The Crow Girl (16 page)

Perfect, Sofia thought.

Johansson handed her the motorcycle and reminded her of how valuable it was. At least two thousand kronor on one of the online auction sites, and probably more if you sold it to someone in Japan or the US.

It must weigh at least a kilo, she thought as she walked back to her room. She apologised again to Samuel and put the motorcycle down on the windowsill to the left of the table.

‘Jeesus, ma’am!’ he exclaimed.

She hadn’t expected the transformation to be so rapid.

Frankly Samuel’s eyes were shining with excitement. He rushed over to the window, and Sofia watched with amusement as he very carefully turned the motorcycle around, all the while letting out small whistles and cries of delight.

‘Jeesus, beautiful …’

During her previous conversations with Frankly Samuel she had detected a particular passion in him. On several occasions he had mentioned the motorcycle club in Freetown, where he would hang out and admire the long rows of bikes. When he was fourteen temptation got the better of him and he stole a Harley and rode it along the wide beaches outside the city.

Now Samuel sat in the chair with the motorcycle in his arms, patting it as if it were a little dog. His eyes were radiant and his face had cracked into a broad smile.

‘Freedom, ma’am. That is freedom … Them bikes are for me like momma-boobies are for the little children.’

He began to talk about his interest. Owning a motorcycle didn’t just mean freedom to him, it also impressed girls and got him a lot of friends.

‘Tell me more about them. Your friends.’

‘Which friends? Da cool sick or da cool fresh? Myself prefer da cool freshies! Frankly, I have lots off dem in Freetown … start with da cool fresh Collin …’

Sofia smiled discreetly and let him talk about Collin and his other friends, each one cooler than the last. She realised after ten, fifteen minutes that he would probably use up the rest of their time telling anecdotes about his friends in impressive detail, sometimes admiring, sometimes boastful.

She knew she had to be on her guard. Frankly Samuel’s rolling torrent of words and body language were making her lose her concentration.

She had to try to steer the conversation onto something else.

Then something happened that she had actually considered before, but wasn’t expecting at that precise moment.

Another Samuel revealed himself to her.

WAS BATHED IN
the flickering light of the television. The Discovery Channel had been on all night, and at half past five in the morning she woke up on the sofa to the narrator’s monotonous voice.

‘
Pla Kat
is Thai, and means ‘plagiarism’, but it’s also the name of the large, aggressive species of fighting fish bred in Thailand for use in spectacular contests. Two males are set loose in a small aquarium, where their innate territorial instincts lead them to attack each other immediately. The brutal and bloody trial of strength doesn’t end until one of the fish is dead.’

She smiled and sat up, then went out into the kitchen to switch on the coffee machine.

While she waited for it to be ready she stood at the kitchen window looking out onto the street.

The park and the leafy trees, the parked cars and the thawed-out people.

Stockholm.

Södermalm.

Home?

No, home was something completely different.

It was a state of being. A feeling that she would never experience. Not ever.

Gradually, piece by piece, an idea began to take shape.

She drank her coffee, cleaned up and went back into the living room.

She moved the floor lamp, lifted the catch and opened the door behind the bookcase.

She saw that the boy was sleeping heavily.

The table in the living room was full of newspapers from the past week. She had expected at least a mention of a missing child, and more likely screaming headlines.

A child vanishing into thin air was surely big news?

Something that could keep the sales of the evening tabloids up for at least a week.

That was usually the way.

But she hadn’t found any indication that he was missing. There were no announcements on the radio, and she began to realise that he was even more perfect than she could have hoped.

If there wasn’t anyone looking for him, it meant he would turn to her for protection as long as she fulfilled his basic needs, and she knew she was going to do that.

She would more than fulfil them.

She would refine his desires so that they matched hers, and the two of them would become one. She would be the intelligent brain of the new being, and he its muscles.

Right now, as he lay knocked out on the mattress, he was just an embryo. But once he had learned to think like her, only one truth would exist for them.

When she had taught him how it feels to be victim and perpetrator at the same time, he would understand.

He would be the beast, and she the one who decided if the beast should give in to its urges. Together they would be a perfect person, one whose freedom of will was governed by one consciousness, and whose physical desires by another.

Her desires could be fulfilled through him, and he would enjoy it.

Neither of them could be held responsible for what the other did.

The body would be made up of two beings, one beast and one human being.

One victim and one perpetrator.

One perpetrator and one victim.

Free will united with physical instinct.

Two antipodes in one body.

The room was gloomy, and she turned on the light in the ceiling. The boy came round, and she gave him a drink. Bathed his sweating brow.

In the little bathroom she filled the sink with warm water. She washed him with a small facecloth, soap and water. Then she dried him carefully.

Before she went back out into the apartment she gave him another injection of tranquilliser, and waited for him to sink back into unconsciousness.

He fell asleep with his head against her chest.

AS USUAL, THE
clientele was a mixture of local artists, a few semi-famous musicians and actors, and passing tourists who wanted to experience the supposedly bohemian Södermalm.

In fact these blocks were the most middle class and ethnically homogeneous in the entire country. It was also one of the most crime-ridden neighbourhoods, but was always portrayed in the media as trendy and intellectual instead of violent and dangerous.

Weakness, Victoria Bergman thought with a snort. She had been going to therapy with Sofia Zetterlund for six months, and what had they come up with so far?

To begin with she had felt the conversations were giving her something; she got a chance to air her feelings and thoughts, and Sofia Zetterlund had been good at listening. Then she began to think she wasn’t getting anything back. Sofia Zetterlund just sat there, looking like she was asleep. While Victoria was genuinely opening up, Sofia sat opposite her nodding coolly, making notes, shuffling her papers, fiddling with her little tape recorder and generally looking rather distant.

She took a packet of cigarettes from her bag and put it on the table, drumming her fingers nervously on the tabletop. A feeling of discomfort weighed heavy on her chest.

It had been there a long time.

Far too long to be able to bear it.

Victoria was sitting at a pavement table on Bondegatan. Since she’d moved to Södermalm she often went there to have a glass of wine or two.

The staff were friendly, without being too personal. She hated bartenders who started calling you by your first name after just a few visits.

Victoria Bergman could see Sofia Zetterlund’s sleepy, uninterested face in front of her, and a thought struck her. She took a pen from her jacket pocket and lined up three cigarettes on the table in front of her.

On one she wrote the name SOFIA, on the second WEAK and on the third SLEEPY.

Then she scrawled SOFIA ZZZZZZZZZZZ … across the front of the packet.

She lit the cigarette with SOFIA on it.

To hell with it, she thought. No more of those sessions. Why should she go any more? Sofia Zetterlund called herself a psychotherapist, but she was a weak person.

She thought about Gao. She and Gao weren’t weak.

Recent events were still fresh in her mind, and she felt almost euphoric. But in spite of her excitement, something unsatisfactory, some sort of discontent was still gnawing away at her. As if she needed something more.

She realised she had to set Gao a test that he couldn’t succeed at. Then maybe she’d feel the way she had at the start. She understood that she wanted to see the look in Gao’s eyes, not anyone else’s. The look in his eyes when he realised she’d betrayed him.

She knew she used betrayal as a drug, and that she told lies to make herself feel good. Having two people in her power, and deciding for herself who to embrace and who to strike. If you kept mixing it up, randomly switching victims, you could make them hate each other and do anything to get approval.

Once they were sufficiently insecure, you could make them want to kill each other.

Gao was her child. Her responsibility, her everything.

Only one person before him had been that. Martin.

She sipped the wine and wondered if it had been her fault that he had disappeared. No, she thought. It wasn’t her fault, she had been just a child then.

The fault lay with her dad. He had ruined her faith in adults, and Martin’s dad had had to bear the collective guilt of all men.

He simply liked me, and I misinterpreted the way he touched me, Victoria thought.

I was just a confused child.

She took a deep gulp of wine and looked idly through the menu, even though she wasn’t planning to eat anything.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND HAD
gone to the Tjallamalla boutique on Bondegatan in the hope of finding something nice to add to her wardrobe, but walked out instead with a small painting of the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed’s former group. She’d listened to them a lot when she was a teenager.

She had been surprised to find that the shop sold art as well; it never used to. But she hadn’t hesitated for a moment; she thought the picture was a bargain.

She sat down at one of the tables along the pavement outside Harvest Home, just a stone’s throw away, resting the painting on the next chair.

She ordered a half-carafe of house white. The waitress smiled in recognition, and she smiled back and lit a cigarette.

She was thinking about Samuel Bai and their therapy session a few hours earlier. She shuddered at the thought of what she had unleashed, and how she herself had reacted.

When he was angry he was unpredictable, with an impenetrable facade, totally divorced from any sort of rationality. Sofia recalled how she had tried to cut right into a noisy, chaotic consciousness, taking root there and becoming something for him to cling to. But she had failed.

She loosened her scarf and felt her sore neck. She had been lucky to survive.

Everything had been going fine until the moment when the new Samuel showed himself.

Without any warning, she had witnessed a terrifying transformation. Almost in an aside about one of his childhood friends, Samuel had mentioned something called the Pademba Road Prison.

When he reached the third word his voice changed and the word came out as a muffled hiss.

‘Prissson …’

She knew that dissociative personalities could switch very rapidly. A single word or gesture could be enough to change Samuel’s personality.

He had let out a loud laugh that had scared the life out of her. His broad smile was still in place, but it was completely empty, and the look in his eyes quite blank.

Her memory of what followed was unclear.

She remembered Samuel getting up from his chair, knocking the desk as he rose and tipping the jar of pens into her lap.

And she remembered what he had snarled at her.

‘I redi, an a de foyo. If yu ple wit faya yugo soori!’

I’m ready, and am here to get you. If you play with fire, you’ll be sorry.

‘Mambaa manyani … Mamani manyimi …’

It had sounded like baby talk, and the grammar was odd, but there was no doubting the words’ meaning. She had heard them before.

Then he had picked her up with a firm grip around her neck, like she was a doll.

Then everything had gone black.

As Sofia lifted her wine glass to her lips with a trembling hand, she discovered that she was crying. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse and realised that she had to try to make sense of her memories.

The social worker arrived to collect him, she thought.

Sofia remembered that she had smiled as she handed Samuel over to his contact from social services. As if nothing unusual had happened. But what about before that?

The strange thing was that her only memory was of a perfume she recognised.

The one Victoria Bergman usually wore.

I can’t keep my clients apart, she concluded numbly as she took a few sips. That’s the real reason I can’t cope with this.

Samuel Bai and Victoria Bergman.

Along with the shock and the lack of oxygen, her judgement wasn’t working properly, which was why her only memory of what had happened with Samuel at the practice was of Victoria Bergman instead.

I can’t do this, she repeated silently to herself. It’s not enough just to postpone my next session with him, I’ll have to cancel the whole lot. I can’t help him right now. Sometimes you have to be allowed to be weak.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her mobile phone. It was a number she didn’t recognise.

‘Yes?’ she said warily.

‘My name’s Jeanette Kihlberg, I’m calling from the Stockholm police. Am I talking to Sofia Zetterlund?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s about one of your patients, Karl Lundström. We believe he might be involved in a case I’m investigating, and Lars Mikkelsen suggested I contact you about your conversations with Lundström. I’m interested in finding out if Karl Lundström has said anything to you that might help us.’