She would guess Cirka's age as at least double that. When she wasn't smiling, those lines drew the corners of her mouth down towards her chin, and the skin beneath it was starting to slacken. The roots of her hair were peppered with grey. Seja couldn't help inspecting this woman as if she were under a magnifying glass. The passing of the years was never so tangible as when you examined a fragment of your own past face to face: in one way unchanged, in another bearing no resemblance to how it used to be. This encounter made Seja realise that she was also someone else now: no longer the insecure teenager who had sweated buckets every time she was spoken to by someone who, in the twisted hierarchy of a teenage girl's world, was worth more than her.
'They were right at the back, and that's where the notebooks from the cafe were as well, otherwise they would have been chucked out long ago. You can't afford to be nostalgic when you live in an apartment that only measures thirty metres square.'
They took her point. The little flat was full from floor to ceiling, mainly with vinyl records. But it seemed not much had changed since the late 8os, the golden age of artificial silk and crushed velvet. One wall was painted black and strewn with luminous stars, and the space that remained around the record collection was taken up by framed posters of the Clash, Nina Hagen, the Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Nick Cave. An unmade mattress lay directly on the floor, and on top of it was a pile of battered notebooks with black covers.
Seja recognised them at once.
'I was absolutely crazy about Woody.'
Hanna's expression was so veiled that Seja couldn't help laughing. They had moved from the Hungarian restaurant, where they had had pea soup and sausage casserole with green chilli and jambalaya, and had settled down in the espresso bar next door.
'You don't have to be a genius to work that out, reading between the lines.' Seja was referring to a number of comments written below Woody's drawings, for which Hanna was responsible. 'Hannami. Where does the mi come from, anyway?'
Hanna rolled her eyes.
'Hannami, God how stupid. Maria is my middle name. I remember introducing myself that way for a while - Hanna Maria. Hannami was a kind of abbreviation. I even tried to change it legally, but to do that you need the signature of your guardian. Mum refused, of course, and it's probably just as well.'
'Yes, but honestly. Listen to this: Your drawings touch my soul, Woody. If you think everything is meaningless, then you are WRONG!…In the darkest hour, when you feel there is no one to comfort you, just remember lam there for you. Hannami.'
Hanna shuddered. 'How embarrassing! I thought I was being so discreet. And deep. But he was brilliant at drawing, you have to admit that.'
They had spent a couple of hours ploughing through the material. From behind the counter the cafe owner was beginning to stare at their empty coffee cups so they bought a second round to appease her. Unfortunately they had failed to find the list of aliases they both thought they remembered at the back of each book.
The first book was from 1991, before their time. Girl and Hannami didn't appear until the following year, first sporadically and tentatively, as if they were waiting to check the response before throwing themselves to the wolves. Gradually their contributions became more personal. In some places there were sections that resembled an official exchange of letters or a political debate between Seja and Crab, who claimed to be an anarchist, while Seja chose to describe herself as a socialist. She read with fascination. Even if many of the arguments were naive, others were well thought through and interesting to follow.
At least we thought about the world. She couldn't help comparing this with the young today, obsessed with reality TV and interested in nothing but what people looked like and the functions on their mobile phones. For the time being Seja allowed herself to disregard the fact that she and her friends had been at least as self-obsessed, their political involvement as much of a fashion statement as the music and the interest in art.
'She used to draw too,' Seja suddenly remembered. 'The girl in the white leather jacket. I remember mentioning it to her, that time I talked to her at the party. I said she drew really well. Let's check all the drawings.'
They flicked back and forth through the books, somewhat disheartened that what they had in front of them was just a fraction of the hoard the staff must have had when they closed the cafe. It was perfectly possible that what they were looking for wasn't even in these books, that the work of the girl in the white leather jacket had been thrown away many years ago. In which case Hanna and Seja's efforts would be in vain.
'This one ought to be on display in a museum or the city library,' said Hanna, reading out a short poem about unrequited love. 'Don't you think so? An exhibition about the thoughts and feelings of teenagers. About first love, unrequited love, sex. The meaning of life, angst, happiness and togetherness. Teen culture uncensored. Isn't it fascinating?'
'Yes… but hang on…'
Seja was holding a picture that folded out from a page in the notebook. It showed a curvaceous naked woman standing in front of a mirror. However, it was not the woman's reflection that appeared, but a wolf standing on its hind legs, its slavering jaws wide open. The drawing was on a loose sheet of paper that had been stuck in the book with something that looked like chewing gum.
'You see?' Seja said eagerly, pointing to a squiggle in one corner of the mirror. She had almost missed the signature because it was in the middle of the picture rather than in the corner. 'I think it says Tingeling. Hanna, I'm absolutely certain that was her alias, the girl in the white leather jacket. Tingeling. I remember now. She signed all her pictures that way, right in the middle of the picture.'
They studied the drawing in silence.
'Excuse me!' The cafe owner's voice brooked no contradiction. 'I'm going to have to ask you to leave if you're not going to order anything else. You have to make way for other customers.'
Seja and Hanna looked meaningfully at the row of empty bar stools but didn't feel like starting an argument.
'We're just going,' said Seja, smiling as sweetly as she could. Unfortunately just going didn't appear to cut it, judging by the death stare she got in return. She glanced at her watch and realised they had been sitting there for several hours. The small of her back ached as they gathered their things together.
Outside Hanna looked at her own watch. 'God, I promised the babysitter I'd be back over an hour ago!' She raced across Gronsakstorget with her jacket flapping open. Seja stood there for a while with the heavy bag of books. It was slowly getting dark. She ought to go over to Nils Erikssonsplats before the buses started running less frequently as the evening timetable took over but it went against the grain to stop now when she felt so close to finding the answer to the questions that had been swirling around in her head.
Now she knew the alias of the girl in the white leather jacket: Tingeling. As she spoke the name out loud the picture in her memory became much clearer. A finely chiselled face with a small mouth, the upper lip a little too thin in relation to the lower to be aesthetically pleasing. Tousled multicoloured hair. Skinny legs in torn stockings, layer upon layer with fishnets on top. Heavy shoes. Attitude, but who had the courage to drop the prickliness and be themselves at sixteen? The last time they met, however, she had seemed noticeably less keen to make a statement and she had been wearing a man's black coat.
Seja walked slowly down to the canal and perched on the edge of a wet bench. The sound of music poured out of the Barsa bar on Kungsportsavenyn as the door opened and new customers arrived or left.
Only one of the notebooks had been completed after the fateful year: on the spine it said NORTHERN STATION 1996-7. That ought to have been too late. And yet it was in this book that Tingeling's name came up from time to time. The letters seemed to stumble over one another as Seja read, frantically flicking back and forth with frozen fingers. Where did she go? What happened to her - was it true that something terrible had happened? Was it rape? Many had wanted to pay tribute to her name with a poem
or a verse from some song. Fear, grief and the desire for sensationalism burned between the lines. Even if the writers had known each other more through their writing than personally, it was clear that they felt a strong bond with each other. That was also how Seja remembered it.
Most seemed to believe that Tingeling had taken her own life, some that she had died of an overdose. Others expressed themselves more cryptically, hinting that a crime might lie behind her disappearance; someone had started this rumour and the ripples had spread. But no one seemed to know for sure. No one seemed to have been with her that evening when she disappeared.
Seja carried on reading until the dampness penetrated through her jeans and her hands were stiffened with cold from a sudden icy blast of wind. The restaurant boat Atta Glas moved almost imperceptibly on the water. That was when she found what she was looking for.
There it was, the list she had kept seeing in her mind's eye, conscientiously written out by someone who clearly liked order and neatness. Her heart began to beat faster as she searched feverishly among the names for something that sounded familiar. Many had not filled in their details on the blank line following their alias, wanting to preserve their anonymity, refusing to accept that their given name was any more real than the one they had chosen for themselves, or perhaps they simply hadn't seen the list. Others, in contrast, had filled in their addresses and telephone numbers, perhaps hoping to create an extended network of like-minded souls.
She had filled hers in: Girl: Seja Lundberg. That was why she had been so sure of the list's existence. With her heart pounding she searched among the names, and there it was. Tingeling: Maya Granith. There was a Borås address, which definitely decided the matter. It was her.
Seja took out her mobile to ring Christian Tell. Her frozen fingers slipped on the keys and she dropped the phone on the ground between her feet. The interruption left space for reflection. She sat there with the phone on her knee listening to the misdial tone, before slowly sliding it back into her pocket.
There would be time enough to talk to him, face to face.
* * *
Chapter 46
Under normal circumstances stress turned him into a miraculous organiser. He was like his father in that respect: he hated doing nothing. During periods when he was feeling more contented he could compromise on orderliness - he sometimes even made a point of it - while his father had remained the very personification of a pedant. However, when the mountain of commitments and unfulfilled promises rose above his head, that was when he turned into his father in every respect. At that point order and neatness became restful, and was the only strategy that enabled him to cope.
On the one hand he loathed it all - the diligence, the conceit, the smugness - and had done so ever since he realised this was a psychological defence mechanism for his father, who had used it as a point of honour and a reason to criticise those around them. On the other hand, like most men approaching middle age, Tell noticed that he was becoming more like his father with every passing day, and despite the fact that he loathed the lack of spontaneity and creativity caused by such pedantry, he was also starting to notice that people who lacked the ability to plan really annoyed him. As a young adult he had convinced himself that the quality he valued most, and the one he wanted to strive towards, was tolerance. He hadn't got there yet, and often felt he was moving further away from his goal.
When a murder enquiry wasn't going anywhere it stressed him out; it was always the same. As time passed, he felt a personal sense of responsibility that the crime hadn't been cleared up. Responsibility to the relatives, of course. But also to his colleagues and superiors. He slept without dreaming. He noticed that he was thinking differently. He made an effort to think in wide circles around the investigation, and often did so at the expense of other mental activity. He became more brusque in his dealings with people. Rational. Emotionally muted, in order to use his energy where it was needed most. What was left was a fairly isolated individual; he was well aware of that. After all, nobody said that being aware of your faults meant that you could change them. And he wasn't even sure he wanted to change. Like his father he had found a strategy for survival that seemed to work. He had solved a large number of cases. After many years in the job he knew his own patterns of behaviour very well, and on one level he accepted them.
Therefore he couldn't help noticing that he was now diverging from his routines. Despite being at a critical stage of the investigation he had acted not only spontaneously but completely irrationally. He was sitting in a shabby pizzeria in Olofstorp. It was the best place he could find for thinking things over, or to put it more accurately, it was the only place that served coffee on the way out to Stenared and Seja Lundberg. Because of course that was where the car seemed to be steering itself.
He had called in to the police station only briefly that morning. He had made his apologies for missing the morning briefing on the grounds that he had an urgent errand, and had got in the car with the vague idea of paying a visit to Maria Karlsson. Along with her husband Gosta, she had been the first to take in Olof Bart, or Pilgren, when he was taken into care by social services at the age of six. According to the information he had been given, Gosta Karlsson had died unexpectedly four years later, and Maria had decided to give up being a foster-parent. She was still registered at an address in Ockero, but Tell had not phoned in advance to prepare her for his arrival. In certain cases it felt better to turn up unannounced, thus depriving the person to be interviewed of the opportunity to sift through and pick over their memories in a way that was often detrimental to a police enquiry.
Before deciding to make this unannounced visit to Maria Karlsson, Tell had checked out the chances of getting hold of Marko Jaakonen, the man with whom Olof's mother had had a relationship. It turned out that Jaakonen had hanged himself in prison seven years after Olof was taken into care. Not that Tell imagined these events were in any way related: Jaakonen had gone down for the premeditated murder of a known drug pusher, and was clearly unable to live with the guilt. Or something like that. Anyway, that was a dead end.
On top of everything else, Ostergren had taken Tell to one side and questioned the wisdom of undertaking such a detailed investigation of the background of one of the murder victims. The only answer Tell could give her was that it was down to intuition.
The interview with Thorbjorn Persson, the contact person involved in finding homes for young people, had told them that Bart had returned to Olofstorp after serving twelve months in Villa Björkudden and spending three years under a supervision order in a one-room flat in Hjällbo. Persson remembered it all very clearly. Since Bart had been a model tenant he was in line for a first lease in his own name, but he had informed his social worker he had managed to rent a small cottage somewhere out in the sticks around Olofstorp. The social worker had tried to persuade him to reconsider, because even in those days it was difficult to secure a lease if you were an unemployed person with a criminal record. But Bart had stood firm. He didn't want to live in an apartment. He wanted to live on his own in the forest. This had made Thorbjorn Persson uneasy, and despite the fact that his job was officially over as soon as Bart was signed off, he had kept in touch with him for a couple of years. Given him a call now and again. Taken a drive over to Olofstorp to see how things were going.
Persson had shrugged his shoulders when Tell asked what life had really been like for twenty-year-old Olof Pilgren, as he was still called at the time.
'Well… he was a bit different, was Olof. It seemed a bit lonely out there in the middle of nowhere, but it was OK. He made a couple of friends, I think, a couple of lads that he used to hang out with all the time. Sven and Magnus, Thomas and Magnus. Or was it Niclas?'
He had also forgotten the surnames, if he had ever known them. He didn't know what had happened after that. After a couple of years Bart had broken off contact for no real reason; he just thought they didn't need to discuss things any more. He was doing fine on his own. And it was true,
he was. He had worked his way out of the social care system and Thorbjorn Persson had allowed him his newly earned freedom.
Tell had sent Karlberg to take Persson for a drive around the Olofstorp area to see if he could find the house Bart had rented when he was twenty. Something told him they would find the answer to the mystery in Olof Bart's past, which was colourful to say the least; that there was more chance of coming across something useful in his history than by putting Waltz under the microscope. Not that they had forgotten the photographer, but having turned both his team's brains and their resources inside out, Tell had almost given up hope of finding a link between the two murder victims.
But when it came down to it he hadn't actually driven out to Ockero. He hadn't even driven in the right direction. Instead he took the Marieholm road out towards Grabo. However, when he caught sight of the turning for Olofstorp and the road that carried on out to Stenared, he had got cold feet, and had kept on going until the speedometer was showing 120 kilometres per hour and he reached Sjovik.
He sat in the car for a good hour, gazing out across Lake Mjorn from a parking area close to the water. Cracked ice floes lay along the shoreline. In the end his breath had produced so much condensation on the car windows he could no longer see the lake. He took this as a sign that it was time to make a move.
Slowly he set off in the direction of the city once more. The pizzeria had looked reassuringly safe, and he convinced himself that he wasn't committing to anything by driving into the village. The place had just opened; he would sit down and think through the alternatives, weighing the pluses against the minuses.
Drive over to Seja's place and try to explain. Tell her about the chaos she had aroused within him and about Ostergren's cancer and his father's agonies, which seemed well on the way to becoming his own. Or drive back to work and say sod the lot of it, including the fact that Ostergren was dying.
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