The Crow Girl (53 page)

When they reach the hospital he switches off the engine.

‘Well, then,’ he says, and Victoria gets out of the car. The door shuts with a muffled thud, and she knows he’s going to sit there in the silence that follows.

She also knows that he’s going to stay there so there’s no need for her to keep looking round to make sure that the distance between them is actually growing. Her footsteps get lighter and lighter with every metre she puts between them. Her lungs expand, and she fills them with air that’s so unlike the air around him. So fresh.

Without him I wouldn’t be ill, she thinks.

Without him she would be nothing, she knows, but she avoids thinking that thought to its conclusion.

The therapist she sees is past retirement age, but still working.

Sixty-six years old, as wise as her years. To begin with progress had been sluggish, but after just a few sessions Victoria had found it easier to open up.

As she steps into the clinic the eyes are the first thing Victoria sees.

They’re what she longs for most. She can land safely in them.

The woman’s eyes help Victoria to understand herself. They’re ancient, they’ve seen everything and they’re trustworthy. They don’t panic, and they don’t tell her she’s crazy, but nor do they tell her she’s right, or that they understand her.

The woman’s eyes don’t mess around.

That’s why she can look into them and feel calm.

‘When was the last time you felt really good?’ She opens each meeting with a question that she can then use as a base for the entire session.

‘The last time I ironed Dad’s shirts he said they were perfect.’ Victoria smiles because she knows that there wasn’t a single crease on them, and that the collars were starched just enough.

Those eyes give her their complete attention, they’re there just for her.

‘And if you had to choose one thing that you would do for the rest of your life, would it be ironing shirts?’

‘No, definitely not!’ Victoria exclaims. ‘Ironing shirts is really boring.’ And suddenly she realises what she’s said, why she said it, and how it ought to be. ‘Sometimes I rearrange his desk and drawers,’ she goes on, getting carried away, ‘to see if he notices anything when he comes home. He hardly ever does.’

‘How are your studies going?’ the old woman interrupts without giving any sign of having noticed Victoria’s answer.

‘OK.’ Victoria shrugs.

‘What mark did you get for your latest assignment?’

Victoria hesitates.

She can remember what it was perfectly well, but isn’t sure if she can say it.

It sounds so ridiculous.

‘Excellent,’ she says sarcastically. ‘It said, “You have a phenomenal understanding of the neural processes, and add exciting thoughts of your own that I would like to see you develop in a longer piece of work.”’

The therapist looks at her, wide-eyed, and claps her hands together. ‘But that’s wonderful, Victoria! Didn’t you feel pleased when you got your work back with something like that on it?’

‘But,’ Victoria begins, ‘it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it’s only pretend.’

‘Victoria,’ the psychologist says seriously. ‘I know you’ve talked about your difficulties telling the difference between what is real and what’s pretend, as you put it, or what’s important to you and what isn’t, as I put it … If you think about it, isn’t this a good example of that? You claim you feel good when you iron shirts, but you don’t really want to do it. And when you study, which you like doing, you do very well indeed, but’ – she raises a finger and fixes her eyes on Victoria’s – ‘you don’t allow yourself to be happy when you receive praise for something you enjoy doing.’

Those eyes, Victoria thinks. They see everything she herself has never seen, only suspected. They enlarge her when she tries to shrink herself, and they gently show her the difference between what she thinks she sees, hears and feels, and what is happening in everyone else’s reality.

Victoria wishes she could see with old, wise eyes. Like the psychologist.

The lightness she feels in the psychologist’s room only lasts for the twenty-eight steps down to the main entrance. Then silence in the car home.

They pass block after block, house after house, family after family. She sees a girl her own age walking arm in arm with her mother. They look so untroubled.

That girl could have been me, Victoria thinks.

She realises she could have been anyone.

But she ended up as her.

‘We’re going to have a talk over dinner,’ he says as he opens the car door and gets out onto the street. He grabs his trousers and hoists them so far up over his stomach that she can see the outline of his testicles. Victoria looks away and walks towards the house.

The house is like a black hole that destroys everyone who enters it, and she opens the door and lets herself be swallowed up.

Mum says nothing when they come in, but she’s got dinner ready. They sit around the table. Dad, Mum and Victoria. When they sit there she realises that they look like a family.

‘Victoria,’ he begins, folding his veiny hands and putting them on the table. Whatever he’s about to say, she knows this isn’t a talk. He’s giving orders. ‘We think you might benefit from a little change of scenery,’ he says, ‘and your mother and I have decided the best solution would be to combine work with pleasure.’ He looks expectantly at her mother, who nods and serves him some potatoes.

‘Do you remember Viggo?’ He looks questioningly at Victoria.

She remembers Viggo.

A Danish man who used to come on regular visits when she was little.

Never when Mum was at home.

‘Viggo has a farm in Jutland, and he needs someone to look after the farmhouse. Nothing too demanding, because of course we’re aware of your current condition.’

‘My current condition?’ Once more she feels the pulsating fury that settles like a luminous screen over her paralysis.

‘You know what I mean,’ he says in a louder voice. ‘You walk around talking to yourself. You have imaginary friends even though you’re seventeen years old. You have tantrums and behave like a small child. We all want what’s best for you, and Viggo has contacts in Aalborg who can help you. You’ll be going down to his farm in the spring. And that’s all there is to it.’

They sit in silence as he ends his meal with a cup of tea. He puts a lump of sugar between his lips and any moment now he’ll filter the tea through it until it dissolves.

They sit in silence as he drinks. Slurping, the way he always does.

‘It’s for your own sake,’ he concludes, then gets up and goes over to the sink, where he rinses his cup with his back to them. Mum squirms on her seat and looks away.

He turns off the tap, dries his hands and leans back against the worktop. ‘You’re not an adult yet,’ he says. ‘We’re responsible for you. There’s nothing to discuss.’

No, I know that, she thinks. There’s nothing to discuss, and there never has been.

ONCE IVO ANDRIĆ
, Schwarz and Åhlund have left the conference room, Hurtig leans forward across the table and speaks to Jeanette in a low voice. ‘Before we go any further with Silfverberg, where are we with the old cases?’

‘Not much progress. At least not from my side. How about you? Anything new?’

‘Good and bad news,’ he says. ‘What do you want first?’

‘Anything but a cliché,’ Jeanette says. He loses his train of thought, and she grins at him. ‘Sorry, only joking. Start with the bad news. You know that’s what I prefer.’

‘OK. First Dürer and von Kwist’s judicial history. Apart from five or six dropped cases where they were on opposite sides, I can’t see anything odd. And even that isn’t particularly surprising seeing as they specialise in the same sort of crime.’

Jeanette nods. ‘Go on.’

‘The list of donors. Sihtunum i Diasporan is supported by a group of former students at Sigtuna College, businessmen and politicians, successful people with flawless records. There are just a few with no direct link to the school, but we can probably assume that they know a former student or have other contacts there.’

A dead end, at least for the time being, Jeanette thinks, and gestures for Hurtig to go on.

‘The IP address was a bit tricky. The user who posted the list of donors only made that one comment, and I had to do some digging before I could identify the IP address. Guess where it leads?’

‘A dead end?’

He throws out his hands. ‘A 7-Eleven shop in Malmö. If you’ve got twenty-nine kronor, you can buy a ticket from a machine completely anonymously and sit down at one of the terminals for an hour.’

‘And the good news?’

Jens Hurtig grins. ‘Per-Ola Silfverberg is one of the donors.’

Before Jeanette Kihlberg leaves police headquarters for the day, Dennis Billing informs her of the budget for the Silfverberg case, and as she drives past Rådhuset it occurs to her that even the preliminary budget Billing has allocated is more than ten times what she was given for her work on the murdered boys.

Dead children with no papers are worth less than dead Swedes with careers and money in the bank.

If only Billing had given her enough money to get a decent perpetrator profile drawn up four months ago, when they found the first two bodies, she wouldn’t have had to organise one on her own.

Now Sofia would have to do the work without payment or recognition, and Jeanette finds that embarrassing. She decides not to put any pressure on Sofia, and give her all the time she needs.

She thinks about what determines the value of a human life. Is it the number of mourners at the funeral, the financial value of the estate, or the media interest in the death? The social influence of the deceased? Their country of origin or skin colour? Or the sum of police resources allocated to a murder investigation?

She knows that the cost of investigating the death of Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had risen to fifteen million kronor by the time the Court of Appeal upheld Mijailo Mijailović’s sentence for her murder, and she knows that it was widely regarded within the police as cheap in comparison to the three hundred and fifty million that Prime Minister Olof Palme’s death had cost the public so far.

WHEN SOFIA ZETTERLUND
wakes up her body feels sore, as if she’s run miles in her sleep, and she gets up and goes into the bathroom.

I look terrible, she thinks when she sees her face in the mirror above the sink.

Her hair is a mess, and she forgot to remove her make-up before going to bed. The smeared mascara looks like she’s got black eyes, and her lipstick is a pink smear across her chin.

What actually happened yesterday?

She wipes her face, turns and pulls the shower curtain aside. The bath is full to the brim with water. There’s an empty wine bottle at the bottom, and the label floating on the surface tells her it’s the expensive bottle of Rioja from the drinks cabinet.

I’m not the one who drinks, she thinks. Victoria is.

What else, apart from a few bottles of wine and a bath? Did I go out last night?

She opens the door and looks into the hall. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But when she goes into the kitchen she sees a plastic bag in front of the cupboard under the sink, and even before she bends over and unties it, she realises it doesn’t contain rubbish.

All the clothes are soaking wet as she pulls them from the bag.

Her black knitted top, a black vest and her dark grey sweatpants. With a deep sigh of resignation she spreads them on the kitchen floor and examines them more closely.

They’re not dirty, but they smell musty. That’s probably because they’ve been in the bag all night, and she wrings the top out above the sink.

The water is dirty brown, and when she tastes it she can detect a hint of salt, but it’s impossible to tell if the taste comes from sweat on the top itself, or from salt water outside somewhere.

She realises that she’s not going to work out what she was doing last night for the time being, gathers the clothes together, and hangs them up to dry in the bathroom before pulling the plug from the bath and taking care of the wine bottle.

Then she goes back into her bedroom, opens the blinds and glances at the clock radio. Quarter to eight. No rush. Ten minutes in the shower, another ten in front of the mirror, then a taxi to the practice. First client at nine o’clock.

Linnea Lundström is coming at one o’clock, she remembers. But who is she seeing before that? She isn’t sure.

She closes the window and takes a deep breath.

This can’t go on. I can’t carry on like this. Victoria has to go.

Half an hour later Sofia Zetterlund is sitting in a taxi, checking her face in the rear-view mirror as the car rolls down Borgmästargatan.

She’s happy with what she sees. Her mask is in place, but inside she’s shaking.

The difference now is that she’s aware of the gaps in her memory. Before, the gaps were such a natural part of her that her brain didn’t register them. They simply didn’t exist. Now they’re there like worrying black holes in her life.

She knows she has to learn to handle this. She has to learn to function again, and she has to get to know Victoria Bergman. The child she once was. The grown woman she later became, hidden from the world, and herself.

The memories of Victoria’s life, her childhood in the Bergman family, aren’t arranged like an archive of photographs where you just have to open a box, pick out a folder with a particular date or event on it, then look at the pictures. Memories of her childhood appear haphazardly, creeping up on her when she least expects it. Sometimes they pop up without external stimulus, but on other occasions an object or a conversation can throw her back in time.

In Annette Lundström’s thin face Sofia had seen a girl from Victoria Bergman’s first year in Sigtuna. A girl two years older than Victoria, one of the ones who whispered about her, casting sly glances at her in the school corridors.