Mats, the National Crime Squad analyst, broke into Ellen’s reverie with a knock at her door.
‘Sorry to butt in,’ he began politely.
Ellen smiled.
‘No problem, I was just sitting . . . thinking.’
Mats gave a tight little smile.
‘Peder said something about us having the go-ahead from the examining magistrate on intercepts for Gabriel. Do you know anything about that?’
When Ellen didn’t reply at once, Mats clarified:
‘Wiretapping and phone records.’
Ellen gave a curt little laugh.
‘Thanks, I know what you mean.’
She went on:
‘It always takes an hour or so before the listening gets underway; you can ask the technical department if you want the exact timings. And then Tele2 was going to send us the logs of calls from Gabriel’s mobile for the past two years, but I don’t know when we can expect those.’
‘I got them an hour ago,’ Mats interrupted her. ‘I’ve checked the activity of his phone in the past few days. Since the child was taken he’s only made three calls, longish ones: one to his mother, one to a lawyer and one international number I haven’t been able to trace. All I can see is that the prefix is the one for Switzerland. And he’s had a few incoming texts.’
Ellen stared at him in surprise.
‘Switzerland?’
Mats nodded.
‘Yes, but I don’t know who to, as I said. And if his mother’s still claiming not to have seen him in the past few days, she’s lying. I’ve checked the mobile phone mast records. Gabriel Sebastiansson’s phone has been active in the vicinity of his parents’ home several times since Tuesday. Right up to six this morning, in fact.’
Ellen whistled.
‘Things are really hotting up,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘They certainly are,’ said Mats.
Fredrika drove far too fast to the Sebastiansson family home. This time she did not ring to announce in advance that she was coming. And when she arrived, she did not wait for Teodora Sebastiansson’s finger to show her where to park. Instead she skidded to a halt right outside the house and was out of the car almost before it came to a complete stop. She took the steps up to the front door in three strides and rang twice on the doorbell. When she heard nothing, she rang again. A moment later, she heard someone fumbling with the lock inside and the door slid open.
Teodora was incensed to see Fredrika.
‘And what in heaven’s name is this supposed to mean?’ the diminutive woman barked, with surprising force in her voice. ‘Roaring onto our estate and almost knocking the door down like this!’
‘Firstly, I don’t know that your home can best be described as an “estate”; secondly, all I’ve done is ring urgently on your doorbell; and thirdly . . .’
Fredrika was taken aback by the power with which she was countering Teodora’s attack, and paused to heighten the effect.
‘And thirdly, I’m afraid to tell you I have some very bad news. Could you let me in, please?’
Teodora stared at Fredrika. Fredrika stared back. This time, too, the older woman had a large brooch pinned to her blouse, right under her chin. It almost looked as though the brooch was there to keep her head held high.
‘Have you found her?’ she asked quietly.
‘I really would prefer us to go in,’ Fredrika said more gently.
Teodora shook her head.
‘No, I want to know now.’
She did not drop her eyes from Fredrika’s face.
‘Yes, we’ve found her,’ Fredrika said, after a brief consideration of the possible implications of breaking such news to a woman of Teodora Sebastiansson’s advanced age on her own doorstep.
Teodora stood stock still for a long time.
‘Come in,’ she said at length, standing aside to let Fredrika enter.
This time, Fredrika did not spare a glance for the decor as she walked the short distance from the front door to the drawing room.
Teodora sat down slowly on a chair by the table. To her relief, Fredrika was not offered anything to drink. As discreetly as possible, she slid into the chair on the other side of the table and rested her chin on her clasped hands.
‘Where did you find her?’
‘In Umeå,’ said Fredrika.
Teodora gave a start.
‘In Umeå?’ she repeated with genuine surprise. ‘What on . . . Are you sure it’s her?’
‘Yes,’ said Fredrika, ‘I’m afraid we are. Her mother and maternal grandparents are about to identify her formally, but yes, we’re completely sure it’s her. Have you any links with Umeå? Or do you know if Sara or your son have?’
Teodora put her hands slowly in her lap.
‘As I believe I explained last time, I know very little about exactly how my daughter-in-law lives her life,’ she said gruffly. ‘But no, as far as I know, neither she nor my son have any particularly strong links with Umeå, and nor do I, for that matter. No links at all, in fact.’
‘Have you got friends there?’
‘My dear girl, I’ve never even been there,’ said Teodora. ‘Nor do I know anyone who has. In my family, that is. It’s possible Gabriel’s been up there for work, but I honestly don’t know.’
Fredrika waited a few moments.
‘Speaking of your son,’ she said more resolutely, ‘have you heard from him?’
Teodora stiffened.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I have not.’
‘Are you sure of that?’ Fredrika asked.
‘I’m quite sure,’ said Teodora.
The two women looked each other straight in the eye, a trial of strength across the tea table.
‘May I see his room?’ asked Fredrika.
‘My answer is the same as before,’ Teodora snapped. ‘You can’t see a single square metre of this house unless you have a search warrant.’
‘As it happens, I do,’ said Fredrika, hearing at that very moment the sound of several vehicles crunching to a halt on the gravel drive outside.
Teodora’s eyes widened, radiating genuine astonishment.
‘It does your son’s cause no good at all if you refuse to work with the police in the hunt for your granddaughter’s murderer,’ said Fredrika, getting to her feet.
‘If you had any children of your own, you would know that one never, ever lets them down,’ Teodora said in a broken voice, leaning towards Fredrika. ‘If Sara had understood that, Lilian would never have come to any harm. Where was she, worthless individual that she was, when Lilian vanished?’
She was caught in a trap, set by somebody who really meant her ill, Fredrika thought to herself.
She said nothing. It had only been for a second, but she had still seen it. Weariness in the older woman’s eyes. And vulnerability.
This is causing her vastly more suffering than she is prepared for people to see, thought Fredrika.
Then she accompanied Teodora to the front door to let in the waiting police officers.
Peder Rydh stood in the middle of Teodora Sebastiansson’s living room, and could not believe his eyes. The whole interior was like a museum, and made him feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Matters weren’t improved by having that fragile-looking little old lady staring at him from the other end of the room. She hadn’t batted an eyelid since she met him at the door and he told her why he and the others were there. She’d just gone over and planted herself in an armchair in one corner.
Peder did a quick circuit of the ground floor. Not a trace of Gabriel Sebastiansson. But Peder knew he had been there. Recently. He was aware of Gabriel’s presence in a way he couldn’t explain.
‘When did you last see your son?’ Peder asked again when he had completed his circuit and come back to the living room.
‘Mrs Sebastiansson will not be answering any questions for the time being,’ said a curt voice right behind him.
He turned.
A man Peder didn’t know had suddenly appeared in the
living room. He was broad-shouldered and extremely tall. His features were heavy and his complexion and hair were dark. Peder felt an immediate and involuntary respect for him.
The man held out his hand and introduced himself as the Sebastiansson family lawyer.
Peder took his hand and told him in brief why the police were searching the premises.
‘Child pornography offences?’ cried Teodora, swiftly on her feet. ‘Are you entirely out of your mind?’
She tripped lightly across the room to the two men.
‘I thought you were looking for Gabriel!’
‘As I explained when we arrived, that’s just what we are doing,’ Peder said evenly. ‘I can also tell you that there’s a nationwide arrest warrant out for your son. By helping him, you risk committing a criminal act yourself, depending what crime he’s eventually prosecuted for. Your lawyer will confirm that.’
But Teodora had a distant look in her eyes again, and did not seem to be listening to what he said. Peder suppressed a sigh and left the room.
He strode up the wide staircase to the first floor. Gabriel’s room was just off the landing at the top.
‘How’s it going?’ he called. ‘Have you found anything?’
A small policewoman who was down on all fours, looking under the bed, scrambled to her feet.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘But we’re damn sure he was here. The bed was very untidily made; the sheets were all crumpled. I’m pretty sure he slept here last night.’
Peder gave a resolute nod.
‘He must have a laptop,’ he said.
‘He’s bound to,’ agreed a colleague. ‘But he’s likely to have taken it with him, in that case, wherever he’s gone.’
‘You’re right,’ Peder said wearily. ‘You haven’t found any photos and so on about the place?’
‘Not a trace,’ said the policewoman.
‘All right,’ said Peder in conclusion, ‘but we think we can say with some degree of certainty that he spent last night here?’
They all nodded in agreement.
‘Good,’ muttered Peder. ‘I’ll ring the other teams to check what they found at his office and his Östermalm place.’
His first call, however, was to HQ, where Ellen confirmed that Mats had been able to link Gabriel Sebastiansson to his parental home by means of mobile telephone mast connections. But no, she said, there hadn’t been any calls of note from the public, even though the girl’s picture was now in every newspaper and all over the media. Though yes, there was someone who’d seen little Lilian being carried off along the platform in Stockholm just after the train pulled in, so that version of events seemed to be confirmed. Other than that? No, nothing new.
Peder rang the team that was busy with Gabriel Sebastiansson’s office. His computer had been taken away and its contents would be scrutinized as soon as they assembled a team of volunteers willing to deal with such distressing material. The computer’s email correspondence would be looked at separately, and considerably more quickly. Gabriel’s boss also confirmed that Gabriel had the use of a laptop belonging to his employer, but he had no idea where it was. As might have been expected, the team had found no trace of any child pornography in the office apart from what was on the computer.
Peder then tried to talk to the new investigator he had put onto interviewing Gabriel’s colleagues, but he said he was busy interviewing and promised to ring back within the hour.
Peder did not know quite what to make of the information generated by the search to that point. It was satisfying to have confirmation that Gabriel was deliberately avoiding the police. It was also good to have confirmation that his mother had lied to protect her son. It was very good that they now knew where he had been over the past few days.
And yet . . .
Why was he stupid enough to keep child pornography on his computer at work, when he had a laptop? Why had he hidden at his mother’s, when he could reasonably expect that to be the first place the police would look? And if it was Gabriel Sebastiansson who murdered Lilian, had the murder taken place at his mother’s house? Had the child’s grandmother even been an accomplice?
Peder felt instinctively that she could not have been. But could Gabriel have had Lilian in the house without his mother knowing? If one supposed the child had been sedated, or something like that? Probably not.
Peder looked around him. Was this really the house where Lilian died? If that were the case, he wanted the examining magistrate’s immediate permission to turn the entire place upside down to find the scene of the crime. Though Alex had told him in their most recent phone call that the hospital reported Lilian had died of some form of poison, injected into her skull. A murder like that wouldn’t exactly leave many clues behind.
Then something struck Peder. Mats the analyst had said Gabriel’s phone hadn’t once gone north of Stockholm. But it had clearly gone south. If you assumed Gabriel had had his phone with him the whole time, how the heck could Lilian’s body have been taken to Umeå?
Fatigue descended on Peder once again. His brain refused to cooperate and his headache came back with a vengeance.
Then he had a call from the colleagues searching Gabriel Sebastiansson’s home in Östermalm. They had not found anything much except a large box of sex toys. It was debatable whether that could be considered abnormal. They had also seized a number of unlabelled DVDs. It was possible that they might yield something.
‘Did you find any trace of the child in the flat?’ Peder asked disconsolately.
‘She’s got her own room in the flat, of course,’ came the answer, ‘but no, we can’t say we found anything to indicate she’s been here over the past few days. In fact no one seems to have been here at all. No rubbish in the kitchen bin, and the fridge has been left empty. Either no one’s been here for a while, or somebody came in and cleared out the fridge.’
Peder was inclined to think the latter. It would be interesting to know whether the flat’s landline had been used in recent days. But then on the other hand, Gabriel Sebastiansson’s boss said Gabriel had been at work as usual all the previous week, and he’d been at the office as late as last Saturday.
Then something had happened to make Gabriel go to ground, take some leave at short notice and lie to his mother about a business trip. Why had he been so heavy-handed about it, though? It was obvious his mother was incredibly loyal to him. Yet if there was one iota of decency in the woman, that loyalty could not extend to child pornography and child murder.
Peder went back to the others in Gabriel’s bedroom and told them he was going to look in on the Östermalm flat. He left the house. Teodora Sebastiansson and her lawyer had locked themselves away in the living room, and Peder saw no need to inform them of his departure.
A strange and overwhelming sense of relief flooded over him as he came out onto the gravel drive where his car was parked. He stared for a few moments at the big, brick mansion. Then he stared at the plot of land it was built on, the size of a park. At this particular spot on earth, time had stood still for far too long.
Jelena nervously put the key in the front door. Her hand always shook a bit when she was excited or nervous. Just now she was both of those things. She had done it. She had done absolutely everything the Man had instructed her to do. She had driven the car up to Umeå, got rid of the Foetus in almost exactly the way and exactly the place he wanted, and then caught the plane back. No one had seen her, no one had suspected what she was doing. Jelena was sure she had never performed better in her whole life.
Silence received her as she shut the door behind her.
She fumbled as she took off her shoes and arranged them precisely beside each other, the way the Man always insisted their shoes should be lined up in the little hall.
‘Hello,’ she said tentatively, going further into the flat. ‘Are you there?’
She took a few more steps. Wasn’t it strangely quiet?
Something was wrong, so wrong.
He suddenly detached him
self from the shadows. She sensed rather than saw the great fist coming towards her and hitting her right in the face.
No, no, no, she thought desperately as she flew backwards through the air and landed hard on her back, her head hitting the wall.
Pain and fear were throbbing in her body, which had learnt that in situations like this, by far the safest thing was not to react at all. But the blow was so unexpected and so ominous that she almost wet herself in terror.
He came swiftly towards her and pulled her to her feet. There was blood running from one corner of her mouth and her head was spinning. Darts of pain were shooting through her back.
‘You bloody whore, you complete bloody misfit,’ he hissed through clenched teeth, and his eyes seethed with a fury she had never seen before.
‘Oh no, no, please, somebody help me,’ she mumbled to herself.
‘She should have been lying in a foetal position,’ he said, holding her face so close to his own that she could see every tiny detail of it. ‘She should have been lying in a foetal position and quite apart from that – quite apart from that! – what the fucking hell was she doing on the pavement? How bloody hard can it be to understand?’
He yelled the last bit with such force that she was struck dumb.
‘I . . . ,’ she began, but the Man broke in.
‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘Shut up!’
And when she made another attempt to explain, explain that there hadn’t been time to arrange the Foetus exactly as they – as he – had planned, nor in exactly the right place, he yelled at her again to shut up, and silenced her with another punch in the face. Two punches. A knee in her stomach. A kick in her side once she was on the floor. Ribs cracked, making the same sound as when frosty branches snap in a forest in winter. Soon she could no longer hear his yelling or feel his blows. She was scarcely conscious as he tore off her clothes and dragged her into the bedroom. She began to whimper as she saw him get out the box of matches. He kept her quiet by stuffing a sock in her mouth, and then lit the first match.
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