Praise for Black River

‘Dean’s series about deaf Swedish reporter Tuva Moodyson is a must read – and this book is his best yet… Black River is eerie, unnerving and buckets of fun.’

Observer, thriller of the month

‘Just finished Will Dean’s Black River. Splendid to catch up with Tuva Moodyson and that very special world... Such a BRILLIANT central character...great on women’s friendships.’

Ann Cleeves, author of the Vera Stanhope novels

‘A peerless exercise in suspense.’

Financial Times

‘The relentless pace drives you forward until you are hanging on to the pages by your fingertips, afraid to go on, but terrified to put it down. Another masterpiece from Mr Dean.’

Liz Nugent, author of Our Little Cruelties

‘My favourite Tuva novel yet... Atmospheric and chilling.’

Jane Casey, author of The Cutting Place

‘An atmospheric and electrifying return.’

****Heat

‘Black River what can I say? Will Dean raises the bar yet again. Suspenseful, distinctive, each page crackles with menace. Everything you could want in a thriller.’

Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End

Praise for Red Snow

‘For all those who loved Dark Pines by Will Dean I can tell you that the forthcoming sequel, Red Snow is even better. Scandi noir meets Gormenghast. Just wonderful. Can’t get enough of Tuva Moodyson.’

Mark Billingham, author of the Tom Thorne novels

‘A complex plot suffused with the nightmarish quality of Twin Peaks and a tough-minded, resourceful protagonist add up to a stand-out read.’

Guardian

‘Makes the blood run even colder than Dark Pines: Will Dean goes from strength to strength.’

Erin Kelly, author of He Said / She Said

‘This is just what crime fiction readers want: the old magic formula made to seem fresh.’

Telegraph, best thrillers and crime fiction of 2019

‘Great Scandi noir with an excellent heroine. Though beware – liquorice will never taste the same again.’

Ruth Ware, author of One by One

‘Total Scandi vibes, a cracking plot and a hugely likeable heroine: the dream.’

Grazia

‘This is a crime novel of poise and polish, peopled with utterly compelling characters. Claustrophobic, chilling and as dark as liquorice. Brilliant.’

Fiona Cummins, author of The Neighbour

Praise for Dark Pines

‘The tension is unrelenting, and I can’t wait for Tuva’s next outing.’

Val McDermid, author of the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels

‘Memorably atmospheric, with a dogged and engaging protagonist, this is a compelling start to what promises to be an excellent series.’

Guardian

‘The best thriller I’ve read in ages.’

Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups

‘Atmospheric, creepy and tense. Loved the Twin Peaks vibe. Loved Tuva. More please!’

C. J. Tudor, author of The Chalk Man

‘A remarkably assured debut, Dark Pines is in turn, tense, gripping and breathtaking, and marks out Will Dean as a true talent. Definitely one to watch.’

Abir Mukherjee, author of A Rising Man

‘Dean never lets the tension drop as his story grows ever more sinister.’

Daily Mail

‘Bravo! I was so completely immersed in Dark Pines and Tuva is a brilliant protagonist. This HAS to be a TV series!’

Nina Pottell, Prima magazine

‘Will Dean’s impressive debut shows that Nordic noir can be mastered by a Brit.’

The Times

ALSO BY WILL DEAN

Dark Pines

Red Snow

Black River

The Last Thing to Burn

For all the English teachers. I know it’s not always easy but we appreciate you. For helping young people fall in love with stories and language. For your enthusiasm and heart. Your dedication. And for introducing fiction to the kids who need it most. Thank you.

1

I slam my foot on the brakes and come to a halt a metre behind the black car.

My Hilux shakes on its axels.

Thick fog.

My seatbelt digs in. The 4x4 in front has its hazard lights flashing. Wisps of fog drift between my bonnet and its rear end, illuminated by my headlights. Is the driver in trouble? I open my window a crack and mist pours in like smoke billowing around a closed door. Why would you stop your car on this hillside road? It hasn’t broken down, the exhaust fumes are drifting out into the forest air.

I switch on my hazard lights and that’s when I hear the scream.

Then another scream. Fainter. Or perhaps just an echo.

My head jolts to the left, to the dense pines hidden by the fog. Sweat starts to drip down my back. I check my phone. Good reception. Another scream, this one weaker: lost to the mists.

Did the driver in front leave the relative safety of their car to wander through the trees?

As I open my door to get out, the 4x4 in front jerks back and its rear lights shine bright in my face. I fall onto wet ground, my hands sinking into leaf sludge. Are they reversing into me? I scramble to my feet.

‘Hey!’ I yell.

The black car has rolled back a little because of the steepness of Visberg hill, that’s all. More like a mountain than a hill. Almost a cliff. The car gains traction and its tyres squeal as it accelerates hard and disappears uphill into the murk.

My heart’s thumping.

Cold air and exhaust fumes.

‘Help me,’ says a woman’s voice. Someone in the forest.

I climb back into my Hilux and pull over, half on the road, half off, and switch on my hazards. I don’t know this hillside forest, I have not stepped into its trees before. But I must check on this screaming woman. How can I not?

‘Hello?’ I shout out.

Nothing.

Chill around the back of my neck.

I jump a ditch that’s October-full of stagnant brown water, and enter the treeline. One tree deep. Three trees deep. Five.

‘Hello? Are you okay?

She screams again. No answer, just a guttural plea.

I turn and I can’t see my Hilux anymore, can’t see the road. No hazard lights, no headlights, no tarmac. The fog is rolling through on the breeze. It is the breeze. Misty waves stroking my face, dampening my hair. I use my hands to cover my hearing aids and then I yell, ‘I’m coming!’

I walk. I cannot run. I’d fall into a ravine and die. I’d slip on a rock and plunge headfirst into a freezing river. I walk and I focus on where I think the woman is, and let me tell you I am not well qualified for this task. Not in twilight. Not in autumn. Not in fog-riddled woodland.

Sobbing. One of my hearing aids is damp and it’s giving me feedback.

‘Where are you?’ I shout.

‘Over here,’ she says, and I could almost laugh if this situation wasn’t so desperate.

I trudge past stumps and trip over moss-crusted boulders. There are boggy stretches that hunger for my boots and my shins. I try to step on roots. Dry land.

I find a path of sorts and start to jog. My chest feels like it’ll explode; cold mist pumping down into my lungs and out again.

The slimy caps of wet mushrooms glisten in my peripheral vision.

She screams again. Unintelligible. Is she trapped by a bull elk? Held down by a man? Injured in some kind of animal trap?

I have no bearings. I could be anywhere. Nowhere. I turn on my heels and the next scream sounds like it’s from the other way. Is she moving around in this forest? Am I going round in circles?

I almost run face first into the house.

A damp, wooden structure with no windows at all on the ground floor. No door I can see. A painted doll’s house that’s been damaged in a fire rests on a tree stump. It’s sat a little way from the main building. The kennel-size roof is blackened and the tiny furniture inside is singed. I look around at the real house. Lots of windows upstairs but no way in or out. What is this place? Some forest-ranger station? Green pollen and mould rising up from the forest floor, trying to reach up to those high windows. A bronze clock bolted onto the gable end; a clock with no hands to tell the time with.

‘Please,’ says the voice. ‘You have to come.’

The voice is close. Is she inside the house?

I turn a quarter circle and listen to her voice and then I run. To where I think she is. I have my phone and the knife Benny Björnmossen sold me last year. I run.

‘Keep talking,’ I yell, gasping for breath. ‘I can’t see you in the fog.’

And so she does. She whispers continually. Droning. Chanting. Is she injured? Or is this whole thing a trap?

I dash through birches and around pine trees, their dead lower branches scratching at my neck, drawing blood on my wrist.

She’s whispering now.

I can barely hear her.

‘I’m nearly there,’ I yell, but I have no idea where ‘there’ is, just as I have no notion of where ‘here’ is either. Drop me in a forest and I’m likely to fall down and give up, but throw in thick fog and I may as well…

An arm catches round my neck.

I fall.

Wet moss and pine needles.

A body on top of me. Heavy. Smells of waxed jacket. A forearm to my face.

‘Get off me!’

‘Please,’ she says.

I roll away and she is staring at me, her eyes bulging and red, her fingers bloody.

‘Please.’

‘Who are you?’ I ask, the fog managing to drift between us, her face breaking up behind the static.

She gets to her knees and stands and I see her jeans are red. Stained. Splattered.

I pull my knife from my bag and she says, ‘No,’ and puts her palms to her face, and she says, ‘No, no, no.’

I take a deep breath of forest air, dense with spores and rotten leaves. It’s thick autumn air laced with the tang of rot and decay.

‘Over there,’ she says, pointing into the mists.

I swallow hard and stand up and move to where she’s pointing.

A fallen pine, its root system flat and sprawling like a metro map. A dash of colour behind. A coat?

I clamber over the pine, its rough bark scratching at my trousers like the nails of a grasping hand.

Two boots.

And two legs.

‘Dead,’ she says.

I look back and see the woman properly for the first time. She’s shaking her head. No coat. Just a haunted expression.

‘What happened here?’ I ask. But she just points harder, her blood-tipped index finger stabbing into the fog.

She doesn’t come to where I am. She stays back.

My foot plunges into a deep pile of leaves and brown, acidic water fills my boot.

‘Call the police,’ I say.

‘No phone.’

I take out my phone and dial Gavrik police. ‘It’s me, Tuva Moodyson. Halfway up Visberg hill. You’ll see my truck. Fifteen minutes into the forest on the north side. Near a house with no ground-floor windows. A body.’ I end the call because what more is there to say.

The woman keeps back and I don’t trust her yet. I don’t like the look of her scarlet hands.

The body is resting on granite, not earth.

Covering the rock is a thin layer of saturated, bright-green moss. A blanket.

The head is hidden by a coat, probably the screaming woman’s coat, but I can tell this is a man’s body. From his boots, his hands, his shape.

I turn back to her. ‘The police are on their way.’

She just looks at the coat covering the top half of the body, at the reflective patches now red with fresh blood, and she chews on her lip and shakes her head from side to side. I’m losing her to these mists. She’s two metres from me and she’s now just a ghost of a person.

The dead man’s wearing black jeans. Rubber boots. His coat is open to reveal his blood-soaked beige sweater. No wedding ring. His palms face up. A single fallen pine needle rests along one of his lifelines, nestled in the crease of his motionless hand.

I kneel down.

Next to my knee is the crisp curve of a copper beech leaf and sitting within its cupped form is a pool of human blood. No animal is troubling it. There is no ant or fly arriving to fulfil a basic destiny. It’s perfect. Obscene.

I reach out to lift the corner of the coat covering him, and the woman lets out a ghoulish bark.

A warning.

‘I need to check for a pulse,’ I say, although looking at the wound on this man’s chest, the amount of blood loss, I know it’s a preposterous notion. He is lifeless. But I must. Even here in this hillside forest, we must hope.

‘No,’ she says.

The fog drifts past her and I see the dread in her eyes, the blood on her face now that she drags her fingers across her damp cheeks.

I turn back to her coat, careful not to disturb the bloody beech leaf.

I hold the coat by the zip toggle and lift it a fraction.

My fingers automatically connect with his skin so I can take a pulse.

I move the coat higher and throw it to one side.

No pulse.

And no head.

2

I scrabble away from the body and come to rest with my back against a rotting birch trunk.

I pant for air. Desperate for fresh air, my chest convulsing.

The woman is sobbing somewhere behind me.

What happened to this headless man? A bear attack out here in Visberg forest? A wolf attack?

I swallow repeatedly to stop myself from throwing up but there is acid in my mouth. I lock my jaw and look away from the scene.

The woman’s shaking her head and rocking back and forth on her heels.

I step over to her.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

She just shakes her head more vigorously.

I reach out to comfort her but she pulls back and her head lifts. The woman’s eyes are wide, her focus darting this way and that.

‘The police are on their way,’ I say. ‘I’m Tuva Moodyson.’

She nods and I urge her to step further away from the headless corpse. I don’t touch her or get too close, I just smile and signal with my head that we could move away.

The woman takes a few strides with me.

We don’t talk. We’ve seen too much for chitchat. But the air is better here. It’s too heavy back by the body. Dense with death. It’s suffocating.

‘What did that?’ she asks, with a strong accent I can’t quite pinpoint. Lebanese? Syrian? ‘What could do that?’

She’s pointing over at the body and her fingertip is red.

‘I don’t know. How long have you been here?’

She just stares at the man on the moss-covered granite. At her coat concealing his gaping neck wound.

‘How long have you been here?’ I ask again, louder this time.

Her eyes snap to me. ‘Half an hour, maybe,’ she says. ‘I don’t know. I was out looking for mushrooms when the clouds came down. I got lost. On the way back to the road I almost fell over him.’

I offer her some spearmint gum and she takes it.

We both chew and the mint helps.

‘I saw it. The wound. The skin and the…’

She trails off. Her Swedish is excellent but I have to focus to understand.

‘Did you see anyone else around?’ I ask.

She shakes her head.

‘I screamed for help. I couldn’t just leave him out here all alone, but I wanted to. I wanted to run away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

She doesn’t cry. We don’t touch hands or arms. We just stand very close in this wild place. A gunshot rings out and she ducks.

‘Elk hunt,’ I say.

‘I know,’ she says, standing up straight once again.

Her teeth start chattering.

‘Wear my coat for a while.’

‘No, I’m okay.’

I look back at her coat. The neon fabric and the growing darkness and fog affording this headless man some modicum of privacy, some tiny shred of dignity.

I take out mittens from my pockets and offer them to her and she takes them without looking at me. To cover her red fingers more than to protect her from cold. To distance herself from the blood.

‘What’s your––’

‘Alright, what’s the situation here,’ booms a loud voice from somewhere in the fog. A torch beam swings over us and then a man steps closer. From his demeanour I’d say he’s police.

‘Officer, over there.’

He’s not in police uniform. Must be a plain-clothes officer or some kind of park ranger.

The man shines his torch over at the body. The reflective patches of the coat shine back. A wet slug climbing up the dead man’s boot shines back. The drying blood shines back.

‘Please move away,’ says the man. ‘Move back now.’

We do as he says.

The cop uses a stick to lift the corner of the coat and then he stumbles back in much the same way I did. Except he staggers away from the scene and starts to gag.

The woman covers her eyes with her hand.

More voices from the murk. Words I can’t make out. Torchlight. A radio.

Thord steps through the fog and says, ‘Are you okay, Tuvs?’

I nod.

‘She okay?’

‘Yeah.’

He walks over to the other guy and they chat and then Thord gestures for the plain-clothes cop to come and stand with us. Chief Björn and Noora arrive. We’re told to move further back and wait.

Noora takes down the woman’s name and contact details and then she tapes up the scene. She doesn’t look at me, she just sticks blue-and-white striped police tape from pine tree to birch, from stump to boulder.

Others arrive and the fog lifts some more.

Lights are erected on tripods. The scene is photographed. There are people here putting on white zip-up suits.

Through the mists the striped police tape looks like lasers at a nightclub.

The Chief walks to us.

‘Are you alright?’

The woman and I both nod.

‘We’re going to need statements from you both. Can you accompany me to Gavrik police department.’

‘I need to make a phone call,’ she says.

‘You can do that from my police vehicle.’

‘I’ll follow in my truck.’

He nods and sighs. ‘Terrible business.’

We walk together through the trees and there’s a dull ache at the back of my jaw. A molar or a wisdom tooth. The path is even and the air has cleared to the point where I can see at least ten metres ahead. With the Chief here it’s not like walking through a dark place. He has a gun on his hip and he gives off the kind of confidence you have when you’ve been raised in forest country. Like nothing bad could ever happen to him.

Visberg hill is a line of police, coroner, and other emergency vehicles. The blue lights strobe up into the wet pine canopy and dance off the surface water of the ditches.

I follow Chief Björn and the woman down the hill in my Hilux. My legs are tired. I’m not hungry, just exhausted. The hazy image of that rough, severed neck will be engraved on my mind until the day I die. I will try to delete it, or at least archive it, but I already know I will fail.

The forty-minute drive back to Gavrik passes in seconds. A blur. A bad dream. We take the long route back because of the driving conditions, I guess. The Chief always prides himself on doing things the correct way. The safe way. I get a pain in the pit of my stomach as we pass between McDonalds and ICA Maxi, the two gateposts of Toytown. A pain and an ache all in one.

Gavrik is deserted. October. Drizzle and fog. Why wouldn’t it be.

I park up in my space behind Gavrik Posten and walk over. The shadow of the Grimberg Liquorice factory is lost to the mists.

Inside the cop shop things are warm and bleached and predictable. Bolted down seats and safety posters. Vertical strip blinds. Humming radiators. A copy of the Gavrik Posten left folded on the pine counter.

The woman is hungry and feels faint, so she gets looked after while I go through to the back and give the Chief my statement.

‘Sorry you had to see that,’ he says.

‘Me too.’

He takes his notepad and switches on his recording device and slowly unscrews the lid of his fountain pen.

I tell him how I heard the scream. About the black 4x4 that drove away up the hill. How I found the woman near the house with no ground-floor windows. Saw the body. Lifted the coat.

‘You notice anyone else in the area?’

‘No.’

‘Any other vehicles parked on Visberg hill? Anyone up near the derelict train tracks?’

‘No, but it was so foggy I couldn’t see much.’

He makes a note. Dark green ink.

‘Notice any noises in the forest out of place? Quad bike? Any fresh bootprints?’

‘No.’

‘Did the woman say anything to you?’

‘Just that she found him. Asked me if an animal could have done that to him.’

‘An animal?’ He looks up.

I nod.

‘Was she wearing a headscarf when you found her? A yellow headscarf?’

I shake my head.

‘She mention Pan Night or Halloween?’

‘What’s Pan Night?’

He ignores that. ‘Did you take any photographs of the crime scene?’

‘Why?’

‘Just answer the question, please.’

‘No.’

‘Can I check your phone?’

‘No.’

He takes a deep sigh. ‘I’m going to ask you to keep any photos or specific details out of your newspaper for the time being. We need to keep all the information tight until we know what happened tonight.’

‘No photos,’ I say. ‘I’ll agree to that.’

‘Or specific details.’

‘Chief, you know as well as I do, if I don’t print what I found then someone else will. Fast. You can’t contain this. People have a right to know.’

‘Do they, now?’

I nod and clear the corners of my eyes. My mascara has clumped.

‘I’ll be sensitive,’ I say.

‘Mind you are.’

He photographs my boots, the treads.

I walk out of the cop shop and past Benny Björnmossen’s gun store. His shop’s still open and it’s full of customers. Brisk business. That’s elk-hunt season for you. Ammunition and high-energy hunt dog-food and GPS trackers. Camouflage jackets and gutting knives. The bell tinkles as I open the door to the Posten. Empty office. The clock on the wall says 7:40pm. Three desks in here looks wrong. It’s one too many. But we’re managing.

Lena steps out from her office at the rear left.

‘Just got a call from Ragnar Falk. A dead hunter?’

She steps toward me and reaches out her hand and places it on my wrist.

Suddenly I feel faint. I steady myself.

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