The Crow Girl (99 page)

The conversation is over in less than thirty seconds.

‘Any news?’

Jeanette takes a deep breath. ‘The samples of paint we took from the car at Dürer’s villa are identical to the traces found out in Svartsjölandet. So the lawyer could have been the person who dumped the boy out there by the jetty back in the spring, and –’ She breaks off and slaps her forehead. ‘Fuck!’ she exclaims. ‘Åhlund told me Dürer had been treated for cancer –’

‘So those could be Dürer’s fingerprints that were found –’

‘In Ulrika’s flat.’

‘Which means that Dürer might still be alive …’

‘
SO WHO WAS
found dead on the boat if it wasn’t Viggo?’

Jeanette has her suspicions, and gets her phone out again.

Detective Superintendent Gullberg of the Skåne police answers after seven long rings, and she explains the situation.

He immediately adopts a defensive attitude and does what a lot of people do when they feel threatened. He goes on the attack. ‘Are you questioning the autopsy?’ he says irritably. ‘Our medical officers are good.’

‘Have you got their report to hand?’

‘Yes,’ he mutters grouchily. ‘Give me a moment.’ She hears him rustling some papers before he returns. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Does it say anything about the man having cancer?’

‘No … Why should it?’

‘Because he had been treated for cancer.’

Gullberg falls silent. ‘Oh shit … It says here that he was in excellent health for his age. The physique of a fifty-year-old, apart from being slightly overweight –’

‘He was almost eighty.’

Gullberg clears his throat, and she realises that he has worked out that they might have made a mistake. ‘Autopsies are performed quickly after accidents,’ he says. ‘The lab in Malmö does what they’re told, but they aren’t infallible. And we had no reason to –’

‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to explain. Does it say anything else in their report?’

‘Now I come to look at it more closely, it mentions that some of the fillings in the dead man’s teeth were done in South-East Asia.’

Thailand, Jeanette thinks. Anders Wikström.

The police van with tinted windows pulls up behind them and the head of the response unit jumps out from the passenger seat. He slaps the side of the van hard and walks over to Jeanette as the back doors open and nine masked police officers get out in total silence. They divide themselves into three groups. Eight of them are armed with sub-machine guns, and the ninth has a bolt-action rifle.

The officer in charge is unmasked, and as he walks up he introduces himself and says they’re ready to go in. As a result of the evidence from the paint samples, Dennis Billing has agreed to authorise a search of Viggo Dürer’s villa at Hundudden. The new information they have received from Skåne and the fact that they’ve found what could be Dürer’s fingerprints in Ulrika Wendin’s apartment helped to convince him.

‘Is that really necessary?’ Jeanette asks, nodding towards the man with the rifle.

‘PSG-90. In case the operation demands a sniper,’ the officer in charge replies officiously.

‘Let’s just hope it doesn’t,’ Hurtig mutters.

‘OK, let’s go in.’ Jeanette turns and glances at Hurtig.

‘Just one question.’ The head of the unit clears his throat. ‘Well, this has all been a bit quick, so our advance information is somewhat sketchy. What’s the primary target, and what sort of resistance can we expect?’

Before Jeanette has time to answer, Hurtig steps forward. ‘We believe that objective number one, a young woman, could be in the building,’ he says. ‘The objective’s name is Ulrika Wendin, and we suspect that objective number two, the homeowner, has kidnapped objective number one and is holding her captive. Objective number two is an approximately eighty-year-old lawyer, and as far as resistance is concerned, we haven’t got a fucking clue.’

Jeanette gives Hurtig a shove. ‘Stop it,’ she hisses, then turns to the head of the unit. ‘I apologise for my colleague. He can be rather trying at times. But most of what he said is correct. We suspect that the owner of the house, a lawyer named Viggo Dürer, is holding Ulrika Wendin captive in there. Obviously he could be armed, but we don’t know.’

‘Good,’ the man says with a stiff smile. ‘Let’s do it,’ he says, and jogs back to his subordinates.

‘You need to lose that attitude.’ Jeanette goes and stands by the car and waits for the heavily armed officers to enter the house ahead of them. The officer in charge raises his right arm to get his men’s attention, then gives his orders. ‘Alpha to the front and the main entrance. Bravo will go in through the rear, and Charlie will secure the garage to the side of the house. Any questions?’

The masked officers don’t say a word.

‘OK, let’s go!’ he concludes, lowering his arm.

Jeanette hears Hurtig mutter
‘Jawohl, mein Führer’
to himself, but can’t be bothered to comment.

Everything happens very fast after that. The first group of three men force the gate with a heavy bolt cutter and move quickly up to the main entrance, where they take positions on either side of the door. The second group disappears out of sight round the left-hand side of the house, and the third heads towards the garage. Jeanette hears the sound of breaking glass and a cry telling anyone inside the house that it’s the police, and that they should lie down on the floor.

‘Ground floor secured!’ they hear from inside the house, and Hurtig comes to stand beside her. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It was a stupid thing to say. I actually like these guys, but sometimes I think they get a bit carried away with the militarism.’

‘I know what you mean,’ she says, touching his arm lightly. ‘The difference between them and the thugs can sometimes be hard to see.’

Hurtig nods.

‘First floor secured!’

‘Garage secured!’

Jeanette watches as the head of the unit emerges from the house and gives the signal that it’s OK for them to approach.

‘The house is empty, but it was alarmed,’ he says when Jeanette and Hurtig reach the steps. ‘One of the old sort, not connected to a security company, just designed to make a hell of a racket. Effective once upon a time, but not these days.’

‘Is everything under control otherwise?’

‘Yes. No girl on either the ground or first floors. The basement’s empty, but we’re checking for concealed spaces.’

The six masked men who had been inside the house come out onto the steps.

‘Nothing,’ one of them says. ‘You can go in now.’

First came nothing, then came nothing, and then came nothing, she thinks, remembering the lyrics to an old song by Kent as she goes through the door with Hurtig and the other police officers gather on the lawn.

They walk through the sparsely furnished hall into the living room. The house smells musty, and there’s a thin layer of dust like a dull skin covering all the furniture and ornaments. The walls are covered with paintings and old posters. Most of them have a medical theme. On one of the bookcases there’s a skull next to a stuffed bird, and the room looks to Jeanette like some sort of museum.

She goes over to the shelves and pulls out one of the books.
Forensic Medicine Textbook,
she reads. Published in 1994 by the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Uppsala University.

The kitchen isn’t quite as musty, and Jeanette detects the sharp smell of cleaning fluid.

‘Bleach,’ Hurtig says, sniffing the air.

Jeanette can’t see anything of immediate interest in the kitchen. She goes out into the hall and up the stairs to the first floor. In the background she can hear Hurtig going through the kitchen cupboards.

The bedroom is empty apart from a wardrobe and a large bed with no sheets or blankets. Just a bare, stained mattress. As Jeanette opens the wardrobe door Hurtig calls to her from downstairs, but before she goes down she looks at the neatly hung dresses, blouses and suits. A strange feeling washes over her as she sees the old-fashioned women’s underwear. Corsets and suspender belts made of nylon and other synthetic materials, and white underpants made of coarse linen.

In the kitchen Hurtig is searching through one of the drawers. He’s laid a number of different objects on the worktop beside him.

‘He has damn strange things in his cutlery drawer,’ he says, pointing at the row of tools.

Jeanette looks closer and sees a number of pairs of pliers, a small saw and several different sizes of tweezers. ‘What’s this?’ she says, holding up a wooden stick with a small hook at the end.

‘Weird, but so far not illegal,’ he says. ‘Come on, let’s take a look at the basement.’

The cellar smells of mould, and down there they find nothing but a box of half-rotten apples, two fishing rods and a pallet with eight bags of easy-mix concrete on it. Otherwise the four damp rooms are completely empty, and she can’t help wondering why it took six police officers almost ten minutes to work out that there were no hidden rooms.

It’s a disappointed Jeanette and an equally frustrated Hurtig who emerge onto the steps in front of the response unit and their commanding officer.

‘OK, just the garage left before we can go home,’ she says, and starts walking dejectedly towards the building next to the house.

One of the masked police officers comes up beside her and pulls his balaclava up to free his mouth. ‘The only thing we noticed once we’d forced the door was that the window was broken. Looks like someone broke it with the wrench we found on the ground outside.’

Rather shame-faced, Hurtig goes over to the officer who’s holding a sealed plastic bag containing the wrench. He says something, looks uncomfortable, then climbs up onto the concrete drain cover immediately behind him. Jeanette notes that the concrete looks new, and presumes that this was why those bags of cement were in the cellar.

She looks into the garage, but doesn’t even bother going inside. She already knows that the only things in there are a workbench and some empty shelves. Nothing else.

They walk back to the car. Jeanette is disappointed that they found nothing useful at all and have made no progress. But at the same time she’s relieved that they didn’t find Ulrika Wendin dead inside the house.

Hurtig gets in the driver’s seat, starts the car and pulls out onto the main road leading back to the city.

They drive the first few kilometres without speaking. Then Jeanette breaks the silence.

‘Did you say it was you who broke the window because you didn’t have a key? Or did you confess that you don’t know how to pick a lock?’

Hurtig grins. ‘No, I didn’t have to confess that I’m useless at picking locks. He said they got into the garage using a sledgehammer. It was impossible to get the door open because it had been bolted from the inside.’

‘Stop the car, for God’s sake!’ Her yell makes Hurtig slam on the brakes automatically, and the police van behind them blows its horn angrily, but stops as well.

‘Drive back, fast as you fucking can!’

Hurtig gives her a quizzical look, then turns the car round and puts his foot down, making the tyres smoke. Jeanette winds down the window and sticks out her arm, and the van does a quick U-turn when she gestures for it to follow them.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she mutters through clenched teeth.

DURING HER INTERNAL
journeys, when she’s in a sort of hibernation, she feels neither pain nor fear, and hopes to be able to take some of her new-found spiritual strength back to earth with her.

She makes another attempt at the states of America. To begin with she could do all but four of them, then she learned them all, but now she’s lost four or five again.

Columbia, she tries. Warner, Columbia and NLC.

No sound, even though she’s screaming inside. Her brain is going to wither as well, just like her body.

Warner isn’t a state, nor is it a Canadian province. She’s thinking of American film companies. Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema.

She tries tensing her muscles, but can’t feel anything at all. She has no body, yet it still hurts, and she thinks she must be moving because she imagines she can hear the sound of skin scraping against wood. A dry, rasping squeak. She can’t move her tongue either, and suspects she must be getting close to the end, that her body is on its way to dissolving into nothingness.

Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema.

She can see images from the film
Seven,
distributed by New Line Cinema.

She’s got it on her computer, and has seen it several times.

She remembers the seven deadly sins in the order that the murders occur, beginning with gluttony, where the killer forces a fat man to eat himself to death.

Then greed, where a businessman is drained of blood.

And then sloth …

She can’t get any further, because she suddenly realises what they’re going to do to her.

The man in the film who was punished for his sloth had been tied to a bed in a dark room, and she feels sick when she thinks of the way he looked.

His grey-brown skin had almost split away from his skull, his veins and bones seemed to have eaten their way half out of him, and he had looked like one of those bodies that have been found in peat or whatever it is.

A thousand years old, but with the expressions on their faces almost intact.

Is that what she looks like now?

Then she hears a scratching sound, followed by a metallic bang, so loud that it makes her ears pop.

The police are here, she thinks. They’re unlocking the door to let me out.

The light that falls into the room where Ulrika Wendin is tied down is so bright that it feels like the corneas of her eyes are catching fire.

THE DOOR OF
Viggo Dürer’s garage had been locked with a solid metal bolt from the inside. The garage was empty. There were no other doors, and just one small window that even a child couldn’t have got through.