The Crow Girl (10 page)

Jeanette told her about the murder of the young boy, and said they needed help identifying him. She showed a picture that one of the police artists had drawn.

The girl, whose name was Aatifa, said she usually hung out in the city centre. According to the volunteers, she was in no way atypical. Her parents had fled from Eritrea and were both unemployed. She lived in an apartment in Huvudsta with her parents and six siblings. Four rooms and a kitchen.

Neither Aatifa nor any of the others recognised or knew anything about the dead boy. After two hours they gave up and walked back towards the car park.

‘Little adults.’ Hurtig shook his head as he took out his car keys. ‘Christ, they’re no more than children. They ought to be playing, making forts.’

Jeanette could see how upset he was.

‘Yes. And evidently they can just disappear without anyone missing them.’

An ambulance flew past, blue lights flashing, but with no siren. At Tegelbacken it turned left and vanished into the Klara Tunnel.

Jeanette pulled her jacket more tightly around her.

Åke was snoring on the sofa, and she wrapped a blanket around him before going to the bedroom, getting undressed and curling up naked under the duvet. She switched the light off and lay there in the dark with her eyes open.

She could hear the wind against the window, the sound of the trees in the garden rustling and the distant rumble from the motorway.

She felt sad. She didn’t want to sleep.

She wanted to understand.

SOFIA FELT DRAINED
as she left Huddinge. Her conversation with Tyra Mäkelä had taken its toll, and Sofia had also agreed to take on another job, which looked likely to be fairly demanding. Lars Mikkelsen at National Crime had asked her to join the investigation into a paedophile who was going to be charged with the abuse of his own daughter and dissemination of child pornography. The man had confessed when he was arrested.

There’s never any end to it, she thought with a heavy heart as she pulled out onto Huddingevägen.

It was as if she were being forced to bear Tyra Mäkelä’s experiences. Memories of humiliation, the scarring inside her that really just wanted to break out and reveal its own feebleness. The awareness of how much pain a person can cause someone else becomes a sort of impenetrable armour.

Armour that can’t let anything out.

Her despondency followed her all the way back to her office and the meeting she had arranged with social services in Hässelby. The meeting with Samuel Bai, the former child soldier from Sierra Leone.

A conversation she knew would revolve around insane violence and appalling abuse.

On days like this there was no chance of lunch. Just a short period of silence in the break room. Eyes closed, lying down, trying to regain some sort of equilibrium.

Samuel Bai was a tall, muscular young man who at first seemed reserved and uninterested. But when Sofia suggested that they talk in Krio instead of English, he opened up and immediately became more communicative.

During her three months in Sierra Leone she had learned the West African language, and they spent a long time talking about life in Freetown, and about places and buildings they both knew. As the conversation progressed, Samuel began to trust her as he realised that she could understand something of what he had been through.

After twenty minutes she began to hope that she might be able to contribute something positive.

Samuel Bai’s problems with focus and concentration, his inability to sit still for more than thirty seconds, and his difficulty holding back sudden impulses and emotional outbursts were all reminiscent of ADHD, with a strong element of hyperactivity and lack of impulse control.

But it wasn’t as simple as that.

She noted that Samuel’s tone of voice, intonation and body language changed with the subject of conversation. Sometimes he would suddenly begin to speak English instead of Krio, and would occasionally break into a version of Krio she’d never heard before. His eyes also changed as he shifted language and posture. He would switch from sitting bolt upright, with an intense look in his eyes as he spoke loudly and clearly about wanting to open a restaurant some day, to sitting slumped, his eyes dull, muttering in that strange dialect.

If Sofia had discerned dissociative tendencies in Victoria Bergman, they seemed to have reached full fruition in Samuel Bai. Sofia suspected that Samuel was suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of the terrible things he had experienced as a child, and that this had provoked a personality disorder. He showed signs of having several different personalities, which he seemed to switch between unconsciously.

The phenomenon was sometimes called multiple personality disorder, but Sofia preferred the term ‘dissociative identity disorder’.

She also knew that people like that were very difficult to treat.

To start with, treatment of that sort was very time-consuming, both in terms of each individual conversation and the total length of the treatment. Sofia realised that her usual forty-five-or sixty-minute sessions wouldn’t be enough. She’d have to try to increase each session with Samuel to ninety minutes, and suggest to social services that she see him at least three times a week.

But the treatment was also difficult because the sessions demanded utter concentration from the therapist.

During that first conversation with Samuel Bai she felt the same thing she had experienced during Victoria Bergman’s monologues. Samuel, like Victoria, was a talented self-hypnotist, and his sleep-like state began to affect Sofia.

She knew she was going to have to be at the very top of her game if she was to stand any chance of helping Samuel.

Unlike her work for the criminal justice system, which ultimately had nothing to do with care of the people she met, she actually felt that she could be of some help here.

They talked for over an hour, and when Samuel left her office Sofia felt that the image of his wounded psyche had become slightly clearer.

She was tired, but knew that her day’s work wasn’t over, because she still had to conclude her file on Tyra Mäkelä, and also needed to prepare for her fact-check of the child soldier’s book. The story of what happens when children are given the power to kill.

She pulled out all the material she had and leafed through the English version. The publishers had sent her a list of questions that they were hoping she could answer during their meeting in Gothenburg, but she quickly realised that she couldn’t give them any straight answers.

It was too complicated.

The book had already been translated, and her contribution was mainly going to consist of technicalities.

But Samuel Bai’s book wasn’t finished yet. It was right in front of her.

Screw this, she thought.

Sofia asked Ann-Britt to cancel the train tickets and hotel in Gothenburg. The publishers could think whatever they liked.

Sometimes acting on impulse is the best decision.

Before she left for the day she put an end to the Tyra Mäkelä case by emailing the members of the investigative group in Huddinge her final conclusions.

That was really just another technicality.

They had agreed that Tyra Mäkelä should be sentenced to secure psychiatric care, just as Sofia had proposed.

She felt she had been able to make a difference.

AFTER DINNER SOFIA
and Mikael cleared the table together and put the plates in the dishwasher. Mikael said he just wanted to relax in front of the television, which Sofia thought sounded like a good idea, since she had work to do. She went into his office and sat down at the desk. It had started to rain again, and she shut the little window and opened her laptop.

She took a cassette marked ‘Victoria Bergman 14’ from her bag and inserted it into the tape player.

Sofia recalled that Victoria Bergman had been sad during that particular meeting, and that something had happened, but when she had asked about it Victoria had merely shaken her head.

She heard her own voice.

‘Tell me exactly what you want to do. We can sit in silence if you’d rather.’

‘Mmm, maybe, if only silence weren’t so horribly unsettling. So incredibly intimate.’

Victoria Bergman’s voice turned darker, and Sofia leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes.

I have a memory from when I was ten years old. It was in Dalarna. I was looking for a bird’s nest, and when I found a little hole I crept slowly up to the tree. When I got there I banged hard on the trunk and the chirping inside stopped. I don’t know why I did it, but it felt right. Then I took a few steps back and sat down in the blueberry scrub and waited. After a while a little bird appeared, and sat in the opening. It crept inside and the chirping started up again. I remember getting annoyed. Then the bird flew off again and I found an old stump that I leaned up against the tree. I got hold of a decent-sized stick and climbed on top of the stump. Then I rammed it in hard, aiming it downward, and continued until the chirping had stopped. I climbed down again and waited for the bird to come back. I wanted to see how it would react when it discovered its dead chicks.

Sofia felt her mouth go dry, and got up and went out into the kitchen. She filled a glass with water and drank it.

There was something in Victoria’s story that felt familiar.

It reminded her of something.

A dream, maybe? She went back into the study. The tape player was still running. She’d forgotten to switch it off.

Victoria Bergman’s voice was eerily rasping. Dry.

Sofia jerked as the tape came to an end. She looked around, bleary-eyed. It was past midnight.

Outside the window Ölandsgatan lay silent and deserted. The rain had stopped, but the street was still wet and the street lamps were twinkling.

She switched off her computer and went out into the living room. Mikael had gone to bed, and she carefully slid in beside him.

She lay awake for a long time, thinking about Victoria Bergman.

The strangest thing was that after her monologues, Victoria immediately went back to being her normal, focused self.

It was as if she changed the channel to a different programme. A quick press of the remote, and she was on another channel. Another voice.

Was it like that with Samuel Bai? Different voices talking in turns? Probably.

Sofia realised that Mikael wasn’t asleep, and kissed him on the shoulder.

‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he said. ‘You looked so peaceful sitting there. You were talking in your sleep.’

At three o’clock she got out of bed, pulled out one of the cassettes, turned on the tape player and leaned back, letting herself be swallowed up by the voice.

The pieces of Victoria Bergman’s personality began to fall into place, and Sofia thought that she was beginning to understand. And could sympathise.

She could see the images Victoria Bergman painted with her words as clearly as if they were a film. It was far too immense to comprehend. But Victoria’s dark sadness frightened her.

In all likelihood she had nurtured her memories, day after day, over the years creating a world in her mind where she sometimes consoled herself, and sometimes blamed herself for what had happened.

Sofia shuddered at the sound of Victoria Bergman’s growling voice.

Sometimes whispering. Sometimes so agitated her mouth sprayed saliva.

Sofia fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until Mikael knocked on the door and said it was morning.

‘Have you been sitting here all night?’

‘Yes, almost, I’m seeing a client today and I need to work out how I’m going to approach her.’

‘OK. Look, I’ve got to go. See you tonight?’

‘Yes. I’ll call.’

He shut the door, and Sofia decided to continue listening, and turned the cassette over. She could hear her own breathing when Victoria Bergman stopped for breath. When she began to speak again it was in an authoritative voice.

… he was sweaty and wanted to hug me, even though it was so hot, and he went on sprinkling water on the stove. I could see the bag between his legs when he leaned over to get water from the wooden bucket, and I felt like pushing him over so he fell onto the hot rocks. The rocks that never seemed to cool down. Warmed up every Wednesday with a heat that never managed to penetrate all the way to my bones. I just sat there quietly, quiet as a little mouse, and all the while I could see the way he was looking at me. The way his eyes went strange and he started to breathe heavily, then I would go out to the shower and scrub myself clean after the game. Although I knew I could never be clean. I ought to be grateful to him for showing me so many secrets, so that I’d be prepared for the day when I met boys, who could be really clumsy and pushy, and he certainly wasn’t, because he’d been practising all his life, and had been trained by Grandma and her brother and no harm had come to anyone, it had just made him strong and resilient. He’d done the Vasaloppet ski race a hundred times, even with cracked ribs and bad knees, without a word of complaint, though he did throw up in Evertsberg. The chafe marks I got down there when he’d finished playing on the sauna benches and pulled his fingers out weren’t worth making a fuss of. When he was done with me and closed the door of the sauna, I thought about the female spider who eats the smaller males after they’ve mated …

Sofia jerked. She felt sick.

She must have fallen asleep again, and in her sleep she’d dreamed a load of terrible things, and she realised it was just because the tape player had been running. The monotonous voice had directed her thoughts and dreams.

Victoria Bergman’s monologue had forced its way into her subconscious.

THE FLY’S WINGS
are stuck fast in the chewing gum. There’s no point in you trying to flap them, Crow Girl thinks. You’ll never fly again. Tomorrow the sun will be shining as usual, but it won’t be shining on you.