Then Ulf Davidsson speaks: ‘Well, we went to bed last night, me and Birgitta, without realising that Josefin hadn’t come home, and then this morning we assumed she was asleep in her room, and we didn’t want to wake her, and neither of us gave a thought to the fact that her bike wasn’t outside . . .’
‘I can’t remember anything,’ Josefin interrupts. ‘The last thing I remember is setting off from home on my bike. I was going to the cinema on my own. The late showing of X-Men 3.’
Her father: ‘Yes, we live in Lambohov. She usually cycles into town.’
Malin and Zeke look at each other.
At the parents.
Knowing which of them will do what.
‘Could I have a word with the two of you in the corridor while my colleague talks to your daughter?’ Zeke asks.
The parents hesitate.
‘Would that be OK?’ Malin asks. ‘We need to talk to you separately. Do you mind if I talk to you, Josefin?’
‘It’s fine,’ Birgitta Davidsson says. ‘Come on, Ulf,’ she says, heading towards the door after a long glance at her daughter.
Malin sinks onto the bed. Josefin makes room for her, although there is no need. The same girl who was sitting on the bench that morning, on the swing, but somehow not the same.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m OK. The wounds hurt a bit. The doctor gave me some pills, so I can’t really feel it.’
‘And you don’t remember anything?’
‘No, nothing. Apart from leaving home on my bike.’
No bicycle in the Horticultural Society Park, Malin thinks. Where’s the bike got to?
‘Were you going to meet anyone?’
‘No. I remember that, because that was before I set off.’
‘Did you get to the cinema?’
Josefin shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. All that is sort of gone, until I woke up here, when the doctor was starting to examine me. That’s when I realised I was in hospital.’
She doesn’t remember me, Malin thinks. Or the park this morning.
‘Can you try to remember? For my sake?’
The girl closes her eyes.
Frowns.
Then she bursts out laughing.
Opens her eyes, saying: ‘It’s like a blank piece of paper! I can sort of see that someone must have hit me, in theory, but it’s like a big white blank, and that doesn’t feel bad at all.’
She doesn’t want to remember.
Can’t.
An organism protecting itself. Hiding away the images, voices, sounds in a distant corner of its consciousness, inaccessible to what we think of as thought.
But the memories take root there, chafe, hurt, and send out tiny, unnoticed little shockwaves through the body, causing pain, stiffness, doubt and anxiety.
‘You don’t remember how you got these wounds? Or anyone washing you?’
‘No.’
‘And your bicycle, where did you leave it?’
‘No idea.’
‘What make is it?’
‘A red Crescent, three gears.’
‘You haven’t been in touch with anyone over the internet? Anyone who seemed odd?’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing. MySpace? Chat rooms? Really dull.’
Banging on the wall from the corridor. Malin has been expecting it.
Zeke’s words just a moment before: ‘Your daughter has been attacked and a blunt instrument has been inserted into her vagina. Probably with force.’
And Ulf Davidsson kicks the wall, clenches his fists, mutters something Zeke doesn’t understand. Birgitta Davidsson is silent beside her husband, staring into the door.
Then her words.
‘But she doesn’t remember, so it’s as if it didn’t happen, isn’t it? Like it doesn’t exist?’
Ulf Davidsson collects himself, stands still beside his wife, putting his arm around her shoulders.
‘No,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t exist.’
The family on the bed in front of them.
Questions recently asked still hanging in the air. The answers floating around them with the dust particles.
‘Everyone else is away for the summer, but we’re staying at home this year.’
‘Telephone numbers of any friends we ought to talk to?’
‘No, no special friends, really.’
‘Yes, we’re staying in the city, saving up for the winter, we’re going to Thailand.’
‘They don’t want to hear about . . .’
‘Any boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone else who could have had something to do with this?’
‘Not that we can think of.’
‘No idea.’
‘No one in your closest circle of acquaintances? Family?’
‘No,’ Ulf Davidsson says. ‘Our families don’t live around here. And none of them would do anything like this.’
Two girls.
Theresa. Josefin.
And neither of them really seems to exist. They’re like shadows of dust in the summer city, invisible and nameless, almost grown-ups, insubstantial as the smoke from the forest fires.
Then a knock on the door.
It opens before anyone has time to say ‘come in’.
A sweeping mop. A huge black man in overalls that are too small for him.
‘Have to clean,’ he says before they can object.
In the corridor, on the way towards the lifts, they meet a middle-aged blonde woman wearing an orange skirt that Malin guesses is from Gudrun Sjödén.
Malin’s finger on the lift button.
‘That must be the psychologist,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’ll get anything?’
‘No chance,’ Malin says, thinking that if they’re going to stand the slightest chance of solving this, Josefin Davidsson will have to remember, or else a witness will have to have seen something, or else Karin Johannison and her colleagues at the National Forensics Lab will have to come up with something really good.
Hypnosis, Malin thinks.
Anyone can remember anything under hypnosis, can’t they?
9
It’s half past one.
Indoctrinated children all around Malin.
The dry, cool air finds its way down her throat and out into her lungs, shocking her body, triggering its defence mechanisms even though the experience is pleasant. Harsh colours making her eyes itch: yellow, blue, green. A clown, pictures, numbers, and an artificial smell of frying.
But it’s cool in here.
And I’m hungry.
The tinted windows make the crashing daylight outside bearable, and I don’t have to wear those damn sunglasses, they impose a filter on reality that I hate. But you have to wear sunglasses out there. The light today is harsh, like having an interrogation lamp aimed right into your eyes, the beams like freshly honed knives right into your soul.
McDonald’s by the Braskens bridge, on the side of the river facing Johannelund. Malin doesn’t usually let the great Satan satisfy her hunger, but today, after their visit to the hospital, she and Zeke make an exception.
Kids with Happy Meals.
The walk from the hospital entrance to the car, parked in the sun on the wide-open car park, made them doubt it was actually possible to be outside at all in heat like this. Then the car, it must have been sixty degrees in its stuffy interior, hot as a sauna, with a protesting engine, a smell of hot oil and the air from the vents first hot, then cold, cold, cold.
The restaurant half full of families with children. Overweight immigrant girls behind the counter jostling each other, giggling and directing quick glances towards them.
‘Isn’t there any way of tracing the person who made the call about Josefin?’
Zeke aims the question into thin air.
‘Not according to Forensics. Pay-as-you-go. We’ll have to leave it as a question mark and move on. And hope whoever it was gets in touch again.’