A fictional crime story.
It started on a Tuesday.
When Karin pulled back the curtain shortly before midnight, a dark grey car was parked across the street. The engine was off, but someone was sitting behind the wheel.
She could not see the person’s face.
The next evening, the car was there again.
And the evening after that.
The Man in the Car
Karin lived alone in a quiet residential neighbourhood outside Gothenburg. She had recently retired and followed almost the same routine every day: a morning walk at eight, lunch at noon, and television in the evening.
Nobody usually waited outside her house.
On the fourth evening, she took out her phone and photographed the car through the window. The picture was blurred, but the registration number was visible.
The next morning, when she showed the photograph to her neighbour Tomas, he turned pale.
“Are you sure it was parked outside your house?” he asked.
“Yes. Why?”
Tomas looked around before answering.
“I’ve seen it before.”
A Twenty-Year-Old Photograph
Tomas explained that the same model of car had appeared in an old police investigation. Twenty years earlier, a woman had disappeared from the neighbourhood. Her name was Eva Lind, and she had lived in the house where Karin now lived.
The police had never found Eva.
The only witness had seen a dark car driving away late that evening.
At first, Karin laughed.
“There must be thousands of cars like that.”
But when she went up to the attic later that day, she found a box left behind by the previous owner. At the bottom was a yellowed photograph.
Eva was standing in front of the house.
Behind her was a dark grey car.
The registration number was the same as the one in Karin’s photograph.
Someone Had Been Inside
That night, Karin locked both the front door and the patio door. She placed a chair against the door handle and left her phone on the bedside table.
At 2:17 a.m., she woke to a sound downstairs.
A short metallic click.
Then footsteps.
Slow footsteps across the hall floor.
Karin picked up her phone and called the police without turning on the light. The operator told her to remain in the bedroom.
The footsteps stopped outside her door.
The handle slowly moved down.
Then she heard sirens in the distance.
The person outside the door ran downstairs and disappeared through the kitchen.
When the police arrived, the patio door was open.
The old photograph was lying on the kitchen table.
Someone had written on the back:
You should have left it alone.
The Secret Beneath the Floor
The police sealed off the house. A dog reacted to a loose floorboard in a storage space beneath the stairs.
There they found a plastic bag containing jewellery, documents and a cassette tape.
Two people could be heard arguing on the tape. One of the voices belonged to Eva. The other was later identified as her partner at the time.
He had left Sweden many years earlier and was believed to be dead.
But the car outside Karin’s house was registered to his son.
The son was arrested that same evening while trying to leave the country. Inside the car, the police found several objects that had belonged to Eva.
During questioning, he admitted that he had been searching for evidence that could connect his father to Eva’s disappearance.
He denied killing her.
A few weeks later, however, her remains were found in a wooded area, together with a tool that could be linked to the father.
The Car Never Returned
Karin sold the house the following year.
She never told the new owner about the car, the cassette tape or the footsteps outside her bedroom door.
But before leaving the house, she went up to the attic one final time.
Another photograph lay in the middle of the floor.
It showed Karin standing at the kitchen window.
The photograph had been taken from across the street.
On the back were only three words:
I saw you.
Dark Stories 