When did Sofia appear? Was she there at Sigtuna? Did she go interrailing with Hannah and Jessica? The memories are all hazy, and Sofia realises that the images in her memory only become logical and clearly structured during the time she was at university, when she was twenty.
Sofia Zetterlund was accepted at Uppsala university and spent five years living in a student apartment, then she moved to Stockholm. A psychology placement at Nacka Hospital, then a couple of years working in forensic psychiatry out in Huddinge.
After that she had met Lasse and set up her own practice.
What else? Sierra Leone, obviously.
Her life suddenly feels so depressingly short and meaningless, and she knows that’s because of one single person. Her dad, Bengt Bergman, stole half her life and forced her to struggle through the other half as a prisoner of routine. Work, money, lofty ambitions, be good, make halfhearted efforts at having a love life. Hold the memories at bay by staying as busy as is humanly possible.
When she was twenty she was strong enough to take over Victoria’s life, putting it behind her and embarking on her own. At university there was only one person, Sofia Zetterlund, who hid Victoria away the same way she forgot about her dad’s abuse. She wiped out Victoria’s existence while simultaneously losing control of her.
Sofia gets up and goes out to the hall mirror. She smiles at her reflection and sees the tooth Victoria chipped in a hotel room in Copenhagen. The neck she tied a noose around. She can feel how sinuous it is, how strong.
She unbuttons her blouse and lets her hand wander inside the fabric. Feels a mature woman’s body, remembers the way Lasse and Mikael have touched it.
Imagines how it would feel if Jeanette were to touch her. Skin against skin. Jeanette’s hands would be cool and soft.
Her hand moves tentatively over her skin. She shuts her eyes and reaches inside herself. Empty. She takes her blouse off and looks at herself standing there. In the mirror she traces her own shape.
The edges of the body are so definite. Where the skin stops, the world takes over.
Everything inside is me, she thinks.
She folds her arms over her chest with her hands on her shoulders, like an embrace. Her hands move up over her cheeks, stroking her lips. She shuts her eyes again. She is taken aback by a retching sensation, and the bitter taste in her mouth.
It is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
Slowly Sofia takes off her trousers and pants. She looks at herself in the hall mirror. Sofia Zetterlund. Where do you come from? When did Victoria hand herself over to you?
Sofia reads her skin like a map of her own life and Victoria’s.
She feels her feet, her sore heels, whose calluses never grow thick enough to stop them breaking again.
Sofia’s heels.
She runs her hands up her calves, stops at her knees. She feels the scars on them and feels the grit beneath them when Bengt took her from behind and his weight pressed and rubbed her kneecaps into the grit on the path.
Victoria’s knees, she thinks.
Thighs. They feel soft under her hands. She shuts her eyes and knows how they looked afterwards. The blue marks she tried to hide. Feels how the tendons on the insides ache, like when he grabbed hold of them.
Victoria’s thighs.
She keeps going, towards her back, over it. Feels irregularities she’s never noticed before.
She closes her eyes, and there’s the smell of warm soil, the special smell she only ever noticed from the red soil of Sierra Leone.
Sofia remembers Sierra Leone, but she doesn’t remember the scars on her back, and doesn’t see the connection that Victoria is trying to show her. Sometimes you have to make do with symbolism, she thinks, and remembers how she woke up in a covered pit, convinced she had been buried alive by the child soldiers who ruled through rage. She feels the heaviness in her body, the threatening darkness, the smell of mouldering cloth. And she had managed to get away.
Now she regards it as a superhuman achievement, but at the time she hadn’t realised that what she was doing was actually impossible.
She had been the only member of the party to survive.
The only one who managed to bridge the chasm between reality and fantasy.
Zinkens Bar
THREE NAMES. THREE men.
First Karl Lundstr?m and Viggo Dürer. Two people whose fates seemed to be connected in an odd way. But at the same time maybe it isn’t so odd, Jeanette thinks. They were members of the same foundation, and would have met at meetings and dinners. When Lundstr?m got into trouble he had contacted a solicitor he already knew. Viggo Dürer. That was how it worked. Favours given, then favours returned.
But the list of people who financed this foundation that Jeanette had never heard of before, Sihtunum i Diasporan, also included Bengt Bergman.
Father of the missing Victoria Bergman.
Jeanette Kihlberg feels the room getting smaller.
‘How did you find this?’ Jeanette hands the phone back and looks at the young woman opposite her.
Ulrika Wendin smiles. ‘It wasn’t hard. I googled it.’
I must be a bad police officer, Jeanette thinks.
‘Flashback? How reliable is that?’ she asks, and Ulrika laughs.
‘Well, there’s a lot of shit there, but a fair bit of truth. Most of it’s rumours about celebrities who’ve fucked up. Their names show up, then when the evening papers do the same thing they can say the information is already available on the Internet. Sometimes you can’t help wondering if the journalists themselves started the muckraking.’
Jeanette reflects that she’s probably right. ‘What sort of organisation is it? Sihtunum i Diasporan?’
Ulrika picks up her fork and starts prodding at her fries. ‘Some sort of foundation. But I couldn’t find out much about it …’
There must be something, Jeanette thinks. I’ll put Hurtig onto it.
‘How did Viggo Dürer die?’ Ulrika looks up from her plate.
‘In a fire on a boat. An accident. The Sk?ne police found him off Simrishamn.’
‘Did he suffer?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
‘And it really did happen?’
‘Yes. He and his wife have been cremated and buried.’
Jeanette looks at the girl’s skinny frame. Her eyes are blank, as if they’re seeing right through her plate, while her hand is making aimless patterns in the Béarnaise sauce with a fry.
She needs help.
‘Ulrika … have you ever thought about therapy?’
Ulrika glances up at Jeanette and shrugs. ‘Therapy? Not likely!’
‘I’ve got a friend who’s a psychologist, she’s used to working with young people. I can see you’ve got a lot of things bottled up. It’s pretty obvious.’ Jeanette pauses before going on. ‘How much do you weigh? Forty-five kilos?’
Another nonchalant shrug. ‘No, forty-eight.’ Ulrika gives a crooked smile, and Jeanette is filled with compassion.
‘I don’t know if it would suit me. I’m probably too stupid for that sort of help.’
You’re wrong, Jeanette thinks. Totally damn wrong.
In spite of her fragility, Jeanette can see strength in the young woman. She’s going to sort this out, if someone can just give her a helping hand.