The Crow Girl (104 page)

‘Stop it …’ Martin backed away a few steps.

‘Maybe we should help you get in?’ the biggest one said.

‘Maybe,’ one of the others said.

‘Definitely,’ the third one joined in.

Please, Victoria, he thought. Come back.

Why was she taking so long? Why did she have to go so far?

Sometimes when Martin got really scared his body went all stiff. It was like it decided to stand as still as it could, like a statue, and that would help him avoid whatever the horrid thing was.

Martin’s body was completely stiff and hard when they picked him up, holding him between them, then swung him back and forth like a hammock between two trees.

He looked up at the sky as they swung him, and just as the three boys let go a little star twinkled.

THE LIGHT FROM
the bulb in the empty room is hurting her eyes.

She’s lying naked on a cold, grey concrete floor, and her hands are still tied behind her back, and there’s still tape over her mouth. Her legs are tied at the ankles as well.

A large ventilation unit rumbles intermittently. Otherwise the room is just grey concrete, apart from the door, which is made of shiny metal.

She’s curled up in a foetal position with her head to one side, and about a metre away stands a man with a hammer drill in his hand.

Heavy black boots, worn jeans and a naked, sweaty upper body with a swollen stomach that bulges over the waist of his trousers.

She can’t take her eyes off the hammer drill. It’s huge, and the drill bit is very thick.

She can’t bear to look into the man’s empty eyes, and continues staring at the drill. She sees that the cord is attached to the end of an extension lead just inside the door. The muscles in the man’s coarse fist tense, and the drill bit starts to spin.

The sound of the machine gets louder, then he eases up and the machine goes quiet. She shuts her eyes, hears his heavy footsteps leaving the room, and doesn’t open them again until she hears him come back.

He’s put a wooden stool down on the concrete floor and has climbed up onto it. Next to the stool is an almost empty bottle of vodka.

The drill starts up again, and the air is filled with dry concrete dust.

She has no idea what he’s doing, and just wants to scream, but the tape over her mouth is stopping her and all she can manage instead is a little groan, a bubble of air from her stomach, and she starts to worry that she might be sick.

The concrete dust tickles her nose, and she feels like she’s going to sneeze.

She looks on in silence as he reaches for the bottle of vodka and takes a deep swig. Close up, she can see that his eyes are bloodshot, and she realises that the dead look on his face is because he’s drunk.

His fat, naked torso is dirty and on his shoulders and arms there are a number of tattoos. There’s a snake coiled around his right arm, and on the other barbed wire loops around women’s heads.
‘Eto konets
,
devotchka,’
he says, stroking her cheek.

She shuts her eyes and feels his thick fingers fumble over her face before they pull the tape from her mouth with a sharp tug. It hurts badly, but she swallows her scream.

She can feel a hot trickle of blood running over her lips, and realises that the strong tape has torn her skin.

‘Devotchka …’
he mutters quietly while she coughs, and she feels him stroke her hair. She can hardly speak a word of Russian, but she knows that word.
Devotchka
means ‘little girl’, she learned that from watching
A Clockwork Orange,
when she wanted to know what the young women who were raped in the film were being called.

‘You drink,’ he says, and she hears the glass bottle scraping on the floor.

Is he going to rape her? And what’s he going to do with that drill apart from make a hole in the ceiling?

She slowly shakes her head, but his fingers grab hold of her chin and force her to open her mouth. His hands smell of machine oil.

When she feels the bottle hit her teeth she looks up, and as the alcohol stings the wounds around her mouth she can see that he’s attached a hook to the ceiling. And he seems to be holding something that looks like a thin nylon rope in the same hand as the bottle of vodka.

A noose, she thinks. He’s going to hang me.

‘Drink,
devotchka
… Drink!’ His voice is soft, almost friendly.

Like hell I will. Drink your fucking vodka yourself.

She peeps through her eyelashes and watches as he drinks more from the bottle, then shakes his head. He lifts her head and puts the noose around her neck. Then he lets out a short laugh and pats her lightly on the cheek. ‘Hey, me Rodya …’ He grins and points at himself. ‘And you?’

‘Rodya … Go fuck yourself,’ she says. The first words she’s spoken since they locked her up.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I fuck you.’

He begins to tighten the noose around her neck. He pulls it so tight that it forces her larynx down. She groans and the urge to vomit returns.

He grabs hold of her body and rolls her over onto her side. He takes something out of his pocket, and when he grabs her wrists and the pressure on them eases she realises that it’s a knife, and that he’s freed her hands.

‘I fuck you dead.
Eto konets,
devotchka.
’

He pulls her up by the rope, which tightens even more, and her vision starts to flicker as he leans her back against the concrete wall.

Soon she’ll be dead, and she doesn’t want that.

She wants to live.

If she’s allowed to live, she’ll never go back to the life she lived before. She’ll realise her dreams. Not hide away or be scared of failure, and she’ll show everyone that she deserves to be taken seriously.

But now she’s going to die.

She thinks about everything she didn’t know she knew. The coastline of Europe and the fifty states of America. She knows all their names now, they come to her all at once, and the four she had trouble remembering were Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey, and that’s because they’re so small on her world map. She feels her arm fall slack to the floor as the cord burns into her neck.

THE SWEDISH POLICE
have access to six helicopters, model EC135, manufactured by Messerschmitt, best known for supplying the Luftwaffe with fighter planes during World War II.

Jeanette Kihlberg and Jens Hurtig are standing on the roof of police headquarters waiting to be picked up. Jeanette demanded that the prosecutor organise a helicopter so that they can get to the north of Norrland as fast as possible – and that they should have backup from the response unit. Prosecutor von Kwist had agreed to her demands.

Jeanette goes over to the edge of the roof and looks out across the Stockholm night.

Hurtig comes and stands next to her, and they look at the view together in silence.

‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,’ Hurtig suddenly proclaims solemnly.

‘How do you mean?’ Jeanette asks, looking at her colleague.

‘Hemingway,’ he explains. ‘From
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. I’ve always liked that line.’

‘It’s nice,’ she says back, smiling.

‘After everything I’ve seen today, I can only agree with the second part,’ he says, then turns and walks away.

Jeanette watches him go, and wonders what he’s thinking about. Probably the same thing she is, Viggo Dürer’s subterranean chamber of horrors.

How sick can a person get? she wonders. And what made him like that?

God, it’s big, Jeanette thinks as the helicopter approaches. It looks like a small passenger plane, with two engines on the roof, and she realises that it won’t be able to land just anywhere, as she had imagined. Even though it’s more than fifteen metres away from them, they crouch down instinctively when the helicopter lands on the roof. They hurry over, under the shrieking rotor blades, and are met at the door by the first pilot and the head of the response unit.

‘Jump in!’ the unit head shouts. ‘We can do the safety procedures once we’re in the air.’

In total there are eleven people sitting on long benches running along the sides of the helicopter. Full combat gear, and an almost devout atmosphere if you didn’t count Hurtig’s persistent questions. ‘Seven hundred and fifty kilometres, as the crow flies,’ he says. ‘How long’s that going to take? Three hours?’

‘No, longer than that,’ the unit head says. ‘We haven’t got the weather or the wind in our favour. Say four hours. We’ll be there sometime around half past four, so you should probably try to get some sleep.’

HE’S TRAVELLED UNDER
a false name many times before. But this time it’s different.

This time the name on his travel documents is a woman’s. His real name.

Gilah Berkowitz.

There hadn’t been any problems at the Swedish or Latvian border controls, and the Ukrainian customs officers aren’t usually interested when a Swedish passport is presented. Real or fake, it doesn’t matter, all they see are the stars of the EU logo.

Before she goes out to the waiting car she buys a pack of cigarettes from a tobacco seller with wrinkled hands whose dark blue veins stand out from the skin.

Her chest feels tight, a painful throbbing. Then the cough again. A dry, sharp cough that tastes of dust.
‘Konets,’
she mutters. It will soon be over. The cancer has spread and she knows that there’s nothing more that can be done.

The thickset man in the driver’s seat starts the car and pulls out of the car park. To the driver and the estate agent, Gilah Berkowitz is just an upper-class Swedish-Ukrainian lady interested in icons. She’s paying seventy euros a day for a five-room apartment on Michailovska, close to Maidan Square, and the price includes the use of a four-wheel-drive SUV, the sort of vehicle that never gets stopped by the local police. Not even if you drive the wrong way down a one-way street right in front of their eyes.

She knows how things work here. Everything works. As long as you’ve got money.

People will do anything to make a living, and the situation is particularly favourable right now, since the country has been hit hard by the financial crisis. The problems in Western Europe are nothing in comparison. Here you can find your salary cut by thirty per cent from one day to the next.

As the car leaves the airport she thinks about what she’s seen over the years on the streets of this country. A hotbed of economic creativity that never ceases to amaze her. Almost ten years ago she tested the hypothesis that a person in dire straits would do whatever they were told and not question their orders, as long as the reward was big enough.

The subject of the experiment was a young, single woman who already had two jobs but still had trouble making ends meet. She had contacted the woman and offered her barely two euros an hour to stand at a particular street crossing every morning and count the number of children who went past without an adult accompanying them.

The first week she had gone to check that the woman was actually there at the allotted time, which she was, without fail. Then she did spot checks, and the woman was always there with her black notebook, even if there was heavy rain or snow.

After testing the hypothesis that hopelessness was for sale, she had applied it to people whose consciences were blacker and whose desperation was greater. It had worked satisfactorily every time.

She looked thoughtfully out of the car window. Her contact in Kiev is no exception. His name is Nikolai Tymoschuk. Kolya. A desperate person who knows that money is the only language that doesn’t lie.

As they head towards the city, she gets her mobile phone from her bag and calls Kolya’s number. The trust between them is based on their mutual conviction that the financial rewards balance the risks. Or, as she prefers to put it: the rewards are so generous that the risks are always of subordinate interest.

The conversation lasts barely ten seconds, because Kolya knows exactly what preparations he needs to make for the following day. He doesn’t have any questions.

When the car pulls up outside the apartment she tells the driver that she won’t need him again. A couple of crumpled notes are exchanged, and they shake hands.

She unlocks the door to the apartment, and exhaustion finally catches up with her. She’s anticipating another attack of dizziness and puts her hand to her heart before the pain starts.

Her face contorts against the cramps, her eyes flare, and she feels several of her false nails break as she clutches her chest.

A minute later the attack passes and she goes into the living room and puts her case down on the sofa. It smells musty, like inside a person, and as she unpacks she lights one of the strong Woodbines she bought at the airport from the woman with the veiny hands. She smokes out the stuffy smell of whoever was staying there before her.

Five minutes later she’s standing by the open living-room window looking down on the narrow, potholed and winding Michailovska three floors below.

She pulls the curtain aside and peers up between the rooftops. The cloud-free night sky is high and cold. Autumns are short here, and the smell of winter is already in the air.

So this is the end, she thinks. Back where it all started.

She can hardly remember the names of the places here, but she remembers Thorildsplan, Danvikstull and Svartsjölandet. She can still recall the taste of the last boy. The slippery taste of rapeseed oil.

And before them the children who haven’t been found yet. Möja, Ingarö, the Norrtälje channel, the forests of Tyresta.

There were girls as well. Buried in the woods on Färingsö, at the bottom of Malmsjön, in a reedbed at Dyviksudd. All in all, more than fifty children.

Most of them from Ukraine, but some from Belarus and Moldova.

She had learned to be a man. A dead Danish soldier and some male hormones had assisted the transformation that had begun when she left her father and brothers.