The Crow Girl (78 page)

And one of them had had a finger bitten off by her dog. But she still spent the whole time spoiling it, and that was weird too.

The room she lived in was the smallest in the house, and it smelled musty. It contained a creaking bed, an old wardrobe that smelled of mothballs and a small window facing the yard. All she had to play with were some crayons, yellow typewriter paper and a box of Lego.

Reluctantly she had built a house on the big, green Lego base. It was on the floor, and she began to stick the little figures to the base. All in all there were nine plastic people, the same number of people staying on the farm at the moment, apart from herself and the little girl the Swedes had brought with them.

She arranged the figures so they were standing in a long line in front of the Lego house. She had to pretend that five of them were women, because there were only male figures available, and soon they were all standing there with their plastic smiles.

The pig farmer and the two lawyer women.

The man they called Berglind, who was a policeman even though he didn’t act like one. That was the only one of the plastic figures that looked the way it should. Not only because it was in a police uniform, but because it also had a moustache, just like him.

Next to him stood Fredrika, who was much fatter than her Lego version. And then the couple who were the little girl’s parents. Karl and Annette.

At the right-hand end of the line stood her foster-parents.

She stared at them while her tongue played with the loose tooth. She was lost in her thoughts when she heard someone unlocking the door.

‘It’s time to go. Have you packed? You haven’t forgotten your beach towel this time?’

Two questions in one that demanded both a yes and a no, meaning that she couldn’t keep quiet.

She couldn’t just nod or shake her head, and it was one of his tricks to get her to talk to him.

‘I’ve packed everything,’ she mumbled.

He shut the door, and it reminded her of when she had lost her first tooth.

He had told her what happened when children left their teeth for the tooth fairy.

If you left them in a glass of water or under your pillow when you went to bed, a little fairy would come flying in at night and give you something in return. She collected children’s teeth, far away somewhere she had a big castle that was built of teeth, and she paid one hundred kronor per tooth.

He had helped her get rid of the first one, so that she would soon be rich.

That was when they came to visit at the start of the summer. She had been sitting where she is now, but on a little stool, and he had tied some strong cotton thread around her tooth. Then he had tied the other end to the door handle, and told her he was just going to get something. But he was lying, and instead slammed the door shut with a loud bang.

Her tooth had flown out onto the floor as the door slammed shut, and that had given her the first hundred kronor.

But the tooth fairy hadn’t flown into her room that night. It was him, creeping into her room when he thought she was asleep, lifting her pillow and leaving the money.

After that she had to show she deserved the money, and she had realised that the tooth fairy wasn’t a magical creature, but only a man who bought baby teeth.

JEANETTE TURNS ON
the desk lamp and spreads the pictures out in front of her.

Hannah Östlund’s burned, sunken face. A woman in her forties, in what should be the prime of life. A complete stranger to Jeanette just a short while ago, but now one of the principal suspects for a series of murders. Nothing in life is what it seems, she thinks. So much of it is something else entirely.

Hannah’s right hand is missing its ring finger, and Jeanette’s suspicions are confirmed.

The identities of the bodies need to be definitively confirmed from DNA samples as soon as possible; then the amount of carbon dioxide in their blood has to be measured. That could give them a cause of death.

A vacuum cleaner hose had carried the poisonous gases from the exhaust pipe into the car, and, because the two women had their seat belts on, Jeanette assumes that they had committed suicide together.

Next picture, Jessica Friberg, Hannah’s friend. Similarly burned beyond recognition.

The characteristic fire-related haematomas that aren’t the result of mechanical injury.

The woman died in the fire.

Her skull became severely overheated; her blood would have started to boil between her skull and the protective layers within.

Folie à deux. Two people sharing the same misconceptions, the same persecution complex, the same hallucinations and insanity.

Usually there’s one person who’s sick and another who’s governed by the first, a more dominant and disturbed individual.

Which of the women was the driving force? she wonders. Does that even really matter? She’s a police officer, and it’s her job to collect the facts, not sit and speculate about cause and effect. Right now the two women are echoes of the past that will soon have faded away and vanished, leaving just their bodies behind.

Fire, she thinks. Hannah and Jessica in a burning car.

Then Dürer and the boat.

The Bergman couple and their burned-out house.

It can’t be a coincidence. She makes a mental note to take it up with Billing at the earliest possible opportunity. If he agrees with her, those cases can be looked at again.

Jeanette picks up the phone and dials the prosecutor’s number. As usual, Kenneth von Kwist is taking his time issuing a search warrant, even though in this instance it’s no more complicated than signing a piece of paper.

She has trouble concealing her contempt for the prosecutor’s incompetence, and perhaps he notices, because his replies to her questions run to two syllables at most, and he sounds disengaged.

But he does promise her that she can have the warrant within an hour, and as they hang up Jeanette wonders where von Kwist finds the motivation to go to work each morning.

Before going to Hurtig’s office to update him in advance of their visit to the homes of the two dead women, she heads towards Åhlund’s office.

She has a job for him and Schwarz to work on for the rest of the day.

The lawyer, Viggo Dürer, she thinks. Even if he’s dead, we need to know more about him. There may be evidence hidden away in his past that might lead us to the murderer.

Jeanette is aware that someone has paid half a million kronor into Annette Lundström’s bank account, and she suspects it could well be a bribe, even if they haven’t been able to trace where the money came from. Sofia had also told her that Ulrika Wendin had plenty of cash, and implied that Dürer might be behind it. And in the letter Karl Lundström wrote to his daughter, Linnea, the lawyer is mentioned as a potential paedophile, something also suggested by the pictures Linnea drew as a child.

PROSECUTOR KENNETH VON
Kwist isn’t feeling well.

His stomach ulcer is one thing; his anxiety that everything is about to go to hell another.

The secret to quickly regaining your self-control is Diazepam Desitin.

The discomfort of having to take the medicine rectally is outweighed by the strong sense of calm that spreads soon afterwards, and he says a silent prayer of gratitude to his private doctor who at short notice had provided him with a generous prescription of the drug. And he’s also been told to take a glass of whisky three times a day to enhance its calming effects.

The anxiety he feels has nothing to do with Hannah Östlund or Jessica Friberg.

It has its foundations in the feeling that everything is starting to slip utterly beyond his control. He leans back in his chair to think things through one more time.

He knows that Viggo Dürer organised bribes for Annette Lundström and Ulrika Wendin, although he’s perfectly aware that it had originally been his idea.

Obviously that isn’t good, and under no circumstances must it become known.

One possibility might be to try to butter up Jeanette Kihlberg a bit more, to portray himself in a better light. It’s just that at the moment he has no more information to give her, apart from the things that absolutely mustn’t come to her attention.

If he were to reveal what he knows about Viggo Dürer, Karl Lundström, Bengt Bergman and former police commissioner Gert Berglind, he would inevitably be dragged down as well.

He would quite literally be crushed. Humiliated and thrown out of his profession. Unemployed and exposed.

Whenever he had done favours for Dürer, Berglind or Lundström, the rewards came quickly, usually in the form of money, but occasionally in other ways. On the most recent occasion that he got rid of some compromising documents for Dürer, he was advised to rearrange his investment portfolio, and just a few days later the banking crisis hit and his old shares would have been worthless. Then there were all the racing tips he’d received over the years. He begins to count on his fingers before he gives up and realises that he has been part of a system of reward that is more comprehensive, and probably stretches further up the corridors of power, than he could have imagined.

The Diazepam Desitin tranquilliser he’s taken makes Kenneth von Kwist calm, and he can think more rationally, but it gives him no ideas about how to solve his dilemma. So he decides to procrastinate for a bit longer, waiting to see what happens, and using the time to stay on good terms with everyone involved, particularly Jeanette Kihlberg.

It’s a passive, compliant position, but it’s unsustainable. It isn’t possible to sit on two chairs at the same time.

WHEN ULRIKA WENDIN
wakes up at first she can’t feel anything, then a wave of pain breaks over her. Her face is throbbing, her nose aches and she has the taste of blood in her mouth.

It’s pitch black, and she has no idea where she is.

The last thing she remembers is the stench of the fat separator in the cellar. The man who chased her through the woods must have knocked her out somehow.

She curses herself for having taken the money. She’s blown the fifty thousand in less than a week.

Maybe someone thought she was still talking, in spite of the money. But going to the police hadn’t led anywhere. No one had believed her.

Why the hell am I lying here? she thinks.

Her face feels stiff and her mouth tight. She’s lying on her back, naked, and she can’t move because her hands have been taped together behind her back.

On both sides of her there are coarse wooden walls, and when she tries to get up she is blocked by a pair of iron bars running above her knees and chest.

What she had initially thought was dried, stiffened blood on her face turns out to be a piece of tape fastened across her mouth. She’s lying in something damp, and assumes she must have wet herself.

I’ve been buried alive, she thinks. The air is dry and stiflingly warm, and it smells like a root cellar.

Panic hits her, and she starts to hyperventilate. She doesn’t know where her scream comes from, but she knows it’s there even if she doesn’t hear it.

Breathe through your nose. Calm down. You can handle this, she thinks. You’ve taken care of yourself almost your whole life without ever needing anyone’s help.

Five years ago, when she had just turned sixteen, she had found her mother’s lifeless body on the kitchen floor, and since then she’s been alone. She’s never turned to social services when she’s been short of money – she’d rather steal food – and she’s kept up with the rent thanks to Mum’s meagre life insurance. She’s never been a burden to anyone.

She doesn’t know who her dad is; her mum took that secret with her to heaven. If that’s where you end up if you’ve used alcohol and pills to slowly but deliberately drink yourself into an early grave before you’ve even reached forty.

Her mum hadn’t been mean, just unhappy, and Ulrika knows that unhappy people are capable of doing things that might seem mean.

Real evil is something else entirely.

Grandma won’t start to worry for a week or so, she thinks. They aren’t usually in touch more often than that.

Her breathing is getting slower and her thoughts more rational.

Maybe that psychologist, Sofia Zetterlund, will miss her? Ulrika regrets calling to cancel all her appointments.

What about Jeanette Kihlberg? Maybe, but probably not.

Her heartbeat returns to normal and, even if it’s still hard to breathe, she’s regained command of her senses. Temporarily, at least.

Her eyes have got used to the darkness, and she knows she isn’t blind. The shadows around her are different shades of grey, and above her she can make out the shape of what looks like a boiler, connected to a mass of pipes.

The wall rumbles at regular intervals. There’s a metallic screech, a bang, and then it’s quiet for a few seconds before the rumbling starts up again.

Her first idea is that it’s the sound of a lift.

A boiler and pipes … a lift?

So where is she?

She turns her head, trying to find any source of light.

Only when she forces her head backwards, so far that it feels like her arteries and throat are going to burst through her neck, does she catch a glimpse of something.

Behind her she can see a narrow strip of light reflected faintly off a wall.

REVENGE TASTES OF
bile, and it doesn’t matter how many times you brush your teeth, you won’t get rid of the taste. It eats its way into your enamel and gums.

Madeleine Silfverberg has checked into the Sjöfarts Hotel in Södermalm, and is in the bathroom tidying herself up. In a few hours she’s going to meet the woman who once called herself her mother, and she wants to look as beautiful as possible. She pulls an eyeliner from her bag and applies some light make-up.

Just like hatred, revenge forms tiny, threadlike wrinkles in an otherwise beautiful face, but whereas bitterness gives you deep lines around your mouth, revenge settles around the eyes and forehead instead. The marked groove between her eyes, just above her nose, has been getting deeper. Her worries have made her frown for far too long, and she has grimaced too many times because of the sour taste in her mouth.