He looks out the window, and a subdued smile spreads over his face as he realises what Jeanette means. ‘I get it. The two other girls who went through that, the ones who disappeared. Silfverberg couldn’t remember their names.’
‘I want you to contact the school in Sigtuna and ask them to send their registers. Ideally their school yearbooks as well, if that’s possible. We’ve got a number of names that might be of interest. Fredrika Grünewald and Charlotte Silfverberg. Their friend, Henrietta Nordlund. But I’m still most curious about our missing Victoria Bergman. What does she look like? Haven’t you wondered that as well?’
‘Yep,’ he says, but Jeanette can see that he hasn’t.
‘There’s another factor we ought to consider before we continue, but that’s not something we’ll be dealing with in today’s meeting, if you get my meaning?’ Hurtig looks interested again and he gestures for her to go on. ‘We’ve got Bengt Bergman, Viggo Dürer and Karl Lundstr?m. Considering that the three of them, and Per-Ola Silfverberg as well, were all involved in the foundation Sihtunum i Diasporan, maybe that’s got something to do with all this. And Billing told me something interesting over lunch. Our former commissioner, Gert Berglind, knew Karl Lundstr?m.’
Hurtig perks up properly now. ‘What do you mean? They saw each other socially?’
‘Yes, and not just that. They knew each other through a foundation. Any idiot can work out which foundation that might be. Quite a can of worms, this, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes. Bloody hell!’ The committed Hurtig is back, and Jeanette smiles in welcome.
‘OK,’ she says, ‘I’ve noticed you’ve had something on your mind, and I don’t think it’s just work worrying you. Has anything happened?’
‘It’s Dad again. Looks like he’s going to have even more trouble with his carving and fiddle playing from now on.’
Oh no, Jeanette thinks.
‘I’ll keep it short, since we’ve got a lot to do. But to start with he was given the wrong medication after the accident with the saw. The good news is that the hospital’s accepted liability, so he’s going to get compensation, but the bad news is that he got gangrene and his fingers have to be amputated. And he also managed to get hit in the head by a Ferrari GF.’
Jeanette is just gaping.
‘I can see you don’t know what a Ferrari GF is. It’s Dad’s ride-on mower, pretty big.’
If it hadn’t been for the smile on Hurtig’s face, Jeanette would have imagined something terrible.
‘What happened?’
‘Well … He was trying to free some branches that had caught in the blades, jacked the machine up on a wooden stake, crawled underneath to get a better look, then of course the stake snapped. Their old neighbour had to sew his head up after Mum had shaved his hair off. Fifteen stitches, right on top of his head.’
Jeanette can’t speak, all she can think of are two names, Jacques Tati and Carl Gunnar Papphammar.
‘He’s always OK.’ Hurtig waves his hand dismissively. ‘What do you think I should do after I’ve spoken to Sigtuna College? There are a few hours to go before the case meeting.’
‘Fredrika Grünewald. Check out her story. Start with why she ended up on the street and then try to work backwards. Preferably with as many names as possible. We’re working on revenge as the motive, and we need to track down people she knew. People she managed to upset, or might otherwise be thought to have a few bones unpicked with her.’
‘I dare say people like her probably have enemies scattered around all over the place. Upper class, crooked deals, deception, sham companies. Walking over dead bodies and selling their friends to get a good deal.’
‘You’re so prejudiced, Jens. Anyway, I know you’re a socialist.’ She laughs loudly and gets up to leave.
‘Communist,’ Hurtig says.
‘What?’
‘I mean, I’m a communist. There’s a hell of a difference.’
The impure parts
CAN BE TOUCHED and you have to watch out for strangers’ hands, or hands that offer money to be allowed to touch. The only hands that are allowed to touch Gao Lian are the fair woman’s.
She combs his hair, which has grown long. He thinks it’s also got lighter, and maybe that’s because he’s spent so much time in the dark. As if the memory of light has been stored in his head and coloured his hair like rays of sunlight.
Right now it’s completely white in the room, and his eyes are having trouble seeing. She’s left the door open and brought in a bowl of water to wash him, and he’s enjoying her touch.
As she’s drying him there’s a ringing sound from the hall.
Hands plunder if you’re not on your guard, and she’s taught him to have complete control over them. Everything they do must have a meaning.
He trains his hands by drawing.
If he can capture the world and take it inside him and then let it out again through his hands, he need never fear anything again. Then he will have the power to change the world.
Feet go to forbidden places. He knows that, because he left her once to look around the city outside the room. That had been wrong, and he realises that now. There is nothing out there that is good. The world outside his room is evil, and that’s why she protects him from it.
The city had seemed so clean and beautiful, but now he knows that beneath the ground and the water there are the remains of millennia of human cadavers, and that inside the buildings and inside the living there is only death.
If the heart gets sick the whole body gets sick and you die.
Gao Lian from Wuhan thinks about the blackness in people’s hearts. He knows that evil manifests itself there as a black stain, and that there are seven ways into the heart.
First two ways, then two more ways and finally three ways.
Two, two, three. The same year the city he was born in, Wuhan, was founded. The year 223.
The first way to the black stain is from the tongue, which lies and slanders, and the second is through the eyes, which see what is forbidden.
The third way is through the ears, which listen to lies, and the fourth is through the stomach, which digests the lies.
The fifth is through the impure parts, which let themselves be touched, the sixth through the hands, which plunder, and the seventh through the feet, which go to forbidden places.
It is said that at the moment of death a person sees all that is in their heart, and Gao wonders what he will see.
Birds, perhaps.
A hand offering comfort.
He draws and writes. Piling paper on top of paper. The work makes him calm, and he forgets his fear of the black stain.
The ringing sound echoes again.
Gamla Enskede – Kihlberg House