The Crow Girl (13 page)

‘You often mention God. Would you like to tell me more about your faith?’

He shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows quizzically.

‘My faith?’

‘Yes.’

Another sigh. He sounded resigned when he went on. ‘I believe in a divine truth. A God who exists beyond our understanding. A God who was close to man at the beginning of time, but whose voice within us has faded away over the centuries. The more God has been institutionalised by human inventions like churches and the priesthood, the less remains of what was there at the start.’

‘And what was there at the start?’

‘Gnosis. Purity and wisdom. I used to think that God existed in Linnea when she was little, and … I thought I’d found Him. I don’t know, I was probably wrong. A child today is less pure at birth. It’s already been contaminated in the womb by the noise of the world outside. A stupid chatter of human lies and petty distractions, meaningless words and thoughts about material concerns …’

They sat in silence for a moment as Sofia reflected on what he had said.

She wondered if Karl Lundström’s religious thoughts might somehow explain why he had abused his daughter, and felt that she was going to have to approach the core of what the conversation was about.

‘When did you first subject Linnea to sexual abuse?’

His answer came without reflection.

‘When? Well … she was three. I ought to have waited another year or so, but it was just too … It just happened, I suppose.’

‘Tell me how you felt that first time. And tell me how you look back on that occasion now.’

‘Well … I don’t know. It’s difficult.’ Lundström squirmed in his chair and made several attempts to start talking. ‘It was … well, like I said, it just happened,’ he eventually said. ‘It wasn’t actually a good occasion because we were living in a house in Kristianstad at the time. In the centre of town, everyone could see what went on there.’

He paused and seemed to think.

‘I was giving her a wash out in the garden. She had a paddling pool and I asked her if I could get in as well, and she said yes. The water was a bit cold, so I fixed up the hose to add some hot water. It had one of those old, rounded metal spouts on the end. It had been in the sun all day and was nice and warm to the touch. Then she said it looked like a willy …’

He looked embarrassed. Sofia nodded to him to go on.

‘Then I realised that she was thinking of mine. Well, I don’t know …’

‘And how did you feel?’

‘I, I just felt sort of giddy … I had the taste of iron in my mouth, a bit like blood. Maybe it comes from the heart? That’s where all the blood comes from.’ He fell silent.

‘So you stuck the end of the hose inside her, and you don’t think you did anything wrong?’ Sofia was feeling sick, and was having difficulty suppressing her revulsion.

Karl Lundström looked weary, and didn’t answer.

She decided to go on. ‘You said before that you thought you’d found God in Linnea. Did that have anything to do with what happened in Kristianstad? With your ideas about right and wrong?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘You don’t understand …’

Then he looked Sofia straight in the eye and carefully explained his reasoning.

‘Our society is based on a moral construct … Why isn’t mankind perfect if it’s a reflection of God?’

He thrust his arm out and answered his own question.

‘Because God isn’t the one who wrote the Bible, people did … The true God is beyond feelings about right and wrong, beyond the Bible …’

Sofia realised that he was likely to carry on a circular argument on the issue of right and wrong.

Perhaps she’d asked the wrong question to start with?

‘The Old Testament God is unpredictable and jealous because He’s basically a human being. There’s an original truth about the nature of humanity that the Bible’s God knows nothing about.’

She saw that their time was almost up, and let him go on.

‘Gnosis. Truth and wisdom. You ought to know that, if you’re called Sofia. It’s Greek, it means wisdom. In Gnosticism, Sofia is the female emanation who is responsible for the Fall.’

Once Lundström had been collected and driven back to the cells, Sofia remained seated, deep in thought. She couldn’t stop thinking about Lundström’s daughter, Linnea. Only just into her teens, but already so badly damaged that it would affect her for the rest of her life. What would happen to her? Would Linnea herself, like Tyra Mäkelä, become an abuser? How much can a human being withstand before they break and turn into a monster?

Sofia leafed through her papers, trying to find any facts about the daughter. All that was there were scant details of the girl’s schooling. She was in her first year at boarding school in Sigtuna. Good grades. And very good at sports. School champion at 800 metres.

A girl who can outrun most people, Sofia thought.

THE OLD MAN
could have been anyone, she’s never seen him before. Yet he evidently thinks it’s OK to comment on how she’s dressed. As for her, Crow Girl thinks his pea coat looks all right, so it’s perfectly justifiable to spit in his face instead
.

On the western hill in Sigtuna stand the ten student blocks that belong to the boarding school. The school, whose previous pupils have included King Karl XVI Gustaf, Olof Palme and the Wallenberg cousins, Peter and Marcus, positively drips tradition.

The grand yellow main building is impregnable against scandal for the same reason.

The first thing Victoria Bergman will have to learn is that everything that happens here stays here, but she’s already very familiar with that particular rule. She’s lived the whole of her childhood in a bubble of mute terror. That’s her clearest memory, much clearer than any individual recollection.

Compared to that, the closed ranks at Sigtuna are nothing.

As soon as she steps out of the car she feels a liberation that she hasn’t felt since she was on her own in Dala-Floda. Immediately she feels she can breathe. She knows she’ll be able to stop listening for footsteps outside the bedroom door.

At reception she is introduced to the two girls with whom she’ll be sharing a room for the coming term.

Their names are Hannah and Jessica. They’re from the Stockholm region as well, and she gets the impression that they’re quiet and orderly, not to say boring. They’re keen to tell her that their parents have senior positions in the Stockholm court system, and suggest that it’s already been decided that they will follow in their parents’ footsteps and train as lawyers.

Victoria looks into their naive blue eyes and realises that they could never be a threat to her.

They’re too weak.

She sees them as two passive dolls who always let other people think and plan things for them. They’re like shadows of people. Scarcely interested in anything. It’s almost impossible to pin them down at all.

During the first week Victoria realises that some of the girls in the top year are planning something. She picks up amused glances across the dinner tables, exaggerated politeness, and a constant tendency to want to be near her and the other new pupils. All of this makes her suspicious.

Justifiably so, as it turns out.

From careful observation of their glances and movements, Victoria soon works out who the group’s informal leader is. Her name is Fredrika Grünewald, a tall, dark-haired girl. Victoria thinks that Fredrika’s long face combined with her large front teeth make her look like a horse.

During one lunch break Victoria makes her move.

She sees Fredrika go into the toilets and discreetly follows her in.

‘I know all about the initiation,’ she lies right in the face of a surprised Fredrika. ‘There’s no way I’m going to agree to it.’ She folds her arms over her chest and tilts her head nonchalantly. ‘Not without a fight, that is.’

Fredrika is clearly impressed by Victoria’s cockiness and self-assured style. They each smoke a sneaky cigarette during the ensuing conspiratorial conversation, as Victoria presents a plan that she says will raise the bar for all forthcoming initiation rites.

There’s no question that it will cause a scandal, and Fredrika Grünewald is particularly taken by Victoria’s dramatic vision of what the evening papers would say:
SCANDAL AT KING’S SCHOOL! YOUNG GIRLS HUMILIATED IN RITUAL
.

During the following week she gets a bit closer to her room-mates, Hannah and Jessica. She lures them into revealing their secrets, and in a short space of time manages to make them her friends.

‘Take a look at this,’ she says.

Hannah and Jessica stare wide-eyed at the three bottles of Aurora wine that Victoria has managed to smuggle in with her.

‘Who’d like to share some?’

Hannah and Jessica both laugh uncertainly and exchange anxious glances with each other before eagerly nodding their assent.

Victoria serves the girls large glasses, convinced that they haven’t got a clue what their tolerance levels are.

They drink quickly and curiously, talking loudly.

The initial giggling is soon replaced by slurring and tiredness. By two o’clock the bottles are empty. Hannah has already fallen asleep on the floor, and, with a great deal of effort, Jessica manages to get to her bed, where she promptly loses consciousness.

Victoria has drunk just a couple of sips, and goes to bed tingling with anticipation.

She lies there awake, waiting.

As agreed, the older girls show up at four o’clock in the morning. Hannah and Jessica wake up as they are being carried through the corridor, down the stairs and across the yard towards the tool shed next to the caretaker’s house, but are so drowsy they can’t put up any resistance.

Inside the shed the girls get changed and put on pink capes and pig masks. They’ve made the masks themselves out of plastic cups and pink cloth that they’ve cut eyeholes in. They’ve drawn on grinning mouths with a black marker, and the nostrils in the snout are marked by two big black dots.

The cups are full of shredded aluminium foil, and they fasten the masks around their heads with rubber bands. Once they’ve changed, one of the girls produces a video camera, and another one begins to speak. The sound that emerges from her jutting snout is more like a rustling, metallic hiss than real words.

Victoria sees one of the older girls leave the shed.

‘Tie them up,’ another one hisses.

The masked girls throw themselves on Hannah, Jessica and Victoria, putting each of them on a chair, tying their arms behind them and blindfolding them.

Victoria leans back contentedly, and hears the girl who left the shed return.

Victoria is taken aback by the smell of what the girl brings in with her.

Later that morning Victoria is trying to scrub the smell from her skin, but it seems to be ingrained.

It had been worse than she could have imagined.

At dawn she picks the lock to Fredrika’s room and when the girl wakes up Victoria is sitting astride her.

‘Give me the tape,’ she hisses quietly so as not to wake Fredrika’s room-mates, while Fredrika tries to defend herself.

Victoria has a firm grip on her hands.

‘No way,’ Fredrika says, but Victoria can hear how frightened she is.

‘You seem to be forgetting that I know who you are. I’m the only person who knows who was behind those masks. Do you really want Daddy to know what you did to us?’

Fredrika realises that she has no choice.

Victoria goes upstairs to the media room and makes two copies of the tape. She’s going to drop one of them in the postbox at the bus station, addressed to herself out in Värmdö. She’s planning to keep the other copy in reserve to send to the papers in case they ever try anything with her again.

FOR THE SECOND
time in two weeks, Jeanette Kihlberg was having to investigate the murder of a young boy.

Hurtig had called that morning, and she had driven straight out to Svartsjölandet to lead the investigation. The body had been found by an elderly couple who were out exercising.

Unlike the boy at Thorildsplan, this time they had a good idea of the boy’s identity. His name was Yuri Krylov, a Belarussian boy who had been reported missing in early March when he disappeared from an immigration centre outside Upplands Väsby. According to the migration board he had no relatives, either in Sweden or back home.

Jeanette walked down to the jetty where the boy’s body lay. The stench caught in her nose. After a long period in the water, his body fat had transformed into a rancid, stinking, almost putty-like consistency. She knew the body had been attacked by flies after just a few hours in the water, and there were yellowish-red beads around the corners of his eyes, nose and mouth. Fly eggs that had hatched into larvae after a few days, so-called corpse maggots. The skin of the boy’s hands and feet had absorbed so much water that it had come loose and looked like gloves and socks.

‘Damn it’ was all she managed to say, before leaving the jetty and walking over to Ivo Andrić.

‘Can you tell me what you’ve got so far?’ she asked, even though she knew that he wouldn’t be able to give her all the relevant information until after the post-mortem examination.

The prosecutor, von Kwist, had that morning consented to a detailed forensic post-mortem in the Yuri Krylov case, the most elaborate type of post-mortem conducted in Sweden, reserved for the most serious crimes.

Ivo Andrić scratched his head. ‘Bodies left lying in water assume a characteristic pose, with their head, arms and legs hanging down and their back raised. That means that the head decays most rapidly, because of the amount of blood that gathers there.’

Jeanette nodded.

‘And when I pressed the ribcage, I discovered that there wasn’t enough water in the lungs to indicate that he’d drowned, which –’

‘– means he was already dead when he was put into the water,’ Jeanette concluded.

Ivo Andrić smiled. ‘And it isn’t unusual for bodies that have decayed in water to show signs of attack from fish. As you must have noticed, that’s what’s happened in this instance. The boy’s eyes have been partially eaten. And his face has large haematomas around the edges of the jaw and chin.’