Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

He shook his head in annoyance, and continued on his way. I didn’t like what I’d heard. I didn’t want to get involved with something that would bring even more disorder into my life. I decided to go home and went back to the car. But something made me stay on even so. I walked through the village until I came to a cart track where the snowplough had been busy. If I went along it, I could approach the rear of the last house through a clump of trees.

It was late afternoon, and dusk would soon close in. I made my way along the track and stopped when I came to a spot where I could see the house through the trees. I shook the snow off some branches and created a good view. The house was obviously well looked after. A car was parked outside, with the cable from an engine heater trailing through the snow to an electric socket in the wall.

Suddenly a young girl appeared. She was looking straight at me and my binoculars. She produced something that had been hidden behind her back. It appeared to be a sword. She started running straight at me with the sword raised above her head.

I dropped my binoculars and fled. I stumbled over a tree root or a large stone and fell down. Before I could get to my feet, the girl with the sword had caught up with me.

She was glaring at me with hatred in her eyes.

‘Perverts like you,’ she said, ‘they’re everywhere. Peeping Toms skulking in the bushes with their binoculars.’

A woman came running after her. She stopped by the girl and snatched away the sword with her left and only hand — and I realised it must be Agnes Klarström. Perhaps, hidden away at the back of my subconscious mind, there was an image of the young girl from twelve years ago who had lain in the sunbed position in front of my well-scrubbed hands in their rubber gloves.

She was wearing a blue jacket, zipped up to her neck. The empty right sleeve was fastened to her shoulder with a safety pin. The girl by her side was eyeing me with contempt.

I wished Jansson could have come to rescue me. For the second time recently the ice under my feet had given way, and I was drifting without being able to clamber ashore.

I stood up, brushed off the snow and explained who I was. The girl started kicking out at me, but Agnes snapped at her and she slunk away.

‘I don’t need a guard dog,’ said Agnes. ‘Sima sees absolutely everything that’s going on, everybody who approaches the house. She has the eyes of a hawk.’

‘I thought she was going to kill me.’

Agnes eyed me up and down, but didn’t respond.

We went into the house and sat down in her office. Somewhere in the background rock music was blaring out at top volume. Agnes seemed not to hear. When she took off her jacket, she did it just as quickly as if she’d had two arms and two hands.

I sat down on a visitor chair. Her desk was empty. Apart from a pen: nothing else.

‘How do you think I reacted when I received your letter?’ Agnes asked.

‘I don’t know. I suppose you must have been surprised. Perhaps furious?’

‘I was relieved. At last, I thought! But then I wondered: Why just now? Why not yesterday, or ten years ago?’

She leaned back in her chair. She had long, brown hair, a simple hairslide, bright blue eyes. She gave the impression of being strong, decisive.

She had placed the samurai sword on a shelf next to the window. She noticed me looking at it.

‘I was once given it by a man who was in love with me. When we fell out of love, for some strange reason he took the scabbard with him, but left this incredibly sharp sword with me. Maybe he hoped I would use it to split open my stomach in desperation after he’d left me?’

She spoke quickly, as if time was short. I told her about Harriet and Louise, and how I now felt duty-bound to track her down, and find out if she was still alive.

‘Did you hope I wouldn’t be? That I’d died?’

‘There was a time when I did. But not any more.’

The telephone rang. She answered, listened to what was said, than replied briefly but firmly. There were no empty places in her home for errant girls. She already had three teenagers to look after.

I entered a world I knew nothing about. Agnes Klarström ran a foster home where she lived with three teenage girls who, in my day, would have been classified as tearaways. The girl Sima came from one of Gothenburg’s sink estates. It wasn’t possible to say for certain how old she was. She had come to Sweden as a lone refugee, hidden in a long-distance lorry via the southern port of Trelleborg. During her journey from Iran, she had been advised to dump all her identification papers the moment she set foot on Swedish soil, change her name and lose all traces of her original identity to avoid deportation should she be caught. All she had was a slip of paper with the three Swedish words it was assumed she needed to know.

Refugee, persecuted, alone.

When the lorry eventually stopped outside Sturup airport, the driver pointed to the terminal building and said she should go there and look for a police station. She was eleven or twelve at the time; now she was about seventeen, and the life she had led in Sweden meant that she only felt safe with the samurai sword in her hands.

One of the other girls in the household had run away two days ago. There was no fence round the property, no locked doors. Nevertheless, anybody who left was regarded as a runaway. If it happened too often, Agnes would eventually lose patience. When found, the girl in question would be faced with a new home where the gates would be substantial and the keyrings large.

The runaway, an African from Chad, called Miranda, had probably gone to stay with one of her friends who, for some reason, was called Teabag. Miranda was sixteen and had come to Sweden with her family as a refugee, as part of a UN quota.

Her father was a simple man, a carpenter by trade and very religious, who had soon buckled in the face of the endless cold weather and the feeling that nothing had turned out as he had hoped. He had locked himself into the smallest of the three rooms in which the large family lived, a room with no furniture, only a small pile of African sand that had been in their battered suitcases when they arrived in their new homeland. His wife used to place a tray with food and drink outside the door three times a day. During the night, when everybody else was asleep, he would go to the bathroom, and perhaps also go out for lonely walks around town. At least, they assumed he did, because they would sometimes find wet footprints on the floor when they woke up the next morning.

Miranda eventually found this too much to bear, and one evening she had simply left, perhaps hoping to go back to where she came from. The new homeland had turned out to be a dead end. Before long she was being picked up by the police for petty theft and shoplifting and ended up being shunted around from one penal institution to another.

And now she had run away. Agnes Klarström was furious, but was determined not to rest until the police had made a determined effort to find her and bring her back.

There was a photograph of Miranda pinned up on the wall. The girl’s hair was plaited and arranged artistically, clinging to her skull.

‘If you look carefully, you notice that she has plaited in the word “fuck” next to her left temple,’ said Agnes.

I could see that she was right.

There was also a third girl in the foster home that was Agnes Klarström’s mission and source of income. She was the youngest of the three, only fourteen, and a skinny creature reminiscent of a timid caged animal. Agnes knew next to nothing about her. She was a bit like the child in the old folk tale who suddenly finds herself standing in a town square, having forgotten her name and where she came from.