Police jargon can sound jokey and insensitive to outsiders. But it’s also a way of distancing yourself.
When Jens Hurtig steps inside the apartment, he’s pleased to have any distance. Ten minutes later he realises that he’s going to have to call Jeanette Kihlberg for assistance, and when she asks what’s happened, he describes it as the most fucking awful thing out of all the fucking awful things he’s seen in his whole fucking career.
Gamla Enskede – Kihlberg House
JOHAN IS ALREADY asleep, and she’s still wondering what she’s going to do with him when the phone rings.
Jeanette answers it, and to her disappointment it’s Hurtig. For a moment she was hoping it might be Sofia.
‘What’s happened now? Tell me it’s important, or I’ll be –’
Hurtig interrupts her. ‘Yes, it’s important.’
He falls silent, and in the background Jeanette can hear agitated voices. According to Hurtig, Jeanette has no option but to go back into the city.
What he’s just seen isn’t human.
‘Some sick bastard has stabbed the man at least a hundred times, cut him into pieces, then used a roller to paint the whole apartment!’
Shit, she thinks. Not now.
‘I’ll be there as quick as I can. Give me twenty minutes.’
Great, so I’m letting Johan down again.
A fatal stabbing is the last thing she needs right now. She hasn’t just got Johan to deal with, but also the investigation that was shut down.
And, not least, Victoria Bergman. Whose trail had gone completely dead at Nacka District Court.
The rain has started to let up, but here and there there are big puddles and she doesn’t dare to drive fast for fear of aquaplaning. The air feels cold. The thermometer at Hammarby reads eleven degrees. The branches of the trees in the park below are heavy with autumn colour, and as she looks towards the city from the Johanneshov Bridge, she thinks it’s incredibly beautiful.
Edsviken – Lundstr?m House
SOFIA LOOKS AT the other drawings. One shows a room containing three men, a girl lying on a bed and a figure with its head turned away. The other is more abstract and harder to interpret, but the figure occurs twice. Once in the middle of the picture, eyeless and surrounded by a blur of faces, then in the bottom left corner it’s there again, on its way out of the drawing. Only half its body is visible, not its face.
She compares them with the first drawing. The same eyeless figure looking at a garden through a window. A big dog and a man behind a tree. U1660?
‘What is it you don’t understand about the drawings?’ Sofia asks over her cup of coffee.
Annette Lundstr?m smiles hesitantly. ‘That figure without eyes. I presume it’s a self-portrait, that that figure is her. But I don’t understand what she’s trying to say.’
How blind can you be? Sofia thinks. The woman has spent her whole life trying to keep her eyes shut. Now she thinks she can make up for that by confessing to a psychologist that she can actually see something odd in her daughter’s old drawings. A lame way of trying to claim that she too can see what’s going on, but that it’s only just occurred to her. The guilt gets transferred to her husband and she can disclaim any involvement.
‘Do you know what this means?’ Sofia asks, pointing at the characters beside the tree in the first drawing. ‘U1660?’
‘Yes, I do understand that. Linnea couldn’t write then, so she drew his name. He’s the man with the bent back behind the tree.’
‘And who is he?’
Annette’s smile is strained. ‘It doesn’t say U1660. It says Viggo. That’s Viggo Dürer, my friend’s husband. The house Linnea drew is the one in Kristianstad. They often came to visit us down there, although they lived in Denmark at the time.’
Sofia starts. Her parents’ lawyer.
Watch out for him.
Annette suddenly looks sad.
‘Henrietta, one of my best friends, got married to Viggo. I think Linnea was a bit scared of Viggo, and maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to see him in the drawing. She was scared of the dog as well. It was a Rottweiler, and it did look rather like that.’
Sofia nods. ‘But if you think that’s Linnea standing in the window without any eyes, who’s the girl standing next to the dog?’
Annette suddenly smiles. ‘That’s probably me. I’m wearing my red dress.’ She puts the first picture down and picks up the second. ‘And in this one I’m lying asleep in bed while the men have a party.’ She lets out an embarrassed laugh at the memory.
For Sofia the meaning of Linnea’s drawings is crystal clear. Annette Lundstr?m is confusing herself with the girl in the pictures, and for her Linnea is the eyeless figure, the one turned away, or running out of the picture.
Annette Lundstr?m can’t see what’s been going on around her.
But Linnea has understood everything since she was five years old.
Sofia knows she has to arrange a meeting with Linnea Lundstr?m, with or without her mother’s help.
‘Is it OK if I photograph these drawings?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Sofia takes out her mobile phone and takes a few pictures of Linnea’s drawings, then gets up from the sofa. ‘Here’s what we do. You and I will go to Danderyd together. The senior psychiatric consultant there is an old acquaintance of mine. We’ll explain the situation to her and maybe she’ll let me see Linnea if we play our cards right.’
By the time Sofia Zetterlund pulls out onto the Norrt?lje road it’s almost six o’clock.
Viggo Dürer? Why can’t she remember him? They sorted out her parents’ estate together over the phone. The memory of his aftershave. Old Spice and Eau de Vie. That’s all.
But Sofia realises that Victoria knew Viggo Dürer. She must have.
She feels restless and turns the radio on. A gentle woman’s voice is talking about what it’s like to live with an eating disorder. The inability to eat and drink because of a fear of swallowing, a phobia triggered by trauma. Basic bodily reflexes knocked out of line. How easy it seems to be.
Sofia thinks about Ulrika Wendin and Linnea Lundstr?m.
Two young girls whose problems are the consequences of the actions of one man.
Ulrika Wendin won’t eat, Linnea Lundstr?m won’t talk. And soon they’ll be sitting opposite her with the next instalment of the man’s story.
The gentle woman’s voice on the radio and the sound of the traffic crawling through the drizzly darkness sends Sofia into an almost hypnotic state.
She pictures two hollow-eyed, sunken faces, and Ulrika Wendin’s emaciated figure merges with Annette Lundstr?m’s.
Suddenly she realises who Annette Lundstr?m is. Or, rather, was.
It was almost twenty-five years ago. Her face had been rounder, and she had been laughing.
The shells
OF HIS EARS listen to lies. He mustn’t let any untruths in, because they’ll soon reach his stomach and poison his body.
He learned not to speak a long time ago, and now he’s trying to learn not to listen to words.