The Crow Girl (100 page)

It’s like a classic crime mystery. The locked room.

When Hurtig had started saying how hard it had been to break the door open, it had struck Jeanette that there had to be another way into Dürer’s garage. She and Hurtig are now standing inside it together with the unit commander, and once she’s explained her reasoning the three of them turn round and look at the solid wooden shelving. The hidden door must be behind there.

The unit commander gives the order to fetch a crowbar, and two of the masked officers disappear off towards the van at the gate.

Jeanette carefully inspects the way the shelves are constructed. The sides are sturdy and on the inside of them there are large rivets on steel rails that appear to be attached to the back of the sides, as well as the roof and floor of the shelving, like a large metal rectangle. It’s suddenly apparent that the shelving is fastened from the other side, since there are several thick screws sticking out of the metal rails. She shouldn’t have just accepted that the garage was empty, she sighs to herself. Now they may have lost valuable time.

The two officers return with a crowbar each, and begin to prise off the metal rails. Behind them are grooves in the concrete that must be the outline of the door, and a third officer begins to pull at one of the screws. There’s a loud noise and the door opens a few centimetres. Another few tugs and the gap grows to ten centimetres.

Ulrika, Jeanette thinks. For a brief moment she has time to paint a terrifying mental picture of what might be behind the shelving. Ulrika Wendin’s body, bricked into the wall. But the illusion vanishes the moment the door flies open.

Inside is a cramped niche in the wall, perhaps half a metre deep, and a very narrow flight of steps leads down into the darkness to the left. In the ceiling of the niche a broken catch is swinging from a loop. She can feel the tension rising in every vein and muscle.

Then the response unit takes over again.

Their commander takes two of his most experienced officers with him, and after what feels like at least ten minutes a voice calls from the hole in the ground. ‘Cellar secure!’

Jeanette and Hurtig hurry down the narrow staircase and are hit by a dry, rancid smell. Nothing, Jeanette convinces herself. They haven’t found anything down here.

She remembers Ulrika Wendin. Her face, her voice, the way she moved. If they had found her down here, dead or alive, they wouldn’t have declared the cellar secure.

The staircase leads to an almost square room, perhaps five by five metres, with a closed door in the far wall. A lit bulb hangs from a chain in the ceiling, and on the floor there are two large dog cages. The walls are covered with maps, photographs, newspaper cuttings and layer upon layer of pieces of paper, all different sizes.

‘What the hell …?’ Hurtig groans at the sight of the dog cages, and Jeanette can see that he’s thinking the same thing she is.

There are toys hanging from the ceiling on pieces of string. Jeanette counts twenty or so, including a little wooden dog with wheels and a bunch of broken Bratz dolls. But the main impression is one of paper and more paper.
L’homme du petit papier,
she thinks.

Viggo Dürer is the man with scraps of paper. How could Sofia have got it so right?

The room also contains a small shelf holding a row of bottles and jars, and a low, open cupboard with more stacks of papers and documents. On top of the cupboard are two miniature toy monkeys, one with a pair of cymbals and the other with a drum.

She takes a closer look at the bottles on the shelf. Some are marked with chemical symbols, others with Cyrillic writing, but she has a pretty good idea what they contain. Even though they are all sealed, there is a faintly acrid smell.

‘Embalming fluids,’ she mutters, turning towards Hurtig, who looks even paler now.

The door at the far end of the room opens. ‘We’ve found the other entrance, and another room,’ the unit head says, and she thinks his voice sounds unsteady. ‘It seems to be …’ He breaks off and pulls off his balaclava. ‘A drying room or something …’ His face is white as chalk.

A drying room? Jeanette thinks.

He shows them into a narrow corridor, barely a metre wide and between six and seven metres long. It’s made entirely from concrete and comes to an abrupt end at a ladder leading up to a hole in the ceiling. A strip of light is shining on the metal of the ladder.

Halfway along the left-hand wall is a steel door.

‘The drying room?’ Jeanette indicates the door, and the unit head nods.

‘The ladder leads up to the garden behind the house,’ he goes on, as if to take their attention away from the closed door. ‘You might have noticed –’

‘The drain cover?’ Hurtig interrupts him. ‘I was standing on top of it less than half an hour ago.’

‘True,’ the unit head replies, ‘but if we’d opened the cover from the outside we’d only have seen mesh over a dark hole.’

She turns to Hurtig and the unit head, who are standing listlessly outside the steel door. ‘I’m going to open it,’ she says. ‘Why is it closed, anyway?’

The head of the response unit just shakes his head and takes a deep breath. ‘What the hell are we dealing with here?’ he says slowly. ‘What kind of sick bastard are we after?’

‘We know his name is Viggo Dürer,’ Hurtig replies. ‘And we have a rough idea of what he looks like, but we have no idea of what sort of person he is –’

‘Whoever did this isn’t a person,’ the unit head interrupts. ‘This is something else altogether.’

They look at one another but say nothing. The only sounds are the wind hitting the garage roof and the other police officers moving around up in the garden.

Something has scared these men so much that they’re not sure about showing us what they’ve found, Jeanette thinks, and feels suddenly hesitant. She thinks of her hellish experience at National Crime that afternoon.

Hurtig gives the door a light nudge.

‘There’s a light switch to the right of the door,’ the unit head says. ‘There’s fluorescent lighting in there, unfortunately.’ Then he turns away, and the steel door slowly slides open.

In the belief that hesitation and reflection are just a waste of time, Jeanette switches the light on at once and takes a step inside. In a fraction of a second her brain makes a long sequence of instinctive decisions that lead her to take an entirely rational view of what’s inside the room.

First she registers everything she sees, and once she’s done that she’s going to shut the door and leave the rest to Ivo Andrić.

Time stops for her.

She registers that Ulrika Wendin isn’t in the room, and that no other living person is either. She also registers that there are two large extractor fans mounted on each of the end walls, and that there are four thin steel cables running across the room.

She registers what’s hanging from the cables, and what’s standing on the floor in the middle of the room.

Then she shuts the door.

Hurtig has backed away a few steps and is now leaning against the concrete wall with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the floor. Jeanette can see his jaw moving, as if he were chewing on something, and she feels sorry for him. The head of the response unit turns round again as he hears the door close. He breathes out and rubs his forehead, but says nothing.

When Ivo Andrić arrives with the forensics unit, Jeanette and Hurtig look at their young, untroubled faces with melancholy sympathy. Even if the assistants will only be dealing with the anteroom of Dürer’s museum, the room with the newspaper cuttings, old toys and scraps of paper, they’ll still have to see the unnameable horrors in the drying room.

Now wearing plastic gloves, Jeanette and Hurtig take a first look at the vast quantity of documents, and after a while it’s as if they’ve come to a tacit agreement not to discuss what they saw in the other room. They know what’s in there, and in the fullness of time Ivo Andrić will give them answers. That’s enough.

Sofia had been right again, Jeanette thinks. A retrospective exhibition of castrations, or a loss of sexual belonging. Well, why not?

She’s experiencing the same heavy tiredness she felt after sitting in front of the screen in National Crime, and forces herself to look for signs of light. One is that there’s still hope that Ulrika Wendin is alive, and that hope gives Jeanette strength.

They’re photographing the material and making a rough catalogue of what it contains. The more thorough examination will be done later, and not by them, so it’s important not to forget their first impressions, when their awareness of what they’re seeing is still relatively uncontaminated.

At first glance, the main categories appear to be cuttings from newspapers and magazines, photographs, handwritten documents, everything from small notes to long letters, as well as artefacts, primarily toys. There’s another category for copies of articles and extracts from books. How much of it is personal memories or documentation of criminal activity is in most cases impossible to determine. Among the photographs are Polaroids of Samuel Bai, whom she can easily recognise by the RUF scars on his chest.

The bottles and jars on the shelf in the room will obviously be examined by the forensics team, and Jeanette wastes no time on them. She has a rough idea of what they contain. Formalin, formaldehyde and similar substances and chemicals used for embalming.

Nor do she and Hurtig touch the dog cages and the small drain in the middle of the room, even if they can’t help glancing in that direction occasionally.

The work proceeds quickly and with a degree of detachment towards what they’re seeing. That’s why Hurtig barely reacts when he finds an illustrated description of the tools used for embalming, and recognises the implements he found in the kitchen drawer up in the house. Pliers, a saw, tweezers, and lastly a wooden stick with a hook at the end.

They find several newspaper clippings about the three boys at Thorildsplan, Danvikstull and Svartsjölandet, but there don’t appear to be any clippings about the boy who was found a few days ago down in Norra Hammarbyhamnen.

What’s striking is that the majority of the clips are from Soviet or Ukrainian newspapers. It’s hard to work out what the articles are about because neither Jeanette nor Hurtig can read Cyrillic, and because almost all of them lack illustrations. They’re marked with dates, in a range running from the early 1960s to fairly recently, the summer of 2008. The articles will have to be scanned and sent to Iwan Lowynsky at the Ukrainian security police.

Jeanette soon decides to break off her work with the material, and agrees with Hurtig that they’ve got enough for the time being, and that the overall picture will become clear later.

Just one more thing, she thinks.

She’s standing in front of the low cupboard with the toy monkeys, looking at a photograph attached to the middle of the wall with a drawing pin. There’s something about the picture that she recognises. It conjures up memories of the films at National Crime, and the person she saw in them looks very similar to the one in the photograph. The man in the picture is sitting on the veranda in front of a house. Probably Viggo Dürer, but there’s also something familiar about the house.

She takes the picture down from the wall, and sits on the floor with it still in her hand as she looks at Hurtig with eyes that she presumes must look bloodshot and tired.

‘Do you want to go back to the office?’ she asks.

‘Not really.’

‘Me neither. But I can’t go home, because I don’t feel like being alone tonight, and I don’t even want to see Sofia, if I’m honest. The only person I think I can bear being with at the moment is, actually, you.’

Hurtig looks almost embarrassed. ‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

He smiles. ‘I don’t feel like being on my own tonight either. First those films, and now this …’

All of a sudden she feels a new sort of closeness to him. They really have been through the day from hell together.

‘We can sleep at work tonight,’ she finds herself saying. ‘How about it? Get some beers and just relax? Forget about all this, we won’t even mention it. Just forget everything for one single bloody evening?’

He laughs quietly. ‘OK. Why not?’

‘Great. But before we knock off I have to call von Kwist. He’s damn well going to have to drag himself to work, sick or not. We need to upgrade the hunt for Dürer to a national search. Besides, I want to check out this picture.’ She shows Hurtig the photograph she’s just taken down from the wall.

WHEN SHE LEAVES
the Sunflower Nursing Home, Sofia drives to Norra Hammarbyhamnen. The Sleepwalker will never come here again, and she wants to see the place one last time.

She sits on the quayside for a while. Tries to work out why she has kept coming back here, time after time. A short distance away there’s a police cordon and some forensics officers. She wonders what’s happened. Maybe someone has jumped from the bridge. That sort of thing happens. After ten minutes she walks back to the car and drives home.

Unaware that she’s being followed.

She parks down by the London Viaduct and walks up Folkungagatan, and just as she’s passing Erstagatan she hears a sudden loud noise.

A man is standing beside his car a few metres away from her. He’s just slammed the boot shut, and looks at her in surprise as he locks it.

Calm down, Sofia, she thinks. It’s over now.

But it isn’t. Not really.

Just as she’s about to turn into Klippgatan she hears another noise that seems unnaturally loud to her.

It’s the bell on the door of the little corner shop. The owner emerges in the company of a small, bent old woman.

‘Take care now, Birgitta,’ he says. ‘Those steps up to the church can be slippery.’

The woman has her grey hair in a bun, and mutters something before she turns away, putting a couple of weekly magazines in her bag.

Sofia stares. It isn’t possible, she thinks.

The woman’s face is lowered and shadowed by the lighting of the shop sign, but Sofia recognises her chubby neck and stares at the little dimples in her cheeks.