The Crow Girl (42 page)

‘Refugee children. Illegal fucking refugee children … not economically justified. It makes me sick.’ Hurtig gets to his feet, and Jeanette can see how angry he is.

‘Sit down, Jens. I haven’t finished.’ She’s surprised she can sound so firm even though she feels utterly exhausted.

Hurtig sighs and sits down again.

‘This is what we do … I have to look after Johan, and I don’t know how long that’s going to take.’ She pauses before going on. ‘But you know as well as I do that there’ll be some time for other things … if you understand what I mean?’ She sees a flash in Hurtig’s eyes, and feels something flaring up inside her as well. A feeling she’d almost forgotten. Enthusiasm.

‘You mean we continue, but in the dark?’

‘Exactly. This has to stay between us. If it gets out, then we’re both finished.’

Hurtig smiles. ‘Actually, I’ve already put out a few feelers that I’m hoping to get replies about this week.’

‘Good, Jens,’ Jeanette says, returning his smile. ‘I’m with you on this, but we’ve got to do it properly. Who have you contacted?’

‘According to Ivo Andrić, the boy from Thorildsplan had traces of penicillin in his body, as well as all the other drugs and anaesthetic.’

‘Penicillin? Meaning what?’

‘That the boy had been in contact with the health services. Probably with some doctor working with hidden, undocumented refugees. I know a woman who works in the Swedish Church, she’s promised to help me with possible names.’

‘Sounds excellent. I’m still in touch with the UNHCR in Geneva.’ Jeanette can feel the future slowly coming back to her. There is one, not just a bottomless present. ‘And I’ve got another idea.’

Hurtig looks at her expectantly.

‘What do you think about getting a profile of the perpetrator?’

Hurtig looks surprised. ‘But how can we get a psychologist to take part in an unofficial …’ he begins, then the penny drops. ‘Aha, you mean Sofia Zetterlund?’

Jeanette nods. ‘Yes, but I haven’t asked her yet. I wanted to check with you first.’

‘Hell, Jeanette,’ Hurtig says with a broad grin. ‘You’re the best boss I’ve ever had.’

Jeanette can see he really means it.

‘Much appreciated. I’m not feeling too hot at the moment.’

She thinks about Johan, and her separation from Åke. Right now she has no idea about her personal future. Is this lonely vigil at Johan’s side a taste of how things are going to be? Definitive loneliness.

Åke has moved in with his new woman.

Alexandra Kowalska. Jeanette contemplates her with some bitterness. Restorer, it had said on her business card. That sounded like the sort of person who tries to breathe fresh life into something that’s dead.

Has Åke moved out for good? She doesn’t know. But it might be as well if he did. He’s taken the first step, and now it’s up to her to give him – and perhaps herself – a bit of a push.

‘Shall we go out for a cigarette?’ Hurtig stands up, as if realising that he needed to interrupt Jeanette’s thoughts.

‘But you don’t smoke?’

‘Sometimes you can make an exception.’ He pulls a pack from his pocket and passes it to her. ‘I don’t know anything about cigarettes, but I got these for you.’

Jeanette looks at the pack and laughs. ‘Menthol?’

They put on their jackets and go outside the main entrance. The rain has started to ease, and over on the horizon they can just make out a bright strip of better weather. Hurtig lights a cigarette and gives it to Jeanette, then lights one for himself. He takes a deep drag, coughs, then blows the smoke out through his nose.

‘Are you going to keep the house if you and Åke split up?’ he asks. ‘Can you afford it?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m going to have to try to make it work for Johan’s sake. Besides, things seem to have taken off for Åke, and his pictures have started to sell.’

‘Yes, I read the review in
Dagens Nyheter
. They were over the moon.’

‘It feels ever so slightly bitter, subsidising his work for twenty years and then not being allowed to reap the rewards.’

She would never have believed that she and Johan meant so little that he could just turn his back on them and walk out.

Hurtig looks at her, stubs out his cigarette and holds the door open. ‘Up like the sun, down like a pancake …’

He gives her a hug, and she realises she needs one. She reflects that signs of affection can be as hollow as dying trees. She feels that she has no ability to differentiate the dead from the living as she steels herself to return to Johan’s side in the silence of the room.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND TURNS
off her computer and folds it shut. Now that she’s decided not to delete the files about Victoria, she seems to feel lighter.

She gets up, goes over to the sink and turns on the hot tap. The hot water makes the skin on her hands tighten up and sting, and they turn red, but she keeps them there. She tests herself, forcing herself to stick it out.

The only reason she had embarked on a relationship with Mikael was that she wanted revenge on Lasse. Now it seems utterly pointless. Empty and tawdry. Lasse is dead, and his son Mikael has slowly but surely become increasingly uninteresting to her since he’s been away, even if she feels tempted to reveal to him who she really is.

I’m going to end it, she thinks, finally pulling her hands out of the hot water. She switches taps and holds them under ice-cold water. At first it’s nice, soothing, then the cold takes over, and once again she forces herself to stick it out. Pain must be vanquished.

The more she thinks about it, the less she misses Mikael. I’m his stepmother, she thinks, and at the same time his lover. But it’s impossible to tell him the truth.

She turns the tap off and empties the sink. After a while her hands revert to their normal colour, then, when the pain has subsided completely, she sits down at the kitchen table again.

Her phone is in front of her and she knows she ought to call Jeanette. But she’s reluctant. She doesn’t know what to say. What she ought to say.

Anxiety hits her in the solar plexus, and she puts her hands on her stomach. She’s trembling, her heart is racing, and all her energy is draining away as if someone has just cut an artery. Her head is burning and she feels that she’s losing control, and has no idea what her body’s about to do.

Bang her head against the wall? Throw herself out the window? Scream?

No, she needs to hear a real voice. A voice that can prove to her that she still exists, that she’s tangible. That’s the only thing that will silence the cacophony inside her, and she reaches for the phone. Jeanette Kihlberg answers after a dozen rings.

She can hear distortion on the line. Background noise interrupted by a bleeping sound.

‘How is he?’ is all Sofia can manage to say.

Jeanette Kihlberg sounds like she’s in as bad a state as the line. ‘We found him. He’s alive, and he’s lying here beside me. That’s enough for the time being.’

Your child is lying beside you, she thinks. And Gao is here with me.

Her lips move. ‘I can come today,’ she hears herself say.

‘Please do. Come in an hour or so.’

‘I can come today.’ Her own voice echoes between the walls of the kitchen. Did she just repeat herself? ‘I can come today. I can …’

Johan had been missing all of one night, while Sofia was at home with Gao. They slept. Nothing else. That’s right, isn’t it?

‘I can come today.’

Her uncertainty spreads, and suddenly she realises that she hasn’t a clue about what happened after she and Johan got in the cradle to ride on Free Fall.

Distantly she hears Jeanette’s voice. ‘Good, see you later. I miss you.’

‘I can come today.’ The phone is silent, and when she looks at the screen she sees that the call lasted twenty-three seconds.

She goes out into the hall to put her shoes and jacket on. When she gets her boots down from the rack she notices that they’re damp, as if they’d just been used.

She looks at them closely. A yellow leaf is stuck to the heel of the left boot, the laces of both are full of pine needles and bits of grass, and the soles are muddy.

Calm down, she thinks. There’s been a lot of rain. How long does it take for a pair of leather boots to dry?

She reaches for her jacket. It too feels damp, and she takes a closer look at it.

A tear in one sleeve, about five centimetres long. She finds some small pieces of grit in the exposed padding.

There’s something sticking out of one pocket.

What the hell?

A Polaroid picture.

When she sees what it’s of, she doesn’t know what to think.

It’s a photograph of her, maybe ten years old. She’s standing on a deserted beach. There’s a strong wind, and her long fair hair is sticking out almost horizontally from her head. In the sand there’s a row of broken-off wooden poles, and in the background she can make out a small, red-and-white-striped lighthouse. A few seagulls are outlined against the grey sky.

Her heart is pounding. The photograph means nothing to her, and the location is utterly unfamiliar.

SLEEPLESS, SHE LISTENED
for his steps and pretended to be a clock. If she could control time, he would be fooled and would leave her alone.

He’s heavy, he’s got a hairy back, and he’s sweaty and smells of ammonia after grappling with the muck spreader for two hours. The swearing from the outhouse is audible all the way up to her room.

His bony hips chafe against her stomach as she stares up beyond his dipping shoulders.

The Danish flag draped across the ceiling is an inverted cross, its colours blood red and skeleton white.

It’s easiest to do what he wants. Stroke his back and groan in his ear. It shortens the whole thing by a good five minutes.

Once the squeaking of the old bed’s springs has stopped and he’s gone, she gets up and goes into the bathroom. The stench of manure has to go.

He’s a repairman from Holstebro, and she calls him the Holstebro pig, after the local breed, specially developed for slaughter.

She’s written his name in her diary, along with the others, and at the top of the list is her pig farmer, the one she has to be grateful to for giving her somewhere to stay.

The other one is actually well educated, a lawyer or something, and works in Sweden when he’s not at the farm killing pigs. She calls him the German bastard, but never when he can hear.

The German bastard is proud of using tried-and-tested, traditional working methods. His Jutland pigs are scorched rather than boiled to remove their bristles.

She turns the tap on and scrubs her hands. Her fingertips are swollen from her work with the pigs, because the pig hair catches under her nails and causes inflammation. Wearing protective gloves doesn’t make any difference.

She’s killed them. Numbing them with electric shocks and draining their blood, cleaning up after and rinsing the drains and taking care of the mess after the slaughter. Once he let her shoot one of them with a bolt gun, and she came close to using it on him instead. If only to see if his eyes ended up as vacant as the pigs’.

Once she’s scrubbed herself reasonably clean, she dries herself and goes back to her room.

I can’t bear it, she thinks. I have to get away from here.

As she gets dressed she hears the Holstebro pig’s old car start up. She peeps through the curtain and looks out of the window. The car is driving away from the farm and the German bastard is walking over to the outhouse to continue repairing the muck spreader.

She makes up her mind to walk out onto Grisetå Point, and maybe over the bridge to Oddesund.

The wind is eating its way in under her clothes, and even though she’s wearing both a cardigan and a jacket, she’s shivering before she gets round the house.

She continues towards the railway line and follows the track out onto the headland. At regular intervals she passes the remains of pillboxes and concrete bunkers from the Second World War. The headland gets narrower, and soon she can see water on both sides, and when the railway swings off towards the bridge she can see the lighthouse a few hundred metres ahead.

She goes down to the beach and realises that she’s alone. She lies down in the grass next to the little red-and-white lighthouse and looks up at the clear blue sky. She recalls how she once lay like this, and heard voices from inside the forest.

Then, as now, it had been windy, and one of them had been Martin’s burbling voice.

Why had he vanished?

She doesn’t know, but she believes that someone drowned him. He had disappeared down by the jetty at the same time as Crow Girl got there.

But her memories are vague. There’s a black hole.

She rolls a blade of grass between her fingers and sees the rotating seed head change colour in the sun. At the top of it is a drop of dew, and beneath it sits an ant, completely still. She can see that it’s missing one of its back legs.

‘What are you thinking about, little ant?’ she whispers, then blows on the seed head.

She lies back on her side and puts the grass straw down carefully on a stone next to her. The ant starts to move, crawling down the stem. It doesn’t appear to be troubled by the fact that it’s missing one leg.

‘What are you doing here?’

A shadow falls across her face as she hears his voice. A flock of birds passes above his head.

She gets up and goes with him to the pillbox. It takes ten minutes, because he doesn’t have much stamina.

He tells her about the war, and all the suffering the Danes had to endure during the German occupation, and how the women were raped and dishonoured.

‘And all the randy little German bitches,’ he sighs. ‘They were whores. Fucking five thousand of the swine.’

He’s told her several times about the Danish women who voluntarily embarked on relationships with German soldiers, and she has long since worked out that he himself is a German kid, a German bastard.

As they walk back she stays a few steps behind him, adjusting her dirty clothes. Her top is torn and she hopes they don’t meet anyone. She aches all over, because he was more heavy-handed than usual, and the ground out here is very stony.