Alex and Fredrika hurried in through the main entrance to Stockholm Central. Alex took a call from the mobile of the third member of the investigating team, Peder Rydh, to say he was on his way. Alex was relieved. It wouldn’t have felt right starting an investigation like this with no one but a piece of office furniture like Fredrika.
It was after half past three by the time they got to platform seventeen where the train had pulled in to become the subject of a standard crime scene investigation. Swedish National Railways had been informed that no precise time could be given for the train to be put back in service, which in due course led to the late running of several trains that day. There were only a few people on the platform not in police uniform. Alex guessed that the red-haired woman looking exhausted but composed, sitting on a large, blue plastic box marked ‘Sand’ was the missing child’s mother. Alex sensed intuitively that the woman was not one of those parents who lose their children. He swallowed hastily. If the child hadn’t been lost, it had been abducted. If it had been abducted, that complicated matters significantly.
Alex told himself to take it easy. He still knew too little about the case not to keep an open mind.
A young, uniformed officer came along the platform to Alex and Fredrika. His handshake was firm but a little damp, his look somewhat glazed and unfocused. He introduced himself simply as Jens. Alex guessed that he was a recent graduate of the police training college and that this was his first case. Lack of practical experience was frightening when new police officers took up their first posts. You could see them radiating confusion and sometimes pure panic in their first six months. Alex wondered if the young man whose hand he was shaking couldn’t be said to be bordering on panic. He was probably wondering in turn what on earth Alex was doing there. DCIs rarely, if ever, turned up to conduct interviews themselves. Or at any rate, not at this early stage in a case.
Alex was about to explain his presence when Jens started to speak, in rapid bursts.
‘The alarm wasn’t raised until thirty minutes after the train got in,’ he reported in a shrill voice. ‘And by then, nearly all the passengers had left the platform. Well, except for these.’
He gave a sweeping wave, indicating of a clump of people standing a little way beyond the woman Alex had identified as the child’s mother. Alex glanced at his watch. It was twenty to four. The child would soon have been missing for an hour and a half.
‘There’s been a complete search of the train. She isn’t anywhere. The child, I mean, a six-year-old girl. She isn’t anywhere. And nobody seems to have seen her, either. At least nobody we’ve spoken to. And all their luggage is still there. The girl didn’t take anything with her. Not even her shoes. They were still on the floor under her seat.’
The first raindrops hit the roof above them. The thunder was rumbling somewhere closer now. Alex didn’t think he’d ever known a worse summer.
‘Is that the girl’s mother sitting over there?’ asked Fredrika with a discreet nod towards the red-haired woman.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the young policeman. ‘Her name’s Sara Sebastiansson. She says she’s not going home until we find the girl.’
Alex sighed to himself. Of course the red-haired woman was the child’s mother. He didn’t need to ask such things, he knew them anyway, he sensed them. Fredrika was entirely lacking in that sort of intuition. She asked about everything and she questioned even more. Alex felt his irritation level rising. Detecting simply didn’t work that way. He only hoped she would soon realize how wrong she was for the profession she had decided was suitable for her.
‘Why did it take thirty minutes for the police to be alerted?’ Fredrika continued her interrogation.
Alex immediately pricked up his ears. Fredrika had finally asked a relevant question.
Jens braced himself. Up to that point, he had had answers to all the questions the senior police officers had asked him since they arrived.
‘Well, it’s a bit of an odd story,’ Jens began, and Alex could see he was trying not to stare at Fredrika. ‘The train was held at Flemingsberg for longer than usual, and the mother got off to make a phone call. She left her little girl on the train because she was asleep.’
Alex nodded thoughtfully. Children don’t vanish, people lose them. Perhaps he had misjudged Sara the redhead.
‘So anyway, a girl came up to her, to Sara that is, on the platform and asked her to help with a dog that was sick. And then she missed the train. She rang the train people right away – a member of staff at Flemingsberg helped her – to tell them that her child was on the train and that she was going to take a taxi straight to Stockholm Central.’
Alex frowned as he listened.
‘The child had gone by the time the train stopped at Stockholm, and the conductor and some of the other crew searched for her. People were flooding off the train, you see, and hardly any of the passengers bothered to help. A Securitas guard who normally hangs round outside Burger King downstairs gave them a hand with the search. Then the mother, I mean Sara over there, got here in the taxi and was told her daughter was missing. They went on searching; they thought the girl must have woken up and, like, been one of the first off the train. But they couldn’t find her anywhere. So then they rang the police. But we haven’t found her either.’
‘Have they put out a call over the public-address system in the station?’ asked Fredrika. ‘I mean in case she managed to get off the platform and onto the concourse?’
Jens nodded meekly and then shook his head. Yes, an announcement had been made. More police and volunteers were currently searching the whole station. Local radio would be issuing an appeal to road users in the city centre to keep an eye out for the girl. The taxi firms would be contacted. If the girl had walked off on her own, she couldn’t have got far.
But she had not been spotted yet.
Fredrika nodded slowly. Alex looked at the mother sitting on the big blue box. She looked like death. Shattered.
‘Put out the announcement in other languages, not just Swedish,’ said Fredrika.
Her male colleagues looked at her with raised eyebrows.
‘There are a lot of people hanging about here who don’t have Swedish as their mother tongue, but who might have seen something. Make the announcement in English, too. German and French, if they can. Maybe Arabic, as well.’
Alex nodded approvingly and sent Jens a look that told him to do as Fredrika suggested. Jens hurried off, probably quailing at the prospect of somehow getting hold of an Arabic speaker. Cascades of rain were coming down on the people gathered on the platform, and the rumbling had turned into mighty claps of thunder. It was a wretched day in a wretched summer.
Peder Rydh came dashing along the platform just as Jens was leaving it. Peder stared at Fredrika’s beige, double-breasted jacket. Had the woman no concept at all of the way you broadcast that you were part of the police when you weren’t in uniform? Peder himself nodded graciously to the colleagues he passed on his way and waved his identity badge about a bit so they would realize he was one of them. He found it hard to resist the urge to thump a few of the younger talents on the back. He had loved his years in the patrol car, of course, but he was very happy indeed to have landed a job on the plain-clothes side.
Alex gave Peder a nod as they caught sight of each other, and his look expressed something close to gratitude for his colleague’s presence.
‘I was on my way from a meeting on the edge of town when I got the message that the child was missing, so I thought I’d pick up Fredrika on the way and come straight here,’ Alex explained briefly to Peder. ‘I’m not really planning to stick around, just wanted to get out for a bit of fresh air,’ he went on, and gave his colleague a knowing look.
‘You mean you wanted to get your feet on the ground as a change from being chained to your desk?’ grinned Peder, and received a weary nod in reply.
In spite of the significant age gap between them, the two men were entirely in agreement on that point. Yo
u were never so far up the hierarchy that you didn’t need to see the real shit. And you were never as far from reality as when you were behind your desk.
Both men assumed, however, that Fredrika did not share this view, and therefore said nothing more about it.
‘Okay,’ said Alex instead. ‘Here’s what we’ll do. Fredrika can take the initial interview with the child’s mother and you, Peder, can talk to the train crew and also find out if any of the other passengers who are still here can give you any information. We should really play it by the book and interview in pairs, but I can’t see there’s time to organize that just now.’
Fredrika was very happy with this division of duties, but thought she could detect some dissatisfaction in Peder’s face. Dissatisfaction that she, not he, would get to tackle the mother of the missing child. Alex must have seen it too, as he added:
‘The only reason Fredrika’s dealing with the mother is that she’s a woman. It tends to make things a bit easier.’
Peder instantly looked a little more cheerful.
‘Okay, see you back at the station later,’ said Alex gruffly. ‘I’m off back there now.’
Fredrika sighed. ‘The only reason Fredrika’s dealing with . . .’ It was always the same. Every decision to entrust her with a task had to be defended. She was a foreign body in a foreign universe. Her whole presence was questionable and demanded constant explanation. Fredrika felt so indignant that she forgot to reflect on the fact that Alex had not only entrusted her with interviewing the mother, but he’d also let her do it alone. She was virtually counting the days until her time in Alex Recht’s investigation team was over. She was planning to finish her probationary period and then leave. There were other agencies where her qualifications were more desirable, albeit less urgently needed.
I shall look over my shoulder one last time and then never look back again, thought Fredrika, seeing in her mind’s eye the day she would stride out of the police building, or HQ, as her colleagues generally called it, on Kungsholmen. Then Fredrika turned her attention to a more imminent task. To the missing child.
She introduced herself politely to Sara Sebastiansson and was surprised at the strength of the woman’s handshake. It belied the anxiety and exhaustion in her face. Fredrika also noted that Sara kept pulling down the sleeves of her top. It looked like a sort of tic or habit, something she did all the time. It was almost as if she was trying to hide her forearms.
Maybe an attempt to conceal injuries she got when she was defending herself, thought Fredrika. If Sara had a husband who hit her, that was information to be brought to the team’s attention as soon as possible.
But there were other questions to be asked first.
‘We can go inside if you like,’ Fredrika said to Sara. ‘We needn’t stand out here in the rain.’
‘I’m all right here,’ said Sara in a voice not far from tears.
Fredrika pondered this for a moment and then said:
‘If you feel you have to be here for your daughter, you have my absolute assurance that she’d be noticed by everybody else here.’
What’s more, Fredrika felt like adding, it’s not particularly likely that your daughter will turn up right here and now, but she left the thought unsaid.
‘Lilian,’ said Sara.
‘Sorry?’
‘My daughter’s called Lilian. And I don’t want to leave this spot.’
She underlined what she was saying by shaking her head. ‘No thank you, no coffee.’
Fredrika knew herself that she found it hard to be personal when she was on duty. She often failed dismally. In that respect, she was a classic desk type. She liked reading, writing and analysing. All forms of interrogation and conversation felt so alien, so hard to deal with. She would sometimes watch with pure fascination as Alex reached out a hand and laid it on someone’s shoulder as he was talking to them. Fredrika would never do that, and what was more, she didn’t want to be patted herself either, be it on the arm or on the shoulder. She felt physically unwell whenever any male colleague at work tried to ‘lighten the mood’ by slapping her on the back too hard or prodding her in the middle. She didn’t like that sort of physical contact at all. And most people realized. But not all. Fredrika gave a slight shiver just as Sara’s voice interrupted her very private musings.
‘Why didn’t she take her shoes?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Lilian’s sandals were still there on the floor by her seat. She must have been in a terrible state about something, otherwise she’d never have gone off in her bare feet. And never without saying something to somebody, asking for help.’
‘Not even if she woke up and found she was all alone? Maybe she panicked and dashed off the train?’
Sara shook her head.
‘Lilian’s not like that. That’s not how we brought her up. We taught her to act and think in a practical way. She would have asked someone sitting nearby. The lady across the aisle from us, for example, we’d chatted to her a bit on the way.’
Fredrika saw her chance to divert the conversation onto another subject.
‘You say “we”?’
‘Yes?’
‘You say that’s not how “we” brought her up. Are you referring to yourself and your husband?’
Sara fixed her gaze on a spot above Fredrika’s shoulder.
‘Lilian’s father and I have separated, but yes, it’s my ex-husband I brought up Lilian with.’
‘Have you got joint custody?’ asked Fredrika.
‘The separation’s so new for us all,’ Sara said slowly. ‘We haven’t really got into a routine. Lilian sometimes stays with him at weekends, but mostly she lives with me. We’ll have to see how it goes, later.’
Sara took a deep breath, and as she breathed out, her lower lip was trembling. Her ashen skin stood out against her red hair. Her long arms were crossed tightly on her chest. Fredrika looked at Sara’s painted toenails. Blue. How unusual.
‘Did you argue about who Lilian was going to live with?’ Fredrika probed cautiously.
Sara gave a start.
‘You think Gabriel’s taken her?’ she said, looking Fredrika straight in the eye.
Fredrika assumed Gabriel must be the ex-husband.
‘We don’t think anything,’ she said quickly. ‘I just have to investigate all possible scenarios for . . . I just have to try to understand what might have happened to her. To Lilian.’
Sara’s shoulders slumped a little. She bit her lower lip and stared hard at the ground.
‘Gabriel and I . . . have had . . . still have . . . our differences. Not so long ago we had a row about Lilian. But he’s never harmed her. Never ever.’
Again Fredrika saw Sara pulling at the sleeves of her top. Her rapid assessment was that Sara would not tell her then and there whether she had been abused by her ex-husband or not. She would have to check for officially lodged complaints when she got back to HQ. And they would certainly have to speak to the ex-husband, at any event.
‘Could you tell me more precisely what happened on the platform at Flemingsberg?’ Fredrika asked, hoping she was now steering the conversation in a direction Sara would feel more comfortable with.
Sara nodded several times but said nothing. Fredrika hoped she wasn’t going to start crying, because tears were something she found very hard to deal with. Not privately, but professionally.
‘I got off the train to make a call,’ Sara began hesitantly. ‘I rang a friend.’
Fredrika distracted by the rain, checked herself. A friend?
‘And why didn’t you ring from your seat?’
‘I didn’t want to wake Lilian,’ came Sara’s quick response.
A little too quick. What was more, she had told the policeman she spoke to earlier that she got off the train because she was in the so-called quiet coach.
‘She was so tired,’ whispered Sara. ‘We go to Gothenburg to visit my parents. I think she was getting a cold, she never sleeps for the whole journey usually.’<
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‘Ah, I see,’ said Fredrika, and paused for a minute before going on. ‘So it wasn’t that you didn’t want Lilian to hear the conversation?’
Sara admitted it almost immediately.
‘No, I didn’t want Lilian to hear the conversation,’ she said quietly. ‘My friend and I have . . . only just met. And it would be a bad idea to let her find out about him at this stage.’
Because then she’d tell her dad, who was presumably still beating up her mum even though they’d separated, thought Fredrika to herself.
‘We only talked for a couple of minutes. Less than that, I think. I said we were almost there, and he could come round to my place later this evening, once Lilian was in bed.’
‘All right, and what happened next?’
Sara pulled her shoulders back and sighed heavily. The body language told Fredrika they were about to talk about something she found really painful to remember.
‘It made no sense at all, none of it,’ Sara said dully. ‘It was completely absurd.’
She shook her head wearily.
‘A woman came up to me. Or a girl, you might say. Quite tall, thin, looked a bit the worse for wear. Waving her arms and shouting something about her dog being sick. I suppose she came up to me because I was standing separately from the other people on the platform. She said she’d been coming down the escalator with the dog when it suddenly collapsed and started having a fit.’
‘A fit? The dog?’
‘Yes, that was what she said. The dog was lying there having a fit and she needed help to get it back up the escalator again. I’ve had dogs all my life, until a few years ago. And I could honestly see what a state the girl was in. So I helped her.’
Sara fell silent and Fredrika considered what she’d said, rubbing her hands together.
‘Didn’t you think about the risk of missing the train?’
For the first time in their conversation, Sara’s tone was sharp and her eyes blazed.
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