‘What the hell is that girl doing hanging around with creeps like that? Guys who hit her and guys she hardly knows,’ sighed Peder, slumping in his seat.
Fredrika fixed Peder with a stare but said nothing.
Alex indicated she should go on.
‘When Sara rang him from the platform, they arranged for him to come round this evening, after Lilian was in bed, about nine-thirty. I’ve come up with three possible Anders Nyströms born the same year as Sara’s friend, none of them with criminal records. When I see him at Sara’s tonight, I shall be able to get more details.’
‘You’re seeing him tonight . . . ?’ began Alex uncertainly.
He got no further before Fredrika raised a discreet hand from her place at the table.
Alex suppressed a sigh.
‘Yes?’ he said patiently.
‘The woman with the dog,’ replied Fredrika with equal patience.
‘Yes?’ Alex said again.
Fredrika took a deep breath.
‘How does the woman with the dog fit into the scenario if we assume the father took the girl?’
Alex gave a rather tight-lipped smile.
‘If Lilian’s father took her, then can’t the woman with the dog just be a coincidence?’
He gave Fredrika a searching look and said firmly:
‘We haven’t forgotten the woman in Flemingsberg, Fredrika. But for now we’re prioritizing other information. With good reason.’
Alex surveyed the group again and cleared his throat.
‘I’d like to come round to Sara’s with you,’ he said, nodding in Fredrika’s direction.
Her eyebrows shot up. Peder reacted, too, straightening his back.
‘It’s not that I’m questioning your competence,’ Alex said hurriedly, ‘but wouldn’t it be a good idea for you to share the responsibility for these interviews with someone else? Sara’s new boyfriend could turn out to be a nasty piece of work and I’d feel happier if there were two of us.’
Peder beamed at Alex. Alex thought for a minute he was going to slap him on the back. This investigation would be hard going if the team couldn’t work together.
From Fredrika there was not a word. Nor were any needed – her fixed expression betrayed what she was thinking very plainly.
Ellen interrupted proceedings with a loud knock at the door.
‘Just wanted to say that the switchboard is getting calls from the public already,’ was all she said.
‘Great,’ said Alex, ‘that’s great.’
Soon, if the child did not reappear, he would have to consider calling in assistance from the National Crime Squad to go through all the tip-offs. He brought the meeting to a close.
‘In spite of the shocking nature of the event,’ he said on his way out of the room, ‘I have to say I’ve got quite a good feeling about this case. It’s bound to be only a matter of time until the girl’s found.’
Once the parcel was ready, the Man put it in an ordinary paper carrier bag and left Jelena alone in the flat.
‘I’ll be back later,’ he said.
Jelena smiled to herself. She wandered restlessly between the kitchen and the living room. She avoided going anywhere near the bathroom.
The television was on. The news that a child had gone missing from a train was covered in a couple of quick sentences. Jelena found that rather annoying.
Just wait, she thought. You’ll all soon realize this isn’t just some ordinary little bit of news.
She ran her hands nervously through her hair. The man would not have liked her doing that; he would have taken it as a sign that she did not have complete trust in his ability to plan and carry through his project. But still. There was so much at stake, so much that had to go right.
Jelena went out into the kitchen and decided to make a sandwich. She was just opening the fridge door when she saw them on the floor, right under the table. The blood went coursing round her body and her pulse rate rose. Her heart was pounding so hard that she thought it would explode in her chest as she bent down to pick up the little pair of panties from the floor.
‘No, no,’ she whispered in panic. ‘No, no, how could I have done this?’
Her brain was working as if it was on autopilot, doing what had to be done. She must get rid of the panties, at once. The Man’s instructions had been entirely clear. All the clothes were to be in the parcel. All of them. Jelena felt so terrified she was on the verge of tears as she screwed the panties into a little ball and put them in an old plastic bag from a supermarket. Just as long as he doesn’t stop on the way and double check everything’s in the parcel. She moved at the speed of light as she left the flat and raced down to the rubbish storage room in the basement of the block of flats. The door resisted as usual and was heavy to open. Jelena lifted the lid of one of the rubbish containers and threw in the bag. Her heart felt like a bolting horse as she ran back up to her flat, taking two steps at a time.
The door of the flat slammed shut behind her with a bang, and she fumbled with the lock. She had to take several deep breaths to stop her palpitations turning into a full-scale panic attack. Then she tiptoed over to the bathroom and swallowed quite a few times before she opened the door. Her relief when she switched on the ceiling light was indescribable.
At least everything in the bathroom was as it should be. The girl was still lying naked in the bath where they had left her.
Peder Rydh flicked distractedly through his little notebook. He could scarcely read what he had written in it. He fanned himself with the book in the close heat of the office and let his thoughts roam free. Life could throw up the most unexpected and nasty surprises. Lilian Sebastiansson had experienced that today, first hand. But Peder took the same view as Alex, expecting the team to solve this particular case with relative ease.
The ringing of his mobile intruded into his thoughts. He smiled when he saw it was his brother calling. Jimmy rang him at least once a day.
‘You listening?’ the voice on the phone asked indignantly after a bit of introductory banter.
‘I’m listening, I’m listening,’ Peder put in hurriedly.
He could hear the silent laughter at the other end, almost like a child’s stifled giggles.
‘You’re cheating, Pedda, you’re cheating. You’re not listening.’
Peder had to smile. No, he wasn’t listening. Not properly, not the way he normally did when he was talking to his brother.
‘You coming soon, Pedda?’
‘I’m coming soon,’ Peder promised. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend.’
‘Is that long?’
‘No, it’s not long now. Only a few days.’
Then they rounded off the conversation the way they always did: with extravagant promises of kisses and hugs and eating posh cake with marzipan together when they saw each other. Jimmy sounded relatively happy. He would be seeing their parents tomorrow.
‘It could just as easily have been you, Peder,’ Peder’s mum had told him, more times than he could remember.
When he was little, she used to cup his face in her warm hands as she said it.
‘It could just as easily have been you. It could just as easily have been you who fell off the swing that day.’
Peder still had very sharp visual images in his head from the day his brother fell off the big swing their father had hung from one of the birch trees in the garden. He remembered the blood running over the stone Jimmy’s head had landed on, the grass smelling so strong because it was freshly mown, Jimmy lying on the ground, looking as if he was asleep. And he remembered rushing over and trying to cradle his little head that was bleeding so badly.
‘You mustn’t die,’ he had shouted, thinking of the rabbit they had buried so sadly, a month or so earlier. ‘You mustn’t die.’
His plea had been answered, in one sense, for Jimmy stayed with them. But he was never the same again, and although his body grew as fast as Peder’s, he remained a child.
Peder leafed through his notebo
ok again. No, you never knew what surprises life would deal you. Peder certainly thought he knew more about that than most people. Not only in view of what happened to his brother when he was growing up, but also as a result of bitter experience gained later in life. Not to mention just recently. But he’d rather not think about that.
He was roused from his reverie by the sound of Fredrika in the corridor outside.
Alex had told Peder a few weeks earlier, in confidence of course, that Fredrika lacked the tact and sensitivity you needed for this profession. Peder couldn’t have put it better himself. To be frank, Fredrika was your classic anally retentive type. And she didn’t seem to have any kind of proper man to give her a proper seeing to at regular intervals, but Peder decided not to mention that to Alex. Alex was remarkably uninterested in thoughts and comments of that kind; he never wanted to talk about anything except work. Maybe eventually, when they’d been working together for longer, they’d be able to go for a beer together one evening? He felt a tickle of excitement in the pit of his stomach. There were few police officers who could even contemplate that – a beer with Alex Recht.
It really annoyed him that Fredrika couldn’t see, and therefore didn’t acknowledge, Alex’s greatness in the policing world. There she sat in her little jacket – she always wore a jacket – with her dark hair plaited in an improbably long plait that hung like a riding crop down her back, looking so bloody sceptical it made him want to throw up. There was something about the way she held herself, and that cocky laugh she would sometimes let out, that he simply couldn’t stand. No, Fredrika wasn’t a police officer; she was a so-called academic. She thought too much and acted too little. That wasn’t how police officers operated.
Peder cursed the fact that he’d been passed over in favour of Fredrika yet again and not been sent to talk to Sara Sebastiansson. At the same time, he cursed the fact that he hadn’t any extra spare time to give to the job, anyway. His private life was still using up too much of his energy for him to be able to function effectively.
Even so. Hadn’t Alex sounded confident the case of the missing Lilian would soon be solved? Wasn’t it very often the case that a man feeling wronged by his wife would use their child to punish her? So the Lilian case was not to be considered particularly major or important. Seen in that light, it was more understandable that Fredrika was going with Alex to interview Sara at home. It was actually a good thing that she and not Peder had been asked to go, because she was the one who needed to hone her skills, not him.
What Peder hardly dared admit, even to himself, was that for all the criticism he directed at her, he found Fredrika remarkably attractive. She had perfect skin and lovely, big blue eyes. Blue eyes when everything else about her was dark created an effect that was frankly dramatic. Her body looked as though it belonged to someone who had just turned twenty, though her bearing and the look in her eyes were those of a mature woman. She certainly had the breasts of an extremely mature woman. Peder occasionally caught himself thinking really filthy thoughts about Fredrika. He strongly suspected that university student unions and pubs were places that turned many young students into really good sexual partners. He suspected equally strongly that Fredrika was one of them. He avoided catching her eye when she automatically glanced into his room as she passed the door. He wondered what going to bed with her would be like. Probably not bad at all.
In a top-floor flat under the eaves in Östermalm, Fredrika Bergman was rounding off her intensive working day in the company of her lover. Fredrika and Spencer Lagergren had been seeing each other for a good number of years. In fact, Fredrika didn’t like to remind herself quite how many years it was, but on the rare occasions she did let herself remember, she always went back to the first time they spent the night together. Fredrika had been twenty-one at the time, and Spencer forty-six.
There wasn’t anything very complicated about their relationship. Over the course of the years, Fredrika had sometimes been single, sometimes involved in another relationship. At the times when she had someone else, she would refrain from seeing Spencer. A lot of men and women seem to be able to see two partners simultaneously. Fredrika couldn’t.
Spencer could, however, and Fredrika was always very much aware of it. Spencer and his wife Eva had got married one sunny day almost thirty-five years before, and he would never leave her for anyone else. Or only for the occasional weekday evening. Fredrika found this an entirely satisfactory arrangement. Spencer was twenty-five years older than her. Common sense told her that such an equation would prove impossible. Cold mathematical calculations also told her that if she really were to give her life to Spencer, if she chose to live with him, it would not be all that many years before she was alone again.
So Fredrika contented herself with seeing Spencer on a sporadic basis and accepting her role as the second, not the first, woman in his life. By extension of the same principle, she did not let it worry her either that their relationship never grew or developed. So Spencer Lagergren was just what she needed, on the whole. So she told herself.
‘I can’t get this cork out,’ said Spencer, frowning as he struggled with the bottle of wine he had brought.
Fredrika ignored him. He would rather die than let her try to open it. Spencer was always in charge of the wine, Fredrika of the music. They both loved classical music. Spencer had once tried to persuade her to play him something on the violin she still kept. But she refused.
‘I don’t play any more,’ came her firm, abrupt reply.
And no more was said on the subject.
‘Perhaps soaking the neck of the bottle in hot water would ease it a bit,’ Spencer muttered to himself.
His shadow played across the kitchen tiles as he moved to and fro with the bottle. It was a small kitchen; he was perpetually just a couple of steps away from treading on her toes. But she knew he never would. Spencer never trod on a woman’s toes, except perhaps when he was expressing his not entirely modern views in feminist discussions. And even then, he did so in such a brilliant way that he almost always emerged from those discussions on the winning side. In Fredrika’s eyes, and those of many other women, that made him an altogether very attractive man.
Fredrika noted he had finally won his fight with the wine bottle. Artur Rubinstein was playing Chopin in the background. Fredrika crept up behind Spencer and gently put her arms around him. She leant her head wearily on his back, her forehead resting against the body she knew best in the world apart from her own.
‘Are you tired, or shattered?’ Spencer asked quietly, pouring the wine.
Fredrika smiled.
She knew he was smiling, too.
‘Shattered,’ she whispered.
He turned in her embrace, and held out a glass of wine. She rested her forehead on his chest for a split second before she took the glass.
‘Sorry I was so late today.’
Spencer raised his glass in a silent toast, and they enjoyed their first sip.
Fredrika had not been particularly keen on red wine before she met Spencer. Now she found it hard to forgo it for more than a few days at a time. The good professor had indisputably taught her some bad habits.
Spencer ran a gentle hand across her cheek.
‘I was late last time, you know,’ was all he said.
Fredrika gave a little smile.
‘But it’s eleven o’clock, Spencer. You certainly weren’t that late, last time we met.’
For some reason – maybe because she felt guilty, maybe because she was tired – tears came to her eyes.
‘Oh, don’t get upset . . .’ began Spencer, seeing the glint of moisture in her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I . . .’
‘You’re tired,’ said Spencer firmly. ‘You’re tired, and you hate your job with the police. And that, my friend, is a really bad combination.’
Fredrika drank more of her wine.
‘I know,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I know.’
He put a steady arm around her waist.
‘Stay at home tomorrow. We’ll both stay here.’
Fredrika gave an imperceptible sigh.
‘No chance,’ she said. ‘I’m working on a new case now. A little girl’s gone missing. That’s why I was so late: we were interviewing the child’s mother and the mother’s new boyfriend all evening. Such a horrible story you can hardly believe it’s true.’
Spencer pulled her closer. She set down her glass and put both arms around him.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she whispered.
Saying anything like that was admittedly against the unspoken rules they agreed on, but Fredrika was too exhausted to worry about any agreement just then.
‘I’ve missed you, too,’ mumbled Spencer as he kissed the top of her head.
Fredrika stared into his eyes in astonishment.
‘Now there’s a coincidence, eh?’ said Spencer with a crooked smile.
It was after one before Fredrika and Spencer finally decided to try to get some sleep. As usual, Spencer was able to put the decision into practice with little delay. Fredrika found it much harder.
The wide double bed stood along one wall of what was really the only proper room in the flat. Apart from the bed, the flat was sparsely furnished with a couple of battered old English armchairs and a beautiful chess table. Over by the little kitchen there were also a small dining table and two chairs.
The flat had belonged to Spencer’s father, and he had inherited it when his father died, nearly ten years ago now. Since then, Fredrika and her lover had never really met anywhere else. She had still never been to Spencer’s main home, which felt logical. The only times they met somewhere other than the flat were when Fredrika occasionally discreetly accompanied Spencer to some conference abroad. She thought a number of his colleagues must know about their liaison, but quite honestly she couldn’t have cared less. What was more, Spencer’s status among his professorial colleagues was extraordinarily high, so he was never confronted with any direct questions.
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