More Bitter Than Death (16 page)

“Okay,” he says skeptically, turning around and leaving the room to get Tilda.

“Well, then I suppose we’ll get started,” Bush-in-the-Bush Carin says, leaving the room quietly.

Sonja thinks about what Roger told her before. He had discussed the interview with Carin beforehand, and she had described some of the difficulties involved in questioning a child. Explained how important it was for the child to feel safe, for the interviewer to ask open-ended, simple questions in language that a child with a limited vocabulary can understand. Carin had said that Tilda, who just turned five, probably only knew between a thousand and fifteen hundred words. Besides, children don’t develop what is called a declarative memory until the age of five or so. Before that children have a limited ability to remember abstract things. They can still remember what happened, particularly if they witnessed a traumatic event, but they have a hard time describing it. Children under the age of three are not routinely questioned at all since the value of their testimony would be minimal.

Tilda and Carin sit down across from one another at the table. Sonja hardly recognizes the room. The child interview specialist brought in decorative pillows and plants and some stacks of paper and books. Sonja assumes that the purpose was to create a warmer atmosphere, and it actually worked.

Tilda is sitting perfectly still. Her brown hair is pulled into a loose ponytail and her denim dress hangs like a sack on her skinny body. Her legs dangle in the air from the tall chair. Her feet are nowhere near the floor.

“Tilda, my name is Carin von Essen and I’m a police officer. Do you know what a police officer does?”

Tilda nods slowly but doesn’t respond.

“It’s my job to try and catch people who do things that are against the rules. People who fight or steal, for example. I would like to talk to you a little about what happened to your mom.”

Again Tilda nods slowly, as if she understands the gravity of the situation. Carin smiles faintly at her and continues.

“Great. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to ask you a few questions about what happened and then you’ll answer them. If you don’t know, then you say, ‘I don’t know.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Tilda speaks so quietly that it’s almost impossible to understand what she’s saying, and yet her voice makes the hairs on the back of Sonja’s neck stand up. There’s just something about crimes that involve children. After all Sonja’s years on the force, it’s almost the only thing that really gets to her anymore. There are things that children shouldn’t know, shouldn’t see. And more than once she has wished she could trade places with them.

Look at the pictures, answer the questions, point on the doll to where that nasty man touched you, show me which boy in the picture poked your little brother in the eye with the stick, tell us about the day your mother got run over by the train.

“So, for example, if I ask you, ‘What color is my cat?’ what would you say then?” Carin asks.

Tilda hesitates for a few seconds, fingering her dress, seeming to think about it.

“I don’t know?”

“Exactly. Because you’ve never met my cat, right?”

“No,” Tilda says, looking down at her knees.

“Good. Now you know how it will go. If I say something you don’t understand, then you should ask. Okay?”

“Yes,” Tilda replies, in that quivering voice.

“What happened to your mom, Tilda?”

Tilda is quiet for a while, hesitant, but then starts talking. And her voice is suddenly strong and clear. Not at all weak or tentative like before.

“The man killed Mama.”

“And where did the man come from, Tilda?”

“From the door.”

“From which door?”

“The door that goes out.”

“The front door?”

“Yes, he knocked on the door a ton, so Mama had to open it. You can’t knock on the door like that. The building people get mad.”

“And what happened then?”

“The man killed Mama.”

“Did you see it?”

Tilda nods seriously without answering the question.

“Can you tell us what he did?”

“He hit my mama.”

“How did he hit your mom?”

“He hit and kicked and kicked and kicked.”

A pause. Carin rubs her arms as if she were chilly. “And then what happened?”

“Mama fell down and a ton of blood came out and the rug got dirty. You’re not supposed to get the rug dirty, but it was dirty and he still didn’t stop yet, even though it was dirty and Mama fell down. And he just kicked and kicked and kicked. And he didn’t stop. Even though . . . Mama . . . even though . . . You can’t do that.”

Tilda’s voice is shrill now and her little fists are clenched hard against her kneecaps. Her legs have stopped swaying, her little body is stiff and unmoving. Her hair has fallen out of her ponytail and it hangs soft and thin over her skinny shoulders.

“Then what happened, Tilda?”

Carin’s voice is calm, almost stoic. Suddenly Tilda slides from her chair and stands in front of the table with her hands over her ears. She screams at the top of her lungs, “Stop it, stop it!”

Carin steps over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder, waits until she quiets down, takes the girl’s little hands in hers, and squats down so that her eyes are level with Tilda’s.

“Should we draw a little, you and me? Then we can go back to talking about your mom in a little while.”

Tilda nods. They sit down at the table again. Carin takes out crayons and paper.

“Should I draw my house?” Carin asks.

Tilda nods.

“Okay, it’s a really little house. Like this.” Carin draws something on the paper in sweeping strokes.

“Where’s the cat?” Tilda asks.

Carin laughs. “Ah, so you remember that I have a cat? Yeah, we can’t forget about Adolf.” Carin draws something small, then reaches for an orange crayon
and fills in the outline. “There, that’s what he looks like. And then there’s a tree. There’s only one tree, because the yard is really small. But it’s a good tree, because it’s got tons of apples every year. And you can climb the tree too, because it has really good climbing branches.”

“We don’t have a yard where Mama lives.” Tilda’s voice is calm again.

“No, well, not all buildings have yards, but maybe you have something else that’s good?”

“Our TV is huge. It hangs on the wall and it’s almost totally flat, like a pancake.”

“Wow, that sounds really nice. Do you remember what you were doing that night, before the knock on the door?” Carin asks.

Tilda looks down again, clenches her fists again, and squirms in her chair. She starts kicking her feet. “I . . . don’t know,” she says.

“Okay, that’s good. That’s what you’re supposed to say when you don’t know. I’d like you to try to think a little now about the guy who hit your mom. Did you see what he looked like?”

“I don’t know,” Tilda says.

“Had you met or seen that man before?”

Again Tilda writhes as if the question were uncomfortable to answer. “I don’t know.”

“Did the man say anything?” Carin asks.

“The man and Mama were screaming.”

“Do you remember what they said?” Carin asks.

Tilda hesitates. “They screamed a lot.”

“Could you hear what they said?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, that’s great, Tilda. You’re doing a great job. Did you recognize the man’s voice?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you think it was a man, not a woman or a girl?” Carin asks.

“He was . . . a magician.”

“How do you know he was a magician?”

Tilda sits there in silence again, serious, studying Carin.

“Why do you think he was a magician, Tilda?” Carin repeats.

“He took the coin.”

“What did he take?” Carin asks.

“The coin.”

A pause. “He took money?” Carin asks.

“Yes.”

Carin is surprised, quickly looking in their direction through the one-way mirror. “Was that before or after he hit your mom?” Carin asks.

“First he hit Mama, then he did that.”

“First he hit your mom, then he took money?” Carin says.

“Yes.”

Sonja sighs. She really hadn’t suspected robbery homicide. The violence was too brutal for that. But if that’s what it was, then that is really depressing—a single mother kicked to death in front of her own child because a junkie somewhere needed a quick fix. When it came right down to it, it was totally conceivable; it happened all the time.

Roger leans over to Sonja and whispers, “Not bad. Her bush is growing a little in my eyes.”

Even though she doesn’t want to, Sonja can’t help but smile, filled with an unreserved tenderness toward her hopeless, lazy, male-chauvinist colleague. She gives him a friendly nudge in his side and looks over at Tilda’s father, worried that he might find their kidding around inappropriate, but he isn’t paying attention to them. He is just staring through the pane of glass as if hypnotized, the sweat at his temple gathering into little beads.

A perfect Saturday.

A long walk along the shoreline, the sea chasing our feet.

Thick knit hats now, mittens, wool sweaters under our jackets. The sky is gray and heavy, like a slab of concrete, above us. Black birds circle over our heads, as if scouting out a potential meal.

Afterward we drink hot chocolate on my couch. The woodstove crackles in the corner and the radio is on. They’re talking about flooding, about how part of highway E18 just floated away like a child’s toy boat. It took two cars with it. Both drivers died. A female passenger survived by escaping through a broken windshield and climbing up onto the roof of a hot dog shop. She had also survived the tsunami in Thailand in 2004 and says, her voice quaking, that this was worse. Her husband, Rune, never made it up to the surface of the muddy water. After forty years of marriage and after beating both cancer and the tsunami, she lost the love of her life to a wave of muddy gruel along the E18.

I look at Markus, sitting there next to me in his jeans and hoodie on that old, worn couch. His face is as smooth as a child’s. His eyes, with those pale lashes, look vaguely worried. I wonder if I’ll ever let him get close enough to me to be as vulnerable as the woman on the radio.

“Are you okay?” he asks gently in his sing-songy northern accent and I prop my feet up on his knees. He massages the soles of my feet, contemplating me in silence.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say.

“I wish you didn’t have to deal with stuff like that at work.”

“Stuff like what?” I ask.

“Violence and all that crap. The kind of stuff I see day in and day out,” Markus says.

“What do you think I should be doing at work then? Therapy for arachnophobes or shopaholics? These women really need help. We’re making a contribution, Aina and I. And Vijay, my God, he has actually dedicated his life to this stuff.”

“But this guy seems more disturbed than average,” Markus says.

“Do you mean more disturbed than the average man or the average perpetrator of domestic violence?”

Markus pushes my feet off his knee, insulted, and says, “Nice, really nice. Honestly!”

I laugh, take a sip of hot chocolate, lean against him, kiss his soft mouth, let my tongue run along his lips. “Did I make you mad?” I ask.

He relaxes, puts his arms around my waist, and says, “Not mad, just worried about you.”

“I don’t want you to worry about me. I’m so over having people worry about me.”

“I know that, but this time maybe it’s justified. I talked to the woman in charge of the investigation into that grisly murder in Gustavsberg. That was obviously a totally heinous crime. The level of violence was . . . unjustifiably brutal. He had obviously . . . kicked her whole face off; it was, like, lying next to her. Do you understand? In front of her daughter and everything.”

Suddenly I feel uncomfortable. Take another big sip of my hot drink. “Did she see anything?” I ask.

“The little girl? I don’t know yet. They were going to question her yesterday, I think.”

“Vijay says you can’t question a child that young,” I say.

Markus shrugs. “I don’t actually know. I’m sure they’ll get a witness psychologist or child interview specialist to help.”