UNWANTED
Kristina Ohlsson is a security policy analyst for the National Swedish Police Board. She has previously worked at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish National Defence, where she was a junior expert on the Middle East conflict and the foreign policy of the EU. Her debut novel, Unwanted was published in Sweden in 2009 to terrific critical acclaim and won a Gold Pocket Award. Kristina lives in Stockholm.
First published in Sweden by Piratförlaget under the title Askungar, 2009
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS Company
Copyright © Kristina Ohlsson, 2009
English translation copyright © Sarah Death, 2011
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Kristina Ohlsson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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For Thelma
CONTENTS
PART I: Signs of Deception
MONDAY
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
PART II: Signs of Anger
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
THE LAST DAY
PART III: Signs of Revival
THE END OF SEPTEMBER
PART I
Signs of Deception
MONDAY
Whenever he let his mind wander, for some reason he always came back to the case notes. It usually happened at night.
He lay motionless on his bed and looked up at a fly on the ceiling. He had never found darkness and rest easy to cope with. It was as though his defences were stripped away the moment the sun disappeared and fatigue and darkness crept up to enfold him. He hated feeling defenceless. A large part of his life had revolved around being on his guard, being prepared. Despite years of training, he found it incredibly hard to be prepared when he was resting. To be ready, he had to be awake. And he was used to not giving way to the fatigue that lingered in his body when he denied it sleep.
It was a long time since he had been woken at night by his own tears. It was a long time since the memories had hurt him and made him weak. In that respect, he had come a long way in his attempt to find peace.
And yet.
If he shut his eyes really tight, and if it was totally quiet all round him, he could see her in front of him. Her bulky form loomed out of the dark shadows and came lumbering towards him. Slowly, slowly, the way she always moved.
The memory of her scent still made him feel sick. Musty, sweet and powdery. Impossible to breathe in. Like the smell of the books in her library. And he could hear her voice:
‘You stubborn wretch,’ she hissed. ‘You worthless freak.’
And then she would grab him and grip him hard.
Her words were always followed by the pain and the punishment. By the fire. The memory of the fire was still there on parts of his body. He liked running his finger over the scars, knowing that he had survived.
When he was really small, he had assumed he was punished because he always did everything wrong. So, following his child’s logic, he tried to do everything right. Desperately, tenaciously. And still it all turned out wrong.
When he was older he understood better. There was simply nothing that was right. It wasn’t just his actions that were wrong and needed to be punished; it was his whole essence and existence. He was being punished for existing. If he had not existed, She would never have died.
‘You should never have existed!’ she howled into his face. ‘You’re evil, evil, evil!’
The crying that followed, after the fire, had to be in silence. Silent, always silent, so she wouldn’t hear. Because if she did, she would come back. Every time.
He remembered how her accusations had caused him intense anxiety for a long time. How could he ever come to terms with what she said he was guilty of? How could he ever pay for what he had done, or compensate for his sin?
The case notes.
He went to the hospital where She had been a patient and read Her notes. Primarily to get some concept of the full extent of his crime. He was of age by then. Of age, but eternally in debt as a result of his evil deeds. What he found in the notes, however, turned him quite unexpectedly from a debtor into a free man. With this liberation came strength and recovery. He found a new life, and new and important questions to answer. The question was no longer how he could compensate someone else. The question then was how he was to be compensated.
Lying there in the dark, he smiled faintly and cast a glance at the new doll he had chosen. He thought – he could never be sure – but he thought this one would last longer than the others. She didn’t need to deal with her past, as he himself had done. All she needed was a firm hand, his firm hand.
And plenty of love. His own special, guiding love.
He caressed her back gently. By mistake, or perhaps because he genuinely could not see the injuries he had inflicted on her, his hand passed right over one of the freshest bruises. It adorned one of her shoulder blades like a small dark pool. She awoke with a start and turned towards him. Her eyes shone with fear; she never knew what awaited her when darkness fell.
‘It’s time, Doll. We can begin.’
Her delicate face broke into a pretty, drowsy smile.
‘We’ll begin tomorrow,’ he whispered.
Then he rolled onto his back again and fixed his gaze on the fly once more. Wide awake and ready to begin. There could be no rest.
TUESDAY
It was in the middle of that summer of endless rain that the first child went missing. It all started on a Tuesday; an odd sort of a day that could have passed by like any other, but ended up being a day that profoundly changed the lives of a number of people. Henry Lindgren was one of them.
It was the third Tuesday in July, and Henry was doing an extra shift on the X2000 express train from Gothenburg to Stockholm. Henry had worked as a conductor for Swedish National Railways for more years than he cared to remember, and he couldn’t really imagine what would become of him on the day they forced him to retire. What would he do with all his free time, all alone?
Perhaps it was Henry Lindgren’s eye for detail that meant he could later recall so well the young woman who was to lose her child on that journey. The young woman with light auburn hair, in a green linen blouse and open-toed sandals that revealed toenails painted blue. If Henry and his wife had had a daughter, she would presumably have looked just like that, because his wife had been the reddest of redheads.
The auburn-haired woman’s little girl, however, was not in the least like her mother, Henry noted, as he clipped their tickets just after they pulled out of the station in Gothenburg. The girl’s hair was a dark, chestnut brown and fell in such soft waves that it looked almost unreal. It landed lightly on her shoulders and then somehow came forward to frame her little face. Her skin was darker than her mother’s, but her eyes were big and blue. There were tiny little clusters of freckles on the bridge of her nose, making her face look less doll-like. Henry smiled at her as he w
ent past. She smiled back shyly. Henry thought the girl looked tired. She turned her head away and looked out of the window. Her head was resting against the back of the seat.
‘Lilian, take your shoes off if you’re going to put your feet up on the seat,’ Henry heard the woman say to the child just as he turned to clip the next passenger’s ticket.
When he turned back towards them, the child had kicked off her mauve sandals and tucked her feet up under her. The sandals were still there on the floor after she disappeared.
It was rather a rowdy journey from Gothenburg to Stockholm. Many of the passengers had travelled down to Sweden’s second city to see a world-class star in concert at the Ullevi Stadium. They were now returning on the morning train on which Henry was conductor.
First, Henry had problems in coach five where two young men had vomited on their seats. They were hung over from the previous night’s partying at Ullevi, and Henry had to dash off for cleaning fluid and a damp cloth. At about the same time, two younger girls got into a fight in coach three. A blonde girl accused a brunette of trying to steal her boyfriend. Henry tried to mediate, but to no avail, and the train did not really settle down until they were past Skövde. Then all the troublemakers finally dozed off, and Henry had a cup of coffee with Nellie, who worked in the buffet car. On his way back, Henry noticed that the auburn-haired woman and her daughter Lilian were asleep, too.
From then on it was a fairly uneventful journey until they were nearing Stockholm. It was the deputy conductor Arvid Melin who made the announcement just before they got to Flemingsberg, twenty kilometres or so short of the capital. The driver had been notified of a signalling problem on the final stretch to Stockholm Central, and there would therefore be a delay of five or possibly ten minutes to their journey.
While they were waiting at Flemingsberg, Henry noticed the auburn-haired woman quickly get off the train, alone. He watched her surreptitiously from the window of the tiny compartment in coach six that was reserved for the train crew. He saw her take a few determined steps across the platform, over to the other side where it was less crowded. She took something out of her handbag; could it be a mobile phone? He assumed the child must still be asleep in her seat. She certainly had been a little while ago, as the train thundered through Katrineholm. Henry sighed at himself. What on earth was he thinking of, spying on attractive women?
Henry looked away and started on the crossword in his magazine. He was to wonder time and again what would have happened if he had kept his eye on the woman on the platform. It made no difference how many people tried to persuade him that he couldn’t possibly have known, that he mustn’t reproach himself. Henry was, and forever would be, convinced that his eagerness to solve a crossword had destroyed a young mother’s life. There was absolutely nothing he could do to turn back the clock.
Henry was still busy with his crossword when he heard Arvid’s voice on the public-address system. All passengers were to return to their seats. The train was now ready to continue on its way to Stockholm.
Afterwards, nobody could recall seeing a young woman running after the train. But she must have done so, because it was only a few minutes later that Henry took an urgent call in the staff compartment. A young woman who had been sitting in seat six, coach two with her daughter had been left behind on the platform in Flemingsberg when the train set off again, and was now in a taxi on her way to central Stockholm. Her little daughter was therefore alone on the train.
‘Bugger it,’ said Henry as he hung up.
Why could he never delegate a single duty without something going wrong? Why could he never have a moment’s peace?
They never even discussed stopping the train at an intermediate station, since it was so close to its final destination. Henry made his way briskly to coach two, and realized it must have been the red-haired woman he’d been watching on the platform who had missed the train, since he recognized her daughter, now sitting alone. He reported back to the communication centre on his mobile phone that the girl was still asleep, and that there was surely no need to upset her with the news of her mother’s absence before they got to Stockholm. There was general agreement, and Henry promised to look after the girl personally when the train pulled in. Personally. A word that would ring in Henry’s head for a long time.
Just as the train went through Söder station on the southern outskirts, the girls in coach three started scuffling and screaming again. The sound of breaking glass reached Henry’s ears as a door slid open for a passenger to move between coaches two and three, and he had to leave the sleeping child. He made an urgent and agitated call to Arvid on the two-way radio.
‘Arvid, come straight to coach three!’ he barked.
Not a sound from his colleague.
The train had come to a halt with its characteristic hiss, like the heavy, wheezing breath of an old person, before Henry managed to separate the two girls.
‘Whore!’ shrieked the blonde one.
‘Slut!’ retorted her friend.
‘What a terrible way to behave,’ said an elderly lady who had just got up to retrieve her case from the rack above.
Henry edged swiftly past people who had started queuing in the aisle to get off the train and called over his shoulder:
‘Just make sure you leave the train right away, you two!’
As he spoke, he was already on his way to coach two. He just hoped the child hadn’t woken up. But he had never been far away, after all.
Henry forged his way onward, knocking into several people as he covered the short distance back, and afterwards he swore he’d been away no more than three minutes.
But the number of minutes, however small, changed nothing.
When he got back to coach two, the sleeping child had gone. Her mauve sandals were still there on the floor. And the train was disgorging onto the platform all those people who had travelled under Henry Lindgren’s protection from Gothenburg to Stockholm.
Alex Recht had been a policeman for more than a quarter of a century. He therefore felt he could claim to have wide experience of police work, to have built up over the years a significant level of professional competence, and to have developed a finely tuned sense of intuition. He possessed, he was often told, a good gut instinct.
Few things were more important to a policeman than gut instinct. It was the hallmark of a skilled police officer, the ultimate way of identifying who was made of the right stuff and who wasn’t. Gut instinct was never a substitute for facts, but it could complement them. When all the facts were on the table, all the pieces of the puzzle identified, the trick was to understand what you were looking at and assemble the fragments of knowledge you had in front of you into a whole.
‘Many are called, but few are chosen,’ Alex’s father had said in the speech he had made to his son when he got his first police appointment.
Alex’s father had in actual fact been hoping his son would go into the church, like all the other firstborn sons in the family before him. He found it very hard to resign himself to the fact that his son had chosen the police in preference.
‘Being a police officer involves a sort of calling, too,’ Alex said in an attempt to mollify him.
His father thought about that for a few months, and then let it be known that he intended to accept and respect his son’s choice of profession. Perhaps the matter was also simplified somewhat by the fact that Alex’s brother later decided to enter the priesthood. At any rate, Alex was eternally grateful to his brother.
Alex liked working with people who, just like him, felt a particular sense of vocation in the job. He liked working with people who shared his intuition and a well-developed feeling for what was fact and what was nonsense.
Maybe, he thought to himself as he sat at the wheel on the way to Stockholm Central, maybe that was why he couldn’t really warm to his new colleague, Fredrika Bergman. She seemed to consider herself neither called to her job, nor particularly good at it. But then he didn’t really expect her police care
er to last very long.
Alex glanced surreptitiously at the figure in the passenger seat beside him. She was sitting up incredibly straight. He had initially wondered if she had a military background. He had even hoped that might be the case. But however often he went through her CV, he couldn’t find a single line to hint that she had spent so much as an hour in the armed forces. Alex had sighed. Then she must be a gymnast, that was all it could be, because no ordinary woman who had done nothing more exciting than go to university would ever be that bloody straight-backed.
Alex cleared his throat quietly and wondered if he ought to say anything about the case before they got there. After all, Fredrika had never had to deal with this sort of business before. Their eyes met briefly and then Alex turned his gaze back to the road.
‘Lot of traffic today,’ he muttered.
As if there were days when inner city Stockholm was empty of cars.
In his many years in the police, Alex had dealt with a fair number of missing children. His work on these cases had gradually convinced him of the truth of the saying: ‘Children don’t vanish, people lose them.’ In almost every case, almost every case, behind every lost child there was a lost parent. Some lax individual who in Alex’s view should never have had children in the first place. It needn’t necessarily be someone with a harmful lifestyle or alcohol problems. It could just as well be someone who worked far too much, who was out with friends far too often and far too late, or someone who simply didn’t pay enough attention to their child. If children took up the space in adults’ lives that they should, they went missing far less often. At least that was what Alex had concluded.
The clouds hung thick and dark in the sky and a faint rumble presaged thunder as they got out of the car. The air was incredibly heavy and humid. It was the sort of day when you longed for rain and thunder to make the air more breathable. A flash of lightning etched itself dully on the clouds somewhere over the Old Town. There was another storm approaching.
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