The Crow Girl (8 page)

She also knows with the same absolute certainty what he’s going to want her to do.

It’s all so predictable, and the whole procedure will be repeated at least twice before he leaves for real. Maybe he’ll have to come back three times before he feels properly relaxed.

She clenches her teeth and peers off towards the edge of the forest, where you can just make out the lake through the trees. Three minutes later she sees the white Volvo approaching and goes back into the kitchen.

This time it’s over in ten minutes. Afterwards he settles himself heavily in the car, says goodbye and turns the key in the ignition.

Victoria watches the car disappear behind the trees again. The sound of the engine grows ever more distant, but she sits and waits with the big lump still in her stomach, so as not to celebrate victory in advance. She knows how severe the disappointment is if you do that.

But he doesn’t come back again.

When she realises he won’t return, she goes off to the well to wash. With some difficulty she hauls up a bucket of ice-cold water and shivers as she scrubs herself clean, before going to Aunt Elsa’s to eat lunch and play cards.

Now she can start to breathe.

After eating she decides to go down to the lake for a swim. The path is narrow and covered in pine needles. It feels soft under her bare feet. From within the forest she can hear a persistent peeping sound, and realises that it’s coming from hungry chicks waiting for their parents to come back with something edible. The peeping is very close, and she stops and looks.

A tiny hole reveals the bird’s nest, no more than two metres up in an old pine tree.

When she reaches the lake she lies on her back in the rowing boat and stares up into the sky.

It’s the middle of June, and the air still feels fairly chilly.

Cold water rolls up and down beneath her back in time with the waves. The sky is like dirty milk with a splash of fire, and a black-throated loon is calling from the edge of the forest.

She wonders about letting the waves carry her out, off to unlimited freedom, away from everything. She feels sleepy, but deep down she realised long ago that she can never sleep deeply enough to get away. Her head is like a lamp that has been left on in a silent, dark house. There are always moths fluttering around the naked electric light, their dry wings in her eyes.

As usual, she swims four lengths between the jetty and the big rock fifty metres out in the lake before spreading her blanket and lying down on the grass a short distance from the narrow strip of white sand. The fish are lying in wait, and midges are buzzing across the water, along with dragonflies and pond skaters.

She shuts her eyes, enjoying an isolation that no one can disturb, when suddenly she hears voices from inside the forest.

A man and a woman are walking down the path, and a little boy is running ahead of them, with long, fair curls.

They say hello and ask if this is a private beach. She replies that she isn’t really sure, but as far as she knows anyone’s allowed to come here. She’s always swum here, anyway.

‘Ah, so you’ve lived here for a while, then?’ the man says with a smile.

The little boy is running excitedly towards the water and the woman hurries after him.

‘Is that your house over there?’ the man asks, pointing. The cottage is just visible through the trees in the distance.

‘That’s right. Mum and Dad are working in the city, so I’m staying here on my own for a week.’

She lies to see how he will react. She has an idea that she wants to check out.

‘I see. So you’re an independent young lady?’ the man says.

She watches as the woman helps the little boy out of his clothes down by the water.

‘Suppose so,’ she replies, turning towards the man.

He looks amused.

‘How old are you, then?’

‘Ten.’

He smiles and starts to take off his shirt.

‘Ten years old and on your own for a week. Just like Pippi Longstocking.’

She leans back and runs her fingers through her hair. Then she looks him right in the eyes.

‘So?’

To her disappointment, the man doesn’t seem at all taken aback. He doesn’t reply, and turns to look at his family instead.

The boy is on his way out into the water, and the woman follows him with her jeans rolled up to her knees.

‘Well done, Martin!’ he cries proudly.

Then he pulls off his shoes and begins to undo his trousers. Under his jeans he’s wearing a pair of tight swimming trunks with the pattern of the American flag. He’s tanned all over, and she thinks he’s handsome. Not like her dad, who’s got a pot belly and is always white as chalk.

He looks her up and down.

‘You seem like a girl who knows her own mind.’

She doesn’t reply, but for a moment she thinks she can see something she recognises. Something she doesn’t like.

‘Well, time for a swim,’ he says, and turns his back on her.

He goes down to the water and tests the temperature. Victoria stands up and gathers her things together.

‘See you another day, maybe,’ the man says, waving to her. ‘Bye!’

‘Bye,’ she replies, suddenly troubled by her solitude.

As she walks along the path leading through the forest towards the cottage, she tries to work out how long it will be before he comes to visit her.

He’ll probably come tomorrow, she thinks, and he’ll want to borrow the lawnmower.

Her sense of security is gone.

STOCKHOLM IS AS
faithless as an old whore. Since the thirteenth century she’s been lying there in the unquiet water, tempting with her islands and islets, with her innocent appearance. She is as beautiful as she is treacherous, and her history is coloured with bloodbaths, fires and expulsions.

And broken dreams.

As Jeanette walked to the metro station at Enskede gård that morning there was a chill mist in the air, almost like fog, and the lawns around the villas were wet with night dew.

Late spring in Sweden, she thought. Long, light nights and greenery, capricious lurches between heat and cold. She actually liked this time of year, but right now it made her feel lonely. There was a collective demand to make the most of this short period. Be happy, live your life, seize the day. Late spring in this city is hazardous, she thought.

It was the morning rush hour, and the train was almost full. There was reduced service because of signalling work, and a technical fault was causing further delays. She had to stand, squeezed into a corner by one of the doors.

Technical fault? She presumed that meant someone had jumped in front of a train.

She looked around.

An unusual amount of smiling. Presumably because most people were just a week or two away from their holiday.

She wondered how people at work thought of her. As a miserable cow sometimes, she assumed. Bossy. Domineering, maybe. Hot-tempered at times.

She wasn’t really any different from the other senior detectives. The work demanded a certain authority and decisiveness, and the responsibility meant that you sometimes asked too much of your subordinates. And cost you your sense of humour as well as your patience. Did the people she worked with actually like her?

Jens Hurtig liked her, she knew that. And Åhlund respected her. Schwarz did neither. The others were probably somewhere in between.

But there was one thing that bothered her.

Most of them called her Jan, and she was sure they all knew she didn’t like it.

That showed a lack of respect.

They could be split into two groups. Schwarz was at the forefront of the Jan team, followed by a long list of other officers. The Jeanette team consisted of Hurtig and Åhlund, but even they slipped up occasionally, along with a handful of other officers and recent recruits who had only ever seen her name written down.

Why didn’t she get the same level of respect as the other senior officers? She was better qualified and had a higher rate of closed cases than most of them. Each year, when their rates of pay were adjusted, she received black-and-white evidence that she was still below the average salary for someone of her level. Ten years of experience were forgotten while new officers were promoted and others advanced.

Could the lack of respect really be because she was a woman?

The train stopped at Gullmarsplan. A lot of passengers got off and she sat down on an empty seat at the end of the carriage before it filled up with new passengers.

She was a woman in a position where most of her colleagues were men. Women weren’t senior officers in the police. They didn’t take command, not at work, and not on the football pitch. They weren’t decisive, bossy or dominant like her.

The train shuddered, left Gullmarsplan and pulled out onto the Skanstull Bridge.

Jan, she thought. One of the guys.

BY THE THIRD
day after the discovery on Kungsholmen nothing new had come to light that could lead the investigation forward, and Jeanette was feeling frustrated. In the register of missing children there was no one who, at first glance at least, matched the dead boy. Of course there were hundreds, possibly thousands of undocumented children in Sweden, but unofficial contacts within the church and the Salvation Army had indicated that they weren’t aware of anyone who might match the victim.

The City Mission in Gamlastan had no information to offer either. But someone who worked for their nightly outreach programme told them that a number of children usually gathered beneath the Central Bridge.

‘They’re incredibly elusive, those kids,’ the male charity worker lamented. ‘When we’re there they come out and grab a sandwich and a mug of soup, then disappear again. It’s perfectly obvious that they don’t really want to have anything to do with us.’

‘Isn’t there anything social services can do?’ Jeanette asked, even though she already knew the answer.

‘I doubt it. I know they were down there a month or so ago, and all the kids scattered and didn’t come back for a couple of weeks.’

Jeanette Kihlberg thanked him for the information and wondered if a visit to the bridge might turn something up, if she could manage to persuade one of the kids to talk to her.

The door-to-door inquiries around the teacher-training college had been completely useless, and the time-consuming work of contacting refugee centres had now been expanded to cover the whole of central Sweden.

But no one was missing a child who might match the mummified boy who’d been found in the bushes by the metro station. Åhlund had been through hours of security camera footage from the station and the neighbouring college, but hadn’t found anything unusual.

At half past ten she called Ivo Andrić at the Institute of Pathology in Solna.

‘Tell me you’ve got something for me! We’ve ground to a halt here.’

‘Well.’ Andrić took a deep breath. ‘Here’s what I’ve got. The first thing is that all his teeth have been removed, so there’s no point calling in a forensic orthodontist to check his dental records. Secondly, the body’s completely desiccated, mummified, in fact …’

He fell silent, and Jeanette waited for him to go on.

‘I’ll start again. How do you want it? Technical terminology or something more comprehensible?’

‘Whatever you think best. If there’s anything I don’t understand I’ll ask, and you can explain.’

‘OK. Well, if a dead body is left in a dry environment at a high temperature, with relatively good ventilation, it dries out fairly quickly. Which means that there’s basically no decay. And in extreme cases of drying – such as this one – it’s difficult, not to say impossible, to remove the skin, especially from the skull. The facial skin has dried out completely and can’t be removed from the underlying –’

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Jeanette said impatiently. ‘I don’t want to seem unfriendly, but I’m mainly interested in how he died and when it might have happened. Even I could see that he was dried out.’

‘Of course. Maybe I got a bit sidetracked. You have to appreciate that it’s practically impossible to say when death occurred, but I can tell you that he hasn’t been dead for longer than six months. The process of mummification also takes time, so I’d guess he died somewhere between November and January.’

‘OK, but that’s still a fairly broad period of time, isn’t it? Have you managed to get any DNA?’

‘Yes, we’ve taken DNA from the victim, as well as urine from the bag.’

‘What? You mean someone pissed on the bag?’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the killer, does it?’

‘No, that’s true.’

‘But it might take another week before we get back comprehensive results about the DNA and can build up a more extensive profile. It’s a tricky job.’

‘OK. Have you got any ideas about where the body might have been kept?’

‘Well … like I said, somewhere dry.’

The line fell silent, and Jeanette thought for a moment before going on.

‘So pretty much anywhere, then? Could I have done it at home?’

She saw the disgusting and utterly absurd image in her mind’s eye. A dead boy at home in the house in Enskede, getting drier and more mummified by the week.

An indescribably terrifying picture was developing. What Ivo Andrić was explaining had a purpose.

‘I don’t know what your home’s like, but even an ordinary apartment might do. It might smell a bit to start with, but if you had access to a hot-air ventilator and put the corpse in an enclosed space, it would certainly be possible to do it before the neighbours started to complain.’

‘A wardrobe, you mean?’

‘Maybe not as small as that. A closet, a bathroom, something like that.’

‘That’s not much to go on.’ She could feel her frustration growing.

‘No, I realise that. But there is something that might be able to help you.’

Jeanette listened intently.

‘The preliminary chemical analysis indicates that the body is full of chemicals.’

Something, at last, she thought.