The Crow Girl (55 page)

Hurtig shakes his head. ‘Bastard …’ He falls silent, and Jeanette continues.

‘The girl keeps coming back to descriptions of P-O’s physical abuse, as well as the full-on kisses he demanded from her, and his very thorough washing of her genitals.’

‘Please …’ Hurtig sounds almost pleading, but Jeanette feels that she wants to get this out of the way, and continues remorselessly.

‘The girl gave specific details and described in depth her emotional reaction to the occasions when Per-Ola came into her room at night. The description the girl has given of his behaviour in her bed suggests that he has had anal and vaginal intercourse with her.’ She pauses. ‘That’s the short version.’

Hurtig stands up. ‘Do you mind if I open the window? I need some air,’ he says, looking out at the park. ‘Intercourse? If it’s with a child, surely it has to be called rape, for fuck’s sake?’

Jeanette hasn’t got the energy to respond. The fresh air makes the papers flutter and the sound of children playing in the park outside merges with the background noise of clattering keyboards and the hum of the air conditioning.

‘So why did they drop the case?’ Hurtig turns back towards Jeanette.

She sighs and reads, ‘“Because it was not possible to examine the girl, it cannot be ruled out that this is not the case.”’

‘What? “Cannot be ruled out that this is not the case”?’ Hurtig slams his hand down on the desk. ‘What kind of pansy shit is that?’

Jeanette laughs. ‘Yes, they simply didn’t believe the girl. And when P-O’s defence lawyer pointed out that the interviewer had posed what might be deemed to be leading questions to the girl during the preliminary interview with her, and might have directed her answers, well …’ She sighs. ‘Offence not proven. Case dropped.’

Hurtig opens his own file and leafs through it, looking for something. When he finds what he’s looking for he pulls the document out and puts it on the desk.

‘It goes on,’ he says. ‘After the investigation the Silfverberg family, in other words Per-Ola and Charlotte, feel that they’ve been vilified and no longer want anything to do with the girl. Danish social services place her with another family. Also in the Copenhagen area.’

‘What happened to her after that?’

‘I don’t know, but hopefully she turned out OK, as they say.’

‘She must be about twenty now,’ Jeanette says, and Hurtig nods.

‘But here’s the weird bit.’ He straightens up. ‘The Silfverbergs move to Sweden, to Stockholm. They buy the apartment on Glasbruksgatan and everything looks rosy.’

‘But?’

‘For some reason the Copenhagen police wanted him to undergo a follow-up interview, and got in touch with us here in Stockholm.’

‘What?’

‘And we brought him in for questioning.’

Hurtig puts the document down and pushes it over to her, keeping his finger on the lines at the bottom.

Jeanette reads the part next to his finger.

The children outside in the park and the keyboards in the next room are suddenly silent. No sound but the air conditioning and Hurtig’s deep breathing.

Hurtig’s finger. The well-manicured nail, neat cuticle.

Jeanette reads and realises that there is another truth on the other side of a very thin veil. Another reality.

And that reality is infinitely more unpleasant.

SHE DIDN’T LIKE
the old, decrepit people.

At the milk counter an old man got far too close with his smell of urine, dirt and cooking.

The woman at the meat counter who brought a bucket of water said it didn’t matter and mopped up everything she had eaten for breakfast.

‘Can you feel it?’ The Swede looks at her excitedly. ‘Stick your arm in a bit further! Don’t be such a coward!’

The sow’s screams make Victoria hesitate. Her arm is buried inside the pig, almost up to her elbow.

Another few centimetres, then she finally feels the piglet’s head. Her thumb on its jaw, her fore- and middle fingers over the top of the head, behind the ears. Like Viggo has taught her. Then pull, carefully.

They think this is the last one. On the bed of straw around the mother ten yellow-stained piglets are wriggling about, fighting for her teats. Viggo has been standing alongside the whole time watching the births. The Swede took care of the first three, and the next seven came out by themselves.

The muscles of the vagina squeeze Victoria’s arm tight and for a moment she thinks the sow might be cramping. But when she pulls a bit harder the muscles seem to relax, and in less than a second the piglet’s halfway out. A moment later and it’s lying on the bloody straw.

Its back legs twitch, then it’s completely still.

Viggo bends over and strokes the piglet’s back. ‘Good work,’ he says, giving Victoria a crooked smile.

The piglets always lie motionless for thirty seconds or so after birth. You think they’re dead, then they suddenly start to move, fumbling around blindly until they find the sow’s teats. But this piglet had twitched its legs. The others hadn’t done that.

She counts silently in her head, and when she gets to thirty she starts to worry. Did she hold it too tightly? Pull the wrong way?

Viggo’s smile fades as he examines the umbilical cord. ‘Shit. It’s dead …’

Viggo pulls his glasses down and looks at her seriously. ‘It’s OK. The umbilical cord is damaged. It isn’t your fault.’

Yes, it’s my fault. And when we leave the sow will make short work of the afterbirth, absorbing all the nutrition she can get.

She’ll eat up her own offspring.

Viggo Dürer has a large farm outside Struer, and Victoria’s only permanent companions besides her schoolbooks are thirty-four Danish-breed pigs, a bull, seven cows and a poorly looked-after horse. The farmhouse is a neglected half-timbered building in a flat, dull landscape with windmills, like an uglier version of Holland. A patchwork of windy, bleak fields stretches all the way to the horizon, where you can just make out a narrow stretch of blue, Venø Bay.

There are two reasons why she is here: her studies and recreation.

There are also two real reasons.

Isolation and discipline.

He calls it recreation, she thinks. But it’s about isolation. Being kept away from other people and being disciplined. Learning to stay within certain boundaries. Housework and studies. Cleaning, making food and studying.

Working with the pigs. And the swine who regularly visit her room.

What matters to her are her studies. She’s picked a correspondence course in psychology at the University of Aalborg, and the only contact she has with the outside world is with her adviser, who occasionally sends her unengaged written comments about her work.

Distance, she thinks. Locked away on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Distance from Dad. Distance from other people. A distance-learning psychology course, shut up in a room on her own in a house owned by a pig farmer with academic qualifications.

The lawyer Viggo Dürer had collected Victoria from Värmdö seven weeks before, and driven her almost a thousand kilometres in his old Citroën through a night-black Sweden and a newly woken Denmark.

Victoria looks out through the misted-up window at the farmyard, where the car has been parked. When it stops, it’s as if it lets out a fart, groans and sinks into a submissive curtsy.

Viggo’s disgusting to look at, but she knows that his interest in her is decreasing with every passing day. With each day that she gets older. He wants her to shave, but she refuses.

‘Shave the pigs instead,’ she tells him.

Victoria closes the blind. She just wants to sleep, even if she knows she ought to be studying. She’s falling behind, not because she lacks motivation but because she thinks the course is a mess. Jumping from one thing to the next. Superficial knowledge without any deeper reflection.

She doesn’t want to rush, and keeps getting stuck in the texts, then moving beyond them and into herself.

Why doesn’t anyone understand how important this is? The human psyche can’t be dealt with in an exam. Two hundred words on schizophrenia and delusional disorders is nowhere near adequate. Certainly not enough to wave about as proof that you’ve understood something.

She lies down on the bed and thinks about Solace. The girl who had made life in Värmdö bearable. Solace had become a surrogate that her dad had used for almost six months. But now she’s been gone seven weeks.

Victoria starts at the sound of the front door slamming downstairs. Soon she hears voices from the kitchen and realises that it’s Viggo and another man.

The Swede again? she thinks. Yes, it must be.

Carefully she sits up and gets off the bed, empties her glass of water in the flowerpot, puts it down against the floor and places her ear to it.

‘Forget it!’ Viggo’s voice. Even though he’s lived in Denmark for several years, the Swede still has trouble with the Jutland dialect, and Viggo always speaks Swedish to him.

She hates Viggo’s Swedish; his accent sounds fake and he speaks more slowly, as if he were talking to an idiot.

‘And why not?’ The Swede sounds annoyed.

Viggo says nothing for a few seconds. ‘It’s too risky. Don’t you get it?’

‘I trust the Russian, and Berglind has vouched for him. What the hell are you so worried about?’

The Russian? Berglind? She doesn’t understand what they’re talking about.

The Swede goes on. ‘Anyway, no one’s going to miss a scruffy little brat from Russia.’

‘Keep your voice down. There’s a scruffy little brat upstairs who might hear what you say.’

‘Yes, about that …’ The Swede laughs, ignoring Viggo’s plea and going on in a loud voice. ‘How did it go in Aalborg? Is everything sorted out with the child?’

Viggo pauses before replying. ‘The last documents are being dealt with this week. You can calm down, you’re going to get your little girl.’

Victoria is confused. Aalborg? That must have been when …

She hears them moving around down there, footsteps on the kitchen floor, then the sound of the front door closing. When she peers round the curtain she sees that they’re on their way to the outhouse.

She takes her diary out of the bedside cabinet, curls up on the bed again and waits. She lies there, wide awake in the darkness with her rucksack packed, as always, on the floor.

The Swede stays at the farm into the small hours. They set off at dawn, and she hears the cars leave at half past four.

She gets out of bed, puts her diary in the outside pocket, zips it up and looks at the time. Quarter to five. He won’t be home until ten o’clock at the earliest, and by then she’ll be long gone.

Before leaving the house she opens the cupboard in the living room.

It contains an old eighteenth-century music box that Viggo likes to show off when he’s got guests, and she decides to find out if it’s as valuable as he claims.

The morning sun is hot as she walks into Struer, where she manages to get a lift to Viborg.

From Viborg she catches the six thirty train to Copenhagen.

IT TAKES HER
no more than a minute in front of the computer in her office to find a picture of Viggo Dürer. Her chest is pounding as she sees his face and she realises that Victoria is trying to tell her something. It’s just that the old man with the thin face and thick, round glasses doesn’t mean anything to her; there’s only the discomfort in her chest and a memory of aftershave.

She saves the picture on her hard drive and prints it out in high resolution.

The image shows his top half, and she studies the details of his face and clothes. He’s pale, with thinning hair, possibly in his seventies, but without too many wrinkles. On the contrary, his face seems almost shiny. He has a number of large liver spots, full lips, a narrow nose and sunken cheeks. A grey suit, black tie and white shirt, and a badge on the breast pocket of his jacket bearing the logo of his legal firm.

No concrete memories at all. Victoria is giving her no images, no words, just vibrations.

She puts the printout in the document basket on her desk, sighs disconsolately and looks at the time. Ulrika Wendin is late.

The thin young woman returns Sofia’s greeting with a weak smile. Her eyes look hollow.

Several days of hard drinking, Sofia thinks. ‘How are you?’

Ulrika gives a wry smile and looks bashful, but doesn’t hesitate to tell her. ‘I was in a bar on Saturday, met a guy who seemed OK, so I took him home. We shared a bottle of Rosita and then we went to bed.’

Sofia doesn’t see where the story is going, so nods in encouragement and waits.

Ulrika laughs. ‘I don’t know if I really did it. I mean, if I took him home. It feels a bit like someone else did that, but I suppose I was pretty hammered.’

Ulrika pauses briefly and takes a packet of chewing gum from her pocket. Several 500-krona notes come with it.

Ulrika quickly pushes them back into her pocket without comment.

Sofia knows that Ulrika is unemployed and hardly has access to that sort of money. Where’s all that come from? she wonders.

‘I was able to relax,’ Ulrika goes on, without looking at her. ‘Because I wasn’t the one sleeping with him. I have vestibulitis. Embarrassing, huh? I can’t just choose to let anyone inside, but it was OK with him because it wasn’t me lying there.’

Vestibulitis? Not her lying there? Sofia considers the rape that Karl Lundström subjected Ulrika to. She’s aware that one of the causes of vestibulitis is believed to be excessive washing of the genitals. The mucus membranes dry out and become fragile, the nerves and muscles are both weakened, and there’s constant pain.