Taken just seconds before she died.
But that isn’t the important thing. What matters is that the hand holding the piano wire is missing its ring finger.
Jeanette thinks about the posthumous letter she received from Ralf B?rje Persson. He had ended by saying that the perpetrator was missing a ring finger.
In spite of the tragedy of the situation, Jeanette feels something like relief.
She has had all the facts in front of her all along, but sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. Not exactly a dereliction of duty, but possibly poor police work, she thinks, and finally the moment arrives when everything falls into place. Unimagined connections become clear, dissonance turns into harmony and nonsense takes on a new, coherent pattern.
‘It’s Hannah ?stlund,’ Annette Lundstr?m says.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
THE PHOTOGRAPH HAS confirmed Jeanette’s suspicions, and all the loose threads are coming together to form a whole. She’ll soon know how solid that whole is.
Her gut feeling is real, but she also knows it can be treacherous. In police work the right feeling is important, but it mustn’t get the upper hand and cloud your vision. Recently she’s been so scared of appearing to be driven by her emotions that she hasn’t listened to them, and has just been staring blindly at facts.
Jeanette thinks about the life-drawing class she took during her first years with ?ke. The teacher had explained how the brain is constantly deceiving the eye, which in turn deceives the hand holding the charcoal. You see what you think you ought to see, and ignore the way things look in reality.
A picture with two subjects, depending on what you focus on. An optical illusion.
Hurtig’s innocent remark had brought her up short, made her drop her guard and just see what was there to be seen.
Understand what was there to be understood, and ignore how it ought to be.
If she’s right, she’s a good police officer who’s done her job and therefore deserves her salary. No more than that.
But if she’s wrong she’ll be criticised and her competence will be called into question. The idea that she made a mistake because she’s a woman and by definition no good as a lead investigator will never be said out loud, but will be there between the lines.
During the morning she shuts herself away in her office, tells Hurtig she doesn’t want to be disturbed, and starts sending out requests for fingerprints and DNA.
She should get replies during the course of the day.
Right now it’s important that she find Victoria Bergman, and while she waits for the answers to her requests, she reads through the notes she made during her conversation with the old psychologist, and is once again astonished at the young Victoria’s fate.
Raped and sexually assaulted by her dad throughout the whole of her childhood.
Her new, secret identity has made it possible for her to start a new life, somewhere else, far away from her parents.
But where has she moved to? What’s become of her? And what did the old psychologist mean when she said that what they did to Victoria in Copenhagen was wrong? What had they done?
Is she mixed up in the murders of Silfverberg and Grünewald?
She doesn’t think so. All she knows for sure so far is that Hannah ?stlund killed Fredrika Grünewald. The idea occurs to her that Jessica Friberg was possibly holding the camera, but that’s still supposition. After all, the picture could in theory have been taken using a timer.
What was it Sofia had said about the perpetrator? That they were dealing with someone with a split self-image? With the diagnosis of borderline, and who therefore experiences an indistinct boundary between themselves and others. Whether or not that’s correct will be proved by future questioning, and for the time being is of less importance.
If it hadn’t been for the murder of Charlotte’s husband, P-O Silfverberg, she would have understood everything much sooner.
Really it was Charlotte who should have been murdered. After all, she had received a threatening letter. Why it ended up being her husband could only be a matter of speculation, but it was undeniably a gruesome way of exacting revenge.
It’s all so obvious, Jeanette thinks. It’s one of the laws of human nature that everything that has been hidden away in the nooks and crannies of the soul will struggle to find its way up to the surface.
She should have concentrated on Fredrika Grünewald and her classmates at Sigtuna, and on the incident that everyone had mentioned.
There’s a knock on the door, and Hurtig comes in.
‘How are you getting on?’ He leans against the wall just to the left of the door, as if he’s not going to stay for long.
‘Fine. I’m waiting for information I should be getting today. Any time now, I hope. And once I’ve got that we can put out a nationwide alert.’
‘Is it them, do you think?’ Hurtig walks over to the visitor’s chair and sits down.
‘Probably.’ Jeanette looks up from her notepad, pushes her chair back from the desk and puts her hands behind her head.
‘Have you had a chance to talk to ?ke? Since you had to hang up when we headed off to Edsviken?’ Hurtig looks worried.
‘Yes, I spoke to him after we got back. Apparently Johan’s having trouble accepting Alexandra. He called her a whore, and then all hell broke loose.’
Hurtig laughs.
‘He’s got guts, that boy.’
Swedenborgsgatan, S?dermalm
SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS getting ready to go home. She feels completely wiped out.
Outside the Indian summer is colouring the light in the street a fiery yellow, and the wind that had been rattling the windows earlier seems to have died away.
As Sofia leaves the practice she can sense winter in the air. In Mariatorget a flock of jackdaws has gathered to prepare for the journey south. By the S?dra station she sees the woman again.
She recognises the gait, the broad, swaying hips, the feet pointing outward, the bowed head and the tight grey bun.
The woman disappears into the station, and Sofia hurries after her. The two heavy doors swing back on her, and when she finally makes it into the hall of the station the woman has vanished again.
Sofia jogs over to the turnstile.
The woman isn’t there, but she couldn’t possibly have had time to get in, go through the turnstile and down the escalator.
Sofia turns and walks back. She checks in the restaurant and the tobacconist’s.
There’s no sign of the woman anywhere.
The setting sun is casting golden reflections on the windows and the facades of the buildings outside.
Fire, she thinks. Charred remnants of people’s lives, bodies and thoughts.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters