The Crow Girl (68 page)

Jeanette Kihlberg is so deeply immersed in the photograph that she jumps when the phone rings.

Kenneth von Kwist says his name in his most ingratiating voice, and Jeanette feels annoyed at once. ‘Oh, it’s you. Why are you calling?’

He clears his throat. ‘Don’t be so abrupt. I’ve got something for you that you’re going to like. Make sure you’re on your own in the office in ten minutes’ time and look out for a fax.’

‘A fax?’ She doesn’t know what he’s up to, but is immediately suspicious.

‘You’re about to receive some information that is for your eyes only,’ he goes on. ‘The fax you’ll be getting consists of documents from Nacka District Court, dated autumn 1988, and you’re the first person apart from me to read them since then. I presume you know what this is about?’

Jeanette is speechless. ‘I understand,’ she finally manages to say. ‘You can trust me.’

‘Good. Well, don’t forget, and good luck. I have every confidence in you and I’m relying on this remaining confidential.’

Wait, she thinks. This is a trap.

‘Listen, don’t hang up. Why exactly are you doing this?’

‘Let’s just say …’ He thinks for a moment before clearing his throat again. ‘This is my way of apologising for having put a wrench in the works before. I want to make up for that, and, as I’m sure you’re aware, I have my contacts.’

Jeanette still doesn’t know what to believe. His words are apologetic, but his tone of voice is just as self-satisfied as always.

When they hang up she leans back in her chair and picks up the yearbook again. Victoria Bergman looks just as evasive as before. Jeanette is still having trouble working out if this is all a cunning joke.

There’s a knock on the door and Hurtig comes in. His hair is wet and his jacket is soaked.

‘Sorry I’m late. Fucking awful weather.’

The fax machine seems to be churning out paper forever, and Jeanette has her hands full moving the sheets from the floor to her desk. When the machine falls silent she gathers all the sheets together and puts them in a heap in front of her.

In September 1988 the National Board of Forensic Medicine reported that Victoria Bergman had been subjected to serious sexual abuse before her body reached full maturity, and Nacka District Court had therefore agreed to grant confidentiality for her personal details.

Jeanette is disgusted by the cold language. Full maturity – what does that mean?

She reads on and finds the explanation further down. The girl, Victoria Bergman, had, according to the board, been subjected to extensive sexual violence between the ages of zero and fourteen. A gynaecologist and a forensic medical officer had conducted a thorough examination of Victoria Bergman’s body and had found that the girl was severely damaged.

Yes, that was actually what it said. Severely damaged.

Finally she reads that it hadn’t been possible to determine who had carried out the assaults.

Jeanette is astonished. That thin, fair-haired, serious little girl with the evasive look in her eyes had evidently chosen not to press charges against her father.

She thinks about the reports filed with the police against Bengt Bergman that she herself had been involved with previously. The two Eritrean refugee children, subjected to whipping and sexual assault, and the prostitute who had been badly beaten, whipped with a belt and anally raped with an object of some sort.

The second report, from the Stockholm County Police Authority, confirmed that in interviews it had emerged that the plaintiff, Victoria Bergman, had been subjected to sexual abuse at least since the age of five or six.

Well, surely it isn’t possible to remember much further back than that? Jeanette thinks.

It’s certainly difficult to evaluate the credibility of such a witness. But if the abuse had begun when she was very young, it could be presumed that she was already being exploited sexually even then.

Hell, she’d have to show these documents to Sofia Zetterlund, regardless of her promise to von Kwist. Sofia would be able to explain how a little girl who had been subjected to so much would be affected mentally.

The last thing in the report says that the police officer responsible for the investigation believed that the threat against the plaintiff was sufficiently serious that she should be granted a protected identity.

Here, once again, it had not been able to ascertain the identity of the abuser.

Jeanette realises that she’s going to have to contact the people responsible for these investigations as soon as possible. It may have been twenty years ago, but with a bit of luck they might still be in the same jobs.

Jeanette goes over to the small side window, which is slightly open. She taps out a cigarette, lights it and takes a deep drag.

If anyone comes in and complains about the smell of smoke, she’ll force them to read what she’s just read. Then she’ll hand them the packet of cigarettes and direct them to the open window.

Back at her desk she reads the report from the psychiatric department of Nacka Hospital. The contents are fundamentally the same as the other documents. The plaintiff should be granted a protected identity in light of what had emerged during some fifty therapy sessions, which had dealt partly with sexual abuse between the ages of five and fifteen, and partly with sexual abuse after the age of fifteen.

Fucking bastard, Jeanette thinks. It’s a shame you’re dead.

Hurtig comes in with coffee, and they each pour a cup. Jeanette tells him to read through the court files from the beginning, while she tackles the final recommendation of the court.

She gathers together the thick bundle of paper and glances at the last page, to satisfy her curiosity over which police officer had investigated the case.

When she sees who had signed the report and recommended that the court grant confidentiality to Victoria Bergman, she almost chokes on her coffee.

IT COULD HAVE
been different.

The linoleum floor is cold and sticks to Sofia Zetterlund’s naked shoulder. It’s dark outside.

The lights of cars passing by in the street play across the ceiling, to the sound of nervous rustling from the trees’ dry autumn leaves.

She’s lying on the kitchen floor next to a couple of bin bags containing vomited food, staring up at the fridge. The open ventilation window in the kitchen combined with the window open in the living room is making the pieces of paper on the fridge door flutter in the cross breeze. If she screws up her eyes they look like flies’ wings, buzzing against a mosquito net.

Beside her is a table laid for a party, with dirty plates and unwashed cutlery.

Nature morte.

Once bright candles, now remnants of wax.

Sofia knows that she won’t remember anything tomorrow.

Like when she once found that glade down by the lake, in Dala-Floda, where time stood still and which she spent weeks trying to find again. She has lived with gaps in her memory since she was a small child.

She thinks about Gröna Lund and what happened the night Johan went missing. Images try to take hold within her.

Sofia shuts her eyes and turns her gaze inward.

Johan had been sitting beside her in the Free Fall cradle, and Jeanette had been standing outside the railing watching them. Slowly they had risen, metre by metre.

Halfway to the top she got scared, and when they passed the fifty-metre mark vertigo was welling up. Her irrational response had come out of nowhere.

She hadn’t dared to move. And hardly dared to breathe. But Johan had laughed and swung his legs. She had asked him to stop, but he had just grinned at her and carried on.

Sofia remembers thinking that the bolts holding the cradle were being put under unnaturally great pressure, and would eventually come loose. And they’d crash to the ground.

The cradle had been swaying and she had begged him to stop, but he hadn’t listened. Arrogant and smug, he had just swung his legs harder.

And suddenly Victoria had been there.

Her fear had vanished, her thoughts cleared, and she was calm again.

And then it all went black once more.

She had been lying on her side. The grit on the tarmac chafing her hip, through her coat and top. Eating its way through.

A smell she had recognised. A cool hand against a hot brow.

She had screwed up her eyes and through the wall of legs and shoes she had seen a bench, and beside the bench she had seen herself from behind.

Yes, that was it. She had seen Victoria Bergman.

Had she been hallucinating?

But she hadn’t been delirious. She had seen herself. Her fair hair, her coat, her bag.

It was her. It was Victoria.

She had been lying down, and had seen herself twenty metres away.

Victoria had gone up to Johan and taken him by the arm.

She had tried to call to Johan, to tell him to look out, but when she opened her mouth no sound came out.

Her chest feels tight, as if she’s going to suffocate. A panic attack, she thinks, and tries to breathe more slowly.

Sofia Zetterlund remembers seeing herself pull a pink mask over Johan’s face.

She’s lying on her kitchen floor in Borgmästargatan and knows that in twelve hours she won’t have any recollection of having lain on the kitchen floor in Borgmästargatan thinking that in twelve hours she would have to get up and go to work.

But right now Sofia Zetterlund knows that she has a daughter in Denmark.

A daughter named Madeleine.

And right now she remembers that she once went to find Madeleine.

But she doesn’t know if she’s going to remember that tomorrow.

IT COULD HAVE
been good.

Could have been fine.

Victoria doesn’t know if she’s in the right place; she feels confused and decides to take a walk round the block to collect her thoughts.

She’s got a surname to go on, and now she knows that the family lives in Hellerup, one of Copenhagen’s smarter suburbs, full of detached villas. The man is managing director of a company that makes toys, and lives in Duntzfelts allé with his wife.

Victoria takes out her Walkman and switches the tape on. A recently released Joy Division compilation. As she walks along the avenues ‘Incubation’ plays, and the music rattles monotonously in her earphones.

Incubation. Brooding, hatching. Baby birds, snatched away.

She has been an egg-laying machine.

All she knows is that she wants to see her daughter. Then what?

Who cares if it all goes to hell? she thinks as she turns onto the next road, yet another tree-lined avenue.

She sits down on a junction box next to a dustbin, lights a cigarette and decides to sit there until the tape stops.

‘She’s Lost Control’, ‘Dead Souls’, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. The cassette changes side automatically: ‘No Love Lost’, ‘Failures’. People walk past, and she wonders what they’re staring at.

When Victoria walks up to the family’s villa she sees that there’s a brass sign on the stone wall beside the gate, and she knows she’s found the right place.

Mr and Mrs Silfverberg and their daughter, Madeleine. She smiles. How ridiculous. Victoria and Madeleine, like the Swedish princesses.

She looks around to make sure no one’s watching, then climbs over the wall and drops down the other side. There are lights on downstairs, but the upper two floors are dark. She sees that the balcony door on the first floor is open.

A drainpipe makes a useful ladder, and soon she’s opening the door wider.

A study, full of bookcases, and on the floor is a big rug.

She takes off her shoes and pads carefully out onto a large landing. There are two doors on her right, and three on her left, one of which is open. At the far end of the landing is a staircase leading to the other floors. From downstairs comes the sound of a football match on television.

She looks in through the open door. Another study, with a desk and two shelves full of toys. She doesn’t bother with the other rooms, since she assumes no one would leave a baby behind a closed door.

Instead she creeps over to the stairs and starts to go down. The staircase is shaped like a U, and she pauses halfway to look down at a large room with a stone floor and a door at the far end, presumably the front door.

An enormous chandelier is hanging from the ceiling, and against the left-hand wall there’s a pram with its hood up.

She acts instinctively. There are no consequences, nothing but the here and now.

Victoria goes down the flight of stairs and places her shoes on the bottom step. She’s no longer worried about creeping around. The noise from the television is so loud she can hear what the commentators are saying.

Semi-final, Italy against the Soviet Union, nil–nil, Neckar Stadium, Stuttgart.

A glazed double door stands open next to the pram. Through the doors she can see Mr and Mrs Silfverberg watching television, and in the pram is her baby.

Incubation. Egg-laying machine.

She’s not the bird of prey here, she’s only taking back what’s hers.

Victoria goes to the pram and bends over the child. The baby’s face is quite calm, but she doesn’t recognise it. At the hospital in Aalborg the child had looked different. Her hair had been darker, her face thinner and her lips less full. Now she looks like a cherub.

The baby is sleeping, and it’s still nil–nil in the Neckar Stadium in Stuttgart.

Victoria pulls the thin blanket back. Her child is wearing a blue onesie; her arms are bent and her hands are clenched, resting on her shoulders.

Victoria picks her up. The noise from the television gets louder, which makes her feel safer. The little girl is still asleep, warm against her shoulder.