Hurtig opens his own file and leafs through it, looking for something. When he finds what he’s looking for he pulls the document out and puts it on the desk.
‘It goes on,’ he says. ‘After the investigation the Silfverberg family, in other words Per-Ola and Charlotte, feel that they’ve been vilified and no longer want anything to do with the girl. Danish social services place her with another family. Also in the Copenhagen area.’
‘What happened to her after that?’
‘I don’t know, but hopefully she turned out OK, as they say.’
‘She must be about twenty now,’ Jeanette says, and Hurtig nods.
‘But here’s the weird bit.’ He straightens up. ‘The Silfverbergs move to Sweden, to Stockholm. They buy the apartment on Glasbruksgatan and everything looks rosy.’
‘But?’
‘For some reason the Copenhagen police wanted him to undergo a follow-up interview, and got in touch with us here in Stockholm.’
‘What?’
‘And we brought him in for questioning.’
Hurtig puts the document down and pushes it over to her, keeping his finger on the lines at the bottom.
Jeanette reads the part next to his finger.
Lead interviewer: Gert Berglind, Rape and Incest unit.
The children outside in the park and the keyboards in the next room are suddenly silent. No sound but the air conditioning and Hurtig’s deep breathing.
Hurtig’s finger. The well-manicured nail, neat cuticle.
Interviewee’s legal representative: Viggo Dürer.
Jeanette reads and realises that there is another truth on the other side of a very thin veil. Another reality.
Also in attendance: Kenneth von Kwist, prosecutor.
And that reality is infinitely more unpleasant.
Denmark, 1988
SHE DIDN’T LIKE the old, decrepit people.
At the milk counter an old man got far too close with his smell of urine, dirt and cooking.
The woman at the meat counter who brought a bucket of water said it didn’t matter and mopped up everything she had eaten for breakfast.
‘Can you feel it?’ The Swede looks at her excitedly. ‘Stick your arm in a bit further! Don’t be such a coward!’
The sow’s screams make Victoria hesitate. Her arm is buried inside the pig, almost up to her elbow.
Another few centimetres, then she finally feels the piglet’s head. Her thumb on its jaw, her fore-and middle fingers over the top of the head, behind the ears. Like Viggo has taught her. Then pull, carefully.
They think this is the last one. On the bed of straw around the mother ten yellow-stained piglets are wriggling about, fighting for her teats. Viggo has been standing alongside the whole time watching the births. The Swede took care of the first three, and the next seven came out by themselves.
The muscles of the vagina squeeze Victoria’s arm tight and for a moment she thinks the sow might be cramping. But when she pulls a bit harder the muscles seem to relax, and in less than a second the piglet’s halfway out. A moment later and it’s lying on the bloody straw.
Its back legs twitch, then it’s completely still.
Viggo bends over and strokes the piglet’s back. ‘Good work,’ he says, giving Victoria a crooked smile.
The piglets always lie motionless for thirty seconds or so after birth. You think they’re dead, then they suddenly start to move, fumbling around blindly until they find the sow’s teats. But this piglet had twitched its legs. The others hadn’t done that.
She counts silently in her head, and when she gets to thirty she starts to worry. Did she hold it too tightly? Pull the wrong way?
Viggo’s smile fades as he examines the umbilical cord. ‘Shit. It’s dead …’
Viggo pulls his glasses down and looks at her seriously. ‘It’s OK. The umbilical cord is damaged. It isn’t your fault.’
Yes, it’s my fault. And when we leave the sow will make short work of the afterbirth, absorbing all the nutrition she can get.
She’ll eat up her own offspring.
Viggo Dürer has a large farm outside Struer, and Victoria’s only permanent companions besides her schoolbooks are thirty-four Danish-breed pigs, a bull, seven cows and a poorly looked-after horse. The farmhouse is a neglected half-timbered building in a flat, dull landscape with windmills, like an uglier version of Holland. A patchwork of windy, bleak fields stretches all the way to the horizon, where you can just make out a narrow stretch of blue, Ven? Bay.
There are two reasons why she is here: her studies and recreation.
There are also two real reasons.
Isolation and discipline.
He calls it recreation, she thinks. But it’s about isolation. Being kept away from other people and being disciplined. Learning to stay within certain boundaries. Housework and studies. Cleaning, making food and studying.
Working with the pigs. And the swine who regularly visit her room.
What matters to her are her studies. She’s picked a correspondence course in psychology at the University of Aalborg, and the only contact she has with the outside world is with her adviser, who occasionally sends her unengaged written comments about her work.
Distance, she thinks. Locked away on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Distance from Dad. Distance from other people. A distance-learning psychology course, shut up in a room on her own in a house owned by a pig farmer with academic qualifications.
The lawyer Viggo Dürer had collected Victoria from V?rmd? seven weeks before, and driven her almost a thousand kilometres in his old Citro?n through a night-black Sweden and a newly woken Denmark.
Victoria looks out through the misted-up window at the farmyard, where the car has been parked. When it stops, it’s as if it lets out a fart, groans and sinks into a submissive curtsy.
Viggo’s disgusting to look at, but she knows that his interest in her is decreasing with every passing day. With each day that she gets older. He wants her to shave, but she refuses.
‘Shave the pigs instead,’ she tells him.
Victoria closes the blind. She just wants to sleep, even if she knows she ought to be studying. She’s falling behind, not because she lacks motivation but because she thinks the course is a mess. Jumping from one thing to the next. Superficial knowledge without any deeper reflection.
She doesn’t want to rush, and keeps getting stuck in the texts, then moving beyond them and into herself.
Why doesn’t anyone understand how important this is? The human psyche can’t be dealt with in an exam. Two hundred words on schizophrenia and delusional disorders is nowhere near adequate. Certainly not enough to wave about as proof that you’ve understood something.
She lies down on the bed and thinks about Solace. The girl who had made life in V?rmd? bearable. Solace had become a surrogate that her dad had used for almost six months. But now she’s been gone seven weeks.
Victoria starts at the sound of the front door slamming downstairs. Soon she hears voices from the kitchen and realises that it’s Viggo and another man.