Fredrika was so worked up that she could hardly sit still in the car. Music blared from the loudspeakers at top volume. Swan Lake. For the briefest of brief moments, Fredrika was back in the life she had lived before The Accident. Music that made her feel alive, an occupation to which she devoted herself passionately.
And then her mother’s voice:
Play so somebody could dance to the music; always remember the Invisible Dancer.
Fredrika could almost see the Invisible Dancer dancing Swan Lake on the bonnet of her car. For the first time in ages, she felt alive. She hadn’t the words to describe how glorious it felt.
From pure euphoria, she texted Spencer as soon as she had parked outside HQ and thanked him again for a wonderful night. Her fingers wanted to write something more amorous. Reason won as usual, and she slipped the phone into her bag without firing off any declarations of love. But she had that feeling again. That feeling of something being different, something having changed.
We’ve been pushing the boundaries recently, she thought. We see each other more often and we’ve started putting how much we mean to each other into words.
There were still people working at their desks as Fredrika offloaded her handbag and jacket in her little room. In the police world, success was measured in terms of the number of square metres of office space you were given. Rumour had it that the security services were planning to move out of HQ and house their staff in a new building with open plan offices. Fredrika sniggered at the thought of the outcry there would be if a plan like that were ever put forward in her department. She could hear her colleague Håkan raising his voice in protest:
‘You expect me to work in an open plan office? When I’ve waited twenty-two years to move into the office next to mine!’
Fredrika was in a good mood, to put it mildly. But as she stood in the doorway of Alex’s room a moment or two later, she felt all the energy and appetite drain from her.
‘Has something happened?’ she asked automatically when she saw the grim look on Alex’s face.
She immediately regretted her choice of words. Two little girls had been murdered in under a week – that alone made the phrasing of her question ludicrous.
But Alex wasn’t one to notice the choice of words. Fredrika more than made up for him in that respect.
‘So did your sudden flying visit produce anything?’ was all he said.
Fredrika had surprised him several times in recent days. He had high expectations of her now.
‘I think I know what crime the women had committed, and the reason why he’s punishing them,’ she said.
Alex raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ve got a theory, too,’ he smiled. ‘Shall we see if they match?’
Peder started by looking at all the men serving sentences for violation of a woman’s integrity who had been released since the previous November. There were far too many of them. He refined his search to a particular age group, men between forty and fifty.
He saw that most of the men had only served very short sentences. It was seven years since Nora had known the man; what had he been doing since? Were there other women who had been through the same thing, but who they just hadn’t found yet? Worse still, were there more children who had died in similar circumstances? Peder felt close to panic. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why had they assumed these were the murderer’s first victims?
Then he calmed down a bit. If there were any police officers in the country who had worked on similar cases over the past twenty years, they would undoubtedly have been in touch with their Stockholm colleagues by now. Unless the murderer had tried, and failed? Maybe he had abducted a child, but not gone through with the actual murder?
Peder shook his head in frustration. They had to take the risk of concentrating their efforts, had to dare to choose which line to pursue first. Peder jotted down the options he had ruled out. ‘Glad to see you prioritizing!’ Fredrika would have said if she’d seen him.
Peder decided to ask Alex to delegate to some other member of the team those lines of enquiry he still considered important, but less pressing.
He looked at the lists he had collated. There were altogether too many people on them with sentences way too short. If he bore in mind what the team had agreed on:
1. that their murderer had for some reason been inactive since he lost control of Nora, and had ‘recruited’ Jelena in her place;
2. that he was probably on their files and might have been convicted of some grievous crime of violence that had kept him locked up for most of the period since Nora left him;
3. that he was in all probability mentally ill;
4. that he possibly visited prostitutes
then there shouldn’t be that many names left on the list. But how did you sift out that kind of information?
Peder worked frantically at his keyboard.
Police files weren’t damn well designed for this kind of investigation, he thought angrily.
He’d had help in retrieving the first set of data he had worked on. But the help, that is to say Ellen, had finished for the day, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Perhaps it was time for Peder to call it a day, too, go home and get some sleep.
The very thought filled Peder with anxiety. He didn’t feel the least bit inclined to go home and be confronted with his crumbling marriage. He missed the children. But he was intensely tired of their mother.
‘What the hell shall I do?’ muttered Peder. ‘What in fuck’s name shall I do?’
He’d heard nothing from Pia Nordh since he left her flat. He was thankful for that. He felt thoroughly ashamed of the way he had behaved that morning. And it scared him that it felt like several years ago, when it fact it was only a few days.
Peder looked down at his conscientiously scribbled notes. He read through them. He read through them again.
He opened his filing cabinet and got out the diagram he and Fredrika had drawn up with timelines for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s movements the day his daughter was kidnapped. He took a blank sheet of paper out of his desk drawer and started drawing a new timeline.
It’s all too rushed, he thought as he drew. There are too few of us with too much to get into our heads too quickly; that’s why we keep missing little things.
Magdalena Gregersdotter’s parents had sold their house in Bromma over fifteen years ago. If Natalie’s murder had anything to do with Magdalena’s family home, then the murderer must have had contact with Magdalena – in some unfathomable way – before her parents sold the house.
So let’s see. First the murderer was in Stockholm for a time. Somehow he became aware of Magdalena, probably when she committed the ‘crime’ that she was now being punished for. Then he moved – temporarily or permanently – to Umeå. He stayed there long enough to come across both Sara Sebastiansson and Nora from Jönköping, now deceased.
Peder paused for thought, then decided to try refining his search through the bulk of material still further. The man they were looking for had probably committed the crime for which he served his prison sentence in Umeå, or somewhere nearby.
Peder went through his list. Then he added a final bullet point:
The man had not necessarily been in prison for seven years. He could have been sentenced to psychiatric care.
There was a knock at Peder’s door.
‘Can you come along for a very quick meeting in the Den before we call it a day?’
‘Sure,’ answered Alex, as he fired off his email request to Ellen.
She would have to deal with it in the morning.
‘Abortion?’ Peder said in amazement.
‘Yes,’ replied Fredrika.
Peder’s drooping eyes were suddenly wide open.
‘Did Magdalena Gregersdotter have an abortion, too? Remember the psychologist said the women had probably both committed the same “crime” . . .’
Fredrika gave an eager nod.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t had a chan
ce to talk to Magdalena yet. I’ll get round there tomorrow morning.’
‘Could he have been the doctor who performed their abortions?’ Peder wondered aloud.
‘We mustn’t get ahead of ourselves,’ warned Alex, holding up a hand. ‘First we need to establish that Magdalena did have an abortion. And if so, we must try to clarify why he crept in and put her dead child on the bathroom floor of her parents’ old house, and not at the hospital where the abortion was carried out.’
‘In the old days, women did their own abortions,’ began Peder, but was silenced by both Fredrika and Alex.
Peder decided to keep his mouth shut.
‘And we must certainly find out,’ said Alex in a businesslike tone, ‘why we weren’t told this earlier.’
‘Because you think in the way you just sounded,’ Fredrika said frankly.
Peder and Alex looked blank.
‘What you just said was: “why weren’t we told this earlier?”’ she explained. ‘“Weren’t told”, rather than didn’t find out. If we thought of facts as things we have to uncover – by asking the right questions, for example – then we wouldn’t be so vulnerable and reliant on the information other people feel like giving us.’
Alex and Peder exchanged glances. They both wore a faint smile.
‘Don’t you think?’ asked Fredrika, suddenly unsure.
Alex laughed out loud for the first time in days.
‘You could well have a point,’ he grinned.
Fredrika flushed.
‘Sara didn’t want to say anything about the abortion, but we all kind of assumed that if she had some specific connection to the hospital and not just Umeå in general, she’d tell us about it of her own accord,’ Alex said thoughtfully, looking serious again. ‘That was a mistake. We should have stuck to our guns, pressed her harder even though it didn’t feel quite right.’
He gathered up his papers.
‘We’ll carry on in the morning,’ he said. ‘It’s late and we’ve come a long way today. I’d even say a very long way.’
‘That’s why it doesn’t feel right to go home just now,’ Peder said grumpily.
‘I know it seems tough, but we all need a bit of rest,’ Alex insisted. ‘We’ll reconvene in the morning. I’ve already rung round to warn everyone it’ll be a full day’s work tomorrow. We’ll have to take our days off some other time.’
Fredrika glanced out of the window at the dull grey, cloudy summer sky.
‘We can take them when summer comes,’ she said drily.
THE LAST DAY
Ellen Lind was the first one in on Sunday morning. She was the first to arrive and the first to leave. She liked working that way.
She sent a text to her daughter as she turned on her computer. She had asked the children about a hundred times if they really thought they’d be all right at home on their own without a babysitter. They had assured her at least as many times that they’d be absolutely fine.
Peder’s request was at the top of Ellen’s inbox. She opened the email. Good grief, what sort of searches did that man think you could do in the police files? He still hadn’t registered that he wasn’t on the set of some American TV crime series, but in the real police world.
Ellen decided to give it a go anyway. She rang her contact at the National Police Board for help. The woman sounded cross and moaned about having to go in.
‘Bloody hell, on a Sunday,’ she muttered.
Ellen made no comment. For her, these were exceptional circumstances. And though they were downright grotesque ones, she had to admit she thought it was all rather exciting.
Less exciting, and more frustrating, was the fact that she hadn’t heard a word from Carl. She had kept her mobile switched on overnight in the hope that he’d be in touch, but he hadn’t sent so much as a line. Ellen didn’t really think there was any reason to doubt Carl’s love, and felt it was more likely that something had happened to him. If she had heard nothing by that evening, she would start ringing round the hospitals.
And yet.
And yet there was something not quite right. A scarcely perceptible feeling of anxiety began to grow and creep over Ellen. However hard she tried, she couldn’t shake it off.
Feeling restless, she went to empty the fax machine, which had been receiving messages during the night. Fredrika had a number of faxes from Umeå University Hospital. Ellen frowned as she leafed through the pile. It was clearly the medical record of somebody called Sara Lagerås. There was a short message for Fredrika, too.
‘Patient file herewith. Permission received from Sara Sebastiansson by phone. Regards, Sonja Lundin.’
Ellen was immediately curious.
Whatever had she missed by going home first last night?
Fredrika Bergman’s head was as heavy as lead when she woke up on Sunday morning. She reached wearily for the alarm clock. It wasn’t due to ring for another ten minutes. She burrowed her head as far into the pillow as it would go. Must rest, must rest.
Leaving the flat an hour later, she remembered she hadn’t devoted much attention to the phone message from the Adoption Centre. Not enough attention, at any rate. Fredrika excused this by concluding it was far too big a decision to make while she was caught up in such a weighty and far-reaching police investigation.
Fredrika focused on the job in hand. She drove straight round to Magdalena Gregersdotter’s and rang on the way to say she was coming. She stressed that she would need to speak to Magdalena alone.
A tall, dark-haired woman opened the door when she rang the bell.
‘Magdalena?’ asked Fredrika, realizing she hadn’t the faintest idea what Natalie’s mother looked like.
‘No,’ replied the woman, holding out a cool hand. ‘I’m Esther, her sister.’
Esther showed Fredrika into the family living room.
Neat and tidy, she thought. This family has no truck with any kind of messiness or disorder. A very appealing characteristic, in Fredrika’s world.
She stood alone in the middle of the living room. So many homes were opened to you when you rang at the door in your professional police capacity. What an enormous stock of trust her employer enjoyed in ordinary domestic settings. The thought almost made her head swim.
Then Magdalena Gregersdotter came into the room, and Fredrika was dragged back to reality.
It struck her that Magdalena was not at all the same kind of woman as Sara Sebastiansson. A woman who would never paint her toenails blue; you could tell by the way she carried herself, by the impression of integrity she gave, that her experiences were far removed from those of the more exuberant Sara. If she admitted to seeing through an abortion in her parents’ bathroom, Fredrika was going to have a bit of difficulty believing it.
‘Shall we sit down?’ she prompted gently.
At least she hoped it sounded gentle. She knew all too well how abrupt she could appear in certain situations.
They sat down. Magdalena perched on the edge of the sofa, Fredrika in a huge armchair. It was upholstered in a multicoloured fabric that contrasted starkly with the white walls. Fredrika couldn’t make up her mind if she thought it was attractive or disgusting.
‘Have you . . . got anywhere?’
The look in Magdalena’s eyes was plaintive.
‘I mean . . . in the investigation, that is. Have you found someone?’
Someone. The magic word that hounded every police officer. Find someone. Pin someone down. Hold someone responsible.
‘We haven’t identified an individual, but we’re working on a theory that could prove very fruitful for the investigation,’ Fredrika said.
Magdalena nodded and nodded. Good, good, good.
‘And it’s our theory that brings me here today,’ Fredrika went on, now she had been given a starting point. ‘I really only have one question for you,’ she said, catching the other woman’s dulled eye.
Fredrika deliberately paused to make sure she had Magdalena’s undivided attention.
‘It’s a t
erribly private question, and it feels grotesque to have to ask it, but . . .’
‘I’ll answer anything you ask,’ Magdalena broke in. ‘Anything at all.’
‘All right,’ said Fredrika, feeling oddly reassured. ‘All right.’
She took a deep breath.
‘I wonder whether you’ve ever had an abortion.’
Magdalena stared at her.
‘An abortion?’ she repeated.
Fredrika nodded in confirmation.
Magdalena did not drop her eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said huskily. ‘But it was a long time ago. Almost twenty years.’
Fredrika waited with bated breath.
‘It was just after I left home. I was with a man almost fifteen years older than me. He was married, but he promised to leave his wife for me.’
Magdalena gave a hollow laugh.
‘But he never did, of course. He went into a total panic when I told him I was pregnant. He shouted at me, told me to get rid of it straight away.’
Magdalena shook her head.
‘It wasn’t a lot to ask,’ she said curtly. ‘I got rid of it, of course. And I never saw him again.’
‘Where was the actual abortion done?’ asked Fredrika.
‘Here in Stockholm, at Söder hospital,’ Magdalena said quickly. ‘But it was so early in the pregnancy that I had to wait several weeks before I could have it done.’
Fredrika could see the other woman’s eyes clouding again.
‘It was all very weird. You see, the abortion didn’t work, but they didn’t realize. So I went home thinking the baby was gone, when in fact it was still inside me. A few days later I felt very ill, and miscarried. My body completed the abortion by rejecting the baby, as it were. I think that’s why I never managed to get pregnant again. The infection I got afterwards made me sterile.’
She fell silent. Fredrika swallowed and looked for the right words to formulate the vital question:
‘Where was the abortion completed?’ she asked in a low voice.
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