9

It took her a week to leave, she wasn’t really sure why.

On the other hand, once the decision was made, there was no hurry. Just as well have a good rest first; get rid of the cold she’d been nursing and pluck up courage.

Maybe she also had some idea of getting to the bottom of the whole Marie and Turid and burning down Freedom thing, but nothing happened. The whole thing fizzled out. Sonja didn’t get back to Anna about it individually, or bring it up in any of the group sessions, so whoever did it, she got off scot-free.

Assuming it actually was one of the girls. Anna found it hard to believe, but who else could it have been? Anyway, the matter had now been set aside, and it was time for her to do the same with Elvafors itself.

She was rather sorry she wouldn’t be able to take everything with her. She had arrived by car with her mother, but she would be leaving on foot. Her rucksack and her guitar, that was all she could possibly carry. Late on the Friday evening, when she hoped all the others would be asleep, she did her packing and weeded out everything she thought she could manage without, or was not too emotionally attached to.

The problem was that she had no plan. She had no way of judging what might come in useful, and she didn’t really want to leave anything behind. She even felt sorry for her old wellies, which were far too big and unwieldy to fit in. It was hard to discard books too, even though she’d read them all, some twice, and would no doubt be able to get new copies at some future point if she felt an urge to read them again.

Finally she was ready. Her rucksack was bulging and quite heavy, but she could carry it. Six books, one jacket, her boots and two thick jumpers she didn’t like would stay at Elvafors. They would be all that was left of her when Sonja or someone else looked into her room tomorrow morning to find out why she hadn’t come down for breakfast.

She hadn’t told anybody she was planning to go, but she thought Marie had a fair idea, even so. So she, at any rate, wouldn’t be surprised. They’d been sitting down by the lake smoking and having a long chat that afternoon. Marie had been feeling quite down about the unspoken accusations that she was the one who started the fire, plus various other things. She felt the other girls were against her, and not just Turid. It had always been like that, she claimed. Ever since she changed to a new school and a new class at the start of secondary, it had been impossible for her to form friendships with other girls. Even though there was nothing she wanted more than to have a best friend.

Then things had gone the way they’d gone. She’d always been popular with the boys, so she turned to them. She learnt to smoke, drink and smoke hash. Learnt what it was they wanted from her. Her soft, pretty face, her submissiveness, her pussy. She had lost her virginity the autumn of the year she’d turned fifteen, and by the end of the following school year she’d had sex with ten different boys. Or men; the eldest had been over thirty.

Anna had no difficulty seeing where the problem lay.

‘You’re too pretty and you’re too nice,’ she said. ‘It’s a hopeless combination.’

‘Do you like me?’ Marie had asked her with an innocent look.

Maybe rather too naive, as well, thought Anna, giving Marie a hug. And too weak, above all, far too weak. But where on earth were people like Anna and Marie to find strength in a world like this one?

‘I’d like you to be my friend here at Elvafors,’ Marie had said to her. ‘I think you’re the nicest person here.’

But she hadn’t even been able to promise her that. To be her friend. She had made herself say something vague and non-committal and then they went back up to the house to start preparing the meal.

But perhaps she’d known.

If not, she’d know tomorrow.

That’s to say, today.

She had set her alarm for half past four, but woke of her own accord three minutes before it went off. She dressed quickly and stole downstairs with her rucksack and her guitar in its soft black case. Nobody heard her and by quarter to she was out on the road. She stopped for a few seconds, adjusted her rucksack and looked back at the yellow building, huddling there in the dew and a morning mist that crept up from the lake.

She gave a shiver and swallowed a couple of times in an effort not to start crying. What lies ahead for me? she thought. What the hell am I doing?

Surely any idiot can see this is going to end badly?

But she still started walking.

To the left. South, not towards Dalby. She knew Gothenburg was only a hundred kilometres away, or a bit more, and even though it wasn’t a consciously formulated decision, this was presumably what sent her in that direction. She had only been in Gothenburg twice in her life, both of them before she reached her teens, both times to visit the Liseberg amusement park. But Gothenburg was a big city, and big cities meant opportunities.

Positive and negative ones, there was no point deceiving herself. If she wanted to fall back into all that again, there was no place to be more confident of doing it than a big city.

That was just a matter of fact, but for now she was far away from anything remotely like a town. She trudged along a narrow road that wound its way through dense forest. Uphill, downhill, round bend after bend, spruce and pine, hardly any straight stretches and after half an hour she hadn’t passed a single house or a single opening to a wider vista.

And not a single vehicle in either direction. A loop was going round and round in her head, two lines from a song she had been struggling to write over the past few evenings.

Young girl, dumb girl, dreaming in the grass

Sad girl, bad girl, wannabe a dead girl

She found she was walking in time to it, too. Sometimes she changed wannabe to gonnabe, she couldn’t decide which sounded better. Or worse, rather. It was a rubbish lyric, she knew that, but she had a loop of tune she didn’t think was too bad. And she needed something mechanical to fill her head with so she wouldn’t have to think about the fact that she was already feeling sweaty and thirsty, even though it was overcast and not particularly warm.

And she was tired. It had been one thing to stand in her room and test out the rucksack, an entirely different matter to have it on her back as she walked.

Young girl, dumb girl . . . she had a hundred and twenty kronor in her purse and six cigarettes left in the packet. After exactly an hour she sat down on a rock at the side of the road and smoked the whole of the first one. She took a break from the rucksack, too, and halfway through the cigarette she began to curse herself for not even bringing a bottle of water with her. How stupid could anyone be? More than anything she would have liked a cola and a . . . a big soft bed to snuggle down into.

Never in my lifetime, she suddenly thought. If I ever do get to sleep in a bed again, it’ll be lumpy and have dirty sheets that loads of other people have already slept in, and they’ll have finished up the can of cola, too.

Home? she pondered. It would be nice if that word had actually had some meaning, some content. The flat where she had been living for the past six months had gone back to its previous owner and her few possessions had been put in a storeroom, her mother had seen to that. I wish I had something to run away to, she thought. Not just from.

And where am I heading? Am I going to try hitching a lift or shall I just carry on walking and walking until I’m picked up at sunset by a knight on his white steed?

Or by the police? Exhausted and unconscious in a ditch.

That seemed a heck of a lot more likely. But she knew it was better to walk than to sit still. Movement kept the tears and the dejection at bay. As did those lines . . . Sad girl, bad girl . . . even the rubbing on her shoulders and the thumps in the small of her back were useful, because they distracted her thoughts from the desperate situation.

From the swamp of self-pity, as her mother was fond of saying. She knew a thing or two about life, her mother, there was no doubt about that. The sort of thing you generally felt happier not knowing.

She shouldered her rucksack again, retrieved her guitar and carried on walking. In an hour’s time it’ll be seven, she thought. By then I’m bound to have come to a petrol station or a cafe. And then I’ll be in better shape to make a decision.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Just after she had passed a derelict farm and had felt the wind turn colder and a few raindrops blow against her cheek, the first car of the morning came along.

It was going the right way and almost unwittingly she raised her hand. Not much; it wasn’t a proper lift-thumbing gesture, more an ambivalent wave with no definite intent.

The car was a blue Volvo, neither very old nor very new. A man of around fifty was behind the wheel; she glimpsed his face as he drove past. Or perhaps he was actually older, she was useless at judging people’s ages.

He pulled in about ten metres in front of her. He opened the side window and stuck his head out.

‘And where are you off to, little lady?’

Her first instinct was to ignore him. His face was a bit puffy but he wasn’t exactly unkempt. Glasses, short, mousy hair, a shirt and leather jacket. As she came abreast of the car he looked her up and down, appraisingly she felt, before he looked her properly in the eye.

You have to look people in the eye first, her mother was in the habit of saying. Once you’ve done that you can look wherever you like.

‘Jump in and I can take you part of the way.’

‘Thanks, but—’

‘I’m only going to Norrviken but it’ll save you a few kilometres at any rate. Well?’

He revved the engine a touch and she realized she’d got to make up her mind. She was the one who needed help, not him.

‘OK.’

She went round the car, opened the back door first and put her rucksack and guitar in the car. A scruffy old brown bag was already lying there. He reached across the passenger seat and opened the door for her. She got in and fastened her seatbelt; he sat still for a moment, looking at her from the side. Before nodding to himself, letting out the clutch and pulling away.

‘Do you play?’

‘What?’

He gestured towards the guitar in the back seat. ‘That.’

‘A little. I’m learning.’

‘I played in a band once.’

‘What did you play?’

‘Drums. I was the drummer.’

His fingers tapped a drum roll on the steering wheel. ‘You’re one of those Elvafors girls, aren’t you?’

‘Elva . . . what makes you think that?’

He gave a laugh. ‘On the run, eh? Yeah, well, it’s not that bloody hard to work out. Have to say I didn’t think your lot were such early birds. So what made you run away? Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you.’

She thought quickly. Realized there was no point denying it. If he knew what sort of place Elvafors was, and presumably everybody in the district did, then it wasn’t difficult to draw the right conclusion.

‘I’m on my way home. It’s voluntary, staying there, and it didn’t suit me.’

‘So what does suit you then, little lady?’

He patted her twice on the thigh and then shifted his hand back to the wheel. She gave a shiver and all at once it hit her: was it going to happen now?

The worst of things.

This had never happened to her before. She’d had sex with boys when she didn’t really feel like it, of course she had, but she’d never actually been raped. Those little pats sent shudders through her and she felt her whole body tense. That sort of sensation, anyway. RLH, she thought. That was Rule Number One she had learnt from the self-defence girl who came to talk to them at school.

Run Like Hell.

That was all well and good, but what if you were sitting in a moving car.

‘How would you like to earn a bit of cash?’

He said it in a completely neutral tone. An innocent work question, as if he were asking her to take on an extra washing-up shift in a cafe. Or deliver some newspapers.

But he didn’t mean either of those things, she was pretty sure of that.

‘Could you stop please, I want to get out here.’

He didn’t seem to have heard her.

‘Five hundred for a half-hour job, what do you say?’

‘No thank you. Please be nice and stop.’

‘I can be nice all right, but I’m not stopping till I feel like it. I bet a girl like you has seen a thing or two, eh?’

He accelerated slightly. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands and bit the inside of her cheek. She decided to keep quiet.

‘Just a little photo job. I’ve got a camera in the back. I won’t touch you.’

She cast a glance at his powerful hands on the wheel. She could see she would have no chance against him. He was burly but not fat. At least fifty, as she’d thought, so perhaps she could outrun him, but there was no way she’d get the better of him if he caught her. And would she just have to leave all her stuff behind? Forget it, she told herself. She wondered if the camera story was true. Could it really be that he only wanted to see her in the nude? That he was one of those types who just liked a good gander?

She took a deep breath and gave him a sideways look. He gave her one back and pulled one corner of his mouth into a sort of grin. She could see that his teeth were quite white and even. So at least he wasn’t a slob, but then she knew that already.

Just a creep. A middle-aged, fairly well-off creep. Maybe he had children older than she was. Maybe he had a wife and a detached house and a neat and orderly life.

Sad girl, bad girl, she thought. How the hell could you have been so stupid as to get into this car? You’ve been away from Elvafors less than two hours and you’ve already got yourself into a mess.

One hell of a mess, at that.

‘So is that a deal?’ he said.

‘Stop the car and let me out,’ she said. ‘I’d recognize you and I know your number plate.’

Even as she said it she realized it was very probably another mistake. If he really did assault her, he’d also have to kill her. Gonnabe a dead girl, that worthless lyric suddenly felt painfully real.

‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘You’re running away, I just want to take some photos of you. You’ll get five hundred kronor, and I expect you’ve a use for it, haven’t you?’

Well she hadn’t scared him, that was one thing. On the other hand, he was showing no signs of stopping or slowing down . . . he sat there calmly with his hands on the wheel, keeping his eyes on the road but occasionally glancing in her direction.

‘Can I see the camera?’ she asked after a silence of half a minute or so.

He reached over to the back seat and delved one-handed into the brown bag. He brought out a system camera that looked pretty old. But also professional, so perhaps he was genuinely some kind of photographer. He passed the camera to her and at the same time reduced speed and turned off to the right, onto a track through the forest. It wasn’t much more than two wheeltracks with a line of grass along the middle. She could see it would be possible to open the door and leap out without hurting herself too much, but what was she to do then? If she ran into the forest and he didn’t bother to chase her, she would lose her rucksack and her guitar.

And the purse with her collected fortune of a hundred and twenty kronor was in the rucksack, too.

‘Stop,’ she said for the umpteenth time, and this time he obliged. They hadn’t gone more than a hundred metres when he drove into a little clearing between four pines, where he turned the car so it was pointing back towards the road. She tried to open the door but couldn’t; some kind of central locking of course, but she hadn’t reckoned on that, either. He produced his wallet from his inside pocket, extracted a five hundred kronor note and put it on top of the dashboard.

‘There we are. Get out now and take your clothes off. I’ll sit here and wait, and this is yours once we’ve finished. Twenty minutes, it won’t even take you half an hour’s work.’

She thought about it.

‘I want you to get my things out of the car first,’ she said. ‘I’m not getting back in that car with you afterwards.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll fetch them out while you take your clothes off.’

He pressed a button and unlocked her door. She opened it, put one foot on the ground and then took a decision that she found hard to rationalize afterwards.

She still had his camera on her lap. Before she got out of the car she took the weighty object in her right hand and pretended to pass it over to him, but then slammed it into his head with full force instead.

The blow struck his right temple at an angle, she heard his glasses smash and the air suddenly seemed to go out of him. Like a deep sigh, a strange, ominous sound. He fell backwards against his seat and the side window and slumped there with his mouth hanging open and blood pouring down the side of his face, over his leather jacket and onto the car seat. His hands rested on his thighs in front of him, twitching slightly.

For a moment she thought she was going to faint, too, but she clambered out of the car, opened the back door and got her things. She pulled on her rucksack, picked up her guitar and started to run. Straight into the forest.

It wasn’t easy. Several times she was almost tripped up by undergrowth and tussocks of grass, but she didn’t look round. Her heart was thudding in her chest and she was gasping for breath, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t find a proper path but kept on running, staggering along until she simply couldn’t go on. She sank down behind a mossy rock and waited. The thought went through her mind this must be how a hunted animal felt, this must be exactly what it was like to be some other creature’s prey.

She sat there for several minutes. If he comes, he comes, she thought. I can’t run any more. Not a single step, so if he turns up, that’s that. Young girl, dumb girl.

Her pulse finally sank to below a hundred and she felt able to bob up and peer round the rock. She looked back in the direction from which she had come.

Her view only extended about twenty or thirty metres but there was no sign of life to be seen. Birch shoots, rocks, scrubby bushes, not a particularly beautiful forest, only a few tall spruces and pines. Maybe it was an old felling area? She held her breath and listened. The sound of the forest, almost like a kind of breathing, and nothing else.

She surely couldn’t have . . .? Surely she hadn’t . . .? She couldn’t really take in the thought, but eventually she was able to put it into words.

Surely he couldn’t be dead?

She sank down with her back to the rock again and a feeling of weakness came washing over her. Her field of vision started to shrink, yellow flecks danced at its periphery and again she had that momentary sensation of being about to pass out. Or throw up. Or both.

Just think if she had killed another human being.

Taken his life.

He had lived on this earth for fifty or fifty-five or sixty years, every day and every hour of all those years he had been alive, but then he’d crossed paths with an Elvafors girl on the run. Picked her up in his car and now he was dead.

She didn’t know his name. Maybe he’d only wanted to take pictures of her, when it came to it. Maybe he wouldn’t have touched her, just as he said.

And whatever would the police think when they found him? What would his wife and children imagine, if he had any? Could it all even lead to . . .?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound. A car starting and driving away. Dear God, hadn’t she got any further away than that? It only sounded about fifty metres away. Had she run round in a circle?

She heard the sound die away. It must . . . it must surely have been him? There couldn’t have been another car that close by. She hadn’t seen a single vehicle all morning, apart from that Volvo.

She noticed it had stopped raining. Or perhaps it had never really started? She couldn’t recall him having the windscreen wipers on. Or had he?

Why the hell am I wasting my time thinking about windscreen wipers? she wondered. I must be losing it.

She fought down the tears by lighting a cigarette. She checked her watch as she did so and found it was exactly seven.

That had been her plan, hadn’t it? A fresh fag and some fresh decisions.

Though she hadn’t really visualized it like this. Instead of that service station or cafe she was in something approaching a state of shock behind a boulder in the forest and had just avoided being raped.

Just avoided being a murderer.

So, thought Anna Gambowska, inhaling deeply, this hasn’t started very well. Not very well at all.

A short while later she was back at the place where he’d parked the car. The car had gone; just as she’d thought, he must have come round and driven off. Dazed and bloodied but still alive. Thank God.

Thinking about it, she felt she could understand his reaction. You would, wouldn’t you? You’d give up, call it a day, rather than plunging into the forest to look for a crazy Elvafors girl who was clearly a danger to anyone she met.

She shook her head and started her trudge back to the main road, trying to keep her spirits up. After all, she thought with a kind of desperate optimism, I did handle that pretty well, all things considered.

I taught him a lesson he won’t forget and kept my dignity too. That was the way to look at it, of course. When she emerged onto the road again, she did not stop. She just straightened her rucksack and went on heading south. Or west or whatever it was. The song lyric resurfaced as soon as she settled back into a steady pace, but she changed it a bit. Or rather it changed itself; clearly she felt she’d had enough death and misery for one day.

Sad girl, bad girl, gonnabe a good girl.

Yes, it was better like that, much better.

But tiredness was setting in. She hadn’t gone more than a few hundred metres before she realized she needed a proper rest. A chance to eat and drink something, too, but above all it was the fatigue, which was starting to feel like a lead weight inside her. If I can just sleep for a couple of hours I’ll be able to cope much better with things, she thought, glancing up at the sky. The clouds were gathering. It was undoubtedly going to start raining again very soon.

Indoors, she decided. I’ve got to get indoors somewhere. Or under cover at any rate; if I doss down here in the forest I’ll wake up with pneumonia.

She came to a turning off to the right. Rödmossen, said a peeling little sign sticking up out of the ditch.

She turned along the narrow track without really knowing why.