Jeanette turns the wheel to the left. The image stops and she rewinds, frame by frame.
‘There,’ he says, pointing at the screen as the camera passes one corner of the room. ‘What’s that?’
Jeanette pauses the film, increases the contrast of the picture, and can see what he means. In the dark corner someone is sitting on a chair watching the scene unfolding on the bed.
Jeanette zooms in, but can only make out the outline of the figure. No clear facial features.
Hurtig’s suggestion of trying to see what’s in the background gives Jeanette an idea. ‘Wait here,’ she says, and gets up. Hurtig looks at her in surprise as she opens the door and calls for Kevin.
The young police officer comes out into the corridor.
‘Could you come in here for a minute, please?’
‘Just a moment.’
Kevin goes back into his room and comes out again holding a CD in his hand. ‘Here,’ he says, handing it to Jeanette and then saying hello to Hurtig. ‘That’s what I’ve found so far on Hannah ?stlund’s computer, and I have to say I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He gulps before going on. ‘This is something else entirely. This has …’
‘This has what?’ Jeanette asks, looking at the clearly shocked young officer.
‘I don’t know how to put it, it’s like it’s got a philosophy or something …’
She looks at him intently, wondering what he means, but doesn’t want to ask. She’ll soon be seeing it herself. But before that she needs his help.
She takes hold of the wheel and moves slowly forward, frame by frame. As the camera sweeps across the window and the parking lot she stops. Outside there are a number of cars parked.
‘Can you make the picture sharp enough to see the registration numbers?’ she asks, turning to Kevin.
‘I get you,’ he says, leaning over the mixing desk and zooming in on the cars, then making the image crystal clear by quickly pressing a few buttons.
‘And now you’d like me to find out who owns the cars?’ he says.
‘Have you got time?’ Jeanette asks, smiling at him.
‘Only because you’re a friend of Mikkelsen’s,’ he says. ‘Just don’t let it become a habit.’
He winks at her, writes down the registration numbers and goes back to his room.
From the corner of her eye she sees Hurtig looking at her from one side.
‘Impressed?’ she asks as she removes the video cassette and inserts the CD.
‘Very,’ he replies. ‘So what are we watching next?’
‘Films from Hannah ?stlund’s computer.’ She leans back and steels herself for what’s about to come. ‘Let’s see if it is even worse, as he implied.’
‘Is that even possible?’ Hurtig mutters as a small room appears on the screen. The soundtrack of the film is full of tinny hissing.
Jeanette thinks it looks like a shed. In the background are a wheelbarrow and some buckets, rakes and other garden equipment.
‘This looks like it was filmed from a television,’ Hurtig says. ‘You can tell by the flickering and the sound quality. The original was probably an old VHS.’
The picture lurches for a few moments as whoever’s holding the camera seems to lose their balance.
Then a face appears, hidden behind a home-made mask that’s supposed to be a pig. The snout is made out of what looks like a plastic mug. The camera pulls back to reveal more people. They’re all wearing capes and similar pig masks. Now three girls are visible as well, on their knees behind a large plate with something unidentifiable on it.
‘That must be Hannah and Jessica,’ Hurtig says, pointing at the screen.
Jeanette nods, recognising the girls from the photograph in the school yearbook.
She realises that this must be what Annette Lundstr?m had talked about. The initiation ritual that got out of hand and led to Hannah and Jessica leaving the school.
‘And the one next to them must be Victoria Bergman,’ Jeanette says, looking at the thin, fair-haired girl with bright blue eyes. It seems to her that Victoria is smiling. But it isn’t an amused smile, more mocking. It’s almost as if she’s in on it, Jeanette thinks. That Victoria knows what’s going to happen. There’s also something vaguely familiar about her that she can’t put her finger on, but she soon has other things to think about.
One of the masked girls takes a step forward and starts speaking.
‘Welcome to Sigtuna College for the Humanities,’ she says, as someone empties a bucket over Hannah, Jessica and Victoria. The soaked girls spit, cough and hiss.
Hurtig shakes his head. ‘Bloody upper-class brats,’ he mutters.
They watch the rest of the film in shared silence.
The final sequence shows Victoria leaning forward and starting to eat the contents of the plate in front of them. When one of the girls in the background takes off her mask and throws up, Jeanette recognises her as well. The young woman puts her mask on again, but the few seconds were enough.
‘Annette Lundstr?m,’ Jeanette declares.
‘Shit, yes …’
‘How did your meeting with her go?’ Jeanette asks.
‘Kind of OK,’ he says, and clears his throat. ‘Some useful information, I think. But we can deal with that later.’
As they start to watch the next film she soon understands what Kevin meant about Hannah ?stlund’s films having some sort of philosophy.
The scene they’re watching appears to be taking place in a pigpen at a farm. There’s hay on the ground, which is dark with mud, or possibly something else. Shit, Jeanette thinks with disgust, pig shit. A row of people walk into the shot; they’re all fully dressed and they sit down in a row around the pigpen, and she recognises all of them.
From the left, Per-Ola Silfverberg, then his wife, Charlotte, holding a small child, and Jeanette presumes that must be their foster-daughter, Madeleine. Then Hannah ?stlund, Jessica Friberg and lastly Fredrika Grünewald. And at the edge of the picture is a man’s profile.
It feels like all Jeanette has seen in the past few hours are images from her own nightmares about the cases she’s been investigating recently. All the key players are there, pretty much everyone who’s involved, and for a moment she is seized by a sense of unreality, as if she were actually in a nightmare, and she feels compelled to sneak a look at Hurtig.
OK, she thinks. He’s in the nightmare as well, and is just as dumbstruck as I am.
When two naked boys step into the picture – or, rather, are shoved in by someone hidden behind the camera – the nightmare is complete.
Itkul and Karakul, she thinks, even though she knows they can’t be the brothers from Kazakhstan because they hadn’t been born when this film was recorded. Besides, these boys are clearly of East Asian origins.
They start to fight, first feebly and warily, then more intensely, and when one of them manages to get hold of the other one’s hair, the second boy is furious and flails around wildly. But it doesn’t help. A powerful blow to the head floors him.