The Crow Girl (72 page)

There’s no more space in the margin after that, and Sofia has drawn an arrow pointing over the page. There she has added:

‘
WHAT DID THEY
do to Victoria in Copenhagen?’ Jeanette asks. ‘And do you remember what the letter said?’

‘Give me another cigarette, and maybe I’ll remember.’

Jeanette hands Sofia Zetterlund the pack.

‘So, what was it we were talking about?’ she asks after taking a couple of deep drags on the cigarette.

Jeanette is starting to lose patience. ‘Copenhagen and the letter you got from Victoria ten years ago. Do you remember what she wrote?’

To Jeanette’s surprise Sofia laughs out loud. ‘Would you mind passing me Freud …?’

‘Freud?’

‘Yes, I heard you messing about with him when you got the ashtray. I may be blind, but I’m not deaf yet.’

Jeanette gets the little snow globe containing Freud’s bust from the chest of drawers while the old woman lights another cigarette.

‘Victoria Bergman was very special,’ Sofia begins, slowly turning the snow globe in her hands. The smoke from the cigarette curls around her blue dress and the snow inside the globe swirls about. ‘You’ve read my final recommendation, and the court’s judgement about protecting Victoria’s identity, and you’re aware of the reasons behind that. Victoria was subjected to extreme sexual abuse by her father and probably other men as well.’

Sofia pauses, and Jeanette finds herself astonished at how the old woman keeps switching between intellectual clarity and dementia-like confusion.

‘But what you probably don’t know is that Victoria also suffers from multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, if those mean anything to you?’

Now Sofia Zetterlund is the one directing the conversation.

Jeanette is vaguely aware of the concepts. Sofia the younger had once explained that Samuel Bai had had a personality disorder of that sort.

‘Even if it’s extremely rare, it’s not really that complicated,’ Sofia the elder goes on. ‘Victoria was forced to invent different versions of herself in order to survive and cope with the memories of her experiences. When we gave her a new identity, she had documentation that one of her split personalities really existed. That was the conscientious part of her, the one that could get an education, work, basically live a normal life.’

Sofia smiles again, winks at Jeanette with one cataract-blurred eye and shakes the snow globe.

‘Freud wrote about moral masochism,’ Sofia adds. ‘The masochism of a dissociative individual can lead them to relive their own abuse by allowing one of their alternative personalities to do the same thing to others. I detected a trace of this in Victoria, and if she hasn’t received help dealing with her problems as an adult, there’s a great risk that this personality is still inside her. It will be acting like her father to torment itself, to punish itself.’

Sofia puts her cigarette out in the pot plant on the table, then leans back in her armchair. Jeanette sees the distant look on her face return.

She leaves the Sunflower Nursing Home ten minutes and one reprimand later. She and Sofia each smoked five cigarettes during their conversation, and were caught red-handed by the manager and a nurse who came to give Sofia her medication.

She gets in behind the wheel and turns the key in the ignition. The engine splutters, but refuses to start. ‘Fuck!’ she swears.

She walks down to the Midsommarkransen shopping centre, and the Tre Vänner bar, opposite the metro station. The bar’s half full and she finds an empty table by the window facing the park, orders a coffee and calls Hurtig’s number.

CAN’T IT BE
said that feeling full to overflowing is one symptom of dissatisfaction? Sofia Zetterlund is walking down Hornsgatan, absorbed in herself. And isn’t dissatisfaction the source of all change?

She knows that sooner or later she’s going to have to tell Jeanette who she really is. Explain that she used to be ill, but is now well. Is it as easy as that? Will just telling her be enough? And how will Jeanette react?

When she tried to help Jeanette put together the perpetrator profile, she was really just talking about herself, unsentimentally and without emotion. She hadn’t needed to read the descriptions of the crime scenes because she knew what they looked like. Or what they should have looked like.

When she walks into reception Ann-Britt calls to her.

Sofia Zetterlund is first surprised and then annoyed when Ann-Britt tells her that she had received calls from both Ulrika Wendin and Annette Lundström.

All future sessions with Ulrika and Linnea have been cancelled.

‘All of them? Did they say why?’ Sofia leans over the reception desk.

‘Well, Linnea’s mum said she was feeling better now, and that Linnea was back at home.’ Ann-Britt folds the newspaper she had been reading before going on. ‘Apparently she’s got custody of her daughter again. The decision to take her into care was only temporary, and now that everything’s fine she didn’t think Linnea needed to see you any more.’

‘What an idiot!’ Sofia can feel her anger building. ‘So now she suddenly imagines she’s competent to decide what sort of treatment the girl needs?’

Ann-Britt gets up and goes over to the water cooler beside the kitchen. ‘Maybe she didn’t quite put it like that, but that was pretty much what she said.’

‘And what was Ulrika’s reason?’

Ann-Britt pours a glass of water. ‘She didn’t say much, just that she didn’t want to come again.’

Sofia turns and walks to the lift and goes back down, then out onto the street, heading east along St Paulsgatan. At Bellmansgatan she turns left, past the Maria Magdalena churchyard.

Fifty metres ahead she catches sight of a woman from behind, and there’s something about the broad, rolling hips and the way the feet point outwards that she recognises.

The woman’s head is bowed, as though weighed down by some internal burden. Her hair is grey, pulled up into a bun.

Sofia’s stomach tightens and she feels cold and sweaty. She stops, and watches the woman turn the corner into Hornsgatan.

Memories, difficult to reconstruct. Fragmentary.

For more than twenty years the memories of her other selves have lain buried like sharp splinters deep inside her – shattered pieces of another time and another place.

She starts walking, speeds up and jogs to the corner, but the woman has vanished.

IT’S LATE IN
the afternoon in October and Jeanette is sitting in her office with a sheet of A3 in front of her containing a diagram of all the names that have cropped up during the investigation.

She’s put the names in groups and marked the relationships between them, and as she picks up her pen to draw a line from one name to another, Hurtig comes rushing into her office, just as the phone rings.

Jeanette can see the call is from Åke and gestures to Hurtig to wait.

He looks frustrated. ‘Don’t answer that,’ he says. ‘We have to leave.’

Jeanette stares at Hurtig and holds two fingers up in the air. ‘Åke, I can’t talk right now.’

He sighs. ‘That doesn’t matter. We need to talk –’

‘Not now!’ she snaps. ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll be home in an hour or so.’

Hurtig shakes his head. ‘No, no, no,’ he says in a low voice. ‘You won’t be home that soon.’

‘Åke, hang on a moment.’ She turns to Hurtig. ‘What did you say?’

‘Annette Lundström has called. We’ve got to –’

‘Just a moment.’ She picks up the phone again. ‘Like I said. I can’t talk now.’

‘As usual, then.’ Åke sighs. The line goes quiet. He’s hung up, and Jeanette feels her cheeks burn as tears well up.

Hurtig is holding out Jeanette’s jacket. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She pulls her jacket on as she herds Hurtig out, turns off the light and closes the door.

While they jog down the stairs to the garage Hurtig tells Jeanette what’s happened.

Annette Lundström has contacted them. Someone’s put a photograph through her letter box.

A Polaroid of someone she recognises.

She didn’t want to say more over the phone.

Hurtig drives fast. First the Essinge motorway, then Norrtull and Sveaplan. He weaves between lanes, blowing his horn angrily at cars that block the way in spite of the blue lights and siren.

‘Why did she call you?’ Jeanette asks.

Hurtig brakes hard for a bus pulling up at a bus stop. ‘I don’t know.’

After the roundabout at Roslagstull the traffic thins and they turn onto the E18.

‘Is Åke fucking with you?’

The outside lane is free of cars, and Hurtig speeds up. Jeanette sees that they’re going more than one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour now.

‘No, I can’t really say that. It’s probably something to do with Johan, and …’ She can feel herself getting close to tears again, this time not out of anger, but of a crushing feeling of not being good enough.

‘He’s OK. Johan, I mean.’

Jeanette realises that Hurtig is glancing at her, and that he’s trying to be discreet. Jens Hurtig can be abrupt and taciturn, but Jeanette knows that he’s quite sensitive under the surface, and realises that he cares about how she’s feeling.

‘But he’s at a difficult age,’ Hurtig goes on. ‘Hormones and all that crap. And with Åke moving out as well –’ He stops himself, as if he’s aware of how clumsy the comment was. ‘There’s something funny about it, though.’

‘About what?’

‘About that age. Considering what happened in Sigtuna. Hannah Östlund, Jessica Friberg and Victoria Bergman. I mean, at that age everything seems to get blown out of proportion. Like the first time you fall in love.’ Hurtig smiles, and seems almost embarrassed.

What Jeanette experiences at that moment must be one of the human intellect’s great mysteries. An igniting spark. A flash of genius.

She already knows who is in the photograph Annette Lundström has received.

But she says nothing.

They drive the last few kilometres in silence.

Now that everything has fallen into place, Jeanette wants to get her suspicions confirmed as quickly as possible.

As they turn into the drive they see Annette Lundström standing on the steps in front of the large house. Jeanette thinks she looks tired and shrunken.

While they’re getting out of the car a man approaches from the neighbouring house. He introduces himself and says he saw a woman he didn’t recognise put something through the Lundströms’ letter box earlier that day.

‘She came walking from down there.’ He points along the street. ‘And because we look out for one another round here, well …’ He falls silent, and Jeanette understands what he means.

The Swedish suspicion of strangers, she thinks.

‘And you didn’t recognise her?’ Hurtig asks.

‘No. Never saw her before. Fair-haired. Nothing special about her clothes. Nothing remarkable at all, really. She went up to the letter box and put something through it. I didn’t see what.’

Jeanette looks at Hurtig, who merely nods back. The man seems credible.

‘OK, well, thanks for your help,’ Jeanette says, then turns towards Annette Lundström while the man goes back home.

They go into the hall together, then into a bare living room.

A quantity of moving boxes, empty curtain rails, lots of dust.

Annette Lundström sits down on one of the boxes while Jeanette stops just inside the door and looks around.

There are pale patches on the walls where paintings once hung. Holes and marks from dirty hands.

There’s a bottle of cognac on the windowsill, next to an overflowing ashtray. The air in the room is suffocating.

What had been a warm and welcoming room just a few days before is now just a dirty, empty space. A nothing, between one place and another.

A home that has been abandoned for another.

‘It’s all my fault. I should have said something earlier.’ Annette’s voice is monotonous, and Jeanette can’t help thinking that it might not be just the alcohol making her seem listless. She’s probably on tranquillizers.

Jeanette leans against the door frame. ‘What should you have said?’

She looks at the woman’s eyes, red from crying. They seem distant, and it takes her a long time before she answers.

‘I should have been honest the last time we met. I think it’s all about the past. Fredrika wasn’t a good person, and she’s got a lot of enemies … She is … or was …’ Annette falls silent. It looks like she’s having trouble breathing and Jeanette hopes she isn’t about to start hyperventilating and get hysterical.

‘It’s her in the photograph,’ Annette says, picking up an unstamped envelope and holding it out to Jeanette.

The lack of a stamp confirms the neighbour’s statement that it had been delivered by hand.

Jeanette takes the envelope, puts it on the windowsill and pulls on a pair of latex gloves before opening it.

‘It’s her!’ Annette says.

Jeanette stares at the photograph, a Polaroid of the dead Fredrika Grünewald.

A lifeless face, its mouth wide open, its blank eyes contorted in the anguished moment of death.

Blood is running down Fredrika’s pale blouse, and the piano wire has cut deep into her rigid neck.

Taken just seconds before she died.

But that isn’t the important thing. What matters is that the hand holding the piano wire is missing its ring finger.

Jeanette thinks about the posthumous letter she received from Ralf Börje Persson. He had ended by saying that the perpetrator was missing a ring finger.

In spite of the tragedy of the situation, Jeanette feels something like relief.