The Crow Girl (97 page)

She’s talking about Sihtunum i Diasporan, the foundation that Viggo Dürer, Karl Lundström and Bengt Bergman were all involved in. It all sounds so nice, the way Annette describes it. The adopted children got along so well in Sweden, and the project abroad helped so many poor people.

‘Do you know Victoria’s father, Bengt Bergman?’

‘No,’ she replies. ‘He helped Karl, P-O, Gert and Viggo to fund the foundation, but I’ve never met him.’

Another direct answer, and a correct one at that. OK, he thinks. Just one more question.

‘Pythia’s instructions. What does that mean?’

Once again the woman looks uncomprehending. ‘Don’t you know? Your colleague asked about that as well, that Sofia I spoke to a few days ago.’

‘No, I don’t actually know. But I’ve heard that it’s a book. Have you read it?’

She looks bemused again. ‘No, of course I haven’t.’

‘Why not?’

The emptiness returns to the woman’s eyes.

‘I’ve never seen a book with that title. Pythia’s instructions are the original words, they’re ancient and must never be questioned.’

She falls silent and looks down at the floor.

As Hurtig leaves Rosenlund Hospital behind him and pulls out onto Ringvägen, his thoughts slowly begin to settle into a pattern that makes sense.

Pythia’s instructions, he thinks. Something exclusively for the men. Rules and truths that they invented for their own purposes. The term that best seems to describe it is ‘brainwashing’.

He’s sure that Jeanette will have something to say about all this, and as he stops at a traffic light he wonders how she’s getting on. When she called to say that she was going to take a look at Lundström’s films, he had wished he could have been there to support her. He knows she’s tough, but how tough do you have to be not to end up a complete wreck?

Twenty minutes later, when he opens the door of the room in National Crime where Jeanette is sitting, the answer to his question is etched on her face.

VICTORIA BERGMAN IS
writing frenetically. Line after line about her daughter, Madeleine, while Sofia Zetterlund sits beside her and listens to the rasp of the pen.

Her cataract-stricken eyes can’t see, but they’re staring at Victoria.

‘I understand that you’re not finished with yourself yet,’ the old woman says.

Victoria isn’t listening to her, but after a while she stops writing, looks at the notepad, and circles a few key sentences before she puts her pen down.

Then she looks up at Sofia, who holds out a trembling, wrinkled hand. She takes it, and soon feels a sense of calm return.

‘I’m worried about you,’ Sofia says quietly. ‘They haven’t gone yet, have they?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Crow Girl and the others.’

Victoria swallows. ‘No … Not Crow Girl, and maybe not the Sleepwalker. But all the others have gone. She helped me with that.’

‘She?’

‘Yes … I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist for a while. She’s been helping me with my problems.’

I’ve helped myself, Victoria thinks. The Sleepwalker has helped me.

‘Really? A psychologist?’

‘Hmm … She’s a lot like you, actually. But obviously she doesn’t have your long experience.’

Sofia Zetterlund smiles enigmatically, squeezes Victoria’s hand a bit tighter before letting go of it, then picks up the pack of cigarettes again. ‘Let’s have another one each. After that I daren’t have any more. The manager is a hard woman, even if she must have a good heart somewhere.’

A good heart? Who has a good heart?

‘Victoria, you wrote to me a few years ago and told me you were working as a psychologist. Are you still doing that?’

No one has a good heart. The ground in all human hearts is more or less stony.

‘Sort of.’

Sofia seems happy with the answer, lights her cigarette and hands one to Victoria. ‘Well, then,’ she says. ‘You’ve made an old woman very happy, but rather tired, and I don’t think I can do anything more at the moment. I lose my focus and start to forget, and then I get sleepy. But the new pills they’ve put me on are better, and I’m much brighter than I was when that police officer came to ask about you.’

Victoria says nothing.

‘I was more muddled then,’ Sofia goes on. ‘But to be honest, not as muddled as that policewoman probably thought. Sometimes it’s useful being this old, you can pull out a bit of dementia whenever you need to. Except when I’m muddled for real, of course. Obviously it’s hard to pretend when you don’t need to.’

‘What were they doing here?’ Victoria asks.

Sofia blows another smoke ring over the table. ‘They were looking for you, of course. The one who was here was named Jeanette Kihlberg. I promised I’d ask you to contact her if I heard from you.’

‘OK, I’ll do that.’

‘Good …’ Sofia smiles weakly and sinks into her chair.

HER BODY IS
just a few centimetres from the ceiling, and she’s looking down on herself, at the girl who’s tied up, thirsty and starving in a coffin under the ground.

She has a narrow tube in her mouth and they’re feeding her the bitter, dry sludge she was given before. Food that just makes her weaker, an anti-food. Nuts and seeds, and something that tastes like resin, but she doesn’t know what it is.

But she no longer cares. She feels light and happy.

Her mouth tastes of glue and she feels euphoric, as if she had the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.

She tries twisting her body, but it’s stuck tight. She can’t do it, no matter how hard she tries.

Not long ago she could drift, free as an astronaut in space, but now her body is tied down.

She starts to feel cold, an indescribable chill that makes her body shake inside.

Yet she still isn’t frightened.

It’s just the water inside her turning to ice.

The cold spreads out to her skin, and it feels like the ice inside is swelling and is going to burst out of her body, splitting her skin. Like when you put a glass bottle full of water in the freezer, and it breaks when the liquid expands into ice.

She smiles at the analogy.

Before she bursts and explodes into a thousand tiny fragments of glass she sees the man standing over her.

It’s Viggo Dürer.

THE ROOM THAT
Kevin, the young police officer, shows her into is claustrophobically small and in no way merits its name.

‘This is the viewing suite,’ he says sarcastically, gesturing for her to sit down.

She looks around. A desk, a computer screen and various different video players, so that you can look at most films regardless of format. In the middle of the desk is a mixer board that makes it possible to stop the film and move forwards or backwards frame by frame. There’s a switch to zoom in, and another to make the image sharper. Then other buttons and controls that she hasn’t got a clue about. And a muddle of cables and leads.

‘As soon as I find anything on Hannah Östlund’s computer I’ll bring it in to you,’ he goes on. ‘Well, just call me if you need anything.’

Once Kevin has shut the door behind him the room falls completely silent, and not even the air conditioning is audible any more. She looks at the stack of video cassettes, hesitates, then grabs one of them and puts it in the machine.

There’s a crackle, and the screen in front of her begins to flicker. Jeanette takes a deep breath and leans back in the chair, at the same time putting her hand firmly on the wheel that will let her stop the film if it gets to be too much. She thinks of the deadman’s handle that makes a train stop if the driver has a heart attack.

The first film contains exactly what Karl Lundström had said it did, and Jeanette can’t bear to watch more than a minute before turning it off. But since she knows she has to look through the whole tape, she focuses her eyes alongside the screen and fast-forwards.

From the corner of her eye she can see the film blurrily, without any details, but clearly enough to see if the scene changes. After twenty minutes the machine stops with a loud click, then begins rewinding the film automatically.

Jeanette knows what she’s just seen, but doesn’t want to believe it’s true.

She feels unable to absorb the fact that there are people who take pleasure in this. Who pay a lot of money to get hold of this sort of film, and risk their whole lives by collecting them. Why isn’t it enough to fantasise about the perverse and forbidden? Why do they have to turn their sick fantasies into reality?

The second film is, if anything, even more unpleasant.

During the thirty minutes or so while she spools through the film, keeping her eyes focused beside the screen doesn’t help, and instead she stares one metre above it.

On the wall is a photocopy of a cartoon. It shows a fat man, grinning and running towards the viewer with an iron bar in his hands. He’s wearing a striped hat, and his teeth would give a dentist nightmares.

The little girl in the film is crying as the three men take turns penetrating the Thai woman.

The man in the cartoon is wearing a pair of dark trousers, his chest is bare, and he’s got heavy boots on his feet. The look in his eyes is intense, almost crazy.

One of the men puts the girl on his lap. He strokes her hair and says something that Jeanette thinks is ‘Daddy’s little girl has been naughty’.

Jeanette notices the corner of her mouth getting wet, and when she licks her lips she can taste salt. Usually crying feels like a relief, but now it only enhances the feeling of disgust and impotence, and she finds herself thinking about the death penalty and people getting shut away and forgotten about. Doors to be locked and keys thrown away. She even sees scalpels performing castrations in anything but a chemical way, and for the first time in a very long time she feels hatred. An unreasonable, unforgiving hatred, and for a moment she understands why some people choose to publicise the names and pictures of convicted sex offenders without thinking of the consequences for their families.

At that moment she realises that she is a human being, even if she is a very bad police officer. A police officer and a human being. An impossible combination? Maybe.

The man in the cartoon is saying what she’s feeling, and she understands what it’s doing there.

That it has to be there so that the people working here don’t forget that they’re human beings as well as police officers.

Jeanette removes the film, puts it back in its box and inserts the third film.

Like the previous two, it starts with flickering noise. Then a shaky camera that seems to be looking for something, stops, zooms in, and the picture comes into focus. Jeanette thinks it looks like a hotel room, and gets a strong sense that this could be the film she’s searching for.

She hopes she might be wrong, but her gut feeling is telling her it’s the right one.

Whoever is holding the camera seems to realise that it’s far too close, zooms out again and adjusts the focus once more. A young girl is lying splayed out on a large bed, and beside the bed are three half-dressed men.

The girl is Ulrika Wendin, and one of the men is Bengt Bergman, Victoria Bergman’s father. The man Jeanette questioned when he was under suspicion for rape, and who was later released when his wife gave him an alibi.

Just as the door behind her opens and Jens Hurtig walks in, Jeanette looks up once more at the photocopied cartoon a metre above the ongoing rape.

The man in the cartoon is yelling, ‘With a decent iron bar you can take the whole world by surprise!’

Hurtig stops behind her, takes a firm grip of the back of the chair and looks at the screen showing the rape scene. ‘Is that Ulrika?’ he asks quietly, and Jeanette nods in confirmation.

‘Yes, I’m afraid it looks like it.’

‘Who are they?’ Jeanette feels Hurtig’s hands tighten on the chair. ‘Anyone we recognise?’

‘So far only Bengt Bergman,’ she replies. ‘But that one’ – she points at the screen – ‘he’s been in other films. I recognise his birthmark.’

‘Only Bengt Bergman,’ Hurtig mutters, and sits down as the camera sweeps around the room. A window with a view of a poorly lit car park, with the men’s grunting in the background, then back to the bed.

‘Stop!’ Hurtig says. ‘What’s that in the corner?’

Jeanette turns the wheel to the left. The image stops and she rewinds, frame by frame.

‘There,’ he says, pointing at the screen as the camera passes one corner of the room. ‘What’s that?’

Jeanette pauses the film, increases the contrast of the picture, and can see what he means. In the dark corner someone is sitting on a chair watching the scene unfolding on the bed.

Jeanette zooms in, but can only make out the outline of the figure. No clear facial features.

Hurtig’s suggestion of trying to see what’s in the background gives Jeanette an idea. ‘Wait here,’ she says, and gets up. Hurtig looks at her in surprise as she opens the door and calls for Kevin.

The young police officer comes out into the corridor.

‘Could you come in here for a minute, please?’

‘Just a moment.’

Kevin goes back into his room and comes out again holding a CD in his hand. ‘Here,’ he says, handing it to Jeanette and then saying hello to Hurtig. ‘That’s what I’ve found so far on Hannah Östlund’s computer, and I have to say I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He gulps before going on. ‘This is something else entirely. This has …’

‘This has what?’ Jeanette asks, looking at the clearly shocked young officer.

‘I don’t know how to put it, it’s like it’s got a philosophy or something …’

She looks at him intently, wondering what he means, but doesn’t want to ask. She’ll soon be seeing it herself. But before that she needs his help.

She takes hold of the wheel and moves slowly forward, frame by frame. As the camera sweeps across the window and the parking lot she stops. Outside there are a number of cars parked.