Andri? hears the two female forensics officers exchange a couple of words. The fridge door opens and the compressor rumbles.
Itkul and Karakul, he thinks. The fact that the dead boys were of Kazakh origin had made him think about his old friend from Prozor, and during the morning he had found out what their names meant. It saddens him to consider what their parents must have thought about their sons’ futures. Itkul means ‘dog’s slave’, and Karakul ‘black slave’.
‘Ivo?’ One of the female forensics officers interrupts his thoughts. ‘Can you come here for a moment?’
He turns round. The young woman is pointing at the fridge door, which is half open. Ulrika Wendin doesn’t seem to have been a big eater. The fridge had been completely empty the last time he was here, and obviously still is this time.
‘Do you see?’ The officer indicates an area just inside the fridge door, right next to the edge, where she’s just dusted some of the ash-grey powder to gather fingerprints. He squats down and looks.
An impression of three fingers, and the scenario begins to take shape for him.
He knows that one person assaulted another person in this kitchen, and then cleaned up after them. While they were cleaning, someone wiped the blood from the fridge door with their left hand and held the door open with the right, at the point he’s staring at.
He doesn’t even need a magnifying glass to see that the prints match something he’s seen before, in fact as recently as that morning.
Sunflower Nursing Home
SOFIA’S ROOM IN the Sunflower Nursing Home is like a doll’s house version of the house on Solbergav?gen in Tyres?.
There’s the same worn armchair and bookcase from the old living room, and they’re sitting facing each other across the same little kitchen table. The glass globe with the snowed-in Freud is in its place on the chest of drawers, and Victoria can even detect the smell of Tyres? from twenty years ago.
It’s not just a torrent of memories that washes over her, but questions too.
She wants to know everything, and she wants confirmation of what she already knows.
In spite of her age there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with Sofia’s memory.
‘I’ve missed you,’ Victoria says. ‘Now that I’m sitting here with you, I’m ashamed at the way I behaved.’
Sofia smiles gently. ‘I’ve missed you too, Victoria. I’ve thought about you a lot, and have often wondered how you were. You shouldn’t feel ashamed of anything. On the contrary, I remember you as a strong young woman. I believed in you. I thought you’d be able to take care of yourself. And you have, haven’t you?’
Victoria doesn’t really know how to reply. ‘I have …’ She changes position. ‘I have problems with my memory. It’s got a bit better recently, but …’
The old psychologist looks at her with interest. ‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘As recently as last night,’ she begins, ‘I realised that I didn’t murder my former partner. For almost a year I believed that I had, but it turns out that he’s alive and I’d imagined the whole thing.’
Sofia looks concerned. ‘I see. Why do you think that might be?’
‘I hated him,’ Victoria says. ‘I hated him so much I thought I had killed him. It was some kind of revenge. Just for myself, in my imagination. It’s almost pathetic.’
She can hear that her voice is starting to sound like the young Victoria’s.
‘Hate and revenge,’ Victoria goes on. ‘Why are they such strong driving forces?’
Sofia’s answer comes quickly. ‘They’re primitive emotions,’ she says. ‘But they’re also emotions that are unique to human beings. An animal doesn’t hate, and it doesn’t seek revenge. I think this is really a philosophical question.’
Philosophical? Yes, maybe, Victoria thinks. Her revenge on Lasse had probably been just that.
Sofia leans across the table. ‘I’ll give you an example. A woman is out driving her car and when she stops at a red light a gang of youngsters comes over to the car and one of the young men breaks the window with a long metal chain. Terrified, the woman drives away, and when she gets home she discovers that the chain had got caught in the bumper and that the young man’s hand had been ripped off.’
‘I get it,’ Victoria says.
The blank cataract eyes stare emptily at her. ‘Have you had your revenge? Have you stopped hating? Are you no longer scared? There are so many questions to consider.’
Victoria thinks for a while. ‘No, I don’t hate him any more,’ she eventually says. ‘Now, in hindsight, I can actually say that the false memory helped me get over him. Sometimes the feelings of guilt were unbearable, but today, sitting here, I feel completely cleansed as far as Lasse’s concerned.’
Damn it, she thinks. I ought to have felt much worse. But maybe somewhere deep inside I always doubted that he was actually dead.
She doesn’t know. It’s all very hazy.
Sofia folds her old, veiny hands. Raised, mauve blood vessels, and Victoria recognises her ring. She remembers Sofia telling her she had once been married, but that her husband died young and she had chosen to live alone after that. Like a swan, Victoria thinks.
‘You talk about cleanliness,’ the old woman says. ‘That’s interesting. The psychological meaning of revenge implies some sort of resolution, which in turn means both a physical confrontation with an enemy and an internal, psychological process with implications of cleansing, and reaching self-awareness.’
This is exactly how it should be, Victoria thinks. Just like it used to be.
But can revenge really be a cleansing process? Her thoughts turn to Madeleine and the notepad in her bag. In contains at least fifteen pages of suppositions, many of them probably wrong and presumptuous, but she had taken as her starting point the fact that Madeleine was driven by the same feelings that she had felt. Hatred and revenge.
Perhaps hatred can also be cleansing?
Victoria takes a deep breath before daring to say one of the things she came here for.
‘Do you remember that I gave birth to a baby, a daughter?’
The old woman sighs. ‘Yes, of course I do. I also know that her name is Madeleine.’
Victoria feels her muscles tense up. ‘What else do you know about her?’
She feels deep regret at not having fought harder to keep the child, at not having protected the little girl, holding her tight and making sure she slept soundly at night.
She could have fought, should have fought, but she had been too weak to do it.
Far too broken and full of hate towards everything.
Back then, hatred had only been destructive.
‘I know she had a difficult time,’ Sofia says. Her face looks powerless, and the wrinkles seem to deepen further as she turns towards the window. ‘And I also know that nothing the girl said was deemed sufficient to bring charges,’ she goes on after a short pause.