Unwanted

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Is she the one who murdered the kid?’ he asked insensitively. ‘Is that why you’re looking for her?’

  ‘She’s not under suspicion for anything,’ Peder said rapidly. ‘We just want to talk to her; she might have seen something of interest to us.’

  The man nodded as he looked through the calendar.

  ‘Here’, he said, stabbing a fat finger onto the open page. ‘That’s when she was here.’

  Peder leant forward. The man turned the calendar round. He had his finger on the left-hand page. June the seventh.

  Peder’s spirits fell.

  ‘What makes you remember it was that day?’ he said dubiously.

  ‘Because it was the day I was having my goddamned wisdom tooth taken out,’ said the car hirer, looking very pleased with himself as he drummed on a straggly doodle on the page. ‘I was just going to close the shop and go to the hospital when she came in.’

  He leant over the desk with a glitter in his eye that made Peder feel very uncomfortable.

  ‘Petrified little beggar,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘Stood staring around her like a little animal caught in the car headlights. Those ones that never shift even though the danger’s right on top of them. That’s the way she looked.’

  He gave a short, coarse laugh.

  Peder ignored the other man’s attitude, though he suspected some of what had just been said ought to be stored away in his mind for future reference.

  ‘Which car did she hire, and how long for?’ he asked.

  The man seemed nonplussed.

  ‘Eh?’ he said, eyeing Peder in confusion. ‘Whaddya mean, which car? She didn’t want a car.’

  ‘Didn’t she?’ said Peder, looking foolish. ‘What did she want, then?’

  ‘She wanted a driving licence. But that was before I’d started that business, so I told her to come back at the beginning of July. But she never turned up again.’

  Peder’s brain was working overtime.

  ‘She wanted a driving licence?’ he echoed.

  ‘Yep,’ said the car hirer, slamming his desk diary shut.

  ‘Did she give her name?’ Peder asked, though he already knew the answer.

  ‘No, why should she? I couldn’t put her down for lessons. I hadn’t got the paperwork sorted by then.’

  Peder sighed.

  ‘Do you remember anything else about her visit?’

  ‘No, only what I’ve already told you,’ said the car hirer, massaging his beard with one hand and his belly with the other. ‘She was scared shitless, and she looked washed out. Her hair must’ve been dyed, it was so dark it didn’t look natural. Almost black. And someone had been knocking her about.’

  Peder pricked up his ears.

  ‘There were bruises on her face,’ the man went on, indicating his left cheek. ‘Not new ones, more the sort that’ve been there a while, know what I mean? Looked quite nasty. Must’ve been painful.’

  Neither of them said anything. The door behind Peder opened and a customer came in. The car hirer waved to the man to wait.

  ‘I’m just going,’ said Peder. ‘Anything else you can remember?’

  The car hirer gave his beard a vigorous scratch.

  ‘No, only that she talked strangely.’

  ‘Talked strangely?’ repeated Peder.

  ‘Mmmm. It was kind of disjointed. I s’pose it was because she’d been beaten up. Women usually learn to hold their tongues then.’

  Once Peder and Fredrika had left HQ, the same feeling descended on Alex that he used to get when his children still lived at home and had gone round to a friend’s for the evening. It was so quiet and peaceful.

  Peder and Fredrika were not the only ones who worked on the same corridor as Alex, far from it, but he still had a palpable sense of their absence, which he sometimes found a positive blessing.

  His wife rang him on his mobile.

  ‘So what about this holiday?’ she asked. ‘In view of this case you’re working on, I mean. The travel agent rang about confirmation and payment.’

  ‘We’ll get our holiday, don’t worry,’ was all Alex said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Do I generally lie about things like that?’

  He smiled, and knew she was smiling back.

  ‘Will you be late home this evening?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘We could have a barbecue,’ Lena suggested.

  ‘We could go to South America.’

  Alex was surprised to hear himself utter the words. But he didn’t take them back, just left them hanging there between them.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Lena at length.

  Alex felt his throat go dry.

  ‘I said we should go and visit our son, who lives there, sometime. So he knows we still want to be part of his life.’

  Alex’s wife took a little while to respond.

  ‘Yes, we certainly should,’ she said softly. ‘This autumn, perhaps?’

  ‘This autumn, perhaps.’

  Love for a child wasn’t like anything else, thought Alex when they had rung off. Love for a child was so fundamental, so unnegotiable. Alex sometimes thought it was actually love for the children that had made it possible for him and Lena to be married for nearly thirty years. What else explained the way they’d come through every setback, every spell of dreary, day-to-day boredom?

  Admittedly Alex was the boss, but he was aware of the gossip circulating in the corridor. He knew what they said about Peder, that he had a woman in the Södermalm force. Alex had never been unfaithful to his wife, but he could still visualize quite easily how a situation like that could arise.

  If you were really, really down. If you were really, really weighed down with a huge burden of problems.

  But not when you had young children at home, as Alex knew Peder did. And definitely not with a work colleague and so indiscreetly that other people noticed. That was low and irresponsible.

  Alex felt a stab of irritation. Young people were so spoilt these days. He knew he sounded old-fashioned and even a bit reactionary, but he had some genuine objections to young people’s way of viewing the world, and what they expected from it. Life was supposed to be one long walk in the park with no obstacles in your way. The world had turned into an enormous playground where anybody could play wherever they fancied. Could Alex have done what his son was doing? Could he have moved to South America? No, he could not. And that was just as well, because if you had options like that open to you, how could your spirit ever settle? You would be bound to end up like Peder.

  Alex was starting to feel guilty about sitting there, thinking. He had no business having opinions on how his colleague lived his life. But still. He was thinking of Peder’s wife and children. Why wasn’t Peder doing that?

  His gloom was dispelled somewhat by a call from Peder. There was at least something driven in that voice, something to tell Alex that Peder liked what he did in his days at work. It was hard to see that as anything but positive.

  But this time his young colleague sounded less than happy.

  ‘The only new thing we’ve found out is that she tried to get a driving licence,’ he said morosely. ‘Even assuming it’s her.’

  Alex stopped Peder in his tracks.

  ‘We also know she gets beaten up at regular intervals, which indicates pretty strongly that we’ve found the right girl. And the right man,’ he said firmly, and went on rather more eagerly. ‘Just think about it, Peder. The girl who was murdered in Jönköping had had protected identity since she broke up with a man who abused her. When she was on the phone to Ellen, she talked about some kind of campaign, about the man wanting to punish certain women. Just suppose that lunatic’s found himself another girl as a partner and assistant. Another girl whose life has gone off the rails – way off – and who for some reason falls for this man. If, and I mean if, it’s the man who took Lilian that murdered the girl in Jönköping, then we also know he must have had help to get Lilian – dead or alive – to Umeå
, since he can hardly have been in two places at once. And that means it would have been very handy if his sidekick could pass her driving test in time.’

  Peder was thinking and took a while to respond.

  ‘Shall I go round to all the driving schools I can find in Söder and show them the picture, while I’m here? She might have tried another one when that car hire place couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Good idea, as long as we don’t overlook the woman who thought she might have fostered the girl.’

  ‘I’ll get that sorted, too,’ Peder said swiftly. ‘Heard anything from Fredrika yet?’

  ‘No,’ sighed Alex. ‘I think she’s on her way to have an extra little chat to Sara. She was going to call before she went on to the airport.’

  Alex was about to hang up when Peder said:

  ‘There’s one more thing.’

  Alex waited.

  ‘Why did he go to Jönköping and murder that girl just then? I mean, he must have had his hands full with Lilian. Why would he draw even more attention to himself?’

  Alex nodded to himself.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that, too,’ he said unsurely. ‘There seems to be some plan behind it all. First he holds up the train and Sara in Flemingsberg; then he sends the box of hair and clothes. Maybe the Jönköping murder was part of the ritual, though we can’t see it yet?’

  ‘I thought the same,’ said Peder, ‘but it doesn’t fit. It feels more like the Jönköping murder was an emergency measure. He didn’t even wipe the floor. He’s been so bloody careful everywhere else, and then suddenly he leaves evidence behind him.’

  ‘Well he did that on the train, too,’ Alex objected.

  ‘Because he had no choice,’ said Peder. ‘He couldn’t go cleaning the floor in there, and he could hardly get on the train barefoot or in his socks. That would really attract attention. And anyway, he probably felt relatively safe on the train, where there’d be lots of other footprints.’

  ‘So you think he murdered the woman in Jönköping to shut her up?’

  ‘Yes,’ Peder replied after a brief pause. ‘That seems the only plausible explanation.’

  Alex pondered this.

  ‘All right, but how did he know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘How did he know she needed shutting up?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the thing,’ Peder said uneasily. ‘How the hell did he know she’d rung the police? Or can we assume he would have topped her anyway?’

  Ellen Lind felt happy, elated even. She thought about the previous evening and night and felt all warm inside.

  ‘Perhaps he loves me,’ she murmured.

  She was so glad she had been able to see him last night. He had been such a good listener, just when she needed to get all that wretched Lilian stuff off her chest. Even though he had no children of his own, he really seemed to understand how traumatic it was for everyone involved.

  Then they had talked about new films they might go and see. Ellen felt a tingle of excitement. They had never been to the cinema together before. Their socializing had always been geographically confined to whatever hotel he happened to be staying at on the evening they met, and the pattern of their dates was always the same: they had a meal, they talked, they made love, they slept.

  It would be good for us to do something new, thought Ellen with a roguish smile.

  If she was able to get him to a film, then it ought not to be a problem to persuade him to meet her children, too. If he really did love her, he would understand that the kids were part of the package.

  Ellen smiled as she took out her mobile. She had just sent a text and was waiting for him to answer. But she had no new messages.

  When they parted that morning, Ellen had asked when she would next see him. He had hesitated for a few moments and then said:

  ‘Soon, I hope. We’ll have to see when I can make it.’

  ‘When I can make it,’ Ellen repeated silently to herself with a wry smile. Why was it always on his damn terms?

  The sun had finally made Stockholm quiver a little in the heat, Fredrika Bergman noted, as she hastily parked outside her block of flats. She raced up the stairs, key at the ready, and was inside her flat in what felt like seconds. It would not take long to pack an overnight bag for her Umeå trip.

  Her case was on the top shelf of the walk-in wardrobe. Fredrika caught a glimpse of the violin in its case, tucked in behind. She tried not to see it, not to remember. But the usual thing happened. The speed of her thoughts won out over the strength of her will not to remember. The words flew through her head as automatically and painfully as ever.

  I could have been somebody else, I could have been somewhere else today.

  Fredrika’s mother had brought up the subject a while back.

  ‘The doctors never said you couldn’t play at all, Fredrika,’ she said softly. ‘They just said you couldn’t play professionally.’

  Fredrika shook her head obstinately, tears burning her eyes. If she couldn’t play as much as she once had, then she didn’t want to play at all.

  The message light on the telephone was flashing when she went out into the kitchen. Surprised, she played the message.

  ‘Hello. Karin Mellander here,’ said a rather throaty, elderly-sounding female voice. ‘I’m ringing from the adoption centre, about your application. I’d appreciate it if you could call me back, whenever it’s convenient, on 08 . . .’

  Fredrika stood dumbly as the woman recited a number. The figures flew across the room and into Fredrika’s head, where they dissolved into thin air.

  Shit, thought Fredrika. Shit, shit, shit.

  Panic and stress had a way of making Fredrika very rational. This time was no exception.

  She went swiftly back to the wardrobe and started packing. Knickers, bra, top. She hesitated over an extra pair of trousers; would she really be away more than one night? And couldn’t she wear the same trousers two days running, if it came to it? Her brain was far too busy concentrating on other things to worry about such trivia. She threw in the trousers.

  Fredrika tried to concentrate as she packed her sponge bag. For some reason, she couldn’t get Spencer out of her mind.

  I’ve got to tell him, she thought. I’ve really got to tell him.

  Her case was ready and the door slammed shut behind her.

  Air, she thought. I need some air.

  Hot tarmac breathed warmth onto her legs as she stood outside on the pavement.

  Shit, what was all this about? If the adoption was so badly thought through that she was reacting like this, maybe she should give up the whole idea.

  Fredrika swallowed hard.

  One look at the billboards of the kiosk in the next block brought her back to the here and now.

  ‘Who murdered Lilian?’ shrieked the billboards.

  That’s what I ought to focus on, Fredrika thought, gritting her teeth. I ought to focus on Sara Sebastiansson, who’s just lost her child.

  She wondered what was worse. To have a child, and then lose it. Or never to have a child at all.

  For some reason, Fredrika had not been expecting Sara herself to open the door, and was surprised to find herself standing face to face with her. Fredrika had not seen Sara since Lilian’s body had been found. She knew she ought to say something. She opened her mouth but then closed it again. She had no idea what she was expected to say.

  I’m a monster, she thought. There’s no bloody way I should be allowed to have children.

  She took a breath. Again she tried to speak.

  ‘I’m truly sorry.’

  Sara gave a stiff nod.

  Her red hair flamed around her head. She must be exhausted.

  Fredrika took a few hesitant steps into the flat. The light hall began to look a little familiar, and the living room off to the left. That was where she had interviewed Sara’s new boyfriend that first evening.

  How long ago it felt.

  Sara’s parents filed in behind her. Like a fighting unit
, ready to attack. Fredrika said hello and shook their hands. Yes, that’s right, they had met before. When the box of hair . . . yes, then.

  Hands pointed, indicating where Fredrika was to go. She was to sit in the living room. The settee felt hard. Sara sat in a big armchair, her mother perched on one of its armrests. Her father took a seat on the settee, a little too close to Fredrika.

  Fredrika would really have preferred not to have Sara’s parents in attendance. It was wrong, and broke all the rules where the art of interrogation was concerned. She felt instinctively that there were things that could not be said in their presence. But both Sara and her parents were demonstrating very clearly that either Fredrika spoke to all of them together, or to no one.

  A big, old grandfather clock dominated one corner of the room. Fredrika tried to recall whether she had noticed it there before. It was two o’clock.

  I’ve been efficient, thought Fredrika. I’ve been to Uppsala and HQ and home to pack.

  Sara’s father cleared his throat to remind Fredrika she was not making very good use of her time.

  Fredrika turned to a new page of her notebook.

  ‘Well,’ she began cautiously, ‘I’ve got a few more questions about your time in Umeå.’

  When Sara looked blank, she clarified:

  ‘When you were on the writing course.’

  Sara nodded slowly. She tugged at the sleeves of her top. She still did not want the bruises to be seen. For some reason, this brought a lump to Fredrika’s throat. She swallowed several times and pretended to read through her notes.

  ‘I interviewed Maria Blomgren this morning,’ she said eventually, raising her eyes to look at Sara again.

  Sara did not react in any way.

  ‘She asked to be remembered to you.’

  Sara went on staring at Fredrika.

  Maybe she’s on tranquillizers, thought Fredrika. She looks drugged up to the eyeballs.

  ‘Sara and Maria haven’t been in touch for years,’ Sara’s father said brusquely. ‘We told your boss that, in Umeå.’

  ‘I know,’ said Fredrika quickly. ‘But a few things came up in my chat with Maria that mean I need to ask a few more questions.’

  She tried valiantly to catch Sara’s dulled eye.