You Will Never Be Found

Contents CoverTitle PageMalmberget, NorrbottenÅdalen—OctoberNovemberDecemberAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorAlso by Tove AlsterdalCopyrightAbout the Publisher Malmberget, NorrbottenThe ground shook that night, with a quake more powerful than the usual rumbles, making beds jump and crockery and glasses fall out of cupboards. When morning broke, an elderly woman would call the mining company and ask to be moved higher up the relocation list. A twenty-seven-year-old father would do the same, having gone out into the garden and discovered his daughter’s trike was missing. Stolen, he would assume, cursing the thieves and the scum and the rising crime levels in society—at least until he spotted the crack that had opened up beside his house and realized that her bike had plummeted towards the bowels of the earth. It was the kind of thing that made people leave Malmberget and never look back, though they would forever long for the place they had once called home. The tremor didn’t wake Tommy Oja. It was his phone, which started ringing an hour later. A cup of black coffee, a quick sandwich. The sun wouldn’t be up for hours, and the car’s headlights swept through the darkness. Many of the streetlights had stopped working over the past year, others had been dismantled. He turned off towards the Hermelin neighborhood and parked by the fence marking the area at risk of collapse. Several of the old wooden houses there were still waiting to be moved to their new locations, the kind of buildings that captured the spirit of Malmberget’s hundred-year history, chosen as particularly valuable. Tommy himself had grown up in one of the apartment buildings that were torn down years earlier. It was what it was. The fence crept closer and closer and his childhood disappeared, swallowed up by the enormous hole known as the Pit at the heart of the mine. Tommy Oja didn’t bother waiting for his colleague from Gällivare. He just grabbed the keys and camera and made his way inside.Insurance, that was what had dragged him out of bed. If a dinner service had smashed or a flat-screen TV had broken during the night’s quake, it was the mining company’s responsibility to replace it, not the contractor’s. In a month or two the movers would empty these apartments of all possessions. That was when the real work would begin, digging around the foundations, wedging pallets and steel beams beneath the structure, and securing the chimneys so that the houses could be transported to their new addresses. Once there, their owners would put all their furniture back and everything would look the same as ever, aside from the fact that their breathtaking views over Malmberget, the church tower, and the mountains had been replaced by a patch of forest outside Koskullskulle. The people who lived here were the lucky ones, Tommy Oja thought as he moved between the rooms, documenting everything. They got to take their homes with them—or at least some part of what made a home, whatever that was. A set of books had fallen from a shelf. The glass had cracked on a black-and-white wedding photograph, slightly yellowed with age. He took a picture of the damage and thought he could hear the couple’s moaning, staring down at their faces, the solemnity of a special occasion some hundred or so years in the past. The crack cut right across the man’s throat, split the bride’s face in two. “Pull yourself together, Tommy Oja,” he told himself.As a native of Malmberget, it was important to keep any sentimentality at bay. Everything around them was temporary, and they didn’t try to kid themselves otherwise. There was no crying over long-lost cinemas or the newspaper kiosks where they bought their first hockey cards. The ore had to be mined, and if it wasn’t for the mining company there would be nothing, no society or jobs, none of the riches that had built Sweden; there would be nothing but reindeer pastures and an expanse of untouched mountains. Certain people in Stockholm would probably think that was wonderful, of course, the ones who hung out in fancy bars and didn’t give a single thought to how their good fortune had been made, blasted from the rock beneath him. There it was again. For God’s sake.He couldn’t make out any words, just a quiet moaning, as though their voices were lingering in the walls.“Shut up,” he barked.“Who you talking to?”The kid was standing in the doorway, a young temp who had been brought in after one of the other guys slipped a disk. Bad timing. Moving these buildings was a prestigious job; they couldn’t afford for it to go wrong. The slightest imbalance and the walls could crack. The local press would be following the procedure, people lining the roads along the way. Finally watching their community disappear.“Dragged yourself out of bed, did you?” said Tommy Oja, heading back out into the stairwell, making his way upstairs.The young man stood still.“What was that?” he asked.“What?”“Sounded like an animal or something.”Tommy Oja stepped back down.“You heard it too?” he said.“Fuck, did someone forget the cat or something?”A jolt rattled through the pipes, a faint knocking. They stood perfectly still, neither uttering a word. The sounds traveled around them, muffled and evasive, then with renewed force. “The basement,” said the young man. “It must be coming from down there.”Tommy rummaged through the keys, trying one and then another. The door opened, a curved staircase leading down into the darkness. That was where it came to an end, by a metal door with a sturdy handle. They could no longer hear anything; the noise must have been transmitted some other way, possibly through the chimney. None of the keys fit the lock. “Shit,” Tommy muttered, turning around. He climbed the stairs first, the young man right behind him as they slowly made their way around the outside of the building. There it was again. He dropped to his knees by the basement window and turned on his torch. The pane of glass