The Crow Girl (77 page)

Fredrika Grünewald and Per-Ola Silfverberg had been murdered by two vengeful women.

Folie à deux. Symbiotic psychosis, as it’s also known, occurs almost exclusively within families. For instance, a mother and a daughter living apart but sharing a mental illness. Although Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg aren’t actually related, they did grow up together, attended the same schools and then chose to live close to each other.

Someone had left yellow tulips beside Grünewald. And the night Karl Lundström died he also received yellow tulips. Could they have killed him as well? An overdose of morphine? Well, why not? Karl Lundström and Per-Ola Silfverberg were both paedophiles who had abused their own daughters. That must be the connection. Yellow tulips and Sigtuna College are the common factors.

Revenge, she thinks. But how the hell could it have such extreme consequences?

Jeanette gets the loaf out of the freezer, breaks off a couple of slices and puts them in the toaster.

She realises she can’t expect to find answers to everything.

Jeanette, she thinks, you have to learn that if there’s one thing you can’t expect as a police officer, it’s peace of mind. You can’t understand everything.

The toaster rattles, and the phone rings. Åke, of course.

He clears his throat. ‘Yes, I want to take Johan to London this weekend. A football match. Just him and me. Just be a dad, I suppose …’

Dad? So you want to do that now, do you? she thinks. ‘OK. Is he up for it?’

Åke laughs quietly. ‘Oh yes, not much doubt about that. London derby, you know.’

Åke falls silent, and Jeanette thinks about their life together, which seems so far away now.

‘Erm …’ he finally says, ‘do you fancy having lunch before Johan and I set off?’

She hesitates. ‘Lunch? Have you got time for that?’

‘Yes, that’s why I’m asking,’ he says, sounding annoyed. ‘How about tomorrow?’

‘The day after would be better. But I’m waiting to get the go-ahead to search a couple of houses, so we might have to keep it provisional.’

He sighs. ‘OK. Let me know when you can make it, then.’ And he hangs up.

She mirrors his sigh down the dead line, gets up from the table and takes the toast from the toaster. Not good, she thinks as she gets the butter. This isn’t good for Johan. Not a hint of stability. She remembers the comment Hurtig made. ‘At that age everything seems to get blown out of proportion,’ he had said, and in the case of Östlund and Friberg that couldn’t have been more true.

But what about Johan? Her own teenager? First the separation, then what happened at Gröna Lund, and now all this bloody shuttling between her, who hardly has any time for him, and Åke and Alexandra, who are behaving like teenagers themselves and hardly know what they’re going to be doing in two days’ time.

She forces herself to eat the last piece of dry, cold toast, then goes back to the phone. She needs someone to talk to, and the only person who qualifies is Sofia Zetterlund.

The autumn evening is full of stars and glitteringly beautiful, and just as Jeanette is wondering what it is about people that makes everything go so completely fucking wrong, Sofia answers.

‘I miss you,’ she says.

‘Me too.’ Jeanette feels warmth returning. ‘It’s lonely out here.’

Sofia’s breathing feels very close. ‘Here too. I want to see you again soon.’

Jeanette shuts her eyes and imagines that Sofia really is there with her, that she’s lying against her shoulder and whispering in her ear, right beside her.

‘I dozed off a little while ago,’ Sofia says. ‘I dreamed about you.’

Jeanette still has her eyes closed as she leans back in her chair and smiles. ‘What did you dream?’

Sofia laughs quietly, almost shyly.

‘I was drowning, and you rescued me.’

SOFIA ZETTERLUND PUTS
the phone down and sinks onto the floor. She’s just been speaking to Jeanette, but doesn’t know what they were talking about.

A vague idea of mutual signs of affection. An indistinct longing for warmth.

Why is it so complicated to say what you really think? she wonders. And why do I have so much trouble not lying?

She feels that she needs to pee so she gets up and goes into the bathroom, and as she pulls down her pants and sits down she realises that she must have been to the Clarion Hotel earlier. The man she must have met has left traces on the inside of her thighs.

A thin crust of dried semen is stuck to her pubic hair, and she washes herself at the sink. Afterwards she dries herself carefully using the guest towel and then goes back into the room behind the bookcase. The room that had once been Gao’s, but which is now a museum to Victoria’s erratic path through life. Odysseus, she thinks. The answers are in here.

In here is the key that fits the lock on the past.

She leafs through Victoria Bergman’s papers, trying to organise the sketches, notes and torn-out newspaper articles. She knows what she’s looking at, yet still doubts it.

She sees a life that was once hers, and that, when reconstructed, becomes, if not her own, then at least a life. Victoria’s life. Victoria Bergman’s life.

It’s a tale of decay.

One name keeps recurring in many of the notes, and it rouses strong feelings in her.

Madeleine.

Her daughter and sister.

The child she once had with her own father.

The girl she was forced to give up for adoption.

Among the notes about Madeleine there is also a photograph, a Polaroid picture of a girl aged about ten standing on a beach, dressed in red and white.

Sofia inspects the picture carefully and is convinced that it’s her daughter. She recognises some of her own features in the way the girl looks. Her face looks troubled and the photograph makes Sofia feel very unsettled. What sort of an adult has Madeleine become?

On another sheet she reads about Martin. The boy who vanished during a trip to the fair, and who was later found drowned in the Fyris River. The boy she hit on the head with a stone and dumped in the water. The police wrote his death off as an accident, but ever since she has been living with the guilt that her actions inexorably brought with them.

Sofia remembers the visit to Gröna Lund when Johan Kihlberg disappeared. There are similarities with Martin’s disappearance, but she’s sure she would never have harmed Johan. He probably vanished of his own accord, or was taken by someone else. Someone who later thought better of it, seeing as Johan was found unharmed.

Sofia Zetterlund goes on looking through the scribbled memories. Puts one sheet aside and picks up another. Reads and remembers what she felt at the moment she wrote the note. She had been living in a cloud of medication and alcohol, suppressing all the unpleasant memories. Hiding parts of herself away deep beneath her skin.

It had worked for years.

At its thinnest points, the skin is a fifth of a millimetre thick, yet still forms an impenetrable line of defence between inside and outside. Between rational reality and irrational chaos. At this precise moment her memory is no longer hazy and unclear, but beautifully crystal clear. But she doesn’t know how long the moment will last.

Sofia reads Victoria’s diary entries from her time at boarding school in Sigtuna. Two years of torment, bullying and mental torture. Words that recur in the diary are ‘revenge’ and ‘retribution’, and she remembers dreaming of going back one day and blowing up the whole school. Now two of the people referred to in the entries are dead.

She knows Victoria had nothing to do with their deaths.

But even if she’s innocent of those murders, she knows what she has done.

She’s killed her parents. She set fire to her childhood home, the house in Grisslinge, out in Värmdö, and since then she has sat in her soundproofed room and drawn the burning house in crayon on picture after picture.

Sofia thinks about Lasse, her former partner and most meaningful relationship. But she can’t feel the same hatred for him as she does for her parents. Boundless disappointment would be a better description, and for a brief second she is seized by doubt. Did she really kill him as well?

The memories of having done so are emotionally very strong, but she can’t see the actual sequence of events inside her that would confirm that she really did it.

But she knows that the fact that she has actually murdered others is something she will have to come to terms with for the rest of her life. It’s something she must learn to accept.

SQUEEZED IN BETWEEN
Ängby and Åkeshov in the west of Stockholm is the city’s first nature reserve.

Ice and rock formed the landscape, which consists of forest and open fields, as well as a small lake. The passage of glaciers is visible in the form of large blocks of rock and stony moraine ridges. First the ice pressed the ground down one thousand metres, then ripped it apart and scattered it with boulders torn from the ground rock.

Here and there in the forest there are the remains of a wall that wasn’t raised by the ice, but by human hands. According to tradition, the stones were piled up by Russian prisoners of war.

The lake in the centre of the forest is called Judar Lake. The name is derived from the Swedish word
ljuda
, ‘to make a sound’, but etymologically it has nothing to do with the cries of the emaciated labour force, nor with the scream that is currently echoing through the forest.

A young, fair-haired woman in a cobalt-blue coat is staring up at the starry sky above the trees.

Thousands and thousands of burning points.

After emptying her lungs of rage once more, Madeleine Silfverberg walks back to the car, which is parked by a cluster of trees close to the lake.

The third scream echoes inside the car, five minutes later, at almost ninety kilometres an hour.

The world is a windscreen with the road at its centre and blurred trees at the edge of her field of vision. She shuts her eyes and counts to five as she listens to the sounds of the engine and the friction of the tyres on the road surface. When she opens her eyes again she feels calm.

Everything has gone as planned.

Soon the police will pay a visit to the house in Fagerstrand.

Beside the large bunch of yellow tulips on the kitchen table they’ll also find a couple of neatly arranged Polaroid pictures that document the murders.

Karl Lundström lying in his bed in Karolinska Hospital.

Per-Ola Silfverberg, slaughtered like a pig in his elegant apartment.

The police already have the third picture, because she left it in the Lundströms’ mailbox. It shows Fredrika Grünewald in her tent in the crypt beneath St Johannes Church with her fat, greasy face contorted in a dead grimace.

When the police go down into the cellar they’ll find the reason why the house stinks.

The forest suddenly stops, there are more buildings and she lowers her speed. Soon she has to stop completely at the intersection of Gubbkärrsvägen and Drottningholmsvägen, and as she waits for a few cars to pass she drums restlessly on the steering wheel with nine fingers.

Hannah Östlund had lost her finger after being bitten by a dog.

She had used a bolt cutter.

As Madeleine pulls out onto Drottningholmsvägen she thinks about those who will soon die, and about those who have already died, but also about those she wishes she had had the pleasure of killing.

Bengt Bergman. Her dad and grandad. Daddygrandad.

The fire took him before she got there. But no one can take her own fire. It’s going to take others.

First it’s going to take the woman who once called herself her mother.

Then it’s going to take Victoria, her real mother.

As she heads along Drottningholmsvägen back into the city, she reaches for the drink she got from McDonald’s, pulls the lid off and sticks her hand in among the ice cubes. She puts a handful in her mouth and chews them greedily before swallowing.

There’s nothing purer than water that has frozen. The isotopes are cleansed of earthly dirt and become receptive to cosmic signals. If she eats enough of the frozen water, it will spread through her body and change its properties. Make her brain sharper.

I bring plenty of water to flow in the stream, so that it skips and rushes.

I bring lots of swallows that fly, and midges for the swallows.

I bring new leaves for the trees, and little birds’ nests here and there.

I make the evening sky beautiful, because I make it so rosy.

SHE WIGGLED THE
loose tooth up to the left. It was getting close to coming out, not now, but maybe this evening.

She closed her mouth. It tasted of blood and stung like ice.

The tooth fairy had given her five hundred kronor. One hundred for every tooth she put under her pillow. She’d saved the money in her secret box, the one under the bed that now contained six hundred and twenty-seven kronor, what with the money she had taken from the pig farmer.

She had spent the whole summer with him, and this was the third time her foster-parents had come to visit. She never called them Mum and Dad, because they weren’t her real parents. Calling them Per-Ola and Charlotte were also out of the question, because they might get the idea that she respected them. Instead she called them ‘you’ and ‘you’.

This time they had their friends from Sweden with them.

And those two new fair-haired ones. Lawyers or something.

They looked like angels, but she thought they were really weird. It was almost as if they were on her side, because they were clearly hesitant when everything started in the evenings. But they weren’t locked up the whole time like her, they were free to come and go as they liked, and that was why they were weird. Because they always came back.