Wolf Pack by Will Dean

Author:Will Dean [Dean, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Point Blank

26

I spend three hours writing up stories, some of which happened almost a week ago, before the murder of Elsa Nyberg, before the community changed, before parents started bribing and pleading with their teenage daughters to stay home each night. Every culture has its bogeyman folklore. Pied pipers and charming werewolves and tall men of the forest who snatch adolescents from their beds. Trolls who swap their own offspring for human children. But right now, right here, we have something worse. Because our monster is real. And he, or she, is still at large.

Drafting headlines and copy is soothing, it always is. Hearing aids out, bag of wine gums open on my desk, Lars in the background, working on arranging and sorting all the photo entries for the Posten’s ‘Scenic Spring’ competition. We’ve extended it to Visberg of course, and we’ve had a record number of entries: twelve. Lars told me one year, before I arrived in shitsville, they had one entry. So, she won. This year we have relatively fierce competition and the prize is a meal for two at the Visberg Grill (no drinks included) and a kilo of Grimberg salted liquorice, which sounds to me like a guarantee for volcanic diarrhoea, but whatever floats your boat, baby.

My focus is Elsa’s murder, but I still need to work on the peripheral stories. There’s a local interest piece on the new weather vane for the Lutheran church. Well, I guess they’re all local interest pieces by default. Some argument at the Kommun planning offices over a cycle-path extension by the gymnasium school. Another article on how the mild winter has affected tick populations in Utgard forest and beyond. Nice quote from a mother, who’s boy was bitten by twenty-two ticks all in one day. Two good photos. All this seems irrelevant, almost ghoulish, in light of Elsa’s story, but such is the reality of a small community newspaper. If I wrote every page on the murder then locals would be overwhelmed. They’d shun the paper and they’d talk to their neighbours and their colleagues and they’d agree that the paper has gone downhill since the deaf girl from Stockholm started almost five years ago, and they’ll say they need positive news, not just negative, why does she try to talk the town down, why can’t she write about the good things that make Gavrik so special?

Why indeed.

I check the Four Horsemen forum but Grey Man hasn’t posted. Seventeen members have asked him questions, asked his advice, and most of them have asked in such a way that they communicate the fact that they’re not newbies, they’re pretty serious operators, they try to make that clear within their question, to validate themselves.

The door moves so I look up. By the time I’ve put my hearing aids back in, the bell above the door has stopped tinkling.

‘I won’t get in your hair, just come in to say hello as I’m passing…’

It’s the owner of the now-defunct town stationery store. Rushed eyeliner, faux-leather handbag, coat so substantial it’d stop a bullet.

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