The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund Page A

throws herself down on her bed.
    She’s in complete torment. She realises that Martin will be ruined, he’ll get big, he’ll become a man, he’ll be like all the others. She had hoped to protect him from that, give herself to save him. But she was too late.
    Everything nice was gone, and it was her fault.
    There’s a gentle knock on the door. She hears Martin’s dad’s voice outside. She crawls over to the door and locks it.
    ‘Is something wrong, Victoria? Why did you get so upset?’
    She realises she can’t open the door now. It would be far too embarrassing.
    Instead she creeps into the bedroom, opens the window at the back and climbs out. She walks in a wide curve around the outhouse and out to the road. When they hear her coming they turn round and walk towards her.
    ‘Ah, there you are, we thought you were inside. Where did you take off to?’
    She feels she’s on the verge of laughter.
    Mum, Dad, with the child in their arms, wrapped in a blanket.
    They look so ridiculous. So scared.
    ‘I needed the toilet,’ she lies, not knowing where the words came from, but they sound good.
    The mum carries her back to their cottage, and there’s nothing odd at all.
    Her arms are safe, like arms usually are when everything’s OK again.
    Her legs hit Martin’s mum’s thigh with each step she takes, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She walks on, focused. As if Victoria belonged with them.
    ‘Will you be coming back next summer?’ she asks, feeling the woman’s cheek against hers.
    ‘Yes, we will,’ she whispers. ‘We’ll come back to you every summer.’
    That summer Martin has six years left to live.

Huddinge Hospital
     
    KARL LUNDSTRÖM WAS going to be charged with child pornography offences, as well as the sexual abuse of his daughter, Linnea. As Sofia Zetterlund turned off towards Huddinge Hospital she reflected on what she knew of his background.
    Karl Lundström was forty-four years old and had a senior position at Skanska, where he was responsible for a number of the largest construction projects in the country. His wife, Annette, was forty-one, and their daughter, Linnea, fourteen. Over the past ten years the family had moved half a dozen times, between Umeå in the north and Malmö in the south, and were currently living in a large turn-of-the-century villa at Edsviken in Danderyd. At the moment there was an extensive police investigation trying to identify whether or not he was actually part of a larger paedophile ring.
    Always on the move, she thought as she turned into the car park. Typical behaviour for paedophiles. Moving to escape discovery and to get away from suspicions about odd behaviour within the family.
    Neither Annette Lundström nor their daughter Linnea wanted to admit what had happened. The mother was in despair and denied everything, whereas the daughter had retreated into an apathetic state of complete silence.
    She parked outside the main entrance and went in. On the way she decided to take one last look at her notes.
    From what had emerged from police interviews, it was clear that Karl Lundström was an extremely complex individual. In the transcripts he talked about how he and the other members of the suspected paedophile ring behaved. He spoke of a physical attraction to children that was seldom noticed by other people, but which paedophiles instinctively recognised in one another. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, they could identify one another’s inclinations simply by their body language or the way they looked around them.
    On the surface, at least, he matched well with Sofia’s previous experiences of a certain sort of man with paedophile or ephebophile personality disorders.
    Their main weapon was the ability to control, manipulate and build up trust and implant guilt and subordination in their victims. In the end there was often a form of mutual dependency between victims and perpetrators.
    Their interest in children wasn’t the only thing they had in