Linnea’s response comes quickly, and is surprisingly blunt, even if she doesn’t address the actual content of the drawings. ‘He was … I liked him when I was little.’
‘Viggo Dürer?’
She looks down at the floor. ‘Yes … He was nice to start with. Then, once I was about five, he could be really strange.’
Linnea herself has taken the initiative to talk about Viggo Dürer, and Sofia realises that the second stage of her treatment has started. Remembering, and dealing with the memories.
Sofia considers the drawing of Viggo Dürer and his dog in the Lundstr?m family’s garden in Kristianstad. Karl Lundstr?m had himself mentioned the event in the letter Linnea had with her. Linnea despises her father, but is frightened of Viggo. She did what Viggo said, and Annette and Henrietta were simply blind. Shutting their eyes to what was going on around them.
As usual, Sofia thinks.
And Karl Lundstr?m had also written that Viggo was doubly ignorant, and from the rest of Lundstr?m’s letter she could deduce that by this he meant that Viggo was both wrong and unaware that he was wrong.
There’s only one question remaining, Sofia thinks. What is Viggo doubly ignorant about?
She’s quite sure that she knows what Karl Lundstr?m meant, and leans across the desk to look Linnea in the eye. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened in Kristianstad?’
Klara Sj? – Public Prosecution Authority
PROSECUTOR VON KWIST isn’t actually from a noble family, he just decided to add a ‘von’ to his name when he was at school to make himself seem special. He is still incredibly vain, and very careful about both his reputation and his appearance.
Kenneth von Kwist has a problem, and is extremely worried. In fact he’s so worried about a conversation he’s just had with Annette Lundstr?m that it feels as if his dormant gastric catarrh is starting to turn into a full-blown ulcer.
Benzodiazepines, he thinks. So addictive that any witness statement from someone taking them is highly questionable. Yes, that must be it. Heavy medication had made Karl Lundstr?m imagine absolutely everything.
Kenneth von Kwist stares at the pile of papers on the desk in front of him.
Five milligrams of Stesolid, he reads. One milligram of Xanor and, finally, .75 milligrams of Halcion. Daily. Completely damn incredible.
The withdrawal symptoms must have been so severe that Lundstr?m would have confessed to anything just to get a new dose, he thinks as he reads the transcript of the interview.
It’s a considerable text, almost five hundred printed pages.
But still Prosecutor von Kwist has his doubts.
There are far too many people involved. People he knows personally, or at least thought he knew.
Had he himself simply been a useful idiot all along, helping a group of paedophiles and rapists to go free?
Had Per-Ola Silfverberg’s foster-daughter been right when she accused him of abusing her?
And had Ulrika Wendin really been drugged by Karl Lundstr?m and taken to a hotel where she was raped?
The truth is staring Prosecutor von Kwist straight in the face. He has allowed himself to be used, it’s as simple as that. But how can he wash his hands of all this without simultaneously letting down his so-called friends?
He notes recurrent references to conversations that had taken place out at forensic psychology in Huddinge. Karl Lundstr?m had evidently had a couple of meetings with a psychologist, Sofia Zetterlund.
Is it possible to hush all of this up?
Kenneth von Kwist gets himself an indigestion tablet, calls his secretary and asks her to get hold of a number for Sofia Zetterlund.
Mariatorget – Sofia Zetterlund’s Office
WHEN LINNEA LUNDSTR?M has left the practice Sofia spends a long time writing up their conversation.
She’s got into the habit of using two ballpoint pens, one red, one blue, to differentiate between what her client says and her own thoughts.
As she turns the seventh sheet of A4 to start on the eighth, she is suddenly seized by a paralysing weariness. It feels like she’s been asleep.
She looks back a couple of pages to refresh her memory about what she’s written, and starts reading at random from the page she’s marked with a 5.
The text is Linnea’s story, written in blue ballpoint.
Viggo’s Rottweiler is always tied up somewhere. To a tree, or the railings by the steps to the house, or to a rumbling radiator. The dog tries to jump at Linnea and she skirts around it. Viggo comes into her room at night, the dog stands guard outside on the landing, and Linnea remembers the reflections in the dog’s eyes in the darkness. Viggo shows Linnea an album of photographs of naked children, the same age as her, and she remembers the flash of the camera in the darkness, and she’s wearing a big black hat and a red dress that Viggo has given her. Linnea’s dad comes into the room, Viggo gets angry, they argue, and Linnea’s dad walks out and leaves them alone.
Sofia had been surprised at the torrent of words pouring out of Linnea. As if her story had been lying dormant inside her, formulated long ago, and could finally flow freely as soon as she had someone to share her experiences with.
Linnea is very frightened of being alone with Viggo. He’s nice during the day, and nasty at night, and sometimes the things he does to her mean she can’t walk without help. I ask what Viggo did to her, and Linnea replies that she ‘thinks it was his hand and his sweetie, and then he took pictures and told me not to say anything to Dad and Mum’.
Linnea repeats ‘his hands, his sweetie, and then flashes from his camera’, then she says that Viggo wants to play cops and robbers, where she’s the robber and has to wear handcuffs. The handcuffs and his rough sweetie chafe all morning even though Linnea is asleep, yet not quite asleep because the flashes from the camera are red on the inside of her eyelids when she closes her eyes. And everything is outside and not inside, like a buzzing gnat in her head …
Sofia is breathing harder and harder. She doesn’t recognise the phrases.
She sees that the rest of the text has been written with the red pen.
… a buzzing gnat that can get out if she hits her head against the wall. Then the gnat can fly through the window which can also let out the rancid smell of a German bastard’s hands that smell of pigs and his clothes that smell of ammonia no matter how much he washes them, and his sweetie that tastes of horsehair and ought to be cut off and fed to the pigs …
Ann-Britt comes into the office, waving to let her know it’s urgent. ‘You’ve got a call waiting. Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist wants you to get in touch as soon as you have a moment.’
Sofia remembers a house surrounded by fields.
She used to sit by the dirty window upstairs, watching the seabirds’ movements against the sky. The sea hadn’t been far away.
‘OK. Let me have his number and I’ll call him straight back.’
And she remembers the cold metal against her hand as she squeezed the bolt gun. She could have killed Viggo Dürer.