sat on the chair and put the glass on the desk in front of her.
She felt some sort of melancholy about what she had to do.
No one knew that she had a room dedicated to all of the unsorted memories of her childhood, and no one would ever know, either. She hadn’t said a word about it to anyone. Not her father or mother. The room had been her own business and no one else’s.
Last spring, she had gotten more answers about her background than she had wanted. She had found out about the man who had made her into what she was, into what she had been: a child soldier.
She still remembered his words: From a crushed child you can carve out a deadly weapon. A soldier without feelings, without anything to lose, is the most dangerous there is.
She was made to call him Papa.
But his real name was Gavril Bolanaki.
Now Gavril was dead, and from Danilo—or Hades, as was carved into his neck as a trafficked child—there was nothing left to gain.
She got up suddenly and started to pull the pictures of the shipping containers from the walls and folded them up. She ripped down the pictures of the house on the island outside Arkösund, where she had lived with Danilo and the other children. She put the photographs of mythological gods and goddesses into an envelope and piled the books about Greek mythology in stacks. She erased the notes from the whiteboard. She took empty boxes, lined them up along the wall in the bedroom, and put all of the pictures, books, photographs and notes in them. Finally, she took down the sketch of Danilo and put it on the boxes.
In the kitchen, she poured a new glass of wine and drank it standing up. Then she went back into the bedroom, opened her nightstand drawer and looked at the journals hidden there.
For a moment, she considered just leaving them there, but she regretted the hesitation and put them into the boxes, too.
After two hours, both the hidden room and one more glass of wine were empty.
With her finger on the switch, she looked around the room and realized that, without all of the materials of her investigation, the room looked remarkably naked.
She had cleaned up everything that revealed her background. It was meaningless to keep it. She should let it remain a secret, live her life as buttoned-up as the oxford shirts she wore in court.
She closed her eyes.
And turned off the light.
She stood still, listening to the sound of her heart pounding.
Her life would take another direction from now on, no longer driven by shadows from the past.
She felt a shiver go down her spine and wondered if it was relief she felt.
TRAIN ATTENDANT MATS JOHANSSON kept his eyes looking out the window. The late night’s intense calm had settled in on the X2000 between Copenhagen and Stockholm. It was the sort of quiet that made him relax.
He always longed for peace and quiet, which is why he and his wife spent every summer in a little red cottage in the middle of a forest in Småland. The cottage had a white veranda, and they sat there every warm summer evening and looked out at the majestic trees and the emerald green lawn. They puttered around in the garden each day, planted carrots and tomatoes. But this time of year there was nothing to do there, Mats thought. Not in cold, harsh Sweden.
He saw the clock turn 10:12 p.m., knew that there were ten minutes left before they would arrive in Norrköping and went with calm, steady steps down the aisle, keeping his balance as the train swayed.
When he opened the door to the fifth car, he saw a young woman standing outside the bathroom. Her hair was dark, shoulder-length and glossy.
She was pounding on the locked door and yelling, turning toward the people sitting closest to her, but no one would meet her panicked eyes.
The train slowed down with wavelike motions, and the brakes squeaked lightly on the rails.
The young, desperate woman yelled again.
Mats went to her quickly, and when she saw him coming closer, she rushed forward and grabbed his arm. Speaking in a language he didn’t understand, she dragged him to the locked bathroom door and gesticulated wildly.
He understood that something serious was going on.
The clock read 10:22 p.m. when he finally was able to force the door open.
He saw the toilet. To the left of it was a wall-mounted changing table. He stepped cautiously forward and saw a young woman propped up in a sitting position on the floor. Her fingers were bloody. Her face was pale and her lips were blue. Some sort of white foam dripped from her lower lip onto her chest.
Mats covered his mouth with his hands and stared in horror at the dead woman’s body.
* * *
Mia Bolander reached for the cell phone that was lying on the table. She scrolled through the status updates on Facebook but was irritated, as usual, by all the people who had posted pictures of freshly baked cakes, Christmas decorations and things as idiotic as pictures of future vacation destinations.
How the hell do they have the energy? she thought, releasing her phone onto her lap.
She drew her hand through her blond hair and yawned, sinking into the sofa. She cast a glance at the fifty-inch television that she had bought on a payment plan last spring and sure, it was a great deal, but now she was behind on her payments. Two months, maybe, but as soon as she got her next paycheck, she’d rectify that, for sure. It kind of sucked, though, paying so much for a TV that was now almost a year old. She’d rather put the money toward a new one, and had seen an awesome one with a curved screen. If she had only been a little less impulsive last spring, she’d have bought one like that instead.
Mia wound a blond lock around her finger. She was tired and not satisfied with how the day had gone. Nor her life, for that matter.
She was turning thirty-one in two months and had discovered new wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes. The skin above her breasts also seemed less tight and made a fanlike pattern when she wore a tight sports bra.
She tried to convince herself that she still looked good, but it didn’t work. In spite of her regular workouts, with strength training three times a week, she didn’t feel attractive. She never slept enough, ate at odd times and drank too much.
All wrong.
She spent money on unnecessary things and was always broke. She had a tiny apartment and only occasional relationships with men who seemed all but normal. The last one had seemed loving and tender, but as soon as they went back to his place, he had shown a sick interest in her feet. A foot fetishist.
He’d had a corny name, too.
Martin.
He had satisfied her, but she never wanted to sleep with him again. Not with someone who wanted to suck her toes.
That
