The Swede again? she thinks. Yes, it must be.
Carefully she sits up and gets off the bed, empties her glass of water in the flowerpot, puts it down against the floor and places her ear to it.
‘Forget it!’ Viggo’s voice. Even though he’s lived in Denmark for several years, the Swede still has trouble with the Jutland dialect, and Viggo always speaks Swedish to him.
She hates Viggo’s Swedish; his accent sounds fake and he speaks more slowly, as if he were talking to an idiot.
‘And why not?’ The Swede sounds annoyed.
Viggo says nothing for a few seconds. ‘It’s too risky. Don’t you get it?’
‘I trust the Russian, and Berglind has vouched for him. What the hell are you so worried about?’
The Russian? Berglind? She doesn’t understand what they’re talking about.
The Swede goes on. ‘Anyway, no one’s going to miss a scruffy little brat from Russia.’
‘Keep your voice down. There’s a scruffy little brat upstairs who might hear what you say.’
‘Yes, about that …’ The Swede laughs, ignoring Viggo’s plea and going on in a loud voice. ‘How did it go in Aalborg? Is everything sorted out with the child?’
Viggo pauses before replying. ‘The last documents are being dealt with this week. You can calm down, you’re going to get your little girl.’
Victoria is confused. Aalborg? That must have been when …
She hears them moving around down there, footsteps on the kitchen floor, then the sound of the front door closing. When she peers round the curtain she sees that they’re on their way to the outhouse.
She takes her diary out of the bedside cabinet, curls up on the bed again and waits. She lies there, wide awake in the darkness with her rucksack packed, as always, on the floor.
The Swede stays at the farm into the small hours. They set off at dawn, and she hears the cars leave at half past four.
She gets out of bed, puts her diary in the outside pocket, zips it up and looks at the time. Quarter to five. He won’t be home until ten o’clock at the earliest, and by then she’ll be long gone.
Before leaving the house she opens the cupboard in the living room.
It contains an old eighteenth-century music box that Viggo likes to show off when he’s got guests, and she decides to find out if it’s as valuable as he claims.
The morning sun is hot as she walks into Struer, where she manages to get a lift to Viborg.
From Viborg she catches the six thirty train to Copenhagen.
Mariatorget – Sofia Zetterlund’s Office
IT TAKES HER no more than a minute in front of the computer in her office to find a picture of Viggo Dürer. Her chest is pounding as she sees his face and she realises that Victoria is trying to tell her something. It’s just that the old man with the thin face and thick, round glasses doesn’t mean anything to her; there’s only the discomfort in her chest and a memory of aftershave.
She saves the picture on her hard drive and prints it out in high resolution.
The image shows his top half, and she studies the details of his face and clothes. He’s pale, with thinning hair, possibly in his seventies, but without too many wrinkles. On the contrary, his face seems almost shiny. He has a number of large liver spots, full lips, a narrow nose and sunken cheeks. A grey suit, black tie and white shirt, and a badge on the breast pocket of his jacket bearing the logo of his legal firm.
No concrete memories at all. Victoria is giving her no images, no words, just vibrations.
She puts the printout in the document basket on her desk, sighs disconsolately and looks at the time. Ulrika Wendin is late.
The thin young woman returns Sofia’s greeting with a weak smile. Her eyes look hollow.
Several days of hard drinking, Sofia thinks. ‘How are you?’
Ulrika gives a wry smile and looks bashful, but doesn’t hesitate to tell her. ‘I was in a bar on Saturday, met a guy who seemed OK, so I took him home. We shared a bottle of Rosita and then we went to bed.’
Sofia doesn’t see where the story is going, so nods in encouragement and waits.
Ulrika laughs. ‘I don’t know if I really did it. I mean, if I took him home. It feels a bit like someone else did that, but I suppose I was pretty hammered.’
Ulrika pauses briefly and takes a packet of chewing gum from her pocket. Several 500-krona notes come with it.
Ulrika quickly pushes them back into her pocket without comment.
Sofia knows that Ulrika is unemployed and hardly has access to that sort of money. Where’s all that come from? she wonders.
‘I was able to relax,’ Ulrika goes on, without looking at her. ‘Because I wasn’t the one sleeping with him. I have vestibulitis. Embarrassing, huh? I can’t just choose to let anyone inside, but it was OK with him because it wasn’t me lying there.’
Vestibulitis? Not her lying there? Sofia considers the rape that Karl Lundstr?m subjected Ulrika to. She’s aware that one of the causes of vestibulitis is believed to be excessive washing of the genitals. The mucus membranes dry out and become fragile, the nerves and muscles are both weakened, and there’s constant pain.
Memories of scrubbing for hours in a steaming shower, the coarse sponge and the smell of soap, but never being able to wash away the stench of him.
Forced to become someone else to dare to feel longing, closeness. To be able to be normal. Ruined forever because of what a man had done. Sofia can feel her blood boiling.
‘Ulrika …’ Sofia leans over the desk to underline her question. ‘Can you tell me what pleasure is?’
The girl sits quietly for a while before she answers. ‘Sleep.’
‘How is your sleep?’ Sofia asks. ‘Can you tell me about it?’
Ulrika breathes in with a deep sigh. ‘Empty. It’s nothing.’
‘So pleasure for you is not feeling?’ Sofia thinks of her chafed heels, the pain she needs in order to feel calm. ‘Pleasure is nothing?’
Ulrika doesn’t answer the question, but straightens her back and says angrily instead, ‘After those bastards raped me in that hotel I drank every day for four years.’ Her eyes are black. ‘Then I tried to pull myself together, but I can’t see what the fucking point is. I always end up back in the shit.’
‘What sort of shit do you end up in?’
Ulrika slumps in her chair.
‘It’s like my body isn’t mine, or that it sends out signals that make people think they can do whatever the fuck they like with me. People can hit me, they can fuck me, no matter what I say or do. I tell them it fucking hurts, but that doesn’t make any difference.’
The vestibulitis, Sofia thinks. Unwanted intercourse and dry membranes. This is a girl who doesn’t know how it feels to desire anything, who has simply learned to dream about avoidance. And being inside the void of sleep is obviously a release.