The Crow Girl (37 page)

‘Come on, Jan, don’t be like that. What are you implying?’

‘I’m not implying anything, but I understand that you’re calling to tell me the case is being dropped. What do we do about Samuel Bai? Even von Kwist must realise that Lundström couldn’t possibly have killed him.’

Billing takes a deep breath. ‘You haven’t got any suspects!’ he roars down the line. ‘There isn’t a single line of inquiry pointing in any direction at all! It might well involve organised human trafficking, and how the hell do you think we’re going to tackle that?’

‘I understand,’ Jeanette says with a sigh. ‘So you mean we have to pack up everything we’ve got and send it to von Kwist?’

‘Exactly,’ Billing replies.

Jeanette goes on. ‘And von Kwist reads our files and then closes the case because there aren’t any suspects.’

‘That’s right. See, you can do it if you try.’ The commissioner laughs. ‘And then you and Jens have some holiday. And everyone’s happy. Is that agreed, then? The investigation and your application for leave on my desk around lunchtime tomorrow?’

‘Agreed,’ Jeanette replies, and hangs up.

She decides it makes sense to inform Hurtig about the new directive and goes into his office.

‘I’ve just heard that we’ve got to bring our work to a close.’

Hurtig looks first surprised, then leans forward and throws his hands out. He now looks mostly disappointed. ‘But that’s fucking ridiculous.’

Jeanette sits down heavily and feels very tired. It seems like her body is spilling off the chair and onto the floor.

‘Is it really?’ she asks. She feels she hasn’t got the energy to play devil’s advocate, but knows it’s her duty as his superior to defend their bosses’ decision.

‘After all, nothing much has happened so far. No decent lines of inquiry. And it’s entirely possible that we’re dealing with human trafficking, just as Billing says, and that’s out of our jurisdiction.’

Hurtig shakes his head.

‘What about Karl Lundström, then?’

‘He’s in a coma, for heaven’s sake. He’s hardly any good to us!’

‘You’re a poor liar, Jan! It’s obvious that a paedophile –’

‘That’s just how it is. I can’t do anything about it.’

Hurtig looks up at the ceiling. ‘A murderer gets away with it and we’re left sitting here with our hands tied by some bastard lawyer. All because we’re dealing with boys that no one’s missed! It’s completely fucked up! And what about that Bergman guy? Aren’t we going to bother trying to talk to his daughter? She seemed to have a lot to say, didn’t she?’

‘No, Jens. That’s out of the question, and you know it. I think the best thing we can do right now is drop it. At least for the time being.’

She only calls him Jens when he’s annoying her. But her frustration subsides when she sees how disappointed he is. After all, they have worked on this together, and he’s been just as engaged in the case as she’s been.

Now she’s going to go home and fall asleep on the sofa.

‘I’m going now,’ she says. ‘I’ve got some leave to use up.’

‘Sure, whatever.’ Hurtig turns away.

EVERYTHING HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY.
She’s been through every part of it thousands of times before.

She passes the Globe. Right at the rotary by the Södermalm bakery. Enskedevägen. Everything feels routine, and as Jeanette turns into the drive in front of the garage she almost collides with Alexandra Kowalska’s red sports car, for the third time in a matter of weeks. Just like the first time, the car is parked askew in front of the garage and Jeanette has to brake hard.

‘Fuck!’ she yells as the seat belt cuts into her shoulder. She reverses angrily, parks next to the hedge, gets out and slams the driver’s door.

The summer evening in Enskede reeks of burnt meat, and she is confronted with the smell of a hundred barbecues. The sweet, heavy smells spread across the neighbourhood, into the garden, and Jeanette thinks it smells of happy families and good company. Having a barbecue presupposes company: it’s not the sort of thing you do alone.

The fragile silence is broken by her neighbours’ voices, laughter and excited shouts from the football pitch. She thinks about Sofia and wonders what she’s doing.

Jeanette goes up the steps to the house. Just as she’s about to open it the handle is pushed down from inside and she has to jump out of the way to avoid being hit by the door.

‘So long, handsome.’ Alexandra Kowalska is facing away from her in the doorway as she waves to Åke, who is smiling back at her from the hall.

His smile dies when he catches sight of Jeanette.

Alexandra turns round. ‘Oh, hi,’ she says, with a breezy smile. ‘I was just leaving.’

Fucking witch, Jeanette thinks as she walks in without replying.

She shuts the door and hangs up her jacket. Handsome?

She goes into the kitchen, where Åke’s standing at the window, waving. He looks at her warily as she tosses her bag on the kitchen table.

‘Sit down,’ she says sharply as she opens the fridge door. ‘Handsome?’ she goes on, then snorts. ‘OK, time for an explanation. What the fuck’s going on here?’ Jeanette makes an effort not to raise her voice, but can feel her anger vibrating inside her.

‘What do you mean? What is it you want me to explain?’

She decides to get straight to the point. She mustn’t let herself be fooled by his puppy-dog eyes, which always come out at moments like this.

‘Tell me why you didn’t come home last night, and why you didn’t even call.’ She looks at him. Predictably, the puppy-dog eyes are in place.

He tries to smile but fails. ‘I … well, I mean we. We were out. Operakällaren. There were quite a few drinks …’

‘And?’

‘Well, I spent the night in the city and Alexandra gave me a lift home.’ Åke turns his head away and looks out through the window.

‘Why are you looking so sheepish? Are you sleeping with her?’

He’s quiet for far too long, Jeanette thinks.

Åke puts his elbows on the table, hides his face in his hands, then stares blankly ahead of himself.

‘I think I’m in love with her …’

Here we go, Jeanette thinks with a sigh. ‘Bloody hell, Åke …’

Without another word she gets up, grabs her bag, walks out into the hall, opens the front door and goes outside. She walks down the drive onto the road, gets in the car, takes out her mobile phone, and calls Sofia Zetterlund.

No answer.

She only gets as far the Nynäshamn road before Åke calls to say that he’s taking Johan to stay with his parents for the weekend. That it might be good for them to think things over separately for a few days. That he needs to do some thinking.

Jeanette realises that’s just an excuse.

Silence is a good weapon, she thinks as she pulls out onto the rotary at Gullmarsplan.

A delaying tactic.

The life she took for granted just a few months ago has been pretty much blown away, and most frighteningly, she doesn’t even know if she cares.

She turns on the car radio to distract her from her thoughts.

Already she’s feeling anxious about having to wake up alone in the house.

ON HER WAY
home from Grisslinge Sofia Zetterlund stops at the petrol station in Hammarby Sjöstad and changes clothes. In the toilet she pushes her expensive but now fire-damaged dress into the bin. She giggles to herself at the thought that it had cost over four thousand kronor. She goes out into the shop and buys a big piece of chèvre, a packet of crackers, a jar of black olives and a carton of strawberries.

As she’s paying, her phone vibrates in her pocket again. This time she takes it out to see who’s calling.

It stops ringing when she’s being given her change. Two missed calls, she reads on the screen, as she thanks the cashier. She notes that Jeanette Kihlberg has been trying to contact her, and puts the phone back in her pocket.

Later, she thinks.

On her way out she catches sight of the display of reading glasses. Her eyes fall on a pair identical to the ones she stole on New Year’s Day, seven months ago, and she stops.

She had gone to Central Station and bought a return ticket to Gothenburg. The eight o’clock train had left on time, and she had been sitting in the deserted buffet car with a cup of coffee.

Soon after they left the conductor had appeared to stamp her ticket, and as she was handing it to him she had intentionally upset the cup of hot coffee over the table with her other hand. She yelped, and the conductor rushed off to get something to wipe it up.

She smiles at the memory and takes the glasses off the rack. She puts them on and looks at herself in the little mirror.

The conductor had brought her some napkins, and she had made sure she thrust her breasts out as she leaned forward to ask if the stains on her blouse showed. With a bit of luck, he would remember her if there was any need to check her alibi later.

But she hadn’t even had to show the police the stamped ticket, bought on her credit card. They had swallowed her story without question.

When the train stopped at Södertälje Syd she had darted into the toilet, pulled her hair up in a tight bun and put the stolen glasses on.

Before she got off the train she had turned her black coat inside out, so that she was suddenly wearing a pale brown one. She had sat down on a bench, lit a cigarette, and waited for the commuter train back to Stockholm and Lasse.

There was nothing that could be said, she thinks as she puts the glasses back on the rack.

No explanation would be good enough.

He had betrayed her.

Pissed all over her.

Humiliated her.

Quite simply, there was no room for him in her new life. Just leaving him and telling him to go to hell wouldn’t have been satisfying enough. He would still have been out there somewhere.

She walks out of the petrol station shop and over to the car, and only now does she notice that her hair smells of smoke.

As she opens the car door she remembers how she found Lasse passed out on the sofa in the living room. An almost empty bottle of whisky told her he was probably pretty drunk. There was nothing particularly remarkable about a man who had been revealed to have lived a double life for ten years committing suicide while drunk.

It was, more than likely, expected.

She starts the engine. It purrs into life, and she puts the car into first gear and pulls away from the petrol station.

He had been snoring loudly with his mouth open, and she had to steel herself to resist the urge to wake him up and make him face the music.

She had gone silently into the bathroom and removed the belt from Lasse’s burgundy dressing gown. The one he had stolen from the hotel in New York.

She drives into the city.

The 222 road, westbound. The light from the street lamps passes by above the windscreen.

Lasse had been lying on his side with his face towards the cushions, the back of his neck unprotected. It was important that the knot ended up in the right place and only left a small impression. She had tied the belt into a noose and carefully slid it over his head.

When the knot was in exactly the right place and all she had to do was pull, she had hesitated.

She had stopped to evaluate the risks, but hadn’t been able to come up with anything that might implicate her.

When she was finished she would go back to Central Station to await the arrival of the afternoon train from Gothenburg, then go and pick up her car from the car park. The car would have got a ticket, but when the attendants saw her valid ticket they would have to waive the fine. And they would be able to support, if not actually prove, that she had spent the day travelling by train to and from Gothenburg.

She heads down the Hammarby hill, across the old Skanstull Bridge, and into the tunnel under the Clarion Hotel.

Discipline, she thinks. You have to stay alert and not act on impulse, because that’s what can give you away.

The parking attendants, the train ticket and the conductor who had seen her in the buffet car should have been enough to remove any suspicions about her involvement. The phone books on the floor by the chair had been the final detail completing the picture.

She heads along Renstiernas gata, passes Skånegatan and Bondegatan, and turns right into Åsögatan.

She had taken a firm grip of the dressing-gown belt and pulled as hard as she could. Lasse had gasped for breath, but the drink dulled his response.

He never woke up again, and she had strung him up from the lamp hook in the ceiling. She had placed a chair beneath him, then, when she realised that his feet didn’t reach it, she had filled the gap with telephone directories that she then shoved onto the floor. A clear case of suicide.

JUST BEFORE SHE
reaches the Johanneshov Bridge, Jeanette Kihlberg sees from the big, round clock at Skanstull that it’s twenty past nine, and decides to call Sofia again.

As she dials the number and presses her phone to her ear, she hears the siren of an emergency vehicle. In the rear-view mirror she sees three fire engines approaching at high speed.

The phone rings, but there’s no answer.

Jeanette wishes she could be somewhere else, with a completely different life, and remembers a documentary she once saw about a man who had suddenly had enough.

Instead of going to work at University Hospital in Copenhagen as usual, he turned round and cycled all the way to southern France. Leaving his wife and children in Denmark and making a whole new life for himself as a blacksmith in a small mountain village. When the reporters found him, he said he didn’t want anything to do with his old life. He told everyone to fuck off.

Jeanette knows she’d be capable of doing the same, leaving everything for Åke to sort out.

The only thing complicating matters was Johan, but he could always join her later. She keeps her passport in her bag, so there’s actually nothing stopping her. In an odd way her anxiety seems to relent, as if the awareness that she isn’t actually stuck makes it less urgent to break free.