The Crow Girl (79 page)

There has never been time to forget, and between the person she once was and the person she is today lies a whole universe of events and circumstances. She imagines that other versions of herself exist in parallel worlds.

But this world is hers, and it’s here that she’s killed five people.

She closes the make-up bag and goes out into the little hotel room, and sits down on the bed where thousands of people have already sat, slept, made love and probably felt hate.

The suitcase lying at the foot of the bed is so new that she has no feelings for it yet, but it contains all she needs. She has called Charlotte Silfverberg and said she wants to meet. That they need to talk and that she’ll leave her in peace after that.

In a few hours’ time she’ll be sitting opposite the woman who once called herself her mother. And they’ll talk about the pig farm outside Struer and everything that happened there.

Together they will remember that time in Denmark, and talk about events in the pig shed the way other, normal people talk about nice holiday memories. But instead of beautiful sunsets, fine-grained sand and lovely restaurants, they’ll be talking about boys who were drugged and forced to fight each other, about men sweating on top of young girls, and about women who called themselves mothers looking on excitedly.

They will talk for as long as necessary, and she will illustrate her story with Polaroid pictures that reveal what her foster-parents had done.

She’ll show her the documents from Copenhagen University Hospital that show that she was a breech birth, and that she was taken from her biological mother along with the placenta. It also says that she was thirty-nine centimetres long, weighed almost two kilos, and was placed in an incubator with suspected jaundice. At the postnatal clinic she was judged to be a month younger than the documents said.

In her suitcase there are more documents, and she knows them all by heart. One of them is from the Childhood and Adolescent Psychiatry unit in Copenhagen.

The seventh line: ‘The girl shows signs of depression.’ Two lines below: ‘She has an ingrained habit of self-harm, and can be violent.’ Next page: ‘Has repeatedly accused her father of sexual abuse, but has not been regarded as credible.’

Then a note in the margin written in pencil that has become almost illegible over the years, but she knows what it says: ‘Based largely upon the mother’s claims that the girl has always had a vivid imagination, which is corroborated by the fact that she often talks incoherently about a farm in Jutland. Recurrent delusions.’

Another document has a social service stamp at the bottom, and is an official authorisation for her ‘placement in a family home.’

Family home, she thinks. A nice phrase.

She shuts the suitcase and wonders what’s going to happen next, afterwards, when she’s finished talking and her foster-mother has understood the nature of the choices facing her.

Revenge is much the same as a cake: you can’t have it and eat it too. Once revenge has been carried out you have to go on in the blunt awareness that you need to find new meaning in an otherwise meaningless life.

But she knows what she’s going to do. She’s going to return to the house in Saint-Julien-du-Verdon in Provence. To the cats, to her little studio, and to the calm isolation of the fragrant lavender fields.

When it’s all over she’s going to stop hating and learn to love. It will be a time for forgiveness, and after twenty years in the dark she needs to learn to see the beauty in life.

But first the woman who once called herself her mother must die.

‘
WHO ARE WE
doing first?’ Hurtig asks as he drives out along Drottningholmsvägen. ‘Hannah Östlund or Jessica Friberg?’

‘They practically live next door to each other,’ she says. ‘We’ll do the closest one first, Hannah Östlund.’

After the roundabout at Brommaplan they head west along Bergslagsvägen, and the rest of the journey passes in silence, which suits Hurtig.

One characteristic he appreciates in his boss is her ability to make silence feel comfortable, and as they pass the Judar Forest nature reserve he gives her a little smile.

They turn off into the residential area, down towards Fagerstrand.

‘OK, pull up along here,’ Jeanette says. ‘It must be that house over there.’

He brakes and steers past the long hedge surrounding the house, then heads up the drive and parks in front of the garage.

The large house is partially lit up, even though its owner obviously can’t be at home. The lights are on in the hall and kitchen, and in one of the rooms on the first floor.

As they walk up to the house he catches a glimpse of something through the kitchen window that they’ve seen before.

A vase of yellow flowers.

Jeanette folds up the warrant bearing von Kwist’s signature and puts it in her inside pocket as Hurtig opens the unlocked door.

A heavy, sweet smell hits them, and Hurtig instinctively takes a step back.

‘Shit,’ he exclaims with a look of disgust.

The house is silent apart from the sound of flies trying desperately to get out through the closed windows. ‘Wait here,’ Jeanette says, and closes the door again.

She goes back to the car, opens the boot, and gets out a couple of white breathing masks, four blue polythene shoe covers and two pairs of latex gloves. Since their visit to the cavern below St Johannes Church she has made sure always to have some breathing masks handy. Just in case.

She goes back, gives Hurtig the protective gear and sits down on the step. She stretches her legs and can feel the tiredness in her body. The stench from inside the house is lingering in the air.

‘Thanks.’ Hurtig sits down beside her and begins to pull the plastic covers over his black leather shoes. Jeanette notes that they look expensive.

‘Are those new?’ She points at them and smiles at him.

‘I don’t know,’ he says with a laugh. ‘Probably, seeing as the guy they came from has a fairly immaculate fashion sense.’

Jeanette thinks he looks embarrassed, as if he were ashamed. But before she has time to ask him about it, he gets up, adjusts his trousers, and makes a move to go inside the house.

Jeanette pulls on the rubber gloves and follows him.

They don’t see anything odd in the hall. Some hooks holding a few coats in muted colours. An umbrella leaning against a dresser, on top of which are a phone book and a calendar. The walls are white, and the floor is grey. Everything looks normal, but the penetrating smell tells them that they’re going to find something disgusting.

Hurtig goes first, and they take care not to touch anything unnecessarily. Jeanette does her best to put her feet down where Hurtig’s have been. Forensics can be fussy, and she doesn’t want to get told off for not being careful.

After the hall they reach the kitchen, and when Jeanette sees what’s on the table she knows that they’ve come to the right place, even if it doesn’t explain the revolting smell.

IN HANNAH ÖSTLUND’S
kitchen there are two Polaroid pictures. Jeanette walks over and picks up one of them. Hurtig looks at the picture over her shoulder.

‘Silfverberg,’ she says, then puts it down and picks up the other one.

‘Look at this.’

He stares at the picture for a few seconds. ‘Karl Lundström,’ he says. ‘So they killed him as well? It wasn’t what the doctor said, that Lundström died when his kidneys packed up after too much morphine.’

‘That’s what it looked like, but they could have messed with his drip. There wasn’t a proper investigation because his death seemed natural, but the thought had actually already occurred to me.’

She looks at the arrangement of pictures on the kitchen table.

Something’s nagging at her, but she can’t put her finger on what it is, and her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up outside.

Jeanette goes out onto the front step to greet Ivo Andrić and the forensics team. She pulls off her mask and takes a deep breath of the fresh air. Whatever it is inside the house, it’s best to let forensics go first.

Ivo gets out. When he catches sight of Jeanette his face breaks into a smile. ‘So …’ He screws his eyes up. ‘What have we got today?’

‘We don’t know anything apart from the fact that something in there stinks.’

‘You mean it smells of death?’ His smile fades.

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘You and Hurtig can wait outside for the time being.’ Ivo gestures to the forensics team. ‘We’ll go in and check it out.’

Hurtig sits down on the step again, and Jeanette takes out her phone. ‘I’ll give Åhlund a call. I put him and Schwarz onto looking into Dürer.’

Hurtig nods. ‘I’ll yell if anything happens here.’

Jeanette walks over to the car. She’s just getting into the passenger seat when Åhlund answers.

‘How are you getting on? Anything interesting about Dürer?’

Åhlund sighs. ‘The Danes aren’t being a massive help, but we’ve done our best.’

‘OK. Tell me.’

‘Dürer arrived in Denmark on the white buses when he was five. He’d been in the camp at Dachau.’

The Second World War? she thinks. A concentration camp, in other words. She quickly calculates Dürer’s age. He was seventy-eight when he died.

‘There were a number of Danes in Dachau, including Dürer’s parents, but they didn’t survive.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘According to the Danish tax office, for a long time he declared an income from pig farming. But it doesn’t look like the business went very well. Some years he doesn’t appear to have had any income at all. The farm was in Jutland, a place called Struer, and it was sold ten years ago.’

‘How did he end up in Sweden?’

‘Towards the end of the sixties he pops up in Vuollerim. And got a job as an accountant at a sawmill.’

‘Not as a lawyer?’

‘No, and that’s what’s a bit strange. I can’t find any evidence of him having any formal qualifications. No exams, no degree.’

‘And in all the years that he worked as a lawyer, no one ever thought to check him out and verify his professional credentials?’

‘No, not from what I can see. But he was being treated for cancer, and –’

Jeanette sees Ivo Andrić come out of the house and say something to Hurtig.

‘I’ve got to go now, we’ll continue later. Good work, Åhlund.’

She puts the phone back in her jacket and walks over to the waiting men.

‘Two dead dogs in the cellar. That’s where the smell’s coming from.’

Jeanette breathes out. It looks as if the pathologist is smiling, and she presumes that, just like her, he’s relieved that it’s not a human body this time.

‘The animals look like they’ve been slaughtered,’ he goes on. ‘But we haven’t found anything interesting to report about the rest of Hannah Östlund’s home, at least not at first glance.’

‘OK, get back to me when you’ve taken a closer look at Jessica Friberg’s house,’ Jeanette says to Ivo as Hurtig nods to him and starts walking towards the car.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS
sitting in the window of the little bar opposite the eastern exit from the Mariatorget metro station. She hasn’t yet recovered from her breakdown the previous day, and stares out at the bald horse-chestnut trees over an untouched plate of hash. In summer this is one of the leafiest streets in the city, but now all she can see are the gloomy skeletons of the trees. The branches stand out against the grey sky like the veins in a lung.

Soon the snow will be here, she thinks.

Instead of eating she leafs through a gossip magazine someone has left on the table. One article catches her eye, because it’s about a young woman she coached for a while. The pseudo-celebrity, nude model and now porn actress Carolina Glanz.

The article makes her lose her appetite even more. Miss Glanz, according to the magazine’s well-placed sources, has managed in the little more than a month to have her second breast enhancement, marry and then divorce a rich American, perform in a dozen films for a major porn producer, and write a book about it all. An autobiography. Twenty-two years old.

Sofia tosses the magazine aside and sits there for another ten minutes without touching her food. Tiredness and oversensitivity after several nights of disturbed sleep – or, rather, troubled wakefulness – are having a paralysing effect on her, and in the end she begins to pick at the plate in a feeble attempt to summon up some enthusiasm.

Although she asked for the egg to be raw, they’ve fried it. Raw egg, not fried. But they still got the order wrong.

She pushes the plate away, gets up and leaves the bar.

Pull yourself together now, she thinks as she checks that she remembered to pick up her purse. You’ve got a job to do.

As she crosses the street she catches sight of someone she recognises. Huddled up and wearing a dark coat and a red woolly hat.

‘Annette?’

The dark figure doesn’t seem to have heard her and just walks past.

‘Annette?’ Sofia repeats in a louder voice, and this time the woman stops and turns round.

Sofia takes a few wary steps towards her. Annette Lundström flinches as if she is frightened.

Annette just stands there with a vacant expression while the wind whistles around them. Her face is droopy and grey beneath the red hat.

‘Where are you heading?’ Sofia tries.

She can see that Annette is only wearing slippers, and has no tights on. She’s moving her lips slightly, but Sofia can’t make out what she’s saying. She realises that something has happened to Annette. It’s her, yet somehow it isn’t.

‘Annette … How are you?’

Then she looks at Sofia. ‘I’m going to move …’ she says quietly in a weak voice. ‘Back to Polcirkeln.’

She takes Annette’s hand, which is ice-cold. She must be freezing.

‘You’re very lightly dressed,’ Sofia says. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come with me and I’ll get you some coffee?’

Reluctantly Annette Lundström allows herself to be led to St Paulsgatan and up to Sofia’s office.