Victoria pulls the thin blanket back. Her child is wearing a blue onesie; her arms are bent and her hands are clenched, resting on her shoulders.
Victoria picks her up. The noise from the television gets louder, which makes her feel safer. The little girl is still asleep, warm against her shoulder.
The noise gets even louder, and she hears someone swear inside the room.
One–nil. The Soviet Union takes the lead at Neckar Stadium in Stuttgart.
She holds the baby up in front of her. The girl is smoother now, and paler. Her head looks almost like an egg.
Suddenly Per-Ola Silfverberg is standing in front of her, and for a few silent seconds she stares at him.
She can’t believe it.
The Swede.
Glasses and cropped fair hair. The sort of yuppie shirt that bankers usually wear. She’s only seen him in filthy work clothes, and never in glasses.
She can see her own reflection in them. Her child is resting against her shoulders in the Swede’s glasses.
He looks like an idiot, his face is completely white, slack and expressionless.
‘Come on, Soviet Union,’ she says as she rocks the baby in her arms.
Then the colour returns to his face. ‘Christ! What the hell are you doing here?’
She backs away when he takes a step closer to her, reaching out for the child.
Incubation. The time between the moment of infection and the outbreak of illness. But also the brooding period. Waiting for an egg to hatch. How can the same word describe waiting to have a baby and waiting for illness to break out? Are they the same thing?
The Swede lunging at her makes her lose her hold of the baby.
Its head is heavier than the rest of the body and she sees the baby turn half a revolution in its fall towards the stone floor.
The head is an egg that cracks.
The yuppie shirt flaps back and forth. It is joined by a black dress and a portable phone. His wife starts to panic, and Victoria can’t help laughing, seeing as no one is bothered about her any more.
Litovchenko, one–nil, the television reminds them.
‘Come on, Soviet Union,’ she repeats as she slumps down by the wall.
The baby is a stranger, and she makes up her mind not to care about it.
From now on it’s just an egg in a blue onesie.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
WHAT THE HELL, Jeanette Kihlberg thinks, as an uncomfortable feeling spreads through her body.
The fact that Lars Mikkelsen had been involved in the investigation into Victoria Bergman isn’t really so strange, but it’s striking that he concluded that her identity needed to be protected, seeing as there was no court conviction behind the case.
What’s more remarkable is that a psychologist named Sofia Zetterlund had conducted the psychological analysis. It couldn’t be her Sofia, because she wouldn’t have been twenty at the time of the investigation.
Hurtig looks amused. ‘That’s one hell of a coincidence. Call her at once.’
Almost too odd, Jeanette thinks. ‘I’ll call Sofia, and you call Mikkelsen. Ask him to come over to see us, preferably today.’
As soon as Hurtig leaves the room she dials Sofia’s number. No answer on her home number, and when she calls the practice the secretary tells her Sofia’s ill.
Sofia Zetterlund, she thinks. What are the odds that Victoria Bergman’s psychologist in the eighties would have the same name as the Sofia she knows, who also happens to be a psychologist?
A search on the computer tells her that there are fifteen Sofia Zetterlunds in the whole of Sweden. Two of them are psychologists, and they both live in Stockholm. Her Sofia is one of them, and the other has been retired for years and is registered as living in a nursing home in Midsommarkransen.
That must be her, Jeanette thinks.
The whole thing seems almost planned. As if someone were making fun of her and had plotted out the entire sequence of events. Jeanette doesn’t believe in coincidence – she believes in logic, and logic is telling her that there’s a connection. It’s just that she can’t see it yet.
Holism again, she thinks. The details seem incredible, incomprehensible. But there’s always a natural explanation. A logical context.
Hurtig is standing in the doorway.
‘Mikkelsen’s in the building. He’s waiting for you by the coffee machine. And what are we going to do with Hannah ?stlund and Jessica Friberg? ?hlund says they’re both unmarried and registered in the same swanky suburb to the west of the city. They’re both local government lawyers.’
‘Two women who’ve evidently stuck together all their lives,’ Jeanette says. ‘Keep looking. Check if the other calls have come up with anything, and put Schwarz onto checking databases and local papers. We’ll hold off on paying them a visit for the time being. I don’t want us to mess things up, and we need much more to go on. Right now Victoria Bergman is of greater interest.’
‘And Madeleine Silfverberg?’
‘The authorities in France didn’t have much to offer. All we’ve got is an address in Provence, and we’ve hardly got the resources to head off down there the way things are these days, but obviously that’s a step we might have to take if everything else gets bogged down.’
Hurtig agrees, and they leave the room. Jeanette finds Lars Mikkelsen by the coffee machine. He’s holding two cups in his hands and smiles at her.
Jeanette takes one of the cups. ‘It’s good that you could come. Shall we go into my office?’
Lars Mikkelsen stays almost an hour and explains that he was fairly inexperienced when he was given the Victoria Bergman case.
Finding out about what had happened to Victoria had undeniably been draining, but it also convinced him that he had made the right choice of career.
‘Every year we receive about nine hundred reports of sexual assaults.’ Mikkelsen sighs and crumples up his empty coffee cup. ‘In over eighty per cent of the cases we’re dealing with male offenders, and often they’re someone the child knows.’
‘But how common is it really?’
‘In the nineties there was a big study of seventeen-year-olds that found that one in eight girls had been abused.’
Jeanette does some quick calculations. ‘So in a normal school class you can assume that there’s at least one girl with a dark secret. Maybe two.’ She thinks of the girls in Johan’s class, and about the fact that he probably knows someone who’s been sexually exploited.
‘Yes, that’s more or less how it is. Among boys the figure is estimated to be one in twenty-five.’
They sit silently for a moment, thinking about the dark statistics.
Jeanette is the first to speak. ‘So you handled Victoria’s case?’
‘Yes, I was contacted by a psychologist at Nacka Hospital who had a patient she was concerned about. But I don’t remember the psychologist’s name.’
‘Sofia Zetterlund,’ Jeanette interjects.
‘Yes, that sounds familiar. That was probably it.’