Unwanted

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Maria stopped, and Fredrika was in no doubt this time. Maria was crying.

  ‘To . . . what?’ Fredrika asked quietly.

  ‘To save her,’ Maria sobbed. ‘I could see how she was getting knocked about in that relationship. And then she got pregnant. After that we lost contact completely, and we haven’t been in touch since. I couldn’t bear seeing her with him. And to be honest, I couldn’t stand seeing the way she just gave up and died when she was with him, and didn’t lift a finger to break free.’

  Fredrika instinctively disagreed with Maria about Sara Sebastiansson not lifting a finger to break free from Gabriel, but she kept it to herself. Instead she said:

  ‘Well, she’s definitely broken free now. In fact, she’s desperately alone.’

  Maria wiped away a tear from her cheek.

  ‘How does she look?’

  Fredrika, who was just packing away her things to get up and go, raised her head.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sara? I wonder how she looks today.’

  Fredrika gave a slight smile.

  ‘She’s got striking red hair, long. Beautiful, you could say. And her toenails are painted blue.’

  The tears rose in Maria’s eyes again.

  ‘Just like before,’ she whispered. ‘That’s the way she’s always looked.’

  Peder Rydh was reflecting on life in general and his marriage to Ylva in particular. He scratched his forehead, as he always did when he was stressed and unsettled. He discreetly scratched his groin, too. He itched all over this morning.

  An inveterate fidget, he dashed out into the corridor for his second coffee of the morning. Then he slunk back into his room again. To be on the safe side, he shut the door. He wanted a bit of peace.

  Yesterday evening had been a nightmare.

  ‘Go home and do something you enjoy,’ Alex had said.

  Enjoy wasn’t really the way Peder would describe how he felt about last night. The boys had been asleep when he got home. It was several days since he had got home early enough to play with the boys and spend some time with them.

  And then there was Ylva. They started by talking to each other as ‘grown-up human beings’, but after a few short exchanges, Ylva went completely crazy.

  ‘Do you think I don’t know what you’re up to?’ she shouted. ‘Do you?’

  How many times had he seen her cry this last year, for Pete’s sake? How many?

  Peder had only one weapon to defend himself with, and he almost died of shame recalling how he had used it.

  ‘Don’t you get how serious this case is?’ he shouted back. ‘Don’t you get how bloody awful I feel with dead kids popping up all over Sweden when I’m a dad myself? Holy shit, is it that odd if I sleep over at work now and then? Eh?’

  He won, of course. Ylva had no concrete proof of her suspicions, and she was so worn down by the past difficult year that she didn’t really trust her own intuition any longer. It ended up with her sitting on the floor, crying and saying she was sorry. And Peder took her in his arms, stroked her hair and said he forgave her. Then he went in to the boys and sat silently in the dark between their beds. Daddy’s home now, guys.

  Peder’s face went hot as he remembered it.

  Arsehole.

  He had been a complete arsehole.

  The memory of it made him start to shake. God al-migh-ty.

  I’m a bad person, he thought. And a bad dad. A useless dad. A disgusting man. A . . .

  Ellen Lind broke into his thoughts with her insistent knocking on his door. He knew it was her although he couldn’t see her. She had a special way of knocking.

  She opened the door before he had a chance to call ‘Come in’.

  ‘Sorry to barge in,’ she said, ‘but a detective from Jönköping has just called, asking to speak to someone in Alex’s team. Alex wants you to take it, because he’s on the phone to someone in Umeå.’

  Peder, confused, stared at Ellen.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and waited while she went back to transfer the call.

  He heard a woman’s voice at the other end. It sounded pleasant, assured; Peder guessed he was speaking to a middle-aged woman.

  She introduced herself as Anna Sandgren and said she was a DI with the crime squad in the Jönköping county force.

  ‘Uhuh,’ said Peder, mainly just to have something to say.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,’ said Anna Sandgren.

  Peder squirmed.

  ‘I’m Peder Rydh,’ he said. ‘DI with the Stockholm police, and I’m one of Alex Recht’s special investigation team.’

  ‘Ah, right,’ said Anna Sandgren, still with that slightly singing intonation she had. ‘I’m ringing about a woman we found dead yesterday morning.’

  Peder listened. That was the same morning Lilian was found.

  ‘Her grandmother reported her missing. She said her granddaughter had rung on the Wednesday evening and said she was coming to stay. She apparently had protected identity status after some violence in an earlier relationship, and she also used to come and hide up at her old granny’s when things got difficult.’

  ‘Right,’ said Peder guardedly, waiting for an explanation of how this could possibly have anything to do with him.

  ‘But there was no word from her that evening as she’d promised,’ Anna Sandgren went on, ‘so the old lady rang the police and asked us to go round there to see if anything had happened to her. We sent a patrol car and everything seemed normal. But the grandmother insisted we ought to go into the flat. And when we did, we found her murdered in her bed. Strangled.’

  Peder frowned. He still could not fathom why the call had been put through to him, of all people.

  ‘We made a brief search of the flat and found her mobile. There weren’t many numbers in it and it hadn’t been used much. But one of the numbers she’d saved was yours.’

  Anna Sandgren stopped.

  ‘Ours?’ gulped Peder, not really understanding what she meant.

  ‘We checked all the numbers on her phone, and one of them was the number the Stockholm police issued to the media for anyone with information about that missing child who turned up in Umeå.’

  Peder sat up straighter.

  ‘As far as we can see, though the number’s saved there, she didn’t ever ring it from her mobile. But we thought you ought to know. Especially as we have so little to go on at our end.’

  Peder swallowed. Jönköping. Had Jönköping come up in any context in the investigation?

  ‘Do you know when she died?’ he asked.

  ‘Probably a couple of hours after she rang her grandmother and told them she was coming to stay,’ Anna Sandgren replied. ‘Forensics will be getting back to us with a more exact time, but preliminary observations indicate she died around ten on Wednesday evening. She’d bought her ticket online for the train up to Umeå where the grandmother lives, and was meant to . . .’

  ‘Umeå?’ Peder interrupted.

  ‘Yes, Umeå. She was meant to be catching the train from Jönköping the morning we found her dead. Yesterday, that is.’

  Peder’s heart was beating faster.

  ‘Does the grandmother know who he is? The man who abused her so she needed a protected identity?’

  ‘It’s a terribly complicated story,’ sighed Anna Sandgren resignedly, ‘but the short version is this: Nora, that’s the victim’s name, got together with a man when she was living in a small place not far from Umeå, six or seven years back. It wasn’t what you’d call a healthy relationship. Nora wasn’t very well herself at the time. She was off work with depression, seems to have had it very tough growing up in a series of foster homes. Both her parents are dead.’

  Peder took a deep breath.

  ‘You ought really to talk to Nora’s grandmother face to face,’ said Anna Sandgren. ‘We’ve only spoken to her on the phone, and she was very shaken by the news of Nora’s death. But she was able to tell me that she’d never met the man in question, and that Nora sudden
ly felt the need to get away from the Umeå area and just went. She was able to get protected identity without having to identify the man, because she had such well-documented injuries. I don’t think the police made any particular efforts to find him. It would have been the same here, if we hadn’t even had a name to go on.’

  ‘And here,’ Peder said without thinking.

  ‘Well now you know what’s happened, anyway,’ said Anna Sandgren to wind up the call. ‘We’ll keep you informed on the progress of our investigation, of course, but as things stand we’ve no leads on the murderer at all.’

  She gave a dry laugh.

  ‘Well no, that was a slight exaggeration. We have got one, and that’s a footprint we found in Nora’s hall. A man’s Ecco shoe, size 46.’

  Fredrika Bergman got back to HQ about lunchtime. She was mystified to see Alex sitting alone at the table in the Den. His brow was knitted, and he was writing furiously on a sheet of paper in front of him.

  He’s woken up now, Fredrika thought to herself. He lost his bearings early on and wandered off in the wrong direction, but now he’s back on track.

  ‘Are we having a meeting?’ she asked out loud.

  Alex jumped.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m just sitting thinking. How did it go in Uppsala?’

  Fredrika reflected.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. But there’s something weird about that writing course.’

  ‘How do you mean, “weird”?’

  ‘Something happened up there, or just beforehand, that made Sara decide to stay up there much longer than her friend.’

  Alex stared ahead, pondering what she had said.

  ‘I’d like to go up to Umeå,’ said Fredrika, taking one step over the threshold.

  ‘Umeå?’ Alex repeated, surprised.

  ‘Yes, and talk to whoever was running that course, ask them if they know what it was that had that effect on Sara.’

  Before Alex could reply, Fredrika added:

  ‘And I thought I’d have another word with Sara herself. If she’s up to it, that is, and assuming she’s back in Stockholm.’

  ‘She’s back,’ said Alex. ‘She and her parents got back this morning.’

  ‘Did you know the parents are very religious?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex. ‘No, I didn’t. Could that be relevant here?’

  ‘It could,’ said Fredrika. ‘It could.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alex. ‘Well then, you’d better come in and tell me more about it.’

  He ventured a smile as Fredrika came into the room. She sat down at the opposite side of the table.

  ‘Where’s Peder?’ she asked.

  ‘On his way to Umeå,’ said Peder, right behind her.

  He had come into the meeting room with a holdall slung over one shoulder.

  Like a boy, thought Fredrika. Like a boy on his way to football practice.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Peder surveyed the room irritably.

  ‘Are we supposed to be having a meeting now?’

  Alex gave a chuckle.

  ‘No, not really. But since you’re both here . . .’

  Peder sank onto a chair. He had already told Alex everything, so he briefed Fredrika in a single sentence.

  ‘They’ve found a murdered woman in Jönköping who had our public hotline number stored in her mobile, and her grandmother lives in Umeå.’

  Fredrika gave a start.

  ‘In Jönköping?’

  ‘Yep. We’ve no idea of course why she had it in her phone, especially as she doesn’t ever seem to have used it to make a call, but . . .’

  ‘But she did make a call,’ Fredrika broke in.

  Alex and Peder stared at her.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Ellen told us about a woman who wanted to stay anonymous, who thought she knew the perpetrator and had once lived with him.’

  Alex was suddenly tense.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re right. But how do you link that to the woman in Jönköping?’

  ‘The call was made from a public telephone in Jönköping,’ said Fredrika. ‘Mats, the analyst, checked it out.’

  ‘How long have we known that?’ asked Peder indignantly.

  ‘We dismissed the call as unimportant,’ Fredrika retorted, equally indignantly. ‘And Jönköping wasn’t in the picture at all at that point.’

  Alex raised a hand to stop them.

  ‘And it’s all there in Mats’s database, for anyone who asks,’ Fredrika swiftly added.

  Peder’s face dropped.

  ‘I didn’t check this with him,’ he admitted.

  He glanced in Alex’s direction.

  Alex gave a couple of dry little coughs.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s assume it was the murdered woman who rang. Is there any written record of what she said?’

  Fredrika gave an eager nod.

  ‘Ellen made a note; I think that’s in the database, too.’

  Peder leapt to his feet.

  ‘I’ll go and talk to Mats,’ he said, and was out of the room before either Alex or Fredrika had time to say anything.

  Fredrika gave an almost imperceptible sigh.

  ‘Wait a second,’ called Alex, and Peder came back into the room.

  ‘Fredrika apparently needs to go to Umeå as well. But I don’t see any point in sending you both up there just now.’

  Fredrika and Peder listened, both on tenterhooks.

  ‘We’ve already had several calls about the woman with the dog in Flemingsberg,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve been with the analyst, er . . .’

  ‘Mats,’ supplied Fredrika.

  ‘Yes, Mats, and we went through them all, and there are two that definitely need following up. One was from the proprietor of a car hire place. He thinks he hired out a car to a woman who looked a bit like the one in the picture. And then a woman rang and said she was the girl’s foster mother some years ago. She gave us a provisional description to go on.’

  Silence descended on the room. Fredrika and Peder glanced at each other.

  ‘It might just be,’ Alex said slowly, enunciating every syllable, ‘that it would be more appropriate for Fredrika to go to Umeå to take care of a poor old grandmother and a writing teacher. And for you, Peder, to deal with the car hire man and the foster mother.’

  Peder and Fredrika nodded to each other in agreement.

  ‘Is there anything else I should know about the dead woman in Jönköping?’ asked Fredrika.

  Peder stuck a memo under her nose.

  ‘Here’s everything we’ve got,’ he said curtly.

  Fredrika began to read.

  ‘A pair of Ecco shoes size 46,’ she said softly.

  ‘We mustn’t get our hopes up,’ said Alex, who had already seen the memo, ‘but it’s certainly a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  Fredrika read on, frowning.

  ‘Good, that’s decided then,’ said Alex.

  A sceptical Fredrika watched Alex and Peder as they hurried out of the room.

  Chaos, she thought. These men live at the epicentre of chaos. I honestly don’t think they’d be able to breathe anywhere else.

  At that moment, Alex turned round.

  ‘By the way,’ he said very loudly.

  Peder and Fredrika both listened. Ellen put her head out of her office.

  ‘I contacted the National Crime Squad with what we got from Gabriel Sebastiansson’s emails,’ he said. ‘Apparently “Daddy-Long-Legs” is well known in those circles. The Crime Squad is gearing up for a major move against him and his network and was very glad of our input. I was to pass on their thanks.’

  Peder Rydh had had certain preconceptions about the police world when he applied for a place on the training scheme ten years before.

  The first was that the police force was a place where stuff really happened. The second was that being a police officer was an important profession. And the third was that other
people looked up to the police.

  That third point had been a crucial one for Peder. Getting respect. Not that he wasn’t used to people showing him respect. But this was a different kind of respect, one that went deeper.

  And he certainly did find himself respected. The only slightly strange thing was that since he had left the uniformed branch and was in plain clothes, people perceived him as less of an authority figure and treated him accordingly.

  The proprietor of the car hire firm who had rung in to say he recognized the picture of the girl at Flemingsberg station was a case in point. When Peder arrived the man regarded him very suspiciously until he showed his ID. He then lowered his guard a little but still wasn’t entirely satisfied.

  Peder glanced around him to get the measure of the place. It was a little office in the heart of Södermalm. The posters in the windows offered both car hire and driving lessons. Not a very usual combination. And there was nothing in the office to indicate that any kind of driver instruction was conducted on the premises.

  The other man saw Peder surveying the scene.

  ‘The driving school’s downstairs,’ he said peevishly. ‘If it’s them you’re looking for.’

  Peder smiled.

  ‘I was just taking a little look round,’ he said. ‘Good place for a car hire firm, I should think.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  What a bloody misery guts, thought Peder angrily, but kept his smile on and said, ‘I just meant there can’t be too much competition round here. Most of the car hire places are at the big petrol stations, aren’t they, so they’re a fair way out of the city centre?’

  When the man did not respond, and went on looking annoyed, Peder decided not to waste any more energy trying to be pleasant.

  ‘You rang and said you thought you’d seen this woman,’ he said briskly, putting the drawing of the Flemingsberg woman on the counter separating him from the other man.

  The man studied the picture.

  ‘Yes, that looks like her, the one who was here.’

  ‘When was she here?’ Peder asked.

  The car hire man frowned and opened a large desk diary he had in front of him.