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Jasmin puts her coffee cup down and takes an incoming call.
‘SOS 112 … What’s the nature of the emergency?’
‘My name is Daniel Grim, I’m a counsellor at the Birgitta Home. One of the residents has just called me. It sounded extremely serious, you have to get out there.’
‘Can you tell me what’s happened?’ Jasmin asks as she searches for the Birgitta Home on the computer.
‘I don’t know, one of the girls called. I didn’t really understand what she was saying, there was a lot of shouting in the background, and she was crying and saying there was blood all over the room.’
Jasmin gestures to her colleague Ingrid Sandén that they need more operators.
‘And are you at the scene yourself?’ Jasmin says through the headset.
‘No, I’m at home, I was asleep, but one of the girls called …’
‘You’re talking about the Birgitta Home, north of Sunnås?’ Jasmin asks calmly.
‘Please, hurry up,’ he says in a shaky voice.
‘We’re sending police and an ambulance to the Birgitta Home, north of Sunnås,’ Jasmin repeats, just to be sure.
She transfers the call to Ingrid, who goes on talking to Daniel while Jasmin alerts the police and paramedics.
‘The Birgitta Home is a children’s home, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, a secure children’s home,’ he replies.
‘Shouldn’t there be some staff there?’
‘Yes, my wife Elisabet is on duty, I’m about to call her … I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t know anything.’
‘The police are on their way,’ Ingrid says calmly, and from the corner of her eye sees the flashing blue lights of the first emergency vehicle sweep across the deserted street.
8 (#ulink_ed8f32f9-95cc-5a2d-a129-3e111a5bc241)
The narrow turning off Highway 86 leads straight into the dark forest, toward Himmelsjön and the Birgitta Home.
The grit crunches beneath the tyres of the police car. The headlights play across the tall trunks of the pines.
‘You said you’d been out here before?’ Rolf Wikner asks, changing up to fourth gear.
‘Yes … a couple of years ago one of the girls tried to set light to one of the buildings,’ Sonja Rask replies.
‘Why the hell can’t they get hold of the staff?’ Rolf mutters.
‘Probably got their hands full – regardless of what’s happened,’ Sonja says.
‘It would be useful to know a bit more.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees calmly.
The two colleagues sit in silence next to each other, listening to the communications over the police radio. An ambulance is on its way, and another police car has set out from the station.
The road, like so many logging roads, is perfectly straight. The tyres thunder over potholes and dips. Tree trunks flit past as the flashing blue lights make their way far into the forest.
Sonja reports back to the station as they pull up into the yard in front of the dark red buildings of the Birgitta Home.
A girl in a nightdress is standing on the steps of the main building. Her eyes are wide open, but her face is pale and distant.
Rolf and Sonja get out of the car and hurry over to her in the flickering blue light, but the girl doesn’t seem to notice them.
A dog starts to bark anxiously.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ Rolf says in a loud voice. ‘Does anyone need help?’
The girl waves vaguely towards the edge of the forest, wobbles, and tries to take a step, but her legs buckle beneath her. She falls backwards and hits her head.
‘Are you OK?’ Sonja asks, rushing over to her.
The girl lies there on the steps staring up at the sky, breathing fast and shallow. Sonja notes that she’s drawn blood from scratching her arms and neck.
‘I’m going in,’ Rolf says firmly.
Sonja stays with the shocked girl and waits for the ambulance while Rolf goes inside. He sees bloody marks left by boots and bare feet on the wooden floor, heading off in different directions, including long strides through the passageway towards the hall, then back again. Rolf feels adrenaline course through his body. He does his best not to stand on the footprints, but knows that his primary objective is to save lives.
He looks into a common room where all the lights are on, and sees four girls sitting on the two sofas.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ he calls.
‘Maybe a bit,’ a small, red-haired girl in a pink tracksuit smiles.
‘Where is she?’ he asks anxiously.
‘Miranda’s on her bed,’ an older girl with straight dark hair says.
‘In here?’ he says, pointing towards the corridor with the bedrooms.
The older girl just nods in reply, and Rolf follows the bloody footprints past a dining room containing a large wooden table and tiled stove, and into a dark corridor lined with doors leading to the girls’ private rooms. Shoes and bare feet have trodden through the blood. The old floor creaks beneath him. Rolf stops, pulls his torch from his belt, and shines it along the corridor. He quickly looks along the hand-painted maxims and ornate biblical quotations, then aims the beam at the floor.
The blood has seeped out across the floor from under the door in a dark alcove. The key is in the lock. He walks towards it, carefully moves the torch to his other hand, and reaches out towards the handle and touches it as gently as he can.
There’s a click, the door slips open, and the handle pings back up.
‘Hello? Miranda? My name is Rolf, I’m a police officer,’ he says into the darkness as he steps closer. ‘I’m coming in now …’
The only sound is his own breathing.
He carefully pushes the door open and sweeps the beam of the torch around the room. The sight that greets him is so brutal that he stumbles and has to reach out for the doorframe.
Instinctively he looks away, but his eyes have already seen what he didn’t want to see. His ears register the rushing of his pulse as well as the drips hitting the puddle on the floor.
A young woman is lying on the bed, but large parts of her head seem to be missing. Blood is spattered up the walls, and is still dripping from the dark lampshade.
The door suddenly closes behind Rolf, and he’s so startled that he drops the torch on the floor. The room goes completely black. He turns and fumbles in the darkness, and hears a girl’s small hands hammering on the other side of the door.
‘Now she can see you!’ a high-pitched voice screams. ‘Now she’s looking!’
Rolf finds the handle and tries to open the door, but it won’t budge. The little peephole glints at him in the darkness. With his hands shaking, he pushes the handle down and shoves with his shoulder.
The door flies open, and Rolf staggers into the corridor. He breathes in deeply. The little red-haired girl is standing a short distance away looking at him with big eyes.
9 (#ulink_f80e3608-46fe-59fb-8e38-1f70cdb6d9db)
Detective Superintendent Joona Linna is standing at the window in his hotel room in Sveg, four hundred and fifty kilometres north of Stockholm. The dawn light is cold, steamily blue. There are no lights lit along Älvgatan. It will be many hours yet before he finds out if he’s found Rosa Bergman.
His light grey shirt is unbuttoned and hanging outside his black suit trousers. His blond hair is unkempt, as usual, and his pistol is lying on the bed in its shoulder holster.
Despite numerous approaches from various specialist groups, Joona has remained as an operative superintendent with the National Crime Unit. His habit of going his own way annoys a lot of people, but in less than fifteen years he has solved more complex cases in Scandinavia than any other police officer.
During the summer a complaint was filed against Joona with the Internal Investigations Committee, claiming that he had alerted an extreme left-wing group about a forthcoming raid by the Security Police. Since then, Joona has been relieved of certain duties without actually being formally suspended.
The head of Internal Investigations has made it very clear that he will contact the senior prosecutor at the National Police Cases Authority if he believes there are any grounds at all for prosecution.
The allegations are serious, but right now Joona hasn’t got time to worry about any potential suspension or reprimand.
His thoughts are focused on the old woman who had followed him outside Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm, and who gave him a message from Rosa Bergman. With thin hands she passed him two tattered cards from an old ‘cuckoo’ card game.
‘This is you, isn’t it?’ the woman said uncertainly. ‘And here’s the crown, the bridal crown.’
‘What do you want?’ Joona asked.
‘I don’t want anything,’ the old woman said. ‘But I’ve got a message from Rosa Bergman.’
His heart began to thud. But he forced himself to shrug and explain kindly that there must be some mistake: ‘Because I don’t know anyone called …’
‘She’s wondering why you’re pretending that your daughter’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Joona replied with a smile.
He was smiling, but his voice sounded like a stranger’s, distant and cold, as if it were coming from under a large rock. The woman’s words swirled through him and he felt like grabbing her by her thin arms and demanding to know what she was talking about, but instead he remained calm.
‘I have to go,’ he explained, and was about to turn away when a migraine shot through his brain like the blade of a knife through his left eye. His field of vision shrank to a jagged, flickering halo.
When he regained fragments of his sight, he saw that people were standing in a circle around him. They moved aside to make way for the paramedics.
The old woman had vanished.
Joona had denied knowing Rosa Bergman, had said there must be some misunderstanding. But he had been lying.
Because he knows very well who Rosa Bergman is.
He thinks about her every day. He thinks about her, but she shouldn’t know anything about him. Because if Rosa Bergman knows who he is, then something could have gone very badly wrong.
Joona left the hospital a few hours later and immediately set about trying to find Rosa Bergman.
He had no choice but to conduct the search alone, and requested a period of leave.
According to official records there was no one called Rosa Bergman living in Sweden, but there are more than two thousand people with the surname Bergman in Scandinavia.
Joona systematically checked through database after database. Two weeks ago the only option remaining to him was to start to search the physical archives of the Swedish Population Register. For centuries the maintenance of the register was the responsibility of the Church, but in 1991 the register was digitised and transferred to the Tax Office.
Joona started to work his way through the registers, beginning in the south of the country. He sat down in the National Archive in Lund with a paper cup of coffee in front of him, searching in the card files for a Rosa Bergman born at the right time and place. Then he travelled to Visby, Vadstena, and Gothenburg.
He went to Uppsala, and the vast archive in Härnösand. He searched through thousands of pages of births, locations, and family connections.
10 (#ulink_643ee407-6b5c-5a9a-8282-800d27171d54)
Joona spent the previous afternoon in the archive in Östersund. The sweet antiquarian smell of discoloured old paper and heavy bindings filled the room. Sunlight wandered slowly across the tall walls, glinting off the glass of the motionless clock before moving on.
Just before the archive closed, Joona found a girl who was born eighty-four years ago and who was christened Rosa Maja in the parish of Sveg in Härjedalen, in the province of Jämtland. The girl’s parents were Kristina and Evert Bergman. Joona couldn’t find any information about their marriage, but the mother, Kristina Stefanson, was born nineteen years before in the same parish.
It took Joona three hours to locate an eighty-four-year-old woman named Maja Stefanson in a care home in Sveg. It was already seven o’clock in the evening, but Joona still got in his car and drove to Sveg. It was late by the time he arrived, and he wasn’t allowed into the home.
Joona booked into Lilla Hotellet and tried to get some sleep, but woke up at four o’clock, and has been standing at the window ever since, waiting for morning.
He’s almost certain that he’s found Rosa Bergman. She’s adopted her mother’s maiden name, and is using her middle name.
Joona looks at his watch and decides that it’s time to go. He buttons his jacket, leaves the room, goes down to reception, and out into the small town.
The Blue Wings care home is a cluster of yellow-plastered houses around a neat lawn with footpaths and benches to rest on.
Joona opens the door to the main building and goes inside. He forces himself to walk slowly through the neon-lit corridor lined with closed doors leading to offices and the kitchen.
She wasn’t supposed to be able to find me, he thinks once more. She wasn’t supposed to know about me. Something’s gone wrong.
Joona never talks about the reason why he’s ended up alone, but it’s with him every waking moment.
His life burned like magnesium, flared up and died away in an instant, from gleaming white to smouldering ash.
In the dayroom a thin man in his eighties is standing and staring at the bright screen of the television. A TV chef is heating sesame oil in a pan, and talking about various ways of updating traditional crayfish parties.
The old man turns to Joona and screws up his eyes.
‘Anders?’ the man says in an unsteady voice. ‘Is that you, Anders?’
‘My name is Joona,’ he replies in his soft Finnish accent. ‘I’m looking for Maja Stefanson.’
The man stares at him with moist, red-rimmed eyes.
