Alex didn’t believe a word of it. For one thing, he had explained in as lecturing a tone as he could without sounding downright arrogant, it was not Sara’s role to evaluate the various avenues of investigation, if indeed there were more than one. And for another, Alex did not believe Sara’s ex-husband was now leaving her in peace. It took him a while to talk her round, but eventually she showed him her forearms, which she had clearly been trying to hide inside her sleeves. Just as Fredrika had suspected, the arms showed clear signs of physical violence. A large and evidently very painful patch stood out sharply on her left arm. The skin was orangey-red and Alex could see signs of blisters that were now starting to heal. A burn, without a doubt.
‘He burnt me with the iron, just before we separated,’ Sara said in a flat voice, with an empty gaze that was trying to fix on a point somewhere behind Alex.
Alex took her arm gently in his hand and said quietly but emphatically:
‘You’ll have to report this, Sara.’
At that, she slowly turned her head and looked him straight in the eye.
‘He wasn’t here then.’
‘What?’
‘Haven’t you read the police reports? He’s never here when it happens. There’s always someone who can confirm he was somewhere else.’
Again her eyes went to that point behind Alex.
It disturbed Alex to see the extent of Sara Sebastiansson’s injuries. To his great annoyance and dismay, her ex-husband had not been in touch at all that evening. Alex sent a radio car to his address for the second time that day, but the officers reported back that the house was still in darkness and no one had answered the door. Fredrika then said she would contact Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother again the following day, and ring the place where he worked. Somebody must know where he was.
Sitting there in his grandfather’s office chair, Alex could feel the anger rising inside him. There were certain fundamental rules that he had grown up with and learnt to respect in his almost fifty-five years in this world. You did not hit women. You did not hit children. You did not lie. And you took care of the elderly.
Alex shuddered as he remembered the burn.
What made you do something like that to the person closest to you?
Alex found it hard to stomach the political mood that was now sweeping the country, talking of ‘men’s violence against women’. It would be unthinkable to make sweeping generalizations like that in other areas. To take just one example, a colleague had said at a police conference that ‘the immigrant tendency not to obey laws or regulations is costing society untold sums of money’. That statement almost cost the colleague his job. If he went round saying things like that, it was argued, the public would think all immigrants chose to live outside society’s rules, and that was definitely not the case.
No, thought Alex, it was definitely not the case. Any more than saying that all men hit all women. Some men hit women. A huge number of others did not. Unless that was the accepted starting point, the problem would never be properly addressed.
There had been no need for the team to meet again the previous evening. Alex had updated Peder once he and Fredrika left Sara Sebastiansson’s flat. Alex was neither stupid nor gullible. Peder had an almost childlike urge to show how clever he was, and Alex was a little concerned that this might have a negative impact on his judgment in stressful situations. But at the same time he didn’t want to inhibit Peder, who showed exemplary enthusiasm for his job and had so much energy.
It would have been nice if Fredrika could display a little more of that, he thought drily.
He glanced at the clock. Nearly seven. Time to get dressed and head into town. He was so lucky to live on an island like Resarö, so close to the city, yet just far enough away. He would never exchange this house for any other. It was a real find, as his darling Lena had said when they bought it a few years before. Alex got up from his desk chair and took the blue corridor back to the kitchen. By the time he stepped into the shower a short while later, the first rain shower of the morning was already drumming on the window.
The train service between Gothenburg to Stockholm is more or less hourly. Sara Sebastiansson’s parents took the earliest train they could, leaving Gothenburg at six in the morning. This was not their first emergency trip from coast to coast, but it was definitely the gravest of its kind. On several previous occasions they had had to drop everything at home and at work to look after Lilian while Sara tried to recover from the damage done to her body as quickly as she could. They had systematically refused to have anything more to do with their son-in-law after the first attack. They had tried every way they could to persuade Sara to be strong and keep away from him. They had implored her to move back to the west coast. But she had always refused. She was not going to let Gabriel destroy any more aspects of her life, she told them. She had been away from Gothenburg for fifteen years, and would never move back. Never. Her life was in Stockholm now.
‘But Sara, love,’ her mother said, ‘he could kill you. Think of Lilian, Sara. What will happen to Lilian if you’re dead?’
But Sara hardened herself against her mother’s tears, and carried on saying no.
Had she done the right thing?
Sitting at her kitchen table the morning after Lilian disappeared, she asked herself if she had made a mistake of incalculable proportions. She wondered if Gabriel really had taken Lilian. God knows the man had done monstrously evil things. Never directly aimed at Lilian, but affecting her indirectly all the same, since she had more than once been woken from her innocent sleep by her mother Sara’s screams from an adjacent room. Once, Lilian had crept out of bed and tearfully found her way to where the sound was coming from.
Sara could still see the scene in her mind’s eye. She was lying on the floor, prevented from getting up by the intense pain in her side where Gabriel had kicked her. Gabriel, seething with rage, bending over her. And in the midst of it all, Lilian’s little voice.
‘Mummy. Daddy.’
As if in a trance, Gabriel turned round.
‘Oh,’ he whispered, ‘is Daddy’s little darling awake?’
He took a couple of swift strides across the kitchen, lifted up the child and carried her out of the room.
‘Mummy just fell over and landed all wrong, darling,’ Sara heard him say. ‘We’ll leave her to have a little rest, and then she’ll be as good as new. Do you want me to read you a story?’
Sara had done a university foundation course in psychology, and she knew that many men who beat their wives showed great remorse afterwards. Gabriel never did. He never said sorry; he never gave any hint of thinking what had happened was abnormal or wrong. He just looked at her injuries and bruises with such casual contempt that she wished she could fall dead on the spot.
She knew she was too exhausted to go on much longer. That night, the first night without Lilian, had been so relentlessly long.
‘Try to get some rest,’ Alex Recht had advised her. ‘I know it sounds impossible, but it really is the best thing you can do for Lilian, so you can be strong. Because when she comes back, she needs a rested mum to look after her. Okay?’
Sara had tried to hang on to that thought. She had tried to sleep, tried to prepare herself for her daughter’s return. She clung on to Alex’s last words: ‘Because when she comes back . . .’ Not if she comes back, but when she comes back.
As she lay there in bed, Sara realized almost at once that it had been a big mistake to send Anders away so soon. It had felt like a kind of betrayal of Lilian to have him around, as if his presence somehow worsened the odds of getting her daughter back. At two in the morning, she rang her parents. Her father went totally quiet, she heard him breathing into the phone.
Finally she heard his husky voice: ‘We’ve always known we’d lose one of you,’ he said. ‘It could never end well with that evil man in your lives.’
Hearing those words, Sara dropped the phone and slumped to the floor. She clawed at the parquet floor of the ki
tchen as her tears flowed.
‘Lilian,’ she cried, ‘Lilian.’
Somewhere in the background, from the telephone lying where it had fallen, she heard her father’s desperate voice.
‘We’ll come right away, Sara. Mum and I will come right away.’
Sara cradled her cup of coffee. She liked the fact that it got light early in the mornings, despite the bad weather. She had slept for less than an hour in total. She tried to convince herself that this didn’t make her a bad mother. A mother who didn’t care at all must be worse than one who cared too much. Sara was taken aback by her own thoughts. Was there really a limit to how upset you were allowed to be if your child vanished? She hoped not. She prayed not.
The shrill tone of the doorbell cut through the silence. Sara had just switched off the radio. She had heard the news of her daughter’s disappearance on both television and radio. At first the girl newsreader’s voice felt like a big, warm blanket. Somebody out there cared. Somebody out there wanted to help look for her child. But by the end of the third or fourth news bulletin, the warm blanket felt more like a noose, throttling her, an ever-present reminder of Lilian’s absence, of which Sara was already all too painfully aware.
The doorbell rang again.
Sara considered. A quick look at the clock showed it was almost half past eight. She had been in touch with the duty officer at the police station an hour previously, and he had updated her. Still no news.
Sara peered cautiously through the peephole in the front door, hoping it would be Fredrika Bergman or Alex Recht. It was neither. No, there was some kind of postman standing there. And he had a parcel.
Sara opened the door, surprised.
‘Sara Sebastiansson?’ asked the man with the parcel.
She nodded. The thought occurred to her as she did so that she must look quite a sight, drained and exhausted as she was.
‘I’ve got a parcel for you,’ said the man, holding it out. ‘It was to go directly to you, not to one of our collection points. Can you take delivery?’
‘Yes,’ said Sara warily, taking the package. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you!’ said the man, smiling. ‘Have a nice day!’
Sara made no reply to this, but shut the door and locked it. She gave the parcel a gentle shake. It weighed scarcely anything, and made no sound when she shook it. She looked for the address of the sender, there was none. It was a box about the size and shape for a DVD player or something like that. She turned it round, turned it over. Hesitant at first, then more deliberate.
‘Contact the police immediately if anything unusual happens, anything you weren’t expecting,’ Alex Recht had urged her the night before. ‘You’ve got to report it, Sara, whatever it is. Odd phone calls, odd rings at the door. Even though we’re inclined not to think so, it could be that Lilian’s been kidnapped, and in that case the perpetrator may try to contact you.’
Standing there with the package in her arms, Sara wondered if this should be considered an abnormal event. Her parents would be arriving any minute; should she wait for them to get there?
Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or the driving forces of desperation and curiosity, that made Sara Sebastiansson decide on the spur of the moment to open the parcel straight away. She laid it gently on the kitchen table and put her mobile phone beside it. She would open the parcel and then ring Alex Recht or Fredrika Bergman. If there was any reason to. It could just be something she’d ordered and forgotten about.
Sara peeled off the tape sealing the lid of the box. Her long fingers grasped both sides of the lid and lifted them up. A bed of polystyrene foam granules confronted her. Sara frowned. What was this?
She pushed the granules carefully aside. At first she could not make out what it was she had been sent. Her eyes sought some kind of context they could comprehend. Hair. A mass of medium-length, wavy hair, chestnut brown. Dumbstruck, Sara touched the hair, revealing what lay beneath it. Then Sara instantly knew whose hair she was holding in her hands, and let out a loud, animal howl. She went on screaming until her parents arrived some minutes later and rang for the police and a doctor. Then the screams, which were starting to make her hoarse, turned into sobs of bewilderment and bottomless despair. The dam she had so skilfully built up to hold back her rising sense of panic had burst. What had she done to deserve this? What in heaven’s name had she done?
Sara Sebastiansson’s parents’ call came through to the police just after 9 a.m. Alex was immediately informed and drove crazily fast to Sara’s flat, taking Fredrika Bergman with him. To her unfeigned amazement, Fredrika noted as they left that Peder looked very unhappy about Fredrika being asked to answer the emergency call and not him.
Once the cardboard box with its nauseating contents had been sent off by special courier to the National Forensic Science Laboratory, SKL, in Linköping, Alex and Fredrika returned to HQ. Both occupants of the car derived a certain comfort from the silence that settled over them as they began the short return journey from Södermalm to the police building in Kungsholmsgatan. They swept up onto Västerbron and looked out from the bridge over a Stockholm wreathed in almost autumnal darkness. The next front of heavy clouds that had rolled in over the capital overnight were vividly reflected in the water spreading out beneath them. Fredrika reflected on the fact that they coloured the water grey, making the view a good deal less attractive than usual.
Alex cleared his throat.
‘Sorry?’ said Fredrika.
Alex looked at her and shook his head.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ he said quietly.
He was reluctant to admit it, but Alex was shocked by what he had just seen. The package turned the case from what initially seemed a routine investigation involving two adults going through a painful divorce in which their child had inevitably become a pawn, into a case with a much less predictable outcome. The experience had been made no less upsetting by Sara Sebastiansson’s panic, which filled the whole flat and was made all the more tangible by her mother’s tearful entreaties to her daughter to calm down. Alex could see at once that Sara Sebastiansson had gone beyond the point where a human being can simply ‘calm down’. He decided the most efficient course of action was to wait for the doctor and then, when Sara had been given a sedative, to investigate the box and its contents himself.
It was clear from Sara’s reaction to the parcel that the hair must be Lilian’s. Tests would establish the fact for certain. Underneath the mass of hair were the clothes Lilian had been wearing when she disappeared. A green, knee-length skirt and a little white T-shirt with a green and pink print on the front. There were two little hairbands, too. Her panties were missing, for some reason.
Seeing the clothes made Alex’s stomach lurch. Someone must have taken them off her. Of all the sick people in the world, he found none more repugnant than those who violated children.
There were no bloodstains or anything like that on the clothes. At least none that were visible, but SKL would establish that, of course, as well as checking for traces of other bodily fluids.
Alex thought he understood the message a package like that was intended to convey all too well. Somebody wanted to frighten Sara in a big way. Sara’s hysterical reaction showed how very successful the sender had been. Later on, Sara would have to be asked about both the package and the person who delivered it, but any sort of conversation or interrogation was out of the question in her present state.
Soon, thought Alex. Soon.
He gripped the steering wheel hard, very hard.
‘Did you get anything useful out of the call to where the ex-husband works?’ he asked Fredrika.
Fredrika gave a start.
‘Yes and no.’
She sat up straighter in her seat. She’d rung Gabriel Sebastiansson’s employer earlier that morning.
‘According to his boss, Gabriel Sebastiansson’s on holiday at the moment, but he couldn’t say where he is. He’s been off since Monday.’
Alex gave a whistle.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Particularly as he clearly hasn’t told his ex-wife about it, even though they have a child together. And didn’t he tell his old mum he was on a business trip?’
‘Yes, he did,’ she said. ‘Or at least, that’s what she told me he said. But to be honest, I didn’t have a very good feeling about her.’
Alex frowned.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean that just because she says he said he was on a business trip, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Her sense of loyalty to her son is so fierce, I presume she wouldn’t have any objection to lying for his sake.’
Alex thought this over. They were almost back at HQ. Fredrika wondered why it was that she was always the passenger rather than the driver when she went anywhere by car with her male colleagues. Presumably this fact, too, could be explained by her never having been to police training college, never having done her stint in a patrol car, so she must clearly be an incompetent driver.
‘Go round to her place,’ Alex said roughly, completely forgetting to applaud the moment of Fredrika’s first ever admission that she was acting on an instinct. ‘Go round and see the ex-husband’s mother. We’ll just have a quick meeting first.’
‘I will,’ said Fredrika.
They turned into the garage entrance and carried on down the tunnel to the parking area.
‘Are we still sure it was the father took the girl?’ Fredrika asked quietly, afraid of reigniting Alex’s anger by questioning his working hypothesis. ‘Would a father scalp his own daughter and send the hair to her mother?’
The question prompted Alex to think of the burn from the iron on Sara’s arm.
‘Normal fathers wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But Gabriel Sebastiansson is not a normal father.’
Peder Rydh was frustrated. The emergency call from Sara Sebastiansson’s had taken the whole group totally by surprise, and then – just as the situation was at its most acute – Fredrika was asked to go along, rather than Peder. He had to carry on following up tip-off after tip-off. He felt he was worth better than being stuck on something so apparently unimportant, compared to a trip to interview Sara again.
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