The Crow Girl (47 page)

He gets up, goes over to the girl and ruffles her hair. ‘Did you sleep well?’ Victoria can see that the girl probably hasn’t slept at all. Her eyes are swollen and bloodshot, and she looks nervous as he touches her.

‘Sit down and eat now.’

He winks at the girl and hands her a banknote, which she tucks away at once before sitting down beside Victoria.

‘There,’ he says before he goes. ‘You could teach my Victoria a thing or two about appetite.’ He nods towards the plate and disappears into the hall, laughing.

Victoria knows that the evening will be difficult. If he’s in this good a mood in the morning, then the day usually ends with darkness.

He’s behaving like some fucking colonialist, she thinks. Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and human rights? That’s just a cover for prancing about like some bastard slave owner.

She looks at the skinny little girl, who is now concentrating on her breakfast.

What has he done to her? She has some bruises on her neck, and a scratch on her earlobe.

‘Well, I must say …’ Mum sighs. ‘I’m going to sort out the laundry. You two can look after yourselves, can’t you?’

Victoria doesn’t answer.
Well, I must say
? You never say anything. You’re a silent, blind shadow without any definition.

The girl has finished eating, and Victoria pushes her plate over to her. She lights up, and Victoria can’t help smiling back as the girl gets to work on the grey sludge surrounded by lukewarm milk.

‘Would you like to help me with the pool? I can show you what to do.’ The girl looks at her over her dish, and nods between mouthfuls.

When she’s finished eating they go out into the garden and Victoria shows her where the chlorine tablets are kept.

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency has a number of houses on the outskirts of Freetown, and they live in one of the largest, but also the one that is most secluded. The white three-storey building is surrounded by a high wall, and the entrance is guarded by armed men in camouflage.

Victoria can hear the men’s voices from inside the house. They’ve moved the conference here because the situation in Freetown is too unstable at the moment.

‘You pull open the edge of the pack,’ Victoria says. ‘Then you carefully put the tablet into the water.’

She can see doubt in the girl’s eyes, and remembers that the pool is strictly out of bounds for the staff.

‘It’s OK,’ Victoria says. ‘It’s my pool as well, so I can say what gets done to it, and I’m saying you can.’

The girl smiles the triumphant smile of someone who for a fleeting moment is allowed to join the elite, and with an elaborate gesture she drops her hand into the pool. Her hand moves up and down before she lets go, and she watches as the tablet slowly sinks to the bottom. She pulls out her wet hand and looks at it.

‘Was the water nice?’ Victoria asks, and receives a nod in reply.

‘Shall we have a swim before he comes?’ she goes on.

The girl shakes her head and says that isn’t allowed. Victoria dismisses her concerns. ‘I’m telling you that you can,’ she says, glancing over at the house and starting to get undressed. ‘Don’t worry about them, we’ll hear when they’ve almost finished.’

She dives into the pool and swims two lengths underwater.

She floats for a while just above the bottom, and enjoys the pressure on her eardrums. The water between her and the world up above forms a dense shield.

When her air begins to run out she swims on and, as she approaches the edge of the pool, she sees that the girl has put her legs in the water. Victoria bobs up beside her and is met by the blinding sun. The girl is sitting on the steps and smiling with the sun behind her.

‘Like fish,’ she says, pointing at Victoria, who laughs back.

‘Come in as well. We can say I made you do it.’

It doesn’t take long to persuade her, but she refuses to swim in just her pants and bra like Victoria.

‘Well, you need to take your sandals off, and you can put this on.’ She tosses her the thin vest she was wearing before she got in.

As the girl takes off her dress and puts on the vest, Victoria sees that she has several large bruises on her stomach and at the base of her spine. The feeling that washes over her is very odd.

The first thing she feels is rage at what he’s done, then relief that it wasn’t her that got beaten.

Then comes a creeping sense of shame, along with a new feeling she’s never experienced before. She feels shame at being her father’s daughter, but at the same time there’s something that makes her lose any desire to teach the girl to swim.

She looks at the slender figure smiling as she stands at the edge of the pool in a vest that’s far too big for her. Her own vest, with the crest of Sigtuna College on it.

She feels suddenly sick when she sees the girl wearing her own clothes, getting into the shallow end of the pool. Victoria tries to see what it is that he sees in the girl. She’s beautiful and unspoiled, she’s younger and she probably doesn’t say no to him like Victoria has started to do.

Who the hell are you, thinking you can take my place? she thinks.

‘Come over here.’ Victoria tries to sound friendly, but she can hear that her voice makes it sound more like an order.

A memory comes into her mind. A little boy whom she loved, but who let her down and then drowned. How easy it would be, she thinks.

‘Let yourself fall forward in the water, and I’ll hold you from underneath.’

Victoria goes and stands next to the girl, who hesitates. ‘Come on, don’t be scared. I’ll hold you.’

She slips gently into the water.

She feels as light as a small child in Victoria’s arms.

The girl moves her arms and legs according to the instructions, but when Victoria lets go of her she stops swimming at once and starts to flail about instead. Victoria gets annoyed each time this happens, but puts up with it, slowly but surely steering the girl into deeper water.

She won’t be able to reach the bottom here, Victoria thinks as she holds her head up by treading water.

She lets go.

‘
SIHTUNUM I DIASPORAN?
What does that mean?’ Jens Hurtig looks inquisitively at Jeanette Kihlberg.

‘It’s runic Swedish for Sigtuna, and classical Greek for living in exile. So, basically, it means Sigtuna in exile, and it’s a foundation made up of people who used to live in Sigtuna. The common denominator seems to be that the members all have, or had, some connection to the boarding school there.’

‘The boarding school? The one Jan Guillou was at?’

‘No, not that one. This one’s where the king went to school. Sigtuna College for the Humanities is the largest and most prestigious boarding school in Sweden. Olof Palme went there, along with Povel Ramel and Peter and Marcus Wallenberg, if those names mean anything?’ Jeanette grins, and Hurtig smiles back.

He closes the door and sits down on the other side of the desk. ‘So are you saying the king supports this foundation, then?’

‘No, the names of the members aren’t that well known, but I’m sure you’ll recognise at least three of them.’

Hurtig lets out a whistle when Jeanette shows him the list of donors.

‘Dürer, Lundström and Bergman are said to have donated large sums of money to the foundation since the mid-seventies,’ Jeanette goes on. ‘But there’s no record of the foundation in local council records, which is odd seeing as it’s active in Sweden.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They used to own a property in Denmark, but that’s been sold off. The only asset of any value was a motor yacht, the
Gilah
. The boat that Dürer and his wife were on when they died.’

‘Interesting. What does it say in the description of the foundation’s activities?’

Jeanette pulls out a sheet of paper and reads from it: ‘“The foundation’s goals are to combat poverty and promote children’s living conditions in all corners of the world.”’

‘A paedophile who helps children, then?’

‘Two paedophiles, at least. The list contains twenty names, and we know for sure that two are paedophiles. Bergman and Lundström. That’s ten per cent. The other names aren’t known to me, apart from Dürer, who acted as the lawyer for both men. But more than two of them might be of interest. If you get my meaning?’

‘I get it. Anything else?’

‘Nothing we don’t already know.’ Jeanette leans across the desk and lowers her voice. ‘Hurtig, you’re better at computers than I am. Do you think it would be possible to trace whoever posted this on Flashback? Could you do that?’

Hurtig smiles but doesn’t answer her question. ‘Just because I’m a man doesn’t mean I’m better than you at computers.’

‘No, not because you’re a man,’ she says. ‘Because you’re younger than me, and you still play bloody computer games.’

Hurtig looks taken aback. ‘Computer games? I wouldn’t say –’

‘Rubbish. Whenever we’re out in the city you always linger by the windows of the game shops, and you’ve got calluses on your fingertips, sometimes even blisters. Once when we were having lunch you said the guy making the pizzas looked like your character in
GTA
. You’re a games addict, Hurtig. No question.’

‘OK, but …’ He looks hesitant. ‘Tracing the poster? Isn’t that data infringement?’

‘No one need know anything. If we get an IP address, we might be able to get a name. Maybe that will take us forward, maybe not. We don’t need to make a big deal out of it. We’re not going to harass anyone, we’re not going to spy on them or keep a record of their opinion. All I want is a name.’

‘OK, I’ll give it a try,’ Hurtig goes on. ‘If it doesn’t work, I might know someone who can help.’

‘Great. Then there’s the list of donors. Check them out while you’re at it, and I’ll try to get hold of Victoria Bergman.’

Once Hurtig has left the room she looks up Victoria Bergman in the police database, but, as expected, draws a blank.

There are two Victoria Bergmans on file, but neither of them is the right age to match the Victoria who was at Sigtuna.

The next step is the population database, and Jeanette logs in to the tax authority’s register of all living Swedish citizens.

There are thirty-two different Victoria Bergmans.

Most of them have the more usual Swedish spelling, Viktoria, but that doesn’t mean they can be automatically dismissed. Spelling is something that can change over time, and Jeanette remembers a classmate at school who swapped her Ss for Zs and at a stroke changed the mundane Susanne into the exotic Zuzanne. A few years later Zuzanne was dead from a heroin overdose.

She expands her search, and brings up the tax returns of people on the list.

Returns from all but one of them.

At number twenty-two on the list is a Victoria Bergman registered in Värmdö.

Daughter of Bengt Bergman the rapist.

Jeanette alters her search to bring up the tax return for the year before, but it’s the same thing there. Victoria Bergman evidently doesn’t bother declaring information about her income and possible deductions.

She goes back ten years, but there’s nothing.

Not a single piece of information.

Just a name, an ID number including her date of birth and an address out in Värmdö.

Jeanette gets the bit between her teeth and searches all the registers she has access to, but no matter how hard she looks, all she finds is confirmation of what Göran Andersson from the Värmdö police told her.

Victoria Bergman had lived at the same place since she was a child, had never earned a single krona, and never had any known expenditures, no credit rating, no debts with the enforcement office and not a single hospital visit in the past twenty years.

She decides to call the tax authority herself sometime during the day to find out if there might be a mistake.

Then she remembers that she spoke to Hurtig about putting together a perpetrator profile, and comes to think of Sofia.

Maybe it’s time to get that started.

What had originally been a long shot might not actually be such a bad idea. As far as she can tell, Sofia has enough experience to be able to come up with a provisional profile.

But, at the same time, it could be disastrous to rely too heavily on a description and trust a psychological evaluation entirely.

It was almost as common for an investigation to be misdirected by a poorly thought-out perpetrator profile as to be helped by a decent one. Jeanette thinks about Niklas Lindgren, the so-called Haga Man. Hadn’t that investigation been hampered by the fact that the profile had been hopelessly wrong? Yes, that was the one.

Many of the country’s most prominent forensic psychiatrists had declared that the perpetrator must be slightly odd, lacking close friends and intimate relationships.

When he was later arrested for eight brutal rapes and attempted murders, he turned out to be an outwardly pleasant father of two, and had been in the same job and the same relationship since he was a young man.

So she’ll have to be careful and not let herself be led by Sofia Zetterlund.

Well, all or nothing. She doesn’t actually have much to lose. Anyway, she needs to talk to Sofia about Ulrika Wendin. She dials the number of the practice at Mariatorget and goes over to stand by the window.

Outside, Kronoberg Park is deserted apart from one young man aimlessly walking his dog. Jeanette watches with idle interest as the dog keeps getting its lead caught around a rubbish bin, stops and looks expectantly at its master.

Ann-Britt answers, and puts Jeanette through at once.

‘Hi,’ Jeanette says. ‘What do you know about putting together a perpetrator profile?’

‘What?’ Sofia replies, and Jeanette thinks she sounds calm and relaxed. ‘Is that you, Jeanette?’

‘Yes, who else?’

‘I should have realised. Straight to the point, as usual!’ Sofia falls silent, and Jeanette hears her leaning back in her chair as it creaks. ‘You want to know what I know about perpetrator profiling?’ she goes on. ‘In purely practical terms not very much, but I presume you study the most plausible demographic, social and behavioural characteristics that the perpetrator might be thought to have. Then I’d probably start by looking at the group where he’s most likely to be found, and with a bit of luck –’