The Crow Girl (85 page)

‘We don’t know yet,’ Jeanette says as she watches Hurtig go through the apartment. A minute later he comes back out to them.

‘Empty,’ he says, holding out his hands. ‘Ulrika isn’t here, and the smell is just rubbish. Old prawn shells.’

Jeanette breathes out. Only prawn shells, she thinks, then puts her arm on the woman’s shoulder and turns her round. ‘Let’s go outside for a chat. Follow me.’

‘I’ll take another look around,’ Hurtig says, and Jeanette nods in response.

Once they’re outside Jeanette suggests going to sit in the car. ‘There’s a Thermos of coffee, if you’d like some.’

Kickan shakes her head. ‘My break’s almost over, and I have to get back to work.’

They sit down on a bench and Jeanette asks her about Ulrika, but it turns out that the woman doesn’t have any real insight into her granddaughter’s life. She doesn’t actually know anything of significance, and from the little she does say Jeanette concludes that she doesn’t even know that Ulrika was raped.

As Kickan Wendin turns and starts to walk away, Jeanette gets into the driver’s seat, lights a cigarette and waits for Hurtig to come out.

‘Traces of blood in the hall.’ Hurtig hits the roof of the car with his hand and Jeanette jumps.

‘Blood?’

‘Yes, so I thought it best to call Ivo.’

‘Did you check that it was really blood? Was there much?’

‘Just a few spots. Dried stains on the floor just inside the door, but it’s definitely blood.’

VON KWIST,’ THE
prosecutor says warily when Jeanette Kihlberg calls him for a second time in just a few hours. The pressure at the top of his stomach gets worse as she tells him that Ulrika Wendin is believed to have gone missing, and when he hangs up he feels sick.

Fucking hell, he thinks, getting up from his desk and going over to the drinks cabinet.

While the ice machine is rattling he gets out a bottle of smoky malt whisky and pours himself a large glass.

If Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist had been a creative person, his swearing would have been more varied than bloody, fucking and hell. But he isn’t that sort of person. ‘Fucking hell,’ he repeats, therefore, and downs the whisky in one gulp.

The whisky is hardly going to help his stomach ulcer, but down it goes, and he feels the alcohol hit the acid reflux somewhere around chest height.

When Detective Superintendent Jeanette Kihlberg called him that morning, in the heat of the moment he thought it best to do as she asked. Now, after the second conversation, he realises that in a worst-case scenario, Ulrika Wendin’s life might be in danger, and he quietly admits to himself that even though he can hardly be accused of being a particularly conscientious person, he does have his limits.

Goddamn kid, he thinks. You should have taken the money and run. And kept quiet.

Now things might come to a very bad conclusion.

The prosecutor shudders and remembers something that happened about fifteen years before, when he was invited to visit the former police commissioner Gert Berglind’s summer cottage out in the archipelago, on Möja.

Viggo Dürer had been there with another man, a Ukrainian who had some sort of murky connection to the lawyer, and who couldn’t speak a word of Swedish.

They had sat in the kitchen, and Dürer and Berglind had fallen out about something. Berglind had become noisy and upset, while Dürer sat there without speaking for a long time, before turning to the Ukrainian and saying something quietly in Russian. While Berglind had carried on ranting angrily, the Ukrainian had left the kitchen and gone to the hutch where the police chief kept his prizewinning rabbits.

Through the open kitchen window they had heard two whimpering squeaks, and a few minutes later the Ukrainian had come in with two freshly skinned breeding rabbits worth about ten thousand kronor each. The commissioner had turned white as a sheet and quietly asked them to leave.

At the time, Kenneth von Kwist had assumed that Berglind was upset at the prize money he’d miss out on, or possibly that he was sad about the rabbits, but now he realises that the police chief had been terrified, and well aware of what sort of person Viggo Dürer was.

He shuts his eyes and prays that he hasn’t realised it too late.

The smoky whisky makes him think of Viggo Dürer’s smell. As soon as he came into a room you noticed it. Was it fried garlic that he smelled of?

No, the prosecutor thinks. More like gunpowder or sulphur. That seems like a contradiction, because he knows that Dürer also had the ability to blend in, to disappear into a crowd somehow.

If one were inclined to show any respect to Kenneth von Kwist, it would be tempting to say that contradictions weren’t his strong point. If one were inclined to be rather less generous, and thus closer to the truth, one might say that his view of contradictions was that they simply didn’t exist. There is just right or wrong, and nothing in between, which is a very bad quality in a prosecutor.

Yet now he admits that Viggo Dürer was a contradictory person.

Capable of being extremely dangerous, but also a weakling who moaned about heart problems, like he had the last time they met, shortly before he died. And now he’s left this bloody mess behind, von Kwist thinks, and it’s landed right in my lap.

‘Lawyer and pig farmer,’ he mutters into his whisky glass. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

THE HELPER, SOLACE
Manuti, had borne Victoria’s daughter, Madeleine, in her round, swollen belly, and it was Solace who suffered the cramps, sickness, swollen legs and aching back. That had been her final task before Victoria forgot her.

Sofia looks at the drawings she has spread out on the table in the living room. They all show a naked child with a fetish mask covering her face. The same girl, the same skinny legs and round stomach. The same Helper. On the table next to the drawings is a photograph of a child holding a Kalashnikov. Unsocial mate. A child soldier.

Sofia thinks of the ritual circumcisions that have left so many boys in Sierra Leone sterile. Out in the countryside the boys would wear the dried scraps of skin on necklaces to prove that they belonged to God, and to protect against evil spirits, but in the hospitals in the cities the foreskins were discarded with the rest of the hospital’s rubbish, among plastic pipettes and disposable syringes, and taken out to the dumps in the suburbs. A lot of boys ended up sterile after being circumcised, but in the cities there was less chance of infection.

Lasse’s sterilisation had been as free from risk as it was voluntary. Vasectomy isn’t a ritual, even though it ought to be, nor is there anything ritualistic about an abortion or, as she herself once did, handing your baby over to strangers. Her thoughts move on to Madeleine. Does she hate me? Was she the one who killed Fredrika and P-O? And, if she was, am I next?

No, she thinks. According to Jeanette, it wasn’t just one person. She had mentioned ‘the people’ who were the murderers, not ‘the person’.

She puts the drawings of Solace aside and realises that she’s soon going to have to burn all her notes and newspaper cuttings, rip out the walls of the concealed room and get rid of everything inside it.

She has to become clean, free from her background. The way it looks at the moment, she can hardly move at home without being reminded of the lies that have helped her stay alive.

She needs to learn to remember properly. Not look for answers in static documents.

Let Victoria act, she thinks. But try not to disappear.

If you squeeze the bar of soap too tight you lose it.

Don’t try to remember, just let it happen.

Victoria gets a notepad from her study and a bottle of wine out of the glass-fronted cabinet, a French Merlot, but can’t find the corkscrew and has to push the cork in with her thumb. Tomorrow Sofia is going to see Jeanette, and she needs to be properly rested. So she has to drink, and red wine is better for sleep than white.

Tonight Victoria is going to concentrate on her daughter, writing down all her thoughts and trying to get to know her. Tomorrow Sofia will get to work on the perpetrator profile again.

But first, Madeleine.

‘Grew up with Charlotte and P-O Silfverberg,’ she writes. ‘With all that that entailed.’ Victoria thinks for a while before adding: ‘Probably abused. They were the same sort of people as Bengt.’ She takes a sip of wine. Its taste warms her and the acidity makes her tongue prickle.

‘Madeleine had a special relationship with Viggo Dürer,’ she goes on to write, without really knowing why. But when she thinks about it she realises what she meant. Viggo was the sort of person who laid claim to people, and patterns like that always recur.

He did it with both Annette and Linnea Lundström, Victoria thinks, and he tried to do it with me.

‘The worst thing about Viggo is his hands,’ she writes. ‘Not his genitals.’

In fact she can’t actually remember ever seeing Viggo naked, and he was only violent occasionally, and then only with his hands. He didn’t hit, but scratched and squeezed. He rarely cut his nails and she can still recall the pain of them digging into her arms.

His assaults were like dry masturbation.

‘Madeleine hated Viggo,’ she goes on, and now she no longer needs to think, the associations come unforced, and her pen scratches quickly across the paper. ‘No matter what sort of adult Madeleine has become, she hates her foster-father, and she hates Viggo. As a child she had no name for her feelings, but she has always hated. As far back as she can remember.’

Victoria is using her own thoughts as a starting point, and transferring them to her daughter. She doesn’t change the text even when she suspects that she’s getting ahead of herself; she can make changes later.

‘There are several possible versions of Madeleine as an adult. Perhaps she is quiet and cowed and lives a reclusive life. Maybe she’s married to one of her father’s friends in the sect, maybe she silently puts up with continued abuse. Or possibly another Madeleine has got help from someone on the outside and has made a break from her family and fled abroad. If she’s strong she may have moved on, but it’s likely that her whole life will be tainted by the abuse and it will be hard for her to have a normal relationship with a partner. Yet another Madeleine could be driven by forces like hate and revenge, and she has spent her whole life trying to find different ways to either suppress or find an outlet for these feelings. This Madeleine lives a reclusive life at times, but can never forget what she suffered. She is a proactive person, who lacks –’

She stops. This is Sofia writing, not her, and she’s writing about Victoria. She doesn’t usually express herself this clearly. She’s even forgotten the wine; it looks like she’s hardly touched it.

‘She is a proactive person who lacks any driving forces in life apart from hate and revenge,’ Sofia concludes. ‘Her only chance to move on is to free herself from these driving forces. And there are no easy solutions to that problem.’

Sofia puts the pen and notepad down on the table.

She realises that Madeleine is going to come and see her, sooner or later.

She also realises what’s starting to happen between her and Victoria.

Sofia won’t resist any longer.

THE BUILDING JENS
Hurtig lives in was built in the late 1800s, and belongs to the part of Norrmalm still known unofficially as Siberia, a name that comes from the fact that it used to be regarded as distant, and that moving from central Stockholm to its small workers’ housing was regarded as a form of exile. Now it is part of the city centre, and the small two-room apartment Jens Hurtig has been renting for the past two months isn’t exactly a gulag, even if the lack of a lift leaves something to be desired. Particularly when he has something to carry. Like now, a clinking bag of bottles in each hand.

He unlocks the door and is confronted by the usual mountain of advertising leaflets and free papers, even though he’s put a sign up over the letter box, politely asking not to receive them. But he can’t help feeling for the poor bastards who trudge around these buildings with heavy bundles of leaflets from the supermarkets, and on the sixth floor they are rejected by signs on every door.

He puts the bags down in the hall, and five minutes later he’s sitting in front of the television in the living room with a beer in his hand.

TV3 is showing old repeats of
The Simpsons
. He’s seen this episode so many times that he knows the lines by heart, and reluctantly admits to himself that the programme usually makes him feel safe. He still laughs in the same places as before, but today his laughter feels flat. It has no firm foundation.

When Jeanette told him about Linnea Lindström’s suicide, all the old feelings washed over him again – his memories of his sister still haven’t left him. They never will.

It was the image of a young girl lying on a slab in the mortuary that sent him straight off to buy beer after work, and it’s the same image that is now making him lose interest in watching the antics of yellow cartoon characters on television.

The last time he saw his sister she had been lying on her back with her hands clasped over her stomach. She had looked determined, her lips had been almost black, and one side of her face and neck was bruised blue from the noose. Her skin had felt dry and cool, and her body had given the impression of being very heavy, even though she was so small and thin.

He reaches for the remote and switches the television off. Now the screen is showing only his own reflection, legs crossed in the armchair, a bottle of beer in his hand.

He feels lonely.

How lonely must she have felt?

No one had understood her. Not him, not their parents and not the psychiatrists, whose efforts had largely consisted of group therapy and trial medication. What was going on inside her remained out of reach to all of them, the hole she had fallen into had been too deep, too dark, and in the end she hadn’t been able to bear the loneliness, of being shut up inside herself.