The Crow Girl (96 page)

The names are all male. Shelf after shelf of men’s names. Common surnames like Svensson and Persson, but also a few that sound more aristocratic. Jeanette is struck by the low proportion of foreign names. It may be more common for migrants to beat their children, but they evidently don’t like abusing them sexually, Jeanette thinks, just as she finds a cardboard box labelled
KARL LUNDSTRÖM
.

Almost holding her breath, she lifts the box down onto a table and opens it. Inside she finds about ten films. She reads their labels and sees that several were filmed in Brazil in the eighties, and remembers that Mikkelsen had called them cult films in paedophile circles, but no matter how cult they are, they hold no interest to her and she puts them back.

She tucks the others under her arm and makes her way to the young police officer’s office.

He’s sitting with his back to her. On his screen Jeanette can see a photograph of a bare-chested man standing beside a bed on which lies a naked Asian boy. The man’s face is distorted, and Jeanette thinks it looks like someone’s tried to conceal his identity.

‘Already finished, ready to throw up, or in need of a strong cup of coffee?’ He turns round and gazes at her with a serious expression.

‘All three,’ Jeanette says, looking him in the eye.

‘Kevin, by the way,’ he goes on, holding out his hand. ‘And if you’re wondering, it’s because Mum was crazy about
Dances with Wolves
. Well, I’m a bit older than that, but she liked Kevin Costner’s earlier films and wanted to give me an original name.’ He pauses, then his face breaks into a broad smile. ‘Mind you, at nursery school there were three Kevins and two Tonys. The one with the most unusual name was Björn.’

‘Really?’ Jeanette realises that the young man is trying to keep the tone light for her sake, presumably to keep her spirits up. But she doesn’t feel up to smiling back.

He clears his throat. ‘I’ll get us some coffee before you go into the viewing suite and suffer a couple of hours of really unpleasant close contact with the worst of humanity. OK?’ He gets up, still smiling, and goes over to a coffee machine in one corner of the room.

‘Thanks, I could do with some,’ Jeanette says.

Kevin hands Jeanette a cup, then sits down again. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. We’ll see,’ she replies, tasting the coffee and discovering that it’s as strong as she was hoping for. ‘Maybe.’

They sit in silence, drink their coffee and look at each other for what feels like several minutes before Jeanette breaks the silence.

She points at the image of the half-naked man on the screen. ‘Do you know who that is?’

‘Yes, we found it on the Net and we think he’s Swedish.’

‘What makes you think that?’

He leans closer to the screen. ‘Can you see what that is?’ he says, putting his finger on an object on the bedside table, next to the naked boy.

‘No. What?’

‘If you zoom in and make the picture a bit sharper, you can see it’s a box of Swedish headache pills. According to the price tag it was bought sometime in April from a chemist in Ängelholm. At the moment I’m checking debit card records that might match, and it looks like a certain preschool teacher is going to be getting a visit from us soon.’

‘As easy as that?’ Jeanette asks.

‘As easy as that,’ Kevin confirms, then goes on. ‘Whoever put these pictures online used Photoshop to hide the man’s identity, so now we’re trying to get his face back, but it’s difficult, and takes a lot of computer capacity. The FBI is doing the same, and I dare say they’ll get there first. They’ve got slightly more resources than we do.’

‘I saw that one of our colleagues is among the seizures,’ Jeanette says, putting her cup down.

‘Yes, that was Operation Sleipner.’ Kevin leans back. ‘We picked up about a hundred people, and apart from the one you’re referring to we got another couple of police officers in Stockholm.’

‘I’m not great at maths, but you said you picked up a hundred people, and three of them were police officers. In other words, three per cent were in the police. There are twenty thousand of us in the whole of Sweden, so we make up, what, .2 per cent of the population? That means that possession of child porn is over ten times more common among police officers than it is among other people.’

Kevin nods. ‘Well, I’d better get on. A seized computer has just arrived and I need to go through it – apparently it’s urgent.’ Kevin gets up from his chair. ‘And if you’re thinking that only men are interested in child porn, I can tell you that this computer comes from a woman.’ He opens the door and walks out. ‘I’ll show you where you can watch your films.’

Jeanette picks up the video cassettes and follows him out of the room.

‘A woman, you say?’

‘Just came in. A seizure out in Hässelby,’ he explains as he heads off along the corridor. ‘In Fagerstrand, if I remember rightly.’

‘Fagerstrand?’

‘Yes. Her name’s Hannah Östlund. Or was. She’s dead now.’

VICTORIA LISTENS, TRYING
not to interrupt Sofia. She has to make an effort to keep her anger in check, and chooses to concentrate on the internal illusion that she’s back in the house on Solbergavägen.

‘If you were to speak to a neurosurgeon, he or she probably wouldn’t agree that capsulotomy is the same as lobotomy. Perhaps it could be described as an upgraded version of lobotomy, I don’t know, but just like lobotomy it was intended to check deviant behaviour …’

Deviant, Victoria thinks. It’s always about deviations. A person is only deviant if there’s a predetermined scale. And psychiatry is subsidised by the state. So, in practice, politicians decide what is sick and what isn’t. But surely things ought to be different within psychology? There are no clear boundaries there, and if there’s one thing that she knows for sure, it’s that everyone is deviant and non-deviant at the same time.

‘In Sweden, and of course even in Denmark, where the procedure was carried out, we have a long history of dubious interventions with people who have been regarded as having learning difficulties, or are otherwise aberrant. I remember one case where a fourteen-year-old boy was given electric shock treatment for six weeks because his devoutly Christian parents found him masturbating. In their world, that was deviant behaviour.’

Victoria finds herself wondering how people like that even have the right to vote.

‘Being religious ought to be regarded as deviant,’ she says.

Sofia smiles briefly, then sits in silence for a while, and Victoria listens to the sound of the old woman breathing. It’s quick and shallow, just like it was twenty years ago, and when she finally speaks again, her voice is more serious. ‘To get back to the point,’ she says quietly, but in a sharp tone. ‘As you know, frontal lobotomy was an operation on the frontal lobe of the brains of people demonstrating deviant behaviour. The connection between the lower part of the brain and the frontal lobe was severed, and approximately one in every six patients died. The Medical Council knew the risks but never intervened. I started my professional career in the early 1950s, and I’ve seen a lot of terrible things over the years. The majority of lobotomy patients in Sweden were women. They were described as dissolute, aggressive or hysterical. And they were made to pay a very high price.’

Taliban politics, Victoria thinks. She’s listening attentively to Sofia, still with her eyes closed, and she realises that this is the first time she’s ever heard even a hint of anger in the old woman’s voice. It feels good. Alleviates her own fury.

‘Unlike lobotomy, capsulotomy isn’t a fatal intervention, as far as we know, and that’s why they decided to use the procedure on Madeleine. They cut through the nerves in her capsula interna, the inner capsule of the brain, in the hope that her mental health problems – compulsive disorder and disruptive behaviour – would abate. But it was a complete failure, and actually had the opposite effect.’

Victoria can no longer keep her eyes shut or stay quiet. ‘What happened to her?’

Sofia looks angry. ‘Her lack of inhibitions got worse, her impulse control vanished more or less entirely, while at the same time her intellectual ability actually seemed to get sharper, oddly enough.’

Victoria doesn’t understand. ‘That sounds like a contradiction.’

‘Yes, maybe …’ Sofia blows out a large smoke ring that sails above the table and breaks against the glass of the window. ‘The brain is fascinating. Not just each separate part and function in itself, but also the interplay between them. In this instance you might compare the procedure to building a dam across a river to block the flow. But the result was that the river found new ways around the dam, and grew in strength.’

Victoria picks up the bag containing her notepad.

And that’s why, Mama says, I’m nearly always happy and gay.

I think the whole of life is like a sunshiny day.

THE HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT
didn’t scare her, because she’d spent large parts of her childhood being treated for one thing or another. If it wasn’t stomach aches, which it almost always was, it was feeling sick or dizzy, or bad headaches.

The worst thing was when she was alone with P-O in the big house with all the toys.

P-O, the man she had never called her father, who had taken pity on her but then discarded her when she was no longer good enough to be his daughter.

Everything around her had had a name, but was always something else. Daddy wasn’t Daddy and Mummy wasn’t Mummy. Home was actually somewhere else, and being ill was like being well. When someone said yes it meant no, and she could remember how confused she had been.

The brain is the only organ in the human body that has no feeling, and can therefore be operated on even while the patient is conscious.

And goodness, how cross they were when she went to the police and told them what P-O and his so-called friends got up to in the shed that was meant for pigs, not young boys who were angry with each other. Screaming and crying and punches left and right, before they sent her away to a new place that they told her she should call home from now on. But there it was just dark and silent and her arms were strapped down, just like they were now.

The doctor had said that if they just did a bit of cutting inside her head, she would no longer think everything was so complicated. She wouldn’t have violent outbursts, and the hope was that she would be able to take care of herself. If only they could snip through a few unhelpful connections in her head, everything would be fine.

Daddy would mean Daddy in the same way that Mummy would mean Mummy.

She was woken from her thoughts by someone lifting her up in bed. But she kept her eyes shut because she didn’t want to see the knife that was going to cut her.

Admittedly, they had actually said that they didn’t use knives any more, because times had changed and they had more refined methods now. Something to do with electricity that she didn’t quite understand, but she had nodded when they asked if she did, because she hadn’t wanted to cause any more trouble than she already had.

Trouble, trouble, trouble, that’s all you are. That’s what Charlotte, the woman she had never called Mother, had always said whenever anything broke or fell on the floor. And it often did. If it wasn’t wobbly glasses full of milk, it was slippery plates, or windows that were so thin that you couldn’t see them until they were lying in pieces on the floor.

Someone took hold of her head and she felt the cold steel of a razor blade.

First the scraping sound as they shaved off the hair at the back of her head, then the pain, and finally the sound of the electric knife.

The future of the procedure was decided when Christian Rück, a psychiatrist at the Karolinska Institute, demonstrated that a combination of the negative side effects of treatment, as well as difficulties with its practical implementation, meant that it should not be used for anything other than strictly controlled experiments.

It’s going to be fine, she thought. Now I’m going to be well, just like everyone else.

NOT VICTORIA BERGMAN
, Hurtig thinks. Why not?

All the other names from Sigtuna are written on the notepad in front of him.

‘But you did know Victoria?’

‘Only from school,’ Annette says. ‘She wasn’t part of our group.’

‘Your group?’

The woman squirms. For the first time in their conversation a flicker of awareness appears in her eyes. ‘I don’t know if they’d want me to say,’ she eventually says.

Hurtig has to make an effort to keep his voice sounding calm and friendly. ‘Who wouldn’t want you to?’

‘Karl and Viggo. And P-O and Gert.’

The men, in other words, he thinks. ‘But Karl, P-O, Viggo and Gert are all dead.’

Shit, why did I say that? he thinks the moment he says it.

Annette Lundström looks utterly confused. ‘Stop it. Why are you teasing me? I don’t think this conversation is fun any more. You can go now.’

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I was wrong. I’ll go very shortly, but there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about. Of course Viggo was –’ He breaks off. Think before you speak. Play it her way. ‘Of course Viggo is a good person, and I’ve heard that he helps poor children to have a better life in Sweden, that he finds adoptive families for them. Is that right?’

The woman frowns. ‘Well, of course it is. Haven’t I already said that? I told that other police officer, that Sofia what’s-her-name. Viggo was so kind to those children.’

A lot of information, Hurtig thinks. He makes notes as she talks, and a bizarre world is starting to take shape on his pad. He doesn’t yet know if what he’s looking at is real or just the world view of someone suffering from psychosis, but he’s going to have plenty to talk to Jeanette about, because he can see patterns in what Annette Lundström is saying, even if she’s confusing basics concepts like time and space.