And those two new fair-haired ones. Lawyers or something.
They looked like angels, but she thought they were really weird. It was almost as if they were on her side, because they were clearly hesitant when everything started in the evenings. But they weren’t locked up the whole time like her, they were free to come and go as they liked, and that was why they were weird. Because they always came back.
And one of them had had a finger bitten off by her dog. But she still spent the whole time spoiling it, and that was weird too.
The room she lived in was the smallest in the house, and it smelled musty. It contained a creaking bed, an old wardrobe that smelled of mothballs and a small window facing the yard. All she had to play with were some crayons, yellow typewriter paper and a box of Lego.
Reluctantly she had built a house on the big, green Lego base. It was on the floor, and she began to stick the little figures to the base. All in all there were nine plastic people, the same number of people staying on the farm at the moment, apart from herself and the little girl the Swedes had brought with them.
She arranged the figures so they were standing in a long line in front of the Lego house. She had to pretend that five of them were women, because there were only male figures available, and soon they were all standing there with their plastic smiles.
The pig farmer and the two lawyer women.
The man they called Berglind, who was a policeman even though he didn’t act like one. That was the only one of the plastic figures that looked the way it should. Not only because it was in a police uniform, but because it also had a moustache, just like him.
Next to him stood Fredrika, who was much fatter than her Lego version. And then the couple who were the little girl’s parents. Karl and Annette.
At the right-hand end of the line stood her foster-parents.
She stared at them while her tongue played with the loose tooth. She was lost in her thoughts when she heard someone unlocking the door.
‘It’s time to go. Have you packed? You haven’t forgotten your beach towel this time?’
Two questions in one that demanded both a yes and a no, meaning that she couldn’t keep quiet.
She couldn’t just nod or shake her head, and it was one of his tricks to get her to talk to him.
‘I’ve packed everything,’ she mumbled.
He shut the door, and it reminded her of when she had lost her first tooth.
He had told her what happened when children left their teeth for the tooth fairy.
If you left them in a glass of water or under your pillow when you went to bed, a little fairy would come flying in at night and give you something in return. She collected children’s teeth, far away somewhere she had a big castle that was built of teeth, and she paid one hundred kronor per tooth.
He had helped her get rid of the first one, so that she would soon be rich.
That was when they came to visit at the start of the summer. She had been sitting where she is now, but on a little stool, and he had tied some strong cotton thread around her tooth. Then he had tied the other end to the door handle, and told her he was just going to get something. But he was lying, and instead slammed the door shut with a loud bang.
Her tooth had flown out onto the floor as the door slammed shut, and that had given her the first hundred kronor.
But the tooth fairy hadn’t flown into her room that night. It was him, creeping into her room when he thought she was asleep, lifting her pillow and leaving the money.
After that she had to show she deserved the money, and she had realised that the tooth fairy wasn’t a magical creature, but only a man who bought baby teeth.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
JEANETTE TURNS ON the desk lamp and spreads the pictures out in front of her.
Hannah ?stlund’s burned, sunken face. A woman in her forties, in what should be the prime of life. A complete stranger to Jeanette just a short while ago, but now one of the principal suspects for a series of murders. Nothing in life is what it seems, she thinks. So much of it is something else entirely.
Hannah’s right hand is missing its ring finger, and Jeanette’s suspicions are confirmed.
The identities of the bodies need to be definitively confirmed from DNA samples as soon as possible; then the amount of carbon dioxide in their blood has to be measured. That could give them a cause of death.
A vacuum cleaner hose had carried the poisonous gases from the exhaust pipe into the car, and, because the two women had their seat belts on, Jeanette assumes that they had committed suicide together.
Next picture, Jessica Friberg, Hannah’s friend. Similarly burned beyond recognition.
The characteristic fire-related haematomas that aren’t the result of mechanical injury.
The woman died in the fire.
Her skull became severely overheated; her blood would have started to boil between her skull and the protective layers within.
Folie à deux. Two people sharing the same misconceptions, the same persecution complex, the same hallucinations and insanity.
Usually there’s one person who’s sick and another who’s governed by the first, a more dominant and disturbed individual.
Which of the women was the driving force? she wonders. Does that even really matter? She’s a police officer, and it’s her job to collect the facts, not sit and speculate about cause and effect. Right now the two women are echoes of the past that will soon have faded away and vanished, leaving just their bodies behind.
Fire, she thinks. Hannah and Jessica in a burning car.
Then Dürer and the boat.
The Bergman couple and their burned-out house.
It can’t be a coincidence. She makes a mental note to take it up with Billing at the earliest possible opportunity. If he agrees with her, those cases can be looked at again.
Jeanette picks up the phone and dials the prosecutor’s number. As usual, Kenneth von Kwist is taking his time issuing a search warrant, even though in this instance it’s no more complicated than signing a piece of paper.
She has trouble concealing her contempt for the prosecutor’s incompetence, and perhaps he notices, because his replies to her questions run to two syllables at most, and he sounds disengaged.
But he does promise her that she can have the warrant within an hour, and as they hang up Jeanette wonders where von Kwist finds the motivation to go to work each morning.
Before going to Hurtig’s office to update him in advance of their visit to the homes of the two dead women, she heads towards ?hlund’s office.
She has a job for him and Schwarz to work on for the rest of the day.
The lawyer, Viggo Dürer, she thinks. Even if he’s dead, we need to know more about him. There may be evidence hidden away in his past that might lead us to the murderer.