‘How do you know she had a difficult time?’
Another sigh from the old woman. She pulls out a cigarette and opens the window slightly, but makes no move to light the cigarette, just rolls it distractedly between her fingers. ‘I’ve followed Madeleine’s progress through a contact at University Hospital in Copenhagen. What happened was truly awful …’
She imagines she can see a spark ignite in Sofia Zetterlund’s misty gaze. ‘Give me a light, would you? I don’t know what I’ve done with my lighter. Nicotine makes me think better.’
Victoria takes out her own lighter and helps herself to a cigarette from the old woman’s pack.
‘Have you ever met Madeleine?’
‘No, but like I said, I know what happened to her, and I’ve seen pictures of her. My colleague in Copenhagen sent me another photograph a couple of years ago, just after my sight went. I haven’t been able to look at it myself, but I’ve got it here if you’d like to see it. It’s in one of the books in the bookcase. The same shelf as Freud, third book from the left, a reference book with French binding. Take a look at it while I tell you about capsulotomy and sensory deprivation.’
Victoria jerks. Capsulotomy? Isn’t that …? ‘Have they lobotomised Madeleine?’
The old woman smiles faintly. ‘That’s a matter of definition. Let me explain.’
Victoria feels angry, confused and expectant as she walks over to the bookcase. Tragic, she thinks as she pulls out the book. I haven’t seen my daughter in twenty years, and when I finally find her it’s in the appendix to an encyclopedia from the fifties.
The photograph shows a girl wrapped in a blanket in a hospital bed. The resemblance between Madeleine and Victoria herself is striking. An oppressive feeling creeps through her stomach.
‘Can I keep it?’
Sofia nods, Victoria sits down again and the old woman lights another cigarette as she starts to explain. Gradually Victoria slips back to her time in Tyres?, and she shuts her eyes and imagines that she’s there again, that it’s summer and they’re sitting in Sofia’s bright kitchen.
‘Madeleine was operated on a few years ago,’ the old psychologist begins.
Denmark, 2002
When little ’un came to earth, it was in May when the cuckoo called,
Mama said all was aglow, bright spring green and sunlight.
The lake shone like silver, and the cherry tree was in bloom,
And the swallow, quick and cheery, arrived along with spring.
THE ROOM WAS as white as it was black, and she stared helplessly up at the ceiling, unable to move because her arms were fastened to the bed.
She knew what awaited her, and she remembered the voice on the crackling radio two months before, just after they made the decision.
Professor of Psychiatry Per Mindus was one of Sweden’s leading authorities on anxiety disorders and compulsive behaviour syndrome. During his time at the Karolinska Institute he was introduced to neurosurgery and the surgical technique known as capsulotomy. In layman’s terms, the technique involved going into the part of the brain known as the capsula interna and cutting the nerves that were believed to contribute to mental illness.
The thick leather straps chafed against her wrists, and she had given up trying to pull free. The medication meant she could feel a secure, warm apathy spreading through her blood.
The technique, which was used for fifty years, was increasingly questioned in the 1990s, because in half of all cases it led to a deterioration in both abstract thinking and the ability to learn from mistakes.
‘Is the girl ready for the operation?’
She heard the voice that she had learned to dislike over the course of the past few weeks.
‘I’m very busy and would like to get it done as soon as possible.’
Why’s he in such a rush? she thought. A round of golf, or a visit to his mistress?
Someone turned on a tap. Washed their hands. Then the smell of surgical fluid.
The warmth in her body was making her tired, and she felt she was about to fall asleep. If I do, she thought, then I’ll wake up as a completely different person.
She could feel the draught of a doctor’s coat and realised someone was standing beside the bed. His mouth was covered by a paper mask, but the eyes were the same. She sneered at him.
‘You’ll see, it’ll all be fine,’ he said.
‘Drop dead, you Swedish bastard!’ she replied, then sank into the warm half-doze.
She could hear the crackle from the radio again, barely tuned in.
Criticism of Per Mindus’s use of capsulotomy increased when it emerged that he had been lying about having been given authorisation for his experiments. One of the leading experts on compulsive disorders claimed that the technique had severe side effects. It was also claimed that when a follow-up report was published, it had been written by someone who was responsible for deciding which patients should be capsulotomised, and who alone evaluated the effectiveness of the treatment.
She was still tied down when they rolled her into the operating room. Still drowsy from all the medication, but alert enough to understand what was about to happen.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
THE ROOM IS as white as it is black. Shelf after shelf of old VHS cassettes, CDs, hard drives and boxes of photographs. All carefully marked with the name of their previous owner, and a time, place and date.
Nothing in Jeanette Kihlberg’s twenty-year career in the police force has prepared her for this, and when she realises the extent of the accumulated documentation of abuse she feels dizzy. Is it that we want to be blind? she wonders. That we don’t want to see?
Evidently it’s more important that interest rates stay low, house prices rise, or your flat-screen TV is plasma or LCD. You fry your gammon steak and wash it down with a three-litre wine box. You’d rather read a badly written thriller about the horror of it than deal with it in real life.
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had no idea how right they were, she thinks, while at the same time being perfectly aware that she’s no better herself.
She wanders aimlessly around the room, not quite sure where to start looking for Karl Lundstr?m’s films.
On one of the shelves she sees a name she recognises. A fifty-four-year-old inspector with the Stockholm police who bought child porn on the Internet over a period of years. Jeanette remembers reading about the case. When Mikkelsen and his colleagues caught him, the officer had over thirty-five thousand illegal images and films in his home.