The Crow Girl (50 page)

That means comfort, and she can share the sickness with Solace.

She will also carry something else back to Sweden.

A seed that has been sown inside her.

JEANETTE SEES THAT
the lights aren’t on in the house and realises that Johan isn’t home yet. His weekend with his grandparents doesn’t seem to have made much difference. He’s just as reserved as before, and she’s at a complete loss. She doesn’t want to admit the problem to herself. Plenty of kids are troubled, but not her little boy.

He’s so fragile now that she suspects that the slightest misunderstanding might break him. He probably never imagined that she and Åke would split up. After all, they’d always been there for him.

Had it been her fault? Had she, like Billing believed, worked too hard and not devoted enough time to her family?

She thinks about Åke, who had taken the first opportunity to leave a grey, uneventful life with his wife and child out in the suburbs.

No, she thinks. It isn’t my fault. And we’re probably better off this way, even if it’s hard on Johan.

Once she’s inside the house and has turned the lights on, she goes into the kitchen and warms up the remains of the pea soup from last night. The wound in her head is starting to heal, and the stitches itch terribly.

She pours herself a glass of beer and opens the paper.

The first thing she sees is a picture of Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist, who has written an article about the lack of security in Sweden’s prisons.

Fucking idiot, she thinks, closing the paper and starting to eat.

Then the sound of the door opening. Johan is home.

She puts her spoon down and goes into the hall. He’s soaking wet from head to toe, and when he takes off his trainers she notices that his socks are so drenched that they squelch on the floor.

Don’t make a fuss, she thinks. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll deal with it. Have you eaten?’ she asks.

He nods wearily in response, takes off his socks, and quickly pads past her and goes into the bathroom.

After another ten minutes in the kitchen with her soup and the newspaper, she begins to wonder what he’s doing in there. No sounds from the shower, no sound at all, actually.

She knocks on the door. ‘Johan?’

He eventually says something, but so quietly that she can’t hear what he says.

‘Johan, can’t you open the door? I can’t hear you.’

After a few seconds the lock clicks, but he doesn’t open up.

For a couple of moments she just stands there staring at the door. A barrier between us, she thinks. As usual.

When she finally opens the door he’s sitting curled up on the lid of the toilet. She can see he’s freezing and pulls down a towel to wrap around him.

‘What was it you said?’ She sits down on the edge of the bath.

He takes a deep breath and she realises he’s been crying. ‘She’s weird,’ he says quietly.

‘Weird? Who is?’

‘Sofia.’ Johan looks away.

‘Sofia? What made you think of her?’

‘Nothing particular, but she got so weird,’ he goes on. ‘When we were up there on Free Fall she started screaming at me, calling me Martin … And then when the ride was over she just walked away. I tried to follow her but I guess I was following the wrong person. That’s the last thing I remember.’

She hugs him hard, then they both start to cry at the same time.

THE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON
sun is sinking behind the large turn-of-the-century villa, tucked away down by the water. A narrow gravel drive lined with maple trees leads down to the house and Sofia Zetterlund parks her car in the turning circle, switches off the engine and looks out through the windscreen. The sky is steel grey and the rain that has been pouring down has eased slightly.

So this is where the Lundström family lives?

A short distance away she can see a boathouse through the trees. There’s another building on the plot, and a swimming pool protected by a high fence. The house looks deserted, as if no one had ever moved into it. She gets out of the car, walks across the gravel towards the house, and as she walks up the broad stone steps to the front door the light in the hall goes on, the door opens and a short, slender woman wrapped in a dark blanket appears in the doorway.

‘Come in and lock the door behind you,’ Annette Lundström says.

Sofia shuts the door behind her and Annette Lundström sways through the hall and turns off to the left. There are stacks of big moving boxes everywhere.

Annette Lundström is forty years old, but looks closer to sixty. Her hair is a mess and she seems tired as she slumps onto a sofa covered with clothes.

‘Take a seat,’ she says in a low voice, gesturing towards an armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

The room is cold, and Sofia realises that the heating has been turned off already.

She considers the Lundström family’s situation. Arrest for incest, paedophilia and child pornography, followed by attempted suicide. The daughter is in the custody of social services.

Sofia looks at the woman in front of her. She had probably been beautiful once, but that was before.

‘Do you want coffee?’ Annette reaches for the half-full carafe on the table.

‘Yes, please, that would be good.’

‘You can get a cup from the box on the floor.’

Sofia bends over. In a box under the table there’s a jumble of badly packed crockery. She finds a chipped mug and lets Annette fill it for her.

The coffee is barely drinkable. Completely cold.

Sofia pretends it’s OK, takes a few sips and puts the mug down on the table.

‘Why did you want to see me?’

Annette coughs and pulls the blanket tighter around her.

‘As I told you on the phone … I want to talk about Karl and Linnea. And I want to plead with you.’

‘Plead?’

‘It’s like this …’ Annette’s eyes become sharper. ‘I know how forensic psychiatry works. Not even death negates your oath of confidentiality. So it’s no use asking you what you and Karl talked about. But there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about. He said something to me after your meeting, that you understood him. That you understood his … well, his problem.’

Sofia shudders. There’s a raw chill in the house.

‘I’ve never understood his problem,’ Annette goes on. ‘And now he’s dead, so I don’t have to protect him any more. But I don’t understand. I thought it only happened once. In Kristianstad, when Linnea was three. It was a mistake, and I know he told you about it. The fact that he watched those disgusting films is one thing, I might have been able to handle that. But not that he and Linnea … I mean, Linnea liked him. How could you understand his problem?’

Sofia feels Victoria’s presence. Annette Lundström irritates her.

I know you’re there, Victoria, Sofia thinks. But I’ll deal with this myself.

‘I’ve seen it before,’ she eventually says. ‘Plenty of times. But you’re probably drawing too many conclusions from what he said. I only met him a couple of times, and he was fairly unbalanced at the time. Linnea is more important now. How is she?’

There’s one big difference between Annette Lundström and Birgitta Bergman. Victoria’s mother was fat, and this woman is so thin she’s almost disappeared. Her skin has eaten its way into her bones, and soon there won’t be anything left.

She’ll just fade away and die.

But there’s something familiar about her. Sofia rarely forgets a face, and is suddenly sure she’s seen Annette Lundström before.

Her eyes are fixed again. ‘Well … they’ve taken her away from me, she’s in the Childhood and Adolescent Psychiatry unit at Danderyd. She hardly acknowledges me, and I’m not told anything. Can’t you ask to see her? You must have contacts?’

‘I can’t just walk in and ask to speak to her,’ Sofia says. ‘The only way I could see her is if she wants to, and I can’t honestly see how that would happen.’

‘I can talk to the people in the unit,’ Annette says.

Sofia sees that she’s serious.

‘There was something else …’ Annette goes on. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’ She pulls out some yellowing sheets of paper. ‘I’ve never understood these.’

She puts three drawings on the table.

All three are drawn in crayon and signed ‘Linnea’ in childish writing.

Linnea five years old, Linnea nine years old and Linnea ten years old.

Sofia picks up one of the drawings.

It’s by Linnea, aged five, but with the number revised, and it’s a picture of a blonde girl standing in the foreground next to a large dog. Out of the dog’s mouth hangs a huge tongue that Linnea had covered with dots. Taste buds, Sofia thinks. In the background there’s a big house, and something that looks like a little fountain. A long chain leads away from the dog, and Sofia notes how carefully the girl has drawn the links, which get smaller and smaller until they disappear behind a tree.

Linnea had written something next to the tree, but Sofia can’t read what it says.

From these characters an arrow points at the tree, behind which a man with a bent back and glasses is peering out with a smile.

In one of the windows of the house there’s a figure looking out on the garden. Long hair, a happy mouth and a sweet little nose. Although the rest of the drawing is painstakingly detailed, Linnea hasn’t given the figure any eyes.

Bearing in mind the picture Sofia has of the Lundström family, it isn’t hard to work out that the figure in the window is Annette Lundström.

Annette Lundström, who didn’t see. Who didn’t want to see.

Taking that as the starting point, the scene in the garden becomes more interesting.

What was Linnea trying to show. What didn’t Annette want to see?

A man with a bent back and glasses, and a dog with a large, prickly tongue?

Now she can see that it says
U1660
.

U1660
?

WE CYCLE AROUND
the world, we play in streets and squares.

We play anything that makes a noise, even our old bike
.

Inside the villa in Värmdö Victoria Bergman stands and looks at the fetish figures on the living-room wall.

Grisslinge is a prison.

She doesn’t know what to do with all the dead hours of the day. Time runs through her like an irregular river.

Some days she doesn’t remember waking up. Some she doesn’t remember going to sleep. Some days are just gone.

Other days she reads her psychology books, takes long walks, goes down to the water by the beach, or goes down Mormors väg to Skärgårdsvägen, main road number 222, almost perfectly straight towards the Värmdö road, where she turns at the roundabout and walks back. The walks help her think, and the cold air against her cheeks reminds her that she has a boundary.

She isn’t the whole world.

She goes over and takes down the face mask, which looks like Solace in Sierra Leone, and puts it in front of her face. It smells strongly of wood, almost like perfume.

Inside the mask is a promise of another life, somewhere else, one Victoria knows she can never have. She is shackled to him.

She can hardly see through the small holes in the mask. She can hear her own breathing, feels its warmth bounce back and settle like a moist film over her cheeks. Outside in the hall she stops in front of the mirror. The mask makes her head look smaller. As if she were a seventeen-year-old with a ten-year-old’s face.

‘Solace,’ Victoria says. ‘Solace Manuti. Now we’re twins, you and I.’

Then the front door opens. He’s returned from work.

Victoria takes the mask off at once and runs back into the living room. She knows she’s not allowed to touch his things.

‘What are you doing?’ He sounds cross.

‘Nothing,’ she replies, hanging the mask back in its place. She hears the shoe rack creak and the wooden hangers rattle against one another. Then his footsteps in the hall. She sits down on the sofa and grabs a newspaper from the table.

He comes into the room. ‘Were you talking to someone?’ He looks around the room before sitting down in the armchair next to the sofa.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks again.

Victoria folds her arms and stares at him. She knows that makes him nervous. She enjoys watching the panic grow inside him, watching him nervously pat the arms of the chair with his hands, shifting position again and again, unable to utter a word.

But when she’s sat there silent for a while she feels anxiety building. She notices that his breathing is getting faster. It looks like his face is giving up. It loses colour and collapses.

‘What are we going to do with you, Victoria?’ he says forlornly, hiding his face in his hands. ‘If the psychologist can’t sort you out soon, I don’t know what we’re going to do.’ He sighs.

She doesn’t answer.

She sees Solace standing there in silence, watching them.

They resemble each other, she and Solace.

‘Can you go down and turn the sauna on,’ he says firmly as he gets up. ‘Mum’s on her way, so we’ll soon be ready to eat.’

Victoria thinks that there ought to be some salvation. An arm reaching in from an unexpected direction and grabbing her, pulling her away from there. Or that her legs were strong enough to take her far away. But she’s forgotten how to go about leaving, forgotten how to create a goal.

After dinner she hears Mum clattering around in the kitchen. Forever sweeping, dusting and clearing things away, all to no avail. However much she cleans and washes up, everything always looks exactly the same.

Victoria knows that it’s all a sort of safe bubble that Mum can creep into in order to avoid seeing what’s going on around her, and the pots and pans always make extra noise when Bengt is home.

She goes downstairs to the basement and sees that Mum has once again managed to miss cleaning the gaps between the steps where the needles from the Christmas tree are still stuck.