The Crow Girl (87 page)

The dossier about the dead immigrant boys that Jeanette sent to Interpol six months ago has finally done some good. A DNA match.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND HAS
decided to walk all the way to work, and at Slussen she opts for the longer route, up to the top of Mariaberget and past the old lift.

Her bag of books is heavy and rubs against her hip as she walks across the cobblestones of Tavastgatan, and at the junction with Bellmansgatan she decides to stop off in the Bishop’s Arms and study the books over a late lunch.

She orders that day’s special, and finds a seat in a corner. While she waits for the food she starts looking through the book about the Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, but is distracted by the erroneous title of the Swedish edition,
The Mass Murderer
. ‘Mass murderer’ means Stalin or Hitler. They killed people not because of some primitive instinct, but for ideological reasons, and developed means of extermination on an industrial scale. Chikatilo murdered one person at a time, in a long, bestial series.

She discovers that every other chapter is about the policeman who eventually solved the case, which ran to more than fifty murders, and decides to skip those. She wants to know how Chikatilo functioned, not read about police work. To her disappointment she soon finds that the book mostly contains descriptions of the murders, and fantastical speculation about what the murderer might have been thinking. Any more profound analysis of his psyche is entirely absent.

Even so, she finds a number of the ideas interesting, but resists the temptation to tear the pages out, and instead turns down the corners of pages she’s thinking of using when she puts her ideas together. The person who couldn’t control her impulses and had no qualms about defacing books was Victoria. Sofia is sensible and controlled, she reflects, as she feels how much her shoes are chafing. Everything has its price.

When the waiter brings her food she orders a beer. She eats a few mouthfuls but realises she isn’t hungry just as a group of Germans comes into the pub. They sit down at the next table, and one of the women turns to Sofia.
‘Sie müssen sehr stolz auf ihn sein?’

‘Ja, sehr stolz,’
Sofia replies, without having any idea what the woman means.

She pushes her plate away and goes back to the book about Andrei Chikatilo. After reading for a while she begins to discern a pattern that she’d like to discuss with Jeanette. She makes a few notes in the margin and gets her mobile out. Jeanette answers almost instantly.

There isn’t really anything new to say, Sofia just wants reassurance that their meeting is still on, and as soon as Sofia hears Jeanette’s voice she’s reminded of the fact that she misses her.

Jeanette hasn’t forgotten that they’re going to meet, but seems stressed. Sofia assumes Jeanette’s got a lot of work to do and keeps it brief. ‘Well, see you at my office,’ she says. ‘Then we can go to my favourite bar and have a couple of beers and talk shop for an hour or so. Then when we’re done with that we can get a taxi back to your place. OK?’

Jeanette laughs. ‘And talk about anything apart from work. Sounds good. Big hug.’

Not back to my place, Sofia thinks. The apartment is still festooned with all of Victoria’s notes, newspaper articles and scraps of paper.

She needs to take care of that soon. Burn the whole lot.

She puts the biography of Chikatilo aside and gets out the old overview of sadism and sexuality. It’s in surprisingly good condition, which is probably due to the fact that it doesn’t get taken out very often, and she soon realises why.
Psychopathia Sexualis
is written in old-fashioned, long-winded English that’s very difficult to understand. After half an hour’s reading she decides that the book is entirely useless in most respects, not just because she can’t understand it all, but because its conclusions are obsolete. She herself saw through Freud at the age of seventeen, and ever since then has been sceptical about seeing things in symbolic terms, and about cast-iron theories. She has dismissed all writing about women’s feelings and desires because it has, without exception, been carried out by men. A position that she has never had any reason to reconsider.

On the other hand, she thinks that Freud’s opinions about libido, life instinct and sexual desire are still relevant and interesting. That the libido, alongside aggression, is the strongest urge of humankind.

Attraction, longing, desire and lust, in combination with violence.

Sofia closes the book, gets up and goes over to the bar to pay. She hands the bartender a couple of notes. ‘Who are they?’ she asks, nodding towards the group of Germans.

‘The Germans?’ The bartender laughs. ‘They’re on a pilgrimage, walking in the Great Man’s footsteps. They’re crazy for anecdotes about him.’

‘The Great Man?’

‘Yes. Stieg Larsson, you know?’ The bartender smiles and hands over her change.

As she leaves the Bishop’s Arms she takes out her notepad again. She thinks about Madeleine, and writes a few lines as she walks over the cobbles.

Her writing is almost illegible.

‘Madeleine is her mother’s sister, and her father is also her grandfather, and she has the right to hate them more than anyone. If I didn’t know that I set fire to the house in Värmdö myself, I’d be inclined to believe that it was Madeleine.’

JENS HURTIG IS
sitting in a chair on the other side of Jeanette’s desk, following her conversation with the Ukrainian police officer Iwan Lowynsky on speakerphone with growing interest.

Schwarz and Åhlund are listening from the doorway.

‘Where did he disappear?’ Jeanette repeats the question because she didn’t catch the name of the metro station in Kiev where the boy used to hang out, and the place where he was last seen.

‘Syrets. Syrets station. Near Babi Yar. Never mind. I send you details.’

‘Funny.’ Schwarz grins. ‘Went missing from a metro station in one part of the world, found at another. In a slightly worse condition, of course.’

Jeanette’s glare makes Schwarz shut up instantly, and he realises it’s time to retreat.

Hurtig wonders how the hell Schwarz ever got his badge.

‘You said there were two people missing from the Syrets station. Two boys, both child prostitutes. Brothers. Itkul and Karakul Zumbayev. Is that correct?’

‘Correct,’ Lowynsky replies.

A long silence. Hurtig guesses that Jeanette is waiting for a more explicit answer.

‘Karakul is still missing?’ she tries instead.

‘Yes,’ Lowynsky says in reply.

‘And their connections to … Sorry, I didn’t get this down right, Kyso –’

‘Kyzylorda Oblast. Parents are gypsies from region in south Kazakhstan. Brothers born in Romanky outside Kiev. Get it?’

‘Yes …’ Hurtig sees Jeanette frowning as she makes notes.

‘So,’ Lowynsky says, and Hurtig thinks it sounds like he’s yawning. ‘Duty calls. Keep in contact?’

‘Of course. Thank you.’

‘You will have our identikit in two hours. Thank you, Miss Killberg.’

There’s a crackle on the speakerphone as Iwan Lowynsky hangs up.

‘Killberg.’ Hurtig smiles. ‘If he thinks that’s how your name is pronounced, he must think it pretty funny considering what your job is.’

Jeanette doesn’t seem to notice the joke, or else her mind is busy elsewhere. When she’s this focused it can be hard to reach her, he thinks, and looks at the clock. Long past lunchtime. ‘What do you say? Shall we go out and get some food?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, I can’t eat now. But I’d like a walk.’

Five minutes later they’re walking down Bergsgatan towards Kungsholmen Church. Hurtig is shivering, and as he rubs his hands together to get the circulation going he feels old. His body has started to feel the cold in a way it’s never done before, and he knows that the only thing that helps is a really hot shower. But that will have to wait.

Beside the door of the kebab shop stands an old man playing well-known tunes on an untuned violin, and Hurtig is fascinated by how he can manage to keep his fingers warm in the cold. It doesn’t sound any good, but he puts a twenty-krona note in the little paper cup by the man’s feet.

Hurtig goes in and orders a large lamb kebab. ‘Seeing as I can’t think on an empty stomach, unlike you, you can tell me how you believe we ought to proceed.’ He opens the bag, pulls out the foil-wrapped bundle and starts to bite into the pitta bread.

‘There’s one thing that struck me,’ Jeanette begins. ‘And it was actually Schwarz’s moronic comment that made me realise it.’

‘OK, I’m being slow.’

‘The boy vanished from and was found at metro stations. Coincidence, do you think?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

‘How about this?’ she goes on. ‘The same person who seized the boy in Kiev also dumped him in Stockholm. And I think that person is a seasoned traveller in Eastern Europe, or maybe comes from there. Knows the area. Knows what he’s doing.’

‘How can you be so sure that –’

‘I’m not. I just said I think, not that I know.’

Hurtig bites into the meat. ‘Lowynsky said two gypsy brothers went missing at the same time,’ he says between mouthfuls. ‘One is our boy, and the other is still missing. What do you think about that, then?’

‘I think the other boy is dead too, and is lying somewhere in Stockholm waiting to be found.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he concedes. ‘What about the identikit? Do you think we can expect anything from that?’

She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Probably not too much, considering that it was put together from the evidence of one single witness who may have seen the person who abducted the boys. And that witness is an eight-year-old girl who’s blind in one eye and couldn’t say how old the man might be. You remember what Lowynsky said? In one interview the girl said he was forty, in another that he was really old, but of course we both know you can hardly ever rely on a child’s estimate of someone’s age.’

He drops the remainder of the kebab in a rubbish bin before they go back inside police headquarters, and opens the bag of chips as they enter the lift. Jeanette’s mobile rings, and her face breaks into a smile.

‘Hi. How are you getting on?’

Hurtig guesses that it’s Sofia Zetterlund. He looks at Jeanette’s face as she talks. Yep, she’s definitely in love, he thinks.

She presses the lift button repeatedly, as if that might make it skip a few floors and get up quicker.

‘Of course. That’s sounds great. My car’s broken down, so I’ll get the metro and pick you up, then we’ll take it as it comes.’

Hurtig assumes they’re going out for a meal, then back to Jeanette’s in Gamla Enskede, where they can have the whole house to themselves now that Johan is with Åke.

And it’s Friday night as well, so they can have a drink or two.

‘And talk about anything apart from work,’ Jeanette says, laughing. ‘Sounds good. Big hug.’

Hurtig wolfs down the chips as the lift pings and the doors slide open. Jeanette puts her phone back in her jacket pocket and looks at him thoughtfully. ‘I think I might be in a relationship with Sofia,’ she says, to his surprise.

SOFIA HAS BEEN
sitting at her desk for more than two hours, adding to her reading about Andrei Chikatilo with research both on the Internet and in the books she’s got in her office. She’s starting to compile a fair bit of material that might be of interest to Jeanette.

Over a period of some ten years Chikatilo killed more than fifty people in an area around the eastern Black Sea, in southern Ukraine and Russia. He killed boys and girls, and usually castrated the boys, almost without exception. On several occasions he ate part of his victims.

She looks down at her notes.

Why didn’t he conceal his victims better? she wonders, thinking about both Chikatilo and the murderer in Stockholm. That’s actually a question that has never been answered.

Sofia believes that the murderer wants to talk about his shame. It might sound contradictory, but someone driven by such peculiar sexual urges probably became aware very early in life that he was different, a perverse individual. Revealing his shame in public isn’t just a show of regret, it’s a way of seeking contact. She also has an idea about the castrations that she hopes to be able to explain to Jeanette.

She looks at the clock on the computer screen. In just under an hour, she thinks. She’s aware that it might be difficult to persuade Jeanette that her conclusions fit, because they feel far too morbid to accept.

When Chikatilo killed women, he ate their wombs. In the cases of the immigrant boys, the police hadn’t found any evidence of cannibalism, but the bodies had been missing their genitals. Her theory isn’t fully formulated yet, and she needs to think it through a couple more times before embarking on a discussion with Jeanette that could spoil the whole evening.

What she’s read about Chikatilo has disgusted her, and she’s going to have to ration the details.

Cannibalism, she thinks, looking at the empty chair on the other side of the desk.

She remembers sitting here on a couple of occasions and discussing the phenomenon with Samuel Bai when he had come to her for therapy back in the spring. Samuel had said that the rebel army used cannibalism as a way of violating and humiliating their victims, but that there had also been a ritualistic aspect to it.

Eating a heart had been a way of appropriating the enemy’s strength.

What else had he said?

Suddenly she can feel her headache coming back, the same throbbing ache as earlier in the day. Flashing in front of her eyes, a jagged stripe making her vision lose all focus. An epileptic migraine. But the attack is over in thirty seconds or so.

Sofia gets up and goes to the filing cabinet where she keeps her records. She unlocks it and quickly finds Samuel’s file and takes it back to the desk with her.