The Crow Girl (56 page)

Memories of scrubbing for hours in a steaming shower, the coarse sponge and the smell of soap, but never being able to wash away the stench of him.

Forced to become someone else to dare to feel longing, closeness. To be able to be normal. Ruined forever because of what a man had done. Sofia can feel her blood boiling.

‘Ulrika …’ Sofia leans over the desk to underline her question. ‘Can you tell me what pleasure is?’

The girl sits quietly for a while before she answers. ‘Sleep.’

‘How is your sleep?’ Sofia asks. ‘Can you tell me about it?’

Ulrika breathes in with a deep sigh. ‘Empty. It’s nothing.’

‘So pleasure for you is not feeling?’ Sofia thinks of her chafed heels, the pain she needs in order to feel calm. ‘Pleasure is nothing?’

Ulrika doesn’t answer the question, but straightens her back and says angrily instead, ‘After those bastards raped me in that hotel I drank every day for four years.’ Her eyes are black. ‘Then I tried to pull myself together, but I can’t see what the fucking point is. I always end up back in the shit.’

‘What sort of shit do you end up in?’

Ulrika slumps in her chair.

‘It’s like my body isn’t mine, or that it sends out signals that make people think they can do whatever the fuck they like with me. People can hit me, they can fuck me, no matter what I say or do. I tell them it fucking hurts, but that doesn’t make any difference.’

The vestibulitis, Sofia thinks. Unwanted intercourse and dry membranes. This is a girl who doesn’t know how it feels to desire anything, who has simply learned to dream about avoidance. And being inside the void of sleep is obviously a release.

Perhaps Ulrika’s behaviour in the bar contained one important element. A situation where she could make the decisions, where she was in control. Ulrika was so unused to acting on her own desires that she simply didn’t recognise herself.

It would be easy to think this was a case of dissociation. But dissociation doesn’t develop in teenagers, it’s a child’s defence mechanism.

This is more like confrontational behaviour, Sofia thinks, in the absence of a better description. A sort of cognitive self-therapy.

Sofia is aware that the girl was drugged in the hotel room, with something that paralysed her lower body and led to her becoming incontinent.

She realises that Ulrika’s condition, including possibly anorexia, self-loathing, relatively low-level alcoholism and a background of abusive and exploitative boyfriends, probably goes back to this one event seven years ago.

Everything is Karl Lundström’s fault.

Ulrika suddenly turns even paler. ‘What’s that?’

Sofia doesn’t understand what she means. The girl’s gaze is fixed on something on the desk.

Five seconds’ silence. Then Ulrika gets up from her chair and picks up the printout from the document basket. The picture of Viggo Dürer.

Sofia doesn’t know how to react. Shit, she thinks. How could I be so thoughtless? ‘That’s Karl Lundström’s lawyer’ is all she manages to say. ‘Have you met him?’

Ulrika looks, stares at the picture for a few seconds, then puts it down on the desk. ‘Oh, forget it. Never seen him before. I thought it was someone else.’ The girl tries to smile, but Sofia doesn’t find the result very convincing.

Ulrika Wendin has met Viggo Dürer.

‘
SO, WHAT DO
we do about the daughter?’ Hurtig looks at Jeanette.

‘Obviously she’s of great interest to us. Find out as much as you can about her. Name, address and so on. Well, you know the sort of thing.’

Hurtig nods. ‘Shall I put out an alert for her?’

Jeanette considers. ‘No, not yet. Let’s hold off and see what we can find out about her.’ She gets up to go back to her office. ‘I’ll call von Kwist and suggest a meeting tomorrow, so we can find out what the hell happened.’

After a short call to the prosecutor to set up a meeting about the dropped investigation into P-O Silfverberg, Jeanette gets in her car to drive home.

Stockholm strikes her as greyer and wetter than ever. A city in black and white. On the horizon the clouds are breaking up, and between their shining edges she can see glimpses of blue sky. When she gets out of the car there’s a smell of earthworms and wet grass.

Johan is sitting in front of the television when Jeanette gets home just after five, and from what she can see in the kitchen it looks like he’s already eaten. She goes over to the sofa and kisses the top of his head.

‘Hello, darling. Had a good day?’

He shrugs his shoulders and doesn’t answer.

‘We’ve had a card from Grandma and Grandad. I left it on the kitchen table.’ He turns the volume up.

Jeanette goes back into the kitchen, picks up the postcard and looks at the picture. The Great Wall of China, tall mountains and a rolling green landscape. She reads the back. They’re fine, but missing home. The usual.

She clears the draining board and fills the dishwasher before going upstairs to have a shower.

When she comes back down, Johan has vanished into his room, and she can hear him playing one of his computer games.

She and Åke had talked about stopping Johan playing the most violent games, but soon realised there was no point. All his friends have them, so a ban would have no effect at all. Have I been overprotective? she wonders, then suddenly gets an idea.

Which game has he been going on about recently? The one everyone apart from him has got? She goes into the kitchen and calls Hurtig.

‘Hi. Can I have your help with something?’

He sounds out of breath. ‘Sure. What with? Anything I need to look up?’

‘You could answer this in your sleep. What’s the most popular computer game right now?’

‘
Assassin’s Creed
,’ he replies instantly.

‘No.’

‘
Counter-Strike
?’

Jeanette recognises the name. ‘No, unless I’ve got this wrong, I don’t think it’s an action game.’

Hurtig is breathing hard down the line, then there’s the sound of a door closing. ‘You must be thinking of
Spore
?’ he eventually suggests.

‘Yep, that was it. Is it violent?’

‘That depends on how you choose to play, but there’s an evolutionary element where you have to develop your character from a tiny cell to master of the universe, and a bit of violence can come in handy now and then.’

The computer noises from Johan’s room go quiet, he opens the door, goes into the hall and starts putting his shoes on. Jeanette asks Hurtig to wait a moment while she asks Johan where he’s going, but the only answer she gets is the front door closing.

When he’s gone she smiles forlornly and picks up the phone. ‘I came home early today because I was worried Johan might have shut himself away in his room or disappeared to a friend’s. And since I got home he’s managed to do both.’

‘I understand,’ Hurtig says. ‘And now you want to surprise him?’

‘Yep. Forgive my ignorance, but if you lend me the game, could I copy it onto Johan’s computer and then give it back to you?’

Hurtig doesn’t answer straight away, and she imagines she can hear him chuckling.

‘OK,’ he finally says. ‘Let’s do it this way … I’ll come over now and install the game for Johan, so he gets a surprise this evening.’

‘You’re a good guy. If you haven’t eaten yet, I can offer you pizza?’

‘Thanks, that’d be great.’

‘What kind do you want?’

He laughs. ‘You could probably answer that in your sleep. What’s the most popular pizza these days?’

She gets the hint. ‘Provençale?’

‘No.’

‘Four Seasons?’

‘No, not that either,’ Hurtig says. ‘Nothing fancy.’

‘In that case, you probably mean Vesuvio?’

‘That’s the one! Vesuvius.’

A noise wakes Jeanette. She gets up from the sofa and sees the two empty pizza boxes on the table. Of course, she thinks. Hurtig came, we ate pizza, and I fell asleep while he was installing the game.

She can see a light from the doorway to Johan’s room, pads over and pushes the door open.

Hurtig and Johan are sitting at the computer with their backs to her, deeply absorbed in some sort of blue insect floating around on the screen.

They’re so immersed in the game that they don’t notice her.

‘Get it! Get it!’ Hurtig whispers with quiet insistence, slapping Johan on the back when the insect swallows up what looks like a hairy red spiral.

Jeanette’s first instinct is to ask what the hell they think they’re doing at four o’clock in the morning and send them to bed, but just as she opens her mouth she stops herself.

Forget it. Let them play.

She curls up on the sofa again, pulls the blanket over her and tries to get back to sleep.

She rolls over onto her stomach to the sound of muffled laughter from Johan’s room. She’s quietly grateful to Hurtig, but at the same time it surprises her that he’s so irresponsible that he doesn’t seem to understand that a teenager needs his sleep if he’s to cope with school. His training later on tomorrow is probably ruined now. Hurtig might manage to work, but Johan’s going to be like a zombie.

She soon realises it’s pointless trying to sleep. She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling.

She can still make out the three letters Åke once wrote on the ceiling in green paint when he was drunk. The fact that he’d painted over them the following day hadn’t helped, and like so many other things he had promised to sort out, nothing more ever happened. An H, an F and a C stand out through the otherwise white ceiling: Hammarby Football Club.

If we end up selling the house, he’d better help me, she thinks.

There’ll be loads of paperwork and estate agents going on about home staging. But no, Åke will just piss off to Poland, drinking champagne and selling old paintings he’d have destroyed years ago if I hadn’t stopped him.

She imagines what it would be like if they signed the divorce papers.

The legally prescribed six-month period between marriage and divorce suddenly feels like limbo to Jeanette. And after that comes the nightmare of dividing their assets. But she can’t help smiling at the thought that she actually has a legal right to half of their shared assets, and wonders if she ought to scare Åke by pretending to demand her share, just to see how he reacts. The more paintings he sells before the divorce goes through, the more money she could get.

More laughter from Johan’s room, and although Jeanette’s happy on his behalf, she feels lonely.

Please, Sofia, come to me soon, she thinks, lying on her side as she huddles up beneath the blanket.

She longs to feel Sofia pressed against her.

SOFIA GETS THE
tape recorder, sits by the window and looks down into the street. It’s stopped raining. A woman walking a black-and-white Border collie passes by on the opposite pavement. The dog makes her think of Hannah, who was so badly bitten by a similar dog shortly after they got home from interrailing that she had to have a finger amputated. Yet she remained devoted to dogs.

Sofia switches on the machine and starts talking.

What’s wrong with me?

Why can’t I feel the same tenderness and love for animals as everyone else?

I certainly tried plenty of times when I was a child.

First it was stick insects, because they were easier than fish, and were more suitable because he was so bloody allergic to Esmeralda, who had to go and live with someone else who liked cats. Then there was the attempt to get something for the summer, a baby rabbit that died in the car because it didn’t occur to anyone that even bog-standard rabbits need water, then the goat we borrowed that spent all summer having a phantom pregnancy, and all anyone remembers are the sticky black pellets of shit that got everywhere and kept getting stuck to your feet. Then there were the hens that nobody liked, then the neighbour’s horse for a while, before the rabbit that was faithful and happy and obedient and warm, looked after come rain or shine, fed before school, but the rabbit got bitten by the neighbour’s German shepherd, which probably wasn’t evil to start with, but anyone who’s been beaten probably ends up getting seriously pissed off and attacking anything weaker …

This time she doesn’t get tired of her voice. She knows who she is.

She sits there by the window, peering down through the venetian blind at everything going on outside, and letting her brain work.

The rabbit couldn’t get away, because there was snow blocking everywhere it could have taken cover and the dog bit it on the scruff of the neck the same way it had bitten the three-year-old who had been feeding it ice cream. Because the dog hated everything, it hated ice cream too and bit the kid’s face and no one really cared, they just sewed up the wounds as best they could. And they all hoped for the best, and then there was the horse again, and riding lessons and ponies and love hearts in diaries that were actually for some older guy you wanted to like you or at least look at you as you stood there in the corridor with your new breasts and tightest trousers. When you could smoke properly without coughing or being sick like you did when you’d taken Valium and drunk too much and been stupid enough to go home and fall over in the hall and Mum had to take care of you and you just wanted to sit in her lap and be as young as you actually were and feel her hugs and the smell of sneaky cigarettes seeing as Mum was scared of him as well and kept her smoking a secret …

She switches off the tape recorder, goes into the kitchen and sits down at the table.

She rewinds, then takes the tape out. She now has a sizeable collection of memories lined up neatly on the shelf in the study.

Gao’s light, almost soundless steps, then the creaking sound of the door behind the bookcase in the living room.

She gets up and goes in to him, in their secret, soft and safe room.

He’s sitting on the floor drawing, and she sits down on the bed and puts a fresh cassette in the tape recorder.