The Crow Girl (69 page)

The noise gets even louder, and she hears someone swear inside the room.

One–nil. The Soviet Union takes the lead at Neckar Stadium in Stuttgart.

She holds the baby up in front of her. The girl is smoother now, and paler. Her head looks almost like an egg.

Suddenly Per-Ola Silfverberg is standing in front of her, and for a few silent seconds she stares at him.

She can’t believe it.

The Swede.

Glasses and cropped fair hair. The sort of yuppie shirt that bankers usually wear. She’s only seen him in filthy work clothes, and never in glasses.

She can see her own reflection in them. Her child is resting against her shoulders in the Swede’s glasses.

He looks like an idiot, his face is completely white, slack and expressionless.

‘Come on, Soviet Union,’ she says as she rocks the baby in her arms.

Then the colour returns to his face. ‘Christ! What the hell are you doing here?’

She backs away when he takes a step closer to her, reaching out for the child.

Incubation. The time between the moment of infection and the outbreak of illness. But also the brooding period. Waiting for an egg to hatch. How can the same word describe waiting to have a baby and waiting for illness to break out? Are they the same thing?

The Swede lunging at her makes her lose her hold of the baby.

Its head is heavier than the rest of the body and she sees the baby turn half a revolution in its fall towards the stone floor.

The head is an egg that cracks.

The yuppie shirt flaps back and forth. It is joined by a black dress and a portable phone. His wife starts to panic, and Victoria can’t help laughing, seeing as no one is bothered about her any more.

Litovchenko, one–nil
, the television reminds them.

‘Come on, Soviet Union,’ she repeats as she slumps down by the wall.

The baby is a stranger, and she makes up her mind not to care about it.

From now on it’s just an egg in a blue onesie.

WHAT THE HELL
, Jeanette Kihlberg thinks, as an uncomfortable feeling spreads through her body.

The fact that Lars Mikkelsen had been involved in the investigation into Victoria Bergman isn’t really so strange, but it’s striking that he concluded that her identity needed to be protected, seeing as there was no court conviction behind the case.

What’s more remarkable is that a psychologist named Sofia Zetterlund had conducted the psychological analysis. It couldn’t be her Sofia, because she wouldn’t have been twenty at the time of the investigation.

Hurtig looks amused. ‘That’s one hell of a coincidence. Call her at once.’

Almost too odd, Jeanette thinks. ‘I’ll call Sofia, and you call Mikkelsen. Ask him to come over to see us, preferably today.’

As soon as Hurtig leaves the room she dials Sofia’s number. No answer on her home number, and when she calls the practice the secretary tells her Sofia’s ill.

Sofia Zetterlund, she thinks. What are the odds that Victoria Bergman’s psychologist in the eighties would have the same name as the Sofia she knows, who also happens to be a psychologist?

A search on the computer tells her that there are fifteen Sofia Zetterlunds in the whole of Sweden. Two of them are psychologists, and they both live in Stockholm. Her Sofia is one of them, and the other has been retired for years and is registered as living in a nursing home in Midsommarkransen.

That must be her, Jeanette thinks.

The whole thing seems almost planned. As if someone were making fun of her and had plotted out the entire sequence of events. Jeanette doesn’t believe in coincidence – she believes in logic, and logic is telling her that there’s a connection. It’s just that she can’t see it yet.

Holism again, she thinks. The details seem incredible, incomprehensible. But there’s always a natural explanation. A logical context.

Hurtig is standing in the doorway.

‘Mikkelsen’s in the building. He’s waiting for you by the coffee machine. And what are we going to do with Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg? Åhlund says they’re both unmarried and registered in the same swanky suburb to the west of the city. They’re both local government lawyers.’

‘Two women who’ve evidently stuck together all their lives,’ Jeanette says. ‘Keep looking. Check if the other calls have come up with anything, and put Schwarz onto checking databases and local papers. We’ll hold off on paying them a visit for the time being. I don’t want us to mess things up, and we need much more to go on. Right now Victoria Bergman is of greater interest.’

‘And Madeleine Silfverberg?’

‘The authorities in France didn’t have much to offer. All we’ve got is an address in Provence, and we’ve hardly got the resources to head off down there the way things are these days, but obviously that’s a step we might have to take if everything else gets bogged down.’

Hurtig agrees, and they leave the room. Jeanette finds Lars Mikkelsen by the coffee machine. He’s holding two cups in his hands and smiles at her.

Jeanette takes one of the cups. ‘It’s good that you could come. Shall we go into my office?’

Lars Mikkelsen stays almost an hour and explains that he was fairly inexperienced when he was given the Victoria Bergman case.

Finding out about what had happened to Victoria had undeniably been draining, but it also convinced him that he had made the right choice of career.

‘Every year we receive about nine hundred reports of sexual assaults.’ Mikkelsen sighs and crumples up his empty coffee cup. ‘In over eighty per cent of the cases we’re dealing with male offenders, and often they’re someone the child knows.’

‘But how common is it really?’

‘In the nineties there was a big study of seventeen-year-olds that found that one in eight girls had been abused.’

Jeanette does some quick calculations. ‘So in a normal school class you can assume that there’s at least one girl with a dark secret. Maybe two.’ She thinks of the girls in Johan’s class, and about the fact that he probably knows someone who’s been sexually exploited.

‘Yes, that’s more or less how it is. Among boys the figure is estimated to be one in twenty-five.’

They sit silently for a moment, thinking about the dark statistics.

Jeanette is the first to speak. ‘So you handled Victoria’s case?’

‘Yes, I was contacted by a psychologist at Nacka Hospital who had a patient she was concerned about. But I don’t remember the psychologist’s name.’

‘Sofia Zetterlund,’ Jeanette interjects.

‘Yes, that sounds familiar. That was probably it.’

‘The psychologist who was involved in the Karl Lundström case with you has the same name.’

‘Yes, now you come to mention it.’ Mikkelsen rubs his chin. ‘Strange … But I only spoke to her over the phone a couple of times, and I’m not good at remembering names.’

‘That’s only one of many coincidences in this case.’ Jeanette gestures towards all the folders and bundles of documents on her desk. ‘If only you knew how tangled this is starting to get. But I know it’s all connected somehow. And Victoria Bergman’s name keeps cropping up everywhere. What exactly happened?’

He thinks. ‘Well, I was contacted by Sofia Zetterlund because she’d had a lot of conversations with the girl and had come to the conclusion that her situation needed to be dramatically changed. That drastic measures were called for.’

‘Such as protecting her identity? But who was she being protected from?’

‘Her dad.’ Mikkelsen takes a deep breath and goes on. ‘Remember that the abuse started when she was small, in the mid-seventies, and the legislation was very different then. In those days it was called sexual indecency with a descendant, and the law wasn’t changed until 1984.’

‘There’s nothing about a conviction in any of my documents. Why didn’t she report her dad?’

‘She refused to, simple as that. I had plenty of conversations with the psychologist about it, but it didn’t help. Victoria said she’d deny everything if we filed charges. All we had was the documentation of her injuries. Everything else was circumstantial, and in those days that wasn’t good enough. Today he would have got between four and five years. And would have had to pay damages, somewhere in the region of half a million.’

‘It needs to be pricey.’ It might sound a bit crass, but Jeanette can’t be bothered to explain. She presumes Mikkelsen understands what she means. ‘So what did you do?’

‘The psychologist, Sofia Zetterberg –’

‘Zetterlund,’ Jeanette corrects him, appreciating that Mikkelsen wasn’t exaggerating when he said he had trouble with names.

‘Yes, that’s right. She believed it was vital that Victoria be separated from her father and get the chance to begin again, under a new name.’

‘So you arranged that?’

‘Yes, with the help of a medical officer, Hasse Sjöquist.’

‘I saw that in my files. What was Victoria like to talk to?’

‘We got fairly close, and as time went by I think she started to trust me.’

Jeanette looks at Mikkelsen and can see why Victoria would have felt safe with him. Like a big brother coming to the rescue when the other children are being mean. Sometimes she feels something similar herself. A desire to make life a bit better, if only in her little corner of the world.

‘So you arranged for Victoria Bergman to get a new identity?’

‘Yes, Nacka District Court agreed with our recommendation and decided to make the whole thing confidential. That’s the way it works, so I’ve got absolutely no idea what she’s called these days, or where she lives, but I hope she’s OK. Even if I have to say that I have my doubts.’ Mikkelsen looks sombre.

‘That’s going to cause me problems, because I have a feeling that Victoria Bergman is the person I’m looking for.’

Mikkelsen stares at Jeanette uncomprehendingly.

She gives him a brief summary of what she and Hurtig have found out, emphasising how vital it is that they find Victoria. If for no other reason than to rule her out of the investigation.

Jeanette notices that it’s almost five o’clock, and concludes that Sofia Zetterlund the elder will have to wait till tomorrow. First she wants to talk to her own Sofia.

She gets her bag and goes down to the car to drive home. She dials the number, then holds the phone against her shoulder as she reverses out of her parking space.

The call goes through, but there’s no answer.

IT COULD HAVE
been different. It could have been good.

Could have been fine.

If only he’d been different. If only he’d been good.

Sofia is sitting on the kitchen floor.

She’s muttering to herself, rocking back and forth.

‘I am the way, I am the truth and I am the life. No one comes to the father except through me.’

When she looks up at the fridge door and sees the mass of notes, scraps of paper and newspaper cuttings she bursts out laughing, spraying saliva everywhere.

She’s familiar with the psychological phenomenon
l’homme du petit papier
. The man with scraps of paper.

The obsessive need to make constant notes everywhere about your observations.

Filling your pockets with tiny dog-eared notes and interesting newspaper articles.

Always having a pen and paper handy.

Antisocial friend.

Unsocial mate.

Solace Manuti.

In Sierra Leone she acquired a new friend. An antisocial friend she gave the name Solace Manuti.

An anagram of unsocial mate.

It had been a play on words, but a desperately serious one. One survival strategy was to create fantasy characters who could take over when Dad’s demands on Victoria got too much to bear.

She had emptied her guilt into her personalities.

Every glance, every whistle, every pointed gesture – she has interpreted everything as proof of her unworthiness.

She has always been dirty.

‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just. Cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’

Lost in her own internal labyrinth, she spills some wine on the table.

‘For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul.’

She pours a second glass of wine and drains it before going into the bathroom.

‘Ye who prepare a table for Gad, and fill up mixed wine unto Meni, I will even assign you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down in the slaughter.’

The hunger fire, she thinks.

If the hunger fire goes out, you die.

She listens to the roaring inside her, and to the blood burning in her veins.

Eventually the fire will die down and then her heart will be charred and end up as a large black stain.

She pours more wine, rinses her face, drinks and retches, but forces herself to finish the glass, sits down on the toilet, wipes herself with a towel, gets up – and puts her make-up on.

When she’s finished she looks at herself. She looks good. Good enough for her purpose.

She knows that when she stands at the bar and appears bored, she never has to wait long.

She’s done it so many times before.

Almost every night.

For several years.

The feelings of guilt have been a comfort, because she feels secure in guilt. She has anaesthetised herself and sought acknowledgement among men who only see themselves and therefore can’t acknowledge her. Shame becomes a liberation.

But she doesn’t want them to see anything but the surface. Never to look inside her.

That’s why her clothes are sometimes dirty and torn. Stained with grass from lying on her back in a park. She knows that the present is a moment that will be a gap in her memory tomorrow.

They’ll compete to see who can buy her the most expensive drink. Like flies on a sugar cube. The winner gets the back of his hand stroked and, after the third drink, her thigh against his groin. She is genuine, and her smile is always real.

She knows what she wants them to do to her, and she’s always very clear about saying so.