The Crow Girl (82 page)

Camouflaged by the darkness and the trees behind the garage is a car, covered by a tarpaulin. A Citroën, dark blue, showing signs of rust.

‘Hang on …’ She stops and sweeps the beam of her torch along the bushes in front of the house. ‘Do you see? What’s that?’

The torch is aimed at part of the foundation, between two of the windows.

‘There’s a cellar. Or there used to be. The windows have been covered up.’

She nods. ‘Just what I was thinking.’

One of the big blocks of granite looks very different than the others. It’s roughly the size of a cellar window, while the other bricks used in the foundation are smaller.

They do another circuit of the house and count a total of eight cellar windows that have been covered by new stones. The garage doesn’t appear to have a cellar.

‘Does it mean anything,’ Hurtig wonders, ‘or do you think it’s just an unusual way of insulating the place?’

‘I don’t know …’ Jeanette shines the torch at one of the blocks again. ‘It must have been a hell of a job getting them in. I’ve got a feeling someone wanted to hide the fact that there is a cellar, rather than …’

Hurtig scratches his chin and looks thoughtful. ‘I don’t know. But we’ll find out if we can get a search warrant. Do you think we should put a watch on the house in case someone shows up?’

‘No, not yet. But I think we should take a closer look at the garage before we go.’

It’s big enough for two cars, the doors are locked, and there’s only one little window high up in the stone wall at the back. The outbuilding reminds Jeanette of a small bunker, and she gives Hurtig a wry smile. ‘Have you got any tools with you?’

Hurtig smiles back. ‘There’s a toolbox in the boot. Are we going to break in?’

‘No, just take a look at what’s in there. And I want to take a sample of the paint on that car, just in case.’

‘Agreed. Off you go, then, you’re clearly better at climbing than I am.’

Two minutes later Jeanette is back with a penknife and a heavy wrench. She scrapes off a few flakes of paint from the car and puts them in a small plastic evidence bag, then hands the wrench to Hurtig. She can’t reach the window herself.

He stands on tiptoe, and, as he pulls his arm back to strike at the window, he looks at her over his shoulder. ‘What do we do if an alarm starts shrieking?’

‘What all vandals do. Run like hell.’ She grins. ‘Just hit it …’

Three heavy blows on the window, and the sound of breaking glass seems deafening to her.

Then complete silence. They wait for ten seconds before Jeanette speaks.

‘Give me a leg up, then,’ she says, pointing at the broken window.

Hurtig cups his hands, and she climbs up.

There’s just room for her to stick her head and the torch through the window. The beam plays across a sturdy workbench below the window, then across a concrete floor towards some heavy-duty shelving against the wall nearest the house. She points the beam around the room, then returns to the shelving.

Completely deserted. Not a single thing inside, as far as she can see. The workbench and shelving are quite empty.

That’s all. A perfectly ordinary garage, albeit very spacious and tidy, which doesn’t seem to have been used for anything but parking cars.

PEOPLE SAY IT’S
dangerous to wake a sleepwalker.

Sofia Zetterlund’s awakening in the Clarion Hotel perhaps doesn’t entirely support that thesis, but her physical reaction is so strong that she’s having trouble breathing, and her pulse rate goes so high that she can’t get up from her seat.

‘Sofia, are you OK?’

In front of her stands Carolina Glanz.

She sees a face stiff from cosmetic surgery. It’s a miracle of the human physiognomy that it can still express concern.

‘Geht es Ihnen gut?’
she hears distantly from the man beside her.

She’s no longer bothered about him.
‘Ja,’
she replies in a tone of derision, and finally manages to stand up. ‘I have to go,’ she then says to the young woman, and pushes past her roughly, without meeting her anxious gaze.

She doesn’t look back once as she walks away from the bar, through the lobby and out into the street.

Go home … I have to go home.

She goes over the pedestrian crossing towards the Ringen shopping centre, ignoring the red light, which leads to angry horn blowing and sudden braking. When she reaches the other side her legs feel like they can no longer carry her, and she sits down on one of the benches outside the shopping centre and hides her face in her hands.

Her head is still spinning, and she doesn’t notice her tears, or the driving rain.

Or the fact that someone sits down beside her.

‘You shouldn’t go there any more,’ Carolina Glanz says after a while.

Sofia calms down slightly, and the young woman puts her hand on her back. What the hell am I doing? she wonders. This is beneath me.

She straightens up and takes a deep breath before looking irritably at the girl and snapping, ‘What do you mean by that? And why are you following me?’

Close up, her face looks even worse. It might seem OK in front of a camera, but in the flat, grey afternoon light her doll-like, unnatural features look grotesque. She appears at least fifteen years older than she actually is.

‘I hang out at the Clarion a lot, and I’ve seen you there a few times,’ Carolina says. ‘I know a few people who work there, and they think you’re on the game. I actually had to stop them from throwing you out.’ She attempts a smile through her make-up and surgery.

A few times? Shouldn’t go there anymore? Sofia finally realises.

Victoria.

Sofia softens slightly as she looks at Carolina Glanz.

Maybe she’s not a lost cause after all?

‘I haven’t been sleeping well recently,’ Sofia says. ‘And I’ve split up with someone and maybe I’m not quite myself.’

‘Let’s go and get some coffee,’ Carolina suggests, nodding towards the entrance to the shopping centre. Sofia presumes she means the cafe in the middle of Ringen.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘We can’t sit here, can we, it’s pouring.’

As they walk into the shopping centre Carolina Glanz tells her that she’s got a contract with a major publisher, and that for the first time in her life she feels like she’s doing something she can be proud of. They get coffee and sit down at one of the tables.

‘The book’s going to be a sensation,’ Carolina says dramatically, and Sofia marvels at the young woman’s ability to just shake herself and move on. From one thing to the next, with just one goal. To make a living from celebrity.

Selling herself in any way she can.

She can’t help agreeing with those who say it shows entrepreneurial spirit.

She thinks about herself, and her efforts to do the exact opposite. To keep her identity secret from everyone, and never reveal who she is at all costs, even to herself.

Today everything has come close to disaster.

Her thoughts are interrupted when the young woman’s mobile phone rings. After a short conversation she looks apologetically at Sofia and explains that her publisher wants to see her, so she’s got to go.

And, just as suddenly as she appeared, Carolina Glanz is gone.

Her appearance makes men and women alike stop and look round, and as she disappears she leaves a furrow of curious faces behind her, from the cafe to the exit of the shopping centre.

Sofia realises that that’s precisely what Carolina wants. Here I am. Look at me. Give me your attention, and I’ll give you all my secrets.

She decides to sit there for a while, at least until her hair has dried, and the more she thinks about Carolina Glanz, the more certain she gets.

She’s envious of the young woman.

Her cosmetic surgery acts like a costume. Hidden behind all the putty and silicon, Carolina Glanz dares to reveal everything about herself. Her costume gives her the courage to play every note on the emotional scale, from foolish vulgarity to sharp intelligence. Because Sofia doesn’t doubt that Glanz is actually an extremely intelligent, determined young woman. There’s a logic to Carolina Glanz’s behaviour, an instinctive logic that also seems to come from her heart. She knows how to show who she is.

Unlike me, Sofia thinks.

She knows that inside her there’s a permanent fancy-dress party going on, where the participants’ characteristics are so varied and diametrically opposed to one another that they can’t actually make up an entire person. No matter how odd it might sound, Carolina Glanz with her constructed exterior is more authentic and coherent than Sofia will ever be.

There isn’t even a me, she thinks.

Then the rushing sound in her head is back. A never-ending stream of voices and faces. Simultaneously inside and outside her.

She stares at the people going towards the exit, and after a while she sees their bodies moving through the shopping centre, vague, elongated streaks in different colours, like cars moving past on a motorway. But sometimes she can freeze the image and look at their faces, one after the other.

Two blonde girls are walking towards the exit of the shopping centre, each one with a dog on a lead.

They bear a striking resemblance to Hannah and Jessica.

Two people who are three people, she thinks. Or rather three fragments of one personality.

The Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie have their models in her old classmates Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg. Two girls who were very similar, almost like mirror images of each other. Like a single, apathetic shadow of a person.

Victoria used those personality fragments to avoid having to do anything dull, but they were also substitutes for feelings in herself that she doesn’t like.

Thinking she knows best, or pessimism, or pettiness. Also unquestioning obedience, subservience, obsequiousness and fawning. Being just one of a flock of clever blondes. The very qualities that Victoria had seen in Hannah and Jessica.

The Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie mean nothing to her any more. She can take care of all the banal emotions and qualities that they represented, it’s all just a matter of being more mature and either abandoning or accepting the trivial parts of her nature.

Even a dog ought to be able to learn to do that.

Go home, she thinks. I have to go home.

ULRIKA WENDIN DOESN’T
know how long she’s been tied up in the dry, warm room. The darkness knocked out her awareness of time a while back.

The silence is as oppressive as the darkness, and all she can hear are sounds inside her. Sometimes she wakes up because she can no longer feel her body, and the lack of sensory information makes her feel like she’s in a vacuum, drifting weightlessly without a sense of complete darkness and silence.

She realises that she’s got to find a way to free her arms, which are taped together behind her back, before they become useless. With a great effort she occasionally manages to raise her body enough to be able to move them and regain some degree of feeling. But the intervals are getting longer, and her room for manoeuvre is limited by the metal bars just centimetres above her chest and knees.

She leans her head back again and looks up. The strip of light is still there. It occurs to her that the light is the Milky Way, and that the galaxy contains as many stars as there are cells in a human brain. Perhaps everything in there will blur together and turn uniformly grey in the end? Is it all just an optical illusion?

Is she seeing things from inside her own mind?

Her throat stings with thirst the whole time, and she’s probably dehydrating faster because of the heat and her fits of crying.

The only way to keep her mouth producing saliva is to lick the tape covering her mouth. The bitter taste of the glue makes her feel sick, but she still licks the inside of her lips and along the edges of the tape at regular intervals.

If only she could produce enough saliva, it might come free altogether. But the worst thing that could happen would be to throw up, because then she would suffocate.

Even though she’s seriously dehydrated, she feels as if she needs to empty her bladder. But she can’t do it. Her body won’t obey her, and no matter how hard she tries, she can’t squeeze out a single drop. It only works if she gives up and stops trying. Then the warmth spreads over her crotch and thighs.

It’s a hot, itchy feeling.

She soon notices the cloying smell. She doesn’t know if she’s imagining it, but it feels like her urine makes the air a bit more moist, and she takes long, deep breaths through her nose.

She knows it’s possible to survive for quite a long time without food. Several months, she seems to recall. But how long can you survive without water?

Her chances of survival ought to be better if she moves as little as possible, lying still and not burning up so many fluids. Minimising her physical exertions. And not crying.

Ulrika Wendin’s eyes are dry as they look at the shades of grey-black above her, and her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth as she slips into unconsciousness again.

In her dream she’s drifting in space and looking down on herself.

In the distance she imagines she can hear a sound of something breaking, and she realises that it must be the centre of the galaxy exploding.

ONE DAY YOU
find out that your life has been the blink of an eye, Madeleine thinks, as she looks in the mirror in the tiny bathroom of her cabin. Life is an almost imperceptible yawn, and then it ends so abruptly that you’ve hardly had time to notice it’s started.

The ship rolls, and she holds on to the door frame and sits down on the bunk. On the table is a glass of ice cubes next to an open bottle of champagne, and she pours a second glassful into the toothbrush mug.

One day you’re standing there with a stupid smile on your lips, reading in your mental diary about all the hopes and dreams you once had, she thinks, raising the mug to her lips and taking a sip of champagne. The bubbles tickle the roof of her mouth. It tastes of mature fruit, with hints of minerals, herbs and roasted coffee.