Unwanted

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s for the case. He decided we could do with the help of one of those profilers, and it would be good if he could get us one.’

  Alex was expressing himself so badly and casually that Fredrika thought he must have been drinking. ‘One of those profilers’ and ‘some psychologist’. They didn’t grow on trees.

  ‘He read about him in the paper,’ Alex explained. ‘That’s what gave him the idea.’

  ‘Read about who?’ Fredrika asked, at a loss.

  ‘An American profiler who works for the FBI is over here lecturing to some behavioural science scientists at the university,’ Alex said, more controlled now. ‘Peder was going to try to arrange a meeting with him through some friend of his who’s on the course.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fredrika said slowly.

  ‘Is everything all right your end?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Yes, fine. I’ll get back to Stockholm as soon as I’ve finished here.’

  She was silent for a moment.

  ‘But why ever should the baby turn up in Bromma?’ she went on.

  ‘You mean he’s breaking the pattern?’

  ‘I don’t know about any pattern,’ mumbled Fredrika. ‘Maybe we’ve just been imagining there was a clear link to Umeå.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Alex. ‘But I do think we need to find a better common denominator.’

  ‘A common denominator of a bathroom in Bromma and a town in Norrland,’ Fredrika sighed.

  ‘Yes, that’s our second challenge,’ Alex said firmly. ‘To try to understand the connection between the bathroom in Bromma and the A&E department at Umeå hospital. Assuming the geography has any relevance at all, that is.’

  If the situation hadn’t been so grave, Fredrika would have allowed herself to laugh.

  ‘Are you there?’ Alex asked, when she said nothing.

  ‘Sorry, I was just thinking. What’s our first challenge?’ Fredrika responded. ‘You said the connections were the second one.’

  ‘Finding Monika Sander,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t think we’re going to understand a bloody thing about this whole mess until we talk to her.’

  Fredrika couldn’t help smiling, but immediately felt guilty. She felt awful, smiling when a baby had just been found dead.

  ‘Okay,’ she said soberly. ‘We’ll just have to do our best.’

  ‘You bet your life we will,’ Alex said with a sigh.

  Fredrika put her mobile away and returned to the flat. She apologized to her hostess.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had to take that call.’

  Margareta nodded to show she accepted the apology.

  ‘Have you found the baby now, as well?’ she asked, to Fredrika’s astonishment.

  ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly, after a pause. ‘Yes, we have. But it isn’t official yet, so I’d really appreciate it if . . .’

  Margareta gave a dismissive wave of the hand.

  ‘Of course I won’t say anything,’ she said. ‘And I don’t talk to anybody anyway, except Tintin.’

  ‘Tintin?’ Fredrika echoed.

  ‘My cat,’ grinned Margareta, and indicated a seat for Fredrika at the table laid with teacups and a plate of sliced bun loaf.

  Fredrika liked Margareta’s voice. It was deep and throaty, dark yet still feminine. Margareta herself was as broad-shouldered as a wrestler. She was not fat or heavy looking, but simply stable in the purest sense of the word. Safe was another word that came spontaneously into Fredrika’s mind.

  She automatically ran over all the information she had had from the Jönköping police about Nora, the murdered woman. Spent her childhood in various foster homes; mental problems; recurring periods of sick leave. In a relationship with the man suspected of having murdered her, Lilian Sebastiansson and now the baby. Moved from Umeå to Jönköping. Held down a job, looked after a home, but had no family and few acquaintances.

  Fredrika decided to start from the beginning.

  ‘How did Nora come to be in a foster home?’

  Nora’s grandmother grew very still. So still that Fredrika thought she could hear Tintin purring as he lay there in his basket.

  ‘Do you know what, I wondered that, too,’ she said slowly.

  Then she took a deep breath and laid her wrinkled old hands in her lap. She plucked at the hem of her frock. The fabric was red and brown. To Fredrika’s mind, it was definitely a winter frock.

  ‘You always try not to have too many expectations of your children. Well my husband and I did, at least. And when he died, I carried on the same way. But . . . But you do have certain basic expectations, you can’t help it. Of course you want your children to grow up and be able to look after themselves. But Nora’s mother never really did, I’m afraid. And we didn’t have any more children.’

  Margareta tailed off, and Fredrika did not realize until she raised her head from her notebook that the other woman was crying.

  ‘We can take a break if you like,’ she said uncertainly.

  Margareta gave a weary shake of the head.

  ‘It’s just that it hurts so much to think I’ve got neither of the girls left now,’ she sobbed. ‘I felt so wretched when Nora’s mother died. But I knew what sort of life she’d lived, how hard it had been for her. There was really only one way it could end. But then I could console myself that at least I had Nora left. And now she’s gone, too.’

  Tintin came out of his basket and approached the table. Fredrika quickly pulled her legs aside. She had never liked cats.

  ‘Things went wrong for Nora’s mother early on in her life,’ Margareta told her. ‘Very early on. When she was still in secondary school, just after her dad died. She got into bad company and brought home one boyfriend after another. I was beside myself when she decided to leave school as soon as she could and go out to work instead. She got a job in a sweet factory; it closed down years ago. But she didn’t stick to the rules, and she got the sack. I think that was when she turned to prostitution and the more dangerous drugs.’

  In Fredrika’s family there was a very conservative saying that went: ‘In every woman of every age there lives a Mother.’ She wondered if she herself was harbouring one. And she wondered what she would have said in that position, if her daughter had dropped out of school, started work in a factory and gone on the game.

  ‘Who was Nora’s father?’ Fredrika asked cautiously.

  Margareta gave a bitter laugh and wiped away her tears.

  ‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘It could have been literally anybody. Nora’s mother didn’t register a father’s name when Nora was born. I was with her for the birth. It was several days before she would even hold little Nora.’

  The sun vanished briefly behind a cloud and it went darker inside the flat. Fredrika felt cold, sitting there.

  ‘Nora was as unwanted as a child could possibly be,’ Margareta whispered. ‘Her mother hated her even when she was still in her stomach; she hoped for a long time she might have a miscarriage. But she didn’t. Nora was born whether she liked it or not.’

  Fredrika felt the floor lurch beneath her.

  ‘Unwanted,’ she repeated softly.

  She immediately saw the pictures of Lilian Sebastiansson’s body in front of her eyes. Somebody had written ‘Unwanted’ on her forehead. ‘Unwanted.’

  Fredrika swallowed.

  ‘Did she know about this when she was growing up, about being unwanted I mean?’ Fredrika asked, trying not to sound too eager.

  ‘Yes, of course she did,’ sighed Margareta. ‘Nora lived with me for most of the time until she was two, since her mother didn’t want her, but then social services found out about it and they said it would be better for Nora to be in a foster home, “A real family,” as they put it.’

  Margareta gripped the edge of the table hard.

  ‘The girl would have been much better off with me,’ she said in a shrill voice. ‘It would have been much better for her to live with me than to keep being moved from family to family. She could alwa
ys come and visit me, but what good did that do? There was no chance of making something decent of her with so many other people allowed to mess her up.’

  ‘Did you both live here in Umeå while all this was going on?’ asked Fredrika.

  ‘Yes, the whole time. It’s hard to believe one person can have lived at so many addresses in the same town as Nora, but that’s what she did. The only thing that cheered me up a bit was that she stuck with school right until the end of upper secondary. She chose an odd course, social this and social that, but at least school gave her a bit of structure.’

  ‘Did she get a job when she left?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ sighed Margareta. ‘Just like her mother: she started going off the rails, too much booze, too many parties, too many men. She could never hang on to her job. She always looked haggard and drawn. And then she met that man.’

  Fredrika held her breath.

  ‘I remember, because it was the same year my brother got married for the third time. That was seven years ago.’

  Tintin the cat took an agile leap from the floor to Margareta’s lap. She put her tired hands on his back and started stroking his fur.

  ‘At first I thought she’d found something decent for herself,’ Margareta recalled. ‘He got her to stop drinking, stop taking drugs. At first I thought it was wonderful, a sort of Cinderella story. The girl in the gutter got her prince and was saved from her horrible life. But then . . . everything changed. And I was terrified, to put it bluntly.’

  Fredrika frowned.

  ‘I never met him,’ Margareta suddenly asserted. ‘I might just as well tell you that straight away, so you don’t go expecting me to whip out a pile of photos for you or anything.’

  ‘But what you can tell me is important, all the same,’ Fredrika said quickly, but with a growing sense of disappointment.

  Part of her had hoped she might be coming away from Margareta’s with at least a description of the suspected murderer.

  Margareta looked quite pleased with herself. Fredrika could see she liked being the centre of attention.

  ‘She met the man in early spring. I’m not sure how they first met, but I think he saved her from some awkward situation in the street one time.’

  ‘Was Nora a prostitute, too?’

  ‘No, no,’ Margareta said indignantly, ‘but you can still find yourself with that sort of people, can’t you?’

  Fredrika was not so sure about that, but she said nothing. She wished Margareta would get a move on with her story. Her wish was instantly granted.

  ‘She told me about him right away. Said he was a psychologist, very clever and good-looking. Then she told me he was always saying she was “chosen” and “special”, and together they’d achieve great things in this world. She became a completely different person. For a while, I thought it must be some kind of sect she’d joined. I mean, it was a good thing of course for her to get a bit more sense of order in her life, but she was going through bad depression just then, and the man’s message to her was basically “pull yourself together, you can sort this out if you really want to”. And when she didn’t get better quickly enough . . .’

  Margareta stopped. She took several deep breaths.

  ‘When she didn’t get better quickly enough, he lost patience with her and started beating her up, very violently.’

  Big tears began rolling down Margareta’s cheeks again. They dropped from her chin onto Tintin’s fur.

  ‘I pleaded with her to leave him,’ Margareta sobbed. ‘And in the end she did. It was after the time he burnt her so badly. She left him when she was discharged from hospital.’

  ‘Burnt her?’ whispered Fredrika.

  ‘He burnt her with matches,’ replied Margareta. ‘He tied her to the bed and lit them, one after another.’

  ‘But didn’t you go to the police?’ persisted Fredrika, sickened by what she was hearing.

  ‘Of course we did, but it didn’t help. That was why Nora moved away and got protected identity status.’

  ‘You mean he wasn’t committed of the crime, in spite of Nora’s terrible injuries?’

  ‘I mean we didn’t know who he was,’ screeched Margareta, her voice almost cracking. ‘Don’t you see? Nora didn’t even know his name. He’d told her just to think of him as “The Man”. And they only ever met at Nora’s flat.’

  Fredrika tried to comprehend what she had just heard.

  ‘She didn’t know what he was called, where he lived, or where he worked?’

  Margareta mutely shook her head.

  ‘But what was this thing they were going to achieve together, what did he say they were going to do?’

  ‘They were going to punish all the women who weren’t capable of loving their children and who rejected them,’ whispered Margareta. ‘And that was exactly what Nora’s own mother had done, after all – reject her and then refuse to love her.’

  They say Stockholm is one of the loveliest capital cities in the world. But that was lost on Alex as he stared out of his office window. He had no idea how many minutes he had spent sitting there, gazing out. It was what he liked to do when he was thinking. And since Fredrika had rung in her report, he undeniably had plenty to think about.

  ‘He’s punishing them, like Nora said when she rang us,’ Fredrika shouted down the phone to make herself heard despite the poor signal. ‘He’s punishing them for harming their children. For rejecting them, in some situation. And the girls go along with him, because they’ve been badly treated themselves. It’s revenge, Alex.’

  ‘But,’ said Alex, nonplussed, ‘we’ve no data suggesting that any of these parents harmed their children. Neither Lilian nor the baby suffered any kind of mistreatment at home.’

  He shuddered.

  ‘Assuming Gabriel didn’t abuse his own daughter,’ he added quickly.

  Fredrika protested.

  ‘It still wouldn’t fit. It’s the mothers he’s punishing, not the fathers. It’s the mothers who’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘But if a mother chose not to save her daughter from a father who was violating her, surely that would count as a crime?’

  Fredrika thought about this.

  ‘Perhaps. But the question is still: where does he find them?’

  ‘Find them?’

  ‘How could he know that Lilian, specifically, had been harmed? There are no official reports. And the baby? How could he know it had suffered any harm, assuming it did?’

  Alex felt his heart start to thump.

  ‘We must have missed somebody close to the families,’ he said.

  ‘Or maybe not,’ said Fredrika. ‘Maybe he’s so far out on the fringes of their lives that he’s invisible to us.’

  ‘Could he work at a school?’

  ‘But the baby who died had never been to school,’ Fredrika objected.

  Alex drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk.

  ‘Is Peder back from the psychologist yet,’ asked Fredrika.

  ‘No,’ replied Alex with a shake of his head. ‘But I think he’s due to see him any minute now.’

  ‘It seems we might need to talk to Sara again. And to the baby’s mother,’ said Fredrika.

  Alex stared angrily out of the window. He’d had more than enough of all the weird elements in this case.

  ‘We need to get a grip here,’ he said, addressing Fredrika. ‘A proper grip. And it’s high bloody time we found ourselves that common denominator.’

  But it wasn’t that easy, Alex saw as he ended the call from Fredrika. What did they really know? What didn’t they know? He collated all the information Fredrika had just given him. It all needed passing on to Peder before he invested time in talking to the American profiler. There was nothing wrong in coming up with new ideas, but Alex was sceptical about bringing new parties into the investigation.

  He surveyed the material in front of him. On a blank sheet of paper he had tried to construct a sort of diagram, setting out various hypotheses. It hadn’t turned out as
well as he hoped, but as long as he didn’t have to show it to anyone else, it would serve its purpose of backing up what was in his mind.

  Revenge, Fredrika had said.

  Revenge? Was that the thread they were looking for?

  ‘Right,’ Alex murmured to himself. ‘Right, let’s take it nice and easy. What do we know? And what do we need to know?’

  They knew that two children of different ages had been murdered. They also knew there was no obvious link between the children. One little girl, Natalie, was adopted, and the other wasn’t. The adopted girl’s parents seemed to be in a trouble-free relationship, whereas Lilian’s parents had separated while waiting for their divorce. And then Natalie’s family was middle class, whereas Lilian was the daughter of a man from a well-to-do family and a woman who could at best be described as middle class.

  The investigative team was currently putting all its energy into identifying any junctions where the paths of the two families might have crossed in the past, but their efforts had so far yielded nothing.

  Alex wrote on a sheet of paper: He is punishing the mothers. Probably because they let their children down in some way. Probably because they rejected them.

  It was the mothers they needed to focus on, not the children. It was the sins of the mothers that had led to the children’s murders. Alex brooded on the phrase ‘because they rejected them’ until his brain ached. In what way could Sara Sebastiansson be said to have ‘rejected’ Lilian? And if she had, why punish the child with death, rather than the mother?

  Another perplexing thing was the location where the bodies had been found. One outside an A&E department up in Umeå, and the other in a bathroom in Bromma, outside Stockholm. The choices of location seemed bizarre in the extreme. Firstly, they were both very difficult places in which to dispose of a dead body unobtrusively. And secondly, the choices seemed illogical. Neither of the children had any apparent connection with the places where they had been left.

  The only thing, thought Alex, the only thing the two have in common is the mode of operation, both the abduction and the murder itself. First the child is kidnapped, then the clothes and hair are sent back to the mother, and shortly after that, the child is dumped in some strange place where it will readily be found.