Once she’s found the books she sits down at one of the desks and takes out the notebook she had been writing in the previous evening. Twenty pages of thoughts about her daughter, and she makes up her mind to spend an hour or two in the library carrying on the work of getting to know Madeleine before she makes a start on Lourie and Krafft-Ebing.
She’s feeling brittle, and she knows she has to make the most of that state.
Central Station
JEANETTE HAS PUSHED the start of her day back a couple of hours so she can drive Johan to school, and is going to be even later because her old Audi, for the umpteenth time, decides to break down at Gullmarsplan. She pulls over to the side of the road and can’t even be bothered to get angry before calling for a tow truck. She makes up her mind that the Audi, despite ?hlund’s best efforts, will have to go to its final resting place at the scrapyard out in Huddinge.
She knows she needs a car, and that the state of her finances won’t let her buy a new one. But she’s too proud to ask ?ke for money.
As she heads down into the metro she thinks about Johan. Saying goodbye to him hadn’t been as difficult as she had expected. For the first time in ages they separated without her being left with a sense that there was a lot of unfinished business between them.
Just as she gets on the train, her mobile rings. She can see it’s Hurtig and suddenly remembers what he told her about his sister the previous day. So fucking tragic. That’s pretty much all there is to say.
She settles into a window seat at the end of the carriage before answering.
‘I’ve got two things to tell you,’ he begins. ‘They’re both pretty alarming.’
She can hear how wound up he sounds. ‘Go on.’
‘At roughly the same time we were out at Dürer’s at Hundudden, Charlotte Silfverberg committed suicide.’
Jeanette feels as if she’s just gone deaf. ‘What did you say?’
‘The Finland ferry, MS Cinderella, the night before last. According to a number of witnesses, Charlotte Silfverberg was alone on deck. She climbed up onto the railing and jumped. The witnesses didn’t have time to intervene, but they alerted the coastguard.’
As the speakers in the carriage announce that the next stop is T-Centralen, Jeanette tries to absorb the news. No, she thinks. Not another suicide. ‘A number of witnesses, did you say?’
‘Yes. No doubt at all. The coastguard found the body this morning.’
A clear case of suicide, then? First Linnea Lundstr?m, and now this. Another family intent on wiping itself out.
Yet she can’t help feeling dubious.
‘Get someone to call the shipping company to ask for the passenger list,’ she says as the train stops and she stands up.
‘Passenger list?’ Hurtig sounds surprised. ‘What for? Like I said –’
‘Suicide, I know. But do you think Charlotte Silfverberg seemed the type to take her own life?’ She gets out onto the platform and continues towards the stairs down to the Blue Line. ‘When we last saw her she wanted to get away for a while, have a few glasses of red wine, and see her hero, Lasse Hallstr?m. What if something happened on the ferry that made Charlotte Silfverberg make that fatal choice?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hurtig says wearily. ‘But there are more than ten witnesses on the ship who all confirm what happened.’
She stops on the first step and leans against the handrail. ‘Sorry, maybe I didn’t express myself very clearly.’ OK, she thinks, stay calm. Maybe I’m getting carried away. ‘You’re probably right. We’ll hold back on the shipping company. You said you had another piece of news?’
She listens to what Hurtig has to say, and soon she’s jogging down the steps through the crowd.
What he’s just told her means they’re going to have to put everything else to one side.
An Iwan Lowynsky from the Ukrainian security police in Kiev, from their department for international crime, is trying to get hold of her regarding the case of a missing person.
The dossier about the dead immigrant boys that Jeanette sent to Interpol six months ago has finally done some good. A DNA match.
Mariaberget – S?dermalm
SOFIA ZETTERLUND HAS decided to walk all the way to work, and at Slussen she opts for the longer route, up to the top of Mariaberget and past the old lift.
Her bag of books is heavy and rubs against her hip as she walks across the cobblestones of Tavastgatan, and at the junction with Bellmansgatan she decides to stop off in the Bishop’s Arms and study the books over a late lunch.
She orders that day’s special, and finds a seat in a corner. While she waits for the food she starts looking through the book about the Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, but is distracted by the erroneous title of the Swedish edition, The Mass Murderer. ‘Mass murderer’ means Stalin or Hitler. They killed people not because of some primitive instinct, but for ideological reasons, and developed means of extermination on an industrial scale. Chikatilo murdered one person at a time, in a long, bestial series.
She discovers that every other chapter is about the policeman who eventually solved the case, which ran to more than fifty murders, and decides to skip those. She wants to know how Chikatilo functioned, not read about police work. To her disappointment she soon finds that the book mostly contains descriptions of the murders, and fantastical speculation about what the murderer might have been thinking. Any more profound analysis of his psyche is entirely absent.
Even so, she finds a number of the ideas interesting, but resists the temptation to tear the pages out, and instead turns down the corners of pages she’s thinking of using when she puts her ideas together. The person who couldn’t control her impulses and had no qualms about defacing books was Victoria. Sofia is sensible and controlled, she reflects, as she feels how much her shoes are chafing. Everything has its price.
When the waiter brings her food she orders a beer. She eats a few mouthfuls but realises she isn’t hungry just as a group of Germans comes into the pub. They sit down at the next table, and one of the women turns to Sofia. ‘Sie müssen sehr stolz auf ihn sein?’
‘Ja, sehr stolz,’ Sofia replies, without having any idea what the woman means.
She pushes her plate away and goes back to the book about Andrei Chikatilo. After reading for a while she begins to discern a pattern that she’d like to discuss with Jeanette. She makes a few notes in the margin and gets her mobile out. Jeanette answers almost instantly.
There isn’t really anything new to say, Sofia just wants reassurance that their meeting is still on, and as soon as Sofia hears Jeanette’s voice she’s reminded of the fact that she misses her.
Jeanette hasn’t forgotten that they’re going to meet, but seems stressed. Sofia assumes Jeanette’s got a lot of work to do and keeps it brief. ‘Well, see you at my office,’ she says. ‘Then we can go to my favourite bar and have a couple of beers and talk shop for an hour or so. Then when we’re done with that we can get a taxi back to your place. OK?’