The Crow Girl (3 page)

Never be seen outside.

Sweden was safer. There you would work mainly in restaurants and could move about more freely. It wasn’t as well paid, but if you were lucky you could earn a lot of money there too, depending on which services were in particular demand.

There were people in Sweden who wanted the same thing as the people in Belgium.

The camp wasn’t very far from the airport, and he was driven there in an unmarked police car. He stayed overnight, sharing a room with a black boy who could speak neither Chinese nor English.

The mattress he slept on was clean, but it smelled musty.

On only his second day there he called the number on the piece of paper, and a female voice explained how to get to the station in order to catch the train to Stockholm. Once he got there he was to call again for further instructions.

The train was warm and comfortable. It carried him quickly and almost soundlessly through a city where everything was white with snow. But by coincidence or fate, he never reached Central Station in Stockholm.

After a few stations a beautiful blonde woman sat down in the seat opposite him. She looked at him for a long time, and he realised that she knew he was alone. Not just alone on the train, but alone in the whole world.

The next time the train stopped the blonde woman stood up and took his hand. She nodded towards the door. He didn’t protest, and went with her like he was in a trance.

They got a taxi and drove through the city. He saw that it was surrounded by water, and he thought it was beautiful. There wasn’t as much traffic as there was at home. It was cleaner, and the air was easier to breathe.

He thought about fate and about coincidence, and wondered for a moment why he was sitting there with her. But when she turned to him and smiled, he stopped wondering.

At home they used to ask what he was good at, squeezing his arms to see if he was strong enough. Asking questions he pretended to understand.

They always had their doubts. Then sometimes they picked him.

But she had chosen him without him having done anything for her, and no one had ever done that before.

The room she led him into was white, and there was a big, wide bed. She put him in it and gave him something hot to drink. It tasted almost like the tea at home, and he fell asleep before the cup was empty.

When he woke up he didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, but he saw that he was in a different room. The new room had no windows and was completely covered in plastic.

When he got up to go over to the door he discovered that the floor was soft and yielding. He tried the door handle, but the door was locked. His clothes were gone, as was the mobile phone.

Naked, he lay back down on the mattress and went to sleep again.

This room was going to be his new world.

JEANETTE COULD FEEL
the wheel pulling to the right, and the car seemed to be heading along the road at an odd angle. She crawled the last kilometre at sixty, and by the time she turned off onto the Drottningholm road towards the metro station, she was beginning to think the fifteen-year-old car was finished.

She parked and walked over to the cordon, where she caught sight of Hurtig. He was a head taller than all the others, Scandinavian blond and thickset, without actually being fat.

After working with him for four years Jeanette had learned how to read his body language.

He looked worried. Almost pained.

But when he caught sight of her he brightened, came over and held the cordon tape up for her.

‘I see the car made it.’ He grinned. ‘I don’t know how you put up with driving around in that old crate.’

‘Me neither, and if you can get me a raise I’ll go and get a little convertible Mercedes to cruise about in.’

If only Åke would get a decent job with a decent wage, she could get herself a decent car, she thought as she followed Hurtig into the cordoned-off area.

‘Any tyre tracks?’ she asked one of the two female forensics officers crouched over the path.

‘Yes, several different ones,’ one of them replied, looking up at Jeanette. ‘I think some of them are from the lorries that come down here to empty the bins. But there are some other tracks from narrower wheels.’

Now that Jeanette had arrived at the scene she was the most senior officer present, and therefore in charge.

That evening she would report to her boss, Commissioner Dennis Billing, who in turn would inform Prosecutor von Kwist. Together the pair of them would decide what should be done, regardless of what she might think.

Jeanette turned to Hurtig.

‘OK, let’s hear it. Who found him?’

Hurtig shrugged. ‘We don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, don’t know?’

‘The emergency line got an anonymous phone call, about’ – he looked at his watch – ‘about three hours ago, and the caller said there was a boy’s body lying here, close to the entrance to the station. That’s all.’

‘But the call was recorded?’

‘Of course.’

‘So why did it take so long for us to be told?’ Jeanette felt a pang of irritation.

‘The dispatcher got the location wrong and sent a patrol to Bolidenplan instead of Thorildsplan.’

‘Have they traced the call?’

Hurtig raised his eyebrows. ‘Unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile phone.’

‘Shit.’

‘But we’ll soon know where the call was made from.’

‘OK, good. We’ll listen to the recording when we get back. What about witnesses, then? Did anyone see or hear anything?’ She looked around hopefully, but her subordinates just shook their heads.

‘Someone must have driven the boy here,’ Jeanette went on, with an increasing sense of desperation. She knew their work would be much harder if they couldn’t identify any leads within the next few hours. ‘It’s pretty unlikely that anyone moved a corpse on the metro, but I still want copies of the security camera recordings.’

Hurtig came up beside her.

‘I’ve already got someone on that. We’ll have them by this evening.’

‘Good. Seeing as the body was probably brought here by road, I want lists of all vehicles that have passed through the road tolls in the last few days.’

‘Of course,’ Hurtig said, pulling out his mobile phone and moving away. ‘I’ll make sure we get them as soon as possible.’

‘Hold on a minute, I’m not done yet. Obviously, there’s a chance the body was carried here, or brought on a bike or something like that. Check with the college to see if they have surveillance cameras.’

Hurtig nodded and lumbered off.

Jeanette sighed and turned to one of the forensics officers who was examining the grass by the bushes.

‘Anything useful?’

The woman shook her head. ‘Not yet. Obviously there are a lot of footprints; we’ll take impressions of some of the best ones. But don’t get your hopes up.’

Jeanette slowly approached the bushes where the body had been found, wrapped in a black garbage bag. The boy, a young adolescent, was naked, and had stiffened in a sitting position with his arms around his knees. His hands had been bound with duct tape. The skin on his face had turned a yellow-brown colour, and looked almost leathery, like old parchment.

His hands, in contrast, were almost black.

‘Any signs of sexual violence?’ She turned to Ivo Andrić, who was crouched down in front of her.

Ivo Andrić was a specialist in unusual and extreme cases of death.

The Stockholm police had called him early that morning. Because they didn’t want to cordon off the area around the metro station any longer than necessary, he had to work fast.

‘I can’t tell yet. But it can’t be ruled out. I don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions, but from my experience you don’t usually see this sort of extreme injury without there being evidence of sexual violence as well.’

Jeanette nodded.

She leaned closer and noted that the dead boy looked foreign. Arabic, Palestinian, maybe even Indian or Pakistani.

The body was visible in some bushes just a few metres from the entrance to the Thorildsplan metro station on Kungsholmen, and Jeanette realised that it couldn’t have remained unseen for very long.

The police had done their best to protect the site with screens and tarpaulins, but the terrain was hilly, which meant it was possible to see the crime scene from above if you were standing some distance away. There were several photographers with telephoto lenses standing outside the cordon, and Jeanette almost felt sorry for them. They spent twenty-four hours a day listening to police-band radio and waiting in case something spectacular happened.

But she couldn’t see any actual journalists. The papers probably didn’t have the staff to send these days.

‘What the hell, Andrić,’ one of the police officers said, shaking his head at the sight. ‘How can something like this happen?’

The body was practically mummified, which told Ivo Andrić that it had been kept in a very dry place for a long time. Not outside in a wet Stockholm winter.

‘Well, Schwarz,’ he said, looking up, ‘that’s what we’re going to try to find out.’

‘Yes, but the boy’s been mummified, for fuck’s sake. Like some damn pharaoh. That’s not the sort of thing that happens during a coffee break, is it?’

Ivo Andrić nodded in agreement. He was a hardened man who was originally from Bosnia, and had been a doctor in Sarajevo during the almost four years of the Serbian siege. He had witnessed a great many unpleasant things throughout his long and eventful career, but he had never seen anything like this before.

There was no doubt at all that the victim had been severely abused, but the odd thing was that there were none of the usual self-defence injuries. All the bruises and haematomas looked more like the sort of thing you’d see on a boxer. A boxer who had gone twelve rounds and been so badly beaten that he eventually passed out.

On his arms and across his torso the boy had hundreds of marks, harder than the surrounding tissue, which, when taken as a whole, meant that he had been subjected to an astonishing number of blows while he was still alive. From the indentations on the boy’s knuckles, it seemed likely that he had not only received but had also dealt out a fair number of punches.

But the most troubling thing was the fact that the boy’s genitals were missing.

He noted that they had been removed with a very sharp knife.

A scalpel or razor blade, perhaps?

An examination of the mummified boy’s back revealed a large number of deeper wounds, the sort a whip would make.

Ivo Andrić tried to picture in his mind’s eye what had happened. A boy fighting for his life, and when he no longer wanted to fight someone had whipped him. He knew that illegal dogfights still happened in the immigrant communities. This might be something similar, but with the difference that it wasn’t dogs fighting for their lives but young boys.

Well, one of them at least had been a young boy.

Who his opponent might have been was a matter of speculation.

Then there was the fact that the boy hadn’t died when he really should have. Hopefully the post-mortem would reveal information about any traces of drugs or chemicals, Rohypnol, maybe phencyclidine. Ivo Andrić realised that his real work would begin once the body was in the pathology lab back at the hospital in Solna.

At noon they were able to put the body in a grey plastic bag and lift it into an ambulance for transportation to Solna. Jeanette Kihlberg’s work here was done, and she could go on to headquarters, at the other end of Kungsholmen. As she walked towards the car park a gentle rain started to fall.

‘Fuck!’ she swore loudly to herself, and Åhlund, one of her younger colleagues, turned and gave her a questioning look.

‘My car. It had slipped my mind, but it broke down on the way here and now I’m stranded. I’ll have to call a tow truck.’

‘Where is it?’ her colleague asked.

‘Over there.’ She pointed at the red, rusty, filthy Audi twenty metres away from them. ‘Why? Do you know anything about cars?’

‘It’s a hobby of mine. There isn’t a car on the planet that I couldn’t get going. Give me the keys and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.’

Åhlund started the car and pulled out onto the road. The creaking and screeching sounded even louder from outside, and she assumed she would have to call her dad and ask for a small loan. He would ask her if Åke had found a job yet, and she would explain that it wasn’t easy being an unemployed artist, but all that would probably change soon.

The same routine every time. She had to eat humble pie and act as Åke’s safety net.

It could all be so easy, she thought. If he could just swallow his pride and take a temporary job. If for no other reason than to show that he cared about her and realised how worried she was. She sometimes had trouble sleeping at night before the bills were paid.

After a quick drive around the block the young police officer jumped out of the car and smiled triumphantly.

‘The ball joint, the steering column, or both. If I take it now I can start on it this evening. You can have it back in a few days, but you’ll have to pay for parts and a bottle of whisky. How does that sound?’

‘You’re an angel, Åhlund. Take it and do whatever the hell you like with it. If you can get it working, you can have two bottles and a decent reference when you go for promotion.’

Jeanette Kihlberg walked off towards the police van.

Esprit de corps
, she thought.

DURING THE FIRST
meeting Jeanette delegated the preliminary steps in the investigation.

A group of recently graduated officers had spent the afternoon knocking on doors in the area, and Jeanette was hopeful that they’d come up with something.

Schwarz was given the thankless task of going through the lists of vehicles that had passed the road tolls, almost eight hundred thousand in total, while Åhlund checked the surveillance footage they had secured from the teacher-training college and the metro station.