The Crow Girl (73 page)

She has had all the facts in front of her all along, but sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. Not exactly a dereliction of duty, but possibly poor police work, she thinks, and finally the moment arrives when everything falls into place. Unimagined connections become clear, dissonance turns into harmony and nonsense takes on a new, coherent pattern.

‘It’s Hannah Östlund,’ Annette Lundström says.

THE PHOTOGRAPH HAS
confirmed Jeanette’s suspicions, and all the loose threads are coming together to form a whole. She’ll soon know how solid that whole is.

Her gut feeling is real, but she also knows it can be treacherous. In police work the right feeling is important, but it mustn’t get the upper hand and cloud your vision. Recently she’s been so scared of appearing to be driven by her emotions that she hasn’t listened to them, and has just been staring blindly at facts.

Jeanette thinks about the life-drawing class she took during her first years with Åke. The teacher had explained how the brain is constantly deceiving the eye, which in turn deceives the hand holding the charcoal. You see what you think you ought to see, and ignore the way things look in reality.

A picture with two subjects, depending on what you focus on. An optical illusion.

Hurtig’s innocent remark had brought her up short, made her drop her guard and just see what was there to be seen.

Understand what was there to be understood, and ignore how it ought to be.

If she’s right, she’s a good police officer who’s done her job and therefore deserves her salary. No more than that.

But if she’s wrong she’ll be criticised and her competence will be called into question. The idea that she made a mistake because she’s a woman and by definition no good as a lead investigator will never be said out loud, but will be there between the lines.

During the morning she shuts herself away in her office, tells Hurtig she doesn’t want to be disturbed, and starts sending out requests for fingerprints and DNA.

She should get replies during the course of the day.

Right now it’s important that she find Victoria Bergman, and while she waits for the answers to her requests, she reads through the notes she made during her conversation with the old psychologist, and is once again astonished at the young Victoria’s fate.

Raped and sexually assaulted by her dad throughout the whole of her childhood.

Her new, secret identity has made it possible for her to start a new life, somewhere else, far away from her parents.

But where has she moved to? What’s become of her? And what did the old psychologist mean when she said that what they did to Victoria in Copenhagen was wrong? What had they done?

Is she mixed up in the murders of Silfverberg and Grünewald?

She doesn’t think so. All she knows for sure so far is that Hannah Östlund killed Fredrika Grünewald. The idea occurs to her that Jessica Friberg was possibly holding the camera, but that’s still supposition. After all, the picture could in theory have been taken using a timer.

What was it Sofia had said about the perpetrator? That they were dealing with someone with a split self-image? With the diagnosis of borderline, and who therefore experiences an indistinct boundary between themselves and others. Whether or not that’s correct will be proved by future questioning, and for the time being is of less importance.

If it hadn’t been for the murder of Charlotte’s husband, P-O Silfverberg, she would have understood everything much sooner.

Really it was Charlotte who should have been murdered. After all, she had received a threatening letter. Why it ended up being her husband could only be a matter of speculation, but it was undeniably a gruesome way of exacting revenge.

It’s all so obvious, Jeanette thinks. It’s one of the laws of human nature that everything that has been hidden away in the nooks and crannies of the soul will struggle to find its way up to the surface.

She should have concentrated on Fredrika Grünewald and her classmates at Sigtuna, and on the incident that everyone had mentioned.

There’s a knock on the door, and Hurtig comes in.

‘How are you getting on?’ He leans against the wall just to the left of the door, as if he’s not going to stay for long.

‘Fine. I’m waiting for information I should be getting today. Any time now, I hope. And once I’ve got that we can put out a nationwide alert.’

‘Is it them, do you think?’ Hurtig walks over to the visitor’s chair and sits down.

‘Probably.’ Jeanette looks up from her notepad, pushes her chair back from the desk and puts her hands behind her head.

‘Have you had a chance to talk to Åke? Since you had to hang up when we headed off to Edsviken?’ Hurtig looks worried.

‘Yes, I spoke to him after we got back. Apparently Johan’s having trouble accepting Alexandra. He called her a whore, and then all hell broke loose.’

Hurtig laughs.

‘He’s got guts, that boy.’

SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS
getting ready to go home. She feels completely wiped out.

Outside the Indian summer is colouring the light in the street a fiery yellow, and the wind that had been rattling the windows earlier seems to have died away.

As Sofia leaves the practice she can sense winter in the air. In Mariatorget a flock of jackdaws has gathered to prepare for the journey south. By the Södra station she sees the woman again.

She recognises the gait, the broad, swaying hips, the feet pointing outward, the bowed head and the tight grey bun.

The woman disappears into the station, and Sofia hurries after her. The two heavy doors swing back on her, and when she finally makes it into the hall of the station the woman has vanished again.

Sofia jogs over to the turnstile.

The woman isn’t there, but she couldn’t possibly have had time to get in, go through the turnstile and down the escalator.

Sofia turns and walks back. She checks in the restaurant and the tobacconist’s.

There’s no sign of the woman anywhere.

The setting sun is casting golden reflections on the windows and the facades of the buildings outside.

Fire, she thinks. Charred remnants of people’s lives, bodies and thoughts.

THE SUN IS
peeping through the breaking clouds, and Jeanette gets up from her desk. She looks out through the window, gazing across the rooftops of Kungsholmen, and takes a deep breath. She fills her lungs and then lets the air out in a deep, liberating sigh.

Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg, she thinks. Schoolmates of Charlotte Silfverberg, Fredrika Grünewald, Henrietta Dürer, Annette Lundström and Victoria Bergman at Sigtuna College for the Humanities.

You always get caught by the past.

As she had guessed they would be, Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg are both missing, and after she presented her evidence to Prosecutor von Kwist, he agreed to issue a warrant for their arrests. Suspected on reasonable grounds of the murder of Fredrika Grünewald. As far as the murder of P-O Silfverberg is concerned, the evidence is less compelling. Suspected on good grounds.

It is now a matter of waiting, watching events develop and biding her time.

The big question is still the motive. Why? Is it really something so simple as revenge?

Jeanette has her theory about cause and effect ready, but the problem is that when she tries to formulate how it all fits together, the whole thing seems completely unlikely.

Could they have murdered the Bergmans and the Dürers as well? Caused those fires?

What about Karl Lundström?

But if so, why would they want those deaths to look like accidents?

She’s interrupted by the internal phone ringing, and she turns round, leans across the desk and presses the button to answer.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me,’ Jens Hurtig says. ‘Come to my office if you want to see something interesting.’

Hurtig’s door is open, and when she goes in she sees that both Åhlund and Schwarz are there as well. They look at her, and Schwarz grins and shakes his head.

‘Listen to this,’ Åhlund says, pointing at Hurtig.

Jeanette forces her way between them, pulls up a chair and sits down. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Polcirkeln,’ he begins. ‘Nattavaara parish registry. Annette Lundström, née Lundström, and Karl Lundström. They’re cousins.’

‘Cousins?’ Jeanette doesn’t quite understand.

‘Yes, cousins,’ he repeats. ‘Born three hundred metres apart. Karl and Annette’s fathers are brothers. Two houses in a village in Lapland named after the Arctic Circle. Exciting, isn’t it?’

Jeanette isn’t sure that ‘exciting’ is the right word. ‘Unexpected, perhaps,’ she replies.

‘It gets better.’

It looks to Jeanette as though Hurtig’s about to laugh.

‘The lawyer, Viggo Dürer, used to live in Voullerim. That’s just thirty or forty kilometres from Polcirkeln. That’s no distance up there. Thirty kilometres and you’re practically neighbours. And I can tell you something about the village of Polcirkeln.’

‘And this bit’s really funny,’ Schwarz interjects.

Hurtig gestures to him to keep quiet. ‘In the eighties a story got into the papers. About a sect, with branches all over northern Lapland and Norrbotten, with its headquarters in Polcirkeln. A bunch of Laestadians who’d lost it big time. You might have heard of the Korpela movement?’

‘No, I can’t say that I have, but I presume you have.’

‘From the thirties,’ Hurtig says. ‘A doomsday cult in eastern Norrbotten. Prophecies of the end of the world and a ship of silver that would collect the faithful. They spent their time having orgies that, according to biblical quotations, meant they were affirming the child inside them, they played leapfrog on the roads, went around naked and so on. One hundred and eighteen people were interrogated and forty-five were fined, and some were charged with sexual activity with minors.’

‘And what happened in Polcirkeln?’

‘Something similar. It started with a report to the police about a movement calling themselves the Psalms of the Lamb. The complaint was about the sexual abuse of children, but the problem was that it was anonymous. Annette and Karl Lundström were named, as well as their parents, but nothing could be proved. The police investigation was dropped.’

‘Jesus,’ Jeanette says.

‘I know. Annette Lundström was only thirteen years old. Karl was nineteen. Their parents were in their fifties.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘Nothing, really. The story about the sect faded away. Karl and Annette moved south and got married a few years later. Karl took over his dad’s construction company, bought a share of a larger construction syndicate, and then became managing director of a company in Umeå. After that the family moved around the country, wherever Karl was sent for work. When Linnea was born they were living in Skåne, but of course you already know that.’

‘And Viggo Dürer?’

‘His name appears in one of the articles. He was working in a sawmill and spoke to the paper. I quote: “The Lundström family is innocent. The Psalms of the Lamb never existed, it’s just something you journalists made up.”’

‘Why was he interviewed? Was he one of the people named in the police complaint?’

‘No. But I imagine he wanted to get in the papers as much as he could. He was probably already ambitious, even then.’

Jeanette thinks about Annette Lundström.

Born in an isolated village up in Norrland. Possibly involved as a child in a sect in which sexual abuse of children took place. Married to her cousin Karl. The sexual abuse continues, spreading like poison through the generations. Families fracture. Implode. They wipe themselves out.

‘Are you ready for more?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ve checked Annette Lundström’s bank account, and …’ Hurtig pauses for a moment before going on. ‘You always say you should act on gut feeling, so I did, and it turns out that someone recently paid half a million kronor into her account.’

Shit, Jeanette thinks. Someone really wants to hush up what happened to Linnea.

Judas money.

ULRIKA WENDIN SWITCHES
her mobile off and heads down into the metro at Skanstull. She feels relieved that the secretary rather than Sofia Zetterlund herself had answered when she called to say she wasn’t going to come any more.

Ulrika Wendin is ashamed that she has allowed herself to be silenced.

Fifty thousand isn’t a lot of money, but she’s been able to pay the rent for the next six months, and buy herself a new laptop.

At the barrier to the metro she sticks her foot far enough under the metal bar to activate the sensor so she can pull the turnstile towards her and slip through.

Von Kwist had sounded upset that she had been to see Sofia. Probably worried that the conversational therapy would reveal what Viggo Dürer and Karl Lundström had done to her.

Ulrika Wendin thinks about Jeanette Kihlberg, who had seemed OK despite being a cop.

Should she have told her everything?

No. She doesn’t feel up to going through it all again, and besides, she doubts anyone would believe her. Much better to keep quiet, because if you stick your chin out you’re likely to get punched.

Nine minutes later she gets out of the train at Hammarbyhöjden and walks through the barrier with no problem. No ticket inspector either on the train or by the exit.

Finn Malmgrens väg, past the school and through the little patch of woodland between the houses. Johan Printz väg. In through the front door, up the stairs, unlock the door and in.

A heap of post. Advertising flyers and free papers.

She shuts and locks the door, and puts the safety chain on.

As she sinks down onto the hall floor she starts to cry. The pile of paper is soft against her back and she lies on her side.

In all the years she has lived with boyfriends who hit her, she has never cried.