The Crow Girl (76 page)

Gilah missed her the way she was before the sickness. When she used to let Gilah sit in her lap and drink warm milk from a glass bottle. When she thought up funny games. When she and Father would kiss and cuddle and were happy. When she tucked Gilah in and read from the Torah.

The last bit of chicken tasted best of all, and Gilah realised that was because there was no more to eat. Never again would she taste a chicken as good as Father’s.

Twelve years later Gilah Berkowitz is travelling through a disintegrating Germany. She can still taste the yellow flavour of her father’s chicken.

The white bus with red crosses painted on its sides was no guarantee of free passage, because there were no longer any international rules. A red cross on the white roof of a van was an easy target for British aircraft, who had complete control of the skies. But there were no problems at German roadblocks, because the convoy was being escorted by the Gestapo.

Gilah was stronger than most of her fellow prisoners, and one of the few that were still conscious.

When they left Dachau there had been forty-four men, forty-five in total including her. At least four were dead and several more were well on the way. They were all suffering from boils, infected wounds and chronic diarrhoea, and many more would die unless the store of essential supplies was replenished soon.

She too was in a very bad way. Four large carbuncles on her neck, her stomach a terrible mess, and the infection she had had in her crotch for the past couple of weeks was worrying her. She had ruptured veins on the inside of her thighs, as if she had blood poisoning, but she couldn’t get treatment here on the bus because her genitals weren’t the same as everyone else’s.

No one must know, and the only person who did know probably wouldn’t survive the war.

The reason her secret had remained intact during her time in the camp was that one of the guard commanders had taken a liking to her from the start. Or a liking to him, depending on how you looked at it. The fat guard commander had a taste for hermaphrodites, or
Ohrwürmer
, earwigs, as he called them, and he had leaped at the chance to acquire his very own earwig in exchange for a bit of protection and some food every now and then.

It was the fat man who had given her those injuries in her crotch, but in spite of her shame she had never tried to escape from the camp. Now, though, when people were saying she was going to be free, she was prepared to make an attempt to escape. Freedom wasn’t something you were given, it was something you chose for yourself.

Something you took.

In her pocket Gilah Berkowitz had a document that confirmed she was a Danish citizen and had the right to receive care at the Neuengamme Camp near Hamburg, and then transportation to a quarantine centre in Denmark. But for her the truth had been a relative concept for so long that she no longer believed in anything. Nothing was falser than the truth.

In her pocket she also had the thumbscrew, a small wooden vice that she had been given by the guard commander to help distract her from pain. It had helped against headaches and stomach cramps, and now it helped her with the churning feeling in her crotch. She put the vice on her thumb and tightened it. One turn, then another, as she looked around inside the bus.

The stench and angst were the same as in Dachau.

Gilah closed her eyes and tried to think of freedom, but it was as if it had never existed, and would never exist. There was no before or after Dachau. The memories were there, but they didn’t feel like her own.

She had arrived at Lemberg in western Ukraine two years ago, thirteen years old, but with the body of a twenty-year-old man. She had stolen a suitcase from a German military bus, been captured by the Gestapo, and became one of the thousands of Nacht und Nebel detainees who were taken to the extermination camps.

The Germans hadn’t examined her when she arrived, just threw her a card and some work clothes. There was no need for a medical examination, she was healthy and strong.

She had liked the forced labour, whether it was digging ditches or putting together machine parts. To begin with her body had got stronger and she had enjoyed watching her fellow prisoners give way, one after the other. She had been tougher than all the adult men in the camp.

It became harder towards the end, but she had endured until the white buses arrived.

Only Scandinavian citizens were being collected, and when the last of the Danish names had been called out Gilah had raised her hand in the air.

They had dressed her in a grey coat and marked it with a white cross to indicate that she was a free person.

SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS
walking along Renstiernas gata and looks up at the rock face to her right. Located in a cavern blasted out of the rock, thirty metres below Sofia Church, is the biggest server farm in Sweden. The steam lies like a white cloud across the street, and the autumn evening’s chilly gusts of wind keep blowing it against the jagged rocks.

Excess heat. As if things are boiling away down there.

She knows that the underground transformers and generators are designed to ensure that all the digitised information belonging to Swedish authorities would survive a disaster. And among them are the confidential files about her. About Victoria Bergman.

She passes through the thick, damp cloud, and for a brief moment she can’t see anything.

Soon she’s standing outside the front door of her building. She takes a quick look at the time. Quarter past ten, which means that her walk has lasted about four and a half hours.

She doesn’t remember which streets and places she’s been to; she can hardly remember what she was thinking about during the walk. It’s like trying to remember a dream.

I’m walking in my sleep, she thinks as she taps in the door code.

She climbs the stairs, and the sharp echo from the heels of her boots wakes her up. She shakes the rain from her coat, adjusts her damp blouse, and when she finally puts the key in the lock she has no recollection of the long walk at all.

Sofia Zetterlund remembers that she had been sitting in her office, and had imagined Södermalm as a labyrinth, with the door to her practice on St Paulsgatan as its entrance, and the door to her apartment in Vita bergen as the exit.

She doesn’t remember saying goodbye to the receptionist, Ann-Britt, and leaving the practice quarter of an hour later.

Nor does she remember the man she met in the bar of the Clarion Hotel at Skanstull, whose room she went back to; nor the fact that he was surprised that she didn’t want payment. She doesn’t remember stumbling out of the hotel lobby, eastward along Ringvägen, then down Katarina Bangata to Norra Hammarbyhamnen to stare at the water, the barges and warehouses lining the quay opposite, or walking back up to Ringvägen where it curves north and becomes Renstiernas gata and passes below the steep rock faces of Vita bergen.

And she doesn’t remember finding her way home, to the exit from the labyrinth.

The labyrinth isn’t Södermalm, it’s the brain of a sleepwalker, with its canals, its system of nerves and signals, its innumerable bends and intersections and dead ends. A walk through streets at dusk, in a sleepwalker’s dream.

The key clicks in the lock; she turns it twice to the right and opens the door.

She’s found her way out of the labyrinth.

Sofia looks at the time, and all she wants to do now is sleep.

She takes off her outdoor clothes and goes into the living room. On the table are piles of papers, files and books. The accumulated evidence of her efforts to help Jeanette compile a perpetrator profile for the murders of the immigrant boys.

A silly idea, she thinks, idly picking up a few of the documents. It hadn’t led anywhere. They had ended up with a kiss, and Jeanette hadn’t mentioned it since that night out in Gamla Enskede. Perhaps it had just been an excuse to meet?

She feels dissatisfied because the work is unfinished, and Victoria isn’t helping, not showing her any memories. Nothing.

She knows she killed Martin.

But the others? The boys without names, and the boy from Belarus?

No memories. No nagging sense of guilt.

She goes over to the bookcase concealing the soundproofed room. As she lifts the catch to slide the bookcase aside, she knows the room will be empty. The only things left in there are the remnants of herself and the smell of her own sweat.

Gao Lian has never sat on the exercise bike, but his sweat has run through her hair, down her back and over her arms. She has cycled round the world several times, without moving a centimetre. She has been pedalling in place.

Gao Lian from Wuhan is all over the room, even though he doesn’t exist. In drawings, in newspaper cuttings, on pages of notes, and on a pharmacy receipt on which she circled the initial letters of her purchases, spelling out the name GAO.

Gao Lian came to her because she needed someone who could channel her guilt. Pay the bill she owed humanity.

She has believed that all the articles, all the newspaper cuttings about the dead children, have been about her. As well as keeping up with what has been going on, she has been looking for explanations, and has found them inside herself.

She understands why she invented him. As well as being a substitute for her own feelings of guilt, he has been a surrogate for the child she wasn’t allowed to keep.

But somewhere along the way she lost control of Gao.

He didn’t turn into the person she had wanted him to be, so in the end he ceased to exist, and she no longer believes in him.

Gao Lian from Wuhan never existed.

Sofia goes into the hidden room, pulls out the rolled-up evening papers, unfurls them and lays them out on the floor.
MUMMY FOUND IN BUSHES
and
MACABRE FIND IN CENTRAL STOCKHOLM
.

She reads about the murder of Yuri Krylov, the orphan boy from Molodechno in Belarus, who was found dead out in Svartsjölandet in the spring, and she’s particularly interested in what she’s underlined in the article. Details, names, places.

Did I do that? she wonders.

She turns the mattress. The draught makes more pieces of paper and little notes fly up around her. The dust from the paper tickles her nose.

Pages torn from a German edition of Zbarsky’s study of Russian methods of embalming. Printouts from the Internet. A detailed description of the embalmment of Lenin, written by a Professor Vorobyov of the Institute of Anatomy in Kharkov, Ukraine.

Sofia puts the articles down when her phone rings, and she sees that it’s Jeanette. She gets up to answer and looks around the room.

The floor is covered with a thick layer of papers, and there’s hardly an empty surface anywhere. But the meaning, the explanation, the big Why?

The answer’s here somewhere, she thinks as she picks up the receiver.

A person’s thoughts shredded into little pieces of paper.

A psyche on display.

THE LIES ARE
white as snow and don’t affect the innocent.

Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist is pleased with his arrangements and convinces himself that he has solved the problems that have arisen in an exemplary fashion. Everyone is happy.

Jeanette Kihlberg has her hands full with Victoria Bergman, and he himself has arranged secret deals with Ulrika Wendin and the Lundström family.

Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist tries to convince himself that all the problems are solved, at least temporarily. It’s just that he’s worried another one may have appeared.

He thinks about the report that he destroyed in the document shredder. Papers that would have helped Ulrika Wendin, but would obviously have damaged the lawyer Viggo Dürer, former police commissioner Gert Berglind and, by extension, himself as well.

Have I done the right thing? the prosecutor thinks.

Kenneth von Kwist has no answers to his own questions, which is why his unease has now spread to his gullet in the form of heartburn and indigestion.

The prosecutor’s stomach ulcer prods his conscience.

THE PLEASURES OF
a quiet life, Jeanette Kihlberg thinks as she parks outside her house in Gamla Enskede. Right now she misses simplicity and routine. Feeling content at the end of a long, hard day at work, and then being able to put work behind her.

Johan is spending the night in the city with Åke and Alexandra, and as soon as she steps into the hall she feels the emptiness of the house. The absence of a family.

Since Åke moved out it also smells different. Reluctantly she realises that she actually misses the smell of oil paint, linseed oil and turpentine. Had she been too intolerant? Too weak to give him a last push in the right direction when he had doubted his talent? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter now. Perhaps the marriage is over, and nothing he does is dependant on her any more.

The women in the car were in all likelihood Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg. Ivo Andrić is currently hard at work trying to confirm their suspicions.

She’ll have the answers tomorrow, and if she’s right it will mean that the case can be sent to the prosecutor’s office and declared closed.

But first they need to search the women’s homes. Find evidence of their culpability, then it will be up to her and Hurtig to put everything together and hand it over to von Kwist. Not that she thinks she’s done a particularly good job. Just followed a winding path and, with the help of a bit of luck and experience, reached a conclusion.