‘You were going out with a boy just before you went up there,’ she said.
Sara nodded.
‘What happened when you broke up?’
Sara shifted in her seat.
‘Nothing much happened,’ she said slowly. ‘Nothing at all, really. He sulked and made things awkward for a while, but he let me go once he realized we weren’t compatible.’
‘Was he ever back in touch later? After the summer maybe, or did he even turn up in Umeå?’
‘No, never.’
Fredrika paused for thought.
‘You stayed on in Umeå longer than Maria,’ she began. ‘Why was that?’
‘I got a summer job there,’ Sara said listlessly. ‘It was too good an offer to refuse. But Maria was cross. And jealous.’
‘Maria says you knew before you went to Umeå that you weren’t coming home to Gothenburg when the course was over, and that you fixed up the summer job before you went.’
‘Then she’s lying.’
Sara’s answer came so rapidly and vehemently that Fredrika almost lost her thread.
‘She’s lying?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would she lie about something like that that happened so long ago?’ Fredrika asked warily.
‘Because she was jealous of me getting that chance when she didn’t,’ Sara said fiercely. ‘She never got over it. She even used it as an excuse for backing out of our plan to share a flat in Uppsala.’
Sara seemed to shrink in the armchair.
‘Or maybe she misunderstood the whole thing,’ she said wearily.
‘Maria told me she had a summer job waiting for her back home in Gothenburg,’ said Fredrika. ‘Hadn’t you?’
Sara appeared not to understand.
‘I mean, hadn’t you got anything planned for the rest of the summer? The course in Umeå was only going to last a fortnight, after all.’
Sara’s eyes had a shifty look.
‘Once I got the chance to work there, I couldn’t just throw it away,’ she said quietly. ‘That had to take priority.’
Sara’s mother shifted uneasily on the arm of the chair.
‘But it’s just come back to me that I ran into Örjan who ran that guest house where you used to work in the summer holidays, and he said you’d turned down the job he offered you that year, because you were going to be out of town all summer.’
Sara’s face darkened.
‘I can’t help what that old man went round saying,’ she hissed.
‘No, of course not,’ Sara’s father put in. ‘And our memories let us down at times like this. We all know that, don’t we?’
He knows, thought Fredrika. He knows Sara’s trying to hide something, but he doesn’t know what it is. He knows it’s something worth hiding, and that’s why he’s helping her out.
‘All right,’ said Fredrika, trying to find a more comfortable position on the settee. ‘What happened when you got there, then? How come you were the one to be offered this job?’
‘They needed an assistant for the writing tutor,’ Sara said quietly. ‘And my creative writing was so good, they thought, so they made me the offer.’
‘Sara’s always been good at writing,’ her father added.
‘I don’t doubt that,’ Fredrika said honestly. ‘But I imagine it must have felt quite competitive in the writing group. We all know what it’s like at that age . . .’
‘No one else seemed put out,’ Sara said, tugging at some strands of her hair. ‘They said when we arrived that they were looking for an extra staff member for the rest of the summer, and that anyone interested could let them know.’
‘And then they chose you?’
‘And then they chose me.’
It went quiet. The hand of the grandfather clock took another peck forward. Outside, the sun went behind a cloud.
‘She’s lying,’ Fredrika said indignantly into the phone when she rang Alex to report on her way out to the airport.
Alex listened to her story and then said:
‘I’m not saying there’s nothing there worth getting to the bottom of, Fredrika. But Sara’s very sensitive at the moment, and her parents are watching over her like hawks. See what you get from the Umeå trip and then we’ll decide how to take this forward.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about that boyfriend she had,’ Fredrika went on. ‘According to Maria Blomgren, he went a bit crazy when Sara chucked him.’
‘He must have been more than a bit crazy if he was angry for fifteen years and then got even by killing Sara’s little girl,’ sighed Alex.
‘I’ve got his ID,’ said Fredrika. ‘I rang and asked Ellen to run a records check, and he seems to have had a finger in various pies since he left school.’
‘Like what?’ Alex enquired dubiously.
‘He was found guilty of beating up his ex’s new boyfriend,’ answered Fredrika. ‘And receiving stolen goods. And car theft.’
‘Certainly sounds like the criminal type, but not exactly capable of carrying out something as well planned as Lilian’s abduction,’ Alex objected.
‘But still,’ Fredrika persisted.
Alex sighed.
‘Where does this crook live nowadays, then?’
‘He seems to move about a lot, but at the moment he lives in Norrköping. He moved away from Gothenburg after he finished his military service.’
Alex sighed again.
‘Jönköping, Norrköping, Umeå,’ he said crossly. ‘This investigation’s getting totally farcical. It’s far too spread out.’
‘But at least it’s moving!’ Fredrika persevered.
‘Okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll see how Peder’s fixed. He’s on his way to Nyköping at the moment to interview the woman who claims the Flemingsberg woman was her foster child.’
‘Nyköping!’ exclaimed Fredrika. ‘Well, that’s on the way.’
Alex took a deep breath.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Peder straight away. Has Ellen got the crook’s details?’
‘Yes,’ Fredrika confirmed.
‘Fine. Let me know when you’ve landed,’ said Alex.
Then he just sat there with the receiver in his hand. For the first time since Fredrika Bergman had joined his team, she was displaying a bit of enthusiasm for her job. Until now she’d just sat there looking self-conscious, full of objections. Alex thought she even sounded as if she was enjoying what she was doing.
It went against the grain to admit it, but the fact was, Fredrika had been the first of them to see the lead that had got the investigation to where it was now. Not that the others couldn’t have found it without her, but she had actually been faster. She was quick to identify connections in the vast array of information that Alex generally needed longer to digest. On the other hand – if Gabriel Sebastiansson had been the culprit, Fredrika would have been the last person in the group to pick it up. And that was hardly encouraging.
Alex peered at a diagram he had made of what they knew, and felt his spirits sink.
Regardless of how they had got to this point in their enquiries:
What did they really know for certain?
Alex felt they could be virtually sure that there were two perpetrators, not just one. The woman with the dog in Flemingsberg, and the man with the Ecco shoes. He looked at Ellen’s note of the call from the woman in Jönköping. Nora. If it was the same woman. Alex gave a sigh of frustration. What the hell, he’d work on the assumption that it was.
Ellen had written that the woman seemed confused. She was scared, and she rang in a hurry, Alex interpreted.
The woman had said she thought the perpetrator was someone with whom she had been in a relationship. Someone who often hit her. Alex’s thoughts went automatically to what Peder had said after his visit to the car hire firm. The Flemingsberg woman had been knocked about, too. Ellen had also jotted down a few little quotes. The woman had said the man was waging some kind of battle and wanted the woman to be part of it. ‘The women we
ren’t to be allowed to keep their children, because they didn’t deserve to.’ Hmm. Alex read on. ‘The women didn’t deserve their children, because if you don’t like all children, you shouldn’t be allowed to have any at all.’
No beating about the bush there, Alex thought grimly.
He did not understand what he was reading. What did it mean: ‘if you don’t like all children’? It goes without saying that people don’t like all children equally. And above all, that there are no children you like better than your own, Alex reasoned.
He read Ellen’s note again. The women had to be punished, the women couldn’t be allowed to keep . . . The women? His stomach knotted.
‘You’re wrong, Fredrika,’ he mumbled to himself.
The man’s fury was not directed only at Sara Sebastiansson. Not if what the woman in Jönköping said was true. The man’s fury was directed at a number of women. Women who didn’t like all children equally. And if the woman in Jönköping was telling the truth, the man had tried to put his plan into action earlier, but not carried it through.
What’s this madness, thought Alex. And who are the other women?
It had taken Magdalena Gregersdotter several years to start feeling at home in Stockholm. So she and her husband had put off having a family until she felt a bit more settled in her new hometown.
‘I don’t want any children until I feel as if I’ve got a social network of my own to fall back on,’ Magdalena said firmly.
Torbjörn, her husband, went along with it of course. For one thing, he always did, and for another, he knew better than to insist on starting a family when the prospective mother didn’t feel ready for it.
But things did not really go the way they had planned. When they eventually did launch their baby project, it turned out they could not have any children. They tried on their own for a whole year – oh how they hated that word ‘tried’ – and then spent the following year having tests. Then another year of ‘trying’. They endured eleven rounds of IVF treatment in all. Then Magdalena suffered an ectopic pregnancy.
‘To hell with it,’ she wept in her hospital bed. ‘I can’t take any more of this.’
Nor could Torbjörn, so they took some unpaid leave and went round the world for six months. Then they decided to adopt.
‘But then it won’t really be yours,’ Torbjörn’s mother said.
It was the only time in her life Magdalena considered hitting another person.
‘Of course she’ll be ours,’ Magdalena hissed emphatically.
And of course, she was. Torbjörn and Magdalena travelled to Bolivia, returning one March day with Natalie, and not a single day had passed since without Magdalena waking with a smile on her lips. It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud, but it was completely true, all the same. It was also true that she was now no longer dreading her imminent fortieth birthday, not even a bit.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Torbjörn had whispered into her ear that morning.
‘Of course I am. I’m young, you know,’ she had responded.
Anyone with young children must be young, too, the way Magdalena saw it. And little Natalie still hadn’t turned one, so by that token, Magdalena must be especially young.
In retrospect, she could not remember why she had suddenly felt the urge to look at Natalie. Though Natalie was growing fast, she still slept outside in her pram every day. First Magdalena would take her out for a walk in the pram to get her off to sleep, and then she would park it in the little patch of garden that went with the ground-floor flat. The garden was shielded from view by a tallish hedge that Torbjörn had fortified still further with a little fence.
So Magdalena felt comfortable leaving Natalie asleep in her pram. She always left the garden door open, and she always had a baby monitor in the pram. Through it, she could hear if even a tiny bird hopped near the pram, and the faintest sound that should not have been there. Maybe it was such a sound that suddenly alerted her attention and caused her to worry. Maybe it was such a sound that made her cover the distance between the kitchen and the garden so quickly.
She saw the pram through the glass door as she approached and slowed her steps.
A little gust of wind crept in at the open door and the long, linen curtains stirred. A flower petal dropped from a potted plant and floated gently to the floor. Later, it was these two details she would remember most vividly, and never forget.
Magdalena bent over the pram. It was empty. As if in a trance, she straightened up and ran her eyes along the hedge and beyond. There was nobody to be seen.
Where was Natalie?
Peder Rydh trekked round Söder from one driving school to the next. He found two other people who thought they could identify the woman in the picture, but nobody could say for sure. Peder, however, felt pretty confident they had all encountered the same woman, since their accounts were identical. For one thing, she had seemed nervous. For another, she had bruises on her face and arms. And for a third, she wanted to know the quickest possible way to get a driving licence. Both driving school proprietors had suggested an intensive course, but when she realized it was a residential course, several days in length and in another town, she had immediately lost interest. She couldn’t get the time off work, she said. And left.
What the hell did she need a driving licence for? Peder thought, feeling frustrated. So she could take the body to Umeå while her sick boyfriend went off to Jönköping to snuff out an old flame?
He glanced at his watch as he got into the car to head for Nyköping for his appointment with the woman who thought she had fostered the Flemingsberg girl. He’d have to make sure he didn’t run too late.
Ylva had said she was taking the twins to the swimming beach at Smedsudde on Kungsholmen. He had felt like saying he didn’t think it was a very good idea. She always found it too much when she was on her own with the boys. She hadn’t really thought through what taking them to the beach would involve. But on the other hand, Ylva could hardly be accused of being the irresponsible one in the family.
Peder hardly dared look at his mobile. If he saw he had a missed call from Ylva or Pia, he would drive off the road. He started wondering if he might be ill. Hadn’t he read an interesting article about men with extra-strong sexual urges? It seemed unlikely that everybody felt as driven by them as he did. The only problem was, it hadn’t been like that before the twins were born. What had gone and happened to his old life? And what sort of person had he turned into?
Ylva and Peder had tried for a baby for nearly a year before it finally ‘worked’. They had been so happy. Terrified, but happy.
‘Holy shit,’ Peder said when Ylva did the pregnancy test. ‘There’s someone growing in here.’
Then he put a warm hand on her bare belly and tried imagining what life must be like in there. They had made love at every possible opportunity until the results of that bloody ultrasound scan. There certainly hadn’t been anything wrong with Ylva’s urges. She couldn’t get enough of him. One time, she had even rung to summon him home in his lunch hour.
‘Must be the hormones,’ she giggled as they got dressed again afterwards.
The notion of Ylva calling him home over lunch for a good screw seemed so distant that a dry laugh burst out of him. It wasn’t even about the sex, really. It was about closeness, and feeling needed. And being allowed to have needs yourself. The times she did ring him at work had to do with strange, other needs. Difficult needs that were impossible to meet if you had a job to hold down. Peder’s needs had ceased to exist. One night he got home from work after he and some other officers found two pensioners who had been robbed and murdered. Shot in the face. He tried to sleep close to Ylva that night. She had wriggled and squirmed.
‘Do you have to lie so close, Peder? I can’t sleep with you breathing in my face.’
He retreated. So Ylva could sleep. Though he shut his eyes as tight as he could, sleep did not come to him. Either that night or the next.
Peder had cried so few times in h
is adult life that he thought he could remember them all. He cried when his grandfather died. He cried when the twins were born. And he cried two weeks after they found the pensioners who had been shot. Like a child he cried, in his mother’s presence.
‘It just goes on and on,’ he whispered, referring to his problems with Ylva. ‘It just goes on and on.’
‘Things will change,’ his mother replied. ‘Things will change, Peder. Misery has its natural limits. There comes a point when you know for certain that things can’t get worse, only better.’
This from a woman who had once believed she would bring up two healthy boys into adult manhood, and had then had to accept that one of them would never be anything other than an overgrown child.
Peder somehow felt he had now passed beyond that misery limit his mother had talked about. Above all by taking up with Pia again. Something was on its way towards ending. Peder’s whole body could sense it. His marriage. It genuinely hadn’t been his intention, and he certainly wasn’t following any conviction that this was the way to extract himself from his hell. But there was a risk it would happen.
At least if he went on seeing Pia.
The road to Nyköping felt much shorter than he had expected. It didn’t take long to get there at all. Had he already missed the turning off, in fact?
He had just found the right address and parked outside when his mobile rang. He answered as he climbed out of the car. It was still quite hot, though the sun had once again stubbornly taken cover behind heavy cloud. Peder surveyed the houses around him. Middle class. No brand new cars, but no dented old ones, either. No new bikes, but decent, used ones. Some clean, wholesome looking children were playing a little way along the road. The safety and security many a Swede hankered after.
Alex’s voice put an end to his impromptu analysis of the neighbourhood.
‘Are you there yet?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Peder. ‘Just got out of the car. What’s up?’
‘Nothing. It was just . . . if you were still on the road. I had a thought. But we can take it later.’
Peder saw out of the corner of his eye that the door of the house he was heading for had opened.
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