall, because what other explanation could there be other than that something terrible had happened to Mia?

Hastily descending to the ground, I could hear raised voices. Through the window I could see Chris and Håkan in the kitchen. Håkan turned and bolted out of the house, back to his car. I dropped the paint, chasing after him, pressing a hand against the window, leaving yellow fingerprints on the glass. I needed to hear him say it. He lowered the window and said:

‘Mia’s gone!’

My next memory is of lying on the gravel drive looking up at the sky. Chris was supporting my head on his lap. Håkan’s car was no longer in the drive. I’d been unconscious for only a small amount of time. Mia quickly came into my thoughts and I hoped the news had been a nightmare, maybe I’d fallen from the ladder, struck my head, maybe Mia was safe – except I knew the truth, I’d always known the truth. My enemies will tell you that my fainting was a watershed moment. My mind snapped and nothing I subsequently said or thought or claimed can be taken seriously. Sick words from a sick mind. Here’s the truth. Fainting didn’t mean a thing. I accept, it made me seem weak and vulnerable, but the sensation that came over me wasn’t madness, it was an overwhelming sense of failure. I’d spent the past two months aware that Mia was in danger and I’d done nothing to protect her.

Håkan gave an account of what happened the night Mia disappeared. His explanation goes like this:

They’d quarrelled.

She’d been upset.

She’d waited until the household was asleep, packed two bags, and disappeared in the middle of the night, gone with no goodbye and no note.

That’s what we were told. That’s what the town was told and that’s what the town believed.

Stellan the detective, Håkan’s closest friend, arrived at his farm. I happened to be in the fields at the time. I saw his car in Håkan’s drive. I timed them. After seventeen minutes Stellan the detective left, the men shaking hands, an investigation seventeen minutes long concluded with a pat on the back.

Håkan stopped at our farm the next day, explaining that the police had been notified in the major cities – Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm. They were looking for Mia. However, there was a limit to what they could do. She wasn’t a child, chasing runaways was a difficult process. Repeating this information, Håkan dropped his head to indicate that he was lost for words, consumed with grief, or so we’re supposed to believe. Chris comforted him, stating that he was sure Mia would come back, that this kind of behaviour was typical of teenagers. Their conversation wasn’t real! It was an act – the two of them performing for me, Håkan playing the part of the heartbroken father, Chris feeding him cues. Except it was more than a performance, they were testing me. Would I walk up to Håkan and put my arm around his shoulder? I couldn’t do it. I remained in the corner of the room as far from him as possible. If I’d been political and shrewd I would’ve embraced him, shed false tears for his false grief, but I don’t possess his gift for deceit, so instead I made it perfectly clear that I didn’t believe him, a brazen statement of defiant opposition. Looking back, I realise what a miscalculation that was. From that moment on I was in danger.

• • •

R
ETURNING TO HER SATCHEL
, my mum took out a poster. She unfolded it across the coffee table and sat back down beside me.

These weren’t produced on Håkan’s computer. He employed a professional printing company, using the highest-quality paper. Even the layout is stylish, more like a supplement pulled from the pages of
Vanity Fair
or
Vogue
magazine – the world’s most extravagant missing person poster. They were everywhere. I spent a day spotting them and counted over thirty, wrapped around tree trunks, on a notice board on the beach, in the church and the shop windows along the promenade. The positioning was troubling to me because Mia wasn’t going to be hiding in any of these places. If she’d run away, she’d be in one of the cities. If she’d run away, she was going to be far, far away, not here, not a mile from home. And if she’d run, she’d never have told a soul, because that information would’ve reached Håkan in a second, so these posters served no useful purpose except as a grand gesture that Håkan had done the right thing, that he was playing the part expected of him.

Look at the bottom of the poster—

A rich reward for useful leads and that isn’t a misprint: one hundred thousand Swedish krona, ten thousand pounds! He might as well have offered a million dollars, or a chest of pirate gold; he knew it would provide no new information. It was a crass statement about him:

‘Look at how much money I’m prepared to pay! My love for Mia has a number attached to it and it’s greater than any number you’ve ever seen on a missing person poster before!’

From your expression, you’ve interpreted these posters as evidence of his innocence just as you were intended to do.

• • •

I
SHOOK MY HEAD AT MY MUM
’
S
presumption that she always knew what I was thinking.

‘I don’t believe these posters prove he’s innocent. They don’t prove anything. You can argue posters both ways. If he spent no money, if he put up no posters, or if he only put up one tatty poster, you could accuse him of being callous. Or too riddled with guilt—’

‘But I can’t make a judgment about something that he didn’t do.’

‘My point is—’

You don’t accept it as evidence. Fine. We won’t accept it. We don’t need it. You shouldn’t doubt his innocence because I say so. You shouldn’t doubt it because of these posters. Doubt it because Håkan’s account of the night Mia disappeared doesn’t make any sense. She supposedly fled the farm on 1 July. What did this sixteen-year-old girl allegedly do? Mia didn’t own a car, no taxi was called, how did she leave a farm in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night? She wasn’t at the train station in the morning. Her bicycle was still on the farm. She didn’t walk – there was nowhere to walk to, the distances were too great. I’ve escaped from a remote farm. Let me tell you, from personal experience, you need a plan. According to Håkan there was a gap of ten hours in which she could’ve disappeared, but those ten hours were a time when everything was shut down. For many miles in every direction the world turned dark, a population asleep, no shops open, no public transport. Mia just vanished. That’s what we were supposed to believe.

It was my duty to talk to the police and I approached them without discussing with Chris, wanting to discover how seriously they were taking the matter. I cycled through the centre of town. The shops were busy. The promenade was crowded. In the coffee shop where I’d eaten cake with Mia only a few weeks ago other people were sitting, drinking, laughing. Where was the grief for this lost girl? The pursuit of comfort is one of the great evils of our time. Håkan understood that perfectly, he understood that as long as there was no body, no evidence of a crime, no one would mind. Everyone would much rather believe that Mia had run off rather than consider the possibility that she’d been murdered.

The local police station was quieter than a library. It was preposterously clean, as if they did nothing but polish the floor and wipe the windows. Self-evidently these officers had never encountered any crime to speak of. These were novices. In Stockholm I might have had a chance, there might have been an ally, someone with experience of the darkness in men’s hearts. Not here, these were steady, safe job-seekers, men and women who understood how to play the politics of a small town.

At the front desk I demanded to speak to Stellan the detective. I’d expected a long wait, several hours, but I’d barely read more than a page or two of my notes when Stellan called my name, ushering me into his office. Maybe it was because he looked so much like Håkan that he seemed so out of place in an office, with pens and paper clips. He gestured for me to sit down, towering over me, asking how he could help. I asked why they hadn’t spoken to me about Mia’s disappearance. He asked bluntly if I knew where Mia was. I said no, I didn’t know, of course I didn’t know, but that I thought that there was more to this than merely a girl running away. I didn’t have the courage to spell out my hypothesis in the police station, not yet, not without enough evidence. What was interesting was that Stellan didn’t stare at me like I was mad, or as though I was speaking nonsense. He stared at me like this—

• • •

M
Y MUM GAVE ME A LOOK
that could have meant she was sad, or that she was listening carefully, or that she was bored.

Like I was a threat! He was assessing how much of a problem I was going to be. This police station and its most senior officer had no intention of unearthing the truth. It was an institution working to conceal the truth. This case required someone who was sceptical – it required an outsider. I hadn’t wanted to be one. But it was the role I was forced to play. I thanked Stellan for his time, deciding that the next course of action, the only logical course of action, in the absence of a functioning police force, in the absence of a search warrant, was to break into Håkan’s farm.

• • •

A
S I SAT
,
TROUBLED
by the notion of my mum breaking into a house, her hands disappeared into the deepest pocket of the satchel. I couldn’t see what she was doing until she slowly lifted them. She was wearing two red mittens, gravely stretched out for my inspection as if they were as conclusive as blood-soaked gloves. There was an absurdity about the moment, the disjunction between my mum’s earnestness and the novelty mittens, yet I felt no urge to smile.

To avoid leaving fingerprints! These were the only gloves in my possession, thick Christmas mittens. I started carrying them in my pocket during the height of summer, waiting for my chance to break in. As you can testify, I’ve never done anything like this before. I wasn’t going to sneak into Håkan’s farm in the middle of the night as a professional thief might do. I’d be opportunistic, seizing a moment when both Elise and Håkan were out. Remember, this is rural Sweden, no one locks their door, there are no alarms. However, Elise’s behaviour had changed since Mia’s disappearance. She wasn’t working. She sat on the veranda, lost in thought. Earlier I described her as always busy. Not any more—Before you interrupt again, I agree, it could be argued in many ways. Regardless of how you interpret the change in her character, it made it difficult to break in because she was at home much more.

One day I caught sight of Elise and Håkan leaving together. I didn’t know where they were going or for how long, maybe they’d be gone for minutes, maybe hours, but this was my only chance and I took it, abandoning my work on the vegetable garden, running through the fields, and knocking on their door just to make sure that the house was empty. There was no reply and I knocked again, asking myself, as I slipped on these thick mittens, whether I had the courage to open this door and walk into their house. As with all sensible people, I’ll break the law if need be. However, that doesn’t mean I find the process easy.

Try the mittens on.

Pick up that glass.

You see?

They have no grip. They’re impractical. No professional burglar would ever choose them. Standing in front of their house I became flustered because I was wearing Christmas mittens in the middle of the summer, trying to break into someone’s farm, and I couldn’t even open the door. The smooth round steel handle didn’t turn easily. I tried many times. In the end I had to clasp the handle with both hands.

Those first few metres inside, from the front door to the bottom of the stairs, were some of the most daunting steps I’ve ever taken. So ingrained were my Swedish customs and sense of household etiquette that I even took off my shoes, an idiotic thing for an intruder to do, depositing my clogs on the bottom step, announcing my presence to anyone who might return home.