Deep Harbour (eBook)

Eira Sjödin tugged down her sweatpants, put on a fresh pair of underwear and desperately rummaged through her wardrobe for something slightly more appropriate for an investigator with Violent Crimes. Her top was stained and probably smelled slightly of sweat, but these were the sorts of things she rarely thought about while she was sitting alone in front of her computer at home, relegated to so-called desk duty.

She brewed a pot of coffee and took some sliced bread out of the freezer.

A body in the river, her neighbour had said on the phone. He was with the divers who’d found it right now.

‘Have you called it in?’ Eira had already found her shoes and was on her way out before Allan Westin had time to explain that the person was very much dead.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Bring them over.’

A cool breeze blew through the kitchen as she opened the window to let some fresh air in. Strictly speaking, a body in the river wasn’t a case for Violent Crimes. Not unless they suspected there was foul play involved. It fell under the jurisdiction of the local police, and she no longer worked for them. Just the thought of her old job made Eira long to get back out on the road, driving mile upon mile, never knowing what might be waiting around the next bend.

She moved her laptop to one side and cleared the case files from the kitchen table. Bank statements, names, telephone numbers. A large drug ring that grew bigger and bigger the more she pulled the thread. It was important work, vital for building a case against their prime suspect down in Sundsvall, but Eira hadn’t become a police officer in order to sit in front of a computer all day. It left her feeling restless and drowsy, whether she was in her cramped booth at the station or at the kitchen table – the latter of which had become perfectly acceptable since the pandemic.

Sure, a pregnant woman could go out and speak to a harmless witness on the fringes of a case every now and then, but it was often hard to know what posed a risk, and her bosses took her safety incredibly seriously. That meant desk duty from day one in her new job, because Eira was already pregnant when they offered her the role. It had been so overwhelming and new then, on the boundary between late autumn and winter, and she hadn’t been showing, but she knew she still had to let them know.

There were moments when she worried that she had duped them, taking advantage of the section of law that prevented discrimination, even though they insisted that it was her they wanted, that she wouldn’t be pregnant forever. Her union rep had three children of her own, and she could vouch for that.

‘Hello?’ a voice called from the hall.

As ever, Allan Westin let himself in without knocking; they were neighbours, after all. Rabble came bounding in after him, leaving a trail of mud and wet pawprints on the floor.

They were followed by three people who shook Eira’s hand, two men and a woman. Jesper, Lars and Ylva. She could make a note of their surnames later.

Eira told them all to take a seat, but Allan remained standing by the hob. The aroma of coffee and toast drifted through the kitchen as the woman explained that she had given in to the temptation to swim under the collapsed Sandö Bridge and then lost her bearings. She was in her fifties, grey hair with blonde highlights.

‘It was like I was in a daze.’ She hadn’t touched her toast, and she let the coffee go cold in her mug. ‘Or a dream. I was just staring at the skull and I forgot everything else. Time is so different down there. I couldn’t tell you how long I was there for.’

‘Nine minutes,’ said Jesper, the youngest of the three. Judging by his accent, he came from down south, Värmland. ‘I lost sight of her while I was filming the remains of the bridge. That’s not so uncommon – it’s dark, and visibility is only a few metres. If we lose each other, the protocol is to spend two minutes looking before heading back up to the surface. There was no sign of her up there, so we went down again.’

‘It was all my fault,’ said Ylva. ‘I was so moved by what I’d seen that I completely forgot what I was doing. I thought maybe I’d found …’ Her eyes began to wander, and she trailed off.

‘Tell me what you saw,’ said Eira.

It took a while; the woman kept mixing facts with feelings. She had seen death down there.

‘It’s rare for us to find remains in sunken vessels,’ the man named Lars explained. ‘Much less common than you might think. People usually manage to get out. Either that or their bodies are carried away on the tide or the current. When we do find someone, it’s usually deeper inside the vessel, often because they were asleep at the time of the sinking.’

Scenes from Titanic flashed through Eira’s head, the third-class passengers trapped in the lower decks, Leonardo DiCaprio handcuffed to a pole. She also remembered the old Evert Taube song about the Blue Bird of Hull, the young cabin boy bound to the helm and forgotten. Sinking with no chance of survival.

Once they had found Ylva and established that she was OK, one of the men had dived back down to document what she had seen. Eira leaned in over the camera. Something blurry and pale in the sand, or whatever the sediment on the bottom consisted of. Blue clay, perhaps. She had dealt with that in previous investigations, and she knew that both it and the weakly saline water had a preservative effect.

‘Do you know anything about the boat?’ she asked.

‘No, it’s not one we’ve dived before,’ said Jesper. ‘But it’s big, bigger than most of the others down there.’

Possibly a steamboat, a ferry, a large tug. Most of the finds in the Ångerman River remained unexplored, he explained. It was only in the last few years that they had started to map the wrecks using sonar. From the surface, the soundwaves were able to produce images of objects down to a depth of thirty metres. He took out a laptop to show Eira. The images on the screen looked more like works of art than reality. Shades of brown, almost sepia-coloured, the shadows and silhouettes of scattered vessels.

It was something of a record to have found three hundred wrecks in such a short space of time. Eira thought it looked like someone had thrown a pack of cards into the water, the riverbed littered with the square barges that once used to transport timber to the ferries. They had become obsolete once the steamboat docks were built, and the easiest and most cost-effective solution was simply to sink them.

Some of the finds were marked ‘wreck-like object’ and required further investigation, and judging by the size and shape of others, they might date back to the seventeenth century. There had been shipyards along the river during the Thirty Years’ War, after all.

Eira pointed to a yellowish band stretching across the river, from Lunde to Sandö. It looked like a matchstick that had been snapped in the middle.

‘Is that the bridge?’

‘That’s the bridge.’

She had never really thought about the fact that it was still down there. The tragic collapse of the bridge was one of many wounds that had never fully healed in the area. Using her finger, she traced a line to the spot where they had found the body.

‘The current can be pretty strong here …’ Eira had grown up with the warnings: stay close to shore when you’re swimming, and never go in alone.

‘Yes, the body could easily have been carried quite some way, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

She exchanged a glance with Allan, who was leaning back against the woodburning stove with his coffee, and realised he was probably thinking the same thing. The missing.

Those whose names had never been carved onto headstones, who had lost their lives or fallen into the river – been thrown into it, in some cases. Names she was already sorting through in the back of her mind, that would form a list.

Eira pushed Rabble away. The dog was desperate for attention, his coat stinking of everything that came seeping out in the spring thaw. She made a note of the exact coordinates of the find, at a depth of sixteen metres. That wasn’t so bad, considering there were areas where the riverbed was a hundred metres below the surface.

‘I’m sorry to ask, but when do you think we can head out again?’ Jesper spoke up. ‘I know that probably sounds insensitive, but we really want to try to avoid losing too much time.’

Marine archaeology was an underfunded specialism; that was why they set out so early in the morning: to maximise their time in the water.

The lengthening hours of light that arrived with summer, nights that would soon become almost indistinguishable from day.

‘It’s fine, providing you stay away from this area.’ Eira used her finger to draw a circle on the chart they had spread out on the table, a good distance from the wreck. It covered almost the...