Unwanted

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Alex could have sworn that Hugo looked relieved, but he made no further comment on the subject. Instead he said:

  ‘The file’s in the glove compartment. You’re welcome to look, but be prepared for the pictures.’

  Alex nodded and took out the file. He opened it carefully, almost reverently, and took out the little bundle of photographs. He nodded to himself again. It was definitely Lilian, no question.

  He felt a pang. Sara Sebastiansson and her parents would be on the next plane – they had been held up in traffic on the way to Arlanda – and then the identity of the child would be formally established. Alex looked at the photos again, leafing through the heart-rending pile. In actual fact, the identification process would be unnecessary and cruel. There wasn’t the least doubt that the child was Lilian.

  Alex shifted his weight. The old Saab had nasty, hard seats that were giving him backache even on this short journey.

  ‘I thought we ought to go straight to the hospital,’ said Hugo Paulsson. ‘We’re seeing the pathologist, who can give us a preliminary report on the cause of death. Then I assume the forensics people in Stockholm will take over, once the girl’s been identified?’

  ‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Alex. ‘You said she’d been dead about twenty-four hours when she was found, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Hugo confirmed. ‘And they found her around one in the morning.’

  That meant Lilian had been alive for less than a day from the time of her disappearance from the train. And she had definitely been dead by the time her mother took delivery of the parcel of clothes and hair.

  ‘Have you interviewed the people who found her?’ Alex asked.

  Hugo nodded. Yes, they’d asked both the doctor and the nurse about what had happened. They had both given very matter-of-fact accounts of the evening’s events, and there was no reason to suspect them of being involved.

  ‘Is there anything to indicate the girl could have been killed here in Umeå?’ Alex asked delicately.

  The question was important, because the answer would determine which police authority took formal responsibility for the investigation. It was the scene of the crime, not the scene of the discovery of the body, which decided it.

  ‘Hard to say,’ said Hugo. ‘The girl had been lying there in the rain for a while – up to half an hour maybe – and we’re afraid a good number of clues could have been simply washed away.’

  Alex was opening his mouth to say something when Hugo went on:

  ‘She had a funny smell, the girl, acetone or something like that. We think somebody tried to wash her, but was in too much of a hurry to finish the job. And her nails had been cut right down, as short as they could possibly be.’

  Alex sighed heavily. For some reason, the details made him more convinced than ever that it was Gabriel Sebastiansson who had taken the girl. Somebody had tried to wash all the evidence off the child. Somebody had cut her nails so no evidence could be scraped from under them. The murderer was evidently a person of some intelligence.

  But why ever had they dumped her outside the hospital in Umeå, of all places? That was clearly where Lilian’s murderer had wanted her to be found. But why?

  He’s mocking us, Alex thought grimly. He’s mocking us, and laying the girl at our feet. Look, he’s saying, look how close I can get. And you still can’t see me.

  Hugo pointed out of the window.

  ‘Here we are. This is the hospital.’

  Fredrika Bergman rang Swedish Railways as soon as she had finished talking to Peder. She introduced herself as a police investigator and said she was ringing about the child who disappeared from the X2000 train from Gothenburg two days before. The man at the other end knew at once what she was referring to.

  ‘I’ve just got one quick question,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ said the man, and waited.

  ‘I wonder what caused the delay. Why did the train have to be held in Flemingsberg?’

  ‘Er, well,’ the man said hesitantly, ‘in the end the train was only delayed a couple of minutes . . .’

  ‘I know that,’ Fredrika interrupted him, ‘and I’m not really interested in exactly how many minutes it was delayed. I just want to know what the problem was.’

  ‘It was what we call a signalling problem,’ the man replied.

  ‘Right, and what caused that problem, as it were,’ Fredrika asked.

  The man at the other end sighed.

  ‘It was probably some foolhardy youngsters playing on the track. A few kids die that way every year, you know. Usually it doesn’t cause too much disruption, it’s just like in Flemingsberg; it takes a few minutes and then it’s all working again.’

  Fredrika swallowed.

  ‘So it was some kind of sabotage that delayed the train?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Or it could have been some animal getting at the transmitter. But I don’t think that’s very likely in this case, because the problem was only just outside Flemingsberg station.’

  Fredrika nodded to herself.

  ‘Thanks, that’s all for now,’ she said, committing the man’s name to memory. ‘I expect I’ll be back in touch soon with a few more questions or a formal request for a written statement.’

  When she had rung off, she gripped the steering wheel hard.

  She scarcely dared to think what the investigating team had lost by not following up such an obviously important line of enquiry.

  It might simply mean, of course, that Gabriel Sebastiansson had been working with the woman in Flemingsberg. Fredrika swallowed. She didn’t really think that, but that was how she would present it to the team. She’d never get the authorization to pursue it any further, otherwise.

  Fredrika felt anything but elated. It was a wretched business from start to finish. Fredrika’s vision clouded as she wondered whether Sara would be able to summon the strength to identify her dead child.

  Some years before, Alex couldn’t recall exactly how long ago, his mother-in-law had been admitted to hospital. The diagnosis, incurable cancer of the liver and pancreas, had plunged Lena into despair. How could her father carry on? How would it be for her and Alex’s children growing up without their grandma?

  Alex had not been too worried for the children’s sake. Naturally they would miss their grandma, but their sense of loss could hardly be compared with what his father-in-law would go through.

  ‘We’ve got to be there for Dad now,’ Lena said the evening they heard the bad news.

  ‘Yes of course,’ Alex replied.

  ‘No, more than that,’ Lena said. ‘More than that, of course, Alex. These are the times people need all the support and love they can get.’

  The memory of the time his mother-in-law lay ill ached in Alex as he sat there in Sonja Lundin’s office at Umeå University Hospital. Hugo Paulsson sat beside him.

  Sonja Lundin was the pathologist who had reached a preliminary verdict on the cause of Lilian’s death.

  ‘We weren’t initially sure which forensic unit was going to take the body,’ Sonja Lundin said with a frown. ‘We don’t know where the crime was committed, of course, here or in Stockholm.’

  Alex stared at Sonja Lundin. She was very tall for a woman, and looked very much on the ball. Alex was drawn to people with that look. He had occasionally reflected that Fredrika Bergman had it, too. Shame she had such shortcomings in other departments.

  ‘But we checked what happened in previous cases, and decided we had to do at least an initial examination here, so as not to hold up the police in their preliminary enquiry,’ Sonja Lundin went on. ‘So now it’s done.’

  She gave them a swift summary of what she had found.

  ‘There’s nothing to indicate the child was subjected to any violence or, from what I could see with the naked eye, any sexual assault,’ she began, and Alex felt himself give a slight sigh of relief.

  Sonja Lundin noticed, and held up a hand.

  ‘I really do have to stress that sexual assa
ult can’t be ruled out until after a more thorough examination.’

  Alex nodded. Naturally he knew that.

  ‘At first I couldn’t work out what had killed her,’ said Sonja Lundin, frowning again, ‘but because her head was shaved, I soon discovered it when I looked a bit closer.’

  ‘Discovered what?’ asked Hugo.

  ‘A wound in the middle of the head. And a much smaller puncture at the back of the neck.’

  Hugo and Alex both instantly raised their eyebrows.

  ‘I can’t say for certain without more comprehensive tests and examinations of course, but my preliminary conclusion is that someone tried to stab the girl in the head, and when that didn’t work, injected poison into her neck instead, and that was what killed her.’

  Hugo, looked at her, his brow furrowed:

  ‘Is that a usual way of going about it?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware,’ said Sonja. ‘And it’s not clear why they would try to stab her skull first, anyway.’

  ‘Can you say what poison was used?’ asked Alex.

  ‘No, we’ll need to run tests before we can say,’ she said, with a defensive gesture.

  Hugo couldn’t keep still.

  ‘But,’ he began, ‘would she have been conscious when they stabbed her? I mean . . .’

  Sonja smiled slightly. It was a warm smile.

  ‘I know what you’re wondering,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I have no answer to that. The girl could have been given some kind of sedative first, but I’m afraid I can’t confirm that either, at this point.’

  There was silence. Hugo quietly cleared his throat and Alex caught himself fiddling with his wedding ring.

  He cleared his throat, too, a bit more loudly than Hugo.

  ‘And what’s the procedure now?’ he asked.

  ‘Your colleague knows that better than I do,’ said Sonja Lundin, nodding in Hugo’s direction.

  ‘We wait for the mother and grandparents to identify the child,’ he said firmly. ‘Unless we manage to link the case more closely to Umeå in the course of the day, the girl’s body will be sent to the forensic unit down in Solna this evening, so the complete autopsy will be done there. When did you say the mother and her parents were due?’

  Alex glanced at his watch.

  ‘They should be landing in about an hour.’

  Fredrika was very happy to find Peder far too absorbed in his own activities to ask where she had been and why she hadn’t gone to see Gabriel’s mother yet.

  Peder was just preparing a draft application to the examining magistrate when Fredrika came into his office.

  ‘We’re going to get him detained in his absence,’ said Peder, his eyes unnaturally wide open from the sudden boost to his adrenalin level.

  Other than that, he looked pretty rough. What had he been up to since the evening before? He really did look quite wild.

  Fredrika chose not to comment on Peder’s appearance out loud.

  ‘And we’re going to get a search warrant from the magistrate,’ he went on. ‘So get yourself off to his old ma’s. You said he had a room there, didn’t you?’

  Fredrika stopped short. Had she said that?

  ‘Yes,’ she said eventually, ‘he has.’

  ‘Right, then we need a warrant to let us search his house in Östermalm, his room at his mother’s, and his office,’ said Peder.

  ‘What are we looking for, officially I mean?’ said Fredrika.

  ‘Officially we’re looking for child porn, unofficially every fucking thing that can give us a clue where the guy’s got to. I just spoke to Alex, and it sounds as if the kid had poison injected straight into her head. So sick it’s beyond belief.’

  Fredrika swallowed. Yet another grotesque detail that had no natural place in the way she viewed the world.

  ‘We’re getting extra backup,’ Peder added. ‘Two more investigators to help us interview all the friends and acquaintances.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fredrika said guardedly.

  She considered asking who was standing in for Alex in his absence, but was reluctant to ask a question to which she didn’t want to hear the answer. Finally she asked it anyway.

  ‘Alex said I was,’ Peder said, so triumphantly that Fredrika felt rather sick.

  He’d been waiting for her to ask, just so he could answer. Typical of her to fall into the trap.

  ‘But Alex will be back this evening,’ Peder added, ‘unless we come up with anything to link this mess to Umeå.’

  Then he went on:

  ‘I’ll take one of the new pair with me out to Gabriel’s company and introduce him there. Gabriel and some of his colleagues seem to have been big buddies, so he might just have confided in them. You can set the other one – it’s a girl – to work on the people Sara knows.’

  Fredrika was about to comment on this when he burst out:

  ‘Heck, this is big! Three search warrants in one go, it’s not every day you get to be in on setting up a big operation like that,’ he said, so elated that Fredrika started wondering if he’d taken something to get so high.

  ‘A child has died,’ she said instead, her voice a monotone. ‘Pardon me for not joining in with your transports of delight.’

  And she walked out of Peder’s room to find her new workmate.

  Peder wondered initially whether he ought to go after Fredrika and give her a good dressing down. Who the hell was she to tell him he was out of order?

  Then he stopped himself. Fredrika was right, at least about this being a murder enquiry. But she was the one not respecting the fact, not him. Well he wasn’t going to sink to her level. And he certainly wasn’t going to let her spoil his good mood. If he could survive his talk with Ylva, or strictly speaking from Ylva, then he wasn’t going to let some stupid colleague get the better of him.

  Peder shuddered at the memory of Ylva’s call. She had been furious, to put it mildly, and it didn’t help that none of his fellow officers who she had rung during the night had been able to tell her where he was. Ylva had considered reporting him missing. Peder was deeply grateful that she hadn’t, but had fallen asleep on the sofa instead. He had promised they would talk properly when he got home, but also told her about the latest developments in the missing child case. He was likely to be late home tonight, as well.

  He found it rather hard to admit it, but Ylva had been really shaken to hear that the girl had been murdered, and had immediately mellowed towards him. Suddenly she was a lot more understanding about his job. But unfortunately she still didn’t sound as though she quite believed he’d been working all night. He would have to learn to lie better, that was all there was to it. Or give up his sessions with Pia Nordh. He didn’t honestly think he could manage either of those things, but there was never any harm in having ambitions.

  Jimmy rang and wanted to talk. He was worried and anxious. He was going on a cookery course with the other people from his assisted living unit and wanted to know if Peder thought it would go all right.

  ‘Of course it will!’ said Peder in that extra positive tone he always used for talking to his brother. ‘You can do anything, you know!’

  ‘You sure?’ asked Jimmy, still not entirely convinced.

  ‘Sure,’ echoed Peder.

  Then the pictures came flooding into his mind again. From a time when everything had been different, when Jimmy had dared and Peder had been the scared one.

  ‘I can swing as high as anything, Pedda! I can swing higher than anybody else!’

  ‘Don’t believe you, don’t believe you!’

  ‘Yes I can, Pedda, I can swing highest in the whole street!’

  If Jimmy had been able to grow up undamaged, thought Peder, would he have turned out the stronger of the two of them? Or would he have got softer over time?

  Peder turned his attention back to his job. He knew Jimmy was the only person in the whole world he had never let down in his adult life. On the other hand, there was no one else to whom he owed so much. And maybe no one else he lo
ved so unreservedly.

  He had almost all the basic data in place for the examining magistrate. A couple of little details, and then it would be ready. Once he had dropped off his new colleague at the SatCom place, he would follow Fredrika out to Sebastiansson’s mother’s house. It wasn’t every day you got the chance to rummage about in a real-live rich man’s mansion.

  Thoughts were circulating more smoothly in Peder’s head now a few hours had passed since his brutal awakening. He had drunk loads of fluid and taken more Panadol. He debated whether he should drive himself to the various search premises. Probably not. But then who would check on a policeman on his way to execute a search warrant? Who could be so unlucky? Not Peder Rydh, anyway. He was convinced of that.

  Ellen Lind was very upset. She had always expected Lilian Sebastiansson to be returned to her mother in the long run, and now they knew she had been murdered, Ellen was badly shaken. She tried to ring her lover on his mobile, even though he had not been very nice the day before, but all she got was his voicemail.

  ‘You’re through to Carl. Please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

  Ellen sighed. Maybe they could see each other for a while later in the evening? There was little likelihood of getting hold of a babysitter at such short notice, but some day there would have to be an end to all this hassle. She needed him. And she wanted to feel she had a right to feel that way. She wanted to feel it was okay – sometimes – to need him. Was that too much to ask?

  She left him a voicemail message and could not stop herself crying as she explained what had happened. That poor girl, just lying there outside the hospital. Naked, on her back, in the rain.

  Ellen stared blankly at her computer screen. She hardly knew what she was supposed to be doing. She was speechless with admiration at the sight of Peder and Fredrika dashing up and down the corridor, always caught up in some new stage of the investigation.

  Alex had left clear instructions for Ellen by telephone before he set off for Umeå: she was not to say a word about the developments in the Lilian case until the girl’s mother had formally identified her. Under no circumstances was she to go into any detail. She was definitely not to say anything about the child being scalped, or about the child pornography found on the computer of the dead girl’s father. Ellen had been following the online news outlets and had seen that the discovery of the child was the top story on every paper’s website.