Unwanted

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Right,’ he began, ‘Alex has asked me to make sure Sara Sebastiansson knows what’s happened first. Then I can deal with the Gabriel thing.’

  He could hear Fredrika was about to say something, so he went on quickly:

  ‘What sort of photos, anyway? We can’t just go checking people’s computers without getting the examining magistrate to grant a search warrant.’

  Fredrika informed Peder with her usual cheek – always that cheek – that she was quite well aware the police couldn’t go snooping in people’s computers whenever they felt like it, but that this could be viewed as a tip-off in a very important investigation, and there was no law forbidding the police from going to look at something somebody else had discovered and . . .

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Peder interrupted her wearily. ‘Give me their number and I’ll ring them now and arrange something.’

  ‘Good,’ said Fredrika, sounding a bit washed out herself.

  ‘They didn’t say anything about what was in these pictures?’ Peder asked.

  ‘No,’ said Fredrika, ‘they just said they were disgusting.’

  ‘What are you going to do now, by the way?’ Peder enquired curiously.

  ‘Alex asked me to go and see Mrs Sebastiansson again,’ Fredrika said. ‘And there are a few other things I need to get done . . .’

  ‘Wasn’t I supposed to be handling the interviews with Gabriel’s family and friends from now on?’ Peder said irritably.

  ‘Clearly not this one,’ came Fredrika’s crisp retort.

  Peder ended the call with a scowl and went back into the bathroom.

  Pia appeared at the doorway. She was still stark naked. Peder looked at her in the bathroom mirror. Was she really that attractive when it came to it? He thought her tits looked a bit on the droopy side. Or was his hangover clouding his judgment? Well it was all the same to him, he was on his way out of the flat anyway.

  For some reason he felt reluctant to turn round and meet her eye.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ said Pia, folding her arms.

  ‘Have you got any Panadol?’ asked Peder wearily, and started brushing his teeth. With Pia’s toothbrush.

  Without a word, Pia opened a bathroom cabinet and got a strip of tablets out of a box. Peder took the lot from her; he’d be needing the rest later in the day.

  ‘You might at least say something.’

  Peder hurled the toothbrush impatiently into the basin.

  ‘Don’t you understand how I’m feeling right now?’ he thundered, afraid his head would explode the moment he raised his voice. ‘The kid’s been found dead, murdered! Don’t you understand that I can’t think about anything else at the moment?’

  Pia stared at him.

  ‘Just go, Peder,’ she said.

  She left the bathroom without waiting for a reply.

  Peder sat down on the floor and took several deep breaths.

  He had let his wife down.

  He had let his employer down by being in such a state.

  He had very likely let little Lilian down as well.

  And now Pia Nordh wanted to make out he had let her down, too. What the hell did the woman want of him?

  Peder straightened up. He’d got to focus. He’d got to get up and get out. How he would get to Sara Sebastiansson’s flat would be a question for later. He most probably wouldn’t be able to drive.

  Peder got up from the floor, put on his clothes and shoes and hurriedly left Pia’s flat.

  A short while later he was standing on a pavement in the rain with wet hair, ringing for a taxi. He blinked a couple of times and peered up at the sky.

  He stopped for a moment.

  For the first time in ages, it looked as though the sun might manage to break through the cloud cover. Summer had arrived.

  Jelena was on her way back to Stockholm. In a plane. She had ditched the car as planned. She had never flown before. She leant forward and looked out of the plane window in fascination. Incredible, she thought. Bloody incredible.

  Anxiety came washing over her. The man hated it when she swore. He had punished her very severely for it at the beginning. Well, not punished, reprimanded was the word he generally used. And only for her own good.

  Jelena smiled as she sat there. The man really was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She squeezed the armrest of her seat. The man was in actual fact the only good thing that had happened to her. He was so generous. And smart. Jelena loved seeing the man working and planning. He was so, so handsome when he was doing that. The fact that he had worked out how to hold up that stupid cow in Flemingsberg so she missed the train, for example, had impressed Jelena enormously.

  And besides, thought Jelena, in Flemingsberg they had had several strokes of luck.

  The man naturally wouldn’t have agreed with her, but they really had been served Sara Sebastiansson on a plate when she decided to get off the train to make her call. The original plan had been for Jelena to attract Sara’s attention by knocking on the window by her seat and trying to lure her out onto the platform by frantic gesticulations. And if that hadn’t worked, they would have tried to snatch Lilian the day after instead, when her mother handed her over to her father. But they hadn’t needed to do any of that, after all.

  Jelena didn’t really know why the man had chosen her. She had been so lucky. The man must have known there were loads of other young girls who’d give their right arm to be part of his battle. He must have had so many to choose from. He had actually said as much.

  ‘I could have taken anybody, Doll,’ he whispered every evening when they were going to sleep. ‘I could have taken anybody, Doll, but I chose you. And if you disappoint me, I’ll choose someone else.’

  Jelena hardly had words for the terror she felt whenever he hinted that she was replaceable. Jelena had been replaceable for almost as long as she could remember. It was not at all nice remembering the years she had lived before she met the man, so she seldom did. It was only at night, in her dreams, that the memories would not leave her in peace. Then she remembered all the disgusting things, every detail. Sometimes the dreams refused to end, and then she would find she had woken herself by sitting up in bed and howling.

  ‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’

  The man never wanted to hear about her dreams. He would just pull her back down into bed and whisper to her:

  ‘You’re the one in charge of your sleep, Doll. You’ve got to understand that. If you don’t, you’ll carry on dreaming things you don’t like. And if you do that, Doll, if you carry on dreaming things you don’t like, and you don’t try hard enough, then you’re a weak person. And you know what I think about weak dolls, don’t you?’

  To start with, she had tried to object, tried to tell him she was doing her very best, but the dreams came anyway. To start with, she had cried.

  Then he would lie down on top of her in the bed, so heavy she could hardly breathe.

  ‘There is nothing, Doll – nothing – more worthless than tears. Try to understand that. Know that you have to understand it. I don’t want to see anything like that again. Ever. Do you understand?’

  Jelena nodded beneath him, felt him making himself even heavier.

  ‘Answer so I can hear, Doll.’

  ‘I understand,’ she whispered hastily. ‘I understand.’

  ‘If you don’t understand,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be happy to reprimand you.’

  His fingers twined their way into her hair, and she saw his other hand clench into a fist.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ she said, her eyes wide with fear.

  ‘Maybe you’d understand better if I reprimanded you, like I had to do in the beginning?’

  Jelena started to tremble involuntarily beneath him, and tossed her head from side to side on the pillow.

  ‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘Please, no.’

  He lowered his raised fist and stroked her cheek.

  ‘Now come on, Doll,’ he sai
d, his voice silky. ‘We don’t plead. Not you and me.’

  She took slow breaths, still with the heavy weight of his body on top of hers. Waited for his next move.

  ‘You don’t need to be afraid of me, Doll,’ he said. ‘Not ever. Everything I do, Doll, I do in your best interests. In our best interests. You know that. Don’t you?’

  She nodded between breathing in and breathing out.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, and rolled off her. ‘Because when our fight begins, when we start our campaign to rouse those damned sinners from their slumbers, there’ll be no room for mistakes.’

  Alex Recht just found time to pop into HQ before he had to head for the airport. Fredrika was able to tell him that someone had rung from where Gabriel Sebastiansson worked, and then he spoke to Peder, who had just left Sara’s flat. Peder confirmed that Sara would be going to Umeå, accompanied by her parents, to identify the dead girl. Alex reminded both Fredrika and Peder of the need to establish whether the Sebastiansson family had any links with Umeå.

  Very soon Alex was in a taxi on his way out to Arlanda. He wasn’t expecting to stay long up in Umeå, in fact he’d probably fly back later that day. Somewhat reluctantly, he had sent Peder with the duty clergyman to break the bad news to Sara. Peder could hardly be called ideal for the job, but sending Fredrika would have been even more unthinkable.

  People whose own emotional lives were dysfunctional could scarcely be entrusted with a demanding task like breaking the news that someone had died.

  Alex leant back on the headrest in the back seat of the taxi. Lilian’s body had been found outside the A&E department in Umeå at about one o’clock the previous night. Alex understood that she had been found by a nurse and a duty doctor, and had been lying stretched out on her back on the footpath, naked and wet in the rain. Someone had written the word ‘Unwanted’ on her forehead.

  The child was already dead when they found her. There had been no attempt at resuscitation. Cause of death had not yet been established, but an initial examination of her body indicated that she had been dead for about twenty-four hours when they found her. That in turn meant she had lived only a few hours after the time when she was abducted. A few hours. If they’d known that was the sort of margin they had to play with . . .

  But that was the thing. They hadn’t known. And they’d had no reason to expect it. Or had they?

  Alex felt a large lump in his throat, and swallowed to try to banish it. His thoughts went to his own children. With quick, fumbling fingers he got out his mobile and rang the home number of Viktoria, his daughter. She answered at the fifth ring and Alex could tell from her voice that he had woken her.

  ‘I’m so glad you answered,’ he said, his voice almost cracking.

  His daughter, used to her father occasionally trying to ring her at odd times, didn’t say much, and rang off without really discovering why he had called. It didn’t matter. Experience told her that she would eventually find out. Maybe not until the next time he rang, but then if not before.

  Alex, happy and relieved, put the phone back in his inside pocket.

  Some part of him had always hoped, as all parents do deep down, that one of his children would choose the same career as him. Or at least something similar. But neither of them had.

  Viktoria had become a vet. For a long, long time, Alex had clung to some sort of hope that her all-embracing interest in horses might make her join the mounted police, but as she took her final school exams and prepared to go to university, he had to admit it was very unlikely.

  He couldn’t really object. After all, he had chosen a career path quite different from the one expected of him. It was more a case of having nurtured some kind of hope that Viktoria, physically the very image of her mother, might turn out to be her father’s daughter in spirit. But she didn’t. Alex would swell with pride whenever he thought of her, though he was aware of letting it show far too infrequently. He could sometimes detect something anxious and quizzical in her steady gaze.

  ‘Are you happy with me, Dad?’ it whispered. ‘Are you satisfied with the person you made me into?’

  Alex felt another lump in his throat. He was so unutterably satisfied that the very word ‘satisfied’ seemed banal in a context such as that.

  He reminded himself that he was satisfied with both his children, not only Viktoria but also her younger brother, Erik. His son, the eternal seeker. Alex knew it was rather harsh of him to classify his younger child as a seeker when he hadn’t even reached twenty-five, but he honestly couldn’t see Erik ever putting down roots. Not really. Not the way he lived.

  For a brief period, when he had just left school, it looked as though Erik might find a niche in military life. Alex didn’t really want a son in the armed forces, but if it proved a good opening for Erik, then he would have no objections. But Erik left the officer training course he had enrolled on, and said he wanted to become a pilot instead. And though nobody could quite work out how, the lad got into some kind of flying school down in Skåne. Then something else got in the way, and to his parents’ unfeigned amazement, he left the training course and the country, and moved to Colombia to live with a woman he had met at evening classes in Spanish. The woman was ten years older than him and had just left her husband. Alex and Lena simply didn’t know what to say, so they let their son go without much of an argument.

  ‘He’ll soon get tired of her, too,’ said Lena, trying to console him a bit.

  Alex merely shook his head in resignation.

  News of his son’s life on the other side of the globe filtered through in the form of emails and calls from the boy himself, but also via Viktoria. Sure enough, the relationship with the woman petered out, but they were not surprised when he soon found someone else and decided to stay on a bit longer. He had now been living there for two years, and Alex hadn’t seen him in all that time.

  We should go out there, Alex thought in the taxi. Show him we care. Then maybe he’ll come back home. Then maybe we won’t lose him.

  He looked distractedly out of the taxi window. The sun was shining. Alex’s mouth felt dry. This was a fine bloody day for summer to make its appearance.

  A very bright Stockholm enfolded Peder Rydh as he stood there outside Sara Sebastiansson’s block of flats. Peder felt absolutely terrible. His flesh was crawling. Sara’s howls and cries were still echoing in his head. Poor beggar, he thought to himself. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, simply refused, to imagine anything like that happening to him. Peder’s children would never go missing. Those children were his children and no one else’s. He made a solemn vow to himself to keep watch over them better than he had until now.

  The sound of the door opening behind him made him jump. Sara Sebastiansson’s father stepped gingerly out onto the pavement and waited right by the wall. Peder could swear the man had aged in the fifteen minutes that had elapsed since Peder and the clergyman came to the flat. His grey hair looked lifeless and his eyes were so full of despair that Peder found it hard to meet his gaze. He felt even more ashamed of the fact that he was again forced to ring for a taxi, as he was still not in a fit state to drive.

  ‘Tell me,’ said the older man before he had a chance to be the one to break the silence, ‘if there’s any chance it might not be our little girl they’ve found.’

  Peder swallowed and felt his stomach knot as he saw the other man was crying.

  ‘We don’t think so,’ he said thickly. ‘We’ve had pictures to help us and we’re almost completely sure we’ve identified her. And then there’s the fact that she didn’t have any hair when she was found . . . I’m sorry, but we’re pretty convinced.’

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘We won’t take it as positive identification until you’ve had a chance to see her, of course, but as I say, we’re not in any doubt.’

  Sara’s father nodded slowly. His tears fell like heavy drops of rain onto his dark jumper and the spots grew into little wet patches weighing down his a
lready weary shoulders.

  ‘We knew all along this would end badly, Mother and I,’ he whispered, and Peder took a step towards him.

  Took a step towards him and put his hands in his pockets. He realized what he had just done and took them out again.

  ‘You see,’ said the man, ‘Sara’s mother and I have only got Sara. And we knew, we knew straight away when Sara met that man that things would turn out badly.’

  His voice quavered, and his look vanished far, far away beyond Peder.

  ‘The first day she introduced him to us, I said to Mother that he was no good for our girl. But they were so in love. She was so in love. Even though he started mistreating her almost straight away. Not to mention his witch of a mother.’

  Peder frowned, and put in:

  ‘But from what we understood from the police reports, it was a few years before he started abusing her. Isn’t that right, then?’

  The older man shook his head.

  ‘He didn’t hit her, but there are other ways of hurting another person. He had other women, for example, all the time. Almost from the start. Disappeared off some evenings without saying where he was going, stayed away whole weekends. And she always took him back. Over and over again. And then they had Lilian. Then she was as good as stuck.’

  The air suddenly seemed too heavy to breathe in, and the older man gave a sort of shudder. When he breathed out, his shoulders slumped and the tears ran more swiftly down his cheeks.

  ‘When the little girl was born, we thought the game was up. All our friends congratulated us, but . . . It was the start of something new, after all, and yet . . . After that there was no way back, after that it was bound to end in disaster.’

  ‘Do you think,’ Peder began tentatively, ‘do you think Gabriel Sebastiansson could have anything to do with what’s happened to the little girl?’

  The other man raised his head and looked Peder in the eye.

  ‘That man is evil incarnate,’ he said in a voice that was tired but firm. ‘There are no limits to what he’d do to harm and wound Sara. No limits at all.’