Cinderella Girl

by Carin Gerhardsen

  His mother had improved considerably and the X-ray images did not show any serious consequences from having broken her ribs. Sjöberg drove her home to Bollmora and helped her up to her apartment, which was on the second floor. After taking cups down from the cupboard above the kitchen counter, his mother made coffee, while Sjöberg looked for a binder on the bookshelf in the bedroom. When he found it he sat down at the kitchen table to help her pay the month’s bills. He flipped back and forth through the papers, in search of the right plastic folder. Suddenly his eyes fell on something he hadn’t seen before.

  ‘What’s this? Björskogsnäs 4:14. It’s a title deed for a piece of property. Do you own a piece of land?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ his mother answered guardedly, not turning towards him.

  She picked up the coffee pot and started pouring coffee for them both.

  ‘Would you like some milk? It’s good for your stomach.’

  ‘I don’t have any problems with my stomach, Mum. Why do you have this land? Where is it?’

  ‘It must be something left behind after Dad. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Mother, of course it’s something. It’s a bit of property. Where is Björskogsnäs?’

  ‘I’m so bad at geography, you know. I really have no idea.’

  She was still standing with her back to him, so he stood up and went over to the counter to look her in the eyes.

  ‘Are you lying to me?’ he asked.

  ‘Lying! Pah!’ she said simply, carrying the cups to the kitchen table.

  She set them down, directed her attention to the binder instead, turned a few pages ahead and then said, ‘Here are the bills. The chequebook and envelopes are on the bookshelf.’

  Sjöberg did not understand. Other than that it was pointless to try to talk to his mother about something she did not want to talk about. He drank his coffee and looked out of the kitchen window at the cloudy grey sky while she wrote her cheques. Finally, after Sjöberg had checked through the bills and cheques one more time, she put them in their envelopes and sealed them. Sjöberg understood that he really had no right to root in his mother’s business. If she wanted to have a secret property, she was perfectly entitled to. But yet – he just could not leave the subject like that. So much in their life together had remained unspoken and unexamined. He felt dissatisfied with all the evasive manoeuvres, with his mother’s way of constantly navigating away from troublesome topics of conversation, always flinching from what wasn’t simple.

  ‘So, was it something he inherited?’ Sjöberg persisted. ‘Did Dad inherit the property from Grandma and Grandpa?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m telling you! Now let’s just forget about it!’

  His mother did not often raise her voice. It was best to shelve the matter. And pretend nothing had happened, in the customary Sjöbergian manner.

  ‘I’ll go to the supermarket for you, Mum. What do you need?’

  They made a shopping list together. An easy task that did not involve any discussions.

  Hanna opened her eyes and discovered that she could not breathe. She did not know where she was. Terrified, she started to wave her arms. Then she remembered she was still in the bathtub. She slid up into a sitting position, coughing and spluttering, and finally managed to take a deep breath again. She knew of course that you couldn’t sleep in the tub. When she had calmed down she stood up. Her whole body ached; it hurt almost everywhere. She moved slowly and carefully now; she did not want to do more damage to herself. Remembered that she was going to wash her hair, but did not have the energy. Had to sleep now.

  She climbed over the edge of the tub and reached for a towel, moving at a snail’s pace. She dried her whole body softly and carefully, almost dabbing it. Then she dropped the towel on the floor and staggered into her parents’ bedroom. She could not see clearly but, squinting through one eye, she managed to focus on the covers on the armchair. She took hold of one of them and pulled it with her over to the bed. Crawled up, thought there ought to be a sheet, before she pulled the cover over herself and fell asleep again.

  * * *

  ‘Conny, it’s Petra.’

  Sjöberg was at the Ica supermarket with a trolley full of shopping.

  ‘Listen, something’s happened here. You probably need to come in.’

  ‘I thought you were off today.’

  ‘I thought so too. I was out jogging this morning – in Vitabergsparken. I found a baby pram insert in some bushes, pulled it out and in the insert there was a little baby. There was a baby in the bushes! I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. I ran with him to a house and tried to bring him back to life. Then the ambulance came.’

  ‘Oh, shit. Do you know how he’s doing now?’

  ‘No, I haven’t had time to find out. I helped the patrol officers fence the area off – it was Holgersson and Staaf and a few others.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sjöberg. ‘They’ll be sure to contact the boy’s parents. Someone must be missing him.’

  ‘Conny, that’s just it. I’d finished here and was just going home –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You know how curious I am, and I couldn’t resist opening the lid of one of those municipal sand boxes as I went past –’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There was a woman lying there. The body of a woman. I don’t know for sure, but I assume it’s the mother.’

  There was silence for a few moments. Then Sjöberg continued matter-of-factly, ‘How did she die?’

  ‘Her skull was completely crushed. Someone put her in that box. I don’t think this is a case for patrol officers.’

  ‘Where are you now, Petra?’

  ‘I’m still in Vita Bergen.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They’ve photographed the discovery site, and they’re in the process of photographing the rest now. I called Bella, and a few of her men have already started combing through the area. She’s on her way here from a tennis court somewhere. The medical examiner is also on his way. We’ve cordoned off a large part of the park. I’m going to call the hospital and check the boy’s condition. Just hope he’s not dead too … Poor, poor baby. We need to take this over now.’

  ‘It looks like you’ve already done that. Good work, Petra. Call in Einar, Jamal and Sandén. It helps if everyone has seen the crime scene. I’ll talk to the police commissioner. We’ll contact the prosecutor’s office later. I’m out in Bollmora right now. I’ll be there within an hour.’

  ‘The reporters, Conny. What should I do with them? They’re already here. This is going to be on the news this afternoon.’

  ‘Just take it easy. Say that we found the body of a woman, but we don’t know more than that. Let them take their pictures. They don’t know about the child?’

  ‘No, they don’t seem to.’

  ‘Good. We’ll leave it like that.’

  Sjöberg put his mobile phone back in the inside pocket of his jacket. He paid for the shopping and walked quickly back to his mother’s apartment. After helping her put away the groceries, he said a quick goodbye, got in the car and drove in towards town. Momentarily incapable of focusing, he let his thoughts flutter between sand boxes and Margit Olofsson, mysterious land titles and abandoned infants.

  * * *

  ‘Yes, I saw her in the bar.’

  The bartender Juha Lehto held the photographs he’d been given by Nieminen, who sat opposite him, studying the bartender over his glasses. The interview was being conducted in swivel chairs at a window table in the dance hall on the upper deck. At tables around them staff and passengers were being questioned by other police officers. All of the almost two thousand people on board would be questioned before those disembarking in Åbo would be allowed off and the ferry could return to Stockholm.

  ‘Are you sure it was her?’ asked Nieminen.

  ‘Yes, I recognize the jacket,’ said Lehto, pointing at the picture the crime scene photographer had taken a few hours earlier. ‘I recognize the face too.
She was very pretty.’

  He said this with a gesture towards the other photo, a copy of her ID card.

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I would say it was nine, maybe nine-thirty. There were very few people in the bar.’

  ‘Was she alone?’

  ‘No, she was in the company of an older man. He may have been somewhere between fifty and sixty. Although I don’t think they were together actually. At first I thought so, because they came in at the same time and he ordered for both of them.’

  ‘What did he order?’

  ‘Beer, I think. But he wasn’t very nice to her. She seemed upset.’

  ‘Did you hear what they were talking about?’

  ‘No, but he took her roughly by the arm and looked angry. Or mean rather. I was just about to say something to him when another man came up that she seemed to know and stood between them. She went and sat with him at a table right next to the bar.’

  Lehto pointed towards a table at the other end.

  ‘Over there, just to the left of the bar. There were two Finnish men sitting there together. Well-dressed, in suits. It looked like they were working, but they stopped when the girl sat down with them.’

  ‘The man at the bar, then, the unpleasant one – was he Finnish too?’ asked Nieminen.

  The bartender hesitated for a moment before he answered.

  ‘No, he was Swedish,’ he said. ‘He had no accent, as far as I could tell. He just got up and left when the girl had gone.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Ordinary. Nothing special about him that I noticed. Other than that he had an aggressive attitude, like I said.’

  ‘This man, do you recognize him?’

  Nieminen showed the bartender another photograph – the picture they had taken of Joakim earlier in the morning.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ answered Lehto. ‘Should I?’

  ‘He was sitting at one of those tables at about the same time and said he saw her together with the two Finnish men. He said he ordered a beer.’

  ‘It was probably from my colleague who was waiting tables. We take table orders sometimes when there aren’t many customers. I don’t remember him anyway.’

  ‘Do you think you’d be able to point out those men we were talking about?’

  ‘Doubtful. Not the guys in suits anyway. Possibly the one at the bar, but I don’t know.’

  Nieminen let the bartender return to his work and made yet another note on his pad before he called the next man.

  Joakim was in the breakfast lounge, absentmindedly toying with a rye roll with liver pâté. The mood on the boat was subdued, the conversations at the tables around him quiet. He felt completely empty inside. He needed to eat, but the very sight of the sandwich turned his stomach. He looked at the seagulls diving through the rain-soaked air outside the windows, but he did not see them. At the same table as him, but a few seats further away, a Finnish father sat with two boys about ten years old playing cards. The chair across from him was pulled out and someone sat down, but he took no notice of that either. Instead, he continued his listless staring out the window. Until a voice mercilessly roused him from his musings.

  ‘Well, that put a real damper on this trip, wouldn’t you say?’

  Joakim turned and looked blankly at the all-too-familiar face without answering. At first he was struck by a sense of unreality. It could not be true, not this too. He could not react, did not know how he should react, whether to be frightened or even relieved. Relieved at the domesticity of the situation, relieved in the security that the balance of terror was restored.

  ‘That was one pretty girl, by the way.’

  Joakim could not get out a word.

  ‘Yeah, the one in the bog, I mean. The body. Although a little sluttish, in my opinion. She got in over her head, you might say.’

  Only now did he hear, only now did he understand what he was seeing and hearing.

  ‘Dad, that was Jennifer. My Jennifer,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I thought as much,’ said his father with a scornful smile. ‘I thought the name sounded familiar.’

  ‘Have they questioned you?’ asked Joakim.

  ‘Depends on what you mean by questioning. They asked me my name and where I live and whether I knew anything. And then they showed photographs and asked if I recognized her. But I said I didn’t. So it was over quickly. And you?’

  ‘She was my girlfriend, Dad. Of course they questioned me. I’ve seen … the body.’

  He turned his eyes away and let them linger again on something far away outside the window.

  ‘You would have,’ said his father. ‘I guess you saw it when you killed her.’

  Joakim winced and looked his father right in the eyes.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he hissed. ‘Why are you saying that?’

  His father only gave him a cunning smile in response.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘What am I doing here? I’m keeping an eye on you, of course. I seem to recall saying you couldn’t go on this trip.’

  ‘But what about Mum?’ said Joakim. ‘You couldn’t leave her home alone, could you?’

  ‘Couldn’t I? You did.’

  His father smiled at him maliciously.

  ‘I did not! You were home. She has to be cared for –’

  ‘Listen, she’s not going to starve to death,’ his father interrupted.

  Joakim got up suddenly and left, his father’s gaze burning into his back.

  Sunday Afternoon

  Chairs scraped across the wooden floor and notebooks thudded on to the table. For once everyone was on time for the briefing in the blue oval office at Östgötagatan 100. The explanation was that they were all coming from the same place – McDonald’s on Götgatan – except Bella Hansson, who took a detour to Forensics, and Hadar Rosén, who came from his summer cabin in Roslagen. Instead of his usual grey suit, today he was wearing jeans, a checked flannel shirt and wellingtons. He looked like he had come straight from his garden. His almost-six-foot-six frame was in a reclining position as Sjöberg opened the meeting.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your weekend, Hadar. And everyone else too, for that matter. But this case has priority, as you all understand. If Westman could go over everything for us, we’ll try to get a general picture of what happened.’

  Petra, who had been rushing around outdoors in thin exercise clothes all morning, was sitting with her hands wrapped around a teacup to warm up. She had still not had time to shower and change after her morning run. But Bella Hansson and Hamad were also in workout clothes and did not appear to have showered. She knew that Hansson had spent the morning at the tennis court, but when Hamad showed up in a tracksuit too she had a feeling he had come from the same place. For some reason she did not really like that.

  Petra told her story and was interrupted only by a few scattered questions from Rosén.

  ‘We have a roughly five-month-old boy fighting for his life at Karolinska,’ she summarized in conclusion. ‘The boy does not have any apparent injuries, but he is dehydrated and suffering from hypothermia. He must have been there for a while before we found him. We have a dead woman, who may be the boy’s mother or nanny, in a municipal sand box near where the child was found. Based on what has been determined so far, she was at least subjected to blunt force to the head. I think we can assume she did not put herself in the sand box. She has not been identified yet. No notification of a missing person has gone out on the boy and no child that age has been reported missing in the Stockholm area. On the other hand, there are a number of missing women who might match the description, but we’ll have to look more closely at that.’

  ‘Bella, what does the medical examiner’s office say?’ asked Sjöberg.

  ‘Because the woman has not yet been identified, they want to wait before starting to cut into the body. Otherwise – severe skull injuries, blunt force, probably sufficient to kill. Both legs broken in several places. A lot of
haemorrhaging on the lower body. I have her clothes, but haven’t had time to look at them closely. And as was said, no form of identification has been found on her person or anywhere else in the park.’

  ‘No ID,’ muttered Sandén. ‘Did she have anything interesting in her pockets?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ Hansson replied. ‘A few tissues, that’s all.’

  ‘So no money, no wallet. No keys?’

  ‘No keys.’

  ‘If she didn’t have any keys on her, that suggests that either someone was at home – someone who ought to have missed her and the child by now – or else someone, let’s say the perpetrator, took them.’

  ‘What about rings?’ asked Hamad.

  ‘No rings either. But there are marks on the left ring finger.’

  ‘So presumably she was married.’

  ‘Or had been,’ Sandén filled in.

  ‘How long has she been dead?’ asked Sjöberg.

  ‘Too soon to say. The medical examiner will send an initial report this evening.’

  ‘Any ideas about what might have happened to her?’

  ‘It looks like she was run over, but presumably she did not get the skull injuries from the car. We’re looking for blood at the scene.’

  ‘She may have flown a little, you mean? Into a tree, for example?’ Sandén interjected.

  ‘Yes.’

  Gabriella Hansson – brief and factual as always. No unnecessary speculation, just direct answers to concrete questions.

  ‘And the pram?’ asked Westman. ‘It looked battered.’

  ‘The damage on the frame itself is a match in terms of height with the broken legs. We’ll investigate the pram further.’

  ‘So we have a possible scenario to work from,’ Sjöberg observed. ‘Woman with pram hit by car. Hit-and-run accident, to put it simply.’

  ‘In that case it was an uncivilized bastard, who emptied the victim’s pockets, hid the body, and left the baby to die in the woods!’ Sandén exclaimed.

  ‘Maybe the driver panicked,’ Sjöberg suggested. ‘Einar, you search for missing persons who may match this woman. Or the child, of course.’