He seemed to be about to fall forwards, so Peder rushed to catch him. But the man hung there in his arms, crying like a child.
Before too long, Peder was on his way out of the centre of town, heading for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s workplace. He had to keep swallowing to keep back his own tears. Then it struck him that he still hadn’t rung Ylva.
He clenched his mobile. Now he was in big trouble. But she’d just have to wait. He was already late for his appointment with Gabriel’s colleague.
Martin Ek met him outside the front entrance of SatCom. Peder could see he was tense and nervous. Generally Peder was no great genius when it came to reading other people, but Martin Ek was plainly on edge. Very much on edge.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ Martin Ek said, with a firm shake of the hand.
Peder noted that the palms of the other man’s hands were sweating profusely, and saw him wipe them on his suit trousers. Charming.
Martin Ek said no more until they were in the lift on their way up to the executive floor. Peder’s intuition told him the lift was too small and they were standing too close together. He hoped he didn’t smell of drink.
‘I went into his office this morning,’ said Ek, staring straight ahead of him. ‘There was an important quarterly report I needed, and Gabriel didn’t answer his mobile. I tried him over and over again. But he never replied.’
Peder recognized that Martin Ek was trying to justify going into his colleague’s computer, which wasn’t necessary at all.
‘I understand,’ he said reassuringly, stepping out of the cramped lift with relief as soon as the doors opened.
Martin relaxed a little and discreetly showed Peder through the open-plan office to his own room. Peder noted a number of raised eyebrows and wondered whether he ought to ask to be introduced to the rest of the staff. He decided it could wait.
Safely inside his room, Martin nodded obligingly towards the visitor’s chair, and took a seat behind his desk. He clasped his hands on his blotter and cleared his throat.
Behind him, Peder could see a row of photos in colourful frames. The pictures radiated warmth and harmony. Peder saw that Martin had three children, all of them probably under ten, and a lovely wife. If the pictures were telling the truth, Martin had a good marriage and loved his wife enough to want to look at her every day. Peder felt himself shrivel as he sat there in the visitor’s chair. He was a disgrace to the male sex. Alex had loads of family photos in the office too, didn’t he?
‘So I went to Gabriel’s room to get the report,’ Martin began again, forcing Peder to focus on what he was saying.
‘We’re authorized to do that,’ he added, ‘if there’s no alternative. And our boss, mine and Gabriel’s, gave me the go ahead.’
Peder nodded again, somewhat more impatiently this time.
‘I didn’t find the report,’ Martin went on. ‘I looked in his filing cabinets; we’ve got special, secure cabinets where we keep sensitive material, and our receptionist has a master key to them all.’
Another pause for effect.
‘When I couldn’t find the report, it occurred to me that he must at least have a working copy in his computer that I could print out.’
Martin shifted the position of his desk chair a little, and suddenly his whole family was hidden from view, for which Peder was truly grateful.
‘That was when I came across the photos,’ he said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. ‘Do you want to see them now?’
Peder had had a few words with Alex on that subject. If the photos really were criminal in content, it would be extremely important for the computer to be handled correctly, so it did not appear that the police had illicitly come by the information about what Gabriel Sebastiansson stored on the hard disk of his computer at work. But if the information was presented by a third party who had gone into Gabriel’s computer of his own volition, there was no reason why Peder could not take a passive look at them. Peder, however, felt instinctively that looking at the photos was one of the last things he wanted to do.
‘You didn’t want to say any more about the photos on the phone,’ he said softly, ‘but maybe you could just give me a rough idea of what’s in them before we take a look?’
Martin Ek squirmed in his seat. His eyes went to a small photo on the desk in front of him, presumably showing his youngest child. He cleared his throat again, looking pale and rigid. His gaze was fixed as it met Peder’s. Then he answered in just two words:
‘Child pornography.’
Fredrika Bergman drove swiftly out of town and down to Flemingsberg. She wondered if what she was doing amounted to official misconduct. Alex had expressly asked her to concentrate on interviewing Sara’s family and closest acquaintances. He had asked her to see Teodora Sebastiansson again as a matter of priority, and to work out how Umeå fitted into the picture. He had definitely not asked her to go out to Flemingsberg to check out a station nobody else in the team thought of any interest.
But here she was on her way there, all the same.
Fredrika parked outside the local public prosecution office, close to the station. She looked about her as she got out of the car. The brightly coloured apartment blocks, where she had occasionally gone to see friends in her student days, were outlined against the sky in the middle distance on the far side of the tracks. The hospital was just beyond them. Her stomach lurched as she saw the signs pointing the way to it and her thoughts turned automatically to Spencer.
I could have lost him, thought Fredrika. I could have been left all on my own.
The walk from the car to the station made Fredrika quite hot. She took off her jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. It was disconcerting to find herself thinking about Spencer so much nowadays. Shouldn’t she be thinking instead about the adoption application she’d sent in a while ago? Dear Spencer seemed suddenly to be pursuing her, day and night. Fredrika felt a slight tremor in the ground beneath her. Was she just imagining things, or had her relationship with Spencer changed since the start of the summer? They met more often and it felt . . . different.
But it was hard to pin down exactly what was different.
I’ve coped with my relationship with Spencer for over ten years without starting to assume anything or make it something it’s not, Fredrika thought. There’s no reason to complicate matters now, either.
She went into the station and looked around. There was an escalator down to each platform. At the far end were the escalator and steps down to platform one, where the intercity trains heading north to Stockholm came in. Sara must have gone pelting down there when she missed the train, thought Fredrika.
She went over to the girl in the ticket window by the barriers down to the local commuter services on platforms two and three, and showed her ID. She introduced herself and briefly explained why she was there. The girl in the cramped space of the ticket booth instantly sat up straight. She realized from Fredrika’s earnest look that it was important to answer the questions properly.
‘Were you working last Tuesday?’ Fredrika asked.
To her relief, the girl at the ticket window nodded. This wasn’t going to take long.
‘Do you remember seeing a woman with a sick dog any time that day?’
The girl frowned, but then nodded eagerly again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. You mean a tall, lanky girl? With a big Alsatian?’
Fredrika’s heart skipped a beat as she remembered Sara’s description of the woman who had held her up in Flemingsberg.
‘Yes,’ she said, trying hard not to sound too excited. ‘That fits the description we’ve been given.’
The girl smiled.
‘I definitely remember her,’ she said, almost triumphantly, reminding Fredrika of the assistant police officer at Stockholm Central at the time Lilian was reported missing, and the way he had received her and Alex.
‘I saw it later on the news, like, about that little girl going missing from the train,’ said the girl
at the ticket window. ‘The girl with the dog was here at the same time as that train from Gothenburg came into the platform, and had to wait there for a while. I remember, because I was the one who helped the little girl’s mum make the call to our control centre after she missed the train.’
Fredrika smiled. Excellent.
‘Where was she travelling to?’ she asked. ‘If you can remember, that is.’
The girl looked confused.
‘The one who lost her kid?’
‘No,’ said Fredrika patiently. ‘The one with the dog.’
‘I don’t know. She just wanted to go down onto the platform to meet someone off the train. She asked me where the train from Gothenburg comes in.’
‘Ah,’ Fredrika said quickly, ‘and what happened then?’
‘Well, I could see there was something wrong with the dog,’ the girl said. ‘It could hardly stand; she was yanking it by its lead. Then sort of shoving it along in front of her. I saw them go down the escalator, and after that I heard her shouting. The girl with the dog, that is.’
She paused.
‘And it was only a minute or two later she came up again with the redheaded woman, who was helping her. At first I thought they were together, but when the X2000 pulled out, the one with the red hair almost had hysterics, and rushed down onto the platform again. She was yelling, “Lilian”, the whole time.’
Fredrika felt her throat constrict.
She cleared her throat.
‘And what did the dog woman do after that?’
‘She bundled the dog onto a mail trolley that was parked just over there,’ said the girl at the ticket window, pointing out through the glass.
Fredrika looked, but saw no trolley.
‘I’ve never seen one of those trolleys in here before, now I come to think of it,’ said the girl, ‘but I just assumed the postmen had left it behind, or something.’
Fredrika made a sharp intake of breath.
‘Anyway, that was when I realized they didn’t know each other, the dog girl and the other one,’ the girl went on. ‘And as far as I could see, the dog girl wasn’t, like, with anyone else. I assumed that the person she’d come to meet hadn’t shown up, and she thought she’d better get a move on because the dog wasn’t well. Though in fact, it seemed poorly from the word go.’
Fredrika nodded slowly, but inside she felt a growing conviction that the woman with the dog had gone down onto the platform with the sole purpose of delaying Sara Sebastiansson, to make her miss the train.
‘Do you think the girl with the dog has anything to do with the kid who went missing?’ the girl in the ticket window asked curiously.
Fredrika forced herself to smile.
‘I don’t know,’ she said swiftly. ‘We’re just trying to have a word with everyone who might have seen something. Would you be able to give a clear description of the woman with the dog if I sent someone over to do an identikit drawing?’
The girl sat up straight and looked earnest.
‘Definitely,’ she said.
Fredrika took her contact details, and also asked for the phone number of the Swedish Railways control centre. She thanked the girl for her time and said she would be back later on that day.
She was just on her way out when the girl shouted after her:
‘Wait a minute!’
Fredrika turned round.
‘What about the little girl? Have you found her?’
There are pictures that speak a thousand words. And there are pictures you just don’t want to see, because you want nothing to do with the words associated with them. Those were the kind of pictures stored on Gabriel’s office computer. To avoid the risk of sounding the alarm for nothing, Peder looked at one of them. He instantly regretted it, and would regret it for the rest of his life.
The pictures were hidden in a folder labelled ‘Reports 2nd Quarter Version III’, the one that had caught Martin Ek’s attention. Having failed to find the report he needed anywhere else, he had opened this folder full of loathsome material that no normal person would wish ever to see.
In a taxi on the way back to HQ, Peder rang his colleagues to have another arrest warrant issued for Gabriel Sebastiansson, on a charge of child pornography. Gabriel would soon be detained in his absence and a nationwide hunt for him would be in progress. Analysis of the pictures – How would that happen? Who had the stomach to pore over vile stuff like that? – would show whether Gabriel was guilty of the sexual exploitation of children, or had contented himself with watching others do so. Inside Peder there was also a growing sense of horror that they might find pictures of Lilian, but he hadn’t yet dared to think the thought consciously.
He had had a word with Alex, who was just off the plane in Umeå, to inform him of developments.
‘We still don’t know where this takes us,’ Alex said circumspectly. ‘But something tells me we’re getting a bit closer.’
‘But this must bloody well mean we’ve got him?’ said an agitated Peder.
‘No mistakes now,’ Alex warned him. ‘Until we find Gabriel Sebastiansson, we’ve got to keep our minds open to possible alternatives. Fredrika will need to go through Sara’s acquaintances with a fine-toothed comb and see if any alternative suspects present themselves. And you can do the same on Gabriel’s side. Get all the skeletons out of his cupboard.’
‘Aren’t child porn and wife beating enough?’ objected Peder doubtfully.
Alex paused to heighten the effect of what came next.
‘When we find this man, Peder, there mustn’t be any doubts. No doubts at all, okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Peder, and ended the call.
Then he rang Fredrika. He glanced out of the taxi window. The sun was still shining. Amazing.
Peder couldn’t stop himself sounding elated when Fredrika answered.
‘We’ve got him!’ he said, pressing the mobile to his ear in his exhilaration.
‘Who?’ Fredrika asked vaguely.
Peder was astonished and irritated.
‘We’ve got the father,’ he said exaggeratedly clearly, but avoided saying Gabriel’s name in the taxi.
‘All right,’ was all Fredrika said.
‘Child porn charges,’ Peder said in triumph, and saw the driver staring at him in the rearview mirror.
‘What?’ said Fredrika in surprise.
‘You heard what I said,’ said Peder, leaning back in satisfaction. ‘But we can talk about it back at HQ. Where are you, by the way?’
Fredrika didn’t respond straight away, and when she did, she said:
‘There was just something I had to check, but I’ll be back at work in fifteen minutes. I’ve got some news as well.’
‘Can hardly be anything of the same calibre as mine,’ sneered Peder.
‘See you,’ said Fredrika brusquely, and rang off.
Peder felt pleased with himself as he ended the call. This was police work at its best. The investigation team had done a great job, in actual fact. Okay, the girl had died. That undoubtedly had to be seen as a police failure. But still. Looking back, it seemed somehow inevitable, almost as if the job of the police had never been to save her. It had been to find the person who took her life. What Peder fixed on was that they seemed to have cleared up a macabre crime in no time at all. Soon, very soon, they would find Gabriel Sebastiansson. Peder would insist on being present at all the interrogations. Presumably Fredrika wouldn’t be trying to compete for that particular task.
His phone rang again.
He wrenched it out of his pocket.
It was only when he saw who was calling that it all came back to him. He had completely forgotten to ring Ylva.
Alex Recht had only been to Umeå once before. In fact his sorties north of Stockholm had been embarrassingly few in number overall. He’d been to visit Lena’s relations in Gällivare on one occasion and once – back in his youth – went to see a girlfriend up in Haparanda. And that was about it.
After he had spoken to Peder,
his mood was considerably better than it had been on boarding the plane. The news that Gabriel Sebastiansson’s colleagues had found pornographic images of children on his computer didn’t really change things much, but confirmed what they already knew in several respects. There was too much pointing at Gabriel for it not to be him, when it came down to it. He still hadn’t been in touch, he had abused his wife, and he had child porn on his computer.
For Alex, it was all fairly clear-cut.
He was perhaps slightly dubious about the motive. It bugged him that he still hadn’t encountered Gabriel, hadn’t got any sense of what he was like. Was he a madman who had gone off his head and calculatingly planned and carried out the murder of his own daughter? Or was it something else? Did he hate Sara so much that he had to punish her by murdering their child?
DCI Hugo Paulsson met him at the airport. The men shook hands gravely and then Hugo showed him to where the car was parked. Alex made a comment about the airport being bigger than he remembered it and Hugo mumbled something about memory not always being reliable ‘as we get older’. They said no more until they were on their way into Umeå. Alex peered sideways at Hugo Paulsson. ‘Older’, he had called them. Alex didn’t really think either of them could be classed as older. The two of them looked about the same age. His colleague’s hair was possibly a shade greyer and a touch thinner, but generally they both seemed equally young and healthy.
‘It’s the children who keep us young, Alex,’ Lena sometimes said.
He noted without comment that Hugo was not wearing a wedding ring. Maybe he had no children, either?
‘Recht, is that a German name?’ asked Hugo, making an attempt at small talk.
‘Partly German,’ said Alex. ‘Jewish.’
‘Jewish?’ echoed his colleague, looking at him as if it was utterly remarkable to have a Jewish surname.
Alex gave a slight smile.
‘Yes, but it’s a long story. For various reasons, my grandfather on my father’s side took his mother’s surname when he was born, the Jewish Recht. But since his father wasn’t Jewish, the family never observed any Jewish traditions. So my nearest Jewish relation is my grandfather.’
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