The Crow Girl (6 page)

But nothing he said made her change her mind. On the contrary, his stories only made her feel more motivated.

The first hurdle to being accepted into the police academy had been a problem with the sight in her left eye. The operation had cost all her savings, and she had to work overtime pretty much every weekend for six months to be able to afford it.

The second hurdle was when she found out that she was too short.

A chiropractor provided the solution to that, and after twelve weeks of treatment on her back he had managed to stretch her height by the two missing centimetres.

She had lain flat in the car on the way to the medical evaluation, because she knew that the body could shrink if you sat down for any length of time.

What happens if I lose my motivation? she thought.

That simply mustn’t happen, she thought. You just keep going. She walked through the bus station towards Central Station, down the escalator, and through the crowded passageway between the commuter trains and the metro.

She opened her purse. Two crumpled hundred-kronor bills left, thirty of which would go to her ticket home. She hoped Åke still had some of the money she had given him for household expenses at the start of the week. Even if Åhlund was able to fix the car, she guessed it was still going to cost a couple of thousand.

Work and money, she thought.

How the hell do you escape from that?

Once Johan had gone to bed, Jeanette and Åke settled down with cups of tea in the living room. The European Football Championships were about to start, and this pre-game show was providing a detailed analysis of the Swedish national team’s chances. As usual, there was talk of at least the quarter-finals, hopefully a semi-final and maybe even gold.

‘Your dad rang, by the way,’ Åke said, without looking away from the screen.

‘Did he want anything special?’

‘The usual. He asked how you were, then about Johan and school. Then he asked me if I’d managed to find a job yet.’

Jeanette knew her dad had trouble with Åke. He had once called him a slacker. On another occasion, a dreamer. Lazy. A couch potato. The list of negative epithets was as varied as it was comprehensive. Occasionally he came out with them in front of Åke.

Usually when that happened she felt sorry for Åke and immediately sprang to his defence, but recently she had found herself agreeing more and more with the criticism.

He often said he was happy being her housewife, but in reality she was just as much of a housewife as he was. It would have been OK if he actually did something with his paintings, but to be honest there wasn’t much sign of activity there.

‘Åke …’

He didn’t hear her. He was deeply absorbed in a report about Swedish team captains over the years.

‘Our finances are completely fucked,’ she said. ‘I’m ashamed of having to call Dad again.’

He didn’t respond.

‘Åke?’ she said tentatively. ‘Are you listening?’

He sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, still staring at the screen. ‘But at least you’ve got a good reason to call him.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, Bosse called here earlier.’ Åke sounded annoyed. ‘He’s probably expecting you to call back, isn’t he?’

Fucking incredible, Jeanette thought.

She wanted to avoid an argument, so she got up from the sofa and went out to the kitchen.

A mountain of washing-up. Åke and Johan had made pancakes, and the evidence was still there.

No, she wasn’t going to do the washing-up. It could sit there until he dealt with it. She sat down at the kitchen table and dialled her parents’ number.

This is the last time, I swear, she thought.

After the call Jeanette went back into the living room, sat down on the sofa again, and waited patiently for the programme to end. She liked football a lot, probably more than Åke, but this type of programme didn’t interest her at all. Too much empty talk.

‘I called Dad,’ she said when the credits started to roll. ‘He’s putting five thousand in my account so we can get through the rest of the month.’

Åke nodded distractedly.

‘But it’s not going to happen again,’ she went on. ‘I mean it this time. Do you understand?’

He squirmed. ‘Yeah, yeah. I understand.’

SOFIA AND HER
former partner, Lasse, had landed the apartment through a complicated triangular sale, in which Sofia sold her small two-room apartment on Lundagatan and Lasse sold his three-room apartment near Mosebacke and they bought this spacious five-room apartment on Åsöberget, not far from Nytorget and the park at Vita bergen.

She walked into the hall, hung up her coat and went into the living room. She put the bag containing the Indian takeaway on the table and went into the kitchen to get cutlery and a glass of water.

She turned on the television, settled down on the sofa and began to eat.

The body needs fuel, she thought.

Eating dinner alone depressed her, and she ate quickly, surfing through the channels. Children’s programmes, an American sitcom, ads, something educational.

She looked at the time and saw that the evening news was about to start, and put the remote down just as her mobile phone buzzed.

A text from Mikael.

‘How are you? Miss you … ’ he wrote.

She swallowed the last mouthful of food and replied.

‘Bored. I’ll probably spend the evening working at home. Hugs.’

For a while now one particular person had commanded more and more of her interest, and Sofia had got into the habit of pulling out some of her notes each evening. Every time she hoped she was going to see something new, something conclusive.

Sofia got up and went into the kitchen, and scraped the last of the food into the bin. She heard the news start in the living room, and the lead story for the second day in a row was the murder at Thorildsplan.

The anchor said that the police had gone public with a phone call made to the emergency call centre the previous morning.

Sofia thought the caller sounded drunk.

She took her USB memory stick out of her bag, plugged it into her computer and opened the folder about Victoria Bergman.

It was as if there were several bits missing from Victoria Bergman’s personality. During their conversations it had become clear that there were a lot of traumatic experiences in Victoria’s youth. A lot of their sessions had developed into long monologues that couldn’t be called conversations in any real sense.

Often Sofia actually came close to falling asleep from the sound of Victoria’s monotonous, droning voice. Her monologues acted as a sort of self-hypnosis that encouraged drowsiness in Sofia as well, and she had difficulty remembering all the details of what Victoria said. When she mentioned this to her fellow psychotherapist at the office he had reminded her about the option of recording the sessions, and had lent her his pocket tape recorder in exchange for a decent bottle of wine.

She had marked the cassettes with the time and date, and now she had twenty-five little tapes locked away in the cabinet at work. Anything she had found particularly interesting she typed up and saved onto the USB stick.

Sofia opened the folder she had labelled VB, which contained a number of text files.

She double-clicked on one of the files, and read on the screen:

Sofia saw from her notes that the conversation was about Victoria’s childhood summers in Dalarna. Almost every weekend the Bergman family would get in the car and drive the two hundred and fifty kilometres up to the little cottage in Dala-Floda, and Victoria had told her that they often spent four full weeks there during the holidays.

She carried on reading:

Sofia made a few notes about what needed to be followed up, then closed the document.

She opened another of the files at random, and realised at once that it was one of the encounters in which Victoria had disappeared inside herself.

The conversation had begun as usual: Sofia would ask a question, and Victoria would answer.

With each question the answers got longer and longer, and less and less coherent. Victoria would talk about one thing, which would lead her to something completely different, and so on, at an ever increasing rate.

Sofia dug out the recording of the conversation, put it into the tape player, pressed play, leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

Victoria Bergman’s voice.

Then I started to eat to put a stop to their bloody cackling and they fell silent at once because they saw what I was prepared to do to be their friend. Not that I was prepared to kiss their backsides. Pretending to like them. Getting them to respect me. Getting them to realise that I actually had a brain and could think.

Sofia opened her eyes, read the label on the cassette case, and saw that the conversation had been recorded a couple of months ago. Victoria had been talking about her time at boarding school in Sigtuna, and a particularly extreme incidence of bullying.

The voice went on.

Victoria changed the subject.

When the treehouse was ready I didn’t think it was any fun any more, I wasn’t interested in lying in there reading comics with him, so when he fell asleep I left the treehouse, went down to the boat, got one of the wooden planks, leaned it up against the entrance, and hammered some nails in until he woke up inside, wondering what I was doing. Just you stay there, I said, and carried on hammering until the box was empty …

The voice faded away, and Sofia realised she was on the verge of falling asleep.

… and the window was too small to crawl through, but while he sat inside crying I fetched more planks and nailed them across it. Maybe I’d let him out later, maybe not, but in the darkness he’d be able to think about how much he liked me …

Sofia switched off the tape player, got up from her chair and looked at the time.

An hour?

No, that can’t be right, she thought. I must have dozed off.

AT NINE O’CLOCK
Sofia decided to do as Mikael wanted and go round to his apartment on Ölandsgatan, in the block known as Monument. On the way she bought things for breakfast, because she knew there’d be nothing in his fridge.

Once she got to Mikael’s apartment she fell asleep on his sofa, exhausted, only waking up when he kissed her on the forehead.

‘Hello, darling, surprise!’ he said quietly.

She looked around, startled, scratching herself where his coarse black beard had tickled her.

‘Hello. What are you doing here? What time is it?’

‘Half past twelve. I managed to catch the last flight.’

He lay a big bouquet of red roses on the table and went into the kitchen. She looked at the flowers with distaste, then got up and followed him over the expanse of the living-room floor. He’d already taken butter, bread and cheese out of the fridge.

‘Do you want some?’ he asked. ‘A cup of a tea and a sandwich?’

Sofia nodded and sat down at the kitchen table.

‘How’s your week been?’ he went on. ‘Mine’s been awful! Some journalist’s got it into his head that our products have dangerous side effects, and there’s been a huge fuss on television and in the press. Has there been anything about it here?’

He put down two plates of sandwiches and went over to the stove, where the water was already boiling.

‘Not as far as I know. There might have been.’ She was still feeling drowsy and taken aback by his sudden appearance. ‘I’ve had to listen to a woman who thinks she’s been abused by the mass media –’

‘I understand. Doesn’t sound great,’ he interrupted, handing her a cup of steaming blueberry tea. ‘But I dare say it’ll pass. We’ve discovered that the journalist is some sort of environmental activist who once took part in a protest at a mink farm. When that comes out …’ He laughed and ran his hand across his neck to indicate what was going to happen to anyone setting themselves up against the big pharmaceutical company.

Sofia didn’t like his arrogance, but she didn’t feel up to having a debate. It was far too late for that. She stood, cleared the table and rinsed their cups before going into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

Mikael fell asleep beside her for the first time in a week, and Sofia realised that she had missed him, in spite of everything.

He reminded her of Lasse.

Sofia woke up when a car’s headlights swept across the ceiling. At first she didn’t know where she was, but as she sat up in bed she recognised Mikael’s bedroom, and saw from the clock radio that she’d been asleep for little more than an hour.

Carefully she closed the bedroom door and went into the living room. She opened a window and lit a cigarette. A mild breeze blew into the room and the smoke disappeared into the darkness behind her. As she smoked she watched a white plastic bag drifting with the wind along the street below her, until it got stranded in a puddle of water on the opposite pavement.