The Crow Girl (105 page)

And in the end she had been stronger than her father.

She is deep in thought and the phone on the coffee table rings several times before she hears it. But she knows what the call is about, and does not hurry to answer it or finish her cigarette.

The man at the other end says exactly what is expected of him. One single word.

‘
Konets …’
says a dark, rasping voice before the line goes dead, and Gilah Berkowitz knows that Rodya has done his job with the Wendin girl.

The only thing she regrets is that she was forced to break off her experiment on the girl’s body.

She goes over to the window again and opens it, letting the cold into the room as her thoughts turn to the next day.

Konets …
she thinks, and coughs drily. The end is getting close for me too.

The conclusion to everything.

Kolya will make sure there’s no one in the vicinity of the Babi Yar monument between one and three o’clock the following night.

After almost seventy years, the promise she made will be fulfilled. It’s taken her twenty years to raise the person who’s going to help her.

HER HEAD IS
banging against the wall, the nylon cord is pressing into her throat, and something large inside her mouth presses against her soft palate.

But she can’t hear or sense anything. She just drifts away and doesn’t even notice her hand suddenly feeling its way over the concrete floor and grabbing hold of something warm.

She watches everything from where she’s resting in the air, just beneath the ceiling, and sees herself close her hand around the handle of the hammer drill, which hasn’t yet cooled down after the thickset man made the hole in the ceiling.

The drill starts with a howl that gets muffled slightly as the drill bit eats its way into the man’s stomach, and that’s when she realises that her strength really does come from below, from the earth itself.

Ulrika Wendin shuts her eyes, and when she opens them again she can move at last. It takes several more seconds for her to remember that her feet are bound with duct tape, that she’s sitting on a concrete floor in a cellar, nowhere.

She’s surrounded by a cloying, stifling smell. It reminds her of whey cheese, the same smell from biology classes when the teachers forced the children to dissect cow eyes with small scalpels. She twists her head. Beside her, leaning against the same wall, a man is sitting and staring at her with a broad smile on his lips. Her other hand is trapped beneath his vast bulk. He has a hole in his stomach, and that’s where the smell is coming from.

‘Eto konets, devotchka,’
he mutters, still smiling. The expression on his face is no longer blank, and it strikes her that he looks almost happy. As for her, she’s experiencing a calmness that she’s never felt before. A calmness so great that it leaves no room for hatred or forgiveness.

He coughs, and now even his eyes are smiling. ‘You are strong,
devotchka,
’ he says in a whisper as a trickle of blood escapes his mouth.

She has no idea what he means. She tries to swallow, but it hurts badly, and she realises that her larynx is damaged.

She looks on in fascination as he makes a great effort to reach into the pocket of his filthy jeans. The hole in his stomach keeps throbbing.

The knife, she thinks. He’s looking for his knife.

But it isn’t a knife. It’s a mobile phone. So small that it almost vanishes into his huge hand.

A bleep. Then another one before he puts the phone to his ear.

It feels to her like an eternity before she hears the ringing tone get interrupted by a voice at the other end, and the man is still staring happily at her.

While his eyes slowly fill with blood he utters one single word.

‘Konets,’
he says, and as the phone slips from his hand the light in his eyes has already gone out.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there with the drill in her hand, and she hardly notices when she puts it down, removes the tape from her ankles and stands up.

She has to get out of there, but first she needs to find something to wear, and she walks on unsteady legs into the next room, where she finds a pair of thin, white protective overalls.

It’s snowing, it’s cold, and she isn’t dressed for it, but she has no choice.

The snow reaches almost to her knees as she stumbles down the slope towards the edge of the forest.

JEANETTE AND HURTIG
are the last to get out of the helicopter, and as the engines fall silent she can hear nothing but the wind in the branches of the spindly pine trees, covered with a thick layer of snow. Winter comes early in the mountains, a thousand kilometres north of Stockholm. It’s cold, and the snow crunches under their boots. The only light is from the lamps on the response unit’s helmets.

‘We’ll split into groups of three, and approach the cottage from all four sides.’

The head of the unit indicates the directions on a map, then points at Jeanette and Hurtig. ‘You two come with me, we’ll take the shortest route straight to the cottage. We’ll go slowly, so the others have time to get round without being spotted. OK?’

Jeanette nods, and the other police officers give the thumbs up.

The forest is thin, but every now and then she still manages to brush against a branch, covering her with snow that seeps under her collar. The heat of her body meets the cold snow and she shivers as it melts and runs down her back. Hurtig is marching ahead of her with long, determined strides, and she can see that he’s on home territory. He probably spent his entire childhood in Kvikkjokk walking through similar forests in similar conditions.

The unit head slows down and holds a hand up. ‘We’re here,’ he says quietly.

Through the trees Jeanette can see the cottage, and recognises it at once from the photograph. There’s a faint glow in one of the windows, and she can see the veranda where Viggo Dürer sat and smiled at the camera, but she can’t see any sign of life inside the house.

At that moment the forest bursts into life and the specially trained police officers rush towards the cottage with their weapons drawn.

As Jeanette follows Hurtig towards the house with her eyes firmly on the ground, she sees footprints leading in the opposite direction.

There’s a trail of bare footprints leading through the snow, from the house into the forest.

THE HALL IS
full of black bin bags and Victoria is going to make sure it all disappears.

Everything must go, every last scrap of paper.

The answers to her questions aren’t there, they’re inside her, and the healing process has progressed far enough for her to feel she’ll soon have full access to her memories. The notes and newspaper clippings helped her to take the first steps, but she no longer needs them. She knows which way she needs to go.

Gao’s room is empty now, the exercise bike is in the living room, she’s taken the mattresses up to her storage compartment in the attic, and all that remains is to rip out the insulation.

She ties the last bag and puts it in the hall. She needs to get rid of the bags herself, but she doesn’t yet know how that’s going to work. In total there are twelve bags, 125 litre capacity each, and she’s going to have to hire a trailer or a van to move everything in one trip.

The simplest solution would obviously be to take it all to a recycling centre, but that doesn’t feel right. She’s going to need a ritual farewell. A symbolic act of closure, like a book burning.

She goes over to the bookcase in the living room and closes the door to Gao’s room.

As she lifts the hook to slot it into the catch she stops, takes the hook out, lets it hang against the side of the bookcase, and then repeats the action. Once more, then again, and then once again.

There’s a memory in that action.

Viggo Dürer’s cellar at the farm in Struer, and the room within. A shudder runs through her body. She doesn’t want to return to that memory.

THE WORLD IS
white and cold and she’s been running through the loose snow for what feels like an eternity.

Despite her dehydration and lack of sleep in the last twenty-four hours, she’s wide awake. As if her body is forcing itself on, even though it has no reserves left.

The weather is also helping, and the cold drives her forward. Sharp snowflakes sting her face.

A few times she’s found herself running into her own footsteps and realises that she’s been going in circles. She can hardly feel her feet any more, and is having trouble walking. When she stops to try to warm them up she listens for the sound of anyone in pursuit. But everything is completely silent.

The world is so white that not even the darkness of night can hide its clarity, which strikes her in the form of cotton-wool cold as she makes her way through the sparse forest, and she knows she’s not going to live to be much older than this.

An hour more or less, depending on how long it takes to freeze to death, and she curses her stupidity in not searching the house for some better clothes to wear.

It’s below freezing, and she’s barefoot and wearing just a thin pair of protective overalls.

An hour, ordinarily such a negligible period of time, now feels like the most precious thing there is, and that’s why she’s running to meet her fate with an open heart. With the freezing air stinging at her throat she stumbles on, as if salvation existed, and the branches lashing her face create the illusion that she’s on her way towards something. Towards a place that is beyond such concepts as onward, ahead and later.

Ulrika Wendin takes a deep breath and runs as though hope did exist in a world of rock, snow and cold.

She runs and thinks, thinks and runs. She remembers what has been, without regretting her choices, and allows herself to dream about things that haven’t yet happened. Things she’s done, things she’s going to do.

But the cold is relentless, and is making her breathing irregular.

Above the white treetops she can see a thin, reddish-yellow strip, and knows that dawn is coming, but holds out no hope that the rising sun will be able to warm her sufficiently. The Swedish winter sun is a worthless sun, no good for anything. Even if it’s the same sun that burns African farmers’ fields to dust, up here in the north it’s ice-cold.

Life, she thinks once more, and the thought repeats as she hears the sound of a helicopter approaching. Ulrika stops and listens. The helicopter is getting closer and closer, and when it’s something like a kilometre away she hears it slowly sink; then the sound of the engines dies away and finally stops altogether. They’re close, she thinks. Maybe even at the house she was held captive in, and she knows she has to hurry if she’s going to find her way back.

She tries to retrace her steps, but the wind has already covered her tracks.

Her legs are moving forward, and the numb soles of her feet aren’t bothered by the stones and branches bruising and cutting her. Pain means life, she tells herself, realising that the helicopter might mean that someone has come to rescue her. Once more she is filled with hope that there might be a future.

Her tracks in the snow are getting fainter and fainter, until eventually the wind has had long enough to erase them completely. Now the cold is hurting so much that it’s anaesthetising her, and her nerves do what they can to deceive her. Her whole body is screaming with cold, but her brain is telling her that she’s sweating. As she stumbles on, it feels like her clothes are scalding her.

The last thing Ulrika Wendin does in life is tear the oversized overalls off. Then she lies down naked in the cold, white snow and understands that it’s over. Life goes on, she thinks. It always does.

And at least she’s warm now.

VICTORIA BERGMAN IS
sitting on the wide windowsill in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and her mobile phone in her hand. The morning sun is strong, casting razor-sharp shadows on the street below.

The shadow play looks like a cubist puzzle, where the edges of the pieces are like shards of glass, and she contemplates her own internal puzzle, now so close to completion.

Can she go on working as a psychologist? She doesn’t know, but she knows she must accept for the time being that she is Sofia Zetterlund, a psychotherapist with her own private practice in rented premises on Mariatorget.

Victoria Bergman unofficially, she thinks. And Sofia Zetterlund on paper. This has been the case for a long time, but the big difference is that now the Sleepwalker is dead, and I’m the one making the decisions, feeling and acting.

No more memory lapses. No nocturnal walks and visits to bars, no more staggering through dark parks drunk. She no longer has to remind Sofia of her existence that way. Once she had even fallen in the water, down by Norra Hammarbyhamnen, and she remembers Sofia sitting in the kitchen the day after with her wet clothes, desperately trying to work out what had happened. The answer was both simple and extremely tasteless. She had gone to the Clarion Hotel, went with someone to his room, fucked until she felt sick, then walked down to the water with two bottles of wine, got too drunk and fell in.

Victoria jumps down from the windowsill, puts her cup on the draining board and goes into the hall. Just the bags to sort out.

Now she knows what she’s going to do with them and where she’s going to take them. The logical place.

She calls Ann-Britt and says that she’s thinking of closing the practice for the foreseeable future. She needs a holiday, needs to get away somewhere, anywhere, and doesn’t know how long she’ll be gone. She might stay a month or two, or she might be back in a few days. But the rent for her office has already been paid a year in advance, so that won’t be a problem.