Marianne paused by the container of shoe protectors. Did she need to put on a pair now? Even though the day care was closed for the day and all the children had gone home? She pulled off her shoes and entered the room in sock feet.
“It’s very kind of you to come in on such short notice.”
Marianne ran a hand over her hair.
“You said it was important. So of course I came in. Stig was able to watch Ida. It’s not his week, but he said it was okay. And that was lucky. Unusual, but lucky. Definitely. As long as he helps out, I have no problem…Well, it could get better now, who knows. I’m sure it will get better.”
She tried to laugh, but it mostly sounded like a cough.
Why am I always like this? Why do I always try to explain why Stig does the things he does? Marianne gave a tentative smile.
The director of Vitsippan Day Care didn’t smile back.
“Let’s have a seat,” she said.
Marianne felt the knot in her belly tighten as she stepped into the teachers’ lounge. What was this? She’d assumed it would just be the two of them. Instead, there were already five people in the room. Ida’s day care teachers, all three of them. Plus, a man in his fifties who introduced himself as a social worker and a woman who was a child care assistant. Why were there so many of them?
“I thought…Is this, does this have anything to do with what happened last week?”
Marianne felt her cheeks go hot. She had asked already. They’d said it didn’t. And she had trusted them. She’d thought they were done discussing that incident, that she wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore. But it was just as she’d suspected. They were still upset. And she would have to defend herself again.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t understand. She’d been upset too, but she hadn’t blown it out of proportion. The boy’s parents had gone crazy. They’d taken him to the recently opened Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital where he had needed three stitches to stop the bleeding. Of course it had been unfortunate, but he would recover completely, no long-term effects at all. And what was Marianne supposed to do? How do you tell a four-year-old that you can’t bite your friends on the genitals? On the wee-wee. Still, Marianne had tried several times to talk to Ida, to try to understand. But she couldn’t keep nagging at her daughter forever. In addition, as she’d already told the staff, she would really like to know whose idea it had been to play such a strange game. It had to be the boys; surely the boys were the ones who wanted to experiment. They must have seen something they shouldn’t have, on TV, or at home when the parents thought the kids were asleep. It wasn’t necessarily all Ida’s fault. She may have been trying to defend herself against an idea her friends had come up with.
I should have left my shoes on, Marianne thought.
Hadn’t they been through enough? If she’d known she was about to be dragged in front of some type of jury, to be judged as a mother, she would have asked Stig to come along. This was his responsibility too.
To be honest, she thought it would be a good thing for them to talk to him instead. Take him to task. Because really, he was the problem. He refused to listen; he refused to take Marianne seriously. He refused to take Ida seriously, or at least the demands that came with having a child. It had always been that way, ever since Ida was a baby. It would be nice if someone besides Marianne told him to be involved.
Stig had hardly touched Ida when she was an infant. He fled to his job, called home to say he would be working all night and sleeping at the office. Marianne was left to parent all on her own. When they separated, Stig had never once put his own daughter to bed. His first time doing so was when she was staying overnight at his house. By then she was two and a half and Marianne had never dared to ask how long Ida had cried before falling asleep.
Before their separation, Marianne was the one who did day care drop-off and pickup, who made breakfast, who knew how warm the bottle of milk should be for Ida to drink it. Always, no exceptions. Stig had never bathed Ida, never clipped her nails, and honestly believed that a two-year-old could brush her own teeth. Ida was seven months old when Stig changed her diaper for the first time. At some dinner they’d had for a visiting researcher from Illinois and two doctoral candidates, he’d been met by laughter from their guests when he said he thought it was too intimate, that those tasks should be the job of the mother. Stig refused to dress her; he “couldn’t choose” the right clothes, he said. He “could never find anything” in her closet. It was unthinkable that he should go to parent-teacher conferences or pack a lunch or buy new rain pants when the old ones were too small. Stig wasn’t an absent father who refused to take responsibility. It was far worse. In Marianne’s opinion, Stig shouldn’t be allowed to call himself Ida’s dad. He’d never earned the name.
I should have demanded that Stig come along, Marianne thought. He should be the one sitting here, not me.
“I’ve done my best to talk to Ida,” Marianne said. “I think she understands now, that it was wrong, that you can’t do that to your friends.”
The director shook her head. No. This wasn’t about the time Ida bit her friend. That’s not why they had asked Marianne to come in, at least not the main reason. They wanted to talk about something else, something very alarming, very sensitive, and they could only have this discussion with Marianne. Because they were concerned. Very concerned.
They were sitting all in a row, the teachers and everyone else. On the same side of the table. Marianne was across from them. She tried to find a comfortable position on the hard chair. It wasn’t easy. And there were so many of them. Marianne couldn’t decide whom to focus on. They were all looking at her intently. All but Ida’s youngest teacher, who was carefully inspecting her own hands, twisting and turning her fingers, picking at her cuticles, sticking one finger at a time in her mouth, then taking it out and eyeing it again.
To Marianne it felt like their seats were a foot or two above her own.
She didn’t understand what they were talking about.
Concerned? She pulled her feet in under her chair and wound her arms around her waist. What did they mean?
Ida was a kind child, very cuddly and warm, considerate and funny. If you just got to know her, she wasn’t a problem at all. Why were they worried? What right did they have to be worried about Ida? What right did they have to call Marianne into question? And Ida.
She didn’t understand.
The director cleared her throat. She glanced at the other participants. The social worker nodded. It was as if he were giving her the go-ahead to start.
Then the director began to speak. When she was done, Ida’s two older teachers took over. As soon as anyone paused for breath or to blow their nose, the social worker jumped in.
There wasn’t a moment of silence. Someone was always speaking. Always telling. Their voices were a roar in Marianne’s ears.
No, no one blamed her. It wasn’t Ida’s fault, not something she was responsible for. But they had to talk about this. About their concern. The reason Marianne had been asked to come in on such short notice.
And without waiting for Marianne to catch a breath, they said a little more. One by one — about inexplicable accidents, games that scared the other children, the diapers Ida refused to stop using, Ida’s swollen vaginal opening. And about odd things Ida had said. About stories she’d told. About her dad.
Marianne looked at them. Their lips were moving. She could hear the sounds; she listened to the words coming from their mouths.
But she didn’t understand.
After twenty minutes, Marianne stood up. Her knees were shaking. She slipped on the freshly polished floor and raised one hand.
They have to stop, she thought. They have to stop. I can’t take it anymore.
“You have to stop,” she said. “You have to stop talking now.”
It was quarter to eight. They’d asked her to come in
at this hour. She’d arranged to leave Ida at Stig’s place and come on her own. It was so late at night. It was quarter to eight.
At seven-thirty Ida wanted to listen to a bedtime story. She wanted someone to stay with her in the bed, scratch her back gently, under her nightgown, stroke her forehead until her eyes began to close.
Ida didn’t like being alone at night; she was too scared. She wanted someone to blow on the back of her neck so she wouldn’t get too warm. She wanted someone to say, “Go to sleep, sweetheart, see you in the morning.”
“I have to go,” Marianne whispered at last. She wasn’t sure anyone could hear her. “I have to go.”
So she went. She left the room and quickly closed the door behind her. The director rose to stop her. “Wait,” she heard from the other side of the door. Then Marianne hurried into the hallway and stepped into her shoes, walked through the exit with her shoelaces untied and her coat over her arm. She ran down the stairs, across the street; she ran so fast her mouth tasted like iron.
She couldn’t stay. It was quarter to eight. She had to pick up Ida. She had to pick up her daughter right away.
7
Sophia hadn’t wanted a ride home when they were done eating. Instead she strolled down to Norrmalmstorg. The sky was leaden and the air heavy with the promise of rain. She had eaten too much.
When she arrived at Norrmalmstorg she glanced up at the big clock. The Norrmalmstorg hostage crisis had taken place in the basement of that building, the legendary bank robbery that ended with staff being taken hostage, the incident that introduced the world to Stockholm syndrome. Sophia had been born that same week. When she was little, Grandpa used to talk about the dramatic days before the hostages were released and she was born. Her sixteen-year-old mother’s labor pains had set in right around the same time as a policeman was shot in the face by one of the hostage takers, shot with a submachine gun through a hole the police themselves had drilled through the ceiling. The Norrmalmstorg hostage crisis was Sophia’s favorite of the bedtime stories Sture could tell without reading from a book.
There was no bank in that building anymore, only clothing shops and a hotel. A few floors up, Sophia had gone to one of her first job interviews, just after passing exams. One of Sweden’s biggest law firms had had offices there at the time. But they had eventually moved out as well.
She had been offered another position three days earlier but wanted to serve at the district court instead. That big business—law firm life wasn’t for her. Not because she was against earning money in principle, but that was never enough of a drive for her. What was more, there had been something about the interview she didn’t like; it had felt like they were inviting her to join a cult. The partner who spoke to her had spent a little too much time talking about how they only hired the very best, the elite. And there was something about the room itself, the oil paintings of older, retired partners and the antique carpet under the oval conference table.
The law isn’t all contract review and stock quotes, she recalled thinking, with that upright posture and steadfast conviction she’d had at twenty-two.
Sophia turned onto Birger Jarlsgatan. What time had the clock shown? The National Library was probably still open and it was more or less on her way home. She could pop in and peek at some microfilm, read the articles that had been published about Katrin’s murder. Sophia liked to do that when she needed to quickly acquaint herself with a major case. It afforded her some distance from all the official reports. Typically, she did her research online, but this time it wasn’t possible — the case was too old.
The more she read of the preliminary investigation, the more she felt she needed to know. Her mental image of the crime was different from what was in the file. Sophia wanted to form a clearer understanding of how wide that gap was, the gap between what the evidence showed and what had been shared with the public.
She walked through the main entrance of the National Library and stowed her outerwear in one of the lockers off to the right. About a dozen people were in the reading room; two of them were bent over their books, fast asleep. Sophia smiled at her memories of coming here on the weekends, when she was home from Uppsala and needed somewhere to study. She headed for the Annex and took the stairs down to the microfilm room.
Apart from the faint hum of the HVAC system, it was quiet. Few carrels were in use as Sophia found her way to the information desk. A man who appeared to have defied every rule about retirement managed, with some difficulty, to get out of his chair.
“It’s organized alphabetically and chronologically,” he muttered, gesturing at the shelves. “Let me know when you’ve found what you need. Then I’ll show you how it works.”
As he shuffled toward the carrel Sophia had chosen he glanced sidelong at the boxes she’d selected — she had around thirty of them, all from the same time period: the week before the murder up until the trial.
“Professor Death,” he remembered. “Are you one of those anti-progressives? Who think computers give off harmful rays?”
Sophia shook her head, bewildered. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Almost all the newspapers and magazines from the late nineties have been digitized. If you visit our databases, you can search by keyword. That ought to be much faster than this Stone Age method.”
“I was planning to do that later,” Sophia said, embarrassed, looking hesitantly at the box she’d intended to start with. She turned it over a few times, looking for a tab that would open it. The librarian groaned and took the box from her hands. He opened it, turned on the machine, and inserted the end of the roll.
“You spool it forward with this knob. And look at this screen. The reading you can do on your own, I hope.”
Stig Ahlin had been the subject of two different investigations: one into the abuse of his daughter and one into the murder of Katrin. In the first few weeks after the murder, nothing appeared on the front pages, but Sophia found a few articles buried further inside the papers. Though it was a tragic death, they gave only vague updates about the police work.
At first, nothing was written at all about the other investigation. That was just as it should be. A woman suspected that her ex-husband had sexually abused their daughter. She had, with support from the daughter’s day care, filed a report. The parents were also in the midst of a custody battle and, because of the situation, she was demanding more child support. Newspapers scrupulously avoided writing about that sort of case. Especially when the investigation didn’t lead to charges filed.
Everything changed when the two investigations were suddenly linked. When the lead suspect in the murder of Katrin Björk, age fifteen, turned out to be a thirty-five-year-old doctor who was also under suspicion of sexually violating his four-year-old daughter, the press coverage exploded.
There was tons of material to read. The leaks from within the investigation must have been more like a waterfall than a calm trickle. Sophia Weber paged through article after article on the dim screen. Wherever she looked, she found something new to read about the murder of Katrin Björk.
She’d searched the library’s two largest databases. But it was a very special feeling to track down the articles and see them as they’d looked when they were published, to see the entire paper, page through it, notice where the article had been placed, how much space had been devoted to it. To skim through other articles: Frank Sinatra’s funeral, the Spice Girls on tour, Saab investing over a billion kronor in a new factory in Trollhättan, downtown condos fetching record prices. Sophia pressed the spool button and pages flickered by.
At regular intervals she moved to a different carrel, where the screen was hooked up to a printer. She was on her third copy card; soon she would have to buy yet another. But first she wanted to read something very specific.
The worst thing that can happen to a mother. That’s what Anna had said.
Sophia was browsing throu
gh one of the biggest evening papers. When she arrived at a date not long after Stig Ahlin was taken into custody, she found an interview with the mother of Stig Ahlin’s daughter. It was three pages long. The photograph on the black-and-white microfilm screen showed the back of a woman sitting on a sofa with her legs curled up.
The headline was a quote. In the woman’s lap was her daughter, who was peering at the photographer over her mother’s shoulder. The girl’s face was blurred out. The woman’s hair was up in a bun; her head was bowed.
IT’S MY FAULT. I SHOULD HAVE DONE A BETTER JOB OF PROTECTING MY DAUGHTER.
Katrin
1998
The mood at the station was explosive. Everyone had put their lives on hold; all that existed was the investigation. They didn’t pick their kids up from day care; the grandparents took care of that. They didn’t call in sick; they took double doses of Tylenol and forced themselves to the station. The cots on their unit were full; no one in their work group wanted to leave the others. Only one thing mattered: resolving this investigation. Because they were about to break it open, they could all feel it. And everyone was thinking the same thing.
A goddamn doctor. It was a goddamn fucking evil thirty-five-year-old doctor who had beaten, slashed, and raped little Katrin. He was polished and handsome, spoke like an encyclopedia, and sneered when you didn’t look at him with enough respect. He was the one who had ingratiated himself with fifteen-year-old Katrin, made her fall in love; he was the one who had fucked her and killed her.
He had called two days ago. Stig had called Bertil’s direct line. The conversation lasted six minutes. Stig had no more than that to tell. About their liaison, as he called it. The brief liaison Stig had with Katrin — he wanted to inform the police about it because he realized it might be of interest to the investigation.
Beyond All Reasonable Doubt Page 8
