Leona

by Jenny Rogneby

  The woman who had been closest to the girl inside the bank hadn’t been questioned at the scene. Reportedly she had been too overwrought to talk about what she had witnessed. For me that was just as well. If she had noticed anything that the other witnesses hadn’t observed, I wanted to be the first to find out about it.

  “Birgitta Rosenqvist,” I called loudly.

  As always there was a hodgepodge of people in reception. There were people waiting to be interviewed, making police reports, or applying for new passports, as well as some people sitting there just to warm up, and others simply for the security of being in a police station.

  “Birgitta Rosenqvist!” I called again.

  Louder this time.

  Why were people always late? I took my phone out to check the time. The display showed that I had an unread message. I clicked on it and read, “I’m waiting.”

  “Over here!”

  At the other end of the room an elderly woman with a shrill voice raised her hand, trying to get up from her chair. I quickly put the phone back in my pocket, went up, and greeted her.

  “May I help you with your coat?”

  I caught myself speaking with exaggerated politeness. The woman’s elderly appearance seemed to warrant it.

  “Thank you, that’s very kind. I don’t know whether to put on a fall coat or a winter coat when I go out at the moment. The weather is so unpredictable this time of year.”

  With the support of the cane that had been leaning alongside the chair she walked slowly behind me. She was breathing heavily and stopped to cough a couple of times along the way. That gave me time to answer the text message. Even though she was limping, she wore shoes with heels. Not particularly high, but still tall enough that they looked uncomfortable. A flowery scent of perfume floated along the corridor and made a couple of oncoming colleagues turn around and look at us.

  I opened the door and turned on the light in the interview room.

  “I never thought I would end up at the police station. Not at my age. But I’m glad I could come.”

  I had offered to hold the interview at her home, but she insisted on coming to the police station. Needed to get out of the house, she said.

  I hung her black coat over the back of the chair in the interview room. Under it she had on an all-black pleated skirt and a black jacket. The only deviation colorwise was a flowery blouse and a red-beige-and-white silk scarf tied around her neck.

  “Would you like something to drink? A cup of coffee perhaps?”

  I had started to sound like a waiter at a nice restaurant.

  “Oh, no thanks, it’s much too late in the afternoon for that.”

  I noted the time for the sake of the written report: 3:13 p.m. It had taken thirteen minutes for us to make our way from reception to the interview room. I would need to start the interview immediately if I was going make it to day care on time.

  “Birgitta, I want you to think back and in your own words tell me in as much detail as you can about what happened at the bank. After that I’ll ask you a few questions.”

  Without answering me, Birgitta closed her eyes and sat quietly for a long time. I was astonished to see how much makeup she was wearing, despite her advanced age. A thick layer of foundation had settled in the folds of her face. She was wearing light pink lipstick, rouge on her cheeks, and her eyebrows were darkly painted. Apart from the lack of jewelry, she was the spitting image of an elderly upper-class lady.

  She kept her eyes shut. Closing out immediate visual stimuli was good when you were trying to remember an incident. I used to be able to sit quietly for a long time and wait out interview subjects who for various reasons did not speak, but Birgitta had been silent an unusually long period. I was just about to say something when she started talking, her eyes still shut.

  “I went into the bank to take out some money, as I always do on Mondays. I took a queue number and was about to go and sit down when…”

  She fell silent, shaking her head slowly.

  “The strange thing was…I didn’t see the girl come in. Suddenly she was just standing there…right in front of me…just a few meters away. Heavens, she was completely covered in blood, the poor child.”

  Birgitta opened her eyes and frowned. She didn’t seem to want to keep picturing the little girl.

  “I thought I was seeing things. I looked around. Thought it was strange that no one reacted…I simply couldn’t understand…it was like seeing…a ghost.”

  There was silence again. She looked blankly around the interview room.

  “When I came to my senses I started walking toward the girl to help her, but then that voice started. I didn’t know what to think…I understood that someone had already injured her and could do it again, exactly as he said. I was so afraid that something else would happen to that poor girl.”

  I made a note of what Birgitta was saying. She turned her eyes to mine.

  “You don’t forget when you see a child mistreated. I’ve never been involved with anything like it…And in broad daylight too. I don’t know, it made the whole thing so…so macabre. Heavens. Could I please get a glass of water?”

  “Of course. I’ll leave you for a moment and get it.”

  I left the interview room. The lady was still very shaken. A child could truly stir up emotions. Of course, it was carefully thought out. With an injured, threatened child no one in the place had dared to try to stop the robbery.

  The break room was dark and empty. Rain was running down the windowpanes. Autumn had definitely arrived. I poured a glass of water. When I came into the interview room again the old lady was holding a phone, tapping at the buttons. Unusual for a lady of her age.

  “Did you have your phone with you at the bank?”

  I set the water glass down on a napkin on the desk. She shook her head.

  “My daughter gave it to me, but I rarely have it with me when I go out. Now I guess I’ve realized the value of it.”

  She pressed a few keys on the phone, which beeped with every tap.

  “If only I understood all the functions on it. My daughter just sent one of those text messages to me. I’ll try to call her as soon as I’m done here so she can meet me.”

  “It’s good that you’ll have company on the way home,” I said.

  “I’ve never needed help with anything before, but now I prefer not to go out by myself. Not even on Karlavägen, where I always felt so at home.”

  She looked down.

  “To think that the world has become so…so…”

  I handed her a tissue. Birgitta took off her glasses and let them hang on a cord around her neck. Dabbed the tissue below her eyes, careful not to disturb her makeup.

  “I understand that it must be difficult for you to talk about this, but your information is extremely important to us, primarily because the child is involved.”

  I wanted to shift the focus from the woman’s own fears. If they took over it would be more difficult to get the information I needed.

  “Oh, yes, of course. The poor girl must be taken care of. I’ll be all right, don’t worry.”

  She put the phone into her handbag with lightly shaking hands. Her fingers were wrinkled. The nails painted with a light-pink nail polish. Although her skin color was uneven and pigmented, I could clearly see light circles around her ring finger and the index finger on her left hand. She must have seen me looking at her hands.

  “I don’t dare have my wedding ring on anymore. What if I got robbed? I remember my husband proposing to me like it was yesterday. He was unusually romantic. Got down on his knees, of course. I was on cloud nine. What a marvelous marriage we had. He was so kind to me, he didn’t drink and he was never violent.”

  Women didn’t have high expectations back then. As long as the guy didn’t booze or hit you, then…

  “How I loved that man. I still do. If only he hadn’t passed away so soon. But you know, men are so much weaker than us. They quickly become frail when they get older.”

/>   I sat quietly, trying to work out the best way to get her back on track.

  “Of course they’re weaker. My husband had the flu a week ago, and you’ve never seen anything more pitiful,” I said.

  Of course it was insensitive to compare the flu with her husband’s passing, but I was starting to get tired of the woman, and I needed her to focus on the robbery. It was sink or swim.

  “Oh, yes, and then they’re very happy to have a strong woman to take care of them.”

  She smiled and reached for another tissue, excusing herself politely before she blew her nose. My tactic had worked.

  “Birgitta, I need you to describe the little girl in as much detail as possible.”

  “The voice said that she was seven, but I thought she looked younger. She was so small and thin. Her skin was quite pale, the poor girl. Blond hair, but I could see she was wearing a wig. The kind of thing you need when you get to my age.”

  A wig. None of the other witness had mentioned that. It didn’t seem to have been spotted on the surveillance video either. I refrained from writing that down on the interview report. Perhaps the old lady was a little confused.

  “And then she was so horridly covered with blood. I don’t understand who would want to harm such a little…”

  “Did you see where the blood came from?”

  “It was probably from her wounds.”

  “Could you see that she had wounds?”

  “Dear, it’s obvious she must have had wounds. Where else would the blood have come from?”

  It was always hard to get witnesses to understand the difference between what might have happened and what they had actually seen. The brain has a way of putting together familiar images and events to create context that is often misleading. A person might believe they’d witnessed a series of actions, when in reality their brain had just joined together various remembered images to create a unified picture, and he or she had really not seen all the parts of the event, but only assumed it had occurred a certain way. The lady had seen blood and therefore assumed the girl had wounds, even though she hadn’t seen any.

  “Okay. Do you remember what the wounds looked like?”

  “I guess they were ordinary wounds.”

  “Could you describe them?”

  “Dear, I’m sure you know what a wound looks like. Like when you cut yourself?”

  “Did it look as though she had cut herself?”

  “Not her. He must have done it.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who talked on the tape. He must have cut her so that she was bleeding so terribly. Heavens, how awful that was.”

  I didn’t want to give the lady any more elbow room. To avoid her raising more loose assumptions I needed to ask her about something specific. Something she should be able to answer without guessing.

  “You said that the girl was bloody.”

  “It was so terrible. Her whole —”

  “Can you describe the blood on the girl’s body?”

  I wanted to know whether Birgitta had noticed anything in particular about the blood — if it was light red and fresh, a congealed dark red, or something else.

  “Red.”

  “Did you notice what shade of red it was?”

  “No, heavens, I can’t think about something like that. It was bad enough having to see all that blood on a little child. We women are used to seeing blood, of course. We’ve had to put up with it every month, ever since our teens. But seeing blood on a little girl like that. That was completely…completely awful…terrible.”

  She stopped. Few people were comfortable talking about blood. Plodding on about it wasn’t necessary.

  “She didn’t have any clothes on, either. Goodness, how cold she must have been.”

  “Do you remember whether she was carrying anything?”

  The lady looked up at the wall while she thought.

  “She was hugging something…a stuffed animal…yes, that was it. I wonder if it wasn’t a teddy bear. Pretty battered, I seem to recall.”

  “Did it have any specific characteristics? Some markings perhaps, or a brand?”

  Birgitta shook her head.

  “It was an ordinary brown teddy bear. But I remember that there was blood on it.”

  I had already instructed the investigators to search for possible purchasing locations as soon as they got detailed information about the teddy bear, but in the present situation there was no point. A brown teddy bear could be acquired at any toy store, anywhere.

  “Was that all she had with her?”

  “She had a tape player too. Not one of those old transistor radios we had when I was young, no, this was a neat little thing. Fascinating that so much sound can come out of such a little…”

  “What kind of sound came out?”

  “It was a man, claiming to speak for the girl, as it were. He spoke as if the words were coming from her. He had a Finnish accent, I remember that clearly. Finnish-Swedish, which usually sounds so lovely, but what he said sounded so awful. Then there was another person who also came in at the end of the tape or…I may have been mistaken. We were forced to do exactly as he said, anyway, otherwise the girl would…”

  She fell silent.

  “What?” I said.

  The lady has fixed her eyes on the wall by the side of the desk.

  “Birgitta!” I said firmly.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. What was it?”

  “What would happen to the girl if you didn’t do what the voice said?”

  “She would…”

  Tears started running down Birgitta’s cheeks. She let them run unchecked and said quietly, “It was lucky my husband didn’t have to be part of this. You know, he’s no longer with us, but in some ways he is still present.”

  “Okay, Birgitta. I want to thank you so much for telling about your observations.”

  “I’m happy if I’ve been of any help. May I ask? Have you found the little girl?”

  “Unfortunately we haven’t, not yet. We’re working on it.”

  “The poor child. I hope she’s found,” she said, drying her cheeks with the napkin. “Her parents must be beside themselves with worry. We’re lucky that the police are around to take care of this sort of thing.”

  I got up and helped the old woman with her coat. The walk back through the corridors to reception felt like ten kilometers. I walked faster now — I didn’t have time to take thirteen minutes to see her off. She hobbled along after me as fast as she could.

  “Thanks so much for coming, Birgitta. Take care now. Please call your daughter. It’s good to have family near you after an incident like this.”

  “Thank you so kindly. You police are doing an amazing job. The things that you’re forced to deal with…”

  “It’s no problem, Birgitta. It’s our job.”

  I left Birgitta feeling a sense of relief. If I’d known she had no more information than that I would have turned the interview over to the other investigators. My body had itched with frustration having to sit and listen to her digressions. The interview had been necessary, though, as she might have made some important observation. But besides some uncertain information about another voice on the tape, and a wig, there was nothing new.

  TEN

  Christer Skoog had been trying for months to get an interview with the prostitute, without result. But now, the day after the prosecutor closed the preliminary investigation of the politicians, she had made contact with him voluntarily. He understood why. Even if many thought the decision by the prosecutor not to indict the men for buying sex was wrong, some had also been critical of the woman who had made the allegations, saying that she was a gold-digger who had made the whole thing up.

  “Why would I want to publish your version now, Dina? The story has gone cold,” said Christer.

  He had been sitting in an editorial meeting when she called and had been close to declining the call. When she said her name on the phone, though, he had literally run out of the conference roo
m. Now he was in the bathroom, to avoid being disturbed by loud colleagues. He was still eager for the interview, but the power dynamic between them was reversed now that she was the one who’d called him. It was in his interests to seem a little reluctant. If he appeared skeptical, she would presumably try harder to convince him of the value of her story, and perhaps be more willing to give out detailed information.

  “It’s so frustrating that they won’t even be indicted. I want to tell everyone what pigs they are,” she said.

  That she had turned to him in particular was an obvious choice, since he was the one at Aftonbladet who reported on the incident initially. He agreed with her that the truth about the politicians should come out and was thrilled that now she’d finally let herself be interviewed.

  “I understand, but it’s a little late. I’ve been looking for you for months for an interview. Ever since you made the police report.”

  “What if you’re allowed to use my name and picture?”

  Now they were starting to get somewhere. Christer heard her puff on a cigarette as she was talking.

  “I’ll need new information too. It won’t work to publish old leftovers. You’ll have to be prepared to give details. Intimate details.”

  “As long as I don’t look like a publicity-hungry gold-digger. Can we meet tomorrow?”

  “Sure. Where would suit you?”

  He let her decide the location for purely selfish reasons. It was important that she was in an environment where she felt comfortable revealing sensitive details.

  “Rival, at Maria Square. Three o’clock tomorrow.”

  He nodded to himself and ended the call. Finally!

  ELEVEN

  Five DVDs of surveillance video were sitting in my in-tray when I arrived at work the next morning, all marked with the Image and Audio Analysis Group’s label. I turned on the radio, opened the desk drawer, and was about to toss in the DVDs when Claes knocked on my open door.