Unwanted

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Lying there in Spencer’s arms, Fredrika curled up into a little ball. He was breathing deeply behind her and already fast asleep. She stroked a cautious finger over the hairs on his naked arm. She couldn’t imagine a life without him. Such thoughts were indescribably dangerous, she knew that. Yet she could not banish them. And they always came when the night was at its darkest and she was feeling at her loneliest.

  She shifted carefully until she was lying on her back.

  The visit to Sara Sebastiansson’s had been a strain in every way. Partly because of Sara Sebastiansson herself, of course. The woman was entirely unbalanced. But also because of Peder. He had been mightily pleased when Alex decided Fredrika should not go to see Sara Sebastiansson on her own. Fredrika had seen him straighten up, and his face had broken into a sneering grin.

  ‘It’s not that I’m questioning your competence,’ Alex had said.

  Fredrika knew all too well that that was exactly what he was doing. Expectations of her, a young woman with an academic background, were set extremely low. She was assumed to be barely capable of operating the photocopier. She could sense Alex’s irritation whenever she dared put forward or develop a new hypothesis.

  His attitude to the woman in Flemingsburg was a case in point.

  Fredrika found it hard to exclude her from the investigation. It was frankly grotesque that Sara hadn’t been asked for a description of the woman and that they hadn’t done a photofit. On the way back to the office after they had seen Sara, Fredrika had tried to raise the question again, but a weary Alex had firmly interrupted her.

  ‘It’s obvious, completely bloody obvious, that the father of that child is as sick as they come,’ he said agitatedly. ‘There’s nothing to point to there being any other lunatics in Sara’s circle who would want to harm her child, or scare Sara by taking Lilian from her. And nobody’s sent Sara a ransom note or anything like that.’

  When Fredrika opened her mouth to point out that the perpetrator could be someone Sara was not actually in touch with at present, or did not realize she was in conflict with, Alex brought the discussion to a close with a:

  ‘It would be to your advantage in this organization to respect the competence and experience we have here. I’ve been looking for missing children for decades, so believe me, I know what I’m doing.’

  Things went very quiet in the car after that, and Fredrika saw no reason to continue the discussion.

  She peered over at Spencer’s peaceful face. Craggy features, grey, wavy hair. Good looking, you might even say handsome. Not cute, not ever. She had stopped asking herself how he could sleep so well, night after night, when he was being unfaithful. She assumed it was because he and his wife lived separate lives and had a mutual agreement about the extent of personal freedom they each had in the marriage. There had never been any children. Perhaps they had chosen not to have any. Fredrika wasn’t sure about that.

  Alex Recht really shouldn’t have been particularly hard for Fredrika, of all people, to deal with. Not after almost fourteen years with a person whose views came from a time machine stuck somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Not after fourteen years with someone who still wouldn’t let her open a bottle of wine. Fredrika smiled wistfully. Spencer still respected her infinitely more than Alex did.

  ‘What is it he gives you that you feel you can’t do without?’ a succession of her friends had asked her over the years. ‘Why do you carry on seeing him, when nothing can ever come of it?’

  Her answer had varied over time. At the very beginning, it had been so incredibly exciting and passionate. Forbidden and invigorating for both of them. An adventure. But the relationship had deepened, within its given limitations. They had many interests and some values in common. Over time, closeness to Spencer developed into a sort of fixed point for her. As she commuted between various cities and countries while finishing her studies, Spencer had always been there to come back to. The same was true when she became entangled in a variety of love affairs, all relatively short-lived. Once disaster had struck and the house of cards had collapsed, he was always still there. Never without pride, but permanently bored with his marriage yet unable to leave his wife. Though Fredrika had been told the wife had flings of her own.

  Fredrika’s single status had been discussed in her own family on countless occasions over the years. She knew she had been a surprise to her parents in more than just her choice of profession. Neither of them had imagined she would still be single by her age. Her grandmother definitely hadn’t.

  ‘Oh, you’ll find someone,’ she used to say, patting Fredrika’s arm.

  It had been a while now since Fredrika’s grandmother had done that. Fredrika had just celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with some good friends out in the archipelago, and was still husbandless and childless. Grandma would probably have had a heart attack if she had known Fredrika shared a bed from time to time with the professor who had been her supervisor at university.

  Her father delivered thinly veiled lectures on the virtue of ‘settling for’ some things in life and ‘not being too greedy’. Only once Fredrika had grasped this would she, as her brother already did each Sunday, take her place at the parental dining table in the company of a family of her own. A year or two after Fredrika turned thirty and still seemed determinedly single (or ‘alone’, as her father put it), the Sunday dinners were putting such a strain on her mentally that she started to avoid them.

  Lying in the dark beside a man she thought she loved in spite of everything, Fredrika knew that the day she told him she was having a baby, Spencer would be on his way out of her life. Not because she was replaceable, but because there was no room for a child in their relationship.

  Fredrika and Spencer hadn’t talked about it for a long time, but after a long period of reflection, Fredrika was increasingly realizing that she might not find a man to start a family with, and that she might need to start thinking about the alternatives. It wasn’t a decision she could postpone indefinitely; she had to decide. Either she did something about it, even though she was alone, or there might be no children at all. She found it unexpectedly painful trying to visualize a whole life without the experience of parenthood. To put it bluntly, it felt unfair and unnatural.

  There were various alternatives to weigh up. The most unthinkable of them was to force Spencer into paternity: she could stop taking the pill without telling him. Less unthinkable was a trip to Copenhagen to buy a chance of motherhood at a fertility clinic. The option that seemed the most feasible was adopting a child.

  ‘For fuck’s sake just send in the forms,’ Fredrika’s friend Julia had said, a few months earlier. ‘You can always back out, say you applied in too much of a hurry. You’ll have oceans of time to think it over; it takes forever to be approved to adopt. I’d get in the queue straight away.’

  At first she hadn’t even seen it as a serious suggestion. What was more, it would amount to giving up somehow. The day she sent in her application to adopt would be the day she really gave up all hope of having a family of her own, with a partner. Had she reached that point?

  The answer to that question came when Spencer didn’t answer the phone, either his mobile or his job number. After several days of silence, she started ringing round hospitals. He was in the cardiac department of the University Hospital in Uppsala. He had suffered a major heart attack and been given a pacemaker. Fredrika cried for a week and then, with a new perspective on what is enduring in life, she sent in the application form.

  Fredrika planted a light kiss on Spencer’s forehead. He smiled in his sleep. She smiled back. She still hadn’t told him about her plan to adopt a little girl from China. After all, her friend was right: she had oceans of time.

  One last thought formed in her head before she succumbed to sleep. How much time did Lilian have? Did she have oceans of it, too, or were her days numbered?

  WEDNESDAY

  The woman on the TV screen was talking so fast that Nora almost missed the news report.
It was early morning and her flat was shrouded in darkness. The only light came from the television, but since the blinds were down, Nora was almost certain its flickering gleam couldn’t be seen by anyone looking in from the street.

  For Nora, this was very important. She knew she was condemned to feel unsafe, but she also knew there were certain little things she could do to improve her odds. One of them was simply not to be seen. By requesting protected identity from the tax authorities, she became less visible; by never having the light on in the flat in the evening, she became even less visible. She had a minimal circle of friends. She only had sporadic contact with her grandmother, always ringing her from a phone box in the street, and always from some other town. Her job was useful in that respect; she had to travel a fair amount.

  When she heard the news she was in the kitchen, making a sandwich, with the fridge door open. The light in the fridge was useful; it meant she didn’t need to switch on any other lights to see what she was doing.

  The woman’s voice cut through the silence and reached Nora as she struggled with the cheese slice.

  ‘A six-year-old girl went missing yesterday from a train travelling between Gothenburg and Stockholm,’ the woman’s voice intoned. ‘The police are appealing for anyone who was on the train that left Gothenburg at 10.50 a.m. yesterday morning, or at Stockholm Central Station around . . .’

  Nora dropped the cheese slice and ran to the television.

  ‘Oh God,’ whispered Nora, feeling her heart thud. ‘He’s started.’

  She listened to the end of the news, then switched off the set and sank down on the settee. The words she had just heard sank slowly into her consciousness, one by one. Together they formed whole sentences creating violent echoes from a time she had tried so hard to put behind her.

  ‘The train, Doll,’ whispered the echo. ‘You’ve no idea what people leave behind on the train. And you’ve no idea how unobservant all the rest are. The ones who don’t leave things behind, but are just travelling. That’s what people do on the train, Doll. They travel. And they don’t see a thing.’

  She sat there on the settee until her hunger reminded her of the sandwich she had made. Only then did she reach a decision about what to do. She switched the TV back on, and clicked to teletext. The police number for members of the public with any information was at the end of the item about the missing child. She keyed it into her mobile. She would ring later in the day. Not from her mobile, of course, but from a telephone box.

  Nora pulled the blind aside and peeped cautiously out into the street. If only it would stop raining.

  Alex Recht woke up just after six, almost an hour before the alarm clock was due to go off. Carefully, so as not to wake his wife Lena, he got out of bed and padded out of the room to make his first cup of coffee of the day.

  The house was light on this bright morning, but the sun had already settled behind a clump of thick cloud. Alex suppressed a sigh as he measured the coffee into the filter of the machine. No, he honestly couldn’t remember ever experiencing a worse summer. The rest of his holiday leave lay just a few weeks ahead. They would feel like totally wasted weeks if the weather didn’t improve.

  Mistrustful of the weather, he opened the back door to check whether it had started raining yet and made a brisk foray to retrieve the morning paper. He unfolded it even before he was back inside. A headline about the disappearance of Lilian Sebastiansson looked back at him from the front page of the national daily. ‘Child of six missing since yesterday . . .’ Excellent, even the big papers had been in time to run the story.

  Alex took his cup of coffee and newspaper and crossed the little hall, painted a deep blue, to his study. It had been Lena’s idea to paint the hall blue. Alex had been sceptical.

  ‘Doesn’t it make small spaces look even smaller if you paint them a dark colour?’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lena. ‘But more to the point, it makes them look nice!’

  That, Alex realized, was an argument he had little hope of countering, so he allowed himself to be persuaded more or less without a fight. It fell to his son to do the painting job, and it certainly did look lovely. And cramped. But they didn’t talk about that.

  Alex sat down in the enormous desk chair that was more like a small armchair on wheels. He had inherited it from his grandfather and would never part with it. Alex gave the arm of the chair a contented pat. Not only was it handsome, it was also comfortable. Alex and the chair would soon be celebrating their thirtieth anniversary. Thirty years! That was a terribly long time to sit in one chair. Actually, thought Alex, it was a terribly long time in every way. Longer than he had been married to Lena, in fact.

  Leaning back in the chair, Alex closed his eyes.

  He didn’t feel properly rested. He had not slept well last night. For the first time in several years, he had had nightmares. However much he would have liked to blame it on the weather, he knew the bad dreams had their origins elsewhere.

  Alex was more than vaguely aware that in the course of his years with the police, he had come to be viewed as something of a legend. On the whole, he thought it was a reputation he deserved. The number of investigations and cases that had crossed his desk was too great for him to count, and he had solved most of them sooner or later. Never alone, but he had generally taken the lead. Just as he was doing this time. But now he was becoming aware of the passage of the years. They were talking about bringing the pension age for police officers down to sixty-one. Alex initially thought it sounded a lousy idea, but now he felt differently. It did no good for an authority like the police to be weighed down by a lot of tired and ageing officers. It was important to bring new blood into the organization.

  In his years in the police force, Alex had encountered more desperate individuals than he could remember. Sara Sebastiansson was the latest of them. But she hadn’t let any real despair show yet. She was keeping herself together in a quite remarkable way, thought Alex. He had no doubt that inside she was being torn apart by her anxiety and her desperate longing to see the child, but she was forcing herself not to show it. It was as if she thought that if she exposed for a single second – a single second – the horror she was going through, then the world would split apart beneath her feet and her daughter would be lost for ever. As Alex understood it, she hadn’t even rung her parents yet.

  ‘I’ll do it tomorrow, if Lilian’s not back by then,’ she had said.

  Now it was tomorrow, and as far as Alex knew, Lilian was still missing. He looked at his mobile phone. No missed calls, no missed news.

  There were a few other basics to bear in mind where missing children were concerned. Almost all such children, the vast majority, were found. Sooner or later. And ‘later’ was seldom more than a day or so. That had been the case, for example, for the little boy out on the coast last year, when Alex was called in precisely because he had handled a number of missing child cases in the course of his career. The boy, perhaps five years old, had slipped away from his family’s summer place at Ekerö when his parents were having an argument, and then simply run or walked so far from the house that he couldn’t find his way back again.

  They found him asleep under a spruce some ten kilometres from home, further away than expected, beyond the radius of the initial search. He was reunited with his parents early the next morning, and the last thing Alex heard as he left the place was the parents bickering loudly and bitterly about whose fault it was the boy had gone off.

  Then, of course, there were cases Alex found it harder to reconcile himself to. Cases in which the child had been subjected to such abominations when it was snatched that it was basically a completely different child by the time it was restored to its parents. There was one particular little girl who always came back into Alex’s mind when another child went missing. The girl had been gone for several days before she was found in a ditch by a motorist. She was unconscious for more than a week after she was admitted to hospital, and could never give any proper account
of what had happened to her. Nor was there any need. The injuries to her body bore witness to the kind of scum that must have taken her, and though doctors, psychologists and well-meaning parents did everything in their power to heal her wounds, there were psychological scars that no medical treatment or words on this earth could remove.

  The girl remained dysfunctional and disturbed as she grew up, not interacting with those around her at home or at school. She became more and more of a loner. She didn’t finish secondary school. Still not of age, she ran away from home and turned to prostitution. Her parents brought her home time after time but she always made off again. And before she was twenty, she died of a heroin overdose. Alex could remember crying in his office when the news reached him.

  Alex had felt an overwhelming urge to go and see Sara Sebastiansson for himself the previous evening, and that was why he had accompanied Fredrika Bergman to Sara’s flat. He was afraid Fredrika took it as a sign that he questioned her competence in that area of work. Which he did, to some extent, but that wasn’t why he had wanted to go with her. No, he had just wanted to get a better feel for the case. And he certainly had.

  First Fredrika and Alex talked to Sara on her own for a while, and then her new friend Anders Nyström turned up. The checks on his personal data had not yielded anything, but Fredrika had nonetheless interviewed him briefly in Sara’s kitchen, while Alex continued his conversation with Sara in the living room.

  The information that emerged troubled him.

  Sara had no enemies. At least none she was aware of.

  On the other hand, she didn’t seem to have many friends, either.

  She told him that her ex-husband used to abuse her, but that it was no longer a problem, and she didn’t believe for a moment that he had taken their daughter. That was why she had chosen not to mention the earlier abuse to Fredrika when they first spoke. She didn’t want the police investigation getting unnecessarily sidetracked, as she put it.