Midwinter Sacrifice (43 page)

Malin sprints across the room and picks up the receiver.

Zeke on the line. Agitated.

‘We’ve just had a call from A&E. A Johnny Axelsson has brought in a woman he found naked and badly beaten up out on the plain.’

‘I’m coming.’

‘She’s in a bad way, but according to the doctor I spoke to she evidently whispered your name, Malin.’

‘What did you say?’

‘The woman whispered your name, Malin.’

69

Viveka Crafoord will have to wait.

Everyone else will have to wait.

Apart from three.

Bengt Andersson.

Maria Murvall.

And now this other woman, found in exactly the same state.

The victims run out of the black forests, out across the white fields. Where’s the source of the violence?

Zeke is driving at seventy kilometres an hour; forty too fast. The stereo is silent. Nothing but the abrupt, stressed sounds of the engine. They’ve had to take a detour, there are roadworks; a frozen pipe must have burst.

Djurgårdsgatan, the trees of the Horticultural Society, grey and straggly, but still somehow sparkling. Lasarettsgatan and the pink-brick blocks of flats put up in the eighties.

Postmodernism.

Malin read the article about the architect in the
Correspondent
, in the paper’s series about the architecture of the city. The word struck her then as absurd, but she knew what the writer meant.

They swing up towards the hospital, the yellow façade of the main building faded by the sun, but the council’s money is needed for other things than replacing the cladding. They take a short cut over a traffic island, knowing that they really shouldn’t, that they’re supposed to drive round, a long way round, but today there just isn’t time.

And they’re in front of the entrance to the A&E department, braking as they swing round the turning circle. They park and run towards the entrance.

A nurse meets them, a short, stocky woman with close-set eyes that make her thin nose stick out from her head.

‘The doctor wants to talk to you,’ she says as she leads them down a corridor, past several empty treatment rooms.

‘Dr who?’ Zeke asks.

‘Dr Stenvinkel, he’s the surgeon who’s going to be operating on her.’

Hasse, Malin thinks, and at first she feels a resistance to meeting Markus’s dad on duty, then realises that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

‘I know him,’ Malin whispers to Zeke as they follow in the nurse’s wake.

‘Who?’

‘The doctor. Just so you know. He’s Tove’s boyfriend’s dad.’

‘It’ll be fine, Malin.’

The nurse stops in front of a closed door. ‘You can go in. No need to knock.’

Hans Stenvinkel is a different man now compared to last night. Gone is the easy-going social individual, and instead there is a strict, sombre and focused person sitting before them. The whole of his green-clad body exudes competence, and the way he greeted her was personal but formal; subtext: we know each other, but we’ve both got important work to do.

Zeke is squirming on his chair, evidently wound up by the authority of the room. How the person in the green jacket bestows a sort of worthiness to the whitewashed textured walls, the oak-veneer bookcase and the worn wooden top of the simple desk.

This is what it used to be like, Malin thinks, when people had respect for doctors, before the Internet made it possible for everyone to be an expert in their own ailments.

‘You can see her in a moment,’ Hans says. ‘She’s conscious, but she’ll have to be anaesthetised soon so that we can take care of her injuries. She needs a skin transplant. But at least we can do that here. We’re the best place in the country for dealing with burns.’

‘Frostbite?’ Zeke asks.

‘That too. But from a medicinal point of view, they’re more like actual burns. So I dare say that she couldn’t be in better hands.’

‘Who is she?’

‘We don’t know. She just keeps saying that she wants to see you, Malin, so I expect you know who she is.’

Malin nods in agreement. ‘Then it’s probably best that she gets to see me. If she’s up to it. We really need to find out who she is.’

‘I think she could handle a short conversation.’

‘Is her condition very serious?’

‘Yes,’ Hans says. ‘She couldn’t possibly have caused those injuries herself. She’s lost a lot of blood. But we’re giving her transfusions at the moment. We’ve relieved the shock with adrenalin. Burns and frost damage, like I said, knife wounds, cuts, compression injuries, and her vagina has been seriously wounded. It’s astonishing that she didn’t lose consciousness. You can’t help but wonder what sort of monster is running loose on the plain.’

‘How long could she have been out there?’

‘I’d say all night. The frost damage is severe. But we should be able to save most of her toes and fingers.’

‘Have you documented the injuries?’

‘Yes, exactly as you want them.’

It’s obvious from Hans’s voice that he’s done this before. With Maria Murvall?

‘Good,’ Zeke says.

‘And the man who came in with her?’

‘He left his number. He works at Ikea. We tried to get him to wait but he said, “The spirit of Ingvar, old IK himself, isn’t happy if you get to work late.” We couldn’t persuade him to stay.’

Then Hans looks her in the eye. ‘I’m warning you, Malin. She looks like she’s been through the fires of hell. It’s terrifying. You have to have incredible willpower to get through what she must have suffered.’

‘People tend to have a ridiculous amount of willpower when their survival is at stake,’ Zeke says.

‘Not always, not always,’ Hans replies, in a voice that sounds heavy and sad.

Malin nods to him, to indicate that she knows that he means. But do I? she wonders.

Who is she? Malin thinks, opening the door to the hospital room. Zeke is waiting outside.

A single bed against a wall, thin strips of light filtering through Venetian blinds and spreading across the grey-brown floor. A monitor is bleeping quietly, and two little red points of light on its screen shine like a pair of badger’s eyes in the gloom. Drip-stands with blood-bags and fluids, a catheter-bag, and then the figure on the bed under thin yellow blankets, her head reclining on a pillow.

Who is it?

The cheek facing Malin is covered with a bandage.

But who is it?

Malin approaches cautiously and the figure on the bed groans, turns her head towards her, and isn’t that something like a smile between the gaps in the bandages?

Hands wrapped in gauze.

The eyes.

I recognise them.

But who is it?

The smile is gone and the nose and eyes and hair become a memory.

Rebecka Stenlundh.

Bengt Andersson’s sister.

She raises her bandaged hand towards Malin, beckoning her to the bed.

Then a huge effort, all the words to get out at once, a whole sentence to finish, as if it were her last.

‘You have to take care of my boy if I don’t make it. See that he ends up somewhere good.’

‘You’re going to make it.’

‘I’m trying, believe me.’

‘What happened? Can you bear to tell me what happened?’

‘The car.’

‘The car?’

‘That’s where I was taken.’

Rebecka Stenlundh turns her head, laying her bandaged cheek on the pillow.

‘Then a hole. In the forest, and a post.’

‘A hole, where?’

‘In the dark.’

‘Where in the dark?’

Rebecka shuts her eyes in a negative, in a: ‘I have no idea.’

‘And then?’

‘Sledge, and car again.’

‘Who?’

Rebecka Stenlundh shakes her head slowly.

‘You didn’t see?’

She shakes her head again. ‘I was going to be hanged, like Bengt.’

‘Was there more than one?’

Rebecka shakes her head once more. ‘Don’t know, couldn’t see properly.’

‘And the man who brought you in?’

‘He helped me.’

‘So you didn’t see . . .’

‘I struck the blackness, I struck the blackness, I . . .’

Rebecka drifts off, shuts her eyes, mumbles, ‘Mum, Mum. Can we go and play under the apple trees?’

Malin puts her ear close to Rebecka’s mouth. ‘What did you say?’

‘Stay, Mum, stay, you’re not ill . . .’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘My boy, take . . .’

Rebecka falls silent, but she’s breathing, her chest is moving; she’s sleeping, or is unconscious, and Malin wonders if she’s dreaming, hopes that Rebecka can escape dreaming for many nights to come, but knows that she’s going to dream.

The machine beside her bleeps.

Glowing eyes.

Malin stands up.

Stands beside the bed for a while before leaving the room.

70

Zeke on his way to Ikea, Malin on her way up the stairs of number 3, Drottninggatan, million-year-old fossils embedded in the stone of the steps. Viveka Crafoord’s clinic is on the third floor of four.

No lift in the building.

Crafoord Psychotherapy: a brass sign with curling letters, in the middle of a brown-lacquered door. Malin tries the handle. The door is locked.

She rings the bell.

Once, then twice, then a third time.

The door opens and a woman in her forties looks out. Frizzy black hair and a face that is round and sharp at the same time. Her brown eyes sparkle with intelligence even though they are half covered by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

‘Viveka Crafoord?’

‘You’re an hour late.’

She opens the door a little more and Malin can see how she is dressed. A suede waistcoat over a puffy lilac-blue blouse, which in turn hangs over an ankle-length, green-checked, velvet skirt.

‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’

‘You said—’

‘I’m seeing a client at the moment. Go down to McDonald’s and I’ll call you in half an hour.’

‘Can’t I wait here?’

‘I don’t want anyone to see you.’

‘Have you got . . .’

The door to the clinic closes.

‘. . . my mobile number?’

Malin lets the question hang in the air, thinks that it’s about time for lunch, and she now has the perfect excuse to partake of the American fast-food Satan.

She really doesn’t like McDonald’s. Has stuck absolutely to her decision never to take Tove there.

Baby carrots and juice.

We’re taking our responsibility seriously and helping to combat childhood obesity.

So stop selling fries, then. Fizzy drinks. Half a responsibility: how much is that worth?

Sugar and fat.

Malin opens the door reluctantly.

Behind her a bus drives into Trädgårdstorget.

One Big Mac and one cheeseburger later she feels ready to throw up. The restaurant’s garish colours and almost tangible smell of frying make her feel even worse.

Call now.

Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty.

Her mobile rings.

Answer quickly.

‘Malin?’

Dad? Not now, not now.

‘Dad, I’m busy.’

‘We’ve been thinking about the matter.’

‘Dad—’

‘Of course Tove is welcome to come down with her boyfriend.’

‘What? I told you, I’m—’

‘. . . so can you see if they still want to . . .’

Call waiting.

Malin clicks away from the call from Tenerife, takes the new one.

‘Yes?’

‘You can come up now.’

Viveka Crafoord’s consulting room is furnished like the library of an upper-class home at the turn of the last century. Books, Freud, metre after metre of shiny new leather book-spines. A black and white portrait of Jung in a heavy gold frame, thick rugs, a mahogany desk and a paisley-patterned armchair beside a chaise longue covered in leather the colour of oxblood.

Malin sits down on the chaise longue, turning down the invitation to stretch out and thinking how much Tove would like this room, its updated Jane Austen feeling.

Viveka is sitting in the armchair with her legs crossed.

‘What I’m about to tell you stays between us,’ she says. ‘You can never mention it to anyone. It must never find its way into a police report or any other form of documentation. This meeting never took place. Is that okay?’

Malin nods.

‘We’re both risking our professional reputations if this ever gets out. Or if anyone knows it came from me.’

‘If I act upon anything you tell me, I’ll just have to say it was my intuition.’

Viveka Crafoord smiles. But only reluctantly.

Then she is serious again and starts to talk.

‘Eight years ago I was contacted by a man, he was thirty-seven then, who said he wanted to get to grips with his childhood. Nothing unusual in that, but what was unusual about this case was that he made no progress at all for the first five years. He came once a week, he had a comfortable life, a good job. He wanted to talk, he said, about how things had been when he was little, but instead I got to hear about pretty much anything else. Computer programs, skiing, apple trees, various forms of faith. Everything apart from what he originally said he wanted to talk about.’

‘What was his name?’

‘I’m coming to that. Or I will, if it proves necessary.’

‘I think it might.’

‘Then something happened, three years ago. He refused to say what, but I think someone in his family was the victim of a violent crime, she was raped, and in some way it was as if this event had made him let go.’

‘Let go?’

‘Yes, and start talking. To begin with I didn’t believe him, but afterwards . . . It could have been something else as well.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘When he persisted.’

Viveka Crafoord shakes her head. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you wonder why some people have children.’

‘I’ve thought the same thing.’

‘His father had been a sailor who died when he was still in his mother’s womb.’

That’s wrong, Malin thinks. His father was someone else . . .

But she lets Viveka Crafoord go on.

‘His earliest memory, the first thing we could reach together, was how his mother locked him in a wardrobe when he must have been about two. She didn’t want to be seen out with a child. Then his mother remarried, a violent man, and they had children. Three brothers and a sister. The new husband and the sons saw it as their duty to torment him, and the mother seems to have cheered them on. In the winter they locked him outside in the snow, naked, so he had to stand in the cold while they were all sitting eating in the kitchen. If he protested he was beaten, even more than usual. They beat him, cut him with knives, poured hot water over him, threw crumbs at him. The brothers seem to have crossed the boundary, encouraged by their father; children can be incredibly cruel if cruelty is encouraged. They don’t know it’s wrong. A selective sort of violence. Almost like a sect in the end. He was the eldest brother, but what use was that? Adults and children against a lone child. The brothers must have been damaged by the situation as well, become confused, hard, insecure, yet simultaneously determined, bound together in something that we all know deep down is wrong.’