‘Sure it can keep?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Alex replied. ‘I’ll carry on refining my little theory, and call you later. Though there was one other thing, too.’
Peder guffawed. ‘A theory?’ he said. ‘You ought to be ringing Fredrika, not me.’
‘I will, naturally. But as I said, there was another thing. Sara Sebastiansson’s got an ex in Norrköping. A small-time crook she was with just before she went on that writing course in Umeå. Think you could have a quick word with him before you come back to Stockholm?’
‘In Norrköping?’ Peder said dubiously.
‘Yes,’ Alex said cautiously, ‘it’s on your way . . .’
‘Okay,’ Peder said. ‘Okay. As long as you can fill me in on the background.’
Alex sounded relieved.
‘I’ll get Fredrika to give you a ring later,’ he promised. ‘Best of luck!’
‘Thanks,’ said Peder, and ended the call.
He smiled at the lady standing on the front steps of the house and went towards her.
Birgitta Franke served homemade cinnamon buns and coffee. Peder couldn’t remember when he’d last been offered such delicious looking buns. He took two.
Birgitta Franke seemed a kindly but no-nonsense sort of woman. Her voice was gruff, but the expression in her eyes was warm. She had grey hair, but a fairly young-looking face. She was, in short, a woman who had learned from what life had thrown at her, Peder surmised.
Peder asked discreetly if he could check her ID card, and saw then that she had just passed her 55th birthday. He wished her a belated happy birthday and praised her baking again. She thanked him and smiled. Her smile made little wrinkles appear round her eyes. They suited her.
‘You rang the police hotline about an identikit picture we’d issued,’ he put in at last, to get away from the small talk about buns and kitchen furnishings.
‘Yes,’ said Birgitta. ‘I did. And what I’d like to know first of all is why she’s wanted.’
Peder drank some more of his coffee, looked at Birgitta’s curtains and thought of his grandmother for the first time in years.
‘She’s not wanted as such, nor formally under suspicion. It’s just that we’d like to have a talk to her, because we think she has information that has a crucial bearing on this case. I’m afraid I can’t go into what sort of information it is.’
Birgitta nodded thoughtfully.
For some reason, Peder’s mind went to Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother. That old hag had plenty to learn from Birgitta when it came to how to communicate with other people.
Birgitta leapt up from the kitchen table and went out into the hall. Peder heard her open a drawer. She came back carrying a large photograph album, which she put down in front of Peder, and then turned over a few pages.
‘Here,’ she said, indicating the photographs. ‘This is where it starts.’
Peder stared at the pictures, which showed a younger version of Birgitta, a man of the same age who Peder could not identify, and a girl who with a little stretch of the imagination could be said to resemble the Flemingsberg woman. There was a boy in two of the shots, as well.
‘Monika came to us when she was thirteen,’ Birgitta began her story. ‘It was rather different being a foster parent in those days. There weren’t as many children in need of a new home as there are nowadays, and the general view was that a bit of love and tolerance could solve most problems.’
Birgitta gave a slight sigh and pulled her coffee cup towards her.
‘But it wasn’t like that with Monika,’ she sighed. ‘Monika was what my husband called damaged, not entirely normal. To look at these pictures, you might think she was almost like anyone else. A blonde girl with lovely eyes and delicate features. But inside, she didn’t function. Wrongly programmed, you might say these days, if you worked with computers.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Peder, leafing through the album.
More pictures of Monika and her foster parents. Monika was not smiling in a single one. But Birgitta was right. She had nice eyes and fine facial features.
‘Her background was so dreadful that looking back, we hardly understood how we could have taken her on in the first place,’ said Birgitta, resting her head in her hands. ‘Though I can honestly say we weren’t given the full picture until after disaster struck. And by then it was too late. More coffee?’ she said.
Peder looked up from the album.
‘Yes please,’ he said automatically. ‘Where’s your husband, by the way?’
‘He’s at work,’ answered Birgitta. ‘But he’ll be back in an hour or two if you’d like to stay and eat with us this evening.’
Peder had to smile.
‘That’s kind of you, but I’m afraid I won’t have time.’
Birgitta smiled back.
‘What a pity,’ she said, ‘because you seem such a nice lad.’
She reached for the coffee jug and poured some for them both.
‘Where was I?’ she said, and supplied the answer herself. ‘Oh yes, the girl’s background.’
She got up and went out to the hall again. She came back with a file.
‘This is where my husband and I kept all the information we were given about our foster children,’ she said proudly, putting the file in front of Peder. ‘You see, we couldn’t have any children ourselves, so we decided to foster instead.’
She had a rather satisfied expression as she flicked through the file for Peder.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘this is what social services sent us before she came. The rest was classified, so I’ve no copies of that.’
Peder pushed the photograph album to one side and read the papers from the social service department.
13-year-old girl, Monika Sander, from a very unsettled background, requires immediate placement with a loving family within a stable, structured framework. The child’s mother lost custody when Monika was three, and has had very limited contact with her since.
Monika was taken into care as a result of her mother’s alcohol and drug addiction problems. The mother has had a succession of male sexual partners since the girl’s birth, and is probably a prostitute. The father disappeared off the scene at a very early stage when he was killed in a car crash. The mother’s problems began after the father’s accident.
The girl was in her first foster home for three years. The foster parents then separated and the girl could not be kept on. She went through a succession of short-stay fostering arrangements until she was eight, and then lived in a children’s home for a year. She was then placed in a foster home that was expected to offer her a long-term solution.
The girl’s schooling has been disrupted from a very early stage by her difficult circumstances. There were suspicions that she had been abused, but investigations could not substantiate this. Monika has found it difficult to socialize with other children. From her third school year, she has been receiving individual remedial tuition, and has been placed in a special class with only six pupils. This has worked relatively well, though it is still not entirely satisfactory.
Peder read two more pages detailing how the girl’s schooling had fallen by the wayside. By the time she came to live with the Frankes, she had already been arrested once, on suspicion of shoplifting and theft.
His thoughts flew at once to the woman in Jönköping. Hadn’t she, too, grown up in a succession of foster homes?
‘I see,’ he said when he had finished reading. ‘And you mean there was other information you and your husband should have been given, apart from all this?’
Birgitta nodded and took a few sips of coffee.
‘We meant so well,’ she said, looking Peder in the eye. ‘We thought we could be the support the girl needed in life. And God knows we tried. But it was all futile.’
‘Did you have other foster children here at the same time?’ Peder asked, thinking of the boy in some of the photographs.
‘No,’ said Birgitta. ‘If it’s the young man
in the photos you’re thinking of, that’s my nephew. He was the same age as Monika, so we thought they might enjoy each other’s company. And they were due to go to the same school.’
Birgitta gave a faint smile.
‘It didn’t work, of course. My nephew was very tidy and organized even at that age. He couldn’t stand her, said she was nuts, disturbed.’
‘Because she stole stuff?’
‘Because she was frightened of odd things,’ said Birgitta. ‘She found any kind of social occasion difficult and made herself scarce. She could be angry and all over you one minute and collapse into a tearful little heap the next. She had violent nightmares about her past; she’d wake up in the middle of the night, yelling. Drenched with sweat. But she never told us what she’d been dreaming, we could only imagine.’
Peder felt weary. That was the obvious drawback to police work: you hardly ever got to talk to, or about, easy-going, unproblematic people.
‘How long was she with you?’ he asked.
‘Two years,’ Birgitta told him. ‘Then we’d had enough. She gave up going to school almost entirely; she would disappear for long periods and then turn up and not tell us where she’d been. And then there were her various illegal activities: stealing, smoking hash.’
‘Boyfriends?’ Peder asked.
‘I never met any, but of course she had boyfriends.’
Peder frowned.
‘And what was it you wish they’d told you before you took her on?’
Birgitta crumpled.
‘That she was originally adopted,’ she said quietly.
‘Sorry?’
‘That the woman who was identified as her mother in the social services report you just read wasn’t Monika’s biological mother. Monika was adopted.’
‘But how on earth could a woman like that get approval to adopt?’ Peder asked in bewilderment.
‘Because what the report says is true: the adoptive mother’s problems only started when her husband died. Or quite possibly they started much earlier, but until then she was living a perfectly normal life with a home, a job, a car. Then things went rapidly downhill. The mother had apparently moved in some pretty socially unacceptable circles when she was younger, and she drifted back to them when she was left alone with the girl and lost her job.’
‘Where did Monika come from originally?’ asked Peder.
‘Somewhere in the Baltic states,’ replied Birgitta, and then shook her head. ‘I don’t quite remember which country, or the exact circumstances of the adoption.’
Peder’s brain was working furiously to process all this new information.
‘Who told you? That she was adopted?’
‘One of the case workers,’ Birgitta sighed. ‘But I never saw it in black and white. The social service department really mismanaged the whole Monika case. They should have intervened much sooner in her life. You could say she was doubly let down: first by her biological mother and then by her adoptive one.’
Birgitta hesitated.
‘And then maybe by another foster family, too,’ she said, ‘but that isn’t clear.’
Peder read the social services report again. Then he flicked randomly through the album. The photographs showed the little family in various settings. At Christmas and Easter. On holidays and outings.
‘We tried,’ said Birgitta Franke, her voice faltering. ‘We tried, but we just couldn’t.’
‘Do you know what happened to her afterwards?’ asked Peder. ‘After she left you?’
‘She went into some kind of residential treatment centre for six months, but she must have run away, oh, ten times or more. Once she even came back here. Then they tried to place her with another family, but that didn’t work out, either. And then all of a sudden she turned eighteen and wasn’t a minor any longer, and since then I haven’t heard a thing about her. Until I saw the picture in the paper, that is.’
Peder gently closed the album in front of him.
‘But how did you recognize her?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I can see some similarities between the drawing and the girl in your photos, but . . .’
He shook his head.
‘How do you know it’s the same girl?’
Birgitta’s eyes shone.
‘The necklace,’ she said with a smile. ‘She’s still wearing the necklace we gave her at her confirmation, just before she moved out.’
Peder grabbed up the identikit picture of the woman at the station. He had not registered the fact before, but sure enough she had a necklace on. It was a silver lion on a chunky silver chain.
Birgitta opened the album again, and flicked through to the middle.
‘See?’ she asked, pointing.
Peder did see. It was the same necklace. The necklace in conjunction with the photo was enough to convince him. It must be the same girl.
‘She was obsessed with star signs,’ Birgitta told him. ‘That was why we gave it to her. At first she didn’t want to get confirmed at all, but we tempted her with a course at a lovely centre out in the archipelago, and said we’d give her a nice present, too. We thought that kind of social group might be good for her. But she made trouble, of course. She stole things from the others, it emerged later.’
Birgitta began clearing the table.
‘That was when we decided we’d had enough, really,’ she said. ‘If you steal when you’re on a confirmation course, then there can’t be much decency in you. But we let her keep the necklace, since she liked it so much.’
Peder started noting down Monika’s details from the social services report. Monika Sander. Then he had a better idea.
‘Could I take this with me and make a copy?’ he asked, waving the document at Birgitta.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You can post it back to me. I like to keep tabs on which foster children I’ve had.’
Peder nodded.
He took the papers and got up slowly from the table.
‘And if anything else occurs to you, do give me a ring,’ he said in a friendly tone, putting his card on the table.
‘I promise I will,’ said Birgitta.
She added, ‘I must say, we never thought she would turn up in such ghastly circumstances.’
Peder stopped.
‘However could she have got drawn into such a web of horrible events?’
‘That’s what we’re wondering,’ said Peder. ‘That’s just what we’re wondering.’
Fredrika Bergman reached Umeå late in the afternoon. By the time the plane landed, her whole body was aching with fatigue. She turned on her mobile to find she had two new messages. It would be too late now, unfortunately, to interview Nora’s grandmother and Sara’s course tutor before the next day. She looked at her watch: it was almost half past five. Her flight had been delayed. She shrugged. There wasn’t really any rush. As long as she got the interviews done tomorrow, everything would be fine.
Fredrika had not had a chance to ring Peder with the background story on Sara’s ex as she had promised. She hoped he had somehow managed to get the information he needed before the interview.
Though she was tired, Fredrika felt strangely buoyed up. The investigation had finally broadened out, and in some peculiar way, she felt it was now on the right track. She wondered briefly where their first main suspect Gabriel could now be. It seemed likely his mother would have helped him leave the country. Fredrika gave a shiver at the thought of Teodora Sebastiansson’s house. There was something creepy about the whole property.
The evening sun was caressing the tarmac as Fredrika left the terminal building. While she waited for Alex to answer his phone, she allowed herself to stand with her eyes closed, basking a little in the sunshine. A warm breeze stirred the air.
Spring weather, thought Fredrika. This isn’t summer weather, there’s spring in the air.
Neither Alex nor Peder were answering their phones, so Fredrika resolutely picked up her case and walked towards the nearest taxi. She had booked a room in the plush old Town Hotel. Maybe
she could treat herself to a glass of wine on the verandah while she drew up the outline of the next morning’s work. Maybe while she was there she could have a proper think about the phone message from the adoption centre, too?
Fredrika almost panicked when the message came into her mind. Was she going to be called on to a decision at last? Was it time to start planning for life as a single mother? She suddenly found herself sobbing.
She tried to take a few deep breaths. She did not know why the call had upset her so much. There was no reason to be reacting like this. It was ludicrous for everything to come to a head this very minute, at a kerbside outside the terminal building at Umeå Airport. She looked about her in confusion. Had she ever been here before? She didn’t think so. She could not recall it if she had.
Fredrika’s phone rang as she got to the taxi. She and the driver slung her bags into the boot and she climbed into the back seat to take the call.
‘Another child’s been taken, a baby girl,’ Alex said, the strain audible in his voice.
Fredrika’s whole attention was suddenly focused. There wasn’t enough air in the back seat of the taxi. She pressed the button and the glass slid down.
The driver protested from in front.
‘You can’t just open the window like that!’ he barked. ‘What about my air conditioning?’
Fredrika hushed him with an urgent gesture.
‘How do we know it’s got anything to do with our case?’ she asked Alex.
‘About an hour after the baby went missing, the police found a parcel on the edge of the flowerbed near the front door of the block, and it had the baby’s clothes and nappy in it. And he’d chopped off a tiny tuft of hair that her mother had put a hairslide in.’
Fredrika did not know what to say.
‘What in God’s name . . . ,’ she began, and was taken aback by the force of her own language. ‘What do we do now?’
‘We work round the clock until we find whoever did this,’ Alex answered. ‘Peder should be in Norrköping to talk to Sara Sebastionsson’s ex just about now, and then he’s coming straight back to Stockholm. I’m on my way to the car to go and see the missing baby’s mother.’
Unwanted Page 24