The Crow Girl (86 page)

At the time there hadn’t been any scapegoats, no one to blame except the depression itself. Today he knows that that isn’t true.

Society itself was and is responsible. The world outside was too hard for her. It promised her everything, but without actually offering her anything at all. Nor was it able to help her when she became ill. Then, as now, it had been politically dysfunctional. The strong survive, and the weak have to manage on their own. She had persuaded herself that she was weak, and she had gone under.

If he had understood that then, perhaps he could have helped her.

If she had had cancer, all the resources of the health service would have been thrown at her, but instead she had been subjected to a patchwork of treatment in which each of the various therapists hadn’t known what the others were doing. He’s convinced that her medication only exacerbated her illness.

But that wasn’t the real problem.

Hurtig knows that his sister’s great dream had been to be a musician or a singer, and she had had the support of her family. But the signals sent out by society were that that wasn’t a valid career choice. Nothing worth setting your sights on.

Instead of standing on a stage somewhere she had studied economics, the sort of thing you were supposed to study if you were clever, and it had ended with her hanging herself in her student room.

Simply because all the rest of us made her believe that her dreams weren’t worth following, he thinks.

IT’S QUARTER TO
nine when the football match kicks off, and they haven’t had time to watch the film she’s rented. Who cares if it’s a late night? she thinks. The evening has been such a success that she doesn’t want to spoil it by nagging at Johan about bedtime.

She glances at him, scarcely visible where he’s lying on the sofa behind the crisp packets, soft drinks and the takeaway cartons from one of the countless Thai restaurants on Södermalm. The amount he can eat is quite incredible, she thinks, particularly when you consider that he never used to like Thai food. But on the other hand he’s growing so fast you can almost hear it, and his tastes and preferences are changing so quickly she’s having trouble keeping up.

As far as his taste in music is concerned, it started with hip hop, then slid unnoticed into Swedish punk, and for a while came dangerously close to hardcore skinhead on the fringes of the far right, before one day back in the spring she discovered him listening to David Bowie.

She smiles at the memory. The strains of ‘Space Oddity’ had confronted her when she got home from work, and at first she had trouble coming to terms with the fact that her son liked the same music she had listened to when she was his age.

But this evening is all about football, and his preferences in that are nowhere near as changeable.

He’s always supported the Spanish team, which is busy making its opponents look like temporary visitors at the top table. He has a favourite team in each of the top leagues, and they’ve always stayed the same, even if they could obviously never compete with his beloved Hammarby. Those stripes never wash out, she thinks with a smile.

The first goal in the televised match doesn’t take long. Johan’s team is celebrating, and he’s not slow to join in with the players, jumping up from the sofa. ‘Yes! Did you see that?’ His face is one big smile, and he leans towards her with his hand raised for a high five, which she returns, somewhat surprised. ‘God, that was good!’

‘That was seriously good,’ she agrees. ‘I hardly had time to see it!’

After a short discussion of the goal and the passing play that preceded it, they fall into a silence that Jeanette feels is similar to what she and Hurtig often share, a silence that makes her feel relaxed. While she’s trying to find a way that doesn’t sound too stupid and motherly to say how nice she thinks the evening has been, he pre-empts her.

‘Shit, Mum. Nice that we don’t have to talk the whole time.’

She feels warm all over. She’s not even bothered about him swearing, but then she’s never particularly aware of her own language. Åke was often quick to point that out.

‘It’s more fun watching football with you than Dad,’ he goes on. ‘He always has to talk the whole time, and he moans at the referees even when they’re right.’

She can’t help laughing. ‘Yep, I have to agree with you there. Sometimes I can’t help wondering if he thinks the matches are all about him.’

Maybe that was a bit mean towards Åke, she thinks. True, though. But she takes deep satisfaction from what Johan has just said, and she knows why. She wonders if he’s noticed that she and Åke seem to have slipped into a sort of competition. A parental contest to see who deserves Johan’s loyalty most. She presumes that she’s leading at the moment by a goal or two, maybe.

‘Poor Dad,’ Johan says after a while. ‘Alex isn’t very nice to him.’

Three–nil, Jeanette thinks in an attack of schadenfreude that’s immediately replaced by a lump in her stomach.

‘Oh? How do you mean?’

He squirms. ‘Oh, I don’t know … She talks about money all the time and he doesn’t understand, just nods and signs everything without reading it. She acts like he works for her rather than the other way round, which is how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?’

‘Do you like spending time with them?’ Jeanette regrets the question as soon as she asks it. She doesn’t want to fall back into the role of prying mother, but Johan doesn’t seem bothered.

‘With Dad. Not with Alex.’

At half-time in the match he clears the table and pours what’s left of the crisps into a bowl. She’s noticed that he’s started to leave the lid down on the toilet these days. Little gestures that show he wants to make a good impression. Be a good son.

Little things, she thinks. God, how I love you, little Johan, even if you’re not that little any more.

‘Er, I …’ He’s just sat down again and has a shy smile on his face.

‘Yes?’

He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out his little black leather wallet with the team logo on it and looks through the note compartment until he finds what he’s looking for.

A small photograph, passport size. He takes a quick look at it, then pushes it across to her.

It’s a picture of a pretty girl with dark, messy hair, trying her best to look hard.

Jeanette gives Johan a quizzical look, and when she sees the twinkle in his eyes she realises that the girl in the photograph has a similar picture of him.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND WALKS
into the large, bright rotunda of the Stockholm City Library, slows down and listens to the silence. It’s early in the morning, and the library is almost empty. Just a few people walking, heads tilted, along the shelves that line the circular walls of the three-storey central hall.

The collection houses almost seven hundred thousand books, and in here she won’t be distracted by anyone. Everyone is immersed in their own business. All you can hear is slow footsteps, the rustle of paper and, every now and then, the sound of a book being quietly closed. Sofia looks up and begins to count shelves, sections, books with brown spines, red, green, grey and black. She glances down at the floor, shaking off the compulsive thoughts, and tries to focus on the reason she’s here.

The biographies are what interest her most. And an older work on sadism and sexuality. She goes over to one of the catalogue terminals to see if the books are available, discovers that they are, and walks up to an information desk.

The librarian is a middle-aged woman with her hair and shoulders covered by a hijab, and her dark complexion makes Sofia assume she’s from the Middle East.

The woman looks familiar.

‘How can I help you?’ Her voice is cool and soft, and Sofia can only detect a faint trace of an accent that sounds like a Norrland dialect. Persian, perhaps, or Arabic?

‘I was wondering if you could help me find Richard Lourie’s book about Andrei Chikatilo, and
Psychopathia Sexualis
by Krafft-Ebing?’

When the woman begins typing the titles without a word, Sofia notices that one of her eyes is brown while the other is pale green. She’s probably partially blind. Possibly pigment damage after an accident. A violent past. Someone might have beaten her.

‘Your parking permit has expired,’ the woman says.

Sofia jerks. The woman is talking, but her lips aren’t moving, her head is still bowed, and those strange eyes are still concentrating on the screen, not her.

It’s time to get it renewed. And you ought to park in the garage instead. The car won’t like standing out of doors this long.

Parking permit? She can’t remember when she last used her car, or even thought about it, still less where it’s actually parked.

‘Sorry, are you OK?’ The woman is looking up at her. The pupil of her injured, pale green eye is much smaller than the healthy one. Sofia doesn’t know which eye to focus on.

‘I … It’s just a headache.’

All of a sudden she’s certain she’s never seen the woman before.

The librarian’s smile looks worried. ‘Would you like to sit down? I could get you a glass of water and an aspirin …’

Sofia takes a deep breath. ‘Nothing to worry about. Have you found the books?’

The woman nods and stands up. ‘Come with me, I’ll show you where they are.’

As she follows in the librarian’s quiet footsteps she thinks about her own healing process. Is this how it works? Piece by piece, the ghosts in her brain are being revealed.

Everything becomes a game of identities, which includes strangers as well. Her own ego is so narcissistic that she thinks she knows every single person, and that they know her. She herself is at the centre of the world, and her ego is still that of a child.

This is how Victoria Bergman’s ego feels, and it’s a significant insight.

She now realises that the woman with her hair in a tight bun, the one she’s seen walking down the street several times, was just a projection of her own ego.

She was seeing her own mother, Birgitta Bergman. Obviously one of her suppressed mental ghosts.

Once she’s found the books she sits down at one of the desks and takes out the notebook she had been writing in the previous evening. Twenty pages of thoughts about her daughter, and she makes up her mind to spend an hour or two in the library carrying on the work of getting to know Madeleine before she makes a start on Lourie and Krafft-Ebing.

She’s feeling brittle, and she knows she has to make the most of that state.

JEANETTE HAS PUSHED
the start of her day back a couple of hours so she can drive Johan to school, and is going to be even later because her old Audi, for the umpteenth time, decides to break down at Gullmarsplan. She pulls over to the side of the road and can’t even be bothered to get angry before calling for a tow truck. She makes up her mind that the Audi, despite Åhlund’s best efforts, will have to go to its final resting place at the scrapyard out in Huddinge.

She knows she needs a car, and that the state of her finances won’t let her buy a new one. But she’s too proud to ask Åke for money.

As she heads down into the metro she thinks about Johan. Saying goodbye to him hadn’t been as difficult as she had expected. For the first time in ages they separated without her being left with a sense that there was a lot of unfinished business between them.

Just as she gets on the train, her mobile rings. She can see it’s Hurtig and suddenly remembers what he told her about his sister the previous day. So fucking tragic. That’s pretty much all there is to say.

She settles into a window seat at the end of the carriage before answering.

‘I’ve got two things to tell you,’ he begins. ‘They’re both pretty alarming.’

She can hear how wound up he sounds. ‘Go on.’

‘At roughly the same time we were out at Dürer’s at Hundudden, Charlotte Silfverberg committed suicide.’

Jeanette feels as if she’s just gone deaf. ‘What did you say?’

‘The Finland ferry, MS
Cinderella,
the night before last. According to a number of witnesses, Charlotte Silfverberg was alone on deck. She climbed up onto the railing and jumped. The witnesses didn’t have time to intervene, but they alerted the coastguard.’

As the speakers in the carriage announce that the next stop is T-Centralen, Jeanette tries to absorb the news. No, she thinks. Not another suicide. ‘A number of witnesses, did you say?’

‘Yes. No doubt at all. The coastguard found the body this morning.’

A clear case of suicide, then? First Linnea Lundström, and now this. Another family intent on wiping itself out.

Yet she can’t help feeling dubious.

‘Get someone to call the shipping company to ask for the passenger list,’ she says as the train stops and she stands up.

‘Passenger list?’ Hurtig sounds surprised. ‘What for? Like I said –’

‘Suicide, I know. But do you think Charlotte Silfverberg seemed the type to take her own life?’ She gets out onto the platform and continues towards the stairs down to the Blue Line. ‘When we last saw her she wanted to get away for a while, have a few glasses of red wine, and see her hero, Lasse Hallström. What if something happened on the ferry that made Charlotte Silfverberg make that fatal choice?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hurtig says wearily. ‘But there are more than ten witnesses on the ship who all confirm what happened.’

She stops on the first step and leans against the handrail. ‘Sorry, maybe I didn’t express myself very clearly.’ OK, she thinks, stay calm. Maybe I’m getting carried away. ‘You’re probably right. We’ll hold back on the shipping company. You said you had another piece of news?’

She listens to what Hurtig has to say, and soon she’s jogging down the steps through the crowd.

What he’s just told her means they’re going to have to put everything else to one side.

An Iwan Lowynsky from the Ukrainian security police in Kiev, from their department for international crime, is trying to get hold of her regarding the case of a missing person.