Through the open kitchen window they had heard two whimpering squeaks, and a few minutes later the Ukrainian had come in with two freshly skinned breeding rabbits worth about ten thousand kronor each. The commissioner had turned white as a sheet and quietly asked them to leave.
At the time, Kenneth von Kwist had assumed that Berglind was upset at the prize money he’d miss out on, or possibly that he was sad about the rabbits, but now he realises that the police chief had been terrified, and well aware of what sort of person Viggo Dürer was.
He shuts his eyes and prays that he hasn’t realised it too late.
The smoky whisky makes him think of Viggo Dürer’s smell. As soon as he came into a room you noticed it. Was it fried garlic that he smelled of?
No, the prosecutor thinks. More like gunpowder or sulphur. That seems like a contradiction, because he knows that Dürer also had the ability to blend in, to disappear into a crowd somehow.
If one were inclined to show any respect to Kenneth von Kwist, it would be tempting to say that contradictions weren’t his strong point. If one were inclined to be rather less generous, and thus closer to the truth, one might say that his view of contradictions was that they simply didn’t exist. There is just right or wrong, and nothing in between, which is a very bad quality in a prosecutor.
Yet now he admits that Viggo Dürer was a contradictory person.
Capable of being extremely dangerous, but also a weakling who moaned about heart problems, like he had the last time they met, shortly before he died. And now he’s left this bloody mess behind, von Kwist thinks, and it’s landed right in my lap.
‘Lawyer and pig farmer,’ he mutters into his whisky glass. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
Vita Bergen – Sofia Zetterlund’s Apartment
THE HELPER, SOLACE Manuti, had borne Victoria’s daughter, Madeleine, in her round, swollen belly, and it was Solace who suffered the cramps, sickness, swollen legs and aching back. That had been her final task before Victoria forgot her.
Sofia looks at the drawings she has spread out on the table in the living room. They all show a naked child with a fetish mask covering her face. The same girl, the same skinny legs and round stomach. The same Helper. On the table next to the drawings is a photograph of a child holding a Kalashnikov. Unsocial mate. A child soldier.
Sofia thinks of the ritual circumcisions that have left so many boys in Sierra Leone sterile. Out in the countryside the boys would wear the dried scraps of skin on necklaces to prove that they belonged to God, and to protect against evil spirits, but in the hospitals in the cities the foreskins were discarded with the rest of the hospital’s rubbish, among plastic pipettes and disposable syringes, and taken out to the dumps in the suburbs. A lot of boys ended up sterile after being circumcised, but in the cities there was less chance of infection.
Lasse’s sterilisation had been as free from risk as it was voluntary. Vasectomy isn’t a ritual, even though it ought to be, nor is there anything ritualistic about an abortion or, as she herself once did, handing your baby over to strangers. Her thoughts move on to Madeleine. Does she hate me? Was she the one who killed Fredrika and P-O? And, if she was, am I next?
No, she thinks. According to Jeanette, it wasn’t just one person. She had mentioned ‘the people’ who were the murderers, not ‘the person’.
She puts the drawings of Solace aside and realises that she’s soon going to have to burn all her notes and newspaper cuttings, rip out the walls of the concealed room and get rid of everything inside it.
She has to become clean, free from her background. The way it looks at the moment, she can hardly move at home without being reminded of the lies that have helped her stay alive.
She needs to learn to remember properly. Not look for answers in static documents.
Let Victoria act, she thinks. But try not to disappear.
If you squeeze the bar of soap too tight you lose it.
Don’t try to remember, just let it happen.
Victoria gets a notepad from her study and a bottle of wine out of the glass-fronted cabinet, a French Merlot, but can’t find the corkscrew and has to push the cork in with her thumb. Tomorrow Sofia is going to see Jeanette, and she needs to be properly rested. So she has to drink, and red wine is better for sleep than white.
Tonight Victoria is going to concentrate on her daughter, writing down all her thoughts and trying to get to know her. Tomorrow Sofia will get to work on the perpetrator profile again.
But first, Madeleine.
‘Grew up with Charlotte and P-O Silfverberg,’ she writes. ‘With all that that entailed.’ Victoria thinks for a while before adding: ‘Probably abused. They were the same sort of people as Bengt.’ She takes a sip of wine. Its taste warms her and the acidity makes her tongue prickle.
‘Madeleine had a special relationship with Viggo Dürer,’ she goes on to write, without really knowing why. But when she thinks about it she realises what she meant. Viggo was the sort of person who laid claim to people, and patterns like that always recur.
He did it with both Annette and Linnea Lundstr?m, Victoria thinks, and he tried to do it with me.
‘The worst thing about Viggo is his hands,’ she writes. ‘Not his genitals.’
In fact she can’t actually remember ever seeing Viggo naked, and he was only violent occasionally, and then only with his hands. He didn’t hit, but scratched and squeezed. He rarely cut his nails and she can still recall the pain of them digging into her arms.
His assaults were like dry masturbation.
‘Madeleine hated Viggo,’ she goes on, and now she no longer needs to think, the associations come unforced, and her pen scratches quickly across the paper. ‘No matter what sort of adult Madeleine has become, she hates her foster-father, and she hates Viggo. As a child she had no name for her feelings, but she has always hated. As far back as she can remember.’
Victoria is using her own thoughts as a starting point, and transferring them to her daughter. She doesn’t change the text even when she suspects that she’s getting ahead of herself; she can make changes later.
‘There are several possible versions of Madeleine as an adult. Perhaps she is quiet and cowed and lives a reclusive life. Maybe she’s married to one of her father’s friends in the sect, maybe she silently puts up with continued abuse. Or possibly another Madeleine has got help from someone on the outside and has made a break from her family and fled abroad. If she’s strong she may have moved on, but it’s likely that her whole life will be tainted by the abuse and it will be hard for her to have a normal relationship with a partner. Yet another Madeleine could be driven by forces like hate and revenge, and she has spent her whole life trying to find different ways to either suppress or find an outlet for these feelings. This Madeleine lives a reclusive life at times, but can never forget what she suffered. She is a proactive person, who lacks –’