The Crow Girl (51 page)

She goes down to the sauna, gets undressed and waits for him.

Outside the house it’s February and icy cold, but in here the temperature has crept up to almost ninety degrees. That’s because the sauna heater is so efficient, and he’s fond of boasting of how he’s connected it to the electricity network without permission.

Outside the sauna is a drainage pipe from the kitchen that runs down into the basement, and the warmth of the new heater makes the smell from the drain stronger.

The smell of onions and food waste, blood bread, beetroot and rancid cream mixes with a smell reminiscent of petrol.

Then he comes down to her. He looks sad. At the other end of the pipe Mum is washing up, while he takes off his towel.

When she opens her eyes she is standing in the living room with her towel around her body. She realises that it’s happened again. She has lost time. She can feel the chafe marks in her crotch, the tenderness of her arms, and feels relieved that she didn’t have to be there during the minutes or hours that have passed.

Solace is hanging in her place on the living-room wall and Victoria goes up to her room alone. She sits down on the bed, throws the towel on the floor and curls up under the covers. The sheets are cool, and she lies on her side looking at the window.

The February cold almost makes the panes crack, and she can hear the glass complain at the hard embrace of fifteen degrees below zero.

A window divided into six panes by wooden struts. Six framed pictures where the seasons have changed since they came home. In the two upper panes she can see the top of the tree outside, in the middle two the neighbours’ house and the tree trunk and the chains of her old swing. In the bottom panes she can see a white covering of snow and the red plastic swing, moving back and forth with the wind.

In the autumn there was yellow, scorched grass, the leaves falling and rotting. And since the middle of November a covering of snow that looks different every day.

Only the swing is the same. It hangs from its chains behind the six little windowpanes, like bars surrounded by ice crystals.

AUTUMN IS SWEEPING
in from the Baltic, bathing Stockholm in a cover of heavy, cold damp.

From Glasbruksgatan, up on Katarinaberget, just below Mosebacke, the island of Skeppsholmen is barely visible through the rain. Kastellholmen, only slightly further out, is veiled in grey mist.

It’s just now six o’clock.

She stops under one of the street lamps, takes the note out of her pocket and checks the address once more.

Yes, she’s in the right place; now it’s just a matter of waiting.

She knows he leaves at six and gets home a quarter of an hour later.

She’s been waiting so long that another hour more or less doesn’t make any difference.

The rain gets heavier, and she clutches her cobalt-blue coat tighter around her and stamps her feet to keep warm.

As she’s going through her plan for the third time, visualising what’s going to happen, she sees a black car slowly approaching. The windows are tinted, but through the windscreen she can make out a man on his own. The car stops a short distance from her and reverses into an empty parking space. Thirty seconds later the car door opens and he gets out.

She recognises Per-Ola Silfverberg at once and goes up to him.

His smile brings back memories. A big house in Copenhagen, a farm on Jutland and a pig slaughterhouse. The stench of ammonia and his firm grip on the large knife when he showed her how to cut. Up and to the right, to get to the heart.

‘It’s been a long time!’ He walks up to her and gives her a warm hug. ‘Is it just a coincidence that you’re here, or have you been talking to Charlotte?’

She wonders if it matters what she says, and decides that it’s completely irrelevant. There’s no way he’ll be able to check the veracity of whatever she says.

‘Well, not entirely a coincidence,’ she says, looking him in the eye. ‘I was in the vicinity and remembered that Charlotte had mentioned that you’d moved here, so I thought I’d look in and see if you were home.’

‘Well, I’m bloody glad you did!’ He laughs, takes her under the arm and starts to cross the street. ‘I’m afraid Charlotte won’t be back for a couple of hours, but come in and have some coffee.’

She knows he’s chairman of the board of a large investment company these days, and a man as used to being obeyed as he is unused to being questioned. There’s no reason not to go inside with him.

‘Well, I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere, so why not?’

His touch and the smell of his aftershave make her feel sick.

She can feel it bubbling inside her, and knows that the first thing she’s going to have to do is ask to go to the toilet.

The apartment is enormous, and as he shows her around she counts seven rooms before he leads her into the living room. It’s tastefully furnished with expensive but discreet furniture, all of it a pale, Scandinavian design.

There are two large windows with a view across the whole of Stockholm, and to the right is a spacious balcony with room for at least fifteen people.

‘I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid I need to use the bathroom,’ she says.

‘No need to apologise. Out in the hall, on the right.’ He points. ‘Coffee? Or would you rather have something else? A glass of wine, perhaps?’

She begins to walk towards the hall. ‘A glass of wine might be nice. But only if you’re having one.’

She goes into the toilet, feeling her pulse pound, and in the mirror above the sink she can see a few beads of sweat on her forehead.

She sits down on the toilet and closes her eyes. Memories come back to her, and she sees Per-Ola Silfverberg’s smiling face, but not the pleasant, business smile he just showed her, but the cold, empty one.

She recalls how he and the other men at the farm used to clean the pigs’ innards before they were ground down into blood pudding, sausages or liver pâté. And his emotionless smile as he showed her how a pig’s head became brawn.

Before she goes back into the living room she washes her hands. Hygiene is alpha and omega when it comes to slaughter, and she’s memorising everything she touches. Afterwards she’ll wipe off all trace of fingerprints.

Per-Ola Silfverberg is pouring out the wine, and hands her a glass. ‘Now, you must tell me where you’ve been all these years.’

She raises the glass, lowers her nose to it and takes a deep breath. A Chardonnay, she thinks.

The man she loathes watches her as she takes a small sip of the wine, then looks him deep in the eye. She slurps audibly and lets the liquid mix with the air to bring out the flavours.

‘I presume there’s a reason why you’ve looked us up after such a long time,’ says the man who hurt her.

She thinks that the wine’s character is probably a blend. Spiced fruit, something like melon, peach, apricot and lemon. She detects a hint of oiliness.

Slowly and pleasurably she swallows.

‘Where would you like me to start?’

Up and to the right, she thinks.

THE ALARM REACHES
police headquarters on Kungsholmen just before ten. A woman is screaming that she’s just got home and found her husband dead.

Jens Hurtig is actually on his way home when the call comes in, but seeing as he has no other plans for the evening he concludes that this would be a good opportunity to build up a bit of time in lieu.

Two weeks in some hot country will sit very nicely, and he’s already decided to take his holiday when the weather is at its worst.

Even if winters in Stockholm are mostly pretty mild, and nothing like his childhood’s snowy hell up in Kvikkjokk, it can be almost unbearable for a few weeks each year.

It’s a neither-nor sort of weather. Not winter, but not really anything else instead.

Five degrees above freezing feels much the same as five below. It’s the damp that does it. All that fucking water.

The only city in the world that might have worse winter weather than Stockholm is possibly St Petersburg, on the other side of the Baltic at the far end of the Gulf of Finland, built on a swamp. The city was first founded by Swedes, before the Russians took over. Just as masochistically inclined as the Swedes.

You’re somehow supposed to enjoy the misery.

As usual, the traffic on the Central Bridge is stationary, and he switches the siren on to get through, but no matter how much people might want to let him through there’s nowhere for them to move.

He zigzags between lanes until he reaches the Stadsgården exit, and turns off onto Katarinavägen. The traffic is thinner here, and he puts his foot down.

By the time he passes La Mano, the memorial to Swedes who died in the Spanish Civil War, he’s going over one hundred and forty kilometres an hour.

He enjoys speed, and sees it as one of the privileges of the job.

He pulls up outside the door, where there are already two police vans parked, blue lights flashing.

In the doorway he meets a colleague on his way out. The man has taken his cap off and is clutching it tight in his hand. Hurtig sees that his face is white as chalk. White verging on green, actually, and Hurtig stands aside so he can get outside before he throws up.

Poor bastard, he thinks. The first time is never much fun. Well, not that it’s ever that much bloody fun. You never get used to it. Maybe you get desensitised, which in no way means that you become a better police officer. But at least it makes it a bit easier to carry out your duties.

Police jargon can sound jokey and insensitive to outsiders. But it’s also a way of distancing yourself.

When Jens Hurtig steps inside the apartment, he’s pleased to have any distance. Ten minutes later he realises that he’s going to have to call Jeanette Kihlberg for assistance, and when she asks what’s happened, he describes it as the most fucking awful thing out of all the fucking awful things he’s seen in his whole fucking career.

JOHAN IS ALREADY
asleep, and she’s still wondering what she’s going to do with him when the phone rings.

Jeanette answers it, and to her disappointment it’s Hurtig. For a moment she was hoping it might be Sofia.

‘What’s happened now? Tell me it’s important, or I’ll be –’

Hurtig interrupts her. ‘Yes, it’s important.’

He falls silent, and in the background Jeanette can hear agitated voices. According to Hurtig, Jeanette has no option but to go back into the city.

What he’s just seen isn’t human.

‘Some sick bastard has stabbed the man at least a hundred times, cut him into pieces, then used a roller to paint the whole apartment!’

Shit, she thinks. Not now.

‘I’ll be there as quick as I can. Give me twenty minutes.’

Great, so I’m letting Johan down again.

A fatal stabbing is the last thing she needs right now. She hasn’t just got Johan to deal with, but also the investigation that was shut down.

And, not least, Victoria Bergman. Whose trail had gone completely dead at Nacka District Court.

The rain has started to let up, but here and there there are big puddles and she doesn’t dare to drive fast for fear of aquaplaning. The air feels cold. The thermometer at Hammarby reads eleven degrees. The branches of the trees in the park below are heavy with autumn colour, and as she looks towards the city from the Johanneshov Bridge, she thinks it’s incredibly beautiful.

SOFIA LOOKS AT
the other drawings. One shows a room containing three men, a girl lying on a bed and a figure with its head turned away. The other is more abstract and harder to interpret, but the figure occurs twice. Once in the middle of the picture, eyeless and surrounded by a blur of faces, then in the bottom left corner it’s there again, on its way out of the drawing. Only half its body is visible, not its face.

She compares them with the first drawing. The same eyeless figure looking at a garden through a window. A big dog and a man behind a tree. U1660?

‘What is it you don’t understand about the drawings?’ Sofia asks over her cup of coffee.

Annette Lundström smiles hesitantly. ‘That figure without eyes. I presume it’s a self-portrait, that that figure is her. But I don’t understand what she’s trying to say.’

How blind can you be? Sofia thinks. The woman has spent her whole life trying to keep her eyes shut. Now she thinks she can make up for that by confessing to a psychologist that she can actually see something odd in her daughter’s old drawings. A lame way of trying to claim that she too can see what’s going on, but that it’s only just occurred to her. The guilt gets transferred to her husband and she can disclaim any involvement.

‘Do you know what this means?’ Sofia asks, pointing at the characters beside the tree in the first drawing. ‘U1660?’

‘Yes, I do understand that. Linnea couldn’t write then, so she drew his name. He’s the man with the bent back behind the tree.’

‘And who is he?’

Annette’s smile is strained. ‘It doesn’t say U1660. It says Viggo. That’s Viggo Dürer, my friend’s husband. The house Linnea drew is the one in Kristianstad. They often came to visit us down there, although they lived in Denmark at the time.’

Sofia starts. Her parents’ lawyer.

Watch out for him.

Annette suddenly looks sad.

‘Henrietta, one of my best friends, got married to Viggo. I think Linnea was a bit scared of Viggo, and maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to see him in the drawing. She was scared of the dog as well. It was a Rottweiler, and it did look rather like that.’

Sofia nods. ‘But if you think that’s Linnea standing in the window without any eyes, who’s the girl standing next to the dog?’

Annette suddenly smiles. ‘That’s probably me. I’m wearing my red dress.’ She puts the first picture down and picks up the second. ‘And in this one I’m lying asleep in bed while the men have a party.’ She lets out an embarrassed laugh at the memory.