The Gallows Bird Read online

  ‘Yes, Lillemor?’ She took her hand down.

  ‘First of all, my name isn’t Lillemor, it’s Barbie now,’ she said with a sullen pout. Then she smiled. ‘But I’d just like to say that I think this is incredibly great! We all get a chance to sit here and speak our minds. We never had anything like this on Big Brother.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Uffe as he slumped in his chair and stared at Barbie. Her smile vanished and she lowered her eyes.

  ‘I think that was very well said,’ said Lars, trying to encourage her. ‘And you’ll have an opportunity for individual therapy as well as group therapy. I think we’ll conclude the group segment now, so maybe you and I . . . Barbie, can start on the individual therapy. Okay?’

  She looked up and smiled again. ‘Yes, I’d like that. I have tons of stuff I need to talk about.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Lars, returning her smile. ‘So I suggest we go behind the set to the room in back so we can talk undisturbed. Then I’ll talk to each of you in order, going round the circle. After Barbie comes Tina, then Uffe, and so on. Will that be okay?’ No one replied, so Lars took that as a yes.

  As soon as the door closed behind Barbie and Lars, they all started talking. All except Jonna, who as usual preferred silence.

  ‘What fucking bullshit,’ Uffe scoffed, slapping his knee.

  Mehmet gave him an annoyed look. ‘What do you mean? I think this is good. You know how fucked up you can get after a couple of weeks on one of these shows. I think it’s great that for once they’re thinking about the cast. They want us to feel good.’

  ‘“They want us to feel good”,’ Uffe mimicked him in a shrill voice. ‘You’re such a fucking pussy, Mehmet, you know? You ought to have one of those health programmes on TV. Sit there in some tight outfit and yoga yourself or whatever the fuck it’s called.’

  ‘Don’t mind him, he’s just being stupid,’ said Tina, glaring at Uffe, who now turned his attention to her.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, bitch? You think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you? Bragging about what good grades you get and how many big words you know. You think you’re better than the rest of us. And now you think you’re going to be a pop star too.’ His laughter dripped with scorn, and he looked around the group for support. Nobody responded. But nobody protested either, so he kept it up. ‘Do you really believe that shit? You’re just embarrassing everybody, including yourself. I heard that you talked them into letting you sing your pathetic fucking song tonight, and I look forward to seeing people throw rotten tomatoes at you. Shit, I’ll come myself and stand in the front row to throw some.’

  ‘You’d better shut up now, Uffe,’ said Mehmet, skewering him with his gaze. ‘You’re just jealous because Tina has talent, while the only thing you have is a short-lived career as a reality-show idiot. After that you’ll be back in the warehouse again carting boxes around all day.’

  Uffe laughed again, but this time he sounded nervous. There was a ring of truth to Mehmet’s words, and that made the uneasiness surge inside Uffe. But he pushed away the feeling.

  ‘You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want. But you’ll get a chance to hear for yourselves tonight. The hicks in this town are going to laugh themselves silly.’

  ‘I hate you, Uffe, just so you know.’ Tina got up with tears in her eyes and left the group. A camera followed her. She started running to get away, but it was impossible to escape the cameras. Their hungry eyes were everywhere.

  Patrik couldn’t concentrate on anything else. Thoughts of the car crash haunted him. If only he could put his finger on what it was that seemed so familiar about the death. He picked up the folder containing all the papers from the investigation and sat down to go through everything again. He had no idea how many times he’d done this. As always when he was thinking intensely, he muttered to himself.

  ‘Bruises around the mouth, unbelievably high blood alcohol content in an individual who never drank, according to her relatives.’ He ran his finger over the autopsy report, looking for something he might have missed on previous readings. But nothing seemed irregular. Patrik picked up the phone and rang a number he knew by heart.

  ‘Hello, Pedersen, this is Patrik Hedström with the Tanum police. Look, I’m sitting here with the autopsy report. Could you spare five minutes to go over it with me one more time?’

  Pedersen agreed, so Patrik continued, ‘These bruises around the mouth, can you say when she got them? Okay.’ He wrote notes in the margin as he talked.

  ‘And the alcohol, can you say anything about the amount of time that elapsed while she drank it? No, I don’t mean a specific time of day; well, that too perhaps. But did she sit drinking for a long time, or did she guzzle it down or . . . that’s exactly what I mean.’ He listened intently and furiously jotted down notes.

  ‘Interesting, very interesting. Did you find anything else that was odd during the post-mortem?’ Patrik listened and didn’t write anything for a moment. He discovered that he was pressing the receiver so hard against his ear that it started to hurt, so he loosened his grip.

  ‘Remnants of tape around the mouth? Yes, that’s undoubtedly significant. But there’s nothing else you can tell me?’ He sighed at the less than informative answers he was getting and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.

  ‘Okay, I suppose that will have to do.’ Patrik hung up the receiver reluctantly. He had really been hoping for more. He took out the photos from the accident scene and began to study them, searching for something, anything, that might trigger his intractable memory. The most annoying part was that he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that there was anything to remember. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe it was some odd form of déjà vu. Maybe he’d seen something on TV or in a film, or merely heard something, that was making his brain try to search for something that didn’t exist. But just as he was about to cast aside the papers in frustration, a flash occurred between the synapses in his brain. He leaned forward to inspect more closely the photo he still held in his hand, and a feeling of triumph came over him. Maybe he wasn’t so far off course after all. Maybe something specific had been hovering in the darkest nooks of his memory after all.

  In one stride he was at the door. It was time to head down to the archives.

  * * *

  Barbie listlessly let the goods pass by on the conveyor belt as she read off the bar codes. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she stubbornly blinked them away. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself by sitting here crying.

  The conversation that morning had stirred up so many emotions. So much muck that had been lying on the bottom was now coming up to the surface. She looked at Jonna sitting at the checkout in front of her. She envied her in a way. Maybe not her depression and all that cutting. Barbie would never be able to slice a knife through her own flesh like that. What she envied was Jonna’s obvious indifference to what everyone else thought. For Barbie there was nothing more important than the way she looked and appeared to others. That hadn’t always been the case, as the school pictures dug up by that damned evening tabloid had shown. The photos of her when she was small and skinny, with gigantic braces, almost nonexistent breasts, and dark hair. She was upset when the photos appeared on the newspaper placards. But not for the reason everyone thought. Not because she worried that people would know that both her hair colour and her boobs were fake. She wasn’t that stupid. But it hurt to see what she no longer had. Her happy smile. Full of self-confidence. She’d been happy about who she was, secure and satisfied with her life. But everything changed the day her pappa died.

  She and Pappa got along so well. Her mamma died when Barbie was little, of cancer. But somehow he had managed to make her feel whole in spite of her mother’s death; she had never felt as though she lacked anything. She knew that things had been up and down for a while, when she was a baby, right after her mamma died, and when All The Evil happened. She had heard all about it, but her pappa had paid the price, learned from it, an
d gone on to build a life for himself and his daughter. Until that day in October.

  It felt so unreal when it happened. In an instant her whole life had been eradicated and everything had been taken from her. She had no other family, no other relatives to go to, so she’d been cast into a world of foster families and temporary living situations. She had learned lessons she would have preferred not to know. The self-confidence she’d had before vanished. Her friends couldn’t understand that she had changed inside because of what had happened. That day took something away from her, and she would never be the same. Her friends tried to support her for a while, but eventually they left her to her fate.

  That was when her craving for confirmation among older boys and tough girls began. It wasn’t enough to be an ordinary tomboy any longer. And the name Lillemor no longer fit either. So she started with what she could do on her own and what she could afford. She dyed her hair blonde in the bathroom belonging to one of the boyfriends who passed through her life. She replaced her old clothes with new ones: tighter, shorter, sexier. Because she had discovered what her ticket out of misery was going to be. Sex. It could buy her attention and material things. It gave her a chance to stand out from the crowd. One boyfriend had plenty of money, so he financed the breasts. She would have preferred them a bit smaller, but he was the one paying, so he got to decide. He wanted E-cups and that’s what he got. When her physical transformation was done, it was merely a matter of packaging. The boyfriend after the breast financier had called her ‘little Barbie doll’, and that solved the question of her name. Then all she had to do was decide what would be the best forum for launching her new self. It had begun with some small modelling jobs, requiring scanty clothing, or none at all. But her breakthrough had come on Big Brother. She became the big star of the series. And it hadn’t bothered her in the least that the entire population of Sweden was able to observe her sex life from their living rooms. Who cared? She had no family to berate her for publicly shaming them. She was alone in the world.

  She usually succeeded in not thinking about what was going on inside Barbie. She had pressed Lillemor so far back in her consciousness that the girl hardly existed anymore. She had done the same thing with the memory of her father. She couldn’t permit herself to remember him. If she were to survive, the sound of his laughter, or the touch of his hand against her cheek, could no longer exist in the life she was now living. It would hurt too much. But this morning’s conversation with that psychologist had touched strings that stubbornly continued to vibrate inside her. And she didn’t seem to be the only one to have such a reaction. The mood had been subdued after they had each gone into the room behind the set and sat in the chair facing the man. Sometimes it felt as though all their negativity was being directed at her, and she occasionally had the feeling that some of the others were giving her malicious looks. But every time she turned round to see where that creeping feeling was coming from, the moment would pass.

  At the same time there was something stirring restlessly inside her. Something that Lillemor tried to fix her attention on. But Barbie forced back the feeling. Some things she simply couldn’t allow to slip out.

  Groceries continued to pass along the conveyor belt in front of her at the checkout stand. It never ended.

  Searching in the archives was, as usual, both dreary and arduous work. Nothing seemed to be where it should be. Patrik had sat down on the floor cross-legged, with boxes all around him. He knew what sort of document he was looking for, and in a foolish moment he had thought they would be easily found in a box labelled ‘Educational Material’. But no such luck. He heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up. It was Martin.

  ‘Hey, Annika said she saw you headed down here. What are you doing?’ Martin gazed in wonderment at all the boxes spread out in a circle around Patrik.

  ‘I’m looking for notes from a conference I attended in Halmstad a couple of years ago. You would have thought they’d be archived in some logical manner, but no. Some idiot has moved everything around, so nothing matches.’ He tossed another stack of papers into yet another box that had been archived in the wrong place.

  ‘Yeah, Annika’s always nagging us about keeping the documents in order down here. She claims that she files everything in the right place, but then the documents apparently grow feet.’

  ‘I don’t understand why people can’t simply put things back where they found them. I know I put the notes in a folder that I archived in this box.’ He pointed to the one labelled ‘Educational Material’ and continued, ‘But now they’re not here. So the question is, which damn box are they in? “Missing persons”, “Solved cases”, “Unsolved cases”, and so on and so forth. Your guess is as good as mine.’ He swept his hand round the cellar piled with boxes from floor to ceiling.

  ‘Well, what fascinates me most is the fact that you actually filed your conference notes. Mine are still back in my office in some pile or other.’

  ‘I should probably have done the same thing. But I was naïve enough to think that somebody else might have a use for them.’ Patrik sighed and grabbed another stack of documents and started leafing through them. Martin sat down next to him on the floor and started in one of the boxes too.

  ‘I’ll help you. Then it’ll go faster. What am I looking for? What sort of conference was it? And why are you looking for your notes, anyway?’

  Patrik didn’t look up but merely replied, ‘As I said, it was a conference in Halmstad, in 2002 if I remember correctly. It had to do with strange cases that were still raising questions and remained unsolved.’

  ‘And . . .’ said Martin, waiting for more.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you more when we find the notes. So far it’s a vague idea, so I want to refresh my memory before I say anymore.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Martin. He was still curious, but he knew Patrik well enough to realize it wouldn’t do any good to pressure him.

  Suddenly Patrik looked up and smiled slyly. ‘But I’ll tell you if you tell me . . .’

  ‘Tell you what?’ said Martin in surprise, but when he saw Patrik’s smile he understood what his colleague was getting at. He laughed and said, ‘Fair enough. When you tell me, I’ll tell you.’

  After an hour of fruitless searching, Patrik suddenly gave out a yell.

  ‘Here they are!’ He pulled some papers out of a plastic folder.

  Martin recognized Patrik’s writing and tried to read what it said upside down. But it was no use, and he had to wait in frustration while Patrik skimmed through the notes. After he’d read three pages, his index finger stopped suddenly in the middle of the page. A deep furrow formed between Patrik’s eyebrows and Martin tried to coax him mentally to read faster. After what seemed like forever, Patrik looked up in triumph.

  ‘Okay, your secret first,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, come on, I’m so curious I’m going to die.’ Martin laughed and tried to tear the papers out of Patrik’s hand. But his colleague was prepared for that manoeuvre and snatched them away, holding them up in the air. ‘Forget it. You first, then me.’

  Martin sighed. ‘You’re such a damned tease, you know that? All right, it’s what you thought. Pia and I are going to have a baby. At the end of November.’ He held up a warning finger. ‘But you can’t tell anybody yet! We’re only in week eight, and we want to keep it quiet until after week twelve.’

  Patrik held up both hands. The papers he held in his right hand fluttered. ‘I promise, my lips are sealed. But congratulations, for God’s sake!’

  Martin grinned from ear to ear. Several times he’d been close to telling Patrik. He was eager to spread the good news, but Pia wanted to wait until the critical first trimester had safely passed. Then he could tell people. It was a relief to tell someone at last.

  ‘So, now you know. How about you tell me why we’ve been sitting here covered with dust for the last hour.’

  Patrik turned serious at once. He handed over the document to Martin, pointed at the spot to begin reading, and waited. A
fter a while Martin looked up in astonishment.

  ‘Now there can’t be any doubt that Marit was murdered,’ said Patrik.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  One question had now been answered. But that only made even more questions pile up. They had tons of work ahead of them.

  He was slamming the baking sheets around so hard that the clatter could be heard all the way in the front of the shop. Mehmet stuck his head into the back regions of the bakery.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? Tearing down the place, or what?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ Uffe purposely slammed the sheets down again.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mehmet, holding up his hands. ‘Woke up on the wrong side of the bed, did you?’

  Uffe didn’t answer. He stacked up the baking sheets and then sat down. He was so tired of all this. Sodding Tanum hadn’t lived up to his expectations, not so far at least. It hadn’t sunk in until now that he was actually going to have to work. That was a serious drawback. This was the first time he’d ever had to do an honest day’s work. A few break-ins, several muggings and stuff like that had previously ensured him a life as a non-worker. It was no life of luxury though; he’d never dared do anything more than minor burglaries, but they brought in enough to keep him out of drudgery. And then he’d ended up here. Even life on the island had been easier than this. There he was able to lie about and sunbathe all day, talking trash with the other cast members. An occasional challenge to do, but otherwise pure leisure. He’d been seriously hungry, but the lack of food hadn’t bothered him as much as he’d thought.

  Nor had the other participants in Sodding Tanum lived up to his expectations. They were all morons. The oh-so-dependable Mehmet worked like a slave in the bakery, completely of his own free will. Calle was only on the show so he could continue to be the king of the Stureplan club scene. Tina was so fucking superior, it made him want to punch her. As for Jonna, what a loser. All that shit with cutting herself, he just didn’t get it. Last but not least, Barbie. Uffe’s face clouded. If that cheap slut thought she could get away with pulling a stunt like that, she had another think coming. The things he’d heard that morning made him want to have a little talk with that silicone queen.