‘Yes, Lillemor?’ She took her hand down.
‘First of all, my name isn’t Lillemor, it’s Barbie now,’ she said with a sullen pout. Then she smiled. ‘But I’d just like to say that I think this is incredibly great! We all get a chance to sit here and speak our minds. We never had anything like this on Big Brother.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Uffe as he slumped in his chair and stared at Barbie. Her smile vanished and she lowered her eyes.
‘I think that was very well said,’ said Lars, trying to encourage her. ‘And you’ll have an opportunity for individual therapy as well as group therapy. I think we’ll conclude the group segment now, so maybe you and I … Barbie, can start on the individual therapy. Okay?’
She looked up and smiled again. ‘Yes, I’d like that. I have tons of stuff I need to talk about.’
‘Excellent,’ said Lars, returning her smile. ‘So I suggest we go behind the set to the room in back so we can talk undisturbed. Then I’ll talk to each of you in order, going round the circle. After Barbie comes Tina, then Uffe, and so on. Will that be okay?’ No one replied, so Lars took that as a yes.
As soon as the door closed behind Barbie and Lars, they all started talking. All except Jonna, who as usual preferred silence.
‘What fucking bullshit,’ Uffe scoffed, slapping his knee.
Mehmet gave him an annoyed look. ‘What do you mean? I think this is good. You know how fucked up you can get after a couple of weeks on one of these shows. I think it’s great that for once they’re thinking about the cast. They want us to feel good.’
‘“They want us to feel good”,’ Uffe mimicked him in a shrill voice. ‘You’re such a fucking pussy, Mehmet, you know? You ought to have one of those health programmes on TV. Sit there in some tight outfit and yoga yourself or whatever the fuck it’s called.’
‘Don’t mind him, he’s just being stupid,’ said Tina, glaring at Uffe, who now turned his attention to her.
‘What the hell are you talking about, bitch? You think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you? Bragging about what good grades you get and how many big words you know. You think you’re better than the rest of us. And now you think you’re going to be a pop star too.’ His laughter dripped with scorn, and he looked around the group for support. Nobody responded. But nobody protested either, so he kept it up. ‘Do you really believe that shit? You’re just embarrassing everybody, including yourself. I heard that you talked them into letting you sing your pathetic fucking song tonight, and I look forward to seeing people throw rotten tomatoes at you. Shit, I’ll come myself and stand in the front row to throw some.’
‘You’d better shut up now, Uffe,’ said Mehmet, skewering him with his gaze. ‘You’re just jealous because Tina has talent, while the only thing you have is a short-lived career as a reality-show idiot. After that you’ll be back in the warehouse again carting boxes around all day.’
Uffe laughed again, but this time he sounded nervous. There was a ring of truth to Mehmet’s words, and that made the uneasiness surge inside Uffe. But he pushed away the feeling.
‘You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want. But you’ll get a chance to hear for yourselves tonight. The hicks in this town are going to laugh themselves silly.’
‘I hate you, Uffe, just so you know.’ Tina got up with tears in her eyes and left the group. A camera followed her. She started running to get away, but it was impossible to escape the cameras. Their hungry eyes were everywhere.
Patrik couldn’t concentrate on anything else. Thoughts of the car crash haunted him. If only he could put his finger on what it was that seemed so familiar about the death. He picked up the folder containing all the papers from the investigation and sat down to go through everything again. He had no idea how many times he’d done this. As always when he was thinking intensely, he muttered to himself.
‘Bruises around the mouth, unbelievably high blood alcohol content in an individual who never drank, according to her relatives.’ He ran his finger over the autopsy report, looking for something he might have missed on previous readings. But nothing seemed irregular. Patrik picked up the phone and rang a number he knew by heart.
‘Hello, Pedersen, this is Patrik Hedström with the Tanum police. Look, I’m sitting here with the autopsy report. Could you spare five minutes to go over it with me one more time?’
Pedersen agreed, so Patrik continued, ‘These bruises around the mouth, can you say when she got them? Okay.’ He wrote notes in the margin as he talked.
‘And the alcohol, can you say anything about the amount of time that elapsed while she drank it? No, I don’t mean a specific time of day; well, that too perhaps. But did she sit drinking for a long time, or did she guzzle it down or … that’s exactly what I mean.’ He listened intently and furiously jotted down notes.
‘Interesting, very interesting. Did you find anything else that was odd during the post-mortem?’ Patrik listened and didn’t write anything for a moment. He discovered that he was pressing the receiver so hard against his ear that it started to hurt, so he loosened his grip.
‘Remnants of tape around the mouth? Yes, that’s undoubtedly significant. But there’s nothing else you can tell me?’ He sighed at the less than informative answers he was getting and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.
‘Okay, I suppose that will have to do.’ Patrik hung up the receiver reluctantly. He had really been hoping for more. He took out the photos from the accident scene and began to study them, searching for something, anything, that might trigger his intractable memory. The most annoying part was that he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that there was anything to remember. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe it was some odd form of déjà vu. Maybe he’d seen something on TV or in a film, or merely heard something, that was making his brain try to search for something that didn’t exist. But just as he was about to cast aside the papers in frustration, a flash occurred between the synapses in his brain. He leaned forward to inspect more closely the photo he still held in his hand, and a feeling of triumph came over him. Maybe he wasn’t so far off course after all. Maybe something specific had been hovering in the darkest nooks of his memory after all.
In one stride he was at the door. It was time to head down to the archives.
Barbie listlessly let the goods pass by on the conveyor belt as she read off the bar codes. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she stubbornly blinked them away. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself by sitting here crying.
The conversation that morning had stirred up so many emotions. So much muck that had been lying on the bottom was now coming up to the surface. She looked at Jonna sitting at the checkout in front of her. She envied her in a way. Maybe not her depression and all that cutting. Barbie would never be able to slice a knife through her own flesh like that. What she envied was Jonna’s obvious indifference to what everyone else thought. For Barbie there was nothing more important than the way she looked and appeared to others. That hadn’t always been the case, as the school pictures dug up by that damned evening tabloid had shown. The photos of her when she was small and skinny, with gigantic braces, almost nonexistent breasts, and dark hair. She was upset when the photos appeared on the newspaper placards. But not for the reason everyone thought. Not because she worried that people would know that both her hair colour and her boobs were fake. She wasn’t that stupid. But it hurt to see what she no longer had. Her happy smile. Full of self-confidence. She’d been happy about who she was, secure and satisfied with her life. But everything changed the day her pappa died.
She and Pappa got along so well. Her mamma died when Barbie was little, of cancer. But somehow he had managed to make her feel whole in spite of her mother’s death; she had never felt as though she lacked anything. She knew that things had been up and down for a while, when she was a baby, right after her mamma died, and when All The Evil happened. She had heard all about it, but