Nor did Frank, presumably.
‘How can I help you?’ Frank asked, sitting down opposite Erik and clasping his hands on the table.
‘Have you heard about this missing girl?’
‘The one who saw the Carlsten murders?’ Frank shook his head. ‘Dreadful. Just dreadful.’
‘Did you know them?’
‘I knew of them, but I’d never actually met them even though they lived only about five kilometres from here.’ Frank shook his head again.
‘We really need to find the girl,’ Erik went on, leaning forward to add weight to his words.
‘Of course.’
‘I thought of … or rather, Pia thought of you,’ Erik corrected himself. ‘You know the forest so well, and she thought the dogs might be able to help.’
Frank met his gaze, and Erik was struck by how sceptical he looked.
‘She’s been missing for a while, hasn’t she?’ Frank said, rubbing his stubbly chin.
‘More than two days – fifty, fifty-five hours maybe. But we have items of clothing belonging to her, if that’s any use.’
‘Two days … that’s a long time if you’re expecting the dogs to track her.’
Erik nodded. Frank got up and went over to the coffee machine, where the last of the brown liquid was dripping into the pot.
‘I’d be happy to help, you know that, but the carer finishes in two hours, and I can’t leave Hampus on his own.’
‘No, of course not.’ It was hard to argue against Hampus’s needs, but then he had an idea. After all, he was married to the chair of the local council, and the council was responsible for the help Frank received. He straightened up and made his final attempt.
‘If you think the dogs might be of some use, then I can make sure someone comes in to look after the boy.’ Frank poured himself a cup of coffee in silence, then replaced the pot and switched off the machine with a sigh. ‘If you feel up to it, of course,’ Erik added.
‘I’m up to it.’ Frank turned and leaned against the draining board, sipping his coffee as he thought things over. ‘What kind of person would I be if I didn’t even try?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Give me fifteen minutes to sort myself out.’
Frank took his cup with him and headed upstairs. Erik leaned back, feeling pleased with himself. Admittedly it had been Pia’s idea to go and see Frank, but he was the one who had persuaded him to join in the search – by thinking outside the box. Just imagine if he could go home tonight and tell Pia that Frank and his dogs had found the girl! How would she react? She would be pleased, of course, perhaps even grateful. Two states of mind he had seen very little of lately.
She worked too hard.
Torsby wasn’t the biggest town in the country – it had been number 185 on the list the last time Pia checked – but there was a lot to do. A huge amount, in fact. The last few months had been unusually tough. It was the beginning of an election year, with all that implied in terms of planning and positioning. Then there was the scandal about the food at one of the council’s care homes for the elderly back in February, a newspaper article about inadequate record keeping in official vehicles, FilboCorp and the endless protests, the debate on salaries, an aggressive opposition that had already attacked next year’s budget even though it wasn’t due to be discussed until June, and an outbreak of TB at one of the preschools. And now five murders and a missing child.
Erik didn’t know how Pia coped. Day in, day out.
She was always a politician – maybe more of a politician than a wife and mother recently, to be honest. That situation was unlikely to improve if she got what she wanted. Last month the party leadership in the Värmland district had decided to put Pia’s name forward as a member of the executive committee, which meant she would join the top rank of politicians. She was unlikely to devote less time to her career if that happened; there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and if she was going to spend more of those hours to her work, she would have to take them away from something else.
From him and the family.
He knew it was mean-spirited to think that way, but he couldn’t help it. He was working in Karlstad, and the commute meant that they already saw too little of one another, in his opinion. At the same time, Pia was passionate about her role. She wanted to bring about change, and she really believed she could do it. Her aim was to make Torsby better for everyone. Her commitment and dedication far surpassed anything he had seen among her colleagues, and that was probably why she was on her way to Stockholm. She always put the interests of the party and the town first.
Maybe that was why he was sitting here hoping that Frank and the dogs would find the girl today – so that he would become the most important thing in Pia’s life again.
Even if it was only for one night.
It was cold.
Much colder than she had expected it to be.
The still air inside the cave couldn’t be far above zero. She curled up in the crevice she had found, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins. That helped a little, but it couldn’t compensate for the icy chill coming from the damp rock. She realised her teeth were chattering. She took several deep breaths and tried to relax as best she could. That was a bit better …
She wondered if she should take off her jacket and lie on it, but decided against it. She was probably getting more benefit from wearing it.
She closed her eyes.
It didn’t make any difference. The darkness was so dense that it didn’t matter whether her eyes were open or not.
She closed them anyway.
The only thing she could hear was her own breathing. The silence was so complete that she might as well have been deaf. If she went blind and deaf in here, she wouldn’t even notice. But the darkness and the silence suited her.
No one would find her.
No one found the boys, the ones who died in here.
She had no intention of dying.
So why was she here? So that no one would find her. Was she planning on staying here for ever? How would she survive? The boys had died. Had she come here to die?
She pushed aside the questions, feeling irritated. She had come here so that no one would find her. She didn’t want to be found. It was that simple. Not now, anyway. In a while, maybe. She hadn’t thought any further ahead than that. She just wanted to run away to a safe place. That was all. Eventually she was going to have to think about the next step.
She would probably try and get hold of her mum. She would know what to do.
But she didn’t have her phone. She hadn’t thought about that when she went back into the house; it had been on charge next to her bed when she and Fred were watching TV, when the doorbell rang, when the shot …
No!
She wasn’t going to think about it. What happened back there. That was on the outside, it didn’t exist on the inside. On the inside there was silence and stillness. That was where she must go. All of her. She must shut herself in completely. Now she was here she could focus on that. Eventually she would have to work out what to do, but not now.
Maybe never.
Maybe she had everything she needed on the inside. If only she could find her way there. All of her. Everything she was. Perhaps she would never have to leave the calm of the place that was not a place.
The stillness. The oblivion.
She didn’t even notice when she fell asleep.
Sebastian emerged from the toilet and went back to the slightly claustrophobic incident room. He glanced into various offices on passing, and met Fredrika’s gaze as she sat at her desk. A nod and a little smile, then he moved on. Even though he sensed that she would accept an invitation to dinner, and that it would probably lead to sex either at her place or in his flowery blue boudoir, he didn’t ask. He couldn’t be bothered.
She was too quiet. She had given him too little to go on while they were having coffee, made it impossible for him to work out whether he was on the right l
ines or not, forced him to make too many guesses, to go back, regroup, change his approach too many times. Seduction had to be a joint effort if he was going to stay interested; this was a one-man show. So he had let it go and made a serious attempt to contribute by doing what he was employed to do: profiling the perpetrator.
An hour later Erik had come in and told him what they had found out so far about Ceder’s circle of acquaintances. There wasn’t much. His friends down in Filipstad had no idea who he could have lent the shotgun to. They didn’t hunt and never talked about such things, they said. The neighbours described him as a lone wolf; they had no social contact with him. They said hello if they happened to see him, but that was very rare. Erik went over to the map on the wall; the neighbours lived almost a kilometre from Ceder’s place.
Sebastian merely nodded to himself. After considering the information at his disposal, he decided he needed to rethink. He wasn’t convinced that Ceder had lied about the gun in order to protect someone he knew well; it could be that it was more important for him to avoid helping the police than to clear his own name.
The more Sebastian read about Jan Ceder, the more the man emerged as a classic, dyed-in-the-wool anti-authority figure.
Erik had explained that they had searched Ceder’s property again; according to Fabian, there was nothing to indicate that the killer had been inside the house. The most likely scenario was that Ceder had met him outside. Nor was there any clue as to where the shotgun might have been.
They were waiting for a list of calls from the mobile-phone operator, but nothing was listed following Ceder’s release. Admittedly he could have deleted a call; if that was the case, they would find out on Monday. The only person he had been in touch with online was a woman in the Ukraine, so if he had been thinking of blackmail, it looked as though he hadn’t had time to put his plan into practice before he was murdered.
Sebastian had thanked Erik, but told him it was best if he went through everything with Torkel and the others when they got back. Erik’s expression had darkened.
‘Surely you can do that?’ he had said without any attempt to hide his annoyance.
‘You know those people who take messages and pass them on to other people? They’re called secretaries, and I am not a secretary.’
Sebastian couldn’t deny that he enjoyed winding Erik up; he made his displeasure so obvious. Erik had left the room without another word, and Sebastian had gone back to his work.
It had been dark for an hour when he heard the others return. He went out into the corridor; Vanja was leading the way, closely followed by Erik, Torkel and Billy. Sebastian didn’t even need to ask; their weary expressions said it all.
They hadn’t found Nicole.
He didn’t want to be a mass murderer, but that was what he was, according to Wikipedia.
‘A person who deliberately kills more than three people during one event.’
You do what you have to do, he thought as he sat there in front of the computer.
Surely it would have said online if they had found her?
He had surfed the Net, searched all the newspaper sites. Local, national and Norwegian.
Nothing.
The latest update in Expressen had been posted over three hours ago:
DARKNESS HALTS SEARCH
The text beneath provided no fresh information; it was just a summary of all the other articles that had appeared during the day.
The murders. The missing girl.
Once again, the police had not denied the possibility that the girl might have seen the killer.
The tabloids loved this kind of story, of course. First of all an entire family had been murdered, then a suspect released from police custody had also been found dead. The icing on the cake was an innocent child who had witnessed the horrific killings, and was now missing.
On the run?
Alone in the vast forests of Värmland.
He had even found an article in Aftonbladet where they had spoken to an ‘expert’ about the greatest dangers she would face out there.
Hypothermia
Thirst
Broken bones as a result of a fall
Shock, which could lead to irrational behaviour.
And the last one, which had made him laugh out loud:
Wolves
Anything to heighten the tension surrounding the search, he assumed. Which was why there would be banner headlines if she’d been found.
Nicole Carlsten.
How could he have missed her?
That was irrelevant now. He had missed her. He hadn’t even thought about whether the Carlstens might have visitors. No point in brooding over it. What was done was done.
He closed the laptop, leaned back in his chair and considered his next move. He went through the ‘expert’s’ list in his head.
Hypothermia was unlikely at this time of year – well into April. Nor was dying of thirst a particularly realistic scenario – there were lakes and streams everywhere. It was of course possible that she might injure herself in the forest, and he had no idea what post-traumatic shock could do to a child. What did irrational behaviour mean? Was she likely to drown herself? Step out in front of a timber wagon? He couldn’t rely on it, whatever it might be. It sounded too good to be true.
Which left wolves. No one, apart from that zookeeper in Kolmården, had been killed by a wolf in Sweden since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and he wasn’t expecting Nicole to change that.
Therefore, she would probably survive.
Which meant she would be found. Sooner or later.
The fact that he hadn’t seen her didn’t necessarily mean that she hadn’t seen him.
You do what you have to do, even if you don’t always like it.
That’s what his mother used to say. All the time. When she got up at five o’clock in the morning to start one of her three jobs, when they moved in with her sister after his father threw them out, when she carried on working in spite of the cancer diagnosis, when she had his dog put down because his aunt thought it was shedding hairs all over the place, every time life put obstacles in her way. You do what you have to do.
Life isn’t fair.
Another of his mother’s aphorisms, which meant she never even tried to change their situation.
He reached forward and switched off the desk lamp, then sat back in the darkness. Gazed out of the window at the night sky, studded with stars. It was going to be a cold night.
Maybe she would freeze to death after all?
He allowed his thoughts to wander.
The girl. If she had seen him, why didn’t she go to the police? She was ten years old. Weren’t all kids taught from a very young age to call 112 or to go and speak to a nice kind policeman? So where the hell was she? Could she be deliberately hiding? She hadn’t made a sound when he was in the house, when he systematically killed every scrap of security around her. Shock, or considered behaviour?
She was the boys’ cousin. Apparently she had been a frequent visitor, but it was unlikely that she knew the surrounding area all that well. So if she didn’t want to go to the police, where could she have gone?
He sensed that the answer lay within reach. The final piece of the puzzle was right there in front of him, but he couldn’t see it.
But it was there. The answer.
He would find it, there was no doubt about that. He just had to stop thinking about it. That was how he worked. He had to push the problem aside, allow it to marinate in the back of his mind without paying any attention to it. Allow his brain to function in peace. He would find the answer, and then he would have to take the appropriate action.
He had thought … no, that was wrong, he had hoped that Jan Ceder would be the last. Nicole Carlsten had nothing to do with anything.
But you do what you have to do.
And she had to die.
Life isn’t fair.
Billy pushed the computer to one side. There wasn’t much more he could do tonight. He h
ad catalogued all the information from Fabian, updated the database, and printed out everything he wanted to put up on the wall the following day. He’d had a brief chat with Maya on Skype; she had asked how the investigation was going, and he had told her about his day.
‘How awful,’ she had said when she heard about the missing girl. Billy could only agree. Maya wondered when he was coming home; he said truthfully that he didn’t know. They both said how much they loved and missed each other, and agreed to talk again tomorrow.
Tomorrow. Another day in the forest, Billy guessed. Organising and joining a search party wasn’t his favourite aspect of police work; perhaps he could ask Torkel if he could do something else instead? If twice as many volunteers turned up from Missing People, they should be able to manage without him. Sebastian had got away with it today, after all.
Billy looked at his watch. It was too early to go to bed, and the thought of channel-hopping didn’t appeal. He was restless. Should he get changed and go for a run? Clear his mind? Then again, he’d had enough fresh air and exercise in the forest today. He couldn’t be the only person who was bored, could he?
★ ★ ★
She seemed surprised to see him when she opened the door.
He held up a bottle of chilled white wine which he had managed to acquire from the restaurant on the ground floor, with a certain amount of persuasion.
‘Unexpected,’ she said when she had taken the first sip.
‘What is?’
‘You turning up with a bottle.’
‘I was bored,’ Billy replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘And it’s a long time since we … hung out, you and me.’
Vanja smiled to herself. She didn’t know anyone else of Billy’s age who used so many expressions normally associated with teenagers. The age difference between them was only three years, but he seemed so much younger than her in so many ways. He was on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, none of which she used. Not that she was against them in any way – she just didn’t see the point of them. Who would she follow, and who would follow her? If there was one thing social media excelled at, it was highlighting a lack of friends and acquaintances.
The Silent Girl (Sebastian Bergman 4) Page 13