The Crow Girl (94 page)

Hurtig is hurriedly making notes. ‘Who’s Gert?’

She laughs. A dry, rasping sound that makes him flinch. ‘Gert? Doesn’t everyone know who he is? He’s so clever, one of the best policemen in Sweden. You ought to know that, as a policeman.’

Clever policeman, he thinks. Like hell. Practical Pig, Gert Berglind. ‘I’ve only got a few questions, and I’d be really happy if you could try to answer them.’

‘I forgot to mention Fredrika as well,’ Annette says.

‘Good,’ Hurtig says appreciatively, writing down the names. The whole Sigtuna gang, all murdered, apart from the murderers themselves, Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg. No, all except one, he realises once he’s written down the last name.

‘Victoria Bergman? Will she be there too?’

Annette Lundström looks surprised. ‘Victoria Bergman? No. Why would she?’

‘
SCHWARZ, ÅHLUND AND
Hurtig’s reports are all done, I’m just waiting for yours now,’ Commissioner Dennis Billing says when Jeanette bumps into him on her way to her office. ‘But perhaps you’ve got more important things to do than put an end to this?’

Jeanette is only half listening, because she’s still thinking about what she saw in the pathology lab. ‘No, no, not at all,’ she replies. ‘You’ll have it later today, so you can send it to von Kwist tomorrow morning at the latest.’

‘Sorry if I sound a bit brusque,’ Billing says. ‘I think you’ve done a good job, solving this so quickly. It wouldn’t have looked good in the papers if it had dragged on. But von Kwist is off sick at the moment, so someone else will be dealing with this until he gets back. Anyway, there’s no rush, since the perpetrators are beyond our reach, so to speak.’ The commissioner smiles.

‘What’s wrong with von Kwist?’ Jeanette asks. The last time she saw the prosecutor he had looked the same as usual, and hadn’t complained of being unwell.

‘Something to do with his stomach. Suspected ulcer, I think he said when he called, and that’s not surprising when you consider how hard he works. Good man, that Kenneth.’

‘The best we’ve got,’ Jeanette says, continuing towards her office. Perfectly aware that the irony will go over Billing’s head.

‘Hell, he’s the best,’ he echoes, sure enough. ‘Well, better get back to the mines.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that now that another murdered boy has appeared, we’re opening the case again. You can keep Hurtig. Åhlund and Schwarz are at your disposal as long as nothing more important crops up.’

More important? Jeanette thinks. My case is only being reopened because it would look bad otherwise. ‘We’re cosmetic, you mean?’ she says, opening the door to her room.

‘No, no, not at all.’ The police chief falls silent. ‘Well, maybe you could put it like that. Cosmetic. Oh, Jan, you’re pretty smart sometimes. I’ll remember that one. Cosmetic.’

Jeanette goes into her office and glances at the identikit picture pinned to the bulletin board by her desk. The drawing says nothing to her. It could be anyone at all.

It could actually be a woman just as easily as a man, she thinks.

Now that she comes to think about it, the face does seem peculiarly vague. Surely there ought to be some kind of distinguishing features? But at least the artist managed to include a couple of birthmarks, one on the chin and one on the forehead. Is that the sort of thing that children notice?

While she’s looking at the picture she calls Ivo Andrić to ask for a more thorough examination of Ulrika Wendin’s flat. As the phone rings Jeanette considers what Ulrika told her about the rape in the hotel room, and about Lundström filming the assault.

She also recalls that Lundström had said in his interview that he had been present when other recordings of child pornography were made, even if he hadn’t mentioned the one involving Ulrika.

Ivo Andrić picks up, and promises to go back to Ulrika Wendin’s apartment with a forensics team. When she ends the call Jeanette is left sitting there with the receiver in her hand and a lump in her stomach.

Lundström’s films, she thinks. It’s actually possible that they might contain something that could help in the search for Ulrika Wendin.

She dials Lars Mikkelsen’s number on the internal phone.

What if the recording from the hotel room is in Lundström’s collection? And why hasn’t she asked herself that before now? If what Ulrika said was accurate, and she’s never doubted that, then the film ought to be of vital importance. The fact that Karl Lundström is dead doesn’t mean that the other perpetrators couldn’t be charged.

She sighs to herself. This investigation really has been low priority. If only she’d been given more resources, they could have been more thorough.

When Mikkelsen finally answers she explains why she’s calling and asks if he has anyone who could go through the material they seized.

‘Well, not really,’ Mikkelsen replies evasively. ‘We’ve already got more than enough going on.’

‘I understand,’ Jeanette says. ‘How about if I come over and pick the films up, and go through them myself? That would work, wouldn’t it?’

Do I really want to do this? Jeanette wonders when she realises what she’s just suggested.

‘Well, there’s no official reason why not. But you’ll have to sign a load of documents agreeing not to divulge their contents and so on, and of course the films mustn’t leave the building. A lot of Lundström’s films were still on VHS and haven’t been digitised yet, which means you’ll have to go through the stuff we seized yourself.’

Jeanette thinks he sounds irritable, but presumes it has nothing to do with her.

‘Great, I’ll come over at once,’ she concludes, and hangs up before Mikkelsen has time to answer.

OK, she thinks. No going back now.

Mikkelsen isn’t there when she arrives, but he’s asked a colleague to look after her. He’s a young man with a thin beard and a ring in his nose, and he comes to get her outside Mikkelsen’s office. ‘Hi, you must be Jeanette Kihlberg,’ he says. ‘Lasse told me to let you into the storeroom and get you to sign for anything you need.’ He gestures for her to follow him. ‘This way, then.’

Once again she wonders what could make a grown man voluntarily spend his days watching children being abused by other grown men, in slow motion, frame by frame. Members of the same species. Friends and colleagues. It could be their childhood friends, old classmates, at worst their dad or brother.

‘Here it is,’ Mikkelsen’s colleague says, unlocking a perfectly ordinary office door. ‘Come and find me when you’re done. My office is down there.’ He points along the corridor.

She looks at the door in surprise, but doesn’t really know what she was expecting.

Surely there ought to be some sort of warning sign, she thinks. ‘Enter at your own risk’ or, even better, ‘No entry’.

‘If you need any help, just yell.’ The young police officer turns away and walks back to his office.

Jeanette Kihlberg takes a deep breath, opens the door to National Crime’s collection of child pornography and steps inside.

She knows that from now on she’s never going to look at the world with the same eyes again.

This is where it starts, she thinks. Zero hour.

HER LITTLE CAR
is parked in Klippgatan, and Sofia Zetterlund realises that her resident’s parking permit has quite rightly expired. Apart from a generous quantity of wet fallen leaves, the car has also been covered with a mass of parking tickets. Considering how long it’s been parked here illegally, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been towed away.

She thinks about the previous day’s visit to the library, and how her encounter with the librarian with the veil and the pigment-damaged eye had made her think about her car and the parking permit.

That was when her cleansing process had seriously begun.

The memory had appeared so suddenly that she had imagined the librarian was talking to her.

Your parking permit has expired.

She unlocks the car door and gets a small brush out of the glove compartment. Deviations, she thinks as she brushes the rotting leaves from the windscreen wipers and roof.

Deviations from the norm make her remember, they wake her from sleepwalking, without necessarily having anything to do with the memories that spark into life.

No memory is unimportant for the brain, she thinks. On the contrary, it’s often the most trivial memories that are dominant, whereas you suppress the things you ought to remember. The brain doesn’t trust itself, doesn’t trust its ability to handle difficult things, so it would rather remember where you parked the car than the fact that you were raped by your dad.

Logical, touching and tragic, she thinks. All at the same time.

She puts the brush and the parking tickets in the glove compartment and gets in behind the wheel. She’s slept for barely three hours, but still feels rested.

Before she starts the car to drive out to the Sunflower Nursing Home, she takes her notepad from her bag and turns to an empty page. ‘Deviations’, she writes, then puts the pad back in her bag.

She pulls out into Bondegatan and isn’t yet sure if she’s going to get out of the car at the home as Victoria Bergman or Sofia Zetterlund. Nor does she know that another deviation from normality will have a decisive impact on what happens.

When she pulls up at the Sunflower Nursing Home twenty minutes later, she catches sight of a woman standing outside smoking, leaning on a walking frame. The light from the lamp above the doors means that her face is partly in shadow and partly clouded by the smoke from the cigarette, but Sofia knows that the woman is Sofia Zetterlund.

She recognises everything. Her movements, posture, clothes. She recognises everything, and approaches the woman with her heart pounding.

But no memories come to her, everything just feels empty.

Her old psychologist exhales the last of the smoke, then turns her head in such a way that the light falls across her face.

The red-painted lips and blue eyeshadow are the same as before, the wrinkles in her forehead and cheeks are somewhat deeper, yet still the same, and wake no memories.

Only when she sees the deviation do her memories wash over her in an absolute torrent.

Her eyes.

They’re no longer her old psychologist’s eyes, and what’s missing, the deviation from the norm, makes her remember everything.

Her therapy sessions in Sofia’s home in Tyresö and at Nacka Hospital. Summer butterflies in the garden, a red kite against a blue sky, the sound of Victoria Bergman’s footsteps on the hospital floor, steps that got lighter and lighter as they approached the door of Sofia Zetterlund’s office.

As she steps into the clinic the eyes are the first thing Victoria sees. They’re what she longs for most. She can land safely in them.

The woman’s eyes help Victoria to understand herself. They’re ancient, they’ve seen everything and they’re trustworthy. They don’t panic, and they don’t tell her she’s crazy, but nor do they tell her she’s all right, or that they understand her.

The woman’s eyes don’t mess around. That’s why she can look into them and feel calm.

They see everything she herself has never seen, only suspected. They enlarge her when she tries to shrink herself, and they gently show her the difference between what she thinks she sees, hears and feels, and what is happening in everyone else’s reality.

Victoria wishes she could see with old, wise eyes.

Now cataracts have made the Eyes blind and empty.

Victoria Bergman goes up to the woman and puts a hand on her arm. Her voice is choked. ‘Hello, Sofia. It’s me … Victoria.’

A smile spreads across Sofia Zetterlund’s face.

IVO ANDRIĆ STOPS
the car outside Ulrika Wendin’s apartment and gestures to the forensics officers in the other car to follow him. Two young women and a young man. Ambitious and thorough.

He unlocks the door, and they go inside.

Right, he thinks. A fresh look. Fresh thinking.

‘We’ll start with the kitchen,’ he tells the forensics team. ‘You’ve seen the pictures of the blood. Look for details. I was only here for an hour, and didn’t have time to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb.’

Fine-tooth comb, he thinks. A new term he’s learned. From the receptionist at the pathology lab, a nice girl from Gothenburg who talks oddly.

Once work in the apartment is under way he thinks about his morning’s examination of the mummified boy. So depressing, the whole thing, yet still progress. They’ve got an impression of his teeth, and the DNA samples will be checked against the Ukrainian information about the Zumbayev brothers.

Kazakhs, he thinks as he looks at one of the bloodstains on the floor. When he lived in Prozor there had been a couple of families of Kazakh extraction. He had become good friends with the father of one of the families. His name was Kuandyk, and on one occasion he had explained how important traditional names were to Kazakhs. His own name meant something like ‘happy’, and as the pathologist thinks about Kuandyk’s cheerful demeanour and loud laugh, it strikes him that it had been a good name for him.

Kuandyk had also told him that the choice of name often reflected the expectations people had of the newborn child. One boy in the village in southern Kazakhstan that Kuandyk came from ended up being called Tursyn. His parents had had several children who had died within days of being born. Tursyn literally meant ‘let it stop’, and his parents’ prayers had actually been answered.

Andrić hears the two female forensics officers exchange a couple of words. The fridge door opens and the compressor rumbles.

Itkul and Karakul, he thinks. The fact that the dead boys were of Kazakh origin had made him think about his old friend from Prozor, and during the morning he had found out what their names meant. It saddens him to consider what their parents must have thought about their sons’ futures. Itkul means ‘dog’s slave’, and Karakul ‘black slave’.