‘Diff . . . rent,’ she whispered at last.
Peder waited.
‘Hardly . . . ever . . . the same . . .’
Peder was taken aback. Did the guy go round in stolen cars, or just hire one when he needed to?
‘Work . . . car . . . ?’
‘You think he uses different cars from work?’
‘He said . . . so . . .’
He’d clearly lied about everything else, so why not lie about his car, too, thought Peder in frustration.
‘Where did you meet him?’ he asked curiously. ‘The very first time, I mean.’
His question prompted an immediate reaction from the woman in the bed. She turned her head away, with a look of what seemed to be anger. Peder waited a few moments and decided not to force it.
‘Maybe you don’t want to talk about that part?’ he said tentatively.
The woman shook her head.
Alex shifted slightly on the other side of the room, but said nothing.
Peder decided to focus on the woman from Jönköping and what she said when she rang the police anonymously. It should have occurred to him at the start that she was the obvious starting point for the interview.
He began a little hesitantly.
‘We think the man who beat you up might have done the same to other women, too.’
Jelena Scortz, exhausted, rested her head back against the pillow, but her eyes were following him with interest.
‘We think he approaches women and asks them to join him in some kind of battle or campaign.’
The woman dropped her eyes but even Peder, with no medical expertise, could see the colour draining from her face. The nurse made an impatient movement and tried to catch Peder’s eye. He avoided her gaze.
‘It’s terribly, terribly important that we find him,’ Peder said, trying not to sound too stern.
After a pause, he went on:
‘It’s absolutely vital that we find him before any more children get abducted and murdered.’
The woman gave a whimper and started to toss helplessly in the bed.
‘I really think . . .’ began the nurse, stroking Jelena’s hair over and over again.
Delicately, delicately, so as not to hurt her.
Peder, however, felt very satisfied with the reaction he had elicited from Jelena. He knew now that she was implicated. In Lilian’s disappearance, at the very least.
He moved over and sat on the edge of the bed. Jelena refused to look at him.
‘Jelena,’ he said gently, ‘we do know you must have been forced into all this.’
That wasn’t true, either, but it didn’t matter at the moment. The main thing was to get Jelena to calm down, which she did.
‘I need all the information I can get,’ Peder pleaded. ‘How does he locate these children? How does he pick them?’
Jelena was breathing in a strange, jerky way. She still wasn’t looking at him, or at the nurse.
‘How does he pick them?’
‘Their . . . mothers.’
The answer came so softly that he could hardly hear what she was saying. Yet he had no trouble at all in understanding what she said.
‘Right,’ he said, hoping she would have something to add.
But she said nothing, so he asked:
‘Are they women he knew before? How does he find them?’
She turned her head slowly until she was looking straight at him again. He felt a chill run through him as he saw how dark her eyes were.
‘You don’t . . . choose,’ she hissed. ‘You love . . . all the ones . . . you get. Or none . . . of them.’
Peder swallowed, several times.
‘Don’t choose what?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand, what is it you don’t choose?’
‘The . . . children,’ Jelena whispered feebly, and her head lay still on the pillow again. ‘You . . . have to . . . love . . . them all.’
With that, Jelena lapsed into silence, and Peder realized the interview was at an end.
Fredrika was surprised to see that the investigation team corridor was such a hive of activity when she got back to HQ. She located Alex and Peder in the Den. Mats, the analyst from the National Crime Squad, was there – hadn’t he had enough yet? – along with another man whom Fredrika didn’t recognize. She said hello and introduced herself.
‘Fredrika Bergman.’
‘Excuse me?’
Rather taken aback, Fredrika said her name again in what she hoped was a less Swedish-sounding way. The man got it that time, and introduced himself as Stuart Rowland. He took a seat again on the chair that was unobtrusively positioned in one corner of the room.
Peder sprang to his feet when he saw Fredrika introduce herself to the mysterious Stuart Rowland. He explained in English why their visitor was there.
‘Dr Rowland is a psychologist, a so-called profiler,’ he explained in a voice almost quivering with reverence. ‘He has promised to give us the benefit of his knowledge at our meeting.’
As if the Pope himself were paying them a visit, thought Fredrika.
Peder turned to Fredrika and asked her discreetly, in Swedish:
‘I hope you won’t feel uncomfortable if we hold the first part of the meeting in English?’
When she realized he meant the question seriously, she felt her cheeks start to turn crimson.
‘As long as the meeting’s in English, German, French or Spanish, I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said with a stiff smile.
Peder blinked, completely failing to grasp the implication of her words.
‘Great,’ he said, and sat down again.
Alex, observing Peder and Fredrika from a distance, allowed himself a smile.
‘Fredrika, I’m glad you’re back in time for the meeting. Take a seat, and we can start.’
Fredrika, who had not realized until that moment she was the only one they were waiting for, sat down. Ellen gave her a little grin and pushed the door of the Den shut with her foot.
Every investigation has its critical moment. Alex had a distinct feeling the violent investigation in which he was currently embroiled had reached precisely that point. There were not that many more facts to be gathered, Alex convinced himself. They already had most of them in front of them.
He took a surreptitious look at the psychology professor Peder had virtually hijacked from the university. In his brown jacket with suede elbow patches and suede breast pocket, and an enormous moustache bristling under his nose like a squirrel’s tail, he looked as if he had wandered into the Den straight off the set of some British film.
But Alex knew he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Any form of help had to be seen as worth having at this stage.
‘Okay,’ he said, surveying all those present.
You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Alex swallowed, hard. People this tense could hardly come up with any masterly theories. He glanced at Fredrika. She would be the exception, of course. Fredrika seemed to be able to focus her thoughts on absolutely anything at any time, as long as she was told it was important. And it didn’t get any more important than this.
He went on in English.
‘We say a special welcome to Professor Rowland,’ he said, hoping he sounded formal enough. ‘We are very pleased to have you at our meeting.’
The Professor gave a gracious nod and smiled under his moustache.
Alex had had to get approval for Professor Rowland to attend the meeting from the next level of the police hierarchy. Desperate though the situation was, there were still rules to follow and confidentiality to be observed.
As Alex switched on the overhead projector, he hoped this was clear to everybody round the table. With the help of the analyst, whose name he now knew to be Mats, he had put together an easy-to-use overview of all the material they had amassed in the course of the investigation, including the recent information supplied by Fredrika over the phone.
Alex summed up the case and their findings with exemplary brevity. He avoid
ed looking at their foreign guest. He took it for granted that the FBI must be a lot more fun than working for the Stockholm police.
As if he could read Alex’s thoughts, the Professor suddenly spoke up.
‘I have to say, this is an extremely interesting case,’ he said.
‘Really,’ queried Alex, feeling perversely flattered.
‘Yes,’ said Rowland. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t quite see from your diagram exactly what help you need from me right now. What is it that’s not clear?’
Alex stared at his own sketch. Surely there was plenty that wasn’t clear?
‘It’s quite clear – beyond all reasonable doubt – that the same man kidnapped and murdered both girls,’ the Professor began. ‘But if the woman you’ve identified at the hospital really is the man’s accomplice, and I think we can assume that on the basis of your interview, then he must have carried the second crime through on his own, without her. The question is: did something go wrong in the first murder? Serial killers very rarely start their careers with two such major crimes in the course of just a few days, crimes that would attract such attention.’
The Professor paused, as though to check everyone understood what he said, and that he was not speaking out of turn.
Alex put his head on one side.
‘So what you mean, Professor Rowland, is that you think the fact that the woman was able to get out of the flat on her own after the attack, and went to hospital, made him act more quickly?’
‘I’m convinced of it,’ the Professor said firmly. ‘The woman was probably punished for not completing some part of her task to the letter during the first murder. The nature of her injuries seems to indicate that he was in a rage when he attacked her, wild and out of control. That in turn shows that she must have been careless about something she didn’t understand to be of crucial importance to the killer at a symbolic level.’
Alex sat down, leaving the stage to the Professor for a while.
‘We must have our picture of this couple clear in our minds,’ Rowland said emphatically. ‘Both the women the man tried to collaborate with were weak individuals in the sense that they had been in very vulnerable positions and had a hard time, even though they were young. They were probably attracted to the man because no one like him had ever shown any interest in them before.’
Fredrika’s mind went back to what Nora’s grandmother Margareta had said: that it had seemed like a real life Cinderella story when Nora met the man who was later to destroy her life.
‘You are almost certainly looking for a very charismatic, determined person,’ the Professor continued. ‘He may have a military background, but whatever his exact background, he’s well-educated. He’s good-looking. That’s how he attracts these abandoned girls and gets them to worship him to the point where they’ll do anything for him. If he is a psychologist, as both girls claim he told them, that scarcely makes him less of a threat to us.’
‘But the first woman walked out on him,’ Fredrika objected, thinking again of Nora in Jönköping.
Who had had the strength to break free and make a new start.
‘True,’ said the Professor, ‘but then she wasn’t entirely alone. She had a strong grandmother behind her. Our killer would certainly have learnt from that mistake the first time – if it was the first time. The woman he seeks has to be weak, and entirely on her own. There mustn’t be anyone in her life with any influence over her. He alone must be able to dominate her and dictate the terms of how she lives.’
Professor Rowland shifted his position on the hard chair. It was apparent that he liked talking, and would carry on as long as no one interrupted him.
‘He thought he had complete control over this last woman, Jelena, yet even she sprang a surprise and left him. His woman is important to him, practically but also mentally. She affirms him; she intensifies his perception of himself as a genius. And . . .’
Professor Rowland looked serious, and held up a warning finger.
‘And, my friends, he is a genius. Neither of the women knows what his name is, where he works, or even what type of car he has. They never call him anything but “The Man”. He could be absolutely anywhere. The best you can hope for is that you pick up his fingerprints in the woman’s flat, but I rather doubt you will. Bearing in mind how strategically this man seems to operate, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s disfigured his own fingers.’
There was a spontaneous murmur from his audience, and Alex impatiently hushed them.
‘What do you mean, disfigured?’
‘Oh, it’s not difficult,’ Professor Rowland smiled. ‘Nor even particularly uncommon. A lot of asylum seekers do it, to make it hard to register their fingerprints. Then they can seek asylum in a series of other countries if their application is turned down in the first one they go to.’
There was not a sound in the Den. Alex had been pinning his hopes on fingerprints or DNA from the flat providing the solution to the case, always assuming the man had a previous conviction. He straightened his back.
‘Wait a minute, you mean you think the man has been convicted before?’
‘If he hasn’t, then there’s more likelihood of your finding his fingerprints in the flat,’ said Professor Rowland. ‘If he has, and I believe that to be the case, then I would be very surprised if he’d been careless enough to leave any concrete traces behind him.’
Fredrika considered what the Professor had said about the perpetrator seeming to speed up the pace once the woman escaped from the flat.
‘Can we infer that more children will go missing?’ she asked, frowning.
‘We certainly can,’ replied Professor Rowland. ‘I think we can more or less assume he has a list of kids he’s planning to abduct. It’s not something he decides as he goes along – he already has this all worked out.’
‘But how does he find them?’ blurted Peder in frustration. ‘How does he choose the children?’
‘It’s not the children he finds,’ said the Professor. ‘It’s their mothers. It’s the mothers being punished; the children are just a means to an end. He’s taking revenge on someone else’s behalf. He’s putting things to rights.’
‘But that still doesn’t answer my question,’ Peder said in desperation. ‘And what’s driving him?’
‘No,’ the Professor agreed, ‘not exactly. But almost. Both women have been punished in the same way: he stole and killed their children and dumped them in a place to which they had some link. So one possible conclusion is that both women had committed the same crime. And that the answer to what’s driving him is vengeance.’
Professor Rowland adjusted his glasses and scrutinized Alex’s diagram.
‘He is punishing the women for not loving all children equally. He is punishing them because if you don’t love all children, you are not to have any at all.’
He furrowed his brow.
‘It’s hard to know exactly what he means,’ he sighed. ‘It seems as if these women, wholly or partially unconsciously, have wronged their own children, or some other child. Again, I don’t think the women themselves necessarily remember the precise occasion. They almost certainly haven’t broken any law. But he thinks they have.’
‘And so does the woman in the hospital,’ Fredrika put in.
The others looked at her and nodded their agreement.
The Professor made an expansive gesture.
‘The word he uses to mark the children, “Unwanted”, identifies the subject for us with absolute clarity, especially now we know the backgrounds of his two female companions, but we still don’t know exactly what the trigger is, so we do not know either exactly how he once encountered these women who have lost their children. But we know, we know, that he must be aware of their pasts, since both bodies were dumped in a town or a place the women have had no contact with for many years.’
Professor Rowland drank some of his now cold coffee.
Fredrika asked tentatively:
‘The places where the children w
ere found, might they be linked to the so-called crime?’
‘Perhaps,’ replied the Professor. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the first body was not presented precisely as the man had envisaged. You’re working on the hypothesis, aren’t you, that the woman now in the hospital drove the car, while the man went to Jönköping to silence Nora? That hypothesis is probably quite correct, so we can’t assume Lilian was found exactly the way the man planned. He delegated the important final stage of the plan to the woman, so he relinquished control of the situation for a brief period.’
Alex and Peder exchanged looks. To hell with confidentiality, thought Alex.
‘The little girl was lying on her back,’ he said. ‘The baby was found curled up in a foetal position.’
‘Really? That’s extremely interesting. That could have been the detail the woman missed, and that’s why he beat her up.’
‘But how can a little detail like that be so significant in the overall context?’ asked Fredrika.
‘We mustn’t forget that although our adversary is very sharp, very intelligent, he’s far from rational. For you and me, it wouldn’t matter a damn whether the child was on its back or curled up, we’d be focused on getting rid of the body as unobtrusively as possible. But this man’s focused on something else. He’s arranging the dead children; he wants to tell us something.’
It all went quiet again. The only sound was a fan whirring in one corner. Nobody said a thing.
‘There are two gaps in your theory,’ Rowland summed up. ‘You don’t know what form of contact the man had with the women, but you can say almost for sure that it must have been a long time ago. The concrete role played by the locations he selected remains unclear, but look more closely into whether the women have any special link to those particular places that hasn’t emerged up to now. The other thing you don’t know is exactly what the women were punished for, but it’s to do with their inability to love all children equally. Look into their pasts. Maybe they worked with children, and were involved in an accident of some kind.’
Alex looked out of the window. More cloud was rolling in over the capital.
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