For the Missing

by Lina Bengtsdotter

  ‘So you think I’m a psychopath?’

  ‘I don’t know you.’ Charlie took her shoes off and sat down next to him on the jetty. ‘Are you?’

  William smiled. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t admit it if I was.’

  This boy, Charlie thought, was certainly no dummy.

  ‘Did you love her?’ she said. ‘Did you love Annabelle?’

  William shrugged. He guessed so. For a while, there had even been talk about moving in together somewhere after graduation, maybe in Stockholm or Gothenburg. Annabelle was probably going to study and he was going to find a job. It shouldn’t be hard to find a job in one of the bigger cities. He didn’t mind where it was, so long as he didn’t have to go to school any more. He was really fucking fed up with that. But now everything felt meaningless, graduating, the future, the celebration, because if something horrible had happened to Annabelle, if she wasn’t found alive, there was nothing to be happy about.

  Charlie said she understood, that she was sure many of Annabelle’s friends felt the same way right now. She hoped, she said, without sounding particularly convincing, that he would get to celebrate his graduation.

  ‘I already miss her,’ William said. ‘I missed her even before she went missing.’

  ‘I understand,’ Charlie said. ‘Was it rough on you when it ended?’

  William nodded and said it had been pretty rough.

  ‘Did you fight the night she disappeared?’

  ‘No, at least not as far as I remember.’

  Charlie couldn’t stop herself from asking if he had trouble remembering things sometimes.

  William’s eyes flashed. No, he didn’t, no more than other people. But maybe Charlie was aware that alcohol could have an effect on a person’s ability to recall things.

  All too aware, Charlie thought to herself. She continued asking the usual questions, about how Annabelle had acted, if she had seemed sad that night, when he last saw her, what state she had been in at that point. If he had noticed anything unusual. But she found out nothing new.

  With further questioning seeming pointless, Charlie realised her last means of getting him to talk was silence. She focused on the water, on the pond skaters skidding across the surface, the shoals of tiny fish underneath, the reddish, wavy sand bottom.

  She was just about to give up when William cleared his throat.

  ‘I felt like the reason she dumped me was because she’d met someone else.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Isn’t that how it usually goes? You find someone new and dump the one you have?’

  Charlie nodded and said that happened, but that there could be many other reasons for dumping someone.

  ‘Jonas and Svante were talking about that night, that I’d been replaced or whatever. Jonas had seen Annabelle with someone else.’

  ‘Did you ask who it was?’

  William shook his head. He hadn’t asked; he didn’t want to know.

  ‘You should have told me that right away,’ Charlie said.

  ‘It didn’t even occur to me. People always talk.’

  ‘You and Svante Linder. How close are you?’

  ‘Pretty close, though Svante gets weird when he drinks. Well, to be honest, we both do.’

  ‘I’ve been told you had a fight down the pub, that you were fighting about Annabelle.’

  William gave her a surprised look and Charlie realised she might have exaggerated a little.

  ‘And last night,’ she pressed on, ‘last night at the pub, you looked like you were at odds.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ William said, ‘just a bit of a bust-up. I don’t even remember what it was about. And we’ve never had a fight about Annabelle. If you’re talking about what happened on Waterfall Day …’

  ‘Waterfall Day?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s when they open the inlet gates. It’s the party that night.’

  Charlie knew what Waterfall Day was. The dam opening, the frothing water roaring down the cliffside. She had witnessed it many times herself as a child. But she hadn’t heard anything about that night, a few weeks previous.

  ‘So what happened?’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t Svante and me fighting. It was the two of us, putting Erik, the guy who owns the motel, in his place.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘He was groping Annabelle. And it makes no difference that things were over between us at that point, he can’t go around fucking groping girls against their will. So incredibly fucking disrespectful.’

  Charlie tried to look unperturbed.

  ‘Does Erik grope underage girls a lot?’

  ‘Not that I know. He’d had a lot to drink that night. By the end, he was barely able to serve his customers. Either way, I don’t think he’s ever going to touch Annabelle again. We scared him. I think we scared him pretty properly that time.’

  Charlie couldn’t remember reading anything about that incident in the interview records. Why had this not come to light sooner? There must have been a lot of witnesses.

  ‘Why has no one told us about this?’

  William shrugged. ‘Drunkenness maybe. And besides, it’s not like anyone thinks Erik has anything to do with Annabelle’s disappearance. He’s an upstanding family guy who went a bit wrong one night and couldn’t keep his hands to himself.’

  ‘And how can you be so sure he’s upstanding?’

  William shrugged again. It was just his opinon. Erik wasn’t exactly the type to kidnap young girls.

  ‘Do you know anyone who is?’ Charlie asked. ‘Who is the type to kidnap young girls?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

  ‘What I’m getting at is that that type might not be so easily identified.’

  ‘I guess not,’ William replied.

  ‘From now on, you’re going to leave it to the police to determine what’s important and what isn’t.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And if you remember anything else from that night, or anything else at all, call me.’ Charlie handed him her card and got to her feet.

  She could feel William’s eyes on her back as she walked away. Anders was nowhere to be seen, so she assumed he’d gone back up to the car.

  Who is William Stark? she pondered on her way back to the house. Is he the dumped boyfriend who consoles himself with his ex-girlfriend’s best friend, or is he more profoundly aggrieved than that? Impossible to know. But he had an alibi for the time around Annabelle’s disappearance. He’d stayed in the village shop until dawn.

  Her phone rang. The H on the screen. She was going to decline, but for some inexplicable reason her left middle finger was drawn to the green receiver button instead.

  ‘What do you want?’ Charlie said.

  But it wasn’t Hugo. It was a sobbing woman who introduced herself as Anna, Hugo’s wife.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ she said.

  Charlie stopped dead. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m just curious how a person thinks when they … You did know he was married, didn’t you?’

  Charlie considered playing ignorant, but realised it was too late for that, so instead she replied that she had been aware. She had known he was married, but surely that was Hugo’s problem, not hers.

  ‘It’s true what they say about you,’ Anna said. ‘It’s true that you don’t have a fucking semblance of a conscience, that you don’t … I get why Maria didn’t want you and Anders working together. I assume you’re fucking him too?’

  Charlie’s first impulse was to ask her to go to hell, but then she calmed herself.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she said.

  ‘I know enough. I know your sort. A lonely, bitter person who wants to destroy other people’s lives, who …’ Anna sobbed, caught her breath and continued. ‘Do you think you’re the only woman he’s amused himself with when he’s been bored?’

  ‘I think this is something you should discuss with your husband,’ Charlie said and hung up. She started walking fa
ster. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She tried to erase Anna’s words from her memory, do you think you’re the only woman? Why did she even care? After all, she’d known from the start that she was the other woman. And yet she didn’t want to believe that there had been others like her; she wanted what she had had with Hugo to have been something more, more than just lust. She thought about his over-the-top words about how beautiful and amazing she was.

  Watch out for men of big words, Betty had told her once. Men of big words are the worst. They may seem kind and even funny, but most of them are really stupid. Remember that, Charline.

  Charlie thought about Anna. How must a person feel in that kind of relationship? Why would they stay? And calling your husband’s mistress? She couldn’t understand it. If Charlie was ever to get married and then cheated on, she would never in a million years call and degrade herself like that. She would focus her wrath on the guilty party: the cheater.

  And what about your own guilt? A voice in her head insisted. What on earth were you thinking?

  Anders was standing by the car when she arrived.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it was Maria. Sam’s apparently running a temperature. She took him to A&E, but the doctors didn’t think he was in any danger. You see that I had to take it, right?’

  Charlie nodded and said she did. Then she felt ashamed for thinking that maybe Maria was overplaying things in order to control her husband.

  ‘I hope he feels better,’ she said.

  Anders nodded and said something about high fevers not being the same thing for children and adults, but that he had to take every call from Maria at the moment.

  Charlie thought to herself that that was no different from usual.

  ‘Did you get anything out of him?’ Anders asked when they were back in the car.

  ‘Yes, he said he’d heard Annabelle had somebody new. Jonas Landell told him that night, that he’d seen Annabelle with someone else. We have to talk to him, and then to Rebecka,’ she added. ‘If it turns out Jonas was telling the truth, that Annabelle was seeing someone, we have to talk to Rebecka about it. We have to ask her why she hasn’t mentioned it to us.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t know.’

  ‘She’s her best friend,’ Charlie retorted. ‘Of course she knows. And then there’s Erik, the guy from the motel.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘William told me he groped Annabelle during a party a few weeks ago. It turned into a fight; Svante and William roughed him up.’

  ‘I’ll grab Adnan or Micke and take care of those interviews,’ Anders said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you look like you need a rest. You’re really pale. Are you okay?’

  ‘It’s my head,’ Charlie said. ‘I just feel a bit dizzy.’

  Anders said he would drop her off at the motel so she could have a nap. Charlie tried to object. There was no need for him to exaggerate. The last few days had just been a bit intense.

  ‘I get that.’ Anders looked at her searchingly. ‘It must feel weird, I mean, coming back after such a long time. There must be a lot of memories and whatnot?’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Who?’ Charlie asked, even though she knew full well whom he meant.

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I miss her very much.’

  ‘It’s okay to cry,’ Anders said. He put a hand on her arm but quickly removed it again.

  ‘I know,’ Charlie said, ‘it’s just that …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t help.’

  There and then

  Alice and Rosa walk past the old mill house on the hill. Big, red and imposing, it casts its long shadow towards the smaller, boxy cottages further down the street. Rosa doesn’t like going close to the manor, as she calls it, but to get to the beach, they have to walk past it. Benjamin is sitting with his brother on a blanket in the grass. Benjamin is in the year above them at school. Rosa calls him stupid-head. Why? She says it’s because he’s … stupid. She doesn’t like stupid people.

  ‘What are you looking at, stupid-head?’ she shouts at Benjamin. And when he doesn’t respond, she walks up closer and asks what he’s reading.

  ‘Nothing,’ Benjamin says and shuts his book.

  ‘And what is that around your neck? Is it a necklace?’

  ‘No, it’s a birthstone with a genuine pearl.’

  ‘And here I was thinking it looks just like a necklace.’

  ‘Necklace,’ John-John says and touches his neck, where he has the same kind of necklace as his brother.

  Rosa shakes her head. Boys with necklaces. And birthstones, she’s never heard of birthstones.

  ‘Our dad gave them to us,’ Benjamin says. ‘They’re real pearls.’

  ‘They’re real pearls,’ Rosa mocks. And then to Alice: ‘I don’t get why anyone would buy little kids real pearls. Do you, Alice?’

  Alice shakes her head, because she doesn’t get why anyone would buy real pearls at all.

  Benjamin gets up and says he’s not a little kid, that he’s actually older than them. Rosa retorts that she supposes she must have meant John-John.

  Then Benjamin’s mother comes out on the porch. She shouts at them to get off her property, right now.

  Rosa points to the ground and says they’re not even on their property, that they’re on public land, but Benjamin’s mother doesn’t care and for her information, they own the land on the other side of the fence too, all the way down to the lake as a matter of fact. And she wants Rosa to stay as far away from them as is humanly possible.

  Rosa just stands there, staring at the stupid-head’s mother. Alice thinks she’s creepy when she stares like that, without moving. She grabs Rosa’s arm and tries to drag her away, but she can’t.

  ‘Maybe I should get my mum as well,’ Rosa says.

  And then Benjamin’s mother retorts that Miss Manner is probably busy with other things, that she’s probably lying on her back at home, working.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ Rosa says. ‘What the fucking is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. Everyone knows what your mother does for a living. She might as well have a sign on the roof.’

  ‘I’m guessing your husband told you that?’ Rosa says.

  She has barely finished the sentence before Benjamin’s mother is there, slapping her face.

  ‘Are you crying?’ Alice says when they reach the water’s edge. ‘Are you sad?’

  Rosa shakes her head. She doesn’t seem to notice the tears rolling down her cheeks. Alice sits down next to her.

  ‘Never mind that family,’ she says. ‘They’re full of it.’

  Rosa says nothing. She picks so hard at a mosquito bite on her shin, it starts bleeding. Then she turns to Alice and says she’s glad they’re best friends, that everything is easier now that she has a sister, that you might say they’ve saved each other.

  27

  Charlie went up to the motel room. Anders was right. She really did need a rest. She lay down on her bed, pulled out her phone and googled Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Annabel Lee’.

  According to Wikipedia, it was the last one he wrote. The death of a young woman, the source said, was a theme he returned to again and again in his works.

  She opened her photos and studied the picture she had taken of the village shop wall. Who had written it? Annabelle herself?

  She swiped back one step and found the picture of the number on the same wall, the one you were supposed to call if you wanted to fuck. Without pausing to think it over, she dialled it. After three rings, a girl answered.

  Charlie recognised her voice but couldn’t place it.

  ‘Who is this?’ she said.

  ‘Sara. Who is this?’

  ‘This is Charlie, from the police.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Charlie detected a hint of anxiety in her voice.

  ‘I …
I just wanted to check in on you.’

  ‘I’m okay. Thanks for driving me home yesterday.’

  ‘No worries.’ There was a pause. Charlie didn’t know what else to say. A man shouted something in the background.

  ‘I have to go,’ Sara said. ‘Maybe I’ll see you around.’

  When Charlie woke up, it took her several seconds to figure out where she was. How long had she been asleep? The room swayed when she stood up. She found her phone and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw it had only been an hour. She called Anders.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ve just talked to Jonas. He’s confirmed William’s information about Annabelle seeing someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s what we don’t know. Jonas has seen her with someone, but it was from a distance when he was out on the lake. He didn’t see who it was. He saw them on an island, Golden Island or some such.’

  ‘Gold Island,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. He’s sure it was Annabelle because of her hair. But the only thing he could tell us about the man was that he was older. At least that was the feeling he had.’

  ‘Didn’t he ask Annabelle who it was?’

  ‘Yes, but she just told him he was mistaken, that she hadn’t been there.’

  ‘And Erik?’

  ‘He says it was just a drunken mistake, that he must have misinterpreted Annabelle’s signals. It wasn’t a big deal, according to him.’

  ‘Does he have an alibi for the night she disappeared?’

  ‘Yes, he worked until midnight and his wife says he was home twenty minutes later.’

  ‘Working’s one word for it,’ Charlie said. ‘And the wife? Could she be wrong about the time?’

  ‘She says she’s sure, that she’s a light sleeper, that she woke up when he got in and that it was twenty past twelve. That doesn’t give him much time to get up to any dodgy business.’

  ‘She’s his wife though,’ Charlie said. ‘Don’t forget that she’s his wife.’

  That day

  The school day was finally over. How had she managed to get through it? Annabelle took a shortcut across the meadow and thought about a couple of lines she’d read in Jane Eyre.