The Crow Girl (64 page)

Germany and Denmark belong together. North Friesland, Schleswig-Holstein. Raped by German boys at the Roskilde Festival, then by a Danish German bastard. Two countries in red and white and black. Eagles fly over the flat fields, shitting on the grey patchwork and landing on Helgoland, a North Friesian island where the rats fled when Dracula carried the plague to Bremen. The island looks like the Danish flag, the cliffs are rust red, the sea foams white.

The bus starts again. ‘Sorry for the delay. We’re now on our way to Tyresö.’

During the remaining twenty minutes of the journey Victoria reads her diary from cover to cover, and when she gets off she sits down on a wooden bench at the bus stop and continues writing.

She packs her things and walks towards the Eyes’ house.

The living room of the villa in Tyresö is light and the sun is shining through the white lace curtains in front of the open terrace door. She’s lying on her back on a sun-warmed sofa and the old woman is sitting opposite her.

She is going to tell everything, and it’s as if there’s no end to what needs to be said.

Victoria Bergman is going to die.

First she talks about interrailing a year before. About a nameless man in Paris in a room with cockroaches on the ceiling and leaking pipes. About a four-star hotel on the beach promenade in Nice. About the man in bed beside her, who was an estate agent and smelled of sweat. About Zurich, but she remembers nothing of the city, just snow and nightclubs and the fact that she jerked a man off in a park.

She tells the Eyes that she’s convinced external pain can wipe out internal pain. The old woman doesn’t interrupt her, just lets her talk freely. The curtains sway in the breeze, and she offers Victoria coffee and cake. It’s the first time she’s eaten anything since she left Copenhagen.

Victoria talks about a man called Nikos whom she met when they got to Greece. She remembers his expensive Rolex on the wrong wrist, and the fact that he smelled of garlic and aftershave, but not his face, and not his voice.

She tries to be honest in what she says. But when she talks about what happened in Greece it’s hard to stick to the facts. She can hear how crazy it all sounds.

She had woken up in Nikos’s home and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water.

‘And Hannah and Jessica are sitting at the kitchen table, and shout at me that I need to pull myself together. That I smell bad, that I’ve bitten my nails so much they must hurt, and that I have rolls of fat and varicose veins. And that I’ve been mean to Nikos.’ The old woman smiles at her like she usually does, but her eyes aren’t smiling, they look worried.

‘Did they really say that?’

Victoria nods. ‘Hannah and Jessica aren’t really two people,’ she says, and it’s like she suddenly understands herself. ‘There are three of them.’

The therapist looks at her with interest.

‘Three people,’ Victoria goes on. ‘One who works, is dutiful, and … well, obedient and moral. And one who is analytical, wise and understands what I have to do to feel better. Then there’s one who tells me off, a real moaning minnie. She gives me a guilty conscience.’

‘A Worker, an Analyst and a Moaning Minnie. Do you mean that Hannah and Jessica are two people who have different characteristics?’

‘Not really,’ Victoria replies. ‘They’re two people who are three people.’ She laughs uncertainly. ‘Does that sound muddled?’

‘No, I think I understand.’

She’s silent for a moment, then she asks Victoria if she’d like to describe Solace.

Victoria thinks about this, but isn’t sure that she has a good answer. ‘I needed her,’ she eventually says.

‘And Nikos? Do you want to talk about him?’

Victoria laughs. ‘He wanted to marry me. Can you imagine? Ridiculous!’

The woman says nothing, changes position in the armchair and leans back. It looks like she’s thinking about what to say next.

Victoria suddenly feels sleepy and bored. It’s no longer so easy to talk, but she feels that she wants to. The words seem sluggish and she has to make an effort not to lie. She feels ashamed in front of the Eyes.

‘I wanted to torment him,’ she says after a while, and as she does so she feels a great calm.

Victoria can’t help grinning, but when she sees that the old woman doesn’t seem at all amused she puts her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. She feels ashamed again and has to make an effort to find her way back to the voice that’s helping her talk.

When the psychologist leaves the room shortly afterwards to go to the toilet, Victoria can’t resist looking to see what she’s written, and she opens the notepad as soon as she’s alone.

She doesn’t understand, and is soon interrupted by footsteps in the hall.

‘What’s a transitional object?’ Victoria feels let down, because the therapist has been writing things they haven’t talked about.

The old woman sits down again. ‘A transitional object,’ she says, ‘is an object that represents someone or something that you have problems being separated from.’

‘Such as?’ Victoria fires back.

‘Well, a stuffed toy or a blanket can comfort a child because the object represents its mother. When she’s not there, the object is there in her place, and helps the child move from dependency on its mother to independence.’

Victoria still doesn’t understand. After all, she isn’t a child, she’s an adult. A grown-up.

Does she miss Solace? Was the wooden mask a transitional object?

She doesn’t know where Tramp, the little dog made out of real rabbit fur, came from.

‘What are DID and MPD?’

The old woman smiles. Victoria thinks she looks sad. ‘I can tell you’ve read my notes. But they aren’t absolute truths.’ She nods towards the notepad on the desk. ‘They’re just my reflections on our conversations.’

‘But what do DID and MPD mean?’

‘They’re a way of describing someone who has several autonomous personalities inside them. It isn’t –’ She stops herself, and looks very serious. ‘It isn’t a diagnosis,’ she continues. ‘I want you to understand that. It’s more like a personality trait.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘DID stands for dissociative identity disorder. It’s a logical self-defence mechanism, the brain’s way of handling difficult things. A person develops different personalities that act independently, separate from each other, in order to deal with different situations in the best possible way.’

What does that mean? Victoria thinks. Autonomous, dissociative, separate and independent? Is she separate and independent from herself through other people who are inside her?

It sounds ridiculous.

‘Sorry,’ Victoria says. ‘Can we continue later? I think I need to get some rest.’

She falls asleep on the sofa. When she wakes up it’s still light outside, but the curtains are still, the light is paler and it’s quiet. The old woman is sitting in her armchair, knitting.

Victoria asks the therapist about Solace. Is she real? The old woman says she might be an adoption, but what does she mean by that?

Hannah and Jessica definitely exist, they were in her class in Sigtuna, but they are also inside her as the Worker, the Analyst and Moaning Minnie.

Solace is also real, but she’s a girl who lives in Freetown in Sierra Leone, and her real name is something different. But Solace Manuti is inside Victoria, and she’s the Helper.

She herself is the Reptile, who only does what it wants, and the Sleepwalker, who watches life pass by without doing anything about it. The Reptile eats and sleeps, and the Sleepwalker stands outside and watches what the other parts of Victoria are doing, without intervening. The Sleepwalker is the one she likes least, but simultaneously she knows that it’s the one with the greatest chance of survival, and it’s this part that she must cultivate. The others need to be removed.

Then there’s Crow Girl, and Victoria knows it isn’t possible to remove that part of herself.

Crow Girl can’t be controlled.

On Monday they go into Nacka. The therapist has arranged for a medical examination to ascertain whether Victoria was subjected to sexual abuse as a child. She has no desire to report her father, but the therapist says it’s likely that the doctor will file a report with the police.

She’ll probably also be referred to the forensic medicine unit in Solna for a more thorough examination.

Victoria has explained to the woman why she doesn’t want to report anything to the police. She regards Bengt Bergman as dead, and she wouldn’t be able to face seeing him during a trial. Her desire to have her injuries documented has other motivations.

She wants to start again, get a new identity, a new name and a new life.

The therapist says she can have a new identity if the justifications are sufficiently strong. That’s why they have to go to the hospital.

As they pull into the car park of Nacka Hospital, Victoria has already begun to plan her new future.

The previous future never existed, because Bengt Bergman took it from her.

But now she is going to get a chance to begin again. She’s going to get a new name and a confidential ID number. She’s going to be good, get an education and find a job in a different city.

She’s going to earn money and take care of herself, maybe get married and have children.

Be normal, like everyone else.

GAMLA ENSKEDE IS
dark, and almost silent, just a few youngsters out on the road. Through the thin, leafless, fairly tragic honeysuckle hedge a blue-grey light shines in from the neighbours’ living-room window, indicating that they, like most other people at this time, are watching television.

Jeanette gets up, goes over to the window and lowers the blinds, turns round and sits down next to Sofia.

She sits quietly and waits. It’s up to Sofia to decide if they’re going to continue talking about work or move on to more private matters.

Sofia reminds Jeanette about the perpetrator profile. ‘Shall we take a look at it?’ she asks. Sofia leans over the edge of the sofa and takes a notepad out of her bag.

‘OK,’ Jeanette replies, disappointed that Sofia has chosen to go on talking about work.

But it’s not that late, she thinks. And Johan’s spending the night somewhere else. We’ve got plenty of time.

‘There’s a lot to suggest that we’re dealing with a person who fulfils the requirements for borderline diagnosis.’ Sofia leafs through her pad. ‘This is someone who thinks in terms of either/or, where he’s divided the whole world into black and white. Good and evil. Friends and enemies.’

‘You mean people who aren’t his friends automatically become his enemies? A bit like George W. Bush said before he invaded Iraq?’ Jeanette smiles.

‘Something like that,’ Sofia replies, smiling back.

‘Can you say anything about the fact that the murders were so brutal?’

‘It’s a matter of seeing the act, well, the murder, as a language of its own. An expression of something.’

‘Oh?’ Jeanette thinks about what she’s seen.

‘So, the perpetrator is staging his own internal drama outside of himself, and we have to work out what this person is trying to say. To start with, I think the murders were planned.’

‘I’m convinced of that as well.’

‘But at the same time, the excessive violence suggests that the murders were committed in a temporary outburst of fury.’

‘So what might this be about, then? Power?’

‘Absolutely. A strong need to dominate and have total control over another person. The victims have been carefully selected, yet seem simultaneously random. Young boys with no identities.’

‘It seems so sadistic. What can you say about that?’

‘That the murderer enjoys seeing the victim’s impotence and helplessness. Maybe it’s even an erotic feeling for him. A genuine sadist can’t experience sexual pleasure any other way. Sometimes their victim is held captive and the abuse goes on for a long time. It’s not unusual for such abuse to end in murder. These acts are usually carefully planned, and not the result of a fit of rage that’s come out of nowhere.’

‘But why so much violence?’

‘As I said, some perpetrators take satisfaction from inflicting pain. It may be a necessary form of foreplay leading to other types of sexual expression.’

‘And the embalming of the boy we found at Danvikstull?’

‘I think that was an experiment. A whim, almost.’

‘But what could have made someone turn out like that?’

‘There are as many different answers to that question as there are perpetrators, and psychologists, too, for that matter. And now I’m talking in general terms, rather than specifically about the immigrant boys.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think this sort of behaviour arises from early disturbances during the development of the personality, as a result of physical and mental abuse.’

‘So the victim becomes a perpetrator?’

‘Yes. Usually the perpetrator has grown up under extremely authoritarian circumstances with elements of violence, where the mother has been passive and submissive. As a child he might have lived under the constant threat of divorce and felt responsible for that. He learned to lie at an early age to avoid beatings, has had to intervene to protect one parent, or has had to take care of one parent in degrading situations. He had to be that parent’s comforter instead of himself being comforted. He might have witnessed dramatic attempts at suicide. He probably started fighting, drinking and stealing at an early age, without this getting any reaction from adults. In short, he has always felt unwanted and basically like a problem.’