The Crow Girl (95 page)

‘Ivo?’ One of the female forensics officers interrupts his thoughts. ‘Can you come here for a moment?’

He turns round. The young woman is pointing at the fridge door, which is half open. Ulrika Wendin doesn’t seem to have been a big eater. The fridge had been completely empty the last time he was here, and obviously still is this time.

‘Do you see?’ The officer indicates an area just inside the fridge door, right next to the edge, where she’s just dusted some of the ash-grey powder to gather fingerprints. He squats down and looks.

An impression of three fingers, and the scenario begins to take shape for him.

He knows that one person assaulted another person in this kitchen, and then cleaned up after them. While they were cleaning, someone wiped the blood from the fridge door with their left hand and held the door open with the right, at the point he’s staring at.

He doesn’t even need a magnifying glass to see that the prints match something he’s seen before, in fact as recently as that morning.

SOFIA’S ROOM IN
the Sunflower Nursing Home is like a doll’s house version of the house on Solbergavägen in Tyresö.

There’s the same worn armchair and bookcase from the old living room, and they’re sitting facing each other across the same little kitchen table. The glass globe with the snowed-in Freud is in its place on the chest of drawers, and Victoria can even detect the smell of Tyresö from twenty years ago.

It’s not just a torrent of memories that washes over her, but questions too.

She wants to know everything, and she wants confirmation of what she already knows.

In spite of her age there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with Sofia’s memory.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Victoria says. ‘Now that I’m sitting here with you, I’m ashamed at the way I behaved.’

Sofia smiles gently. ‘I’ve missed you too, Victoria. I’ve thought about you a lot, and have often wondered how you were. You shouldn’t feel ashamed of anything. On the contrary, I remember you as a strong young woman. I believed in you. I thought you’d be able to take care of yourself. And you have, haven’t you?’

Victoria doesn’t really know how to reply. ‘I have …’ She changes position. ‘I have problems with my memory. It’s got a bit better recently, but …’

The old psychologist looks at her with interest. ‘Go on. I’m listening.’

‘As recently as last night,’ she begins, ‘I realised that I didn’t murder my former partner. For almost a year I believed that I had, but it turns out that he’s alive and I’d imagined the whole thing.’

Sofia looks concerned. ‘I see. Why do you think that might be?’

‘I hated him,’ Victoria says. ‘I hated him so much I thought I had killed him. It was some kind of revenge. Just for myself, in my imagination. It’s almost pathetic.’

She can hear that her voice is starting to sound like the young Victoria’s.

‘Hate and revenge,’ Victoria goes on. ‘Why are they such strong driving forces?’

Sofia’s answer comes quickly. ‘They’re primitive emotions,’ she says. ‘But they’re also emotions that are unique to human beings. An animal doesn’t hate, and it doesn’t seek revenge. I think this is really a philosophical question.’

Philosophical? Yes, maybe, Victoria thinks. Her revenge on Lasse had probably been just that.

Sofia leans across the table. ‘I’ll give you an example. A woman is out driving her car and when she stops at a red light a gang of youngsters comes over to the car and one of the young men breaks the window with a long metal chain. Terrified, the woman drives away, and when she gets home she discovers that the chain had got caught in the bumper and that the young man’s hand had been ripped off.’

‘I get it,’ Victoria says.

The blank cataract eyes stare emptily at her. ‘Have
you
had your revenge? Have you stopped hating? Are you no longer scared? There are so many questions to consider.’

Victoria thinks for a while. ‘No, I don’t hate him any more,’ she eventually says. ‘Now, in hindsight, I can actually say that the false memory helped me get over him. Sometimes the feelings of guilt were unbearable, but today, sitting here, I feel completely cleansed as far as Lasse’s concerned.’

Damn it, she thinks. I ought to have felt much worse. But maybe somewhere deep inside I always doubted that he was actually dead.

She doesn’t know. It’s all very hazy.

Sofia folds her old, veiny hands. Raised, mauve blood vessels, and Victoria recognises her ring. She remembers Sofia telling her she had once been married, but that her husband died young and she had chosen to live alone after that. Like a swan, Victoria thinks.

‘You talk about cleanliness,’ the old woman says. ‘That’s interesting. The psychological meaning of revenge implies some sort of resolution, which in turn means both a physical confrontation with an enemy and an internal, psychological process with implications of cleansing, and reaching self-awareness.’

This is exactly how it should be, Victoria thinks. Just like it used to be.

But can revenge really be a cleansing process? Her thoughts turn to Madeleine and the notepad in her bag. In contains at least fifteen pages of suppositions, many of them probably wrong and presumptuous, but she had taken as her starting point the fact that Madeleine was driven by the same feelings that she had felt. Hatred and revenge.

Perhaps hatred can also be cleansing?

Victoria takes a deep breath before daring to say one of the things she came here for.

‘Do you remember that I gave birth to a baby, a daughter?’

The old woman sighs. ‘Yes, of course I do. I also know that her name is Madeleine.’

Victoria feels her muscles tense up. ‘What else do you know about her?’

She feels deep regret at not having fought harder to keep the child, at not having protected the little girl, holding her tight and making sure she slept soundly at night.

She could have fought, should have fought, but she had been too weak to do it.

Far too broken and full of hate towards everything.

Back then, hatred had only been destructive.

‘I know she had a difficult time,’ Sofia says. Her face looks powerless, and the wrinkles seem to deepen further as she turns towards the window. ‘And I also know that nothing the girl said was deemed sufficient to bring charges,’ she goes on after a short pause.

‘How do you know she had a difficult time?’

Another sigh from the old woman. She pulls out a cigarette and opens the window slightly, but makes no move to light the cigarette, just rolls it distractedly between her fingers. ‘I’ve followed Madeleine’s progress through a contact at University Hospital in Copenhagen. What happened was truly awful …’

She imagines she can see a spark ignite in Sofia Zetterlund’s misty gaze. ‘Give me a light, would you? I don’t know what I’ve done with my lighter. Nicotine makes me think better.’

Victoria takes out her own lighter and helps herself to a cigarette from the old woman’s pack.

‘Have you ever met Madeleine?’

‘No, but like I said, I know what happened to her, and I’ve seen pictures of her. My colleague in Copenhagen sent me another photograph a couple of years ago, just after my sight went. I haven’t been able to look at it myself, but I’ve got it here if you’d like to see it. It’s in one of the books in the bookcase. The same shelf as Freud, third book from the left, a reference book with French binding. Take a look at it while I tell you about capsulotomy and sensory deprivation.’

Victoria jerks. Capsulotomy? Isn’t that …? ‘Have they lobotomised Madeleine?’

The old woman smiles faintly. ‘That’s a matter of definition. Let me explain.’

Victoria feels angry, confused and expectant as she walks over to the bookcase. Tragic, she thinks as she pulls out the book. I haven’t seen my daughter in twenty years, and when I finally find her it’s in the appendix to an encyclopedia from the fifties.

The photograph shows a girl wrapped in a blanket in a hospital bed. The resemblance between Madeleine and Victoria herself is striking. An oppressive feeling creeps through her stomach.

‘Can I keep it?’

Sofia nods, Victoria sits down again and the old woman lights another cigarette as she starts to explain. Gradually Victoria slips back to her time in Tyresö, and she shuts her eyes and imagines that she’s there again, that it’s summer and they’re sitting in Sofia’s bright kitchen.

‘Madeleine was operated on a few years ago,’ the old psychologist begins.

When little ’un came to earth, it was in May when the cuckoo called,

Mama said all was aglow, bright spring green and sunlight.

The lake shone like silver, and the cherry tree was in bloom,

And the swallow, quick and cheery, arrived along with spring.

THE ROOM WAS
as white as it was black, and she stared helplessly up at the ceiling, unable to move because her arms were fastened to the bed.

She knew what awaited her, and she remembered the voice on the crackling radio two months before, just after they made the decision.

Professor of Psychiatry Per Mindus was one of Sweden’s leading authorities on anxiety disorders and compulsive behaviour syndrome. During his time at the Karolinska Institute he was introduced to neurosurgery and the surgical technique known as capsulotomy. In layman’s terms, the technique involved going into the part of the brain known as the capsula interna and cutting the nerves that were believed to contribute to mental illness.

The thick leather straps chafed against her wrists, and she had given up trying to pull free. The medication meant she could feel a secure, warm apathy spreading through her blood.

The technique, which was used for fifty years, was increasingly questioned in the 1990s, because in half of all cases it led to a deterioration in both abstract thinking and the ability to learn from mistakes.

‘Is the girl ready for the operation?’

She heard the voice that she had learned to dislike over the course of the past few weeks.

‘I’m very busy and would like to get it done as soon as possible.’

Why’s he in such a rush? she thought. A round of golf, or a visit to his mistress?

Someone turned on a tap. Washed their hands. Then the smell of surgical fluid.

The warmth in her body was making her tired, and she felt she was about to fall asleep. If I do, she thought, then I’ll wake up as a completely different person.

She could feel the draught of a doctor’s coat and realised someone was standing beside the bed. His mouth was covered by a paper mask, but the eyes were the same. She sneered at him.

‘You’ll see, it’ll all be fine,’ he said.

‘Drop dead, you Swedish bastard!’ she replied, then sank into the warm half-doze.

She could hear the crackle from the radio again, barely tuned in.

Criticism of Per Mindus’s use of capsulotomy increased when it emerged that he had been lying about having been given authorisation for his experiments. One of the leading experts on compulsive disorders claimed that the technique had severe side effects. It was also claimed that when a follow-up report was published, it had been written by someone who was responsible for deciding which patients should be capsulotomised, and who alone evaluated the effectiveness of the treatment.

She was still tied down when they rolled her into the operating room. Still drowsy from all the medication, but alert enough to understand what was about to happen.

THE ROOM IS
as white as it is black. Shelf after shelf of old VHS cassettes, CDs, hard drives and boxes of photographs. All carefully marked with the name of their previous owner, and a time, place and date.

Nothing in Jeanette Kihlberg’s twenty-year career in the police force has prepared her for this, and when she realises the extent of the accumulated documentation of abuse she feels dizzy. Is it that we want to be blind? she wonders. That we don’t want to see?

Evidently it’s more important that interest rates stay low, house prices rise, or your flat-screen TV is plasma or LCD. You fry your gammon steak and wash it down with a three-litre wine box. You’d rather read a badly written thriller about the horror of it than deal with it in real life.

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had no idea how right they were, she thinks, while at the same time being perfectly aware that she’s no better herself.

She wanders aimlessly around the room, not quite sure where to start looking for Karl Lundström’s films.

On one of the shelves she sees a name she recognises. A fifty-four-year-old inspector with the Stockholm police who bought child porn on the Internet over a period of years. Jeanette remembers reading about the case. When Mikkelsen and his colleagues caught him, the officer had over thirty-five thousand illegal images and films in his home.

Jeanette reads the titles, and a lot of the films speak for themselves. ‘Photo Lolita’, ‘Little Virgins’, ‘Young Beautiful Teens’, and ‘That’s My Daughter’. One of the films has a Post-it note stuck to it, and Jeanette sees that it says the film shows a girl tied down and assaulted by an animal.

She works out fairly quickly how the archive is categorised. In most cases by the date when the assaults occurred and, when that isn’t known, by the time of seizure. The locations of the seizures remind her of the lists of places in her old school atlas. Obviously the big cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. If the number of sick individuals is constant, then there should be more of them there. Smaller towns such as Linköping, Falun and Gävle, mixed up with villages she’s never heard of. From north to south, east to west. No community seems too small, too remote or too well-to-do not to contain people with paedophile tendencies.