Authors: Erik Axl Sund
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Crime
Denmark is a shit country. Pigs and farmers, German girls and German boys.
I am holes and cracks and meaningless acts. In Viktoriagade and in Bergmannstrasse. Then raped by Germans on Danish soil. At the Roskilde Festival, three little German boys.
Now humiliated by a Danish German bastard in a bunker built in Denmark by the Germans. Denmark and Germany. Viggo is German Danish. A German whore’s bastard Danish son.
She laughs out loud. ‘Solace Manuti. Comfort me, I am crazy.’
Crazy.
How the hell can anyone be called that?
Then she puts the diary down. She isn’t crazy. Everyone else is.
She thinks about Viggo Dürer. The German bastard.
He deserves to be strangled and dumped in a bomb shelter out on Oddesund.
Born out of a German cunt, and dead in a German shithole. Then the pigs could eat him up.
She picks up her diary again.
She stops and leafs back through it. Two months, four months, six months.
She reads:
Värmdö, 13 December 1987
Solace won’t wake up after what he did in the sauna. I’m scared she might be dying. She’s breathing and her eyes are open, but she’s completely gone. He was hard with her. Her head hit the wall while he was at it and she looked like a game of pickup sticks afterwards. Spilled out across the bench in the sauna.
I’ve bathed her face with a damp cloth, but she won’t wake up.
Is she dead?
I hate him. Goodness and forgiveness are just another form of oppression and provocation. Hate is purer.
Victoria leafs forward a few pages in the diary.
Solace wasn’t dead. She woke up, but she didn’t say anything, she just had a stomach ache and cramped like she was going to give birth. Then he came to us, into our room.
When he saw us he looked very unhappy at first. Then he blew snot all over us. He put his finger against one nostril and blew snot out of the other!
Couldn’t he just have spat on us?!
She hardly recognises her own handwriting.
24 January 1988
Solace refuses to take off the mask. I’m starting to get tired of her wooden face. She just lies there whining. She squeaks. The mask must have grown into her face, like the wooden fibres have eaten into her.
She is a wooden doll. Silent and dead, she just lies there and her wooden face squeaks because it’s so damn damp in the sauna.
Wooden dolls don’t have children. They just swell in damp and heat.
I hate her!
Victoria closes the diary. Outside the window she hears someone laugh.
That night she dreams of a house where all the windows are open. It’s her task to close them, but as soon as she closes the last one, one she’s already closed opens again. The strange thing is that she’s the one who decides that all the windows can’t be closed at the same time, seeing as her task is far too easy. Closing, opening, closing, opening, on and on until she gets fed up and sits down on the floor and pees.
When she wakes up the bed is wet and it’s run through the mattress and onto the floor.
It’s no more than four o’clock in the morning, but she decides to get up. She washes herself, gathers her things together, leaves the room, taking the sheet with her and dumping it in a bin out in the corridor, and then goes down to reception.
She sits down in the little cafe and lights a cigarette.
This is the fourth or fifth time in less than a month that she’s woken up after wetting the bed. It’s happened before, but never so frequently, and never in connection with such vivid dreams.
She gets some books out of her rucksack.
Her university psychology course book and several books by R. J. Stoller. She likes the fact that someone with a name so close to the Swedish word for crazy can write about psychology, and finds it just as amusing, if not ridiculous, that the paperback of Freud’s
Theory of Sexuality
that she’s also brought with her is so thin.
Her copy of
The Interpretation of Dreams
is so dog-eared now that it’s almost falling apart, but in contrast to what she expected before she began reading, she found herself in complete opposition to Freud’s theories.
Why should dreams be an expression of subconscious lust and hidden, internal conflict?
And where’s the sense in hiding your own intentions from yourself? That would be like her being one person when she was dreaming, and someone else when she woke up, and what would be the logic in that?
Her dreams simply reflect her thoughts and fantasies. They might include symbolism, but she doesn’t believe she could get to know herself better by thinking too much about their meaning.
It seems idiotic to try to solve life’s problems by interpreting your own dreams. She thinks it might actually be dangerous.
What if you were to read something into them that wasn’t there?
It’s more interesting that her dreams are so clear and lucid; she realised this after reading an article on the subject. She’s aware that she’s dreaming while she’s asleep, and she can influence what happens in her dreams.
She giggles to herself as she concludes that each time she’s wet herself in her sleep, it’s been an active choice.
It gets even funnier when you consider that people who have lucid dreams are, according to psychological research, supposed to have unusually high brain capacity. In other words, she wets herself because she has a brain that is considerably more refined and better developed than other people’s.
She stubs out the cigarette and pulls out another book. An academic overview of attachment theory. How an infant’s relationship with its mother affects the future life of the child.
Even though the book isn’t on the reading list for her course, and also makes her feel depressed, she can’t help dipping into it every so often. Page after page, chapter after chapter about something she had been denied by others, but had also abdicated from herself. Relationships with other people.
Everything was wrecked by her mother as soon as she was born, and the ruins of her ability to form relationships have been carefully managed by her father, who denied anyone else access to her.
She no longer smiles.
Does she miss relationships? Does she actually long for anyone else at all?
She certainly doesn’t have any friends to miss, nor any friends who might miss her.
Hannah and Jessica are long since forgotten. Have they forgotten her as well? And the promise they made to one another? Eternal friendship and all that?
But there is one person she has missed since she arrived in Denmark. And it isn’t Solace. Down here she’s been able to manage without her.
She misses the old psychologist at Nacka Hospital.
If she had been here now, she would have realised that Victoria visited this hotel for a specific reason: to relive her own death.
But Victoria has realised what needs to be done.
If you can’t manage to die then you can become someone else instead, and she knows how to go about that.
First she’s going to take the ferry to Malmö, then the train to Stockholm, then the bus out to Tyresö, where the old woman lives.
And this time she’s going to tell her everything, precisely everything she knows about herself.
She has to.
If Victoria Bergman is to be able to die properly.
LINNEA LUNDSTRÖM IS
sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk, and Sofia is surprised how quickly she has managed to gain the girl’s trust.
‘This is you, isn’t it?’ Sofia asks, pointing at the three drawings. ‘And this is Annette?’
Linnea looks surprised, but says nothing.
‘And perhaps this is a friend of the family?’ Sofia points at Viggo Dürer. ‘From Skåne. Kristianstad.’
Sofia gets the impression that the girl relaxes slightly. ‘Yes,’ she sighs, ‘but he didn’t look like that then. He was thinner.’
‘What was his name?’
Linnea hesitates, and when she eventually answers she does so in a whisper. ‘That’s Viggo Dürer, Dad’s lawyer.’
‘Do you want to tell me about him?’
The girl’s breathing becomes shallow and less regular, as if she’s struggling for air. ‘You’re the first person who’s ever understood my drawings,’ she says.
Sofia thinks about Annette Lundström, who had pretty much misunderstood every single detail of Linnea’s pictures.
Linnea’s response comes quickly, and is surprisingly blunt, even if she doesn’t address the actual content of the drawings. ‘He was … I liked him when I was little.’
‘Viggo Dürer?’
She looks down at the floor. ‘Yes … He was nice to start with. Then, once I was about five, he could be really strange.’
Linnea herself has taken the initiative to talk about Viggo Dürer, and Sofia realises that the second stage of her treatment has started. Remembering, and dealing with the memories.
Sofia considers the drawing of Viggo Dürer and his dog in the Lundström family’s garden in Kristianstad. Karl Lundström had himself mentioned the event in the letter Linnea had with her. Linnea despises her father, but is frightened of Viggo. She did what Viggo said, and Annette and Henrietta were simply blind. Shutting their eyes to what was going on around them.
As usual, Sofia thinks.
And Karl Lundström had also written that Viggo was doubly ignorant, and from the rest of Lundström’s letter she could deduce that by this he meant that Viggo was both wrong and unaware that he was wrong.
There’s only one question remaining, Sofia thinks. What is Viggo doubly ignorant about?
She’s quite sure that she knows what Karl Lundström meant, and leans across the desk to look Linnea in the eye. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened in Kristianstad?’
PROSECUTOR VON KWIST
isn’t actually from a noble family, he just decided to add a ‘von’ to his name when he was at school to make himself seem special. He is still incredibly vain, and very careful about both his reputation and his appearance.
Kenneth von Kwist has a problem, and is extremely worried. In fact he’s so worried about a conversation he’s just had with Annette Lundström that it feels as if his dormant gastric catarrh is starting to turn into a full-blown ulcer.
Benzodiazepines, he thinks. So addictive that any witness statement from someone taking them is highly questionable. Yes, that must be it. Heavy medication had made Karl Lundström imagine absolutely everything.
Kenneth von Kwist stares at the pile of papers on the desk in front of him.
Five milligrams of Stesolid, he reads. One milligram of Xanor and, finally, .75 milligrams of Halcion. Daily. Completely damn incredible.
The withdrawal symptoms must have been so severe that Lundström would have confessed to anything just to get a new dose, he thinks as he reads the transcript of the interview.
It’s a considerable text, almost five hundred printed pages.
But still Prosecutor von Kwist has his doubts.
There are far too many people involved. People he knows personally, or at least thought he knew.
Had he himself simply been a useful idiot all along, helping a group of paedophiles and rapists to go free?
Had Per-Ola Silfverberg’s foster-daughter been right when she accused him of abusing her?
And had Ulrika Wendin really been drugged by Karl Lundström and taken to a hotel where she was raped?
The truth is staring Prosecutor von Kwist straight in the face. He has allowed himself to be used, it’s as simple as that. But how can he wash his hands of all this without simultaneously letting down his so-called friends?
He notes recurrent references to conversations that had taken place out at forensic psychology in Huddinge. Karl Lundström had evidently had a couple of meetings with a psychologist, Sofia Zetterlund.
Is it possible to hush all of this up?
Kenneth von Kwist gets himself an indigestion tablet, calls his secretary and asks her to get hold of a number for Sofia Zetterlund.
WHEN LINNEA LUNDSTRÖM
has left the practice Sofia spends a long time writing up their conversation.
She’s got into the habit of using two ballpoint pens, one red, one blue, to differentiate between what her client says and her own thoughts.
As she turns the seventh sheet of A4 to start on the eighth, she is suddenly seized by a paralysing weariness. It feels like she’s been asleep.
She looks back a couple of pages to refresh her memory about what she’s written, and starts reading at random from the page she’s marked with a 5.
The text is Linnea’s story, written in blue ballpoint.
Viggo’s Rottweiler is always tied up somewhere. To a tree, or the railings by the steps to the house, or to a rumbling radiator. The dog tries to jump at Linnea and she skirts around it. Viggo comes into her room at night, the dog stands guard outside on the landing, and Linnea remembers the reflections in the dog’s eyes in the darkness. Viggo shows Linnea an album of photographs of naked children, the same age as her, and she remembers the flash of the camera in the darkness, and she’s wearing a big black hat and a red dress that Viggo has given her. Linnea’s dad comes into the room, Viggo gets angry, they argue, and Linnea’s dad walks out and leaves them alone.
Sofia had been surprised at the torrent of words pouring out of Linnea. As if her story had been lying dormant inside her, formulated long ago, and could finally flow freely as soon as she had someone to share her experiences with.