Surely there ought to be some sort of warning sign, she thinks. ‘Enter at your own risk’ or, even better, ‘No entry’.
‘If you need any help, just yell.’ The young police officer turns away and walks back to his office.
Jeanette Kihlberg takes a deep breath, opens the door to National Crime’s collection of child pornography and steps inside.
She knows that from now on she’s never going to look at the world with the same eyes again.
This is where it starts, she thinks. Zero hour.
Sunflower Nursing Home
HER LITTLE CAR is parked in Klippgatan, and Sofia Zetterlund realises that her resident’s parking permit has quite rightly expired. Apart from a generous quantity of wet fallen leaves, the car has also been covered with a mass of parking tickets. Considering how long it’s been parked here illegally, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been towed away.
She thinks about the previous day’s visit to the library, and how her encounter with the librarian with the veil and the pigment-damaged eye had made her think about her car and the parking permit.
That was when her cleansing process had seriously begun.
The memory had appeared so suddenly that she had imagined the librarian was talking to her.
Your parking permit has expired.
She unlocks the car door and gets a small brush out of the glove compartment. Deviations, she thinks as she brushes the rotting leaves from the windscreen wipers and roof.
Deviations from the norm make her remember, they wake her from sleepwalking, without necessarily having anything to do with the memories that spark into life.
No memory is unimportant for the brain, she thinks. On the contrary, it’s often the most trivial memories that are dominant, whereas you suppress the things you ought to remember. The brain doesn’t trust itself, doesn’t trust its ability to handle difficult things, so it would rather remember where you parked the car than the fact that you were raped by your dad.
Logical, touching and tragic, she thinks. All at the same time.
She puts the brush and the parking tickets in the glove compartment and gets in behind the wheel. She’s slept for barely three hours, but still feels rested.
Before she starts the car to drive out to the Sunflower Nursing Home, she takes her notepad from her bag and turns to an empty page. ‘Deviations’, she writes, then puts the pad back in her bag.
She pulls out into Bondegatan and isn’t yet sure if she’s going to get out of the car at the home as Victoria Bergman or Sofia Zetterlund. Nor does she know that another deviation from normality will have a decisive impact on what happens.
When she pulls up at the Sunflower Nursing Home twenty minutes later, she catches sight of a woman standing outside smoking, leaning on a walking frame. The light from the lamp above the doors means that her face is partly in shadow and partly clouded by the smoke from the cigarette, but Sofia knows that the woman is Sofia Zetterlund.
She recognises everything. Her movements, posture, clothes. She recognises everything, and approaches the woman with her heart pounding.
But no memories come to her, everything just feels empty.
Her old psychologist exhales the last of the smoke, then turns her head in such a way that the light falls across her face.
The red-painted lips and blue eyeshadow are the same as before, the wrinkles in her forehead and cheeks are somewhat deeper, yet still the same, and wake no memories.
Only when she sees the deviation do her memories wash over her in an absolute torrent.
Her eyes.
They’re no longer her old psychologist’s eyes, and what’s missing, the deviation from the norm, makes her remember everything.
Her therapy sessions in Sofia’s home in Tyres? and at Nacka Hospital. Summer butterflies in the garden, a red kite against a blue sky, the sound of Victoria Bergman’s footsteps on the hospital floor, steps that got lighter and lighter as they approached the door of Sofia Zetterlund’s office.
As she steps into the clinic the eyes are the first thing Victoria sees. They’re what she longs for most. She can land safely in them.
The woman’s eyes help Victoria to understand herself. They’re ancient, they’ve seen everything and they’re trustworthy. They don’t panic, and they don’t tell her she’s crazy, but nor do they tell her she’s all right, or that they understand her.
The woman’s eyes don’t mess around. That’s why she can look into them and feel calm.
They see everything she herself has never seen, only suspected. They enlarge her when she tries to shrink herself, and they gently show her the difference between what she thinks she sees, hears and feels, and what is happening in everyone else’s reality.
Victoria wishes she could see with old, wise eyes.
Now cataracts have made the Eyes blind and empty.
Victoria Bergman goes up to the woman and puts a hand on her arm. Her voice is choked. ‘Hello, Sofia. It’s me … Victoria.’
A smile spreads across Sofia Zetterlund’s face.
Johan Printz V?g – Ulrika Wendin’s Apartment
IVO ANDRI? STOPS the car outside Ulrika Wendin’s apartment and gestures to the forensics officers in the other car to follow him. Two young women and a young man. Ambitious and thorough.
He unlocks the door, and they go inside.
Right, he thinks. A fresh look. Fresh thinking.
‘We’ll start with the kitchen,’ he tells the forensics team. ‘You’ve seen the pictures of the blood. Look for details. I was only here for an hour, and didn’t have time to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb.’
Fine-tooth comb, he thinks. A new term he’s learned. From the receptionist at the pathology lab, a nice girl from Gothenburg who talks oddly.
Once work in the apartment is under way he thinks about his morning’s examination of the mummified boy. So depressing, the whole thing, yet still progress. They’ve got an impression of his teeth, and the DNA samples will be checked against the Ukrainian information about the Zumbayev brothers.
Kazakhs, he thinks as he looks at one of the bloodstains on the floor. When he lived in Prozor there had been a couple of families of Kazakh extraction. He had become good friends with the father of one of the families. His name was Kuandyk, and on one occasion he had explained how important traditional names were to Kazakhs. His own name meant something like ‘happy’, and as the pathologist thinks about Kuandyk’s cheerful demeanour and loud laugh, it strikes him that it had been a good name for him.
Kuandyk had also told him that the choice of name often reflected the expectations people had of the newborn child. One boy in the village in southern Kazakhstan that Kuandyk came from ended up being called Tursyn. His parents had had several children who had died within days of being born. Tursyn literally meant ‘let it stop’, and his parents’ prayers had actually been answered.