Sofia has got breakfast ready out in the garden, and as they eat she explains that Victoria will be seeing a doctor named Hans who’s going to examine her and document what he finds. Then, if they have time, they’re going to meet a policeman named Lars.
‘Hasse and Lasse?’ Victoria giggles. ‘I hate cops,’ she snarls, pushing her cup away demonstrably. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Apart from taking two hundred kronor from my purse, so you can pay for the petrol when I fill up.’
Victoria doesn’t know what she feels, but it’s like she’s sorry for Sofia.
It’s a new experience.
Hasse is a doctor at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Solna, and he examines Victoria. This is the second examination, after the one at Nacka Hospital a week ago.
When he touches her, spreading her legs and looking inside her, she wishes she was back at Nacka Hospital instead, where the doctor had been a woman.
Anita or Annika.
She doesn’t remember.
Hasse explains to her that the examination might feel a bit uncomfortable, but that he’s there to help her. Wasn’t that just what she’d always been told?
That it might feel funny, but that it’s for her own good.
Hasse looks all over her body, and he makes notes about what he sees using a little tape recorder.
He looks inside her mouth with a pocket torch, and his voice is factual and monotonous. ‘Mouth. Damage to the mucous glands,’ it says.
And the rest of her body.
‘Crotch. Inner and outer genitals, scarring from forced dilation at a premature age. Anus, scarring, premature, healed injuries, forced dilation, swollen blood vessels, fissures in the sphincter, anal fistula … Scarring from sharp objects on the torso, chest, thighs and arms, approximately one-third of them premature. Evidence of bleeding …’
She shuts her eyes and thinks that she is doing this so she can start again, become someone else and forget.
At four o’clock the same day she meets Lars, the policeman she needs to talk to.
He seems observant, like when he realises that she doesn’t want to shake his hand when they first meet, and he doesn’t touch her.
The first conversation with Lars Mikkelsen takes place in his office, and she tells him what she’s already told Sofia Zetterlund.
He looks sad when she answers his questions, but he doesn’t lose sight of what he’s doing and Victoria feels surprisingly relaxed. After a while she starts to feel curious about who Lars Mikkelsen really is, and she asks him why he does this sort of work.
He looks thoughtful and takes his time answering.
‘I think this sort of crime is the most disgusting of all. Far too few victims get justice, and far too few offenders get put away,’ he says after a while, and Victoria feels the remark is aimed at her.
‘You know I’m not going to help put anyone away?’
He looks at her seriously. ‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry about that, even if it isn’t unusual.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
He smiles warily and doesn’t seem bothered by her easy tone. ‘You seem to be questioning me now,’ he says. ‘But, to answer your question, I think that basically we’re still living in the Dark Ages.’
‘The Dark Ages?’
‘Yes. Have you ever heard of bride kidnapping?’
Victoria shakes her head.
‘In the Dark Ages men could force a marriage by kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. Because she’d been sexually exploited, she was forced to marry the man and at the same time he got the right of ownership to all her property.’
‘So?’
‘It’s about property and dependence,’ he says. ‘Originally, rape wasn’t regarded as a crime against the woman who was the victim, but as a property crime. The rape laws came about to protect a man’s rights to valuable sexual property, either through marrying the woman off or keeping her for his own use. The woman had no say in the matter. She was merely a piece of property whose fate was decided by men. There are still traces of that medieval view of women in attitudes towards rape. She could have said no, or she did say no, but she meant yes. She was dressed so provocatively. She just wants to get revenge on the man.’
His speech surprises Victoria. She had never imagined a man could think like that.
‘And in the same way the medieval attitude towards children is still with us,’ Lars Mikkelsen concludes. ‘To this day, adults regard children as their own property. They punish them and raise them according to their own laws.’
He looks at Victoria. ‘Are you satisfied with my answer?’
He seems genuine, and passionate about his work. She really does hate cops, but he doesn’t behave like a cop.
It’s night, and Sofia’s asleep. Victoria creeps into the study and closes the door carefully behind her. Sofia hasn’t said anything about Victoria writing in her notes, and probably hasn’t discovered it yet.
She gets the book out and continues from where she was interrupted.
She likes Sofia’s handwriting:
Victoria has a tendency to forget what she herself said ten minutes ago, or a week ago. Are these ‘lapses’ ordinary gaps in her memory or a sign of DID?
I’ve noticed that most of these lapses occur when she’s talking about subjects she isn’t usually capable of discussing. Her childhood, and her earliest memories.
Victoria’s story is associative, one memory leads to another. Is one specific personality talking, or does Victoria behave more childishly because it’s easier to talk about memories if she adopts the behaviour she had as a twelve-or thirteen-year-old? Are the memories real, or are they mixed up with Victoria’s current thinking about those events? And who is this Crow Girl to whom she refers so often?
Victoria sighs and adds:
Crow Girl is a mixture of all the rest of us, apart from the Sleepwalker, who hasn’t worked out that Crow Girl exists.
Victoria works through the night, and at six o’clock she starts to worry that Sofia will wake up soon. Before putting the book back in the desk drawer, she leafs through it at random, mostly because she has trouble putting it down. Then she discovers that Sofia has seen her annotations after all.
Victoria reads the original text on the very first page of the notebook.
My first impression of Victoria is that she’s highly intelligent. She has good background knowledge of my work and of what therapy entails. When I pointed this out at the end of the session, something unexpected happened, which showed that as well as being intelligent she also has a very hot temper. She snapped at me. Told me I ‘didn’t know shit’. and that I ‘was a total zero’. It’s been a long time since I saw someone so angry, and this undisguised anger in her troubles me.
A couple of days ago Victoria had commented on this.
I wasn’t at all angry with you. It must be a misunderstanding. I said I was the one who didn’t know shit. That I was a total zero. ME, not you!
And evidently Sofia had read what Victoria had written, and had left her own response.
Victoria, sorry if I misunderstood. But you were so angry that I could hardly make out what you were saying, and you gave the impression that it was me you were angry at.