“Now you don’t need to come along just for my sake,” Elin said.
“What are you talking about?” one of the boys asked.
“Time for bye-byes here,” said Elin, nodding at Jeanette and smiling.
“I’m really tired, that’s all,” she said.
“Go home and get to bed then,” the boy said. “Should I call for an ambulance?”
She stuck her tongue out. He laughed.
“I’m off.”
“Walking?”
“Yes, walking.”
“It’s a long way. And the last streetcar’s probably gone.”
“There’s always the night bus. Or I might take a taxi for the last part.”
“Get one now,” Elin said.
“Eh? You can’t mean that . . . What do you mean?”
“You shouldn’t walk through town alone.”
She looked around.
“On my own? The place is full of people.” She looked around again. “People of all ages, at that.”
“You do what you want,” Elin said.
“Are we going, then?” asked one of the gang.
They stood up.
“Eleven tomorrow morning, OK?” Elin said.
“Can you manage to get up by then?”
“I can manage when there’s some sunbathing in store.”
“You know where to find me,” she said, bid them good night, and set off walking southward.
“Rest in peace,” said one of the guys.
“That was a ridiculous thing to say,” Elin said.
Jeanette hesitated when she got to the taxi stand. She suddenly felt livelier, as if walking had triggered some spare engine inside her or something. She paused. Looked at the park. There were as many people there as had been at the café, maybe more. There were lights everywhere, the trees and bushes sparkled in bright colors that seemed to have been painted onto the leaves. There was a pleasantly cool breeze coming from that direction; she could feel it. It smelled good. And cool. She could take a shortcut through the park to the street beyond. There were thousands of people around, everywhere. She could hear music coming from the café to the right. It was only a hundred meters away.
Something was tugging at her, from the park. She stood on the grass. It smelled even better from there. She could hear voices on all sides, just like by the water earlier. She closed her eyes and heard fragments of voices, splinters. It wasn’t red and yellow inside her head now, more green, and perhaps just a touch of yellow. She opened her eyes again and started across the lawn. People everywhere. Voices everywhere. She entered a group of trees and could see the street beyond them. Another twenty meters, perhaps.
She felt awake, wide awake, like in the morning after a good night’s sleep and breakfast.
There was a rustling in the branches above her. The path was more like a grove. She could see street lamps everywhere. It was already getting light. The sky was bluer now than it had been an hour ago. It was only just past 1:00. There was a rustling, a swishing. Cars, laughter. She was already wondering when the first taxi would come rolling down the street.
A rustling to her right, a shadow in the corner of her eye, perhaps. She heard something, a bird. A laugh on the other side. A bush moved in a sudden gust of wind.
She was out in the street now. Cars passing by.
She walked along the pavement, then turned back into the park to cut off the last corner before emerging on the other side. There would be people absolutely everywhere and she wasn’t scared and there was no reason to be, either. The very thought almost made her laugh. Just a few more steps to go.
2
SHE HAD BECOME NUMB, LAPSED INTO UNCONSCIOUSNESS, COME
back to life. Reached home. The sun was already hot, it felt like midmorning. She’d walked down the hill hiding her face, so that nobody would see what had happened to her, what she had
done.
What somebody else had done to her.
The room looked the same as before, but nothing would ever be the same as before.
She ripped off her clothes,
ripped
off her clothes, and flung everything into the washing machine without looking and turned it on. The sound of the water was comforting.
She stood under the shower and washed herself
under
her skin, or so it seemed. She stood there for a long time, rubbing her body and destroying all the evidence while the washing machine tossed her clothes back and forth, dissolving the evidence, back and forth. There was nothing left by the time Detective Inspectors Fredrik Halders and Aneta Djanali from the local CID arrived an hour later; nothing when the forensics officers from the police station in Ernst Fotell’s Square eventually tried to find something among the threads and fibers.
The officer in charge who had sent them out, Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter, suspected serial rape every time a rape was reported. He’d been right on two previous occasions.
Aneta Djanali eyed the park, Slottsskogen, as they drove past—the girl had told her mother and father it had happened in the park, they knew that. Djanali noticed the dog. Not something to play with. Nothing was to be played with. Three uniformed police officers were hovering around the parking lot. There were about ten cars there.
“Do you think they’re checking the cars?” asked Halders, who was driving.
“Not yet, from the looks of it.”
“You get this big show every time.”
“Show?”
“They go crazy. Twenty-five cops with their hands in their pockets, and the bastard could have run off and left his car behind, that could be it there in the middle. That green Opel. Or that black Volvo.”
“There are three of them, not twenty-five.”
Djanali saw one of the officers take a notebook out of his pocket and start writing down the registration numbers.
“They’re starting now.”
The Bielkes’s house was set back from the road, within a walled garden. The sea glistened only a few hundred meters away. Halders could smell the salt, see the water, hear the gulls, see the sails, a couple of ferries, a catamaran, the oil storage tanks, three cranes in the abandoned wharf on the other side of the estuary. A horizon line.
The house must be worth ten million, but he couldn’t let that affect him. People had a right to more money than he had. It might be newly built. Inspired by Greek architecture. The thing looked like a whole Greek village.
He wiped the sweat from his brow, felt it on his back under his shirt. Aneta looked cool. Must have to do with genes or something. Black on the outside, cool on the inside.
“OK, then,” he said, and rang the doorbell, which was a tiny button barely visible in the yellow-tinted plaster.
The door opened immediately, as if the man inside had been waiting for the bell. He was wearing shorts and a shirt, barefoot, sunburned, maybe fifty, glasses with thin frames, thinning hair longer in the back. Thin all over in fact, Halders thought. Red eyes. Scared eyes. Something had invaded his home.
Now reality was intruding for the second time: first a daughter who had been raped, then two plainclothes police officers. The two always go together. Hadn’t occurred to me before, Halders thought. We’re the ones who do the following up, the good after the bad; but for him we’re each as shitty as the other.
They introduced themselves.
Kurt Bielke ushered them in. “Jeanette is in her room.”
“Yes.” Halders glanced up the stairs. “It won’t take long. Then she can go to East General.”
“East General?”
“The hospital. Women’s clinic.”
“I know what it is,” said Bielke, stroking his high forehead. “But . . . does she really have to go?” He turned to face Aneta Djanali. “She says she doesn’t want to.”
“It’s important,” Djanali said. For numerous reasons, she thought to herself.
“Can we have a word with her now?” Halders asked.
“Yes . . . Yes, of course,” said Bielke, gesturing toward the stairs. Then he just stood there, as if frozen, until his head moved once again. He wasn’t looking at them. “It’s up there.”
They went up the stairs and came to a closed door. Djanali could hear the sounds of summer outside. A seabird laughed aloud, and the laughter was followed by more. The birds drifted off over the bay. A dog barked. A car tooted. A child shouted out in a shrill voice.
Bielke knocked on the door. There was no answer, and he knocked again.
“Jeanette?”
They could hear a voice from inside, but no words.
“Jeanette? The po . . . the police are here.”
Some word or other from inside again.
“Let’s go in now,” Halders said.
“Should I come too?” Bielke asked.
“No,” said Halders, knocking on the door himself. He turned the handle, the door opened, and they went in.
The girl was in her robe, sitting on the bed. It was as dark as she could make it in the room, with the venetian blinds closed. The bright light of the sun was trying to break through. It’s as though the girl is trying to hide from it on one corner of the bed, thought Djanali. She’s clinging to the wall. She’s named Jeanette, not “she.” She has a name, but suddenly it has no meaning for anybody else; maybe not even for her now that she’s a victim.
Now it’s my turn to speak.
Djanali introduced herself and Halders, who nodded, said nothing, sat down in the desk chair, and observed her, gave her a friendly nod.
Half of Jeanette’s face was hidden under the towel she’d wrapped around her head after her long shower. She was holding the collar of her robe closed with a dainty hand. Djanali’s eyes had grown used to the half light in the room by now, and she contemplated the fragile skin on the girl’s fingers. It seemed to be sodden.
She’s been in the shower for hours. I’d have done the same.
Djanali asked a few brief questions, the simplest she could think of, to start off the first interview. The answers were even briefer, barely possible to comprehend. They had to move closer, but not too close. Jeanette spoke about the park. Yes, it had been late. No, early. Late and early. She was alone. She’d walked there before. Lots of times, at night, too. Alone? Yes, alone at night, too.
This time she’d been alone for only a moment. Or maybe it had been a few minutes. She’d been to two different places and she said where they were and Halders wrote them down. She spoke about the others who’d been there with her, for a little while at least. They’d been to a graduation party, just a small one. A quarter of the class. It was nearly a month since they finished their exams.
Djanali could see Jeanette’s white cap on the chest of drawers under the window. She could imagine her joy at passing her exams, and earning the right to wear her white cap. It seemed luminescent in the darkness.
A little graduation party. Djanali shifted her gaze from the white cap to Jeanette’s face. Nineteen years old. She would have liked to ask about boyfriends, but knew it was better to wait. The important thing now was basic questions about what had happened: when, how, when, how, when, how. Ask, listen, look. She’d done this often enough to know that the most important thing for an interrogator to do was to pin down what she called the incident behind the incident. Not just to take an account at face value. The victim’s account. No, to start thinking about the difficult question: Is that really true? Is that really what happened?
She asked Jeanette Bielke to tell her what impression she’d gotten of her attacker.
Suddenly Jeanette said she wanted to go to the hospital, she wanted to go now. Djanali had known that would come, or maybe should have come before now.
“Soon. Just one more question. One second only.”
“But I want to go
now.
”
“Can you tell us anything about this man?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Was he tall?”
“He was big. Strong. Or maybe I didn’t . . . didn’t dar . . . want . . . didn’t dare to try and struggle. I did try at first . . . but then I couldn’t any more.”
She’d started to cry. She pulled at the towel and rubbed it over her eyes and it came loose and fell down and her wet hair became visible, stuck to her head as if by glue.
“He . . . he tied me,” she said.
“Tied you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Well, tied . . . he had a noose around my ne . . . around my neck. My arms . . . then . . .”
She grasped hold of her throat. Djanali could see it now, a red mark like a narrow line around her neck. Jesus Christ.
“It was like a dog leash,” Jeanette said. “It didn’t smell like a dog, but it was like a dog leash.” She was looking straight at Djanali now. “I could see it shining. I think.”
“Shining?”
“It was shining around the collar. I think. As if there were studs on it, or something.”
She gave a shudder, cleared her throat, then shuddered again. Djanali looked at Halders, who nodded.
“Just one last question, Jeanette. Did he say anything?”
“I don’t remember much. I fainted. I think he said . . . something.”
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t hear what it was.”
“But you could hear words?”
“Yes . . .”
“You didn’t hear what language?”
“It wasn’t like a language.”
“What do you mean? Not like a language?”
“It was . . . just sounds . . . didn’t mean anything. It was just something he . . . something I couldn’t understand.”
Djanali nodded, waited. Jeanette looked at her.
“He did it three times, or whatever. Repeated it. Or maybe it was just once. Just when he was . . . when he . . .”
The gulls were laughing outside the window again: they’d come back from the sea. A car engine started. A child shouted again. Jeanette rubbed hard at her hair with the towel. It was hot and stuffy in the room.
Djanali knew Jeanette had said all she was capable of saying just now, and that it was high time they got her to the hospital.