The Crow Girl (71 page)

As the train passes Gamla stan and crosses the bridge over the waters of Riddarfjärden she can see the Djurgård ferries and, a bit further away, the roller coaster at Gröna Lund, and realises that she hasn’t been to a fair for three years. Not since the day Martin went missing. She doesn’t know exactly what happened to him, but she thinks he fell in the water.

As she walks in through the gate she can see Sofia sitting in a garden chair in front of the little red house with its white gables. She’s sitting in the shade of a large cherry tree, and as Victoria gets closer she sees that the old woman is asleep. Her fair, almost white hair is draped over her shoulders like a shawl, and she’s wearing make-up. Her lips are red and she’s wearing blue eyeshadow.

It’s chilly, and Victoria picks up the blanket Sofia has put over her feet and wraps it around her.

She goes into the house and, after a search, finds Sofia’s handbag. In the outside pocket is a worn, brown leather purse. She finds three hundred-krona notes inside and decides to leave one. She folds the other two and puts them in the back pocket of her jeans.

She puts the purse back and goes into Sofia’s study. She finds the notepad in one of the desk drawers.

Victoria sits down at the desk, opens the pad and starts reading.

She sees that Sofia has written down everything Victoria has said, sometimes verbatim, and Victoria is astonished that Sofia has also managed to describe Victoria’s movements, or her tone of voice.

Victoria presumes that Sofia must know shorthand, and writes her notes up afterwards. She reads slowly and considers everything she reads.

After all, they have had more than fifty sessions.

She picks up a pen and changes the names so that they’re right. If it says that Victoria had done something when it was actually Solace who was the guilty party, she corrects it. Things need to be right, and she doesn’t want the blame for something Solace has done.

Victoria works hard and doesn’t notice time passing. As she reads she pretends to be Sofia. She frowns and tries to diagnose her client.

On the edge of the pages she writes down her own reflections and analysis.

When Sofia hasn’t understood what Solace was talking about, Victoria explains in the margin in tiny, clear writing.

She really doesn’t understand how Sofia could have got so much wrong.

Victoria is so absorbed in her work that she doesn’t put the pad down until she hears Sofia moving around in the kitchen.

She looks out through the window. On the other side of the road, down by the lake, a group of people are sitting and eating. They’ve taken over the jetty and have laid out a spread for their Midsummer celebrations.

There’s a smell of dill from the kitchen.

‘Welcome back, Victoria!’ Sofia calls from the kitchen. ‘How was your trip?’

She replies that it had gone well.

The baby is just an egg in a blue babygrow. Nothing more. And she’s put all that behind her.

The bright evening turns into a night that’s almost as bright, and when Sofia says she’s going to bed, Victoria stays on the stone steps listening to the birds. A nightingale is calling plaintively from a tree in the next garden and she can hear the sounds from the party down on the jetty. It makes her think of Midsummer celebrations in Dalarna.

They would start with a trip to the Dala River to watch the church boats, before it was time for dancing around the midsummer pole, erected by the men with a lot of huffing and puffing. Women with wreaths of flowers in their hair laughed more than they had in ages, but not for too long because once the vodka started to flow and all the other men’s women looked so much better than their own, there was a good chance of getting a slap on the cheek from a hand telling you how fucking fat you were. And how everyone else had it easy, with a woman who was horny and happy and grateful, not just miserable and grey. And that it was just as well to curl up next to her and fiddle and poke even though you said you had a stomach-ache and he said that you’d eaten too many sweets even though you’d hardly had the money for a fizzy drink and spent the time wandering about instead, watching all the other kids with great clouds of candyfloss buy raffle tickets … Victoria looks around. It’s quiet down by the lake and the sun is just visible over the horizon. It will only be gone for an hour or so before rising again. It never gets dark.

She stands up, a little stiff from the hard steps. She doesn’t feel tired, even though it’s almost morning.

The sharp gravel hurts her bare feet and she walks along the edge of the lawn instead. By the gate a flowering lilac is wilting, but even though the flowers look withered they still smell.

The road is deserted, and she goes down to the jetty. Some seagulls are feasting on the remains of the evening’s festivities, spread out around an overflowing bin. They take off reluctantly and fly out across the lake, shrieking. The water’s black and cold and a few fish are up and about, snapping at the insects flying just above the surface. She lies on her stomach and stares down into the darkness.

The ripples on the water made her reflection hazy, but she likes seeing herself like that. It makes her look prettier.

The licking of lips and his tongue stuck in your mouth, which probably tastes of vomit because two bottles of cherry wine come back up easier than they slip down. There could be fifteen guys, all goading one another on, and the hut wasn’t exactly big. They used to play cards to see who got to go in the other room with you. If they were outside then maybe it was the slope behind the school, which you could roll down and end up in a heap just a couple of metres from the path, and people looking the other way when you looked up at them from below and you only yelled at the kid that he’d just said he wanted to go swimming after the Ferris wheel. And now you’re standing there shivering, so you might as well jump in instead of going on about the new nanny who’s supposed to be so lovely …

In the water Victoria sees Martin slowly sink and disappear.

On Monday morning she is woken by Sofia, who tells her it’s eleven o’clock and that they’ll be driving into the city soon.

When Victoria gets out of bed she sees that her feet are dirty, her knees are scratched and her hair is still wet, but she can’t remember what she was doing during the night.

Sofia has got breakfast ready out in the garden, and as they eat she explains that Victoria will be seeing a doctor named Hans who’s going to examine her and document what he finds. Then, if they have time, they’re going to meet a policeman named Lars.

‘Hasse and Lasse?’ Victoria giggles. ‘I hate cops,’ she snarls, pushing her cup away demonstrably. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘Apart from taking two hundred kronor from my purse, so you can pay for the petrol when I fill up.’

Victoria doesn’t know what she feels, but it’s like she’s sorry for Sofia.

It’s a new experience.

Hasse is a doctor at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Solna, and he examines Victoria. This is the second examination, after the one at Nacka Hospital a week ago.

When he touches her, spreading her legs and looking inside her, she wishes she was back at Nacka Hospital instead, where the doctor had been a woman.

Anita or Annika.

She doesn’t remember.

Hasse explains to her that the examination might feel a bit uncomfortable, but that he’s there to help her. Wasn’t that just what she’d always been told?

That it might feel funny, but that it’s for her own good.

Hasse looks all over her body, and he makes notes about what he sees using a little tape recorder.

He looks inside her mouth with a pocket torch, and his voice is factual and monotonous. ‘Mouth. Damage to the mucous glands,’ it says.

And the rest of her body.

‘Crotch. Inner and outer genitals, scarring from forced dilation at a premature age. Anus, scarring, premature, healed injuries, forced dilation, swollen blood vessels, fissures in the sphincter, anal fistula … Scarring from sharp objects on the torso, chest, thighs and arms, approximately one-third of them premature. Evidence of bleeding …’

She shuts her eyes and thinks that she is doing this so she can start again, become someone else and forget.

At four o’clock the same day she meets Lars, the policeman she needs to talk to.

He seems observant, like when he realises that she doesn’t want to shake his hand when they first meet, and he doesn’t touch her.

The first conversation with Lars Mikkelsen takes place in his office, and she tells him what she’s already told Sofia Zetterlund.

He looks sad when she answers his questions, but he doesn’t lose sight of what he’s doing and Victoria feels surprisingly relaxed. After a while she starts to feel curious about who Lars Mikkelsen really is, and she asks him why he does this sort of work.

He looks thoughtful and takes his time answering.

‘I think this sort of crime is the most disgusting of all. Far too few victims get justice, and far too few offenders get put away,’ he says after a while, and Victoria feels the remark is aimed at her.

‘You know I’m not going to help put anyone away?’

He looks at her seriously. ‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry about that, even if it isn’t unusual.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

He smiles warily and doesn’t seem bothered by her easy tone. ‘You seem to be questioning me now,’ he says. ‘But, to answer your question, I think that basically we’re still living in the Dark Ages.’

‘The Dark Ages?’

‘Yes. Have you ever heard of bride kidnapping?’

Victoria shakes her head.

‘In the Dark Ages men could force a marriage by kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. Because she’d been sexually exploited, she was forced to marry the man and at the same time he got the right of ownership to all her property.’

‘So?’

‘It’s about property and dependence,’ he says. ‘Originally, rape wasn’t regarded as a crime against the woman who was the victim, but as a property crime. The rape laws came about to protect a man’s rights to valuable sexual property, either through marrying the woman off or keeping her for his own use. The woman had no say in the matter. She was merely a piece of property whose fate was decided by men. There are still traces of that medieval view of women in attitudes towards rape. She could have said no, or she did say no, but she meant yes. She was dressed so provocatively. She just wants to get revenge on the man.’

His speech surprises Victoria. She had never imagined a man could think like that.

‘And in the same way the medieval attitude towards children is still with us,’ Lars Mikkelsen concludes. ‘To this day, adults regard children as their own property. They punish them and raise them according to their own laws.’

He looks at Victoria. ‘Are you satisfied with my answer?’

He seems genuine, and passionate about his work. She really does hate cops, but he doesn’t behave like a cop.

It’s night, and Sofia’s asleep. Victoria creeps into the study and closes the door carefully behind her. Sofia hasn’t said anything about Victoria writing in her notes, and probably hasn’t discovered it yet.

She gets the book out and continues from where she was interrupted.

She likes Sofia’s handwriting:

Victoria sighs and adds:

Victoria works through the night, and at six o’clock she starts to worry that Sofia will wake up soon. Before putting the book back in the desk drawer, she leafs through it at random, mostly because she has trouble putting it down. Then she discovers that Sofia has seen her annotations after all.

Victoria reads the original text on the very first page of the notebook.

A couple of days ago Victoria had commented on this.

And evidently Sofia had read what Victoria had written, and had left her own response.