The Crow Girl (46 page)

‘Flashback?’

‘Yes. Just read it. You’ll see.’

On the screen is a website with a sequence of comments.

One of the posts is a list of Swedes who were said to have given financial backing to a foundation called Sihtunum i Diasporan.

The list contains twenty or so names, and once Jeanette has looked through it she sees what Ulrika Wendin means.

Apart from the two names Ulrika has mentioned, she recognises another one of them.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS
sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring into the darkness. She hasn’t bothered to switch on any lights since she got home. It’s almost pitch black, except for the light from the street lamps.

Sofia feels she can no longer resist. She also knows that it isn’t rational to try to resist.

They’re going to have to cooperate, she and Victoria. Otherwise things will only get worse.

Sofia knows she’s ill. And she knows what needs to be done.

She and Victoria make up the complicated product of a shared past, but have split into two personalities in a desperate attempt to deal with the brutalities of daily life.

They have completely different ways of defending themselves, and different strategies for healing. Sofia has held her illness at bay by clinging to routines. Her work at the practice gives her a framework that muffles the chaos within her.

Victoria is governed by hatred and rage, simple solutions and black-and-white logic, where if it proves necessary everything can be cut away.

Victoria despises Sofia’s weakness, her desire to blend in and adapt. Her persistent attempts to suppress all manner of injustice and apathetically accept the role of victim.

Since Victoria returned, Sofia has been full of self-loathing and has lost the ability to see a clear path ahead of her. Everything has turned into a quagmire.

Nothing is obvious any more.

Two wildly different wills must be satisfied and distilled down to one. A hopeless equation, she thinks.

It’s said that a person is shaped by their fears, and Sofia has developed her personality out of fear of being Victoria. Victoria has lain dormant within Sofia, like an opposing pole, a trampoline.

Without Victoria’s characteristics, Sofia will cease to be and will become nothing but an empty shell.

Without substance.

Where did Sofia Zetterlund come from? she thinks. She can’t remember.

She runs her hand over her arm.

Sofia Zetterlund, she thinks. She tastes the name, is struck by the realisation that she is someone else’s creation. Her arm really belongs to someone else.

Everything started with Victoria.

I am a product of another person, Sofia thinks. Of another ego. The thought makes her dizzy, and she finds it hard to breathe.

Where can she find a point of contact? Where in Victoria is the need that Sofia fulfils? She has to find that point, but to do that she has to stop being scared of Victoria’s thoughts. She has to dare to look her in the eye with an open mind. Make herself receptive to everything she has devoted her whole life to avoiding.

To start with, she has to locate the point in time when her memories are her own and not Victoria’s.

She thinks about the Polaroid picture. About ten years old, on a beach wearing ugly red and white clothes. It’s quite clear that she doesn’t remember it. That time, that sequence, belongs to Victoria.

Sofia strokes her other arm. The pale scars are Victoria’s. She used to cut her arm with a razor blade or pieces of broken glass behind Aunt Elsa’s house in Dala-Floda.

When did Sofia appear? Was she there at Sigtuna? Did she go interrailing with Hannah and Jessica? The memories are all hazy, and Sofia realises that the images in her memory only become logical and clearly structured during the time she was at university, when she was twenty.

Sofia Zetterlund was accepted at Uppsala university and spent five years living in a student apartment, then she moved to Stockholm. A psychology placement at Nacka Hospital, then a couple of years working in forensic psychiatry out in Huddinge.

After that she had met Lasse and set up her own practice.

What else? Sierra Leone, obviously.

Her life suddenly feels so depressingly short and meaningless, and she knows that’s because of one single person. Her dad, Bengt Bergman, stole half her life and forced her to struggle through the other half as a prisoner of routine. Work, money, lofty ambitions, be good, make halfhearted efforts at having a love life. Hold the memories at bay by staying as busy as is humanly possible.

When she was twenty she was strong enough to take over Victoria’s life, putting it behind her and embarking on her own. At university there was only one person, Sofia Zetterlund, who hid Victoria away the same way she forgot about her dad’s abuse. She wiped out Victoria’s existence while simultaneously losing control of her.

Sofia gets up and goes out to the hall mirror. She smiles at her reflection and sees the tooth Victoria chipped in a hotel room in Copenhagen. The neck she tied a noose around. She can feel how sinuous it is, how strong.

She unbuttons her blouse and lets her hand wander inside the fabric. Feels a mature woman’s body, remembers the way Lasse and Mikael have touched it.

Imagines how it would feel if Jeanette were to touch her. Skin against skin. Jeanette’s hands would be cool and soft.

Her hand moves tentatively over her skin. She shuts her eyes and reaches inside herself. Empty. She takes her blouse off and looks at herself standing there. In the mirror she traces her own shape.

The edges of the body are so definite. Where the skin stops, the world takes over.

Everything inside is me, she thinks.

She folds her arms over her chest with her hands on her shoulders, like an embrace. Her hands move up over her cheeks, stroking her lips. She shuts her eyes again. She is taken aback by a retching sensation, and the bitter taste in her mouth.

It is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.

Slowly Sofia takes off her trousers and pants. She looks at herself in the hall mirror. Sofia Zetterlund. Where do you come from? When did Victoria hand herself over to you?

Sofia reads her skin like a map of her own life and Victoria’s.

She feels her feet, her sore heels, whose calluses never grow thick enough to stop them breaking again.

Sofia’s heels.

She runs her hands up her calves, stops at her knees. She feels the scars on them and feels the grit beneath them when Bengt took her from behind and his weight pressed and rubbed her kneecaps into the grit on the path.

Victoria’s knees, she thinks.

Thighs. They feel soft under her hands. She shuts her eyes and knows how they looked afterwards. The blue marks she tried to hide. Feels how the tendons on the insides ache, like when he grabbed hold of them.

Victoria’s thighs.

She keeps going, towards her back, over it. Feels irregularities she’s never noticed before.

She closes her eyes, and there’s the smell of warm soil, the special smell she only ever noticed from the red soil of Sierra Leone.

Sofia remembers Sierra Leone, but she doesn’t remember the scars on her back, and doesn’t see the connection that Victoria is trying to show her. Sometimes you have to make do with symbolism, she thinks, and remembers how she woke up in a covered pit, convinced she had been buried alive by the child soldiers who ruled through rage. She feels the heaviness in her body, the threatening darkness, the smell of mouldering cloth. And she had managed to get away.

Now she regards it as a superhuman achievement, but at the time she hadn’t realised that what she was doing was actually impossible.

She had been the only member of the party to survive.

The only one who managed to bridge the chasm between reality and fantasy.

THREE NAMES. THREE
men.

First Karl Lundström and Viggo Dürer. Two people whose fates seemed to be connected in an odd way. But at the same time maybe it isn’t so odd, Jeanette thinks. They were members of the same foundation, and would have met at meetings and dinners. When Lundström got into trouble he had contacted a solicitor he already knew. Viggo Dürer. That was how it worked. Favours given, then favours returned.

But the list of people who financed this foundation that Jeanette had never heard of before, Sihtunum i Diasporan, also included Bengt Bergman.

Father of the missing Victoria Bergman.

Jeanette Kihlberg feels the room getting smaller.

‘How did you find this?’ Jeanette hands the phone back and looks at the young woman opposite her.

Ulrika Wendin smiles. ‘It wasn’t hard. I googled it.’

I must be a bad police officer, Jeanette thinks.

‘Flashback? How reliable is that?’ she asks, and Ulrika laughs.

‘Well, there’s a lot of shit there, but a fair bit of truth. Most of it’s rumours about celebrities who’ve fucked up. Their names show up, then when the evening papers do the same thing they can say the information is already available on the Internet. Sometimes you can’t help wondering if the journalists themselves started the muckraking.’

Jeanette reflects that she’s probably right. ‘What sort of organisation is it? Sihtunum i Diasporan?’

Ulrika picks up her fork and starts prodding at her fries. ‘Some sort of foundation. But I couldn’t find out much about it …’

There must be something, Jeanette thinks. I’ll put Hurtig onto it.

‘How did Viggo Dürer die?’ Ulrika looks up from her plate.

‘In a fire on a boat. An accident. The Skåne police found him off Simrishamn.’

‘Did he suffer?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

‘And it really did happen?’

‘Yes. He and his wife have been cremated and buried.’

Jeanette looks at the girl’s skinny frame. Her eyes are blank, as if they’re seeing right through her plate, while her hand is making aimless patterns in the Béarnaise sauce with a fry.

She needs help.

‘Ulrika … have you ever thought about therapy?’

Ulrika glances up at Jeanette and shrugs. ‘Therapy? Not likely!’

‘I’ve got a friend who’s a psychologist, she’s used to working with young people. I can see you’ve got a lot of things bottled up. It’s pretty obvious.’ Jeanette pauses before going on. ‘How much do you weigh? Forty-five kilos?’

Another nonchalant shrug. ‘No, forty-eight.’ Ulrika gives a crooked smile, and Jeanette is filled with compassion.

‘I don’t know if it would suit me. I’m probably too stupid for that sort of help.’

You’re wrong, Jeanette thinks. Totally damn wrong.

In spite of her fragility, Jeanette can see strength in the young woman. She’s going to sort this out, if someone can just give her a helping hand.

‘The psychologist’s name is Sofia Zetterlund. You could see her as early as next week, if you’d like to.’

She realises that’s a guess, but knows Sofia well enough to be sure she’d agree. As long as Ulrika herself wants it.

‘Is it OK for me to give her your number?’

Ulrika squirms. ‘Well, I suppose so … But no funny business, all right?’

Jeanette laughs.

‘No, I promise. She’s good.’

‘
EAT UP NOW
, Victoria.’ He glares at her across the breakfast table. ‘When you’re finished you can put a chlorine tablet in the pool. I’m going to have a swim after my morning meeting.’

It’s already more than ninety-five degrees outside, and he wipes the sweat from his brow. She nods in response and pokes at the steaming, disgusting porridge. Every spoonful expands in her mouth and she hates the sweetened cinnamon he forces her to sprinkle on top of it. His colleagues from the development agency will soon be here, and he’ll leave the table. Then she can throw away the rest of her breakfast.

‘How are your studies going?’

She doesn’t look at him, but can feel him observing her. ‘Fine,’ she says flatly. ‘We’re reading Maslow. It’s about needs and motivation.’ She doesn’t think he knows about Maslow, and hopes his ignorance will shut him up.

She’s right. ‘Motivation,’ he mutters. ‘Yes, well, you could do with some of that.’ He looks away and goes back to his breakfast.

Needs, she thinks.

While she pretends to eat the porridge she thinks about what she’s read about the hierarchy of needs, which starts with physiological needs. Needs such as food and sleep. She thinks how he is systematically denying them to her.

After that comes the need for security, then the need for love and belonging, and then the need for esteem. All things he is denying her, and will continue to deny her.

At the top of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualisation, a term she can’t even understand. She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants; her self-actualisation is out of reach because it’s beyond her, outside her own ego. As far as her needs are concerned, he has denied her everything.

The door to the terrace opens, and a little girl, a few years younger than Victoria, stands in the doorway.

‘There you are!’ he says with a smile on his lips as he looks at the girl, who works as a general maid. Victoria has liked her since the very first day.

Bengt has also taken a shine to the slender, happy little girl, and has been courting her with compliments and ingratiating remarks.

At dinner on the first evening he decided that she should move out of the servants’ quarters and into the main house for practical reasons. From that day Victoria has slept more soundly than she has for a long time, and even Mum seems happy with the arrangement.

You blind cow, she thinks. One day it’s all going to catch up with you, and you’ll have to pay the price for keeping your eyes closed.

The little girl comes into the kitchen. She looks scared at first, but calms down slightly when she catches sight of Victoria and Birgitta.

‘You can clear the table when we’ve finished,’ he says, turning towards the girl, then gets interrupted by the sound of car engines and wheels on the drive outside the open window. ‘Damn, they’re here already.’