Unwanted

MONDAY

Whenever he let his mind wander, for some reason he always came back to the case notes. It usually happened at night.

He lay motionless on his bed and looked up at a fly on the ceiling. He had never found darkness and rest easy to cope with. It was as though his defences were stripped away the moment the sun disappeared and fatigue and darkness crept up to enfold him. He hated feeling defenceless. A large part of his life had revolved around being on his guard, being prepared. Despite years of training, he found it incredibly hard to be prepared when he was resting. To be ready, he had to be awake. And he was used to not giving way to the fatigue that lingered in his body when he denied it sleep.

It was a long time since he had been woken at night by his own tears. It was a long time since the memories had hurt him and made him weak. In that respect, he had come a long way in his attempt to find peace.

And yet.

If he shut his eyes really tight, and if it was totally quiet all round him, he could see her in front of him. Her bulky form loomed out of the dark shadows and came lumbering towards him. Slowly, slowly, the way she always moved.

The memory of her scent still made him feel sick. Musty, sweet and powdery. Impossible to breathe in. Like the smell of the books in her library. And he could hear her voice:

‘You stubborn wretch,’ she hissed. ‘You worthless freak.’

And then she would grab him and grip him hard.

Her words were always followed by the pain and the punishment. By the fire. The memory of the fire was still there on parts of his body. He liked running his finger over the scars, knowing that he had survived.

When he was really small, he had assumed he was punished because he always did everything wrong. So, following his child’s logic, he tried to do everything right. Desperately, tenaciously. And still it all turned out wrong.

When he was older he understood better. There was simply nothing that was right. It wasn’t just his actions that were wrong and needed to be punished; it was his whole essence and existence. He was being punished for existing. If he had not existed, She would never have died.

‘You should never have existed!’ she howled into his face. ‘You’re evil, evil, evil!’

The crying that followed, after the fire, had to be in silence. Silent, always silent, so she wouldn’t hear. Because if she did, she would come back. Every time.

He remembered how her accusations had caused him intense anxiety for a long time. How could he ever come to terms with what she said he was guilty of? How could he ever pay for what he had done, or compensate for his sin?

The case notes.

He went to the hospital where She had been a patient and read Her notes. Primarily to get some concept of the full extent of his crime. He was of age by then. Of age, but eternally in debt as a result of his evil deeds. What he found in the notes, however, turned him quite unexpectedly from a debtor into a free man. With this liberation came strength and recovery. He found a new life, and new and important questions to answer. The question was no longer how he could compensate someone else. The question then was how he was to be compensated.

Lying there in the dark, he smiled faintly and cast a glance at the new doll he had chosen. He thought – he could never be sure – but he thought this one would last longer than the others. She didn’t need to deal with her past, as he himself had done. All she needed was a firm hand, his firm hand.

And plenty of love. His own special, guiding love.

He caressed her back gently. By mistake, or perhaps because he genuinely could not see the injuries he had inflicted on her, his hand passed right over one of the freshest bruises. It adorned one of her shoulder blades like a small dark pool. She awoke with a start and turned towards him. Her eyes shone with fear; she never knew what awaited her when darkness fell.

‘It’s time, Doll. We can begin.’

Her delicate face broke into a pretty, drowsy smile.

‘We’ll begin tomorrow,’ he whispered.

Then he rolled onto his back again and fixed his gaze on the fly once more. Wide awake and ready to begin. There could be no rest.

TUESDAY

It was in the middle of that summer of endless rain that the first child went missing. It all started on a Tuesday; an odd sort of a day that could have passed by like any other, but ended up being a day that profoundly changed the lives of a number of people. Henry Lindgren was one of them.

It was the third Tuesday in July, and Henry was doing an extra shift on the X2000 express train from Gothenburg to Stockholm. Henry had worked as a conductor for Swedish National Railways for more years than he cared to remember, and he couldn’t really imagine what would become of him on the day they forced him to retire. What would he do with all his free time, all alone?

Perhaps it was Henry Lindgren’s eye for detail that meant he could later recall so well the young woman who was to lose her child on that journey. The young woman with light auburn hair, in a green linen blouse and open-toed sandals that revealed toenails painted blue. If Henry and his wife had had a daughter, she would presumably have looked just like that, because his wife had been the reddest of redheads.

The auburn-haired woman’s little girl, however, was not in the least like her mother, Henry noted, as he clipped their tickets just after they pulled out of the station in Gothenburg. The girl’s hair was a dark, chestnut brown and fell in such soft waves that it looked almost unreal. It landed lightly on her shoulders and then somehow came forward to frame her little face. Her skin was darker than her mother’s, but her eyes were big and blue. There were tiny little clusters of freckles on the bridge of her nose, making her face look less doll-like. Henry smiled at her as he went past. She smiled back shyly. Henry thought the girl looked tired. She turned her head away and looked out of the window. Her head was resting against the back of the seat.

‘Lilian, take your shoes off if you’re going to put your feet up on the seat,’ Henry heard the woman say to the child just as he turned to clip the next passenger’s ticket.

When he turned back towards them, the child had kicked off her mauve sandals and tucked her feet up under her. The sandals were still there on the floor after she disappeared.

It was rather a rowdy journey from Gothenburg to Stockholm. Many of the passengers had travelled down to Sweden’s second city to see a world-class star in concert at the Ullevi Stadium. They were now returning on the morning train on which Henry was conductor.

First, Henry had problems in coach five where two young men had vomited on their seats. They were hung over from the previous night’s partying at Ullevi, and Henry had to dash off for cleaning fluid and a damp cloth. At about the same time, two younger girls got into a fight in coach three. A blonde girl accused a brunette of trying to steal her boyfriend. Henry tried to mediate, but to no avail, and the train did not really settle down until they were past Skövde. Then all the troublemakers finally dozed off, and Henry had a cup of coffee with Nellie, who worked in the buffet car. On his way back, Henry noticed that the auburn-haired woman and her daughter Lilian were asleep, too.

From then on it was a fairly uneventful journey until they were nearing Stockholm. It was the deputy conductor Arvid Melin who made the announcement just before they got to Flemingsberg, twenty kilometres or so short of the capital. The driver had been notified of a signalling problem on the final stretch to Stockholm Central, and there would therefore be a delay of five or possibly ten minutes to their journey.

While they were waiting at Flemingsberg, Henry noticed the auburn-haired woman quickly get off the train, alone. He watched her surreptitiously from the window of the tiny compartment in coach six that was reserved for the train crew. He saw her take a few determined steps across the platform, over to the other side where it was less crowded. She took something out of her handbag; could it be a mobile phone? He assumed the child must still be asleep in her seat. She certainly had been a little while ago, as the train thundered through Katrineholm. Henry sighed at himself. What on earth was he thinking of, spying on attractive women?

Henry looked away and started on the crossword in his magazine. He was to wonder time and again what would have happened if he had kept his eye on the woman on the platform. It made no difference how many people tried to persuade him that he couldn’t possibly have known, that he mustn’t reproach himself. Henry was, and forever would be, convinced that his eagerness to solve a crossword had destroyed a young mother’s life. There was absolutely nothing he could do to turn back the clock.

Henry was still busy with his crossword when he heard Arvid’s voice on the public-address system. All passengers were to return to their seats. The train was now ready to continue on its way to Stockholm.

Afterwards, nobody could recall seeing a young woman running after the train. But she must have done so, because it was only a few minutes later that Henry took an urgent call in the staff compartment. A young woman who had been sitting in seat six, coach two with her daughter had been left behind on the platform in Flemingsberg when the train set off again, and was now in a taxi on her way to central Stockholm. Her little daughter was therefore alone on the train.

‘Bugger it,’ said Henry as he hung up.

Why could he never delegate a single duty without something going wrong? Why could he never have a moment’s peace?

They never even discussed stopping the train at an intermediate station, since it was so close to its final destination. Henry made his way briskly to coach two, and realized it must have been the red-haired woman he’d been watching on the platform who had missed the train, since he recognized her daughter, now sitting alone. He reported back to the communication centre on his mobile phone that the girl was still asleep, and that there was surely no need to upset her with the news of her mother’s absence before they got to Stockholm. There was general agreement, and Henry promised to look after the girl personally when the train pulled in. Personally. A word that would ring in Henry’s head for a long time.

Just as the train went through Söder station on the southern outskirts, the girls in coach three started scuffling and screaming again. The sound of breaking glass reached Henry’s ears as a door slid open for a passenger to move between coaches two and three, and he had to leave the sleeping child. He made an urgent and agitated call to Arvid on the two-way radio.

‘Arvid, come straight to coach three!’ he barked.

Not a sound from his colleague.

The train had come to a halt with its characteristic hiss, like the heavy, wheezing breath of an old person, before Henry managed to separate the two girls.

‘Whore!’ shrieked the blonde one.

‘Slut!’ retorted her friend.

‘What a terrible way to behave,’ said an elderly lady who had just got up to retrieve her case from the rack above.

Henry edged swiftly past people who had started queuing in the aisle to get off the train and called over his shoulder:

‘Just make sure you leave the train right away, you two!’

As he spoke, he was already on his way to coach two. He just hoped the child hadn’t woken up. But he had never been far away, after all.

Henry forged his way onward, knocking into several people as he covered the short distance back, and afterwards he swore he’d been away no more than three minutes.

But the number of minutes, however small, changed nothing.

When he got back to coach two, the sleeping child had gone. Her mauve sandals were still there on the floor. And the train was disgorging onto the platform all those people who had travelled under Henry Lindgren’s protection from Gothenburg to Stockholm.

Alex Recht had been a policeman for more than a quarter of a century. He therefore felt he could claim to have wide experience of police work, to have built up over the years a significant level of professional competence, and to have developed a finely tuned sense of intuition. He possessed, he was often told, a good gut instinct.

Few things were more important to a policeman than gut instinct. It was the hallmark of a skilled police officer, the ultimate way of identifying who was made of the right stuff and who wasn’t. Gut instinct was never a substitute for facts, but it could complement them. When all the facts were on the table, all the pieces of the puzzle identified, the trick was to understand what you were looking at and assemble the fragments of knowledge you had in front of you into a whole.

‘Many are called, but few are chosen,’ Alex’s father had said in the speech he had made to his son when he got his first police appointment.

Alex’s father had in actual fact been hoping his son would go into the church, like all the other firstborn sons in the family before him. He found it very hard to resign himself to the fact that his son had chosen the police in preference.

‘Being a police officer involves a sort of calling, too,’ Alex said in an attempt to mollify him.

His father thought about that for a few months, and then let it be known that he intended to accept and respect his son’s choice of profession. Perhaps the matter was also simplified somewhat by the fact that Alex’s brother later decided to enter the priesthood. At any rate, Alex was eternally grateful to his brother.

Alex liked working with people who, just like him, felt a particular sense of vocation in the job. He liked working with people who shared his intuition and a well-developed feeling for what was fact and what was nonsense.

Maybe, he thought to himself as he sat at the wheel on the way to Stockholm Central, maybe that was why he couldn’t really warm to his new colleague, Fredrika Bergman. She seemed to consider herself neither called to her job, nor particularly good at it. But then he didn’t really expect her police career to last very long.

Alex glanced surreptitiously at the figure in the passenger seat beside him. She was sitting up incredibly straight. He had initially wondered if she had a military background. He had even hoped that might be the case. But however often he went through her CV, he couldn’t find a single line to hint that she had spent so much as an hour in the armed forces. Alex had sighed. Then she must be a gymnast, that was all it could be, because no ordinary woman who had done nothing more exciting than go to university would ever be that bloody straight-backed.

Alex cleared his throat quietly and wondered if he ought to say anything about the case before they got there. After all, Fredrika had never had to deal with this sort of business before. Their eyes met briefly and then Alex turned his gaze back to the road.

‘Lot of traffic today,’ he muttered.

As if there were days when inner city Stockholm was empty of cars.

In his many years in the police, Alex had dealt with a fair number of missing children. His work on these cases had gradually convinced him of the truth of the saying: ‘Children don’t vanish, people lose them.’ In almost every case, almost every case, behind every lost child there was a lost parent. Some lax individual who in Alex’s view should never have had children in the first place. It needn’t necessarily be someone with a harmful lifestyle or alcohol problems. It could just as well be someone who worked far too much, who was out with friends far too often and far too late, or someone who simply didn’t pay enough attention to their child. If children took up the space in adults’ lives that they should, they went missing far less often. At least that was what Alex had concluded.

The clouds hung thick and dark in the sky and a faint rumble presaged thunder as they got out of the car. The air was incredibly heavy and humid. It was the sort of day when you longed for rain and thunder to make the air more breathable. A flash of lightning etched itself dully on the clouds somewhere over the Old Town. There was another storm approaching.

Alex and Fredrika hurried in through the main entrance to Stockholm Central. Alex took a call from the mobile of the third member of the investigating team, Peder Rydh, to say he was on his way. Alex was relieved. It wouldn’t have felt right starting an investigation like this with no one but a piece of office furniture like Fredrika.

It was after half past three by the time they got to platform seventeen where the train had pulled in to become the subject of a standard crime scene investigation. Swedish National Railways had been informed that no precise time could be given for the train to be put back in service, which in due course led to the late running of several trains that day. There were only a few people on the platform not in police uniform. Alex guessed that the red-haired woman looking exhausted but composed, sitting on a large, blue plastic box marked ‘Sand’ was the missing child’s mother. Alex sensed intuitively that the woman was not one of those parents who lose their children. He swallowed hastily. If the child hadn’t been lost, it had been abducted. If it had been abducted, that complicated matters significantly.

Alex told himself to take it easy. He still knew too little about the case not to keep an open mind.

A young, uniformed officer came along the platform to Alex and Fredrika. His handshake was firm but a little damp, his look somewhat glazed and unfocused. He introduced himself simply as Jens. Alex guessed that he was a recent graduate of the police training college and that this was his first case. Lack of practical experience was frightening when new police officers took up their first posts. You could see them radiating confusion and sometimes pure panic in their first six months. Alex wondered if the young man whose hand he was shaking couldn’t be said to be bordering on panic. He was probably wondering in turn what on earth Alex was doing there. DCIs rarely, if ever, turned up to conduct interviews themselves. Or at any rate, not at this early stage in a case.

Alex was about to explain his presence when Jens started to speak, in rapid bursts.

‘The alarm wasn’t raised until thirty minutes after the train got in,’ he reported in a shrill voice. ‘And by then, nearly all the passengers had left the platform. Well, except for these.’

He gave a sweeping wave, indicating of a clump of people standing a little way beyond the woman Alex had identified as the child’s mother. Alex glanced at his watch. It was twenty to four. The child would soon have been missing for an hour and a half.

‘There’s been a complete search of the train. She isn’t anywhere. The child, I mean, a six-year-old girl. She isn’t anywhere. And nobody seems to have seen her, either. At least nobody we’ve spoken to. And all their luggage is still there. The girl didn’t take anything with her. Not even her shoes. They were still on the floor under her seat.’

The first raindrops hit the roof above them. The thunder was rumbling somewhere closer now. Alex didn’t think he’d ever known a worse summer.

‘Is that the girl’s mother sitting over there?’ asked Fredrika with a discreet nod towards the red-haired woman.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the young policeman. ‘Her name’s Sara Sebastiansson. She says she’s not going home until we find the girl.’

Alex sighed to himself. Of course the red-haired woman was the child’s mother. He didn’t need to ask such things, he knew them anyway, he sensed them. Fredrika was entirely lacking in that sort of intuition. She asked about everything and she questioned even more. Alex felt his irritation level rising. Detecting simply didn’t work that way. He only hoped she would soon realize how wrong she was for the profession she had decided was suitable for her.

‘Why did it take thirty minutes for the police to be alerted?’ Fredrika continued her interrogation.

Alex immediately pricked up his ears. Fredrika had finally asked a relevant question.

Jens braced himself. Up to that point, he had had answers to all the questions the senior police officers had asked him since they arrived.

‘Well, it’s a bit of an odd story,’ Jens began, and Alex could see he was trying not to stare at Fredrika. ‘The train was held at Flemingsberg for longer than usual, and the mother got off to make a phone call. She left her little girl on the train because she was asleep.’

Alex nodded thoughtfully. Children don’t vanish, people lose them. Perhaps he had misjudged Sara the redhead.

‘So anyway, a girl came up to her, to Sara that is, on the platform and asked her to help with a dog that was sick. And then she missed the train. She rang the train people right away – a member of staff at Flemingsberg helped her – to tell them that her child was on the train and that she was going to take a taxi straight to Stockholm Central.’

Alex frowned as he listened.

‘The child had gone by the time the train stopped at Stockholm, and the conductor and some of the other crew searched for her. People were flooding off the train, you see, and hardly any of the passengers bothered to help. A Securitas guard who normally hangs round outside Burger King downstairs gave them a hand with the search. Then the mother, I mean Sara over there, got here in the taxi and was told her daughter was missing. They went on searching; they thought the girl must have woken up and, like, been one of the first off the train. But they couldn’t find her anywhere. So then they rang the police. But we haven’t found her either.’

‘Have they put out a call over the public-address system in the station?’ asked Fredrika. ‘I mean in case she managed to get off the platform and onto the concourse?’

Jens nodded meekly and then shook his head. Yes, an announcement had been made. More police and volunteers were currently searching the whole station. Local radio would be issuing an appeal to road users in the city centre to keep an eye out for the girl. The taxi firms would be contacted. If the girl had walked off on her own, she couldn’t have got far.

But she had not been spotted yet.

Fredrika nodded slowly. Alex looked at the mother sitting on the big blue box. She looked like death. Shattered.

‘Put out the announcement in other languages, not just Swedish,’ said Fredrika.

Her male colleagues looked at her with raised eyebrows.

‘There are a lot of people hanging about here who don’t have Swedish as their mother tongue, but who might have seen something. Make the announcement in English, too. German and French, if they can. Maybe Arabic, as well.’

Alex nodded approvingly and sent Jens a look that told him to do as Fredrika suggested. Jens hurried off, probably quailing at the prospect of somehow getting hold of an Arabic speaker. Cascades of rain were coming down on the people gathered on the platform, and the rumbling had turned into mighty claps of thunder. It was a wretched day in a wretched summer.

Peder Rydh came dashing along the platform just as Jens was leaving it. Peder stared at Fredrika’s beige, double-breasted jacket. Had the woman no concept at all of the way you broadcast that you were part of the police when you weren’t in uniform? Peder himself nodded graciously to the colleagues he passed on his way and waved his identity badge about a bit so they would realize he was one of them. He found it hard to resist the urge to thump a few of the younger talents on the back. He had loved his years in the patrol car, of course, but he was very happy indeed to have landed a job on the plain-clothes side.

Alex gave Peder a nod as they caught sight of each other, and his look expressed something close to gratitude for his colleague’s presence.

‘I was on my way from a meeting on the edge of town when I got the message that the child was missing, so I thought I’d pick up Fredrika on the way and come straight here,’ Alex explained briefly to Peder. ‘I’m not really planning to stick around, just wanted to get out for a bit of fresh air,’ he went on, and gave his colleague a knowing look.

‘You mean you wanted to get your feet on the ground as a change from being chained to your desk?’ grinned Peder, and received a weary nod in reply.

In spite of the significant age gap between them, the two men were entirely in agreement on that point. You were never so far up the hierarchy that you didn’t need to see the real shit. And you were never as far from reality as when you were behind your desk.

Both men assumed, however, that Fredrika did not share this view, and therefore said nothing more about it.

‘Okay,’ said Alex instead. ‘Here’s what we’ll do. Fredrika can take the initial interview with the child’s mother and you, Peder, can talk to the train crew and also find out if any of the other passengers who are still here can give you any information. We should really play it by the book and interview in pairs, but I can’t see there’s time to organize that just now.’

Fredrika was very happy with this division of duties, but thought she could detect some dissatisfaction in Peder’s face. Dissatisfaction that she, not he, would get to tackle the mother of the missing child. Alex must have seen it too, as he added:

‘The only reason Fredrika’s dealing with the mother is that she’s a woman. It tends to make things a bit easier.’

Peder instantly looked a little more cheerful.

‘Okay, see you back at the station later,’ said Alex gruffly. ‘I’m off back there now.’

Fredrika sighed. ‘The only reason Fredrika’s dealing with…’ It was always the same. Every decision to entrust her with a task had to be defended. She was a foreign body in a foreign universe. Her whole presence was questionable and demanded constant explanation. Fredrika felt so indignant that she forgot to reflect on the fact that Alex had not only entrusted her with interviewing the mother, but he’d also let her do it alone. She was virtually counting the days until her time in Alex Recht’s investigation team was over. She was planning to finish her probationary period and then leave. There were other agencies where her qualifications were more desirable, albeit less urgently needed.

I shall look over my shoulder one last time and then never look back again, thought Fredrika, seeing in her mind’s eye the day she would stride out of the police building, or HQ, as her colleagues generally called it, on Kungsholmen. Then Fredrika turned her attention to a more imminent task. To the missing child.

She introduced herself politely to Sara Sebastiansson and was surprised at the strength of the woman’s handshake. It belied the anxiety and exhaustion in her face. Fredrika also noted that Sara kept pulling down the sleeves of her top. It looked like a sort of tic or habit, something she did all the time. It was almost as if she was trying to hide her forearms.

Maybe an attempt to conceal injuries she got when she was defending herself, thought Fredrika. If Sara had a husband who hit her, that was information to be brought to the team’s attention as soon as possible.

But there were other questions to be asked first.

‘We can go inside if you like,’ Fredrika said to Sara. ‘We needn’t stand out here in the rain.’

‘I’m all right here,’ said Sara in a voice not far from tears.

Fredrika pondered this for a moment and then said:

‘If you feel you have to be here for your daughter, you have my absolute assurance that she’d be noticed by everybody else here.’

What’s more, Fredrika felt like adding, it’s not particularly likely that your daughter will turn up right here and now, but she left the thought unsaid.

‘Lilian,’ said Sara.

‘Sorry?’

‘My daughter’s called Lilian. And I don’t want to leave this spot.’

She underlined what she was saying by shaking her head. ‘No thank you, no coffee.’

Fredrika knew herself that she found it hard to be personal when she was on duty. She often failed dismally. In that respect, she was a classic desk type. She liked reading, writing and analysing. All forms of interrogation and conversation felt so alien, so hard to deal with. She would sometimes watch with pure fascination as Alex reached out a hand and laid it on someone’s shoulder as he was talking to them. Fredrika would never do that, and what was more, she didn’t want to be patted herself either, be it on the arm or on the shoulder. She felt physically unwell whenever any male colleague at work tried to ‘lighten the mood’ by slapping her on the back too hard or prodding her in the middle. She didn’t like that sort of physical contact at all. And most people realized. But not all. Fredrika gave a slight shiver just as Sara’s voice interrupted her very private musings.

‘Why didn’t she take her shoes?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Lilian’s sandals were still there on the floor by her seat. She must have been in a terrible state about something, otherwise she’d never have gone off in her bare feet. And never without saying something to somebody, asking for help.’

‘Not even if she woke up and found she was all alone? Maybe she panicked and dashed off the train?’

Sara shook her head.

‘Lilian’s not like that. That’s not how we brought her up. We taught her to act and think in a practical way. She would have asked someone sitting nearby. The lady across the aisle from us, for example, we’d chatted to her a bit on the way.’

Fredrika saw her chance to divert the conversation onto another subject.

‘You say “we”?’

‘Yes?’

‘You say that’s not how “we” brought her up. Are you referring to yourself and your husband?’

Sara fixed her gaze on a spot above Fredrika’s shoulder.

‘Lilian’s father and I have separated, but yes, it’s my ex-husband I brought up Lilian with.’

‘Have you got joint custody?’ asked Fredrika.

‘The separation’s so new for us all,’ Sara said slowly. ‘We haven’t really got into a routine. Lilian sometimes stays with him at weekends, but mostly she lives with me. We’ll have to see how it goes, later.’

Sara took a deep breath, and as she breathed out, her lower lip was trembling. Her ashen skin stood out against her red hair. Her long arms were crossed tightly on her chest. Fredrika looked at Sara’s painted toenails. Blue. How unusual.

‘Did you argue about who Lilian was going to live with?’ Fredrika probed cautiously.

Sara gave a start.

‘You think Gabriel’s taken her?’ she said, looking Fredrika straight in the eye.

Fredrika assumed Gabriel must be the ex-husband.

‘We don’t think anything,’ she said quickly. ‘I just have to investigate all possible scenarios for… I just have to try to understand what might have happened to her. To Lilian.’

Sara’s shoulders slumped a little. She bit her lower lip and stared hard at the ground.

‘Gabriel and I… have had… still have… our differences. Not so long ago we had a row about Lilian. But he’s never harmed her. Never ever.’

Again Fredrika saw Sara pulling at the sleeves of her top. Her rapid assessment was that Sara would not tell her then and there whether she had been abused by her ex-husband or not. She would have to check for officially lodged complaints when she got back to HQ. And they would certainly have to speak to the ex-husband, at any event.

‘Could you tell me more precisely what happened on the platform at Flemingsberg?’ Fredrika asked, hoping she was now steering the conversation in a direction Sara would feel more comfortable with.

Sara nodded several times but said nothing. Fredrika hoped she wasn’t going to start crying, because tears were something she found very hard to deal with. Not privately, but professionally.

‘I got off the train to make a call,’ Sara began hesitantly. ‘I rang a friend.’

Fredrika distracted by the rain, checked herself. A friend?

‘And why didn’t you ring from your seat?’

‘I didn’t want to wake Lilian,’ came Sara’s quick response.

A little too quick. What was more, she had told the policeman she spoke to earlier that she got off the train because she was in the so-called quiet coach.

‘She was so tired,’ whispered Sara. ‘We go to Gothenburg to visit my parents. I think she was getting a cold, she never sleeps for the whole journey usually.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Fredrika, and paused for a minute before going on. ‘So it wasn’t that you didn’t want Lilian to hear the conversation?’

Sara admitted it almost immediately.

‘No, I didn’t want Lilian to hear the conversation,’ she said quietly. ‘My friend and I have… only just met. And it would be a bad idea to let her find out about him at this stage.’

Because then she’d tell her dad, who was presumably still beating up her mum even though they’d separated, thought Fredrika to herself.

‘We only talked for a couple of minutes. Less than that, I think. I said we were almost there, and he could come round to my place later this evening, once Lilian was in bed.’

‘All right, and what happened next?’

Sara pulled her shoulders back and sighed heavily. The body language told Fredrika they were about to talk about something she found really painful to remember.

‘It made no sense at all, none of it,’ Sara said dully. ‘It was completely absurd.’

She shook her head wearily.

‘A woman came up to me. Or a girl, you might say. Quite tall, thin, looked a bit the worse for wear. Waving her arms and shouting something about her dog being sick. I suppose she came up to me because I was standing separately from the other people on the platform. She said she’d been coming down the escalator with the dog when it suddenly collapsed and started having a fit.’

‘A fit? The dog?’

‘Yes, that was what she said. The dog was lying there having a fit and she needed help to get it back up the escalator again. I’ve had dogs all my life, until a few years ago. And I could honestly see what a state the girl was in. So I helped her.’

Sara fell silent and Fredrika considered what she’d said, rubbing her hands together.

‘Didn’t you think about the risk of missing the train?’

For the first time in their conversation, Sara’s tone was sharp and her eyes blazed.

‘When I got off, I asked the conductor how long the train would be stopping there. He said at least ten minutes. At least.’

Sara held up her hands and spread her long, narrow fingers wide. Ten fingers, ten minutes. Her hands were shaking slightly. Her lower lip was quivering again.

‘Ten minutes,’ she whispered. ‘That was why I helped the girl shove the dog up the escalator. I thought – I knew – I had time.’

Fredrika tired to breathe calmly.

‘Did you see the train leave?’

‘We’d just got to the top of the escalator with the dog,’ said Sara, her voice unsteady. ‘We’d just got the dog back up when I turned round and saw the train starting to pull out.’

Her breathing was laboured and her eyes were on Fredrika.

‘I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes,’ she said, and a single tear ran down her cheek. ‘It was like being in a horror film. I ran down the escalator, ran like mad after the train. But it didn’t stop. It didn’t stop!’

Although Fredrika had no children of her own, Sara’s words aroused a genuine feeling of anguish in her.

She felt something akin to stomach ache.

‘One of the staff at Flemingsberg station helped me get in touch with the train. And then I took a taxi to Stockholm Central.’

‘What was the girl with the dog doing while this was happening?’

Sara wiped the corner of her eye.

‘It was a bit odd. She just sort of made off, all of a sudden. She bundled the dog up onto some kind of parcel trolley that had been left there at the top of the escalator, and went out through the station entrance. I didn’t see her after that.’

Sara and Fredrika stood for a while saying nothing, each absorbed in their own thoughts. It was Sara’s voice that broke the silence.

‘And you know what, I wasn’t really too worried once I’d got through to the train. It felt pretty irrational to get worked up about a little thing like Lilian being by herself for that last little bit of the journey from Flemingsberg to Stockholm.’

Sara moistened her lips, and then cried openly for the first time.

‘I even sat back in the taxi. Closed my eyes and relaxed. I relaxed while some bloody sick bastard took my little girl.’

Fredrika realized this was a pain she had no chance of alleviating. With great reluctance she did what she would never normally do: she reached out a hand and stroked Sara’s arm.

Then she realized it had stopped raining. Lilian had been missing for another hour.

It was trickier than Jelena had expected to get out of Flemingsberg by bus.

‘You mustn’t take the commuter train, you mustn’t take a taxi, you mustn’t drive,’ the Man had told her that very morning, as they went over every detail of the plan for the hundredth time. ‘You’re to go by bus. Bus to Skärholmen, then take the underground home. Understand?’

Jelena had nodded and nodded.

Yes, she understood. And she would do her very, very best.

Jelena felt at least ten anxious butterflies fluttering in her stomach. She hoped desperately that it had all worked. It simply had to work. The Man would be furious if he hadn’t managed to get the kid off the train.

She peered at her watch. It had taken more than an hour. The bus had been late, and then she’d had a wait for a tube train. She would soon be home and then she would know. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. She could never be really sure whether she was doing things right or wrong. Not until later, when the Man either praised her or told her off. Just recently she’d done almost everything right. It had even gone okay when she practised driving, and when she had to practise talking properly.

‘People have to be able to understand what you’re saying,’ the Man would tell her. ‘You don’t speak clearly. And you’ve got to stop your face twitching like that. It scares people.’

Jelena had had a real struggle, but in the end the Man had given her his seal of approval. All she had now was a slight twitch at the corner of one eye, and really only when she was nervous or unsure. When she was calm, it didn’t twitch at all.

‘Good girl,’ the Man said then, and patted her on the cheek.

Jelena felt all warm inside. She hoped for more praise when she got home.

The train got to her stop at last. It was all she could do not to rush out of the carriage and run all the way home. She must walk calmly and unobtrusively, so nobody would notice her. Jelena kept her eyes on the ground, and fiddled with a bit of her hair.

The rain was beating on the road when she came up out of the underground, impairing her vision. It didn’t matter – she saw him anyway. For a brief second, their eyes met. She thought he looked as if he was smiling.

A highly sceptical Peder Rydh observed Fredrika’s pathetic attempt to offer comfort. She was patting Sara Sebastiansson with the same reluctance as you would pat a dog you found utterly revolting, but had to pat because it belonged to a good friend. People like her had no business in the police force, where everything depended on how you handled people. Different sorts of people. All sorts. Peder gave an irritated sigh. It really had been a very bad idea to recruit civilians into the police.

‘The force needs an injection of top skills,’ was the explanation from certain individuals high up in the organization.

Fredrika had mentioned on several occasions what subject she had read at university, but to be honest, Peder couldn’t have cared less. She used too many words, with too many letters. She complicated things. She thought too much and felt too little. She simply wasn’t made of the right stuff for police work.

Peder could only admire the police union’s persistent opposition to the position and status that civilians had been given in the force. Without any relevant work experience whatsoever. Without the unique set of skills that can only be gained by learning police work from the bottom up. By spending at least a few years in the patrol car. Manhandling drunks. Talking to men who hit their wives. Giving pissed teenagers a lift home and facing their parents. Breaking into flats where lonely souls have died and just lain there, rotting.

Peder shook his head. He had more pressing things to think about than incompetent colleagues. He thought over the information he had garnered from talking to the train crew so far. Henry Lindgren, the conductor, talked too much, but he had a good eye for detail and there was certainly nothing wrong with his memory. The train left Gothenburg at 10.50. It reached Stockholm eight minutes after the time it was due, at 14.07.

‘I wasn’t the one in charge of the delay in Flemingsberg,’ Henry pointed out. ‘That was Arvid. And Nellie.’

He looked sadly at the train, still standing at the platform. All the doors were open, gaping like great dark holes along the side of the train. More than anything else on earth, Henry wished that the little girl would suddenly come stumbling out of one of those holes. That she had somehow lost her way on the train, gone back to sleep, and then woken up. But with all the certainty that only grown-up human beings can muster, Henry knew it wasn’t going to happen. The only people getting on and off the train were policemen and technicians. The whole platform had been cordoned off, and a fingertip search of the damp surface for traces of the missing child was in progress. Henry felt a lump in his throat that proved impossible to swallow.

Peder went on with the interview.

‘You say you were keeping an eye on the child; then what happened?’

Peder could see Henry literally shrink, as if he was ageing as he stood there on the platform, faced with explaining what had made him leave the girl.

‘It was hard, trying to be in lots of places at the same time,’ he said dejectedly. ‘Like I told you, there’d been trouble in several of the coaches, and I had to leave the girl and get to coach three, smartish. But I called Arvid on the two-way radio. I called him really loud, and I tried several times, but he never replied. I don’t think he can have heard. I didn’t seem to be getting through at all.’

Peder decided not to make any comment on Arvid’s behaviour.

‘So you left the child, and didn’t ask any of the passengers to keep an eye on her?’ he asked instead.

Henry threw out his arms in dramatic appeal.

‘I was only in the next carriage!’ he cried. ‘And I thought, yes I thought, I’ll be straight back. Which I was.’

His voice almost gave way.

‘I left the girl for less than three minutes, I was back the minute the train stopped and people started getting off. But she’d already gone. And nobody could remember seeing her get up and go.’

Henry’s voice was choked as he went on:

‘How’s that possible? How can nobody have seen a thing?’

Peder knew all too well how. Get ten people to witness the same crime and they will come up with ten different versions of what happened, the order it happened in, and what the perpetrators were wearing.

What was strange, on the other hand, was the way Arvid Melin had acted. First he let the train leave Flemingsberg without Sara Sebastiansson, and then he failed to answer Henry’s call.

Peder quickly sought out Arvid, who was sitting by himself on one of the seats on the platform. He seemed very twitchy. As Peder approached, he raised his eyes and said:

‘Can we go soon? I’ve got to be somewhere.’

Peder sat down beside Arvid deliberately slowly, fixed him with a look and replied:

‘A child’s gone missing. What have you got to do that’s more important than helping to find her?’

After that, Arvid uttered hardly a word that was not a direct answer to a direct question.

‘What did you say to passengers who asked you how long the train would be stationary at Flemingsberg?’ Peder asked sternly, finding he was addressing Arvid like some kind of schoolboy.

‘Don’t remember exactly,’ answered Arvid evasively.

Peder noted that Arvid, who must have been nearing thirty, responded in the way he expected his own kids would answer questions when they reached their teens.

‘Where are you going?’ ‘Out!’ ‘When will you be home?’ ‘Later!’

‘Do you remember a conversation with Sara Sebastiansson?’ Peder enquired.

Arvid shook his head.

‘No, not really,’ he said.

Peder was just wondering whether he could give Arvid a good shake, when he went on:

‘There were lots of people asking the same thing, see. I think I remember her, the girl’s mother, being one of them. People have to take a bit of responsibility for themselves,’ he said in a choked voice, and only then did Peder realize how shaken he really was. ‘It’s not a bloody promise that the train’s going to be stopped for ten minutes, just because we say so. All the passengers, all of them, want to get there as fast as possible. There’s never any problem about setting off earlier than we first said. Why did she leave the platform? If she’d been standing there, she’d have heard me make the announcement on the train.’

Arvid kicked an empty cola bottle that was lying at his feet. It bounced angrily against the train and went spinning across the platform.

Peder suspected both Arvid Melin and Henry Lindgren would be having some disturbed nights for a good time to come if the girl failed to turn up.

‘You didn’t see Sara Sebastiansson being left behind?’ Peder asked gently.

‘No, definitely not,’ said Arvid emphatically. ‘I mean, I looked along the platform, the way we usually do. It was empty, so we left. And then Henry says he called me on the two-way radio, but I didn’t hear… because I’d forgotten to switch it on.’

Peder looked up at the dark grey sky and shut his notebook.

He would just have a brief talk to the rest of the train crew and the others on the platform. If Fredrika had finished getting the mother’s statement, perhaps she would help him.

Peder saw Fredrika and Sara Sebastiansson out of the corner of his eye, exchanging a few words and then going their separate ways. Sara looked the picture of dejection. Peder swallowed. An image of his own family rose to the surface of his consciousness. What would he do if anyone tried to harm either of his children?

His grip on his notebook tightened. He would have to get a move on. There were more people to talk to and Alex did not like to be kept waiting.

They drove back to the HQ in Peder’s car. As the car swished along the rain-soaked tarmac, Fredrika and Peder were both lost in their own thoughts. They parked in the basement garage and took the lift in silence up to the floor where the team had its offices. Close to the county police and National Crime Squad’s base, close to the Stockholm Police Department. Nobody was ever willing to say it out loud, but Alex Recht’s investigative team most definitely served two masters. Well three, really. A special resources group, comprising a small number of hand-picked people of different background and experience, who on paper were part of the Stockholm police, but who in practice worked very closely with, and could be called upon by, both the national and county departments. It was a political solution to something that shouldn’t have been a problem.

Fredrika sank down wearily in the office chair behind her desk. Was there any better place for thinking and acting than behind her desk? She realized she had been naive to think that her specialized skills would be welcomed and made full use of within the police organization. She could not for the life of her understand police officers’ deep-rooted, all-embracing contempt for advanced, academic qualifications. Or was it really contempt? Did they in actual fact feel threatened? Fredrika couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She only knew that her current work situation was not tenable in the long term.

Her route to Alex Recht’s team had taken her via an investigative role at the Crime Prevention Council, and then a couple of years with social services, where she had been an expert adviser. She had applied to the police force to broaden her practical experience. And she would not be staying on. But she was relaxed about her current situation. She had an extensive network of contacts that could gain her entry to plenty of other organizations. She just needed to hold her nerve, and some new opportunity would eventually turn up.

Fredrika was very conscious of the way she was perceived by her colleagues in the force. Difficult and reserved. As someone with no sense of humour or normal emotional life.

That’s not true, thought Fredrika. I’m not cold, I’m just so damn confused about where I’m going at the moment.

Her friends would describe her as both warm and sympathetic. And extremely loyal. But that was in her private life. And now here she was in a workplace where she was expected to be private even on duty. It was completely unthinkable as far as Fredrika was concerned.

It wasn’t that she felt nothing at all for the people she encountered in the course of her job. It was just that she chose to feel a little less.

‘My job’s not pastoral care,’ she had said to a friend who had asked why she was so unwilling to get emotionally involved in her work. ‘It’s detecting crimes. It’s not about who I am – it’s about what I do. I do the detecting; someone else has got to do the comforting.’

Otherwise you’d drown, thought Fredrika. If I were to offer comfort to every victim I met, there’d be nothing left of me.

Fredrika could not remember ever having expressed a desire for a police job in her life. When she was little, her dreams had always been of working with music, as a violinist. She had music in her blood. She nurtured the dreams in her heart. Many children grow out of their earliest dreams about what they want to be when they grow up. But Fredrika never did; instead, her dreams developed and grew more concrete. She and her mother went on visits to various music schools and discussed which would suit her best. By the time she started at secondary school, she had already composed music of her own.

Just after she was fifteen, everything changed. For ever, as it turned out. Her right arm was badly injured in a car crash on the way home from a skiing trip, and after a year of physiotherapy it was obvious that the arm could not cope with the demands of playing the violin for hours every day.

Well-meaning teachers said she had been lucky. Theoretically and rationally, Fredrika understood what they meant. She had been to the mountains with a friend and her family. The accident left her friend’s mother paralysed from the waist down. The son of the family was killed. The newspapers called their accident the ‘Filipstad tragedy’.

But for Fredrika herself, the accident would never be called anything but The Accident, and in her mind she thought of The Accident as the most concrete of dividing lines in her life. She had been one person before The Accident, and became a different person after it. There was a very clear Before and After. She did not want to acknowledge that she had had any kind of Luck. But even now, almost twenty years later, she still wondered if she would ever accept the life that came After.

‘There’s so much else you can do with your life,’ her grandmother said reasonably, on the rare occasions when Fredrika voiced the dreadful sense of despair she felt at being robbed of the future opportunities she had dreamt of. ‘You could work in a bank, for example, seeing as you’re so good at maths.’

Fredrika’s parents, on the other hand, said nothing. Her mother was a concert pianist and music had a holy place in everyday family life. Fredrika had virtually grown up in the wings of a series of great stages on which her mother had played, either as a soloist or as part of a larger ensemble. Sometimes Fredrika had played in the ensembles. There were times when it had been quite magical.

So Fredrika’s discussions with her mother had been more productive.

‘What shall I do now?’ nineteen-year-old Fredrika had whispered to her mother one evening just before she left school, when her tears would not stop.

‘You’ll find something else, Fredrika,’ her mother had said, rubbing her back with a sympathetic hand. ‘There’s so much strength in you, so much willpower and such drive to achieve things. You’ll find something else.’

And so she did.

History of art, history of music, history of ideas. The university had an unlimited range of courses on offer.

‘Fredrika’s going to be a history professor,’ her father said proudly in those early years.

Her mother said nothing; it was her father who had always boasted far and wide of the great success in life he envisaged for his daughter.

But Fredrika did not become a professor. She became a criminologist specializing in crimes against women and children. She never completed her doctorate, and after five years at university she felt she had had more than enough of theoretical study.

She could see in her mother’s eyes that this was unexpected. It had been assumed that she would not want to leave the academic world. Her mother never expressed her disappointment openly, but she admitted she was surprised. Fredrika would dearly have liked to possess more of that quality herself: never to be disappointed, only surprised.

Consequently Fredrika knew a fair bit about pleasure and idleness, about passion and not knowing which way to go in life. As she printed out the accusation of abuse that Sara Sebastiansson had now formally lodged against her ex-husband, she wondered as she so often did why women stay with men who batter them. Was it love and passion? Fear of loneliness and exclusion? But Sara had not stayed. Not really. At least not judging by what Fredrika could deduce from the documents in front of her.

The first formal accusation had been lodged when her daughter was two years old. Sara, unlike many other women, claimed then that her husband had never hit her before. In cases where women themselves came forward to make complaints, there was usually a history. At the time of the first report, Sara had come to her local police station with extensive bruising on her right side and face. Her husband denied all the accusations and said he had an alibi for the evening when Sara claimed to have been attacked. Fredrika frowned. As far as she understood it, Sara never withdrew her accusation as so many women do. But nor did it lead to any kind of prosecution. The evidence did not hold, as three friends of her husband could attest that he had been playing poker until two o’clock on the night in question and had then spent the night at the home of one of them.

Two years then passed before Sara Sebastiansson lodged another complaint. She then claimed that he had not hit her on any occasion in between, but when Fredrika read about the extent of Sara’s injuries and compared them with those she had had the first time, she felt pretty much convinced Sara was lying. She had also been raped. There were no marks at all to be seen on her face.

It seemed unlikely, in Fredrika’s view, for the husband not to have touched his wife for two years, only for the violence then to escalate as it obviously had.

There was no prosecution that time either. Sara’s husband could prove by means of original tickets and the word of two independent witnesses that he had been on business in Malmö at the time of the alleged assault. The crime could not be substantiated, and the investigation was halted.

Fredrika was concerned by what she read, to put it mildly. She could not get the pieces of the picture to fit together. Sara Sebastiansson hadn’t given the impression of being a woman who would lie. Not about anything, in fact. She had not mentioned the assaults, though she must have realized that the police would find out about them sooner or later, but Fredrika was not inclined to see that as a lie. The injuries that had been documented were also true and genuine. So her ex-husband must be guilty, but however did he manage his alibis? He was clearly a successful businessman, and twelve years older than Sara. Did he buy his alibis? But that many?

Fredrika continued working her way through the papers. The couple had separated shortly after the second assault, and only a few weeks after that, Sara was back at the police station lodging another complaint. Her ex-husband would not leave her alone; he stalked her in his car; he waited for her outside her flat and her workplace. Her ex-husband made a counter-accusation that Sara sabotaged all his attempts to maintain proper contact with their daughter. A real classic. A few more months passed – more official complaints to the police of unlawful threat, molestation and trespass – but he never actually hit her. Or if he did, it was not reported.

The last report was dated 11 November 2005, when according to Swedish Telecom’s records Sara’s husband had rung her over a hundred times the same night. That was the only time any accusation made against him could be substantiated, and a banning order was issued to prevent him visiting Sara.

Fredrika pondered this. During Fredrika’s interrogation, Sara had said that she and her ex-husband had recently separated, but the official reports told another story: she and her husband had not lived together since July 2005, when Sara had made the second report of assault to the police. What had happened between 11 November 2005 and today? Fredrika rapidly checked her information against the national police files and sighed when she discovered the answer. They had, of course, got back together again.

The timeline became all too clear. On 17 July 2005, two weeks after the second report to the police, Sara and Gabriel Sebastiansson were at different addresses. They never filed for divorce, but they did separate. On 20 December 2005, just weeks after the banning order was issued, they were back at the same address. Then it all went quiet.

Fredrika wondered what their lives had been like since. She wondered how relations between them were now. And she understood all too well that Sara would not want it to come to her ex-husband’s attention that she had moved on in her life and was in a new relationship.

Fredrika turned to a new page in her notebook. She would have to talk to Sara as soon as possible about the earlier, or continuing, abuse. She would definitely have to talk to Sara’s ex-husband, who was currently unavailable. And she would also have to interview Sara’s new ‘friend’, as she called him. Fredrika slammed her notebook shut and hurried out of her office. There was still time to get a cup of coffee before the team assembled to pool their information about the missing child, Lilian. Maybe she could also fit in a call to Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother before the meeting. She might know her son’s whereabouts.

Alex Recht opened the meeting in the Den with his usual efficiency. Peder always felt a slight quickening of his pulse when they were gathered there on operational business. The Den, or the Lions’ Den to give it its full name, was what they called the only meeting room they had. Peder liked the name. He took it for granted that it hadn’t been Fredrika’s suggestion. She was entirely lacking in that sort of imagination and finesse.

It was nearly six and Lilian Sebastiansson had been missing for more than four hours. In view of the fact that she had disappeared in the middle of Stockholm, and in view of her age, this had to be considered a long time. It was clearly beyond all reasonable doubt that she had not gone missing of her own free will. She was far too young to have made her way anywhere unaided, and she had no shoes on her feet.

‘I need hardly remind you that we have a very grave situation here,’ said Alex grimly, surveying his colleagues.

Nobody said a word, and Alex took a seat at the table.

Besides Alex, those in attendance were Fredrika, Peder, and the team’s assistant Ellen Lind. Also present were some officers from the uniformed branch, there to report on the search of the area round the Central Station, and a few people from the technical division.

Alex started by asking what the search had revealed. The answer was as short as it was depressing: it had revealed nothing at all. Hardly anyone had responded to the appeal over the public-address system on the concourse, and talking to the taxi firms had not produced any leads either.

The result of the technical check of the train coaches was almost as scanty. It had been hard to secure any fingerprints on site, nor had they found any traces indicating where the girl had got off the train. If it was assumed that she was carried and was possibly still asleep when she was taken, the task became even more difficult. No traces of blood had been found anywhere. All that they had found, and been able to secure, were some shoeprints on the floor, right by the girl’s seat.

Alex pricked up his ears when he heard that the train crew said the floors were cleaned between trips, which meant the prints the technicians had found must relate to the journey in question. The prints were from a pair of Ecco shoes, size 46.

‘All right,’ Alex said briskly. ‘We’ll have to see if we get any pointers from the other passengers on the train.’

He cleared his throat.

‘Has the news gone out to the media yet, by the way? I haven’t seen or heard anything.’

The question was really directed at Ellen, who was the nearest thing the team had to a press officer. She answered:

‘It was on the radio quite quickly, as we requested, and on the web, of course. And an announcement went out through the Central News Agency about an hour ago. We can expect the story to be in all the big national dailies tomorrow. The statement we issued to the media says specifically that we want to hear from all the passengers on that train from Gothenburg as soon as possible.’

Alex nodded, feeling fairly satisfied. He had no objections himself to turning to the media for help. But he was well aware that putting out the appeal could prove counterproductive. It was the end of July, the summer was raining away, millions of Swedes were off work for the holidays, and the newspaper editorial offices were presumably suffering from a total dearth of news. He scarcely dared think what the following day’s headlines would be if the girl was not found in the course of the evening. And he scarcely dared contemplate how many members of the public would pick up the phone and ring in with a tip-off. Far too many people had a tendency to imagine that they were in possession of some vital piece of information the police couldn’t live without.

‘We’ll hold back on the press conference for now,’ he said meditatively. ‘And we’ll wait a bit before we issue a picture of the girl.’ He went on, now addressing the whole investigation team: ‘As we know, we’re only talking about a very short space of time when there was no adult with her. According to the statements we’ve taken, she was left unsupervised for fewer than four minutes. The train had been at a standstill for scarcely a minute when the conductor got back to her seat, and by then she was gone.’

Alex turned to Peder.

‘Peder, did you get anything concrete from your interviews? What sense did you get of the people you spoke to?’

Peder sighed and flicked through his notebook.

‘I didn’t talk to anyone who was directly under suspicion, so to speak,’ he drawled. ‘Nobody saw anything; nobody heard anything. The girl was gone, that’s all. The only one who behaved a bit weirdly was the other conductor, Arvid Melin. He not only gave the all-clear for the train to leave Flemingsberg without Sara Sebastiansson, he also ignored his colleague’s call for assistance. But to be honest… No, I can’t for the life of me say I really think Arvid M. had anything to do with it. He seems totally useless at his job, and that no doubt made it easier for whoever took Lilian, but he wasn’t actively involved in her disappearance. I really don’t think so. And he hasn’t got a criminal record.’

‘Good,’ said Alex.

Fredrika frowned.

‘I’m not sure I think Arvid Melin stands out as the shady one in all this,’ she said. ‘Can we assume it was a coincidence that Sara missed the train in Flemingsberg? What have we got on the woman who delayed her there?’

Alex put his head on one side.

‘What’s your take on it?’ he asked.

‘It depends how we view the girl’s disappearance. If we think it was planned, and depended on the girl being unsupervised in Stockholm so she’d be easier to snatch, we have to see the woman with the dog as a suspect, too,’ Fredrika replied.

‘True,’ said Alex with some hesitation. ‘But then how did the perpetrator know that the adult who was supposed to keep watch on Lilian would be prevented from doing so?’

‘He didn’t, of course,’ said Fredrika. ‘The perpetrator must naturally have realized that Sara Sebastiansson would leap into action when she missed the train, and contact the crew. But maybe it still seemed less of a problem to take her from someone who didn’t know her than from her mother. Whoever took Lilian might have tried to do it even if Henry Lindgren had been there.’

‘So you think the priority was to get Sara off the train, so what happened in Flemingsberg was no coincidence?’ asked Alex.

‘Exactly,’ said Fredrika.

‘Hmm,’ said Alex.

‘Er,’ said Peder.

Alex gave Peder an encouraging nod.

‘Well, I think it seems a bit far-fetched,’ said Peder with a doubtful expression.

‘What’s the alternative?’ asked Fredrika. ‘It was all pure chance?’

‘Opportunity makes a thief,’ said Peder, like a patient teacher.

Fredrika could not believe what she was hearing, and was about to argue when Alex broke in.

‘Let’s finish the run-through of our findings first, then we can continue this discussion,’ he suggested.

He nodded to Peder to go on.

Peder waited demonstratively for a few seconds for Fredrika to start protesting, but to his disappointment, she did not. Ellen’s mobile stated to ring, however, so she left the room. Referring to his rather sloppy notes, Peder passed on to his colleagues what little other information they had. Nobody had seen what happened in Flemingsberg and nobody had seen Lilian leaving the train.

‘The interviews didn’t produce much,’ said Peder, feeling suddenly sheepish.

Alex shook his head as if to say it didn’t matter.

‘At this juncture, it’s impossible to say what’s important and what’s not,’ he sighed. ‘Fredrika, can you give us Sara’s story and what you’ve got on her ex-husband, please?’

Fredrika liked giving lectures. She spoke clearly and concretely, and in all the other places she had worked, her presentations had been praised. But she suspected that in the police she was considered supercilious and far too formal.

Fredrika briefly gave her own impression of Sara and her account of the events in Flemingsberg. She also explained what the files had turned up, and put forward her theory that Sara’s husband was still a big problem for her.

It was Alex who spoke next, of course.

‘Have you talked to her ex-husband?’ he asked.

‘His name’s Gabriel, and technically they’re still married, so he’s not really her “ex-husband” but her husband,’ Fredrika began. ‘And no, I haven’t managed to get hold of him. He’s got a small house tucked away in a nice part of Östermalm. I got through to his mother just before the start of the meeting, and she said her son was on a business trip. She thought he’d be in Uppsala all day. I tried ringing, but his phone’s turned off. He had to be informed of what’s happened to his daughter, anyway, so I left a voicemail message.’

‘What’s his current situation? Does he live alone?’ asked Alex, jotting something down on his pad.

‘I haven’t had a chance to ask Sara or his mother yet. But I shall look into it, of course.’

Alex pondered in silence. A father who had in all probability abused his ex-wife on numerous occasions, and was perhaps still doing so, was a very interesting person in a missing child investigation. The single most interesting person, in fact. Decades of police work supported that fundamental assumption.

‘What were the custody arrangements?’ he asked Fredrika, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head.

‘What Sara herself told me was that it hadn’t been a matter of dispute between them, but on the phone just now, the husband’s mother expressed concern that her son didn’t get to see Lilian more often. I got the impression that she, the grandmother, was well informed about her son’s daily life. She told me, for example, that the time he rang Sara a hundred times on one evening he was, as the grandmother put it, “beside himself with worry for the girl”. She claimed Sara had taken Lilian off on a short trip without telling Gabriel.’

‘So they had argued about the girl, in fact, at least earlier on,’ Alex said slowly. ‘Are there any grounds at all for suspecting that Sara Sebastiansson has been lying, and never was abused and harassed by her husband?’

Fredrika gave an emphatic shake of the head.

‘No,’ she said, with some force. ‘I simply don’t see how that could be possible. Not when the injuries are so well documented.’

‘But isn’t there something fishy about this whole set-up?’ asked Peder, glancing at Alex, who nodded.

‘Yes, there’s something fishy all right. But I can’t quite put my finger on it.’

He looked at Fredrika.

‘Have you spoken to Sara Sebastiansson about the abuse aspect?’

‘No, I didn’t see the reports until I got back here. But I’m going to see her later this evening and I’ll bring it up then.’

A rattling sound filled the silence when Fredrika stopped talking. The ancient air conditioning made a lot of noise considering how little cool air it generated.

‘But even so,’ Peder persisted, with another look of entreaty at Alex. ‘The father’s got to be our hottest lead, if he really is such a bastard as Sara claims, that is.’

Alex saw Fredrika’s face harden at Peder’s insinuation that Sara Sebastiansson might be lying to the police.

‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘Regardless of what Sara herself may think, the father is a main lead in this investigation until we have reason to write him off as uninteresting.’

Fredrika felt relieved, and her shoulders relaxed a little. Alex had often thought how attractive she could be when she smiled and relaxed. Shame she didn’t do it more often, that was all.

‘Right,’ said Alex. ‘You said the girl’s mother had a new man. Is he of any interest?’

‘I haven’t got a definite ID on him yet. He’s called Anders Nyström, and Sara’s known him for such a short time that all she could give me was his year of birth and where he lives. He isn’t recorded as living at the address where Sara went to see him, and his mobile number only traces back to an unregistered pay-as-you-go account. He isn’t answering his mobile and the voicemail isn’t working.’

‘What the hell is that girl doing hanging around with creeps like that? Guys who hit her and guys she hardly knows,’ sighed Peder, slumping in his seat.

Fredrika fixed Peder with a stare but said nothing.

Alex indicated she should go on.

‘When Sara rang him from the platform, they arranged for him to come round this evening, after Lilian was in bed, about nine-thirty. I’ve come up with three possible Anders Nyströms born the same year as Sara’s friend, none of them with criminal records. When I see him at Sara’s tonight, I shall be able to get more details.’

‘You’re seeing him tonight…?’ began Alex uncertainly.

He got no further before Fredrika raised a discreet hand from her place at the table.

Alex suppressed a sigh.

‘Yes?’ he said patiently.

‘The woman with the dog,’ replied Fredrika with equal patience.

‘Yes?’ Alex said again.

Fredrika took a deep breath.

‘How does the woman with the dog fit into the scenario if we assume the father took the girl?’

Alex gave a rather tight-lipped smile.

‘If Lilian’s father took her, then can’t the woman with the dog just be a coincidence?’

He gave Fredrika a searching look and said firmly:

‘We haven’t forgotten the woman in Flemingsberg, Fredrika. But for now we’re prioritizing other information. With good reason.’

Alex surveyed the group again and cleared his throat.

‘I’d like to come round to Sara’s with you,’ he said, nodding in Fredrika’s direction.

Her eyebrows shot up. Peder reacted, too, straightening his back.

‘It’s not that I’m questioning your competence,’ Alex said hurriedly, ‘but wouldn’t it be a good idea for you to share the responsibility for these interviews with someone else? Sara’s new boyfriend could turn out to be a nasty piece of work and I’d feel happier if there were two of us.’

Peder beamed at Alex. Alex thought for a minute he was going to slap him on the back. This investigation would be hard going if the team couldn’t work together.

From Fredrika there was not a word. Nor were any needed – her fixed expression betrayed what she was thinking very plainly.

Ellen interrupted proceedings with a loud knock at the door.

‘Just wanted to say that the switchboard is getting calls from the public already,’ was all she said.

‘Great,’ said Alex, ‘that’s great.’

Soon, if the child did not reappear, he would have to consider calling in assistance from the National Crime Squad to go through all the tip-offs. He brought the meeting to a close.

‘In spite of the shocking nature of the event,’ he said on his way out of the room, ‘I have to say I’ve got quite a good feeling about this case. It’s bound to be only a matter of time until the girl’s found.’

Once the parcel was ready, the Man put it in an ordinary paper carrier bag and left Jelena alone in the flat.

‘I’ll be back later,’ he said.

Jelena smiled to herself. She wandered restlessly between the kitchen and the living room. She avoided going anywhere near the bathroom.

The television was on. The news that a child had gone missing from a train was covered in a couple of quick sentences. Jelena found that rather annoying.

Just wait, she thought. You’ll all soon realize this isn’t just some ordinary little bit of news.

She ran her hands nervously through her hair. The man would not have liked her doing that; he would have taken it as a sign that she did not have complete trust in his ability to plan and carry through his project. But still. There was so much at stake, so much that had to go right.

Jelena went out into the kitchen and decided to make a sandwich. She was just opening the fridge door when she saw them on the floor, right under the table. The blood went coursing round her body and her pulse rate rose. Her heart was pounding so hard that she thought it would explode in her chest as she bent down to pick up the little pair of panties from the floor.

‘No, no,’ she whispered in panic. ‘No, no, how could I have done this?’

Her brain was working as if it was on autopilot, doing what had to be done. She must get rid of the panties, at once. The Man’s instructions had been entirely clear. All the clothes were to be in the parcel. All of them. Jelena felt so terrified she was on the verge of tears as she screwed the panties into a little ball and put them in an old plastic bag from a supermarket. Just as long as he doesn’t stop on the way and double check everything’s in the parcel. She moved at the speed of light as she left the flat and raced down to the rubbish storage room in the basement of the block of flats. The door resisted as usual and was heavy to open. Jelena lifted the lid of one of the rubbish containers and threw in the bag. Her heart felt like a bolting horse as she ran back up to her flat, taking two steps at a time.

The door of the flat slammed shut behind her with a bang, and she fumbled with the lock. She had to take several deep breaths to stop her palpitations turning into a full-scale panic attack. Then she tiptoed over to the bathroom and swallowed quite a few times before she opened the door. Her relief when she switched on the ceiling light was indescribable.

At least everything in the bathroom was as it should be. The girl was still lying naked in the bath where they had left her.

Peder Rydh flicked distractedly through his little notebook. He could scarcely read what he had written in it. He fanned himself with the book in the close heat of the office and let his thoughts roam free. Life could throw up the most unexpected and nasty surprises. Lilian Sebastiansson had experienced that today, first hand. But Peder took the same view as Alex, expecting the team to solve this particular case with relative ease.

The ringing of his mobile intruded into his thoughts. He smiled when he saw it was his brother calling. Jimmy rang him at least once a day.

‘You listening?’ the voice on the phone asked indignantly after a bit of introductory banter.

‘I’m listening, I’m listening,’ Peder put in hurriedly.

He could hear the silent laughter at the other end, almost like a child’s stifled giggles.

‘You’re cheating, Pedda, you’re cheating. You’re not listening.’

Peder had to smile. No, he wasn’t listening. Not properly, not the way he normally did when he was talking to his brother.

‘You coming soon, Pedda?’

‘I’m coming soon,’ Peder promised. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend.’

‘Is that long?’

‘No, it’s not long now. Only a few days.’

Then they rounded off the conversation the way they always did: with extravagant promises of kisses and hugs and eating posh cake with marzipan together when they saw each other. Jimmy sounded relatively happy. He would be seeing their parents tomorrow.

‘It could just as easily have been you, Peder,’ Peder’s mum had told him, more times than he could remember.

When he was little, she used to cup his face in her warm hands as she said it.

‘It could just as easily have been you. It could just as easily have been you who fell off the swing that day.’

Peder still had very sharp visual images in his head from the day his brother fell off the big swing their father had hung from one of the birch trees in the garden. He remembered the blood running over the stone Jimmy’s head had landed on, the grass smelling so strong because it was freshly mown, Jimmy lying on the ground, looking as if he was asleep. And he remembered rushing over and trying to cradle his little head that was bleeding so badly.

‘You mustn’t die,’ he had shouted, thinking of the rabbit they had buried so sadly, a month or so earlier. ‘You mustn’t die.’

His plea had been answered, in one sense, for Jimmy stayed with them. But he was never the same again, and although his body grew as fast as Peder’s, he remained a child.

Peder leafed through his notebook again. No, you never knew what surprises life would deal you. Peder certainly thought he knew more about that than most people. Not only in view of what happened to his brother when he was growing up, but also as a result of bitter experience gained later in life. Not to mention just recently. But he’d rather not think about that.

He was roused from his reverie by the sound of Fredrika in the corridor outside.

Alex had told Peder a few weeks earlier, in confidence of course, that Fredrika lacked the tact and sensitivity you needed for this profession. Peder couldn’t have put it better himself. To be frank, Fredrika was your classic anally retentive type. And she didn’t seem to have any kind of proper man to give her a proper seeing to at regular intervals, but Peder decided not to mention that to Alex. Alex was remarkably uninterested in thoughts and comments of that kind; he never wanted to talk about anything except work. Maybe eventually, when they’d been working together for longer, they’d be able to go for a beer together one evening? He felt a tickle of excitement in the pit of his stomach. There were few police officers who could even contemplate that – a beer with Alex Recht.

It really annoyed him that Fredrika couldn’t see, and therefore didn’t acknowledge, Alex’s greatness in the policing world. There she sat in her little jacket – she always wore a jacket – with her dark hair plaited in an improbably long plait that hung like a riding crop down her back, looking so bloody sceptical it made him want to throw up. There was something about the way she held herself, and that cocky laugh she would sometimes let out, that he simply couldn’t stand. No, Fredrika wasn’t a police officer; she was a so-called academic. She thought too much and acted too little. That wasn’t how police officers operated.

Peder cursed the fact that he’d been passed over in favour of Fredrika yet again and not been sent to talk to Sara Sebastiansson. At the same time, he cursed the fact that he hadn’t any extra spare time to give to the job, anyway. His private life was still using up too much of his energy for him to be able to function effectively.

Even so. Hadn’t Alex sounded confident the case of the missing Lilian would soon be solved? Wasn’t it very often the case that a man feeling wronged by his wife would use their child to punish her? So the Lilian case was not to be considered particularly major or important. Seen in that light, it was more understandable that Fredrika was going with Alex to interview Sara at home. It was actually a good thing that she and not Peder had been asked to go, because she was the one who needed to hone her skills, not him.

What Peder hardly dared admit, even to himself, was that for all the criticism he directed at her, he found Fredrika remarkably attractive. She had perfect skin and lovely, big blue eyes. Blue eyes when everything else about her was dark created an effect that was frankly dramatic. Her body looked as though it belonged to someone who had just turned twenty, though her bearing and the look in her eyes were those of a mature woman. She certainly had the breasts of an extremely mature woman. Peder occasionally caught himself thinking really filthy thoughts about Fredrika. He strongly suspected that university student unions and pubs were places that turned many young students into really good sexual partners. He suspected equally strongly that Fredrika was one of them. He avoided catching her eye when she automatically glanced into his room as she passed the door. He wondered what going to bed with her would be like. Probably not bad at all.

In a top-floor flat under the eaves in Östermalm, Fredrika Bergman was rounding off her intensive working day in the company of her lover. Fredrika and Spencer Lagergren had been seeing each other for a good number of years. In fact, Fredrika didn’t like to remind herself quite how many years it was, but on the rare occasions she did let herself remember, she always went back to the first time they spent the night together. Fredrika had been twenty-one at the time, and Spencer forty-six.

There wasn’t anything very complicated about their relationship. Over the course of the years, Fredrika had sometimes been single, sometimes involved in another relationship. At the times when she had someone else, she would refrain from seeing Spencer. A lot of men and women seem to be able to see two partners simultaneously. Fredrika couldn’t.

Spencer could, however, and Fredrika was always very much aware of it. Spencer and his wife Eva had got married one sunny day almost thirty-five years before, and he would never leave her for anyone else. Or only for the occasional weekday evening. Fredrika found this an entirely satisfactory arrangement. Spencer was twenty-five years older than her. Common sense told her that such an equation would prove impossible. Cold mathematical calculations also told her that if she really were to give her life to Spencer, if she chose to live with him, it would not be all that many years before she was alone again.

So Fredrika contented herself with seeing Spencer on a sporadic basis and accepting her role as the second, not the first, woman in his life. By extension of the same principle, she did not let it worry her either that their relationship never grew or developed. So Spencer Lagergren was just what she needed, on the whole. So she told herself.

‘I can’t get this cork out,’ said Spencer, frowning as he struggled with the bottle of wine he had brought.

Fredrika ignored him. He would rather die than let her try to open it. Spencer was always in charge of the wine, Fredrika of the music. They both loved classical music. Spencer had once tried to persuade her to play him something on the violin she still kept. But she refused.

‘I don’t play any more,’ came her firm, abrupt reply.

And no more was said on the subject.

‘Perhaps soaking the neck of the bottle in hot water would ease it a bit,’ Spencer muttered to himself.

His shadow played across the kitchen tiles as he moved to and fro with the bottle. It was a small kitchen; he was perpetually just a couple of steps away from treading on her toes. But she knew he never would. Spencer never trod on a woman’s toes, except perhaps when he was expressing his not entirely modern views in feminist discussions. And even then, he did so in such a brilliant way that he almost always emerged from those discussions on the winning side. In Fredrika’s eyes, and those of many other women, that made him an altogether very attractive man.

Fredrika noted he had finally won his fight with the wine bottle. Artur Rubinstein was playing Chopin in the background. Fredrika crept up behind Spencer and gently put her arms around him. She leant her head wearily on his back, her forehead resting against the body she knew best in the world apart from her own.

‘Are you tired, or shattered?’ Spencer asked quietly, pouring the wine.

Fredrika smiled.

She knew he was smiling, too.

‘Shattered,’ she whispered.

He turned in her embrace, and held out a glass of wine. She rested her forehead on his chest for a split second before she took the glass.

‘Sorry I was so late today.’

Spencer raised his glass in a silent toast, and they enjoyed their first sip.

Fredrika had not been particularly keen on red wine before she met Spencer. Now she found it hard to forgo it for more than a few days at a time. The good professor had indisputably taught her some bad habits.

Spencer ran a gentle hand across her cheek.

‘I was late last time, you know,’ was all he said.

Fredrika gave a little smile.

‘But it’s eleven o’clock, Spencer. You certainly weren’t that late, last time we met.’

For some reason – maybe because she felt guilty, maybe because she was tired – tears came to her eyes.

‘Oh, don’t get upset…’ began Spencer, seeing the glint of moisture in her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I…’

‘You’re tired,’ said Spencer firmly. ‘You’re tired, and you hate your job with the police. And that, my friend, is a really bad combination.’

Fredrika drank more of her wine.

‘I know,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I know.’

He put a steady arm around her waist.

‘Stay at home tomorrow. We’ll both stay here.’

Fredrika gave an imperceptible sigh.

‘No chance,’ she said. ‘I’m working on a new case now. A little girl’s gone missing. That’s why I was so late: we were interviewing the child’s mother and the mother’s new boyfriend all evening. Such a horrible story you can hardly believe it’s true.’

Spencer pulled her closer. She set down her glass and put both arms around him.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she whispered.

Saying anything like that was admittedly against the unspoken rules they agreed on, but Fredrika was too exhausted to worry about any agreement just then.

‘I’ve missed you, too,’ mumbled Spencer as he kissed the top of her head.

Fredrika stared into his eyes in astonishment.

‘Now there’s a coincidence, eh?’ said Spencer with a crooked smile.

It was after one before Fredrika and Spencer finally decided to try to get some sleep. As usual, Spencer was able to put the decision into practice with little delay. Fredrika found it much harder.

The wide double bed stood along one wall of what was really the only proper room in the flat. Apart from the bed, the flat was sparsely furnished with a couple of battered old English armchairs and a beautiful chess table. Over by the little kitchen there were also a small dining table and two chairs.

The flat had belonged to Spencer’s father, and he had inherited it when his father died, nearly ten years ago now. Since then, Fredrika and her lover had never really met anywhere else. She had still never been to Spencer’s main home, which felt logical. The only times they met somewhere other than the flat were when Fredrika occasionally discreetly accompanied Spencer to some conference abroad. She thought a number of his colleagues must know about their liaison, but quite honestly she couldn’t have cared less. What was more, Spencer’s status among his professorial colleagues was extraordinarily high, so he was never confronted with any direct questions.

Lying there in Spencer’s arms, Fredrika curled up into a little ball. He was breathing deeply behind her and already fast asleep. She stroked a cautious finger over the hairs on his naked arm. She couldn’t imagine a life without him. Such thoughts were indescribably dangerous, she knew that. Yet she could not banish them. And they always came when the night was at its darkest and she was feeling at her loneliest.

She shifted carefully until she was lying on her back.

The visit to Sara Sebastiansson’s had been a strain in every way. Partly because of Sara Sebastiansson herself, of course. The woman was entirely unbalanced. But also because of Peder. He had been mightily pleased when Alex decided Fredrika should not go to see Sara Sebastiansson on her own. Fredrika had seen him straighten up, and his face had broken into a sneering grin.

‘It’s not that I’m questioning your competence,’ Alex had said.

Fredrika knew all too well that that was exactly what he was doing. Expectations of her, a young woman with an academic background, were set extremely low. She was assumed to be barely capable of operating the photocopier. She could sense Alex’s irritation whenever she dared put forward or develop a new hypothesis.

His attitude to the woman in Flemingsburg was a case in point.

Fredrika found it hard to exclude her from the investigation. It was frankly grotesque that Sara hadn’t been asked for a description of the woman and that they hadn’t done a photofit. On the way back to the office after they had seen Sara, Fredrika had tried to raise the question again, but a weary Alex had firmly interrupted her.

‘It’s obvious, completely bloody obvious, that the father of that child is as sick as they come,’ he said agitatedly. ‘There’s nothing to point to there being any other lunatics in Sara’s circle who would want to harm her child, or scare Sara by taking Lilian from her. And nobody’s sent Sara a ransom note or anything like that.’

When Fredrika opened her mouth to point out that the perpetrator could be someone Sara was not actually in touch with at present, or did not realize she was in conflict with, Alex brought the discussion to a close with a:

‘It would be to your advantage in this organization to respect the competence and experience we have here. I’ve been looking for missing children for decades, so believe me, I know what I’m doing.’

Things went very quiet in the car after that, and Fredrika saw no reason to continue the discussion.

She peered over at Spencer’s peaceful face. Craggy features, grey, wavy hair. Good looking, you might even say handsome. Not cute, not ever. She had stopped asking herself how he could sleep so well, night after night, when he was being unfaithful. She assumed it was because he and his wife lived separate lives and had a mutual agreement about the extent of personal freedom they each had in the marriage. There had never been any children. Perhaps they had chosen not to have any. Fredrika wasn’t sure about that.

Alex Recht really shouldn’t have been particularly hard for Fredrika, of all people, to deal with. Not after almost fourteen years with a person whose views came from a time machine stuck somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Not after fourteen years with someone who still wouldn’t let her open a bottle of wine. Fredrika smiled wistfully. Spencer still respected her infinitely more than Alex did.

‘What is it he gives you that you feel you can’t do without?’ a succession of her friends had asked her over the years. ‘Why do you carry on seeing him, when nothing can ever come of it?’

Her answer had varied over time. At the very beginning, it had been so incredibly exciting and passionate. Forbidden and invigorating for both of them. An adventure. But the relationship had deepened, within its given limitations. They had many interests and some values in common. Over time, closeness to Spencer developed into a sort of fixed point for her. As she commuted between various cities and countries while finishing her studies, Spencer had always been there to come back to. The same was true when she became entangled in a variety of love affairs, all relatively short-lived. Once disaster had struck and the house of cards had collapsed, he was always still there. Never without pride, but permanently bored with his marriage yet unable to leave his wife. Though Fredrika had been told the wife had flings of her own.

Fredrika’s single status had been discussed in her own family on countless occasions over the years. She knew she had been a surprise to her parents in more than just her choice of profession. Neither of them had imagined she would still be single by her age. Her grandmother definitely hadn’t.

‘Oh, you’ll find someone,’ she used to say, patting Fredrika’s arm.

It had been a while now since Fredrika’s grandmother had done that. Fredrika had just celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with some good friends out in the archipelago, and was still husbandless and childless. Grandma would probably have had a heart attack if she had known Fredrika shared a bed from time to time with the professor who had been her supervisor at university.

Her father delivered thinly veiled lectures on the virtue of ‘settling for’ some things in life and ‘not being too greedy’. Only once Fredrika had grasped this would she, as her brother already did each Sunday, take her place at the parental dining table in the company of a family of her own. A year or two after Fredrika turned thirty and still seemed determinedly single (or ‘alone’, as her father put it), the Sunday dinners were putting such a strain on her mentally that she started to avoid them.

Lying in the dark beside a man she thought she loved in spite of everything, Fredrika knew that the day she told him she was having a baby, Spencer would be on his way out of her life. Not because she was replaceable, but because there was no room for a child in their relationship.

Fredrika and Spencer hadn’t talked about it for a long time, but after a long period of reflection, Fredrika was increasingly realizing that she might not find a man to start a family with, and that she might need to start thinking about the alternatives. It wasn’t a decision she could postpone indefinitely; she had to decide. Either she did something about it, even though she was alone, or there might be no children at all. She found it unexpectedly painful trying to visualize a whole life without the experience of parenthood. To put it bluntly, it felt unfair and unnatural.

There were various alternatives to weigh up. The most unthinkable of them was to force Spencer into paternity: she could stop taking the pill without telling him. Less unthinkable was a trip to Copenhagen to buy a chance of motherhood at a fertility clinic. The option that seemed the most feasible was adopting a child.

‘For fuck’s sake just send in the forms,’ Fredrika’s friend Julia had said, a few months earlier. ‘You can always back out, say you applied in too much of a hurry. You’ll have oceans of time to think it over; it takes forever to be approved to adopt. I’d get in the queue straight away.’

At first she hadn’t even seen it as a serious suggestion. What was more, it would amount to giving up somehow. The day she sent in her application to adopt would be the day she really gave up all hope of having a family of her own, with a partner. Had she reached that point?

The answer to that question came when Spencer didn’t answer the phone, either his mobile or his job number. After several days of silence, she started ringing round hospitals. He was in the cardiac department of the University Hospital in Uppsala. He had suffered a major heart attack and been given a pacemaker. Fredrika cried for a week and then, with a new perspective on what is enduring in life, she sent in the application form.

Fredrika planted a light kiss on Spencer’s forehead. He smiled in his sleep. She smiled back. She still hadn’t told him about her plan to adopt a little girl from China. After all, her friend was right: she had oceans of time.

One last thought formed in her head before she succumbed to sleep. How much time did Lilian have? Did she have oceans of it, too, or were her days numbered?

WEDNESDAY

The woman on the TV screen was talking so fast that Nora almost missed the news report. It was early morning and her flat was shrouded in darkness. The only light came from the television, but since the blinds were down, Nora was almost certain its flickering gleam couldn’t be seen by anyone looking in from the street.

For Nora, this was very important. She knew she was condemned to feel unsafe, but she also knew there were certain little things she could do to improve her odds. One of them was simply not to be seen. By requesting protected identity from the tax authorities, she became less visible; by never having the light on in the flat in the evening, she became even less visible. She had a minimal circle of friends. She only had sporadic contact with her grandmother, always ringing her from a phone box in the street, and always from some other town. Her job was useful in that respect; she had to travel a fair amount.

When she heard the news she was in the kitchen, making a sandwich, with the fridge door open. The light in the fridge was useful; it meant she didn’t need to switch on any other lights to see what she was doing.

The woman’s voice cut through the silence and reached Nora as she struggled with the cheese slice.

‘A six-year-old girl went missing yesterday from a train travelling between Gothenburg and Stockholm,’ the woman’s voice intoned. ‘The police are appealing for anyone who was on the train that left Gothenburg at 10.50 a.m. yesterday morning, or at Stockholm Central Station around…’

Nora dropped the cheese slice and ran to the television.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Nora, feeling her heart thud. ‘He’s started.’

She listened to the end of the news, then switched off the set and sank down on the settee. The words she had just heard sank slowly into her consciousness, one by one. Together they formed whole sentences creating violent echoes from a time she had tried so hard to put behind her.

‘The train, Doll,’ whispered the echo. ‘You’ve no idea what people leave behind on the train. And you’ve no idea how unobservant all the rest are. The ones who don’t leave things behind, but are just travelling. That’s what people do on the train, Doll. They travel. And they don’t see a thing.’

She sat there on the settee until her hunger reminded her of the sandwich she had made. Only then did she reach a decision about what to do. She switched the TV back on, and clicked to teletext. The police number for members of the public with any information was at the end of the item about the missing child. She keyed it into her mobile. She would ring later in the day. Not from her mobile, of course, but from a telephone box.

Nora pulled the blind aside and peeped cautiously out into the street. If only it would stop raining.

Alex Recht woke up just after six, almost an hour before the alarm clock was due to go off. Carefully, so as not to wake his wife Lena, he got out of bed and padded out of the room to make his first cup of coffee of the day.

The house was light on this bright morning, but the sun had already settled behind a clump of thick cloud. Alex suppressed a sigh as he measured the coffee into the filter of the machine. No, he honestly couldn’t remember ever experiencing a worse summer. The rest of his holiday leave lay just a few weeks ahead. They would feel like totally wasted weeks if the weather didn’t improve.

Mistrustful of the weather, he opened the back door to check whether it had started raining yet and made a brisk foray to retrieve the morning paper. He unfolded it even before he was back inside. A headline about the disappearance of Lilian Sebastiansson looked back at him from the front page of the national daily. ‘Child of six missing since yesterday…’ Excellent, even the big papers had been in time to run the story.

Alex took his cup of coffee and newspaper and crossed the little hall, painted a deep blue, to his study. It had been Lena’s idea to paint the hall blue. Alex had been sceptical.

‘Doesn’t it make small spaces look even smaller if you paint them a dark colour?’ he said doubtfully.

‘Maybe,’ said Lena. ‘But more to the point, it makes them look nice!’

That, Alex realized, was an argument he had little hope of countering, so he allowed himself to be persuaded more or less without a fight. It fell to his son to do the painting job, and it certainly did look lovely. And cramped. But they didn’t talk about that.

Alex sat down in the enormous desk chair that was more like a small armchair on wheels. He had inherited it from his grandfather and would never part with it. Alex gave the arm of the chair a contented pat. Not only was it handsome, it was also comfortable. Alex and the chair would soon be celebrating their thirtieth anniversary. Thirty years! That was a terribly long time to sit in one chair. Actually, thought Alex, it was a terribly long time in every way. Longer than he had been married to Lena, in fact.

Leaning back in the chair, Alex closed his eyes.

He didn’t feel properly rested. He had not slept well last night. For the first time in several years, he had had nightmares. However much he would have liked to blame it on the weather, he knew the bad dreams had their origins elsewhere.

Alex was more than vaguely aware that in the course of his years with the police, he had come to be viewed as something of a legend. On the whole, he thought it was a reputation he deserved. The number of investigations and cases that had crossed his desk was too great for him to count, and he had solved most of them sooner or later. Never alone, but he had generally taken the lead. Just as he was doing this time. But now he was becoming aware of the passage of the years. They were talking about bringing the pension age for police officers down to sixty-one. Alex initially thought it sounded a lousy idea, but now he felt differently. It did no good for an authority like the police to be weighed down by a lot of tired and ageing officers. It was important to bring new blood into the organization.

In his years in the police force, Alex had encountered more desperate individuals than he could remember. Sara Sebastiansson was the latest of them. But she hadn’t let any real despair show yet. She was keeping herself together in a quite remarkable way, thought Alex. He had no doubt that inside she was being torn apart by her anxiety and her desperate longing to see the child, but she was forcing herself not to show it. It was as if she thought that if she exposed for a single second – a single second – the horror she was going through, then the world would split apart beneath her feet and her daughter would be lost for ever. As Alex understood it, she hadn’t even rung her parents yet.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow, if Lilian’s not back by then,’ she had said.

Now it was tomorrow, and as far as Alex knew, Lilian was still missing. He looked at his mobile phone. No missed calls, no missed news.

There were a few other basics to bear in mind where missing children were concerned. Almost all such children, the vast majority, were found. Sooner or later. And ‘later’ was seldom more than a day or so. That had been the case, for example, for the little boy out on the coast last year, when Alex was called in precisely because he had handled a number of missing child cases in the course of his career. The boy, perhaps five years old, had slipped away from his family’s summer place at Ekerö when his parents were having an argument, and then simply run or walked so far from the house that he couldn’t find his way back again.

They found him asleep under a spruce some ten kilometres from home, further away than expected, beyond the radius of the initial search. He was reunited with his parents early the next morning, and the last thing Alex heard as he left the place was the parents bickering loudly and bitterly about whose fault it was the boy had gone off.

Then, of course, there were cases Alex found it harder to reconcile himself to. Cases in which the child had been subjected to such abominations when it was snatched that it was basically a completely different child by the time it was restored to its parents. There was one particular little girl who always came back into Alex’s mind when another child went missing. The girl had been gone for several days before she was found in a ditch by a motorist. She was unconscious for more than a week after she was admitted to hospital, and could never give any proper account of what had happened to her. Nor was there any need. The injuries to her body bore witness to the kind of scum that must have taken her, and though doctors, psychologists and well-meaning parents did everything in their power to heal her wounds, there were psychological scars that no medical treatment or words on this earth could remove.

The girl remained dysfunctional and disturbed as she grew up, not interacting with those around her at home or at school. She became more and more of a loner. She didn’t finish secondary school. Still not of age, she ran away from home and turned to prostitution. Her parents brought her home time after time but she always made off again. And before she was twenty, she died of a heroin overdose. Alex could remember crying in his office when the news reached him.

Alex had felt an overwhelming urge to go and see Sara Sebastiansson for himself the previous evening, and that was why he had accompanied Fredrika Bergman to Sara’s flat. He was afraid Fredrika took it as a sign that he questioned her competence in that area of work. Which he did, to some extent, but that wasn’t why he had wanted to go with her. No, he had just wanted to get a better feel for the case. And he certainly had.

First Fredrika and Alex talked to Sara on her own for a while, and then her new friend Anders Nyström turned up. The checks on his personal data had not yielded anything, but Fredrika had nonetheless interviewed him briefly in Sara’s kitchen, while Alex continued his conversation with Sara in the living room.

The information that emerged troubled him.

Sara had no enemies. At least none she was aware of.

On the other hand, she didn’t seem to have many friends, either.

She told him that her ex-husband used to abuse her, but that it was no longer a problem, and she didn’t believe for a moment that he had taken their daughter. That was why she had chosen not to mention the earlier abuse to Fredrika when they first spoke. She didn’t want the police investigation getting unnecessarily sidetracked, as she put it.

Alex didn’t believe a word of it. For one thing, he had explained in as lecturing a tone as he could without sounding downright arrogant, it was not Sara’s role to evaluate the various avenues of investigation, if indeed there were more than one. And for another, Alex did not believe Sara’s ex-husband was now leaving her in peace. It took him a while to talk her round, but eventually she showed him her forearms, which she had clearly been trying to hide inside her sleeves. Just as Fredrika had suspected, the arms showed clear signs of physical violence. A large and evidently very painful patch stood out sharply on her left arm. The skin was orangey-red and Alex could see signs of blisters that were now starting to heal. A burn, without a doubt.

‘He burnt me with the iron, just before we separated,’ Sara said in a flat voice, with an empty gaze that was trying to fix on a point somewhere behind Alex.

Alex took her arm gently in his hand and said quietly but emphatically:

‘You’ll have to report this, Sara.’

At that, she slowly turned her head and looked him straight in the eye.

‘He wasn’t here then.’

‘What?’

‘Haven’t you read the police reports? He’s never here when it happens. There’s always someone who can confirm he was somewhere else.’

Again her eyes went to that point behind Alex.

It disturbed Alex to see the extent of Sara Sebastiansson’s injuries. To his great annoyance and dismay, her ex-husband had not been in touch at all that evening. Alex sent a radio car to his address for the second time that day, but the officers reported back that the house was still in darkness and no one had answered the door. Fredrika then said she would contact Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother again the following day, and ring the place where he worked. Somebody must know where he was.

Sitting there in his grandfather’s office chair, Alex could feel the anger rising inside him. There were certain fundamental rules that he had grown up with and learnt to respect in his almost fifty-five years in this world. You did not hit women. You did not hit children. You did not lie. And you took care of the elderly.

Alex shuddered as he remembered the burn.

What made you do something like that to the person closest to you?

Alex found it hard to stomach the political mood that was now sweeping the country, talking of ‘men’s violence against women’. It would be unthinkable to make sweeping generalizations like that in other areas. To take just one example, a colleague had said at a police conference that ‘the immigrant tendency not to obey laws or regulations is costing society untold sums of money’. That statement almost cost the colleague his job. If he went round saying things like that, it was argued, the public would think all immigrants chose to live outside society’s rules, and that was definitely not the case.

No, thought Alex, it was definitely not the case. Any more than saying that all men hit all women. Some men hit women. A huge number of others did not. Unless that was the accepted starting point, the problem would never be properly addressed.

There had been no need for the team to meet again the previous evening. Alex had updated Peder once he and Fredrika left Sara Sebastiansson’s flat. Alex was neither stupid nor gullible. Peder had an almost childlike urge to show how clever he was, and Alex was a little concerned that this might have a negative impact on his judgment in stressful situations. But at the same time he didn’t want to inhibit Peder, who showed exemplary enthusiasm for his job and had so much energy.

It would have been nice if Fredrika could display a little more of that, he thought drily.

He glanced at the clock. Nearly seven. Time to get dressed and head into town. He was so lucky to live on an island like Resarö, so close to the city, yet just far enough away. He would never exchange this house for any other. It was a real find, as his darling Lena had said when they bought it a few years before. Alex got up from his desk chair and took the blue corridor back to the kitchen. By the time he stepped into the shower a short while later, the first rain shower of the morning was already drumming on the window.

The train service between Gothenburg to Stockholm is more or less hourly. Sara Sebastiansson’s parents took the earliest train they could, leaving Gothenburg at six in the morning. This was not their first emergency trip from coast to coast, but it was definitely the gravest of its kind. On several previous occasions they had had to drop everything at home and at work to look after Lilian while Sara tried to recover from the damage done to her body as quickly as she could. They had systematically refused to have anything more to do with their son-in-law after the first attack. They had tried every way they could to persuade Sara to be strong and keep away from him. They had implored her to move back to the west coast. But she had always refused. She was not going to let Gabriel destroy any more aspects of her life, she told them. She had been away from Gothenburg for fifteen years, and would never move back. Never. Her life was in Stockholm now.

‘But Sara, love,’ her mother said, ‘he could kill you. Think of Lilian, Sara. What will happen to Lilian if you’re dead?’

But Sara hardened herself against her mother’s tears, and carried on saying no.

Had she done the right thing?

Sitting at her kitchen table the morning after Lilian disappeared, she asked herself if she had made a mistake of incalculable proportions. She wondered if Gabriel really had taken Lilian. God knows the man had done monstrously evil things. Never directly aimed at Lilian, but affecting her indirectly all the same, since she had more than once been woken from her innocent sleep by her mother Sara’s screams from an adjacent room. Once, Lilian had crept out of bed and tearfully found her way to where the sound was coming from.

Sara could still see the scene in her mind’s eye. She was lying on the floor, prevented from getting up by the intense pain in her side where Gabriel had kicked her. Gabriel, seething with rage, bending over her. And in the midst of it all, Lilian’s little voice.

‘Mummy. Daddy.’

As if in a trance, Gabriel turned round.

‘Oh,’ he whispered, ‘is Daddy’s little darling awake?’

He took a couple of swift strides across the kitchen, lifted up the child and carried her out of the room.

‘Mummy just fell over and landed all wrong, darling,’ Sara heard him say. ‘We’ll leave her to have a little rest, and then she’ll be as good as new. Do you want me to read you a story?’

Sara had done a university foundation course in psychology, and she knew that many men who beat their wives showed great remorse afterwards. Gabriel never did. He never said sorry; he never gave any hint of thinking what had happened was abnormal or wrong. He just looked at her injuries and bruises with such casual contempt that she wished she could fall dead on the spot.

She knew she was too exhausted to go on much longer. That night, the first night without Lilian, had been so relentlessly long.

‘Try to get some rest,’ Alex Recht had advised her. ‘I know it sounds impossible, but it really is the best thing you can do for Lilian, so you can be strong. Because when she comes back, she needs a rested mum to look after her. Okay?’

Sara had tried to hang on to that thought. She had tried to sleep, tried to prepare herself for her daughter’s return. She clung on to Alex’s last words: ‘Because when she comes back…’ Not if she comes back, but when she comes back.

As she lay there in bed, Sara realized almost at once that it had been a big mistake to send Anders away so soon. It had felt like a kind of betrayal of Lilian to have him around, as if his presence somehow worsened the odds of getting her daughter back. At two in the morning, she rang her parents. Her father went totally quiet, she heard him breathing into the phone.

Finally she heard his husky voice: ‘We’ve always known we’d lose one of you,’ he said. ‘It could never end well with that evil man in your lives.’

Hearing those words, Sara dropped the phone and slumped to the floor. She clawed at the parquet floor of the kitchen as her tears flowed.

‘Lilian,’ she cried, ‘Lilian.’

Somewhere in the background, from the telephone lying where it had fallen, she heard her father’s desperate voice.

‘We’ll come right away, Sara. Mum and I will come right away.’

Sara cradled her cup of coffee. She liked the fact that it got light early in the mornings, despite the bad weather. She had slept for less than an hour in total. She tried to convince herself that this didn’t make her a bad mother. A mother who didn’t care at all must be worse than one who cared too much. Sara was taken aback by her own thoughts. Was there really a limit to how upset you were allowed to be if your child vanished? She hoped not. She prayed not.

The shrill tone of the doorbell cut through the silence. Sara had just switched off the radio. She had heard the news of her daughter’s disappearance on both television and radio. At first the girl newsreader’s voice felt like a big, warm blanket. Somebody out there cared. Somebody out there wanted to help look for her child. But by the end of the third or fourth news bulletin, the warm blanket felt more like a noose, throttling her, an ever-present reminder of Lilian’s absence, of which Sara was already all too painfully aware.

The doorbell rang again.

Sara considered. A quick look at the clock showed it was almost half past eight. She had been in touch with the duty officer at the police station an hour previously, and he had updated her. Still no news.

Sara peered cautiously through the peephole in the front door, hoping it would be Fredrika Bergman or Alex Recht. It was neither. No, there was some kind of postman standing there. And he had a parcel.

Sara opened the door, surprised.

‘Sara Sebastiansson?’ asked the man with the parcel.

She nodded. The thought occurred to her as she did so that she must look quite a sight, drained and exhausted as she was.

‘I’ve got a parcel for you,’ said the man, holding it out. ‘It was to go directly to you, not to one of our collection points. Can you take delivery?’

‘Yes,’ said Sara warily, taking the package. ‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you!’ said the man, smiling. ‘Have a nice day!’

Sara made no reply to this, but shut the door and locked it. She gave the parcel a gentle shake. It weighed scarcely anything, and made no sound when she shook it. She looked for the address of the sender, there was none. It was a box about the size and shape for a DVD player or something like that. She turned it round, turned it over. Hesitant at first, then more deliberate.

‘Contact the police immediately if anything unusual happens, anything you weren’t expecting,’ Alex Recht had urged her the night before. ‘You’ve got to report it, Sara, whatever it is. Odd phone calls, odd rings at the door. Even though we’re inclined not to think so, it could be that Lilian’s been kidnapped, and in that case the perpetrator may try to contact you.’

Standing there with the package in her arms, Sara wondered if this should be considered an abnormal event. Her parents would be arriving any minute; should she wait for them to get there?

Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or the driving forces of desperation and curiosity, that made Sara Sebastiansson decide on the spur of the moment to open the parcel straight away. She laid it gently on the kitchen table and put her mobile phone beside it. She would open the parcel and then ring Alex Recht or Fredrika Bergman. If there was any reason to. It could just be something she’d ordered and forgotten about.

Sara peeled off the tape sealing the lid of the box. Her long fingers grasped both sides of the lid and lifted them up. A bed of polystyrene foam granules confronted her. Sara frowned. What was this?

She pushed the granules carefully aside. At first she could not make out what it was she had been sent. Her eyes sought some kind of context they could comprehend. Hair. A mass of medium-length, wavy hair, chestnut brown. Dumbstruck, Sara touched the hair, revealing what lay beneath it. Then Sara instantly knew whose hair she was holding in her hands, and let out a loud, animal howl. She went on screaming until her parents arrived some minutes later and rang for the police and a doctor. Then the screams, which were starting to make her hoarse, turned into sobs of bewilderment and bottomless despair. The dam she had so skilfully built up to hold back her rising sense of panic had burst. What had she done to deserve this? What in heaven’s name had she done?

Sara Sebastiansson’s parents’ call came through to the police just after 9 a.m. Alex was immediately informed and drove crazily fast to Sara’s flat, taking Fredrika Bergman with him. To her unfeigned amazement, Fredrika noted as they left that Peder looked very unhappy about Fredrika being asked to answer the emergency call and not him.

Once the cardboard box with its nauseating contents had been sent off by special courier to the National Forensic Science Laboratory, SKL, in Linköping, Alex and Fredrika returned to HQ. Both occupants of the car derived a certain comfort from the silence that settled over them as they began the short return journey from Södermalm to the police building in Kungsholmsgatan. They swept up onto Västerbron and looked out from the bridge over a Stockholm wreathed in almost autumnal darkness. The next front of heavy clouds that had rolled in over the capital overnight were vividly reflected in the water spreading out beneath them. Fredrika reflected on the fact that they coloured the water grey, making the view a good deal less attractive than usual.

Alex cleared his throat.

‘Sorry?’ said Fredrika.

Alex looked at her and shook his head.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ he said quietly.

He was reluctant to admit it, but Alex was shocked by what he had just seen. The package turned the case from what initially seemed a routine investigation involving two adults going through a painful divorce in which their child had inevitably become a pawn, into a case with a much less predictable outcome. The experience had been made no less upsetting by Sara Sebastiansson’s panic, which filled the whole flat and was made all the more tangible by her mother’s tearful entreaties to her daughter to calm down. Alex could see at once that Sara Sebastiansson had gone beyond the point where a human being can simply ‘calm down’. He decided the most efficient course of action was to wait for the doctor and then, when Sara had been given a sedative, to investigate the box and its contents himself.

It was clear from Sara’s reaction to the parcel that the hair must be Lilian’s. Tests would establish the fact for certain. Underneath the mass of hair were the clothes Lilian had been wearing when she disappeared. A green, knee-length skirt and a little white T-shirt with a green and pink print on the front. There were two little hairbands, too. Her panties were missing, for some reason.

Seeing the clothes made Alex’s stomach lurch. Someone must have taken them off her. Of all the sick people in the world, he found none more repugnant than those who violated children.

There were no bloodstains or anything like that on the clothes. At least none that were visible, but SKL would establish that, of course, as well as checking for traces of other bodily fluids.

Alex thought he understood the message a package like that was intended to convey all too well. Somebody wanted to frighten Sara in a big way. Sara’s hysterical reaction showed how very successful the sender had been. Later on, Sara would have to be asked about both the package and the person who delivered it, but any sort of conversation or interrogation was out of the question in her present state.

Soon, thought Alex. Soon.

He gripped the steering wheel hard, very hard.

‘Did you get anything useful out of the call to where the ex-husband works?’ he asked Fredrika.

Fredrika gave a start.

‘Yes and no.’

She sat up straighter in her seat. She’d rung Gabriel Sebastiansson’s employer earlier that morning.

‘According to his boss, Gabriel Sebastiansson’s on holiday at the moment, but he couldn’t say where he is. He’s been off since Monday.’

Alex gave a whistle.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Particularly as he clearly hasn’t told his ex-wife about it, even though they have a child together. And didn’t he tell his old mum he was on a business trip?’

‘Yes, he did,’ she said. ‘Or at least, that’s what she told me he said. But to be honest, I didn’t have a very good feeling about her.’

Alex frowned.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean that just because she says he said he was on a business trip, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Her sense of loyalty to her son is so fierce, I presume she wouldn’t have any objection to lying for his sake.’

Alex thought this over. They were almost back at HQ. Fredrika wondered why it was that she was always the passenger rather than the driver when she went anywhere by car with her male colleagues. Presumably this fact, too, could be explained by her never having been to police training college, never having done her stint in a patrol car, so she must clearly be an incompetent driver.

‘Go round to her place,’ Alex said roughly, completely forgetting to applaud the moment of Fredrika’s first ever admission that she was acting on an instinct. ‘Go round and see the ex-husband’s mother. We’ll just have a quick meeting first.’

‘I will,’ said Fredrika.

They turned into the garage entrance and carried on down the tunnel to the parking area.

‘Are we still sure it was the father took the girl?’ Fredrika asked quietly, afraid of reigniting Alex’s anger by questioning his working hypothesis. ‘Would a father scalp his own daughter and send the hair to her mother?’

The question prompted Alex to think of the burn from the iron on Sara’s arm.

‘Normal fathers wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But Gabriel Sebastiansson is not a normal father.’

Peder Rydh was frustrated. The emergency call from Sara Sebastiansson’s had taken the whole group totally by surprise, and then – just as the situation was at its most acute – Fredrika was asked to go along, rather than Peder. He had to carry on following up tip-off after tip-off. He felt he was worth better than being stuck on something so apparently unimportant, compared to a trip to interview Sara again.

Admittedly he was getting a lot of valuable help from Mats Dahman, the data analyst from the National Crime Squad; Alex had asked if he could call him in to help with the investigation as soon as Sara’s parents rang. Mats had a handy programme for sorting the information that had come in. You could easily identify who had reported things that happened too early, for example. All those who claimed to have seen Lilian Sebastiansson at Stockholm Central Station at quarter to two, for example, could be weeded out automatically, because Lilian hadn’t disappeared by then. But the later ones were trickier. One woman who had been on the same train as Sara and Lilian said she had noticed a short man carrying a sleeping child when they got out onto the platform. But if the perpetrator took size 46 shoes, he was hardly likely to be particularly short. He was presumably quite tall, in fact. Assuming the shoeprints had anything at all to do with Lilian’s disappearance.

Peder leant back in his desk chair and gave a dejected sigh. It hadn’t been particularly great last night, either. He hadn’t got home until ten, despite having made up his mind to get back earlier, and he’d found Ylva sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of tea. She’d been at home all day, but she was still feeling tired. For some reason, Peder found that infuriating, and had to make a real effort not to say anything critical or unkind. He made himself repeat the same old mantra that had been going round and round inside his head for the last ten or eleven months:

She’s tired; she’s not well. She can’t help it. And if we take it slowly, one step at a time, she might improve. Things can only get better.

Until about a year before, Peder had been one of those people who really enjoy their lives to the full. He considered it almost a duty for anyone lucky enough to have a healthy body and a decent situation in life. He enjoyed going to work every day. He enjoyed life in general, and a career that was finally taking off, and he enjoyed his Ylva and the thought of the family they were about to become. In short, he was a secure, straightforward, positive and harmonious person. Happy and outgoing. That was how he saw himself, anyway.

But things changed when Ylva gave birth to the twins, their first children. Life as Peder knew it evaporated, never to return. The boys were immediately put in a special care incubator, and Ylva disappeared into a vast darkness called ‘post-natal depression’. In place of the life he had before, Peder got a different one: full of dissatisfaction and regret, of prescription drugs and long-term sick leave, and constant phone calls asking his mother to look after the children again. What was more, he had to cope with the misery of an everyday life with a total lack of sex. Peder felt instinctively that this was a life he had neither asked for nor deserved.

‘Ylva is so depressed that she doesn’t feel she wants any kind of physical relationship with you,’ the elderly, not to say ancient, doctor had explained to Peder. ‘You’ll have to be patient.’

And Peder really had been patient. He tried to think of Ylva as incurably ill, almost the way he thought of Jimmy, with no prospect of getting better. Peder – and his mother, he mustn’t forget – took over all the day-to-day running of things at home. Ylva slept her way through September, October and November. She cried all through December, except for Christmas itself, when she pulled herself together for a day for the family’s sake. In January she was a little better, but Peder still had to be patient. In mid-February she had another setback and was down all month. In March things improved a bit again. But by then it was already more or less too late.

In March, the Södermalm police, where Peder was working at the time, held its big spring party, and Peder spent half the evening having sex with his colleague Pia Nordh. A delicious relief. Horribly sinful. Totally unforgivable. And yet – in Peder’s world – entirely understandable.

Afterwards he felt the deepest and most awful remorse he had ever known. But then, as Ylva gradually got better and better, and the days longer and longer, Peder started to forgive himself. He had a right to a bit of physical pleasure now and then, after the hell he’d been through. He had the solidarity and support of some of his colleagues, who knew his secret. It was only natural for him to fancy screwing someone else. Not all that often, but occasionally. He felt sorry for himself, thought he deserved a better fate. Bloody hell, he wasn’t even thirty-five. So he got together with Pia every so often. The damage was already done, after all.

He stopped like a shot when she asked him if he was thinking of leaving Ylva, though. Was she crazy? Leave Ylva for some colleague dying for a fuck? Pia obviously had no idea about what was important in life, thought Peder, and dumped her by text message.

Soon after that, he got a new job, moving on from the uniformed branch to become a DI – sooner in his career than most people. He was allocated to the investigation team of the almost legendary Alex Recht, and threw himself wholeheartedly into the new job. At home, to Peder’s genuine delight, Ylva started talking about the future, and how it would be in the autumn, when Peder was to take a spell of paternity leave, and then the boys would start at nursery; and they all went to Majorca for the last week in May. Peder and Ylva made love for the first time in over ten months, and after that some things seemed to start going back to more like what Peder thought of as normal.

‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get everything back to how it was,’ his mother warned him. ‘Ylva’s still sensitive.’

Peder actually felt like saying that Ylva was still bordering on the unrecognizable, but the week away had given him new hope. Ylva was gradually showing more sides of herself that he could recognize. It really would be risking everything to tell her about the affair with Pia Nordh, he told himself. And anyway, he had so deserved a bit of fun just then.

Now it was the end of July. Two months since Majorca. He still had Pia’s number if he felt miserable again. He hoped he wouldn’t need to use it, but you never knew.

There were times when he simply could not accept his situation, times when it was all too much. The evening he screwed Pia Nordh had been one of those. Last night had been another one.

‘Have you been working all this time?’ Ylva asked.

Peder tensed. What the hell was this? An accusation?

‘Yes, there’s a kid gone missing.’

‘I saw,’ said Ylva, looking up from her teacup. ‘I didn’t know you were on that case.’

Peder took a beer from the fridge and a glass from one of the cupboards.

‘She didn’t go missing until this afternoon, before that there was no case. And now I’m telling you that I’m working on it.’

The cold beer chilled his hand as he filled the glass.

‘You could have rung,’ Ylva said.

Peder lost his temper.

‘But I did,’ he sputtered, and gulped down some of his beer.

‘Yes, but not until six,’ Ylva said wearily. ‘And you said you’d be late, but you’d be back by eight. And now it’s ten. Don’t you realize how worried I’ve been?’

‘I didn’t know you cared where I was,’ Peder said curtly, and regretted it the same instant.

Sometimes, when he was tired, stupid things like that just slipped out. He met Ylva’s eyes over his beer glass, saw the tears come to her eyes. She got up and went out of the kitchen.

‘For fuck’s sake, Ylva, I’m sorry,’ he called after her, keeping his voice down.

Keeping his voice down so as not to wake the children, sorry to try to get her back in a good mood. There was always somebody else whose needs he was supposed to prioritize over his own.

Peder felt anxiety and his guilty conscience clawing at him as he sat there at his desk. He simply didn’t understand how it could all have turned out so wrong when he got home. He’d rung, hadn’t he? The only reason he hadn’t rung again was that he hadn’t wanted to wake the children. Or he tried to convince himself that was the main reason, at least.

It had been a wretched night. The boys woke up and wouldn’t settle again, and it ended up with the two of them lying in between their parents in the double bed. Peder had fallen asleep with his arm round one of his sons. The little boy slept less fitfully that way.

Driving home from work the evening before, Peder had hoped that Ylva would still be awake and might feel like sex. How naïve of him, looking back. She’d only felt like sex once since they got back from Majorca. And he could hardly bring it up with his best mates when they were in the sauna after training on Thursdays.

It was bloody humiliating, thought Peder. Not being able to make love to your own wife.

And nobody humiliated Peder, that was for sure.

There had been so much life in Ylva when they met six years before. He could never for a moment have imagined then that he might cheat on her one day. But was it really cheating on someone when that person scarcely wanted sex all year? A year was an enormously long time, to Peder’s way of seeing things.

Ylva, Ylva, where the hell have you gone?

Pia Nordh’s number was burning a hole in his mobile.

If he just gave her a call and made himself sound really, really charming, and sort of hinted it was all his fault for handling it so badly when they broke up, she’d be sure to want to see him again. Peder straightened his back as he sat there. This enforced abstinence was affecting his judgment badly, he told himself. Affecting his judgment and making him frustrated. He’d do his job much better if he could just have a little distraction.

Peder’s fumbling fingers located his mobile. It took her a few rings to answer.

‘Hello.’

Husky voice, warm memories. Crazy memories. Peder cut off the call. He swallowed hard and ran his hands through his hair. He’d got to pull himself together. This wasn’t the time to lose his grip on real life again. It just wasn’t. He decided to ring Jimmy instead and see how he was doing.

Then Ellen, their assistant, stuck her head round the door.

‘Alex rang and said he wanted you to make sure the media get a photo of the girl to spread around. They didn’t get one yesterday.’

Peder braced himself.

‘Fine, no problem.’

Alex Recht felt under pressure as he assembled his team again on his return from Sara Sebastiansson’s. A pair of size 46 shoeprints belonging to an unidentified individual had been found just where Sara and Lilian were sitting on the train. Apart from that, there was no technical evidence to help the team in its work. Alex hoped the box that had gone off to SKL would give them some more leads.

But the parcel delivered to Sara was extremely alarming. The act was so calculated that it felt like the work of a not entirely healthy mind. What was brewing here, exactly?

‘Fredrika, try to get Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother to tell you everything – and I mean everything – she knows,’ he said sharply.

Fredrika gave a brief nod and jotted a few words in the notebook she always carried with her. It wouldn’t surprise Alex if she turned up with a dictaphone one of these days.

‘The parcel puts a different complexion on things,’ he said. ‘Now we know for sure that Lilian’s disappearance was no coincidence, and that she didn’t just wander off. Someone who knew who she was – someone who clearly wants to hurt her mother – is deliberately keeping her hidden. As things stand…’

Alex cleared his throat and went on.

‘We haven’t been able to interview Sara yet, but when I spoke to her yesterday there was no indication she might have any enemies apart from her ex. Until we get any information to take us in other directions, any tip-offs that come in, for example, we’ll work on the hypothesis that Gabriel Sebastiansson’s got the girl.’

Alex fixed Fredrika with a look, and she said nothing.

‘Any questions?’

No one said anything, but Peder squirmed in his seat.

‘How are you getting on with what’s come in from the public?’ Alex asked. ‘Anything we can use?’

Peder shook his head.

‘No,’ he said hesitantly, with a sideways glance at the analyst from the National Crime Squad, who had been asked to join them for the meeting. ‘No, we’ve nothing concrete to tell you. A few tip-offs have come in, but things won’t really start happening until her photo’s on TV and in the papers.’

Alex nodded.

‘But they’ve had the photo?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Peder said quickly.

‘Good,’ muttered Alex. ‘Good. Somebody out there must have seen something. It’s just absurd that nobody on the train registered seeing Lilian leave it.’

He took a breath and then added:

‘And naturally we’ll keep quiet about the parcel sent to Sara. God knows what the headlines would look like if it got out that the kidnapper scalped the girl.’

Everyone was quiet for a moment. The air conditioning coughed and hissed.

‘Okay,’ said Alex in conclusion. ‘We’ll have another meeting this afternoon, when Fredrika’s back from seeing Gabriel’s mother. I’ve decided to send her on her own; I reckon we’ll get more out of the lady in question if she doesn’t have to entertain a whole delegation. Peder will carry on following up what comes in, and we’ll hope to hear back from SKL about the parcel soon. Peder can also contact the courier company that brought it round. I’ve asked Sara’s parents to draw up a list of people Sara knows, people we can interview and ask about Gabriel’s whereabouts. It’s going to be another busy day.’

With that, the meeting was over and the team dispersed. Only Ellen remained at the table for a few minutes, making notes.

It was only when Fredrika Bergman was actually sitting in the car with a road atlas open that it registered: Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother – Lilian’s grandmother – lived in Djursholm. Big, expensive houses, huge gardens, and endless bisous on the cheek. Fredrika reflected for a moment that Sara Sebastiansson seemed to come from a very different background to her husband.

In her mind, Fredrika went over the day so far. She was feeling a lack of structure and direction in her work. It had not escaped her that Alex was very skilled and competent at what he did. She also readily conceded that he had a vast range and depth of experience that she lacked. But she felt contempt, to put it bluntly, for his inability to incorporate new suggestions into their work. Particularly in the current situation. Loose threads remained loose, and Fredrika could not see that any concrete measures were being taken either to discard them or to follow them up. They were assuming – perhaps entirely wrongly – that the girl was being kept hidden by her own father and therefore was not in any immediate danger. Now they knew for sure that Lilian had not disappeared by chance. So how could Alex decree that what had happened in Flemingsberg was still of no interest?

And how the hell could he let a National Crime Squad analyst attend their meeting without introducing him properly? In conversations with Fredrika and Peder, Alex had only referred to him as ‘the analyst’. Such an oversight that it almost made Fredrika blush. When she got the chance, she would take matters into her own hands and at least introduce herself.

Fredrika was unwilling to admit it, but as a woman she was treated differently by the boss she and Peder shared. Particularly as a childless woman, she felt, she was treated differently. Not to mention the sense of exclusion she faced because of her academic background. That was one thing she had in common with the National Crime Squad analyst, at least.

Fredrika considered making a quick phone call to Spencer before she got out of the car. But she decided against it. Spencer had hinted that they might be able to see each other again at the weekend. Best to leave him to get on with his work in peace, so he would have time to see her.

‘But you only ever see each other on his terms,’ Fredrika’s friend Julia had objected, a few times. ‘When have you ever been able to ring and suggest getting together on the spur of the moment, like he does?’

Fredrika found questions and observations like that quite upsetting. The terms on which they met were given: Spencer was married, and she wasn’t. Either she accepted it, and the consequences – such as Spencer always being less accessible to her than she could be to him – or she didn’t. And if she didn’t, she might as well look for a different lover and friend. The same was true for Spencer. If he had not accepted that Fredrika occasionally had relationships with other men, and then came back to him, they would have split up long ago.

He doesn’t give me everything, Fredrika would say, but since I don’t happen to have anyone else at the moment, he gives me enough.

Perhaps the relationship was unconventional, but it was genuine and it was practical. And it neither demeaned nor ridiculed either of them. A mutual exchange, in which neither appeared a clear loser. Fredrika chose not to examine too closely whether either of them emerged a clear winner. As long as her heart carried on signalling desire, she surrendered herself to it.

An elderly woman, presumably Gabriel’s mother, was already standing on the front steps as she braked and pulled up at the edge of the gravel forecourt. The woman gestured to Fredrika to wind down the window.

‘Please park your car over there,’ she said, her long, slim finger graciously indicating a space beside two cars Fredrika assumed to belong to the house.

Fredrika parked and climbed out onto the gravel. She breathed in the damp air and felt her clothes sticking to her body. As she walked over to Teodora Sebastiansson, she looked around her. The garden was larger than others she had passed on the way there, almost like a park, secluded and at the end of the road. The lawn was strangely green, and reminded her of the grass on a golf course. A wall ran round the entire garden. The gate through which Fredrika had driven was the only opening to be seen. She had a sense of being both unwelcome and shut in. Large trees of some species she didn’t recognize were growing all around and immediately behind the house. But for some reason, Fredrika could not imagine children ever having played in them. On the lawn over near the wall was a little collection of magnificent fruit trees, and further back, beyond where Fredrika had parked the car, was a greenhouse of abnormally large proportions.

‘We are pretty much self-sufficient in vegetables here in the summer,’ the woman said, answering the question that Fredrika assumed to be reflected in her face as she caught sight of the glasshouse.

‘My husband’s father took a great interest in horticulture,’ the woman added as Fredrika approached.

There was something in her voice that caught Fredrika’s attention. It had a faint echo to it, with a sort of rasp to some of the consonants. The echo was hard to explain, coming from such a small person.

Fredrika held out her hand as she got to the steps and introduced herself.

‘Fredrika Bergman, police investigator.’

The woman took Fredrika’s hand and squeezed it unexpectedly hard, just as Sara had done at Stockholm Central the day before.

‘Teodora Sebastiansson,’ said the woman with a very slight smile.

It struck Fredrika that the smile made her thin face look older.

‘It’s very kind of you to let me come round,’ she said.

Teodora nodded with the same gracious attitude she had displayed when pointing out the parking place. The smile vanished and her face smoothed out.

Fredrika noted they were about the same height, but that was where the similarity ended. Teodora’s grey and presumably quite long hair was pulled back from her face into a severe knot, high at the back of her neck. Her eyes were as icily blue as those Fredrika had seen in her son’s passport photo when she retrieved it from the passport authority records.

Her body language was perfectly controlled. And her hands rested one on top of the other on her stomach, just where her blouse met her grey skirt. The cream blouse was enlivened only by the brooch fastened under her pointed little chin. Her ears were adorned with simple pearl earrings.

‘Naturally I am deeply worried about my little granddaughter,’ said Teodora, but her voice was so impersonal that Fredrika could not believe she really meant it. ‘I shall do everything in my power to help the police.’

She extended one hand in a simple gesture of invitation. Fredrika took three quick steps into the large hall and heard Teodora close the door firmly behind them.

For a brief moment there was silence, while their eyes grew used to the dim lighting in the windowless hall. That moment also felt like stepping straight into a museum of the end of the last century. A tourist from outside Europe would probably be willing to pay a small fortune to stay in the Sebastiansson family mansion. The feeling of being in another age was if anything intensified as Fredrika was shown into what must be the family drawing room. Every detail in the choice of wallpaper, mouldings, stucco ceiling, furniture, every painting and chandelier, had been hand-picked with exquisite precision to give the sense of a home where time stood still.

Fredrika was amazed, and could not remember having seen anything like it before. There had been nothing to rival the sight in front of her even in the homes of her grandparents’ most bourgeois acquaintances.

Teodora Sebastiansson was standing right beside Fredrika, observing the impression her home interiors were making with thinly veiled delight.

‘My father left a huge collection of porcelain, including the china dolls up there on the top shelf,’ she rasped, when she saw Fredrika staring wide-eyed at the tall, glass-fronted case that seemed to have pride of place right next to the gorgeous black grand piano.

Fredrika’s thoughts strayed immediately to her mother. She knew that if she shut her eyes, she would instantly be transported back to the time before The Accident and see herself sitting at the piano with her mother.

‘Can you hear the melody, Fredrika? Can you hear the games it plays before it settles in our ears?’

Teodora followed Fredrika’s gaze and ran her fingers over the instrument.

I’m already losing it with this lady, thought Fredrika. I’ve got to take back the initiative; I wouldn’t have been here at all if I hadn’t invited myself round.

‘Do you live in this big house all by yourself?’ she asked.

Teodora allowed herself a brittle laugh.

‘Yes, so there is going to be no question of an old people’s home where I am concerned.’

Fredrika gave a fleeting smile, and cleared her throat.

‘Well, I’ve come to see you because we’ve been trying to speak to your son, but we haven’t been able to get hold of him.’

Teodora listened and did not stir. Then all at once, she turned to look at Fredrika and said:

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

Fredrika had lost control of the conversation again.

Peder Rydh was trying to do at least ten things at once, with the inevitable result that he perceived his work situation appeared as to be even more chaotic than it really was. An address stamped on the box delivered to Sara Sebastiansson had identified the courier company that brought it. Full of hope, he had rushed round to the company’s unobtrusive office on Kungsholmen. There was a good chance somebody there had accepted the parcel and would be able to give a description of whoever brought it in.

His hopes were dashed pretty soon.

The parcel had been left anonymously at the office the previous evening after closing time. The staff had found it in the morning, in the parcel deposit box that was open round the clock. The system was that the sender of the parcel would stick an envelope to the item, containing the recipient address, requested delivery time and payment in cash. Unfortunately the CCTV camera trained on the box had been out of order for a long time so there was no picture of the person who had left the parcel. The envelope with the money and address details had been seized, of course, and sent straight off to SKL by express courier, but Peder didn’t really expect them to find any trace of the kidnapper on either the money or the envelope.

He swore to himself and went back to HQ to pick up Alex so they could head off to interview Sara Sebastiansson again.

Then out of the blue, he had a phone call from Ylva. Her voice was strained and she wanted to talk about what had happened the previous evening. Peder said he would have to ring her back later; he was busy at the moment. Her call was an irritant and stressed him out. They were so indescribably remote from each other at the moment. They seemed to be living in separate worlds even when they were together. Sometimes it felt as though the boys were the only things they had in common.

Sara was sleeping and could not be woken when they visited her. The doctor who had been summoned that morning had given her a very effective sedative. Peder looked at her lying there on one side in her bed. A pale face framed in a tangle of red hair. A summery, freckled arm sticking out from under the cover. Another arm with a big burn that was just starting to heal. A blue bruise on her calf. Evil was fond of bright colours, Peder thought wearily.

Alex was in the kitchen, talking quietly to Sara’s parents, who were keen to tell him about all their son-in-law’s acts of cruelty to date. They had written down the names of people the police might be interested in talking to. It was a short list. Sara was very isolated, thanks to that dreadful husband of hers.

‘She was never able to hang on to her friends,’ said Sara’s mother. ‘Scarcely a single one.’

They warned Alex and Peder to be wary of Sara’s mother-in-law. They had admittedly only met her once, at the wedding. But she had made a lasting impression on them.

‘She’d go through fire and water for her son,’ sighed Sara’s father. ‘She’s not quite right in the head, that woman.’

Peder took the list of names and telephone numbers provided by Sara’s parents with some help from her mobile phone. With Alex at the steering wheel on the way back to Kungsholmen, Peder started ringing round. The reaction at the other end was always the same. Oh no, not again. Was it so bad this time that the police had been called in? What had that madman taken it into his head to do now? No, nobody had heard from him or had any idea where he could be.

‘But try talking to his mother,’ said one man Peder spoke to, once a good friend of Sara and Gabriel.

Peder put his mobile away in his jacket pocket and spared Fredrika a fleeting thought.

‘To be quite honest, I imagined my son would meet a different sort of girl,’ said Teodora Sebastiansson, breaking the silence that had descended after Fredrika Bergman accepted the offer of a cup of coffee.

Fredrika raised an interested eyebrow over the cup she had brought to her lips.

Teodora fixed her gaze on something behind Fredrika. For a second, Fredrika felt tempted to turn round, but she took another sip of coffee instead. It was too strong, but was served in beautiful little cups that her grandmother would have sold her own grandchildren to drink out of.

‘You see,’ Teodora said rather hesitantly, ‘I had certain expectations of Gabriel. Really just the sort all parents have of their children, but he showed us quite early in life that he wanted to go his own way. I suppose that was why he chose Sara specifically.’

She took a discreet sip of her coffee and put the cup back down on the table in front of her. Fredrika asked guardedly:

‘Have you any idea how their relationship actually worked, Sara and Gabriel’s?’

She realized her mistake a split-second later. Teodora sat back even more stiffly in her chair.

‘If you are asking whether I, as Lilian’s grandmother, have been informed of all the hateful lies my daughter-in-law has been spreading about my son, the answer is yes. I believe I told you that when we spoke on the telephone.’

The message was not difficult to interpret – either Fredrika backed off, or the interview would be brought to an immediate end.

‘I realize this may be a sensitive issue,’ said Fredrika hoarsely, ‘but we are actually in the middle of a very serious investigation here, and…’

Teodora interrupted by leaning across the table that separated them and fixing her with eyes of steel.

‘My grandchild – not yours, mine – one of the most precious things I have, is missing. Do you think,’ she hissed, ‘do you think you need to spend a single second telling me how serious the situation is?’

Fredrika took a deep breath and refused to drop her eyes, though she could feel herself shaking.

‘Nobody doubts how anxious you are,’ she said with a composure that surprised her. ‘But it would be a very good idea for you to answer our questions, so we felt you really were trying to cooperate with us.’

Then she explained about the parcel that had been delivered to Sara that morning. Once she had finished, the room remained in eerie silence, and for the first time since her arrival, Fredrika saw she had managed to say something that Teodora took to heart.

‘We’re not saying,’ Fredrika went on, stressing the word ‘not’, ‘that your son is mixed up with this in any way. But we must – I repeat must – get hold of him. We can’t and won’t ignore the information about him that has come to our attention. About his and Sara’s marriage. And there’s no way we can cross him off our list of key people until we’ve spoken to him.’

There was no list of key people, but all in all, Fredrika felt pretty satisfied with her exposition. If she had not had Teodora’s full attention before, she certainly had it now.

‘If you do know where he is, this would be a really useful time to tell us,’ Fredrika said, quietly but forcefully.

Teodora slowly shook her head.

‘No,’ she said at last, so quietly that Fredrika hardly heard the word, ‘I don’t know where he is. All I know is that he was going to be away on business yesterday. That’s what he said when I spoke to him on the telephone on Monday. We talked about him and little Lilian coming to dinner here, once Sara was back from the latest of all those trips she drags the poor child along on.’

Fredrika observed her.

‘I see,’ she said, and then leant across the table herself. ‘The only problem is,’ she said, with a slight smile, ‘that according to Gabriel’s boss, he’s been on leave since Monday.’

She felt her heart beat extra fast as she saw the colour drain from Teodora’s face.

‘So naturally we’re wondering why he lied to his own mother about that,’ she went on mildly.

She sat back again.

‘Unless there’s anything else you want to tell me?’

Teodora said nothing for a long while. Then she declared:

‘Gabriel never lies. I refuse to call what he told me a lie, before he has himself admitted that it really was one.’

She pursed her lips and her colour slowly returned. She looked Fredrika in the eye.

‘Are you conducting the same thorough investigation of Lilian’s mother?’ she said, her eyes narrowing.

‘In a case like this, we investigate everyone in the child’s immediate vicinity,’ Fredrika replied tersely.

Teodora clasped her hands on the table in front of her and smiled a wry, superior smile.

‘My dear girl,’ she said sternly, ‘it really would be most unfortunate if you didn’t take a closer look at Sara.’

Fredrika sat up straighter.

‘As I say, we’re looking at everyone who…’

Teodora held up a hand to interrupt her.

‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘you and your colleagues would gain a lot of time by focusing more on all those people Sara allows to come and go as they like in that flat.’

When Fredrika made no reply, she went on.

‘You may not be aware of the fact, but in my opinion, my Gabriel has been more than patient in his relationship with Sara.’

She clicked her tongue in a way Fredrika knew she could never imitate, however much she might want to.

‘He was put through total humiliation,’ she said, and Fredrika was taken aback to see the old lady’s eyes glinting with tears.

Teodora looked out of the window at the dark sky and dabbed the corners of her eyes. When she looked back at Fredrika, her face was white with rage:

‘And then she told all those atrocious lies. As if Gabriel hadn’t suffered enough, she then had to go and try to destroy his life by accusing him of being a wife-beater.’

She gave a sudden, shrill laugh that made Fredrika jump.

‘If that isn’t evil, you tell me what is.’

Dumbfounded, Fredrika could only watch the older woman’s little theatrical performance, or whatever you could call it.

‘Perhaps you didn’t know that Sara had well-documented physical injuries each time she reported your son for assault?’

Teodora stopped her before she launched into her next point.

‘Of course I knew,’ she said, glaring at Fredrika as if to say the question was both unnecessary and lacking in judgment. ‘Some of her other male friends must have lost patience with her, of course.’

Then Teodora reached across the table and took the cup of coffee Fredrika had scarcely more than tasted.

‘I have rather a lot to do, as I’m sure you understand,’ she said apologetically. ‘So if you have no more questions…?’

Fredrika swiftly took one of her cards from her inside pocket and put it on the table.

‘Feel free to contact me any time you like,’ she said firmly.

Teodora nodded and said nothing, but they both knew she would never ring.

When they were back in the gloomy hall, Fredrika asked:

‘Does Gabriel still keep any of his things here?’

Teodora again pursed her lips.

‘Naturally. This is his home, after all. He has his own room upstairs.’

And before Fredrika had time to respond, she went on:

‘Unless you have a search warrant, I shall have to ask you to leave my house at once.’

Fredrika hastily thanked her and left. It was not until she was standing on the steps and Teodora was shutting the door behind her that she realized what she had forgotten to ask:

‘By the way, what size shoes does your son take?’

Ellen Lind had a secret. She had just fallen in love. This made her feel terribly guilty, for some reason. Somewhere out there, she thought, looking out of the window, a child was being held captive by some deranged person, and down in Söder the child’s mother was going through all the torments of hell. Ellen had children of her own. Her daughter was nearly fourteen and her son twelve. She had been on her own with them for quite a few years now, and had no words to describe what they meant to her. Sometimes at work she felt herself going all warm inside at the very thought of them. They had a good life, a full life, and occasionally – but only occasionally – the children’s father put in a brief appearance. Ellen was waiting patiently for the children to get older and understand how badly their father had behaved all those years. At their age, there was no room for anything but pleasure when their dad got in touch. They never asked about him, and when he did turn up, Ellen noted they had stopped asking him where he’d been, and why he hadn’t rung for weeks or months.

Ellen had found out from mutual acquaintances that he had a new girlfriend again, and that she had very quickly got pregnant, which Ellen did not find very amusing. In fact the thought of it made her gnash her teeth. Why have more children, when he didn’t even look after the ones he’d already got?

But more than anything, Ellen thought about her new love. Rather unexpectedly, it was her interest in stocks and shares that had brought them together. She hadn’t yet come across any colleagues who shared her enthusiasm, but outside work she had several friends who were eager to give her tips and advice. It was all just a big gamble for Ellen. She never invested large sums, and she was careful never to risk her profits. This last spring had enriched her life, and the children’s, more than she had ever dared wish. A successful and in fact rather bold venture had paid so well that Ellen and the kids had been able to go on a package holiday abroad for a couple of weeks earlier that summer. They went to Alanya in Turkey, staying in a five-star hotel. All inclusive, of course. Masses of food and drink. Excursions and the beach or the pool in the daytime. Entertainment in the evenings. Ellen had realized how desperate she’d been for a break like that. She and the children, just as it always had been.

Ellen was no flirt. She was actually rather shy, and not used to being paid compliments. It wasn’t that she was ugly or anything, absolutely not, but she did tend to create a rather ‘ordinary’ impression. Neither too much colour, nor too little. Not a fabulous wardrobe, but not a dull one, either. It was easy to make her laugh, and she had a pretty smile. Her eyes were narrow and her hair was straight. Her bust was maybe a little tired after feeding two babies, but the way Ellen dressed hid it well.

Then one evening in the hotel bar in Alanya he was suddenly standing there, asking if he could get her a drink.

Ellen loved to recall that moment and blushed every time. He was so good looking and his eyes had a lovely glitter to them. The top few buttons of his shirt were undone and Ellen could see dark hair. And he was tall and tanned. All in all, he was incredibly attractive.

Ellen wasn’t a pushover by any means, but this man had really turned her on. He flattered and flirted, but never too much. Not so much that she had to take it seriously. They had such a lot to talk about. Ellen accepted several glasses of wine, and the time simply flew by. Just after midnight she said she had to go; the children – who had been keeping themselves amused – wanted to go back to the room, and Ellen didn’t really want to let them go on their own.

‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ the man asked.

Ellen nodded eagerly – so eagerly – and smiled. She did very much want to see him again, and was pleased that the interest was mutual.

Perhaps she had had her doubts when it was time to come home at the end of the holiday. They’d tried to meet for a while every day, always when the children were busy elsewhere. They hadn’t been to bed together, but he had kissed her on two different occasions. In the end it was Ellen who brought it up on their last evening.

‘Shall we see each other in Stockholm when we get back?’

A slightly evasive look came into his eyes, trying to avoid looking at her.

Damn, was Ellen’s immediate thought.

Then he drew himself up straight.

‘I have to work long hours,’ he said gently. ‘Very long hours,’ he clarified. ‘I’d like to see you again, but I really can’t promise anything.’

Ellen had assured him she didn’t need any promises at all. She just wanted to know there was some chance of them seeing each other again. Yes, there was, he assured her in his turn, clearly relieved she wasn’t demanding any guarantees. But he didn’t actually live in Stockholm, though his job brought him there fairly often. He would ring her next time he was passing through the city.

A week went by, and the rainy summer became a fact. And on one of all those rainy days he rang, and since then, Ellen hadn’t been able to stop smiling. How totally ridiculous, but what a glorious relief. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that they really did only meet as rarely as he had hinted they might, and then there was the almost complete lack of interest he showed in her children. But of course she understood that, too. Making him part of the children’s lives straight away would mean making the relationship too serious too fast. That was why, Ellen told herself, it was more rational to see him in his hotel room, the way he always suggested. They would go out for a meal at some expensive restaurant, and then go back to his room. Once they had spent that first night together, Ellen was sure. There was no way she would give this up without a fight. He was simply too good to be true.

Ellen looked at the calendar she had on her desk. She had counted the weeks since they got back from Turkey. Five weeks had passed. In those five weeks, she and her new love had seen each other four times. Bearing in mind that he didn’t live in town, Ellen thought that felt like a very solid start, a verdict confirmed by the friend who looked after the children for her when she went on her dates.

‘I’m so happy for you,’ she whooped.

Ellen fervently hoped her friend’s enthusiasm wouldn’t wear off, because it looked as though she was going to need a babysitter again soon. She had just reached for her mobile to call her lover, when her desk phone rang. It was the central command unit, asking her to take a call from someone with something to report about the missing girl, Lilian. Ellen accepted the call at once, and heard a reedy female voice at the other end.

‘It’s about that child that went missing,’ she said.

Ellen took it slowly.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘I think…’ the woman went quiet. ‘I think I might know who did it.’

More silence.

‘I think it might be a man I met,’ she said in a low voice.

Ellen frowned.

‘What makes you think that?’ she asked gently.

Ellen could hear the other woman breathing, not being sure whether to go on or not.

‘He was just horrible. Just… out of his mind.’

Another pause.

‘He was always talking about it, about doing it.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ellen. ‘You’ve lost me there. What was it he talked about doing?’

‘Putting everything right,’ the woman whispered. ‘He talked about putting everything right.’

The woman sounded as though she was starting to cry.

‘What did he want to put right?’

‘He said there were women who’d done things that meant they didn’t deserve their children,’ the woman said in a brittle voice. ‘That was what he wanted to put right.’

‘He was going to take their children from them?’

‘I never understood what he said, I never wanted to listen,’ said the woman, and now Ellen was sure she was crying. ‘And he hit me so hard, so hard. Shouted at me: I’d got to stop having nightmares, I’d got to fight against it. And I’d got to help put everything right.’

‘Sorry, but I don’t think I understand all this,’ Ellen said tentatively. ‘The nightmares and all that.’

‘He said,’ the woman sobbed, ‘that I’d got to stop dreaming, stop remembering what had happened before. He said that if I couldn’t do it, that showed I was weak. He said I’d got to be strong, to join the fight.’

The woman was silent for a moment, and then she said:

‘He called me his doll. He’d never be able to do it on his own; he must have another doll now.’

Ellen was so nonplussed that she really did not know what to say next. She decided to try to steer the conversation back to the bit about children.

‘Have you got children of your own,’ she asked the woman.

The woman gave a weary laugh.

‘No, I haven’t got any,’ she said. ‘And he hadn’t, either.’

‘Was that why he wanted to take another person’s child?’

‘No, no, no,’ the woman protested. ‘He wasn’t just going to take it; he didn’t want it for himself. The important thing was for the women to get their punishment, to have their children taken away from them.’

‘But why?’ Ellen asked in desperation.

The woman said nothing.

‘Hello?’ said Ellen.

‘I can’t talk any more now, I’ve already said too much,’ the woman whimpered.

‘Tell me your name,’ pleaded Ellen. ‘You’ve nothing to be afraid of. We can help you.’

Ellen admittedly doubted the confused woman’s story had any relevance for the case, but she was quite convinced the woman needed help.

‘I can’t tell you my name,’ the woman whispered. ‘I can’t. And don’t you go saying you can help me, because you lot have never been able to. But the women weren’t to be allowed to keep their children, because they didn’t deserve to.’

Why not, Ellen wondered. Out loud she said:

‘Where did you meet him? Tell me his name.’

‘I can’t tell you any more now, I just can’t.’

Ellen thought the woman was going to hang up, and tried to keep her on the line by asking:

‘But why did you ring if you don’t want to tell us who he is?’

The question made the other woman hesitate.

‘I don’t know what his name is. And the women didn’t deserve their children, because if you don’t like all children, you shouldn’t be allowed to have any at all.’

Then she ended the call, and Ellen sat there with the receiver in her hand, bewildered. She was sure she hadn’t found out anything of particular value. She hadn’t got a name, and the woman hadn’t explained why the man she knew had taken that particular child. Ellen shook her head, replaced the telephone receiver and wrote a short memo of the incoming call, which she put with all the rest. She made a mental note not to forget to mention it to the others in the team.

They were all waiting for Fredrika in the Den when she got back to HQ from Teodora Sebastiansson’s. It was several hours after lunchtime, and in a desperate attempt to boost her blood sugar level a little, Fredrika gulped down a chocolate wafer she found in the bottom of her handbag.

Alex Recht was standing by himself in one corner of the room. His expression was tense. He was deeply concerned. The case of Lilian Sebastiansson’s disappearance was developing in a direction he could never have predicted. Initial tests had confirmed the hair and clothes were Lilian’s. They had nothing else to go on at all. There wasn’t a single fingerprint on the box, inside or out. There were no traces of blood or anything like that. And the call on that goddamned courier company had yielded no information either.

When Fredrika turned up, Peder slipped in through the door behind her. Alex opened their third meeting in the Den in a very short space of time.

He called on Fredrika to report back on her meeting with Lilian’s grandmother. Alex had had misgivings from the very start about letting Fredrika conduct such vital questioning without the assistance of a more experienced colleague, but as Fredrika’s story emerged, Alex – and even Peder – realized they could scarcely have sent anyone other than Fredrika to interview such an eccentric old lady.

‘What was the overriding impression you brought away with you?’ Alex asked.

Fredrika put her head on one side.

‘I’m really not sure about her,’ she had to admit in the end. ‘I get the feeling she’s lying, but I don’t know how much or what about. I don’t know if she believes herself that her son would never have hit Sara, and I don’t know if she’s lying because she knows something or because she’s simply protecting her son, regardless of what he may have done.’

Alex nodded thoughtfully.

‘Have we got enough on him to issue an arrest warrant? Arrest him in his absence?’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ was Fredrika’s forceful response. ‘The only thing we could use would be the earlier wife-battering.’

Alex was opening his mouth to say something, when Fredrika added:

‘And we know he takes a size 45 shoe and has a mother who’s pretty bloody disturbed.’

Alex was so surprised to hear Fredrika Bergman swear that he completely forgot what he was about to say.

‘Size 45 shoe,’ he eventually echoed.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Fredrika. ‘According to his mother he does. So it’s not entirely unthinkable that he might own a pair in size 46, as well.’

‘Well done, Fredrika, well done!’ said Alex, elated.

Fredrika’s face flushed blood red at the unexpected praise, and Peder looked as though he might like to kill himself. Or possibly Fredrika.

‘Well maybe we should go after him on a charge of assault and battery?’ he suggested in an attempt to grab a bit of attention at the table.

He ignored the fact that Fredrika had said the same thing a few seconds before.

‘Definitely,’ said Alex, nodding in agreement. ‘We’re not crossing him off the list until we find him. Issue an arrest warrant, for the assaults on his wife.’

Peder gave a slight nod.

Fredrika stared at him with an empty expression.

Ellen broke in.

‘There was a woman who rang a little while ago,’ she began hesitantly.

Alex absent-mindedly scratched a mosquito bite. Those blessed mosquitoes; surely they got earlier every year?

‘Yes?’

‘Well,’ sighed Ellen, ‘I don’t really know what to say. She wouldn’t identify herself and what she told me was, er… a right old jumble, to put it mildly. But basically it came down to her thinking she knew the man who’s taken Lilian.’

Everyone round the table turned their eyes to Ellen, who gave a deprecating wave of her arm.

‘I mean, she sounded confused. And scared. But it wasn’t at all clear what of. She said she thought it was a man she’d once been in a relationship with, and he had hit her.’

‘Which we know Gabriel Sebastiansson did, hit the woman he’s got now,’ Alex put in.

Ellen carried on shaking her head.

‘It was something else,’ she said, trying to get her thoughts in order. ‘She said she had nightmares that made him cross, and…’

‘What?’ interrupted Peder.

‘Yes, it was something like that she said. About her having nightmares and the guy getting angry. He was waging some campaign he wanted her to get involved in.’

‘What kind of campaign?’ asked Fredrika.

‘I couldn’t make it out,’ sighed Ellen. ‘The whole thing was a jumble, like I said. Something about some women not deserving their children. Something about her being his doll, him using dolls somehow. But it was all pretty unintelligible.’

‘And she didn’t give his name? The man who hit her?’ said Alex slowly.

‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘And like I said, she wouldn’t tell me her name, either.’

‘But you got the technical department to trace the call?’ asked Alex.

Ellen hesitated.

‘Er, no, I didn’t,’ she admitted. ‘It felt so weird, not serious. And you always get a few loonies ringing at times like this. But I can ring the technical unit as soon as the meeting’s over,’ she added.

‘Good,’ said Alex. ‘My guess is that your assessment of it is about right, but it does no harm to check who the caller was.’

He was about to go on when Fredrika signalled that she, too, had something to say.

‘Unless the woman wasn’t confused at all, just scared,’ she said.

Alex frowned.

‘If the woman’s been a victim of abuse, she might have turned to the police on other occasions, and felt she got no support. In that case, she’s pretty traumatized by her whole relationship with the police service, and she’s probably also still afraid of her ex. And in that case…’

‘Wait a bloody minute!’ Peder interrupted in frustration. ‘What do you mean, “traumatized by her relationship with the police”? It’s not the police force’s fault that nearly every bit of skirt who rings in and reports her guy takes him back time after time after time…’

Fredrika wearily held up her hand.

‘Peder, that’s not what I’m saying,’ she said calmly. ‘And I don’t think we need a debate on police tactics for preventing assaults on women right now. But if, and I mean if, she has been abused and felt she didn’t get any protection from the police, she’s probably very scared indeed. And that means it would be stupid to dismiss the call as confused.’

‘But if we think the whole thing through,’ interrupted Alex, ‘isn’t it a bit odd that she’s rung as soon as this?’

Nobody said anything.

‘What I mean is, how much do the media know as yet? The fact that a child has gone missing. That’s all. We haven’t told them about the parcel with the hair and there isn’t really anything to point to the girl having suffered anything worse than all the other kids reported missing in the course of a year.’

Each individual group member digested what Alex had said.

‘I still tend to think she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about,’ he concluded. ‘But of course we ought to follow up the call. We can’t exclude the possibility that it was Gabriel Sebastiansson she had a relationship with.’

‘But there must have been something in the story that she recognized from what her ex had told her,’ persisted Fredrika. ‘You’re quite right, Alex, when you say how little information we’ve released. It must be some tiny detail that caught her attention and rang a bell for her, and distinguished this story from all the other stories about missing children. And we can’t take it for granted that it actually is Gabriel Sebastiansson popping up here again…’

Alex had had enough, and quite forgot that he had been full of praise for Fredrika just a moment before.

‘Right, let’s get on with the meeting,’ he said brusquely. ‘There are always a variety of leads in an investigation, Fredrika, but for now we only have the one, and it looks very plausible, to say the least.’

Alex turned to the National Crime Squad analyst, whose name he couldn’t for the life of him recall.

‘Have any other witnesses been in touch? Any train passengers?’

The analyst was quick to nod. Oh yes, lots of people – lots and lots – had got in touch. Almost all the passengers from carriage number 2 where Sara and Lilian had been sitting. None of them could remember hearing or seeing anything. All of them could definitely remember seeing the child asleep, but nobody remembered anyone coming to fetch her.

‘The first time I talked to Sara, she said she and her daughter had chatted a bit with a woman sitting on the other side of the aisle. Has she rung in?’ Fredrika wanted to know.

The analyst took a sheaf of paper out of a plastic folder.

‘If the lady was sitting straight across the aisle,’ he said, extracting a sheet of paper, ‘that would mean she was in seat number 14. Nobody’s been in touch from seats 13 or 14.’

‘Let’s hope they soon will be,’ muttered Alex, rubbing his chin.

His eyes were drawn to the window. Somewhere out there was Lilian Sebastiansson. Most likely in the company of her sadistic father, who was prepared to stoop to anything to terrify his ex-wife. He fervently hoped they would find the girl soon.

Then Ellen’s mobile rang and she slipped out of the room to answer it.

‘Peder,’ Alex said decisively, ‘I want you to deal with the warrant for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s arrest. I also want you and Fredrika to get a second interview with as many of his and Sara’s family and friends as you can. Try to find out where on earth he might be.’

Or, thought Fredrika to herself, we might even find out something that gives us some new leads.

She chose not to say anything out loud.

Alex was about to round off the meeting when Ellen popped her head round the door:

‘Our prayers have been answered,’ she said. ‘The lady sitting just across from Sara and Lilian on the train has just rung in.’

At last, thought Alex. At last things are starting to move.

Peder Rydh took Ingrid Strand’s statement in one of the interview rooms on the same floor as the reception desk. The day had started so chaotically he could hardly get his thoughts in order. He was glad he had a colleague sitting in on the interview with the new witness. Otherwise there was an undeniable risk that Peder might miss some of the information she had to offer. Ingrid Strand might be sitting on the last crucial lead for solving the case, and he needed to be on the ball.

Peder was pleased to be the one taking the lead in the interview with the potential key witness. There had been a few shaky moments back there when he thought this witness was going to be given to Fredrika as well, but Alex had come to his senses, thank goodness, and entrusted the task to Peder.

Ingrid Strand was looking straight at him. So was his colleague Jonas. Peder stared back at them both.

He cleared his throat.

‘Sorry, where were we?’ he said, and looked up.

‘I don’t think we were anywhere,’ said the elderly lady sitting opposite him.

Peder smiled his lopsided smile, the one that generally made even the toughest old ladies melt. Ingrid Strand thawed a fraction.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’ve had an incredibly stressful day.’

Ingrid Strand nodded and smiled to show she accepted his apology. They could continue the conversation.

He took a furtive, appraising glance at Ingrid Strand. She looked nice. Like a safe, well-adjusted granny. Almost reminded him of his own mother. He immediately felt the pressure in his chest. He still hadn’t rung Ylva back. That permanently nagging, guilty conscience.

‘So you were sitting beside Sara and Lilian Sebastiansson on the train, across the aisle?’ he asked, because he had to start somewhere.

Ingrid nodded obligingly and sat up straighter.

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and I would very much like to explain why I haven’t been in touch sooner.’

Peder leant forward attentively.

‘We’d be very interested to know where you’ve been,’ he smiled.

Ingrid smiled back, but then the smile faded.

‘The thing is,’ she said quietly, lowering her eyes. ‘I’ve been with my mother; she’s very poorly. Well she’s quite old now, of course, no spring chicken. But she was taken ill without any warning, a few days ago, and that was why I had to come to Stockholm.’

Peder had worked out from her dialect that she couldn’t be from Stockholm.

‘We’ve lived in Gothenburg for nearly forty years, my husband and I, but my parents stayed here. Dad died last year and now Mum’s time seems to have come. My brother is with her at the moment. He says he’ll ring if there’s any change.’

Peder slowly nodded.

‘We’re terribly grateful to you for making the time to come in,’ he said patiently.

Jonas nodded in agreement and jotted something on his pad.

‘Oh, of course I wanted to come, once I heard what had happened. Yesterday, you see, I was with my mother virtually the whole time. I was scarcely out of her room, and I slept in the chair beside the bed. We thought it might all happen more quickly, you know, it felt that way. But then my brother came, as I said, and I went to sit in the room for the relatives, and the television was on. And then… well, then I heard the girl had gone missing and realized I ought to get in touch straight away. I was sitting right by her and her mother. I rang as soon as I could.’

A slight shiver ran through Ingrid’s body before she went on.

‘Maybe I should have realized something was wrong,’ she sighed. ‘I mean, I was talking to the little girl and her charming mother on the journey, after all. The girl fell asleep quite quickly, but I talked to her mother for longer. And I was certainly aware of her not coming back to her seat after we left Flemingsberg. But the conductor, the older one, came and stood with the child. I didn’t want to interfere; I thought he seemed so solid and “on top of things” as they say these days. And like I told you – I had other things on my mind.’

To make things easier for Ingrid Strand, Peder gave a nod of recognition.

‘Of course that’s how it is sometimes,’ he said gently. ‘Of course we all have other things on our mind.’

When Ingrid met his gaze, there were tears in her eyes.

‘It never occurred to me that she could come to any harm,’ she whispered. ‘The train stopped in Stockholm in the normal way, and we all got up to collect our things and get off. And the conductor, he never came back. I wondered if I ought to do something, but for some reason I felt they must have made arrangements for the little girl.’

Ingrid sighed and a tear rolled down her cheek.

‘I was just leaving the carriage when I saw she’d woken up. She looked round, still a bit dozy. She sat up in her seat and looked all round. And then he just came out of nowhere. All of a sudden I couldn’t see the girl any more, just his back view.’

Peder stared at her.

‘A man came up to her?’ said Jonas, who hadn’t spoken until now.

Ingrid Strand nodded and wiped her eyes.

‘Yes, he did. And he seemed so sure of what he was doing that I thought… I just assumed everything was all right. Because when I got out onto the platform, I saw her again.’

Peder sat motionless. His mouth felt dry.

‘The man was holding her in his arms,’ whispered Ingrid. ‘I saw them just outside the other door of the carriage, just as I got out myself. He was holding the girl, and she looked all relaxed. I thought that was good; it must be someone she knew who’d come to pick her up.’

Ingrid blinked a few times.

‘I only saw him from behind. He was tall. Tall and dark. Short hair, and he had a green shirt on, like the one my son-in-law wears when we’re at the cottage. And he was rubbing her back, like a parent would. I saw his hand; he had a big gold ring, a signet ring.’

Peder noted it all down. Was the man tall enough for them to assume he might take size 46 shoes?

‘I saw him whisper something in her ear,’ Ingrid Strand went on, her voice less shaky now, ‘ I saw him talking to her. And she was listening, even though she was hanging there so floppily in his arms.’

It all went quiet, totally quiet. Peder took slow breaths, in and out. Jonas shifted a little, and looked at him. If Ingrid had anything else to tell them, it would be best for neither of them to speak.

Her shoulders slumped and her face had a dejected look.

‘I really didn’t think there was anything wrong when I saw them,’ she said under her breath, and more tears came into her eyes. ‘It was so obvious the girl knew him. I thought he must be her father, in fact.’

Pia Nordh was waiting in Peder’s office when he got back. Peder stopped in the doorway and just stared at her. She had a faint smile on her lips, and Peder could feel his stomach somersault as she moved her head and her pale blonde hair crept towards her heart-shaped face.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ answered Peder, coming into the room.

He looked around him in confusion. Shit.

‘I saw I had a missed call from you,’ said Pia, and smiled. ‘I must have picked up just as you ended the call.’

Yes, that was the plan.

Peder was too disconcerted to do anything; he just stood in the middle of the floor facing Pia. Hell, what now?

‘But maybe you’re busy right now?’ Pia ventured softly.

Way too softly.

Peder shook his head fiercely. He took several quick steps past Pia and sat down at a safe distance behind his desk.

He straightened his back. He cleared his throat. Control, Peder, control.

‘Yes, actually,’ he said in a rather too authoritative tone. ‘I’m working on an important case at the moment. Haven’t really got time to… you know, chat. No time for a coffee break just now, if I can put it that way.’

Peder knew he was laying it on thick. In the police, there was always an excuse for a coffee. Saying you had no time for a coffee break was tantamount to signalling you were faced with a very serious situation. Like the king getting shot, or Parliament being blown up by terrorists. But crimes like that would be dealt with by the security services, of course.

The security services. Just imagine getting a job there. Every policeman’s wet dream.

They were interrupted when Ellen Lind rushed in, looking for Peder.

‘Are you nearly ready? Alex wants the feedback from the interview as soon as possible,’ she said, sounding stressed.

Ellen threw a surprised glance at the enchanting Pia, whom she had never seen before, but then looked back at Peder.

‘I’ll be right there,’ he said quickly.

Ellen went out, leaving the door open.

‘Maybe we could have a beer, after work?’ asked Pia with a smile.

Peder grinned back. Forget her, forget her, forget her.

‘I’ll ring you later,’ he said.

Peder looked at Pia one more time and left the room, relieved to avoid further confrontation with the very individual who personified his transgression, but painfully aware of the desire that seeing her aroused in him. Forget her, forget her, forget her.

Fate had been kind to Ellen Lind when she was born. Not only had she always been in the best of health, but she also had a number of talents to draw on. One of these was being able to spot when there was a spark between two people. That was how she had discovered her mother had met someone new, so she had not been surprised by her parents’ divorce when it eventually happened. That was also, unfortunately, how she realized her husband was being unfaithful, which was how she had ended up on her own. And it was thanks to this gift, too, though she only had a millisecond to deploy it, that she knew the beautiful woman in Peder’s office was more than just a colleague.

The discovery that Peder was cheating on his wife did not really come as a surprise to Ellen, but it made her absolutely livid. The papers that needed sorting on her desk got the rough treatment. Ellen knew Peder’s wife had spent the last year with the misery of protracted post-natal depression that wasn’t responding to treatment.

Ellen was all too well acquainted with that aspect of the male world not to realize what had happened. Peder had felt sorry for himself and treated himself to a fling. Ellen simply couldn’t understand how that sort of man could live with himself. She couldn’t understand, either, why anybody would want to be with a man on such contemptible terms.

On the other hand, Ellen’s own situation in the love stakes was hardly ideal. Her man friend had just rung back and said something had come up at work that he couldn’t get out of. Ellen had found it hard to hide her disappointment. It was as if he didn’t understand that it wasn’t always easy to juggle a love affair with being a single parent in sole charge of two children.

Talking to him on the phone this time, she had detected an entirely new note. His voice implied she was nagging and childish for voicing her displeasure. Suddenly he had completely changed his tune and more or less given her a telling off. Subtle, but still unmistakable.

‘We’ve got to be reasonable in what we expect of each other,’ he said. ‘It worries me that you’re so set in your ways, so inflexible, Ellen.’

Her first reaction was one of amazement. Then she considered hanging up. In the end she decided to ignore his killjoy comment entirely, and ended the call with a ‘Let’s speak later in the week.’

Why did it have to be so hard – so hard – to find a man to have a normal, functioning relationship with?

Alone on the road, under cover of the rain and the unusually dark sky, Jelena drove north in the car she and the Man had purchased for just that purpose. Jelena was so excited she could hardly sit still. Finally it was happening. After all the planning, all the waiting, it was about to happen at last. A smile played on her small, delicate face; a persistent bubble of happiness kept demanding her attention and begging to take over her body. But the Man’s instructions had been extremely clear, as always.

‘We won’t count our chickens before they’re hatched, Doll,’ he had whispered, cupping her face in his strong hands. ‘No celebrations – nothing – until it’s all gone without a hitch. Remember that, Doll. Don’t let anything go wrong. Not when we’re so nearly there.’

She had looked him straight in the eyes and promised and sworn on all that was holy never ever to let him down.

‘Do you love me?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, urgently, longingly. ‘I love you so awfully much!’

His grip on her face tightened.

‘I asked whether you loved me, Doll. That’s a question best answered with just one word. Never use more words than you need. It could land us in a proper mess.’

She tried to nod between his rough hands, eager to please him.

‘I know,’ she answered, ‘I know. But since it’s only us here… I so much wanted to tell you how much I love you, not just that I do.’

He gripped her even harder; it hurt now. Slowly, he raised her up to his chest, up to his face. She had to stand on tiptoe or she’d be dangling in mid-air.

‘It’s nice that you want to say it, Doll,’ he whispered. ‘But you know we’ve talked about this before. The important thing isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. If I don’t know how much you love me, if you have to tell me, then our love’s worth nothing. Am I right?’

Jelena tried to nod, but it was impossible with him holding her head in such a tight grip. Tears came into her eyes, and she hoped desperately they wouldn’t overflow. Then the evening would be ruined. And it would mean pain for her. A lot of pain.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

His grip relaxed very slightly, so she could nod.

‘Say it,’ he demanded, his voice its normal volume.

‘I understand,’ Jelena said swiftly. ‘I understand.’

To her horror, his grip tightened again.

‘That’s good, Doll,’ he said, lowering his voice again. ‘Because if you don’t understand, if I can’t rely on you, then I’ve no use for you. You understand that, as well?’

Jelena understood. She understood very well indeed.

‘So we’ll say no more about it,’ he said calmly, releasing her face enough for the soles of her feet to touch the ground again.

Her breathing eased. The muscles in her neck were taut.

‘And you’re my doll, aren’t you?’ he whispered, leaning forward to kiss her.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, deeply relieved that he had forgiven her for her mistake.

‘That’s nice, Doll,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’

And he had propelled her gently but firmly towards the bedroom.

Jelena hugged the steering wheel hard as she remembered their union in bed, both of them filled with a great and overwhelming joy that they had taken the first steps. The man was right, of course. She mustn’t feel pleased yet, risk not concentrating properly. But when they had finished… Jelena felt a shiver of anticipation. It would be fantastic. It just had to be.

The car purred obligingly along the road. Even though Jelena hadn’t even passed her test. She met hardly any other cars. She looked neither ahead nor behind. She felt very sure of the role she had to play now. When it came down to it, this stage was childishly simple. She just had to do exactly what they had arranged. Or the Man had arranged. Since he knew best, Jelena left all the planning to him.

She knew for sure that it would be the end of her if she messed up. She swallowed and concentrated on driving.

Dump the Foetus, she thought. Nothing else matters for now.

Just got to wait for the right moment.

Fredrika Bergman ended her working day by making a list. She was exhausted. She’d had no idea the day might develop along the lines it had when she elected to drink too much wine and get too little sleep the night before.

Fredrika glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty. She hadn’t had lunch until four. She would soon be hungry again.

Her mobile telephone buzzed. One new message. Fredrika was very surprised to see it was from Spencer. He hardly ever texted her.

‘Hello again and thanks so much for the wonderful time last night. Hope to see you at the weekend too. S.’

Fredrika felt warm inside. There was somebody for everybody. And she had Spencer Lagergren. Sometimes, anyway.

Then the thoughts she had been having the previous night resurfaced. What was the relationship with Spencer really costing her? One of her girlfriends once pointed out that Spencer made her feel comfortable, which meant she never met anyone she could start a serious relationship with. Fredrika protested and said that wasn’t the case at all. Spencer was a comfort blanket she could reach for whenever the longing to be close to someone got the better of her. If she didn’t have him, she wouldn’t have been less lonely; she’d have been desperately lonely.

Fredrika went back to her list, well aware that the thoughts would be back all too soon.

Why was there no other witness to corroborate Ingrid Strand’s version of events? Why hadn’t anybody else seen the girl being carried around on the platform by a tall man?

Alex’s explanation was that it was quite simply the sort of everyday sight that people don’t react to and therefore don’t remember. A father carrying his child, who would see that as noteworthy?

Fredrika could buy that argument to some extent. She could also appreciate that Ingrid Strand remembered it because she had had some contact with the child in question on the train journey. But still. Fredrika had discreetly made enquiries of Mats, the analyst who Alex seemed uninterested in introducing to the rest of the team. Had there really been no calls to corroborate that version of events?

Mats, who was dealing with the information from the public one bit at a time, entering it into a database, pursed his lips and shook his head as he searched through the tip-offs. No, no one else had rung in with information to support Ingrid Strand’s story.

Fredrika did not doubt that Ingrid Strand had really seen what she had told the police she saw. She simply wondered where Lilian and her father – if it was him Ingrid had seen – had gone once they left the platform. Why hadn’t anyone else seen them after that?

They had questioned taxi firms and people who ran shops inside Stockholm Central Station, but not the slightest lead had been forthcoming. Nobody could remember encountering a tall man carrying a child who looked like Lilian. That didn’t mean they hadn’t seen them, of course, but no one remembered anything of the kind. And that troubled Fredrika, because there had been huge numbers of people with every opportunity of seeing them.

Alex didn’t sound particularly concerned about their inability to pin down how Lilian had left the station.

‘Give people a bit of time,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later somebody’s going to remember something.’

Give people a bit of time.

Fredrika gave an involuntary shiver. How much time had they got, in actual fact?

Everything depended on who had taken the girl and why? Fredrika realized with a sinking feeling that she was the only one in the team who had still not discounted it being anyone other than Gabriel Sebastiansson.

The examining magistrate had largely gone along with Alex and Peder and thought it most likely to be Lilian’s father who had taken her off the train. Admittedly, Ingrid Strand hadn’t seen the man’s face, but the information she had been able to give them pointed in that direction. But of course it was no crime to collect your daughter from a train. There was no order banning Gabriel Sebastiansson from contact with his daughter, even though it would naturally be desirable for him to keep her mother informed of where he was taking her. The fact that her hair had been shaved off, on the other hand, could readily be categorized as assault, the examining magistrate argued. But since there was no evidence to link her father to the parcel of clothes and hair, they could not exclude the possibility that something else entirely had happened to the girl, even though the magistrate said several times that this was highly unlikely.

After half an hour’s deliberation, the magistrate reached her conclusion: the child had been abducted; her mother had not been informed; the child had suffered maltreatment and the parcel sent to the mother could be construed as a threat. That was sufficient for classifying the crime as a potential abduction, with Gabriel Sebastiansson as the prime suspect. A warrant could therefore be issued for his arrest, and Alex would issue a national alert.

Alex and Peder looked hugely relieved as they left the examining magistrate’s office. Fredrika walked two steps behind them, frowning.

She peered at the list of Sara Sebastiansson’s circle of acquaintances and family, people she would try to see the next day. Predictably enough, Peder was delighted to find her so willing to hand over the task of continuing to investigate Gabriel’s contacts. He looked quite triumphant, as if he had just won the lottery.

But Fredrika preferred to maintain her sceptical stance.

She no longer doubted that the perpetrator was someone with whom Sara had some kind of relationship, wittingly or unwittingly. But she was not convinced that that person had to be Gabriel. She thought about the woman Ellen had spoken to that afternoon. The woman who had lived with a man who hit her, and who now believed him to be the man who had taken Lilian. There was a microscopic chance that the man she was talking about actually was Gabriel Sebastiansson, but even there, Fredrika was keeping an open mind. No one else had reported Gabriel to the police, and surely they would have done if he were the man the anonymous woman was talking about? That was if they worked on the hypothesis that the woman’s call constituted an actual report of being assaulted by the man. Alex and Peder had impatiently dismissed her attempt to try to unravel the information in the woman’s call, asking her to focus on ‘real, concrete scenarios’ rather than the invented variety.

Fredrika gave a grim laugh. Invented scenarios. Where did they get these expressions from?

Thanks to the analyst Mats, she had at least been able to find out what happened when they tried to trace the call. The woman had rung from a telephone box in central Jönköping. The lead stopped there. In Jönköping. Fredrika ran a quick check to see if Gabriel Sebastiansson had any contacts there, but drew a complete blank.

Fredrika, for her part, was sure the incoming call had nothing at all to do with Gabriel. The question was whether it was worthy of attention, even so. Ellen was right, of course: whenever the police appealed to the public for help, there always were a number of very odd people who rang in.

Fredrika frowned. Maybe Alex was right when he said she hadn’t got the right feel for the job. On the other hand. Fredrika took a deep breath. On the other hand. If you took notice of what Alex and Peder classed as the nub of police work, then the work Fredrika was doing now could be classed as the very sharpest end of that work.

Because when it came down to it, in the case of the woman with the dog on the platform in Flemingsberg, and in the case of the woman who rang in with the tip-off, Fredrika had absolutely nothing to go on but her gut instinct. That was something those boys ought to approve of.

Gut instinct. The very phrase made her feel queasy.

She put one hand cautiously on her stomach while the other noted down yet one more thing that needed doing the next day. Pay a visit to Flemingsberg Station.

Her guts rumbled.

Dialogue, thought Fredrika. Right now, there was nobody apart from her own guts to have a dialogue with.

Peder Rydh felt relaxed as he left work later that evening. In fact, he felt great. For the simple reason that he was not intending to spoil his evening by going home to his sulky wife, but was heading out for a beer with some of his workmates instead.

He felt curiously relieved. They had known all along that Gabriel Sebastiansson had taken the girl, of course, but now they knew it more definitely, they wouldn’t have to grapple with the ‘who’ any more and could concentrate on the ‘where’. Where was the girl?

Peder laughed out loud as he thought of Fredrika getting bogged down in every little tip-off and sidetrack that cropped up in the investigation. She was no bloodhound, that was certain. More a very tired little pug dog with short legs and a snub nose. Peder gave another laugh. A pug, that was her. And pugs shouldn’t play with the big dogs like Peder and Alex.

Peder’s legs found their own way to the bar. He was walking tall as he went in through the door. By chance, Pia Nordh was there. He noted that several of the lads recognized her and grinned at him. He grinned back. No comments, guys.

Peder was a man who liked relying on sheer chance. Chance had made him very happy on more than one occasion. Ylva had less faith in chance and liked to plan everything that possibly could be planned. Taking the day as it came was not something that appealed to her.

In fact, that was the spark in their relationship, the glow, Peder told himself. It was fun and a challenge to live with somebody who thought differently, followed a different pattern.

But there was a down side, too.

Chance lives a life of its own and isn’t amenable to being structured out of existence. It was so ironic that chance was the very thing that had devastated their lives. Peder didn’t like thinking along those lines, particularly when he was on the beer and a bit drunk, but that was precisely what had happened. Their lives were pretty much devastated, and sheer chance was to blame. Along with Ylva’s inability to go with its flow.

When Ylva had the ultrasound scan, both she and Peder had been dumbstruck to discover they were expecting twins.

‘But,’ Ylva stuttered, ‘there are no twins on either side of the family.’

The midwife had explained. Two-egg twins could be the result of genetic predisposition. Identical twins, on the other hand, from a single egg, are purely random.

Peder found the phrase energizing, a source of great strength. Random twins. But Ylva, he realized later, had started to fall apart from the very first moment she heard the words.

‘But this wasn’t what we planned at all,’ she said repeatedly during her pregnancy. ‘This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.’

Peder remembered being surprised, since he had not in any way shared that clear image of ‘how it was supposed to be’.

One of the other lads in the group interrupted his reverie by thumping him on the back.

‘How’re things going in the Recht team?’ he asked, his eyes plainly signalling his envy.

Peder savoured the moment. To hell with all his gloomy thoughts; here was a source of energy to tap into.

‘They’re going bloody well,’ he said with a genial smile. ‘Alex is such a pro. He’s got an incredible feel for the job.’

His colleague nodded attentively and Peder felt himself almost blushing. Who would have thought that after only a few years in the police department he’d be standing here referring to the great Alex Recht by his first name?

‘Things have turned out bloody well for you, Peder,’ said his colleague. ‘Congratulations, you jammy bastard!’

Peder gave a self-deprecating wave of the hand and thanked him for the compliment.

‘The next round’s on me,’ he said loudly, and instantly found yet more colleagues flocking round him.

He had to answer a steady stream of questions. The guys were all very interested in how things were done in Recht’s team. Peder relished being the centre of attention and didn’t bother to mention the elements of his new situation that for him felt distinctly negative. Like the fact they were often short of resources and had to borrow people right, left and centre. Like the fact that he had to work on his own to a far greater extent than ever before. And like the fact that Alex Recht didn’t really live up to his amazing reputation in many ways.

After a while they switched to talking about the other members of the exclusive team. Almost immediately, the conversation turned to Fredrika Bergman.

‘You know what,’ said one of Peder’s colleagues from the Södermalm police, ‘we’ve got a so-called civilian appointment in our team, too. And I’ve never worked with a more useless individual. Goes on the whole time about databases and structures, draws diagrams and rules lines. All talk and no action, in fact.’

Peder eagerly swallowed a gulp of beer and nodded.

‘Too fucking right!’ he exclaimed. ‘And, like, no feeling at all for which lines of enquiry are seriously worth following up. Trying to keep all the balls in the air at the same time, and impossible to work with as a result.’

Another mate from his time in Södermalm squinted hazily in Peder’s direction, and gave him a crooked grin.

‘But maybe she’s a nice eyeful, that Fredrika?’

Peder grinned back.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hate to say it, but… yep, she’s a very nice eyeful.’

Enthusiastic grins spread from face to face around the assembled party, and they ordered another round.

It was eleven before Peder was able to leave the bar with a modicum of discretion in the company of Pia Nordh. His head was spinning with alcohol and lack of sleep, but his gut instinct was telling him unmistakably that this was another of those rare occasions in a man’s life when he has the right to go to bed with a woman other than his wife.

As Pia closed the door of her flat behind her a short while later, there wasn’t a trace of bad conscience in his body. Just alcohol and desire. Overwhelming desire. He gave it a right royal welcome.

Teodora Sebastiansson was a relic of a bygone era, a fact she was very aware of, and it was a status she cherished. Sometimes she felt almost as though she had no place in the age in which she was now living.

Her own mother had never beaten about the bush when it came to telling Teodora what life was ultimately all about. You had to get an education, get married, and immortalize yourself. The last of these you achieved quite simply by reproducing. Education, husband and children: the holy trinity of womanhood. There was no room for a career within the strict boundaries of that trinity, and nor would you need one, since a husband was expected to support his wife. You only bothered with education as an aid to making conversation with cultivated people.

As she had told Fredrika Bergman, Teodora was of the firm opinion that her son could have made a far better match than Sara. Teodora had waited patiently in the wings, hoping her son would come to his senses and leave his wife while he still had the chance. To her aggravation, he never did, and it was Sara who bore Teodora her first grandchild.

Since Teodora had herself been brought up in one of life’s harder schools, she had honestly seen nothing to object to in her son’s desperate and justified efforts to bring his wife up to scratch. Despite what she had told Fredrika Bergman, she had considerable insight into her son’s life with Sara and the turbulent aspect the relationship sometimes assumed. Teodora could not help regretting Sara’s inability to please her husband. Sara had certainly – certainly – never tried to hide who she was. And Teodora accepted that her son had married Sara to a large extent as an embarrassingly delayed rebellion against his poor parents. Nonetheless, Teodora was in no doubt at all where her daughter-in-law’s loyalties lay once things came to a head and she turned to the police for help. So the life of luxury Gabriel could offer didn’t suit her after all!

It was stupid of Sara, very stupid, to think that a good mother like Teodora would let her husband and grandchild down, under any circumstances. She was thinking above all of Lilian, she told herself as she lifted the receiver and rang two of her husband’s faithful old servants, who owed the Sebastiansson family large sums of money and considerable favours.

The simple part was saving Gabriel’s skin by arranging the alibis he needed and deserved. The hard part was guiding and directing him in life from now on. After the second phase of trouble and the second report to the police, Teodora had had a serious talk to her son. She had no particular problem with his attempts to knock Sara into shape, but the police involvement had got to stop. It was awkward for the family, and clearing his name repeatedly could prove difficult in the long run. Particularly as his efforts to smarten Sara up left such visible marks, and particularly as she hadn’t the sense to keep quiet about things one always sorted out within the family.

After the time Gabriel was legally banned from seeing his own wife, and therefore ended up ringing her a few times too many one evening, Teodora had finally had enough. He was either to see that he got Sara back, which from the outset she really did not favour, or he was to abandon his attempts to make her into a good person, and file for divorce. Divorce and sole custody.

Teodora didn’t know exactly how her son had managed it, but suddenly he and Sara were living together again. It didn’t last long. Sara carried on making trouble and soon it was time for another separation.

And now Sara had inconceivably pulled off the trick of depriving Teodora of her only grandchild. Her whole body was shaking. There was plainly no limit to the ways Sara imagined she could destroy the Sebastiansson family. Teodora, a mother herself, had seen how Sara treated her child, oh yes. No firm hand, and no particular maternal care, either. If the child was returned to her mother, Teodora was going to fight tooth and nail for her son to be allowed to bring the child up on his own. Sara would finally meet a foe impervious to police reports and threats. Sara would find out what happened when you lived your life in a way that was bound to destroy you, and tried to take your child with you to perdition.

In view of these feelings for her daughter-in-law and grandchild, she had had no difficulty at all in lying on her son’s behalf, either the day before or during that day’s interview with Fredrika Bergman. It was most regrettable, of course, that her son had not had time to inform her he was going on holiday, since that would have simplified the basis for further lies considerably.

She sighed.

‘They’ll be back, you know,’ he said.

Teodora jumped at the sudden sound of his voice.

‘Goodness, you gave me such a fright.’

Gabriel stepped over the threshold of his father’s library, where Teodora had been sitting ever since Fredrika Bergman left the house. Teodora got to her feet and walked slowly towards him.

‘I’ve got to know, Gabriel,’ she said in a low, urgent tone. ‘I’ve got to know for sure. Have you anything – anything at all – to do with Lilian’s disappearance?’

Gabriel Sebastiansson gazed past his mother, out of the window.

‘I think there’s a thunderstorm brewing,’ he said huskily.

There was a time, when Nora was much younger, when the darkness had been her enemy. Now she had grown up, she knew better. The darkness was her friend, and she welcomed it every evening and every night. The same went for the silence. She welcomed it, and she needed it.

Under the cover of darkness and silence, Nora quickly packed a suitcase of clothes. As usual in summer, the sky never turned completely black, but that deep, velvety blue was dark enough. The floor creaked under her bare feet as she moved about the room. The sound frightened her. The sound disturbed the silence, and the silence did not want to be disturbed. Not now. Not when she had to concentrate. Actually, it was quite simple packing this time. There was no need to take everything with her. She would only be gone a few weeks.

Nora’s grandma had been glad to hear her voice when she rang.

‘You want to come and stay for a bit, love?’ she exclaimed when Nora revealed her plan to go and visit her grandmother in the country.

‘If that’s all right,’ Nora said.

‘You’re always welcome here, dear. You know that, don’t you?’ her grandmother replied.

Safe Grandma. Wonderful Grandma. The one bright spot in a childhood that was otherwise painful to look back on.

‘I’ll ring again when I’ve booked the ticket and have a better idea what time I’ll be arriving, Grandma,’ Nora whispered into the telephone, and they hung up.

Nora tried to get her thoughts in order as she packed. She decided to travel in her red, high-heeled shoes. Shoes like the ones the Man had once said made her look cheap, but she loved wearing them now, and saw them as a badge of her independence. Perhaps it had been a mistake not to give her name to the police, but Nora really didn’t want to let anyone crack open the shell inside which she had successfully built herself a safe existence.

Nora’s case was packed and she felt ready to leave the flat.

She stood the suitcase on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. It was almost ten o’clock. She ought to ring Grandma to confirm when she’d be arriving, as promised.

Nora was just keying in the number when a sound from the hall caught her attention. Just a single sound, then it went quiet. Nora blinked. Then the sound came again, the sound of someone taking a step on the creaking floorboards.

Her mouth went dry with fear when he suddenly appeared in the doorway. Paralysed by the realization that it was all over now, she did not move from her seat on the bed. She had still not keyed in the whole number.

‘Hello, Doll,’ he whispered. ‘You going somewhere?’

The telephone slipped automatically from Nora’s hand and she shut her eyes in the hope that the evil would disappear. The last things she saw were the red shoes, still standing beside her suitcase.

THURSDAY

Dr Melker Holm had always enjoyed the night shift in Accident and Emergency. For one thing, he was the sort of man who liked things being on the go, when there was stuff happening, and for another, he found himself irresistibly attracted by the nocturnal calm that always followed the more turbulent hours.

Maybe when Melker went on duty that night, he already had a premonition that this shift would be different. The emergency ward was buzzing with a level of commotion and activity that could hardly be considered normal. A serious car accident involving several vehicles took a very long time to deal with, while in the waiting room, a group of patients with slightly less acute problems grew increasingly fed up with the long wait.

Melker heard Sister Anne’s footsteps before he heard her voice. Sister Anne had uncommonly short legs, which meant she took unusually short, quick steps. Apart from that, Melker had not noticed a single defect in her overwhelming physical presence. Though he was never one to listen to or spread gossip, he had – most unintentionally – heard that Sister Anne had not been slow to see how she could capitalize on her beauty.

He could not have cared less about vulgar women prostituting themselves in their places of work. At the same time, Sister Anne, of all people, was someone in whom he felt a degree of trust. There was something fundamentally stable about her. She was reliable. And there were few personal qualities Melker valued more highly than reliability.

Sister Anne appeared in the doorway a few seconds after he first heard her.

‘I think you ought to come, Doctor,’ said Sister Anne, and Melker noted a tension in her features he had not seen before.

Asking no questions, he got up and went with her.

To his surprise, Sister Anne hurried right through the Emergency Department and out of the front entrance. Only then did Melker speak.

‘Sorry, but what’s going on?’

Sister Anne turned her head towards him and her steps faltered a little.

‘A woman rang,’ she said. ‘She said she and her husband were on their way here by car. She said it was her first baby and she was afraid they wouldn’t make it in time. Afraid the baby was going to be born on the way. She wanted us to go out ready to meet them.’

Sister Anne licked her lips and anxiously scanned the drive leading to the Emergency Department. She sensed Melker’s quizzical look and turned back to him again.

‘She said they were almost here, and I couldn’t get hold of the obstetrician, so I thought…’

Melker interrupted her with a nod.

‘That’s all right. But they aren’t here, are they? And anyway – why would they be coming to A &E? You should have sent them to Maternity.’

Sister Anne flushed.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to waste your time,’ she said quickly. ‘It was just… Well, her voice. There was something about her voice that made me think it was much more urgent than it clearly is.’

Melker nodded again, graciously this time.

‘I understand what you were thinking and I am at your disposal, absolutely. But if they ring again, do tell them to go to Maternity Reception, please.’

He turned on his heels and went back to his room. He happened to glance at his watch. It was just past midnight. A new day had begun.

It was just after one o’clock when Melker heard Sister Anne’s footsteps in the corridor once more. He had time to register that it really sounded more as if she was running, and then she was at his door, rain-sodden and wild-eyed.

‘You must bloody well come right now,’ she said, and rapidly repeated herself: ‘Bloody well come right now.’

Melker Holm was taken aback by the strong language, which was totally inappropriate in the working climate of the Emergency Department, and rushed after Sister Anne through the reception area and out into the car park.

‘Carry on, to the parking area at the far end,’ Sister Anne exhorted him.

At the end of the access road, just between the ordinary visitors’ car park and the approach to A &E, in the middle of the pavement, lay a little girl. She did not have a thread of clothing on her body, and her empty, glassy eyes stared unseeing up into the night sky as it pelted her pale, naked body with rain.

‘What on earth…?’ mumbled Melker, kneeling down beside the girl and checking her pulse, though he could tell at a glance that she was dead.

Later, Melker was to envy Sister Anne her ready tears, mixing freely with the rain, for he was unable to shed any himself for several days.

‘I popped out to check whether that couple were waiting out here in the car park, because they didn’t ring again,’ he heard Sister Anne say. ‘Oh my God, she was just lying here. Just lying here.’

Against his better judgment, Melker Holm leant down and stroked the girl’s cheek. His eye fell on her forehead, where someone had written a word, the letters blurred and sprawling. Someone had marked her body.

‘We must ring the police right away so we can get the poor little thing into the warm,’ he said.

Just as he was opening the front door to set off for work, Alex received the call from the police up in Umeå.

‘DCI Hugo Paulsson here, from the Umeå Crime Squad,’ bellowed a voice at the other end.

Alex stopped what he was doing.

Hugo Paulsson gave a sigh.

‘I think we may have found your little girl, the one who went missing from the Central Station,’ he said softly. ‘Lilian Sebastiansson.’

Found? Alex would remember that moment later as one of the few in his career when time stood utterly still. He did not hear the rain beating on the window, did not see Lena who was watching him from just a few feet away, did not say anything in reply to what he had just heard. Time stopped, and the ground opened up beneath his feet.

How the hell could I mess up on this one?

When Hugo Paulsson found himself still getting no reply, he went on.

‘She was found at the hospital here in Umeå, outside A &E, at one o’clock last night. It took a while to establish the likely identity, because we had another little girl up here who’d run away, you see, and we had to make sure it wasn’t her first.’

‘Lilian didn’t run away,’ Alex said automatically.

‘No, of course not,’ said Hugo Paulsson grimly. ‘But anyway, now you know where she is. Or to be more accurate – where she probably is. Someone will have to identify her.’

Alex nodded gently to himself as he stood in his hall, waiting for time to start moving again.

‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can on how we’re going to proceed,’ he said at last.

‘Fine,’ said Hugo Paulsson.

Then he added slowly:

‘I don’t know what it means, but the girl’s clothes haven’t been found. And her head’s been shaved.’

Fredrika Bergman received the news that the case of the missing Lilian had become a murder investigation via her mobile phone. It was Alex who rang, and she could tell from his voice that he was in shock. She herself felt drained of all emotion. Alex asked her to go and see Teodora Sebastiansson again and then try to talk to as many people as possible on the list of names and contacts they had got from Sara’s parents. They would have to try to work out why the child had turned up in Umeå, of all places.

Only once Fredrika had ended the call and looked out to see that summer had yet another day of rain ahead did she start to cry. She felt profoundly grateful that she was alone in her office, behind a closed door.

How on earth could the girl suddenly be dead?

Of all the questions raging in her head, one was more insistent than the rest.

What the hell am I doing here? she thought. How did I end up working in a place like this on a job like this?

Fredrika was on the point of ringing Alex back there and then and saying:

‘You’re right, Alex. I’m not cut out for this. I’m too weak, too emotional. I’ve never seen a dead person in my life and I hate stories with unhappy endings. And it doesn’t get any unhappier than this one. I give up. I’ve no business being here.’

Fredrika ran her fingers gently over the scar on her right arm. Time had faded the operation scar to just a couple of white lines, but they were still fully visible to any eye. For Fredrika, they were a daily reminder not only of The Accident, but also of the life that never was. The life she never had.

Fredrika wiped the corner of her eye and blew her nose. If she carried on thinking like this in her present state, she definitely wouldn’t be able to work properly. She was tired, worn out. It was only a few weeks until her holiday. She gave a stubborn shake of the head. Not now, she told herself, not now. Right now it would do the investigation more harm than good if she got up and left. But later, when the case was over…

Then I’ll leave…

Fredrika blew her nose again. Crumpled the tissue into a ball in her hand. Threw it at the bin. Missed but left it lying on the floor.

Why was the picture refusing to come into focus?

Thoughts were flying through Fredrika’s brain at lightning speed as she sat there at her desk, though it was not yet eight o’clock. She was the first to admit that she had not worked on many cases, but she did have a solid amount of analytical experience behind her. Considering the point they had now reached in the case of Lilian’s disappearance, it ought not to be that hard for Fredrika to complete the jigsaw puzzle in front of her. But there was something missing. She could feel it in her whole body, but couldn’t put it into words. Had they missed something? Was it something they should have seen or thought of earlier?

But then, Fredrika argued to herself, they still hadn’t found a motive for the abduction itself. If it was Gabriel Sebastiansson who had taken Lilian, what was his motive? There was no tedious custody battle going on; there were no reports of his having previously harmed the girl.

Fredrika’s encounter with Gabriel’s mother had left her in no doubt that he really had physically assaulted Sara. There was something extremely unpleasant about the whole family. Fredrika went to the computer to put together a list of further questions for Mrs Sebastiansson. The mere recollection of that lady’s bony finger pointing to where she was to park the car made her feel tense. No, there was definitely something sick about that family. The only question was: why had someone like Sara chosen to marry into it? After all, unlike her mother-in-law she seemed a straightforward, unpretentious, uncomplicated person. It was certainly going to be interesting to see what Gabriel was like, when the time came.

Then her mobile rang, forcing her to break off from the list she had barely started to compile. It was a man’s voice on the line.

‘Am I speaking to Fredrika Bergman?’

‘Yes, you are. And who am I speaking to?’ said Fredrika.

‘I’m Martin Ek, from SatCom. We spoke briefly the other evening, when you rang to ask about Gabriel Sebastiansson,’ the man replied.

SatCom, the company in which Gabriel had been working his way up over the past ten years, and was now one of the top executives.

Fredrika was immediately alert.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘Well,’ Martin Ek began, sounding relieved that she remembered him. ‘You asked me to ring if Gabriel got in touch, so I kept your card.’

‘Ah, right,’ said Fredrika with a little gasp. ‘And he’s been in touch now?’

Martin Ek initially said nothing. Fredrika sensed he was on the verge of hanging up.

‘We haven’t heard from him.’

Fredrika’s shoulders slumped a fraction.

‘But I think I may have found something you’d be interested in seeing,’ he gabbled.

‘Okay,’ said Fredrika guardedly, pulling paper and pencil towards her. ‘What have you found, exactly?’

Another pause.

‘I’d really rather you came over and saw for yourself,’ he said.

Fredrika hesitated. She had neither the time nor the inclination to go over there. And anyway, it was really Peder who ought to be dealing with this contact, since he was the one following up Gabriel Sebastiansson’s circle of acquaintances.

‘You won’t even give me an idea of what this is about?’ she asked. ‘We’ve got a huge amount on at the moment.’

Martin Ek was breathing heavily at the other end of the line.

‘It’s something I found on his computer,’ he said finally.

He took a few more deep breaths before he went on.

‘Photos. Disgusting photos. I’ve never seen anything so bloody sick. I’d really, really appreciate it if you could come round. Straight away, if possible.’

Fredrika felt her throat constrict.

‘I’ll ask my colleague to get back to you right away. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Fredrika was about to ring off when Martin Ek added:

‘But please come quickly.’

The desert.

Thirst.

Pain. A whole head full of pain.

Peder Rydh was hung over and barely awake when Alex rang to tell him that a little girl who in all probability was Lilian Sebastiansson had been found dead in Umeå. Alex also told him to get round to Sara’s and make sure she, or one of Lilian’s other close relations, caught the ten o’clock flight to Umeå. Alex would be on that plane himself, and would meet whoever was going at the airport. He also instructed Peder to pull out all the stops to work out how Umeå fitted into the picture.

Peder’s first reaction was one of near panic.

How the hell could the child be dead?

She had been missing fewer than forty-eight hours, and since getting the information from the woman sitting beside Sara and Lilian on the train, they’d been looking for the girl’s father, suspecting him of involvement in her disappearance. Had Gabriel Sebastiansson gone off his head? Had he murdered his own daughter and dumped her outside a hospital?

Then came his second reaction: Where the fuck was he?

Peder fought desperately against the hangover, which was completely paralysing his powers of thought. Several long seconds passed before it dawned on him that he had fallen asleep at Pia Nordh’s. Heck, this was going to be tricky to explain to Ylva.

The phone had woken Pia, and she lay on her side, watching him. She was naked and her expression was quizzical. She realized from the short call that something very serious had happened.

‘They’ve found her,’ Peder said curtly, getting up from the bed far too fast.

The floor rocked beneath his feet, his head throbbed and his eyes ached. He sat down on the edge of the bed and rested his head in his hands. He’d got to think, pull himself together. He ran his fingers through his hair and reached for his mobile again. He had a missed call from Jimmy and eleven from Ylva, who had admittedly been told to expect him home late, but would hardly have expected him not to come home at all. When had he rung her, exactly? His memories of the previous evening were one big whirl, impossible to separate out. Had he rung at all, when it came to it? The shadow of a recollection flitted by. Peder, half undressed in Pia’s bathroom. One hand on the washbasin for support, keeping himself upright, the other hand holding his mobile, sending a text.

‘Don’t wait up. Back later. Speak soon.’

Peder wanted to crawl out of his own skin. This wasn’t good. Or rather… it didn’t get any worse than this. If this wasn’t rock bottom, then he didn’t want to be part of it all any longer.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said gruffly, and stood up again.

His legs carried him all the way from the bedroom, out into the hall, into the bathroom. How much had he drunk? How many beers had it added up to?

He was just getting out of the shower when he heard his mobile ring again. He raced out of the bathroom, almost skidding on the wet floor tiles. Pia met him in the hall, his mobile in her hand.

It was Fredrika.

‘There was a call from the place where Gabriel Sebastiansson works,’ she said tersely. ‘They want one of us round there at once, to see something they found on Gabriel’s computer. Some horrible photos.’

Peder retreated into the bathroom so as not to drip all over Pia’s hall floor, but had to come back out again because there was no signal in there. He tried to towel himself one-handed with the towel while he was still on the phone.

‘Right,’ he began, ‘Alex has asked me to make sure Sara Sebastiansson knows what’s happened first. Then I can deal with the Gabriel thing.’

He could hear Fredrika was about to say something, so he went on quickly:

‘What sort of photos, anyway? We can’t just go checking people’s computers without getting the examining magistrate to grant a search warrant.’

Fredrika informed Peder with her usual cheek – always that cheek – that she was quite well aware the police couldn’t go snooping in people’s computers whenever they felt like it, but that this could be viewed as a tip-off in a very important investigation, and there was no law forbidding the police from going to look at something somebody else had discovered and…

‘Okay, okay,’ Peder interrupted her wearily. ‘Give me their number and I’ll ring them now and arrange something.’

‘Good,’ said Fredrika, sounding a bit washed out herself.

‘They didn’t say anything about what was in these pictures?’ Peder asked.

‘No,’ said Fredrika, ‘they just said they were disgusting.’

‘What are you going to do now, by the way?’ Peder enquired curiously.

‘Alex asked me to go and see Mrs Sebastiansson again,’ Fredrika said. ‘And there are a few other things I need to get done…’

‘Wasn’t I supposed to be handling the interviews with Gabriel’s family and friends from now on?’ Peder said irritably.

‘Clearly not this one,’ came Fredrika’s crisp retort.

Peder ended the call with a scowl and went back into the bathroom.

Pia appeared at the doorway. She was still stark naked. Peder looked at her in the bathroom mirror. Was she really that attractive when it came to it? He thought her tits looked a bit on the droopy side. Or was his hangover clouding his judgment? Well it was all the same to him, he was on his way out of the flat anyway.

For some reason he felt reluctant to turn round and meet her eye.

‘So where do we go from here?’ said Pia, folding her arms.

‘Have you got any Panadol?’ asked Peder wearily, and started brushing his teeth. With Pia’s toothbrush.

Without a word, Pia opened a bathroom cabinet and got a strip of tablets out of a box. Peder took the lot from her; he’d be needing the rest later in the day.

‘You might at least say something.’

Peder hurled the toothbrush impatiently into the basin.

‘Don’t you understand how I’m feeling right now?’ he thundered, afraid his head would explode the moment he raised his voice. ‘The kid’s been found dead, murdered! Don’t you understand that I can’t think about anything else at the moment?’

Pia stared at him.

‘Just go, Peder,’ she said.

She left the bathroom without waiting for a reply.

Peder sat down on the floor and took several deep breaths.

He had let his wife down.

He had let his employer down by being in such a state.

He had very likely let little Lilian down as well.

And now Pia Nordh wanted to make out he had let her down, too. What the hell did the woman want of him?

Peder straightened up. He’d got to focus. He’d got to get up and get out. How he would get to Sara Sebastiansson’s flat would be a question for later. He most probably wouldn’t be able to drive.

Peder got up from the floor, put on his clothes and shoes and hurriedly left Pia’s flat.

A short while later he was standing on a pavement in the rain with wet hair, ringing for a taxi. He blinked a couple of times and peered up at the sky.

He stopped for a moment.

For the first time in ages, it looked as though the sun might manage to break through the cloud cover. Summer had arrived.

Jelena was on her way back to Stockholm. In a plane. She had ditched the car as planned. She had never flown before. She leant forward and looked out of the plane window in fascination. Incredible, she thought. Bloody incredible.

Anxiety came washing over her. The man hated it when she swore. He had punished her very severely for it at the beginning. Well, not punished, reprimanded was the word he generally used. And only for her own good.

Jelena smiled as she sat there. The man really was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She squeezed the armrest of her seat. The man was in actual fact the only good thing that had happened to her. He was so generous. And smart. Jelena loved seeing the man working and planning. He was so, so handsome when he was doing that. The fact that he had worked out how to hold up that stupid cow in Flemingsberg so she missed the train, for example, had impressed Jelena enormously.

And besides, thought Jelena, in Flemingsberg they had had several strokes of luck.

The man naturally wouldn’t have agreed with her, but they really had been served Sara Sebastiansson on a plate when she decided to get off the train to make her call. The original plan had been for Jelena to attract Sara’s attention by knocking on the window by her seat and trying to lure her out onto the platform by frantic gesticulations. And if that hadn’t worked, they would have tried to snatch Lilian the day after instead, when her mother handed her over to her father. But they hadn’t needed to do any of that, after all.

Jelena didn’t really know why the man had chosen her. She had been so lucky. The man must have known there were loads of other young girls who’d give their right arm to be part of his battle. He must have had so many to choose from. He had actually said as much.

‘I could have taken anybody, Doll,’ he whispered every evening when they were going to sleep. ‘I could have taken anybody, Doll, but I chose you. And if you disappoint me, I’ll choose someone else.’

Jelena hardly had words for the terror she felt whenever he hinted that she was replaceable. Jelena had been replaceable for almost as long as she could remember. It was not at all nice remembering the years she had lived before she met the man, so she seldom did. It was only at night, in her dreams, that the memories would not leave her in peace. Then she remembered all the disgusting things, every detail. Sometimes the dreams refused to end, and then she would find she had woken herself by sitting up in bed and howling.

‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’

The man never wanted to hear about her dreams. He would just pull her back down into bed and whisper to her:

‘You’re the one in charge of your sleep, Doll. You’ve got to understand that. If you don’t, you’ll carry on dreaming things you don’t like. And if you do that, Doll, if you carry on dreaming things you don’t like, and you don’t try hard enough, then you’re a weak person. And you know what I think about weak dolls, don’t you?’

To start with, she had tried to object, tried to tell him she was doing her very best, but the dreams came anyway. To start with, she had cried.

Then he would lie down on top of her in the bed, so heavy she could hardly breathe.

‘There is nothing, Doll – nothing – more worthless than tears. Try to understand that. Know that you have to understand it. I don’t want to see anything like that again. Ever. Do you understand?’

Jelena nodded beneath him, felt him making himself even heavier.

‘Answer so I can hear, Doll.’

‘I understand,’ she whispered hastily. ‘I understand.’

‘If you don’t understand,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be happy to reprimand you.’

His fingers twined their way into her hair, and she saw his other hand clench into a fist.

‘Do you understand?’

‘I understand,’ she said, her eyes wide with fear.

‘Maybe you’d understand better if I reprimanded you, like I had to do in the beginning?’

Jelena started to tremble involuntarily beneath him, and tossed her head from side to side on the pillow.

‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘Please, no.’

He lowered his raised fist and stroked her cheek.

‘Now come on, Doll,’ he said, his voice silky. ‘We don’t plead. Not you and me.’

She took slow breaths, still with the heavy weight of his body on top of hers. Waited for his next move.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of me, Doll,’ he said. ‘Not ever. Everything I do, Doll, I do in your best interests. In our best interests. You know that. Don’t you?’

She nodded between breathing in and breathing out.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Good,’ he said, and rolled off her. ‘Because when our fight begins, when we start our campaign to rouse those damned sinners from their slumbers, there’ll be no room for mistakes.’

Alex Recht just found time to pop into HQ before he had to head for the airport. Fredrika was able to tell him that someone had rung from where Gabriel Sebastiansson worked, and then he spoke to Peder, who had just left Sara’s flat. Peder confirmed that Sara would be going to Umeå, accompanied by her parents, to identify the dead girl. Alex reminded both Fredrika and Peder of the need to establish whether the Sebastiansson family had any links with Umeå.

Very soon Alex was in a taxi on his way out to Arlanda. He wasn’t expecting to stay long up in Umeå, in fact he’d probably fly back later that day. Somewhat reluctantly, he had sent Peder with the duty clergyman to break the bad news to Sara. Peder could hardly be called ideal for the job, but sending Fredrika would have been even more unthinkable.

People whose own emotional lives were dysfunctional could scarcely be entrusted with a demanding task like breaking the news that someone had died.

Alex leant back on the headrest in the back seat of the taxi. Lilian’s body had been found outside the A &E department in Umeå at about one o’clock the previous night. Alex understood that she had been found by a nurse and a duty doctor, and had been lying stretched out on her back on the footpath, naked and wet in the rain. Someone had written the word ‘Unwanted’ on her forehead.

The child was already dead when they found her. There had been no attempt at resuscitation. Cause of death had not yet been established, but an initial examination of her body indicated that she had been dead for about twenty-four hours when they found her. That in turn meant she had lived only a few hours after the time when she was abducted. A few hours. If they’d known that was the sort of margin they had to play with…

But that was the thing. They hadn’t known. And they’d had no reason to expect it. Or had they?

Alex felt a large lump in his throat, and swallowed to try to banish it. His thoughts went to his own children. With quick, fumbling fingers he got out his mobile and rang the home number of Viktoria, his daughter. She answered at the fifth ring and Alex could tell from her voice that he had woken her.

‘I’m so glad you answered,’ he said, his voice almost cracking.

His daughter, used to her father occasionally trying to ring her at odd times, didn’t say much, and rang off without really discovering why he had called. It didn’t matter. Experience told her that she would eventually find out. Maybe not until the next time he rang, but then if not before.

Alex, happy and relieved, put the phone back in his inside pocket.

Some part of him had always hoped, as all parents do deep down, that one of his children would choose the same career as him. Or at least something similar. But neither of them had.

Viktoria had become a vet. For a long, long time, Alex had clung to some sort of hope that her all-embracing interest in horses might make her join the mounted police, but as she took her final school exams and prepared to go to university, he had to admit it was very unlikely.

He couldn’t really object. After all, he had chosen a career path quite different from the one expected of him. It was more a case of having nurtured some kind of hope that Viktoria, physically the very image of her mother, might turn out to be her father’s daughter in spirit. But she didn’t. Alex would swell with pride whenever he thought of her, though he was aware of letting it show far too infrequently. He could sometimes detect something anxious and quizzical in her steady gaze.

‘Are you happy with me, Dad?’ it whispered. ‘Are you satisfied with the person you made me into?’

Alex felt another lump in his throat. He was so unutterably satisfied that the very word ‘satisfied’ seemed banal in a context such as that.

He reminded himself that he was satisfied with both his children, not only Viktoria but also her younger brother, Erik. His son, the eternal seeker. Alex knew it was rather harsh of him to classify his younger child as a seeker when he hadn’t even reached twenty-five, but he honestly couldn’t see Erik ever putting down roots. Not really. Not the way he lived.

For a brief period, when he had just left school, it looked as though Erik might find a niche in military life. Alex didn’t really want a son in the armed forces, but if it proved a good opening for Erik, then he would have no objections. But Erik left the officer training course he had enrolled on, and said he wanted to become a pilot instead. And though nobody could quite work out how, the lad got into some kind of flying school down in Skåne. Then something else got in the way, and to his parents’ unfeigned amazement, he left the training course and the country, and moved to Colombia to live with a woman he had met at evening classes in Spanish. The woman was ten years older than him and had just left her husband. Alex and Lena simply didn’t know what to say, so they let their son go without much of an argument.

‘He’ll soon get tired of her, too,’ said Lena, trying to console him a bit.

Alex merely shook his head in resignation.

News of his son’s life on the other side of the globe filtered through in the form of emails and calls from the boy himself, but also via Viktoria. Sure enough, the relationship with the woman petered out, but they were not surprised when he soon found someone else and decided to stay on a bit longer. He had now been living there for two years, and Alex hadn’t seen him in all that time.

We should go out there, Alex thought in the taxi. Show him we care. Then maybe he’ll come back home. Then maybe we won’t lose him.

He looked distractedly out of the taxi window. The sun was shining. Alex’s mouth felt dry. This was a fine bloody day for summer to make its appearance.

A very bright Stockholm enfolded Peder Rydh as he stood there outside Sara Sebastiansson’s block of flats. Peder felt absolutely terrible. His flesh was crawling. Sara’s howls and cries were still echoing in his head. Poor beggar, he thought to himself. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, simply refused, to imagine anything like that happening to him. Peder’s children would never go missing. Those children were his children and no one else’s. He made a solemn vow to himself to keep watch over them better than he had until now.

The sound of the door opening behind him made him jump. Sara Sebastiansson’s father stepped gingerly out onto the pavement and waited right by the wall. Peder could swear the man had aged in the fifteen minutes that had elapsed since Peder and the clergyman came to the flat. His grey hair looked lifeless and his eyes were so full of despair that Peder found it hard to meet his gaze. He felt even more ashamed of the fact that he was again forced to ring for a taxi, as he was still not in a fit state to drive.

‘Tell me,’ said the older man before he had a chance to be the one to break the silence, ‘if there’s any chance it might not be our little girl they’ve found.’

Peder swallowed and felt his stomach knot as he saw the other man was crying.

‘We don’t think so,’ he said thickly. ‘We’ve had pictures to help us and we’re almost completely sure we’ve identified her. And then there’s the fact that she didn’t have any hair when she was found… I’m sorry, but we’re pretty convinced.’

He took a deep breath.

‘We won’t take it as positive identification until you’ve had a chance to see her, of course, but as I say, we’re not in any doubt.’

Sara’s father nodded slowly. His tears fell like heavy drops of rain onto his dark jumper and the spots grew into little wet patches weighing down his already weary shoulders.

‘We knew all along this would end badly, Mother and I,’ he whispered, and Peder took a step towards him.

Took a step towards him and put his hands in his pockets. He realized what he had just done and took them out again.

‘You see,’ said the man, ‘Sara’s mother and I have only got Sara. And we knew, we knew straight away when Sara met that man that things would turn out badly.’

His voice quavered, and his look vanished far, far away beyond Peder.

‘The first day she introduced him to us, I said to Mother that he was no good for our girl. But they were so in love. She was so in love. Even though he started mistreating her almost straight away. Not to mention his witch of a mother.’

Peder frowned, and put in:

‘But from what we understood from the police reports, it was a few years before he started abusing her. Isn’t that right, then?’

The older man shook his head.

‘He didn’t hit her, but there are other ways of hurting another person. He had other women, for example, all the time. Almost from the start. Disappeared off some evenings without saying where he was going, stayed away whole weekends. And she always took him back. Over and over again. And then they had Lilian. Then she was as good as stuck.’

The air suddenly seemed too heavy to breathe in, and the older man gave a sort of shudder. When he breathed out, his shoulders slumped and the tears ran more swiftly down his cheeks.

‘When the little girl was born, we thought the game was up. All our friends congratulated us, but… It was the start of something new, after all, and yet… After that there was no way back, after that it was bound to end in disaster.’

‘Do you think,’ Peder began tentatively, ‘do you think Gabriel Sebastiansson could have anything to do with what’s happened to the little girl?’

The other man raised his head and looked Peder in the eye.

‘That man is evil incarnate,’ he said in a voice that was tired but firm. ‘There are no limits to what he’d do to harm and wound Sara. No limits at all.’

He seemed to be about to fall forwards, so Peder rushed to catch him. But the man hung there in his arms, crying like a child.

Before too long, Peder was on his way out of the centre of town, heading for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s workplace. He had to keep swallowing to keep back his own tears. Then it struck him that he still hadn’t rung Ylva.

He clenched his mobile. Now he was in big trouble. But she’d just have to wait. He was already late for his appointment with Gabriel’s colleague.

Martin Ek met him outside the front entrance of SatCom. Peder could see he was tense and nervous. Generally Peder was no great genius when it came to reading other people, but Martin Ek was plainly on edge. Very much on edge.

‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ Martin Ek said, with a firm shake of the hand.

Peder noted that the palms of the other man’s hands were sweating profusely, and saw him wipe them on his suit trousers. Charming.

Martin Ek said no more until they were in the lift on their way up to the executive floor. Peder’s intuition told him the lift was too small and they were standing too close together. He hoped he didn’t smell of drink.

‘I went into his office this morning,’ said Ek, staring straight ahead of him. ‘There was an important quarterly report I needed, and Gabriel didn’t answer his mobile. I tried him over and over again. But he never replied.’

Peder recognized that Martin Ek was trying to justify going into his colleague’s computer, which wasn’t necessary at all.

‘I understand,’ he said reassuringly, stepping out of the cramped lift with relief as soon as the doors opened.

Martin relaxed a little and discreetly showed Peder through the open-plan office to his own room. Peder noted a number of raised eyebrows and wondered whether he ought to ask to be introduced to the rest of the staff. He decided it could wait.

Safely inside his room, Martin nodded obligingly towards the visitor’s chair, and took a seat behind his desk. He clasped his hands on his blotter and cleared his throat.

Behind him, Peder could see a row of photos in colourful frames. The pictures radiated warmth and harmony. Peder saw that Martin had three children, all of them probably under ten, and a lovely wife. If the pictures were telling the truth, Martin had a good marriage and loved his wife enough to want to look at her every day. Peder felt himself shrivel as he sat there in the visitor’s chair. He was a disgrace to the male sex. Alex had loads of family photos in the office too, didn’t he?

‘So I went to Gabriel’s room to get the report,’ Martin began again, forcing Peder to focus on what he was saying.

‘We’re authorized to do that,’ he added, ‘if there’s no alternative. And our boss, mine and Gabriel’s, gave me the go ahead.’

Peder nodded again, somewhat more impatiently this time.

‘I didn’t find the report,’ Martin went on. ‘I looked in his filing cabinets; we’ve got special, secure cabinets where we keep sensitive material, and our receptionist has a master key to them all.’

Another pause for effect.

‘When I couldn’t find the report, it occurred to me that he must at least have a working copy in his computer that I could print out.’

Martin shifted the position of his desk chair a little, and suddenly his whole family was hidden from view, for which Peder was truly grateful.

‘That was when I came across the photos,’ he said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. ‘Do you want to see them now?’

Peder had had a few words with Alex on that subject. If the photos really were criminal in content, it would be extremely important for the computer to be handled correctly, so it did not appear that the police had illicitly come by the information about what Gabriel Sebastiansson stored on the hard disk of his computer at work. But if the information was presented by a third party who had gone into Gabriel’s computer of his own volition, there was no reason why Peder could not take a passive look at them. Peder, however, felt instinctively that looking at the photos was one of the last things he wanted to do.

‘You didn’t want to say any more about the photos on the phone,’ he said softly, ‘but maybe you could just give me a rough idea of what’s in them before we take a look?’

Martin Ek squirmed in his seat. His eyes went to a small photo on the desk in front of him, presumably showing his youngest child. He cleared his throat again, looking pale and rigid. His gaze was fixed as it met Peder’s. Then he answered in just two words:

‘Child pornography.’

Fredrika Bergman drove swiftly out of town and down to Flemingsberg. She wondered if what she was doing amounted to official misconduct. Alex had expressly asked her to concentrate on interviewing Sara’s family and closest acquaintances. He had asked her to see Teodora Sebastiansson again as a matter of priority, and to work out how Umeå fitted into the picture. He had definitely not asked her to go out to Flemingsberg to check out a station nobody else in the team thought of any interest.

But here she was on her way there, all the same.

Fredrika parked outside the local public prosecution office, close to the station. She looked about her as she got out of the car. The brightly coloured apartment blocks, where she had occasionally gone to see friends in her student days, were outlined against the sky in the middle distance on the far side of the tracks. The hospital was just beyond them. Her stomach lurched as she saw the signs pointing the way to it and her thoughts turned automatically to Spencer.

I could have lost him, thought Fredrika. I could have been left all on my own.

The walk from the car to the station made Fredrika quite hot. She took off her jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. It was disconcerting to find herself thinking about Spencer so much nowadays. Shouldn’t she be thinking instead about the adoption application she’d sent in a while ago? Dear Spencer seemed suddenly to be pursuing her, day and night. Fredrika felt a slight tremor in the ground beneath her. Was she just imagining things, or had her relationship with Spencer changed since the start of the summer? They met more often and it felt… different.

But it was hard to pin down exactly what was different.

I’ve coped with my relationship with Spencer for over ten years without starting to assume anything or make it something it’s not, Fredrika thought. There’s no reason to complicate matters now, either.

She went into the station and looked around. There was an escalator down to each platform. At the far end were the escalator and steps down to platform one, where the intercity trains heading north to Stockholm came in. Sara must have gone pelting down there when she missed the train, thought Fredrika.

She went over to the girl in the ticket window by the barriers down to the local commuter services on platforms two and three, and showed her ID. She introduced herself and briefly explained why she was there. The girl in the cramped space of the ticket booth instantly sat up straight. She realized from Fredrika’s earnest look that it was important to answer the questions properly.

‘Were you working last Tuesday?’ Fredrika asked.

To her relief, the girl at the ticket window nodded. This wasn’t going to take long.

‘Do you remember seeing a woman with a sick dog any time that day?’

The girl frowned, but then nodded eagerly again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. You mean a tall, lanky girl? With a big Alsatian?’

Fredrika’s heart skipped a beat as she remembered Sara’s description of the woman who had held her up in Flemingsberg.

‘Yes,’ she said, trying hard not to sound too excited. ‘That fits the description we’ve been given.’

The girl smiled.

‘I definitely remember her,’ she said, almost triumphantly, reminding Fredrika of the assistant police officer at Stockholm Central at the time Lilian was reported missing, and the way he had received her and Alex.

‘I saw it later on the news, like, about that little girl going missing from the train,’ said the girl at the ticket window. ‘The girl with the dog was here at the same time as that train from Gothenburg came into the platform, and had to wait there for a while. I remember, because I was the one who helped the little girl’s mum make the call to our control centre after she missed the train.’

Fredrika smiled. Excellent.

‘Where was she travelling to?’ she asked. ‘If you can remember, that is.’

The girl looked confused.

‘The one who lost her kid?’

‘No,’ said Fredrika patiently. ‘The one with the dog.’

‘I don’t know. She just wanted to go down onto the platform to meet someone off the train. She asked me where the train from Gothenburg comes in.’

‘Ah,’ Fredrika said quickly, ‘and what happened then?’

‘Well, I could see there was something wrong with the dog,’ the girl said. ‘It could hardly stand; she was yanking it by its lead. Then sort of shoving it along in front of her. I saw them go down the escalator, and after that I heard her shouting. The girl with the dog, that is.’

She paused.

‘And it was only a minute or two later she came up again with the redheaded woman, who was helping her. At first I thought they were together, but when the X2000 pulled out, the one with the red hair almost had hysterics, and rushed down onto the platform again. She was yelling, “Lilian”, the whole time.’

Fredrika felt her throat constrict.

She cleared her throat.

‘And what did the dog woman do after that?’

‘She bundled the dog onto a mail trolley that was parked just over there,’ said the girl at the ticket window, pointing out through the glass.

Fredrika looked, but saw no trolley.

‘I’ve never seen one of those trolleys in here before, now I come to think of it,’ said the girl, ‘but I just assumed the postmen had left it behind, or something.’

Fredrika made a sharp intake of breath.

‘Anyway, that was when I realized they didn’t know each other, the dog girl and the other one,’ the girl went on. ‘And as far as I could see, the dog girl wasn’t, like, with anyone else. I assumed that the person she’d come to meet hadn’t shown up, and she thought she’d better get a move on because the dog wasn’t well. Though in fact, it seemed poorly from the word go.’

Fredrika nodded slowly, but inside she felt a growing conviction that the woman with the dog had gone down onto the platform with the sole purpose of delaying Sara Sebastiansson, to make her miss the train.

‘Do you think the girl with the dog has anything to do with the kid who went missing?’ the girl in the ticket window asked curiously.

Fredrika forced herself to smile.

‘I don’t know,’ she said swiftly. ‘We’re just trying to have a word with everyone who might have seen something. Would you be able to give a clear description of the woman with the dog if I sent someone over to do an identikit drawing?’

The girl sat up straight and looked earnest.

‘Definitely,’ she said.

Fredrika took her contact details, and also asked for the phone number of the Swedish Railways control centre. She thanked the girl for her time and said she would be back later on that day.

She was just on her way out when the girl shouted after her:

‘Wait a minute!’

Fredrika turned round.

‘What about the little girl? Have you found her?’

There are pictures that speak a thousand words. And there are pictures you just don’t want to see, because you want nothing to do with the words associated with them. Those were the kind of pictures stored on Gabriel’s office computer. To avoid the risk of sounding the alarm for nothing, Peder looked at one of them. He instantly regretted it, and would regret it for the rest of his life.

The pictures were hidden in a folder labelled ‘Reports 2nd Quarter Version III’, the one that had caught Martin Ek’s attention. Having failed to find the report he needed anywhere else, he had opened this folder full of loathsome material that no normal person would wish ever to see.

In a taxi on the way back to HQ, Peder rang his colleagues to have another arrest warrant issued for Gabriel Sebastiansson, on a charge of child pornography. Gabriel would soon be detained in his absence and a nationwide hunt for him would be in progress. Analysis of the pictures – How would that happen? Who had the stomach to pore over vile stuff like that? – would show whether Gabriel was guilty of the sexual exploitation of children, or had contented himself with watching others do so. Inside Peder there was also a growing sense of horror that they might find pictures of Lilian, but he hadn’t yet dared to think the thought consciously.

He had had a word with Alex, who was just off the plane in Umeå, to inform him of developments.

‘We still don’t know where this takes us,’ Alex said circumspectly. ‘But something tells me we’re getting a bit closer.’

‘But this must bloody well mean we’ve got him?’ said an agitated Peder.

‘No mistakes now,’ Alex warned him. ‘Until we find Gabriel Sebastiansson, we’ve got to keep our minds open to possible alternatives. Fredrika will need to go through Sara’s acquaintances with a fine-toothed comb and see if any alternative suspects present themselves. And you can do the same on Gabriel’s side. Get all the skeletons out of his cupboard.’

‘Aren’t child porn and wife beating enough?’ objected Peder doubtfully.

Alex paused to heighten the effect of what came next.

‘When we find this man, Peder, there mustn’t be any doubts. No doubts at all, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Peder, and ended the call.

Then he rang Fredrika. He glanced out of the taxi window. The sun was still shining. Amazing.

Peder couldn’t stop himself sounding elated when Fredrika answered.

‘We’ve got him!’ he said, pressing the mobile to his ear in his exhilaration.

‘Who?’ Fredrika asked vaguely.

Peder was astonished and irritated.

‘We’ve got the father,’ he said exaggeratedly clearly, but avoided saying Gabriel’s name in the taxi.

‘All right,’ was all Fredrika said.

‘Child porn charges,’ Peder said in triumph, and saw the driver staring at him in the rearview mirror.

‘What?’ said Fredrika in surprise.

‘You heard what I said,’ said Peder, leaning back in satisfaction. ‘But we can talk about it back at HQ. Where are you, by the way?’

Fredrika didn’t respond straight away, and when she did, she said:

‘There was just something I had to check, but I’ll be back at work in fifteen minutes. I’ve got some news as well.’

‘Can hardly be anything of the same calibre as mine,’ sneered Peder.

‘See you,’ said Fredrika brusquely, and rang off.

Peder felt pleased with himself as he ended the call. This was police work at its best. The investigation team had done a great job, in actual fact. Okay, the girl had died. That undoubtedly had to be seen as a police failure. But still. Looking back, it seemed somehow inevitable, almost as if the job of the police had never been to save her. It had been to find the person who took her life. What Peder fixed on was that they seemed to have cleared up a macabre crime in no time at all. Soon, very soon, they would find Gabriel Sebastiansson. Peder would insist on being present at all the interrogations. Presumably Fredrika wouldn’t be trying to compete for that particular task.

His phone rang again.

He wrenched it out of his pocket.

It was only when he saw who was calling that it all came back to him. He had completely forgotten to ring Ylva.

Alex Recht had only been to Umeå once before. In fact his sorties north of Stockholm had been embarrassingly few in number overall. He’d been to visit Lena’s relations in Gällivare on one occasion and once – back in his youth – went to see a girlfriend up in Haparanda. And that was about it.

After he had spoken to Peder, his mood was considerably better than it had been on boarding the plane. The news that Gabriel Sebastiansson’s colleagues had found pornographic images of children on his computer didn’t really change things much, but confirmed what they already knew in several respects. There was too much pointing at Gabriel for it not to be him, when it came down to it. He still hadn’t been in touch, he had abused his wife, and he had child porn on his computer.

For Alex, it was all fairly clear-cut.

He was perhaps slightly dubious about the motive. It bugged him that he still hadn’t encountered Gabriel, hadn’t got any sense of what he was like. Was he a madman who had gone off his head and calculatingly planned and carried out the murder of his own daughter? Or was it something else? Did he hate Sara so much that he had to punish her by murdering their child?

DCI Hugo Paulsson met him at the airport. The men shook hands gravely and then Hugo showed him to where the car was parked. Alex made a comment about the airport being bigger than he remembered it and Hugo mumbled something about memory not always being reliable ‘as we get older’. They said no more until they were on their way into Umeå. Alex peered sideways at Hugo Paulsson. ‘Older’, he had called them. Alex didn’t really think either of them could be classed as older. The two of them looked about the same age. His colleague’s hair was possibly a shade greyer and a touch thinner, but generally they both seemed equally young and healthy.

‘It’s the children who keep us young, Alex,’ Lena sometimes said.

He noted without comment that Hugo was not wearing a wedding ring. Maybe he had no children, either?

‘Recht, is that a German name?’ asked Hugo, making an attempt at small talk.

‘Partly German,’ said Alex. ‘Jewish.’

‘Jewish?’ echoed his colleague, looking at him as if it was utterly remarkable to have a Jewish surname.

Alex gave a slight smile.

‘Yes, but it’s a long story. For various reasons, my grandfather on my father’s side took his mother’s surname when he was born, the Jewish Recht. But since his father wasn’t Jewish, the family never observed any Jewish traditions. So my nearest Jewish relation is my grandfather.’

Alex could have sworn that Hugo looked relieved, but he made no further comment on the subject. Instead he said:

‘The file’s in the glove compartment. You’re welcome to look, but be prepared for the pictures.’

Alex nodded and took out the file. He opened it carefully, almost reverently, and took out the little bundle of photographs. He nodded to himself again. It was definitely Lilian, no question.

He felt a pang. Sara Sebastiansson and her parents would be on the next plane – they had been held up in traffic on the way to Arlanda – and then the identity of the child would be formally established. Alex looked at the photos again, leafing through the heart-rending pile. In actual fact, the identification process would be unnecessary and cruel. There wasn’t the least doubt that the child was Lilian.

Alex shifted his weight. The old Saab had nasty, hard seats that were giving him backache even on this short journey.

‘I thought we ought to go straight to the hospital,’ said Hugo Paulsson. ‘We’re seeing the pathologist, who can give us a preliminary report on the cause of death. Then I assume the forensics people in Stockholm will take over, once the girl’s been identified?’

‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Alex. ‘You said she’d been dead about twenty-four hours when she was found, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Hugo confirmed. ‘And they found her around one in the morning.’

That meant Lilian had been alive for less than a day from the time of her disappearance from the train. And she had definitely been dead by the time her mother took delivery of the parcel of clothes and hair.

‘Have you interviewed the people who found her?’ Alex asked.

Hugo nodded. Yes, they’d asked both the doctor and the nurse about what had happened. They had both given very matter-of-fact accounts of the evening’s events, and there was no reason to suspect them of being involved.

‘Is there anything to indicate the girl could have been killed here in Umeå?’ Alex asked delicately.

The question was important, because the answer would determine which police authority took formal responsibility for the investigation. It was the scene of the crime, not the scene of the discovery of the body, which decided it.

‘Hard to say,’ said Hugo. ‘The girl had been lying there in the rain for a while – up to half an hour maybe – and we’re afraid a good number of clues could have been simply washed away.’

Alex was opening his mouth to say something when Hugo went on:

‘She had a funny smell, the girl, acetone or something like that. We think somebody tried to wash her, but was in too much of a hurry to finish the job. And her nails had been cut right down, as short as they could possibly be.’

Alex sighed heavily. For some reason, the details made him more convinced than ever that it was Gabriel Sebastiansson who had taken the girl. Somebody had tried to wash all the evidence off the child. Somebody had cut her nails so no evidence could be scraped from under them. The murderer was evidently a person of some intelligence.

But why ever had they dumped her outside the hospital in Umeå, of all places? That was clearly where Lilian’s murderer had wanted her to be found. But why?

He’s mocking us, Alex thought grimly. He’s mocking us, and laying the girl at our feet. Look, he’s saying, look how close I can get. And you still can’t see me.

Hugo pointed out of the window.

‘Here we are. This is the hospital.’

Fredrika Bergman rang Swedish Railways as soon as she had finished talking to Peder. She introduced herself as a police investigator and said she was ringing about the child who disappeared from the X2000 train from Gothenburg two days before. The man at the other end knew at once what she was referring to.

‘I’ve just got one quick question,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ said the man, and waited.

‘I wonder what caused the delay. Why did the train have to be held in Flemingsberg?’

‘Er, well,’ the man said hesitantly, ‘in the end the train was only delayed a couple of minutes…’

‘I know that,’ Fredrika interrupted him, ‘and I’m not really interested in exactly how many minutes it was delayed. I just want to know what the problem was.’

‘It was what we call a signalling problem,’ the man replied.

‘Right, and what caused that problem, as it were,’ Fredrika asked.

The man at the other end sighed.

‘It was probably some foolhardy youngsters playing on the track. A few kids die that way every year, you know. Usually it doesn’t cause too much disruption, it’s just like in Flemingsberg; it takes a few minutes and then it’s all working again.’

Fredrika swallowed.

‘So it was some kind of sabotage that delayed the train?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Or it could have been some animal getting at the transmitter. But I don’t think that’s very likely in this case, because the problem was only just outside Flemingsberg station.’

Fredrika nodded to herself.

‘Thanks, that’s all for now,’ she said, committing the man’s name to memory. ‘I expect I’ll be back in touch soon with a few more questions or a formal request for a written statement.’

When she had rung off, she gripped the steering wheel hard.

She scarcely dared to think what the investigating team had lost by not following up such an obviously important line of enquiry.

It might simply mean, of course, that Gabriel Sebastiansson had been working with the woman in Flemingsberg. Fredrika swallowed. She didn’t really think that, but that was how she would present it to the team. She’d never get the authorization to pursue it any further, otherwise.

Fredrika felt anything but elated. It was a wretched business from start to finish. Fredrika’s vision clouded as she wondered whether Sara would be able to summon the strength to identify her dead child.

Some years before, Alex couldn’t recall exactly how long ago, his mother-in-law had been admitted to hospital. The diagnosis, incurable cancer of the liver and pancreas, had plunged Lena into despair. How could her father carry on? How would it be for her and Alex’s children growing up without their grandma?

Alex had not been too worried for the children’s sake. Naturally they would miss their grandma, but their sense of loss could hardly be compared with what his father-in-law would go through.

‘We’ve got to be there for Dad now,’ Lena said the evening they heard the bad news.

‘Yes of course,’ Alex replied.

‘No, more than that,’ Lena said. ‘More than that, of course, Alex. These are the times people need all the support and love they can get.’

The memory of the time his mother-in-law lay ill ached in Alex as he sat there in Sonja Lundin’s office at Umeå University Hospital. Hugo Paulsson sat beside him.

Sonja Lundin was the pathologist who had reached a preliminary verdict on the cause of Lilian’s death.

‘We weren’t initially sure which forensic unit was going to take the body,’ Sonja Lundin said with a frown. ‘We don’t know where the crime was committed, of course, here or in Stockholm.’

Alex stared at Sonja Lundin. She was very tall for a woman, and looked very much on the ball. Alex was drawn to people with that look. He had occasionally reflected that Fredrika Bergman had it, too. Shame she had such shortcomings in other departments.

‘But we checked what happened in previous cases, and decided we had to do at least an initial examination here, so as not to hold up the police in their preliminary enquiry,’ Sonja Lundin went on. ‘So now it’s done.’

She gave them a swift summary of what she had found.

‘There’s nothing to indicate the child was subjected to any violence or, from what I could see with the naked eye, any sexual assault,’ she began, and Alex felt himself give a slight sigh of relief.

Sonja Lundin noticed, and held up a hand.

‘I really do have to stress that sexual assault can’t be ruled out until after a more thorough examination.’

Alex nodded. Naturally he knew that.

‘At first I couldn’t work out what had killed her,’ said Sonja Lundin, frowning again, ‘but because her head was shaved, I soon discovered it when I looked a bit closer.’

‘Discovered what?’ asked Hugo.

‘A wound in the middle of the head. And a much smaller puncture at the back of the neck.’

Hugo and Alex both instantly raised their eyebrows.

‘I can’t say for certain without more comprehensive tests and examinations of course, but my preliminary conclusion is that someone tried to stab the girl in the head, and when that didn’t work, injected poison into her neck instead, and that was what killed her.’

Hugo, looked at her, his brow furrowed:

‘Is that a usual way of going about it?’

‘Not that I’m aware,’ said Sonja. ‘And it’s not clear why they would try to stab her skull first, anyway.’

‘Can you say what poison was used?’ asked Alex.

‘No, we’ll need to run tests before we can say,’ she said, with a defensive gesture.

Hugo couldn’t keep still.

‘But,’ he began, ‘would she have been conscious when they stabbed her? I mean…’

Sonja smiled slightly. It was a warm smile.

‘I know what you’re wondering,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I have no answer to that. The girl could have been given some kind of sedative first, but I’m afraid I can’t confirm that either, at this point.’

There was silence. Hugo quietly cleared his throat and Alex caught himself fiddling with his wedding ring.

He cleared his throat, too, a bit more loudly than Hugo.

‘And what’s the procedure now?’ he asked.

‘Your colleague knows that better than I do,’ said Sonja Lundin, nodding in Hugo’s direction.

‘We wait for the mother and grandparents to identify the child,’ he said firmly. ‘Unless we manage to link the case more closely to Umeå in the course of the day, the girl’s body will be sent to the forensic unit down in Solna this evening, so the complete autopsy will be done there. When did you say the mother and her parents were due?’

Alex glanced at his watch.

‘They should be landing in about an hour.’

Fredrika was very happy to find Peder far too absorbed in his own activities to ask where she had been and why she hadn’t gone to see Gabriel’s mother yet.

Peder was just preparing a draft application to the examining magistrate when Fredrika came into his office.

‘We’re going to get him detained in his absence,’ said Peder, his eyes unnaturally wide open from the sudden boost to his adrenalin level.

Other than that, he looked pretty rough. What had he been up to since the evening before? He really did look quite wild.

Fredrika chose not to comment on Peder’s appearance out loud.

‘And we’re going to get a search warrant from the magistrate,’ he went on. ‘So get yourself off to his old ma’s. You said he had a room there, didn’t you?’

Fredrika stopped short. Had she said that?

‘Yes,’ she said eventually, ‘he has.’

‘Right, then we need a warrant to let us search his house in Östermalm, his room at his mother’s, and his office,’ said Peder.

‘What are we looking for, officially I mean?’ said Fredrika.

‘Officially we’re looking for child porn, unofficially every fucking thing that can give us a clue where the guy’s got to. I just spoke to Alex, and it sounds as if the kid had poison injected straight into her head. So sick it’s beyond belief.’

Fredrika swallowed. Yet another grotesque detail that had no natural place in the way she viewed the world.

‘We’re getting extra backup,’ Peder added. ‘Two more investigators to help us interview all the friends and acquaintances.’

‘Okay,’ Fredrika said guardedly.

She considered asking who was standing in for Alex in his absence, but was reluctant to ask a question to which she didn’t want to hear the answer. Finally she asked it anyway.

‘Alex said I was,’ Peder said, so triumphantly that Fredrika felt rather sick.

He’d been waiting for her to ask, just so he could answer. Typical of her to fall into the trap.

‘But Alex will be back this evening,’ Peder added, ‘unless we come up with anything to link this mess to Umeå.’

Then he went on:

‘I’ll take one of the new pair with me out to Gabriel’s company and introduce him there. Gabriel and some of his colleagues seem to have been big buddies, so he might just have confided in them. You can set the other one – it’s a girl – to work on the people Sara knows.’

Fredrika was about to comment on this when he burst out:

‘Heck, this is big! Three search warrants in one go, it’s not every day you get to be in on setting up a big operation like that,’ he said, so elated that Fredrika started wondering if he’d taken something to get so high.

‘A child has died,’ she said instead, her voice a monotone. ‘Pardon me for not joining in with your transports of delight.’

And she walked out of Peder’s room to find her new workmate.

Peder wondered initially whether he ought to go after Fredrika and give her a good dressing down. Who the hell was she to tell him he was out of order?

Then he stopped himself. Fredrika was right, at least about this being a murder enquiry. But she was the one not respecting the fact, not him. Well he wasn’t going to sink to her level. And he certainly wasn’t going to let her spoil his good mood. If he could survive his talk with Ylva, or strictly speaking from Ylva, then he wasn’t going to let some stupid colleague get the better of him.

Peder shuddered at the memory of Ylva’s call. She had been furious, to put it mildly, and it didn’t help that none of his fellow officers who she had rung during the night had been able to tell her where he was. Ylva had considered reporting him missing. Peder was deeply grateful that she hadn’t, but had fallen asleep on the sofa instead. He had promised they would talk properly when he got home, but also told her about the latest developments in the missing child case. He was likely to be late home tonight, as well.

He found it rather hard to admit it, but Ylva had been really shaken to hear that the girl had been murdered, and had immediately mellowed towards him. Suddenly she was a lot more understanding about his job. But unfortunately she still didn’t sound as though she quite believed he’d been working all night. He would have to learn to lie better, that was all there was to it. Or give up his sessions with Pia Nordh. He didn’t honestly think he could manage either of those things, but there was never any harm in having ambitions.

Jimmy rang and wanted to talk. He was worried and anxious. He was going on a cookery course with the other people from his assisted living unit and wanted to know if Peder thought it would go all right.

‘Of course it will!’ said Peder in that extra positive tone he always used for talking to his brother. ‘You can do anything, you know!’

‘You sure?’ asked Jimmy, still not entirely convinced.

‘Sure,’ echoed Peder.

Then the pictures came flooding into his mind again. From a time when everything had been different, when Jimmy had dared and Peder had been the scared one.

‘I can swing as high as anything, Pedda! I can swing higher than anybody else!’

‘Don’t believe you, don’t believe you!’

‘Yes I can, Pedda, I can swing highest in the whole street!’

If Jimmy had been able to grow up undamaged, thought Peder, would he have turned out the stronger of the two of them? Or would he have got softer over time?

Peder turned his attention back to his job. He knew Jimmy was the only person in the whole world he had never let down in his adult life. On the other hand, there was no one else to whom he owed so much. And maybe no one else he loved so unreservedly.

He had almost all the basic data in place for the examining magistrate. A couple of little details, and then it would be ready. Once he had dropped off his new colleague at the SatCom place, he would follow Fredrika out to Sebastiansson’s mother’s house. It wasn’t every day you got the chance to rummage about in a real-live rich man’s mansion.

Thoughts were circulating more smoothly in Peder’s head now a few hours had passed since his brutal awakening. He had drunk loads of fluid and taken more Panadol. He debated whether he should drive himself to the various search premises. Probably not. But then who would check on a policeman on his way to execute a search warrant? Who could be so unlucky? Not Peder Rydh, anyway. He was convinced of that.

Ellen Lind was very upset. She had always expected Lilian Sebastiansson to be returned to her mother in the long run, and now they knew she had been murdered, Ellen was badly shaken. She tried to ring her lover on his mobile, even though he had not been very nice the day before, but all she got was his voicemail.

‘You’re through to Carl. Please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

Ellen sighed. Maybe they could see each other for a while later in the evening? There was little likelihood of getting hold of a babysitter at such short notice, but some day there would have to be an end to all this hassle. She needed him. And she wanted to feel she had a right to feel that way. She wanted to feel it was okay – sometimes – to need him. Was that too much to ask?

She left him a voicemail message and could not stop herself crying as she explained what had happened. That poor girl, just lying there outside the hospital. Naked, on her back, in the rain.

Ellen stared blankly at her computer screen. She hardly knew what she was supposed to be doing. She was speechless with admiration at the sight of Peder and Fredrika dashing up and down the corridor, always caught up in some new stage of the investigation.

Alex had left clear instructions for Ellen by telephone before he set off for Umeå: she was not to say a word about the developments in the Lilian case until the girl’s mother had formally identified her. Under no circumstances was she to go into any detail. She was definitely not to say anything about the child being scalped, or about the child pornography found on the computer of the dead girl’s father. Ellen had been following the online news outlets and had seen that the discovery of the child was the top story on every paper’s website.

Mats, the National Crime Squad analyst, broke into Ellen’s reverie with a knock at her door.

‘Sorry to butt in,’ he began politely.

Ellen smiled.

‘No problem, I was just sitting… thinking.’

Mats gave a tight little smile.

‘Peder said something about us having the go-ahead from the examining magistrate on intercepts for Gabriel. Do you know anything about that?’

When Ellen didn’t reply at once, Mats clarified:

‘Wiretapping and phone records.’

Ellen gave a curt little laugh.

‘Thanks, I know what you mean.’

She went on:

‘It always takes an hour or so before the listening gets underway; you can ask the technical department if you want the exact timings. And then Tele2 was going to send us the logs of calls from Gabriel’s mobile for the past two years, but I don’t know when we can expect those.’

‘I got them an hour ago,’ Mats interrupted her. ‘I’ve checked the activity of his phone in the past few days. Since the child was taken he’s only made three calls, longish ones: one to his mother, one to a lawyer and one international number I haven’t been able to trace. All I can see is that the prefix is the one for Switzerland. And he’s had a few incoming texts.’

Ellen stared at him in surprise.

‘Switzerland?’

Mats nodded.

‘Yes, but I don’t know who to, as I said. And if his mother’s still claiming not to have seen him in the past few days, she’s lying. I’ve checked the mobile phone mast records. Gabriel Sebastiansson’s phone has been active in the vicinity of his parents’ home several times since Tuesday. Right up to six this morning, in fact.’

Ellen whistled.

‘Things are really hotting up,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘They certainly are,’ said Mats.

Fredrika drove far too fast to the Sebastiansson family home. This time she did not ring to announce in advance that she was coming. And when she arrived, she did not wait for Teodora Sebastiansson’s finger to show her where to park. Instead she skidded to a halt right outside the house and was out of the car almost before it came to a complete stop. She took the steps up to the front door in three strides and rang twice on the doorbell. When she heard nothing, she rang again. A moment later, she heard someone fumbling with the lock inside and the door slid open.

Teodora was incensed to see Fredrika.

‘And what in heaven’s name is this supposed to mean?’ the diminutive woman barked, with surprising force in her voice. ‘Roaring onto our estate and almost knocking the door down like this!’

‘Firstly, I don’t know that your home can best be described as an “estate”; secondly, all I’ve done is ring urgently on your doorbell; and thirdly…’

Fredrika was taken aback by the power with which she was countering Teodora’s attack, and paused to heighten the effect.

‘And thirdly, I’m afraid to tell you I have some very bad news. Could you let me in, please?’

Teodora stared at Fredrika. Fredrika stared back. This time, too, the older woman had a large brooch pinned to her blouse, right under her chin. It almost looked as though the brooch was there to keep her head held high.

‘Have you found her?’ she asked quietly.

‘I really would prefer us to go in,’ Fredrika said more gently.

Teodora shook her head.

‘No, I want to know now.’

She did not drop her eyes from Fredrika’s face.

‘Yes, we’ve found her,’ Fredrika said, after a brief consideration of the possible implications of breaking such news to a woman of Teodora Sebastiansson’s advanced age on her own doorstep.

Teodora stood stock still for a long time.

‘Come in,’ she said at length, standing aside to let Fredrika enter.

This time, Fredrika did not spare a glance for the decor as she walked the short distance from the front door to the drawing room.

Teodora sat down slowly on a chair by the table. To her relief, Fredrika was not offered anything to drink. As discreetly as possible, she slid into the chair on the other side of the table and rested her chin on her clasped hands.

‘Where did you find her?’

‘In Umeå,’ said Fredrika.

Teodora gave a start.

‘In Umeå?’ she repeated with genuine surprise. ‘What on… Are you sure it’s her?’

‘Yes,’ said Fredrika, ‘I’m afraid we are. Her mother and maternal grandparents are about to identify her formally, but yes, we’re completely sure it’s her. Have you any links with Umeå? Or do you know if Sara or your son have?’

Teodora put her hands slowly in her lap.

‘As I believe I explained last time, I know very little about exactly how my daughter-in-law lives her life,’ she said gruffly. ‘But no, as far as I know, neither she nor my son have any particularly strong links with Umeå, and nor do I, for that matter. No links at all, in fact.’

‘Have you got friends there?’

‘My dear girl, I’ve never even been there,’ said Teodora. ‘Nor do I know anyone who has. In my family, that is. It’s possible Gabriel’s been up there for work, but I honestly don’t know.’

Fredrika waited a few moments.

‘Speaking of your son,’ she said more resolutely, ‘have you heard from him?’

Teodora stiffened.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I have not.’

‘Are you sure of that?’ Fredrika asked.

‘I’m quite sure,’ said Teodora.

The two women looked each other straight in the eye, a trial of strength across the tea table.

‘May I see his room?’ asked Fredrika.

‘My answer is the same as before,’ Teodora snapped. ‘You can’t see a single square metre of this house unless you have a search warrant.’

‘As it happens, I do,’ said Fredrika, hearing at that very moment the sound of several vehicles crunching to a halt on the gravel drive outside.

Teodora’s eyes widened, radiating genuine astonishment.

‘It does your son’s cause no good at all if you refuse to work with the police in the hunt for your granddaughter’s murderer,’ said Fredrika, getting to her feet.

‘If you had any children of your own, you would know that one never, ever lets them down,’ Teodora said in a broken voice, leaning towards Fredrika. ‘If Sara had understood that, Lilian would never have come to any harm. Where was she, worthless individual that she was, when Lilian vanished?’

She was caught in a trap, set by somebody who really meant her ill, Fredrika thought to herself.

She said nothing. It had only been for a second, but she had still seen it. Weariness in the older woman’s eyes. And vulnerability.

This is causing her vastly more suffering than she is prepared for people to see, thought Fredrika.

Then she accompanied Teodora to the front door to let in the waiting police officers.

Peder Rydh stood in the middle of Teodora Sebastiansson’s living room, and could not believe his eyes. The whole interior was like a museum, and made him feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Matters weren’t improved by having that fragile-looking little old lady staring at him from the other end of the room. She hadn’t batted an eyelid since she met him at the door and he told her why he and the others were there. She’d just gone over and planted herself in an armchair in one corner.

Peder did a quick circuit of the ground floor. Not a trace of Gabriel Sebastiansson. But Peder knew he had been there. Recently. He was aware of Gabriel’s presence in a way he couldn’t explain.

‘When did you last see your son?’ Peder asked again when he had completed his circuit and come back to the living room.

‘Mrs Sebastiansson will not be answering any questions for the time being,’ said a curt voice right behind him.

He turned.

A man Peder didn’t know had suddenly appeared in the living room. He was broad-shouldered and extremely tall. His features were heavy and his complexion and hair were dark. Peder felt an immediate and involuntary respect for him.

The man held out his hand and introduced himself as the Sebastiansson family lawyer.

Peder took his hand and told him in brief why the police were searching the premises.

‘Child pornography offences?’ cried Teodora, swiftly on her feet. ‘Are you entirely out of your mind?’

She tripped lightly across the room to the two men.

‘I thought you were looking for Gabriel!’

‘As I explained when we arrived, that’s just what we are doing,’ Peder said evenly. ‘I can also tell you that there’s a nationwide arrest warrant out for your son. By helping him, you risk committing a criminal act yourself, depending what crime he’s eventually prosecuted for. Your lawyer will confirm that.’

But Teodora had a distant look in her eyes again, and did not seem to be listening to what he said. Peder suppressed a sigh and left the room.

He strode up the wide staircase to the first floor. Gabriel’s room was just off the landing at the top.

‘How’s it going?’ he called. ‘Have you found anything?’

A small policewoman who was down on all fours, looking under the bed, scrambled to her feet.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘But we’re damn sure he was here. The bed was very untidily made; the sheets were all crumpled. I’m pretty sure he slept here last night.’

Peder gave a resolute nod.

‘He must have a laptop,’ he said.

‘He’s bound to,’ agreed a colleague. ‘But he’s likely to have taken it with him, in that case, wherever he’s gone.’

‘You’re right,’ Peder said wearily. ‘You haven’t found any photos and so on about the place?’

‘Not a trace,’ said the policewoman.

‘All right,’ said Peder in conclusion, ‘but we think we can say with some degree of certainty that he spent last night here?’

They all nodded in agreement.

‘Good,’ muttered Peder. ‘I’ll ring the other teams to check what they found at his office and his Östermalm place.’

His first call, however, was to HQ, where Ellen confirmed that Mats had been able to link Gabriel Sebastiansson to his parental home by means of mobile telephone mast connections. But no, she said, there hadn’t been any calls of note from the public, even though the girl’s picture was now in every newspaper and all over the media. Though yes, there was someone who’d seen little Lilian being carried off along the platform in Stockholm just after the train pulled in, so that version of events seemed to be confirmed. Other than that? No, nothing new.

Peder rang the team that was busy with Gabriel Sebastiansson’s office. His computer had been taken away and its contents would be scrutinized as soon as they assembled a team of volunteers willing to deal with such distressing material. The computer’s email correspondence would be looked at separately, and considerably more quickly. Gabriel’s boss also confirmed that Gabriel had the use of a laptop belonging to his employer, but he had no idea where it was. As might have been expected, the team had found no trace of any child pornography in the office apart from what was on the computer.

Peder then tried to talk to the new investigator he had put onto interviewing Gabriel’s colleagues, but he said he was busy interviewing and promised to ring back within the hour.

Peder did not know quite what to make of the information generated by the search to that point. It was satisfying to have confirmation that Gabriel was deliberately avoiding the police. It was also good to have confirmation that his mother had lied to protect her son. It was very good that they now knew where he had been over the past few days.

And yet…

Why was he stupid enough to keep child pornography on his computer at work, when he had a laptop? Why had he hidden at his mother’s, when he could reasonably expect that to be the first place the police would look? And if it was Gabriel Sebastiansson who murdered Lilian, had the murder taken place at his mother’s house? Had the child’s grandmother even been an accomplice?

Peder felt instinctively that she could not have been. But could Gabriel have had Lilian in the house without his mother knowing? If one supposed the child had been sedated, or something like that? Probably not.

Peder looked around him. Was this really the house where Lilian died? If that were the case, he wanted the examining magistrate’s immediate permission to turn the entire place upside down to find the scene of the crime. Though Alex had told him in their most recent phone call that the hospital reported Lilian had died of some form of poison, injected into her skull. A murder like that wouldn’t exactly leave many clues behind.

Then something struck Peder. Mats the analyst had said Gabriel’s phone hadn’t once gone north of Stockholm. But it had clearly gone south. If you assumed Gabriel had had his phone with him the whole time, how the heck could Lilian’s body have been taken to Umeå?

Fatigue descended on Peder once again. His brain refused to cooperate and his headache came back with a vengeance.

Then he had a call from the colleagues searching Gabriel Sebastiansson’s home in Östermalm. They had not found anything much except a large box of sex toys. It was debatable whether that could be considered abnormal. They had also seized a number of unlabelled DVDs. It was possible that they might yield something.

‘Did you find any trace of the child in the flat?’ Peder asked disconsolately.

‘She’s got her own room in the flat, of course,’ came the answer, ‘but no, we can’t say we found anything to indicate she’s been here over the past few days. In fact no one seems to have been here at all. No rubbish in the kitchen bin, and the fridge has been left empty. Either no one’s been here for a while, or somebody came in and cleared out the fridge.’

Peder was inclined to think the latter. It would be interesting to know whether the flat’s landline had been used in recent days. But then on the other hand, Gabriel Sebastiansson’s boss said Gabriel had been at work as usual all the previous week, and he’d been at the office as late as last Saturday.

Then something had happened to make Gabriel go to ground, take some leave at short notice and lie to his mother about a business trip. Why had he been so heavy-handed about it, though? It was obvious his mother was incredibly loyal to him. Yet if there was one iota of decency in the woman, that loyalty could not extend to child pornography and child murder.

Peder went back to the others in Gabriel’s bedroom and told them he was going to look in on the Östermalm flat. He left the house. Teodora Sebastiansson and her lawyer had locked themselves away in the living room, and Peder saw no need to inform them of his departure.

A strange and overwhelming sense of relief flooded over him as he came out onto the gravel drive where his car was parked. He stared for a few moments at the big, brick mansion. Then he stared at the plot of land it was built on, the size of a park. At this particular spot on earth, time had stood still for far too long.

Jelena nervously put the key in the front door. Her hand always shook a bit when she was excited or nervous. Just now she was both of those things. She had done it. She had done absolutely everything the Man had instructed her to do. She had driven the car up to Umeå, got rid of the Foetus in almost exactly the way and exactly the place he wanted, and then caught the plane back. No one had seen her, no one had suspected what she was doing. Jelena was sure she had never performed better in her whole life.

Silence received her as she shut the door behind her.

She fumbled as she took off her shoes and arranged them precisely beside each other, the way the Man always insisted their shoes should be lined up in the little hall.

‘Hello,’ she said tentatively, going further into the flat. ‘Are you there?’

She took a few more steps. Wasn’t it strangely quiet?

Something was wrong, so wrong.

He suddenly detached himself from the shadows. She sensed rather than saw the great fist coming towards her and hitting her right in the face.

No, no, no, she thought desperately as she flew backwards through the air and landed hard on her back, her head hitting the wall.

Pain and fear were throbbing in her body, which had learnt that in situations like this, by far the safest thing was not to react at all. But the blow was so unexpected and so ominous that she almost wet herself in terror.

He came swiftly towards her and pulled her to her feet. There was blood running from one corner of her mouth and her head was spinning. Darts of pain were shooting through her back.

‘You bloody whore, you complete bloody misfit,’ he hissed through clenched teeth, and his eyes seethed with a fury she had never seen before.

‘Oh no, no, please, somebody help me,’ she mumbled to herself.

‘She should have been lying in a foetal position,’ he said, holding her face so close to his own that she could see every tiny detail of it. ‘She should have been lying in a foetal position and quite apart from that – quite apart from that! – what the fucking hell was she doing on the pavement? How bloody hard can it be to understand?’

He yelled the last bit with such force that she was struck dumb.

‘I…,’ she began, but the Man broke in.

‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘Shut up!’

And when she made another attempt to explain, explain that there hadn’t been time to arrange the Foetus exactly as they – as he – had planned, nor in exactly the right place, he yelled at her again to shut up, and silenced her with another punch in the face. Two punches. A knee in her stomach. A kick in her side once she was on the floor. Ribs cracked, making the same sound as when frosty branches snap in a forest in winter. Soon she could no longer hear his yelling or feel his blows. She was scarcely conscious as he tore off her clothes and dragged her into the bedroom. She began to whimper as she saw him get out the box of matches. He kept her quiet by stuffing a sock in her mouth, and then lit the first match.

‘How do you want things, Doll?’ he whispered, holding up the burning match in front of her wide, terrified eyes. ‘Can I rely on you?’

She nodded desperately, trying to get the sock out of her mouth.

He grabbed her by the hair and leant forward. The match was burning.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, bringing the match closer to the thin skin where her neck met her chest. ‘I’m really not sure.’

Then he lowered the match and let the flickering flame lick at her skin.

Alex Recht and Hugo Paulsson met Sara Sebastiansson and her parents in a so-called family room an hour or so after they had identified Lilian. Warm colours on the walls. Soft armchairs and sofas. Indian wood tables. No paintings, drawings or photos on the walls. But there was a bowl of fruit.

Alex scrutinized Sara.

Unlike when she had been given the box with the hair, and later the preliminary news of the death, she now seemed more composed. With the emphasis on ‘seemed’. Alex had met enough suffering, grieving people in his professional life to know that Sara had a very long road ahead of her before she got back to anything resembling a normal, everyday life. Bereavement had so many faces, so many phases. Somebody, Alex couldn’t remember who, had said it was as hard to bear intense grief as it was to walk on thin ice. One moment it feels all right, the next it suddenly gives way and you are suddenly plunged into the darkest darkness of pain.

Just at the moment, Sara seemed to be standing on a very small, but solid piece of ice. Alex felt he was viewing her from a distance. She was not really present, but not really absent, either. Her eyes were still red and puffy from crying, and she had a paper tissue in her hand. From time to time, her hand went up and wiped her nose with the tissue. The rest of the time, it lay motionless in her lap.

Her parents sat quietly, their eyes bright with moisture.

It was Hugo who broke the silence. First with the offer of coffee. Then with the offer of tea. And then with a promise that the interview would not take long.

‘We’re wondering why Lilian ended up here in Umeå,’ Alex began hesitantly. ‘Has the family got any connections in the town, or the area?’

At first no one said anything. Then Sara herself replied.

‘No, we’ve no connections here,’ she said quietly. ‘None at all. Nor has Gabriel.’

‘And you’ve never been here before?’ asked Alex, turning to look at Sara again.

She nodded. It was almost as if her head was not properly fixed to her neck, as it was wavering around in all directions.

‘Yes, once. My best friend Maria and I were here, the summer after we finished school,’ she whispered, and then cleared her throat. ‘But that was – let me see – seventeen years ago. I went on a writing course at a centre a little way outside the town, and then I got a summer job there as an assistant to one of the teachers. But I wasn’t here long, as I say, maybe three months in all.’

Alex regarded her thoughtfully. In spite of the fatigue and grief that seemed to envelop her whole face, he could see a very slight twitch in the corner of her eye as she spoke. There was something bothering her, something that had nothing to do with Lilian.

Her lower lip trembled a little and her chin was jutting out. Did she perhaps look a bit defiant, despite the tears welling in her eyes and threatening to overflow?

‘Did you make any new friends up here? Maybe a boy or something?’ Alex asked vaguely.

Sara shook her head.

‘Nobody at all,’ she said. ‘I mean, I met some nice people on the course, and some of them lived here in Umeå, and we saw each other a bit after I started working at the centre. But you know how it is, you go back home, and then it all seems so far away. I lost touch with most of them.’

‘And you didn’t make any enemies here?’ Alex asked kindly.

‘No,’ said Sara, and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘No, not one.’

‘And the friend you came with?’

‘Maria? No, nor did she. Not as far as I can remember. We don’t keep in touch these days.’

Alex leant back in his chair and indicated with a nod to Hugo that he was free to ask any questions he wanted. Alex and Hugo both felt a bit dubious about the link to the writing course, but to be on the safe side Hugo took down the names of all the other people on the course that Sara could remember. There was, after all, nothing else to go on as they tried to find out why the girl’s body had turned up in Umeå.

For now, the team in Umeå was working on the basis that the girl had been killed in Stockholm and that Alex’s team should therefore take the lead in the enquiry.

Hugo’s group had, however, collated all the information about the discovery of Lilian’s body. The telephone call that had initially lured Anne the nurse out into the car park had come from a mobile with an unregistered top-up account. The call had come from thirty kilometres south of Umeå. The phone had not been used since. No woman about to give birth had showed up at the hospital with her partner that night, so the investigating team assumed the call had only been made to get a member of staff out to the car park. Someone wanted the child to be found, without delay.

There was so much that baffled Alex about this case. And he felt very clearly that he wouldn’t be able to focus his mind on it properly where he was. He needed to get back to Stockholm as soon as possible, so he could sit down in peace and think things through. He felt a disturbing sense of anxiety. The story just didn’t fit together. It just didn’t.

Sara Sebastiansson’s husky voice broke into his thoughts.

‘I never regretted having her,’ she whispered.

‘Pardon?’ said Alex.

‘It said “Unwanted” on her forehead. But it wasn’t true. I never regretted having her. She was the best thing that ever happened to me.’

Fredrika spent the rest of the day trying to get through as many interviews as possible with Sara Sebastiansson’s friends, acquaintances and colleagues, using the contact details supplied by Sara and her parents. The list had expanded as a result of the first ring round. She allocated some of the people on the list to the extra investigator.

It was an unambiguous picture of Sara that emerged. She was basically seen as a very warm and positive person, a good person. Almost everyone, even those not so close to her, thought her private situation had been very difficult for the past few years. Her husband was inconsiderate and inflexible, cold and controlling. Sometimes she was limping when she came to work, and sometimes she wore long-sleeved tops even in the middle of summer. They couldn’t be sure, of course… but… how many times could a person accidentally trip and hurt herself?

None of the people Fredrika and her assistant spoke to recognized Teodora Sebastiansson’s picture of Sara as an irresponsible mother and unfaithful wife. But one of Sara’s closest friends told them Gabriel had been cheating on Sara with other women from the very start. She was crying as she spoke, and said:

‘You see, we all thought she’d get away from him, find the strength to leave him. But then she got pregnant. And then we knew, then we knew almost for sure that the game was up. She would never be rid of him.’

‘But she left him, didn’t she?’ asked Fredrika, frowning. ‘They’re getting divorced.’

Sara’s friend cried even harder, and shook her head.

‘None of us really believe that. People like him always come back. Always.’

One thing Fredrika picked up on in the course of the interviews was that even the individuals Sara referred to as ‘friends from way back’ turned out to be people she had got to know in adult life. She had not retained a single friend from when she was growing up in Gothenburg. To judge by the list, her parents were the only contacts she had on the west coast.

‘Sara once told me she had to break off with almost everybody once she met Gabriel,’ her friend explained. ‘The rest of us got to know Sara and Gabriel as a couple, pre-packaged, but I think Sara’s friends from before could never accept that she was with him.’

The information coming out of interview after interview indicated that Sara did not have an enemy in the world, apart from her husband.

Fredrika returned to HQ exhausted, clutching a hot dog in her hand. She fervently hoped Alex was back. And if he wasn’t, Fredrika was going to take the opportunity to shut herself in her room and try to relax for a little while. She needed to put her feet up and listen to a piece of music her mother had recommended, which she had downloaded to her MP3 player.

‘Something to meditate to,’ her mother had said with a smile, knowing that Fredrika, like her, considered music as important an element of everyday life as food and sleep.

But it was Peder she ran into first.

‘Ooh, hot dog!’ he exclaimed.

‘Mmmm,’ answered Fredrika with her mouth full.

To her surprise, Peder followed her into her office and virtually collapsed into her visitor’s chair. Clearly there would be neither rest nor music for her at the moment.

‘How was your day?’ he asked, sounding tired.

‘Good and bad,’ she said evasively.

She still hadn’t told him that she had taken herself off to Flemingsberg, still less that she had then sent an identikit artist there to make a sketch of the woman with the dog who had held up Sara Sebastiansson and made her miss the train.

‘Did the searches reveal anything?’ she said instead.

Peder took his time to frame his thoughts and eventually said:

‘They certainly did. And it all seems a damn sight murkier than we thought, to be honest.’

Fredrika sat down at her desk and studied Peder. He still looked the worse for wear. Her attitude to him had at times been one of casual contempt. He was childish, puppylike, and unhealthily fond of showing off. But this particular afternoon, when they were all feeling the effects of what had happened over the past few days, she could see him in a different light. There was a human being inside Peder, too. And that human being was not coping well.

She quickly ate up her hot dog.

Peder somewhat hesitantly laid a thin sheaf of papers on her desk.

‘What’s this?’ Fredrika asked.

‘Print-outs of emails from Gabriel Sebastiansson’s work computer,’ replied Peder.

Fredrika raised an eyebrow.

‘I got them about an hour ago,’ said Peder, ‘just after I got back from interviewing Gabriel’s uncle. Fat lot of bloody use that was.’

Fredrika gave a wry smile. She’d had a few interviews like that herself in the course of the day.

‘What’s in them?’ she asked.

‘Read them and see,’ responded Peder, ‘because I’m not sure I can believe they say what I think they’re saying.’

‘Okay,’ said Fredrika, leafing through the sheets.

Peder just sat there. He wanted to watch as she read. Uneasy and eager at the same time.

She read the top sheet first.

‘It’s an exchange,’ Peder explained. ‘It starts some time in January.’

Fredrika nodded as she read.

The exchange was between Gabriel Sebastiansson and someone calling himself ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’, which Fredrika with her scanty knowledge of children’s literature assumed to come from a harmless series of picture books she knew.

Gabriel and Daddy-Long-Legs were discussing various types of wine and planning dates for wine tastings. By the time she had read two pages, Fredrika could feel a wave of queasiness rising inside her.

Daddy-Long-Legs, 1 January, 09.32: The others in the circle don’t want to taste wines of any vintage earlier than 1998. What’s your view?

Gabriel Sebastiansson, 1 January, 11.17: I think 1998 grapes would be fine, but preferably a younger wine. I am sceptical about long storage.

Daddy-Long-Legs, 2 January, 06.25: Questions have also been asked about the countries of origin of the wines, and the grape varieties. Is this important to you?

Gabriel Sebastiansson, 2 January, 19.15: I naturally prefer blue grapes to red. I am less concerned about the regions from which the wines come. I might like to sample something a little more exotic than I did last time our eminent circle met. Perhaps from South America?

‘Oh good God,’ whispered Fredrika, her throat tightening.

‘It isn’t wine tasting they’re talking about, is it?’ said Peder dubiously.

Fredrika shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I really don’t think so.’

‘Red grapes, could they be girls? And blue grapes boys…?’

‘I reckon so.’

Fredrika’s stomach churned.

‘My God,’ she said under her breath, and put her hand over her mouth as she read on.

Daddy-Long-Legs, 5 January, 07.11: Esteemed Member! Our next wine tasting will take place next week! Our supplier will provide us with delicious wines to sample and enjoy through the evening and night. Payment in cash on the day. Further details of the venue will follow as previously arranged.

They could work out that Gabriel Sebastiansson had attended four ‘wine tastings’ in all, since the start of the year.

‘How do they find out about the venue?’ Fredrika asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Peder said in a weary voice. ‘But I rang a friend of mine in the National Crime Squad who deals with this kind of shit. He said they have all sorts of ways: could even be by text message from unregistered mobiles.’

‘How absolutely horrible,’ said Fredrika in agitation, and reluctantly went back to the print-outs.

‘Read the last sheet,’ Peder demanded a little impatiently.

Fredrika was more than happy to skip some of the text, and leafed to the end.

Daddy-Long-Legs, 5 July, 09.13: Esteemed Member! The high point of the summer is almost upon us! We have taken delivery of an unexpected consignment of wonderful wines made from numerous grape varieties and all from the incredible vintage of 2001! Come and enjoy them next week! Venue to be announced separately as usual, but you can mark Tuesday July 20^th in your calendar as the red-letter day. You can assume our event will start at around 4 p.m. Please note that this event is not to be held in our own wonderful part of the country, and you should allow at least five hours for the drive. Let me know as soon as possible if you can attend!

Fredrika instantly raised her eyes and stared intently at Peder.

‘But… the 20th of July was the day Lilian went missing,’ she said with a deep frown.

Peder nodded without a word.

They held each other’s gaze for a few moments more.

Then Fredrika flicked through the print-outs. There were no messages with dates any later than the email she had just read.

‘According to Gabriel’s employer, he was on leave on Monday to Wednesday this week,’ she said reflectively. ‘He left it very late to apply for the leave, said he needed some days off for private reasons.’

‘And as far as we can tell from the movements of his mobile, he was somewhere near Kalmar just after 10 p.m. the day Lilian was taken. The phone hadn’t been used since that morning, but late in the evening he turned it on again.’

‘And who did he ring?’

‘That was when he rang his mother,’ said Peder.

Fredrika gave Peder a long look.

‘Just say their little, what can I call it… “event”… was in Kalmar,’ she began, and Peder nodded to show the same thought had occurred to him. ‘That would more or less fit with the journey down taking five hours.’

‘So he must have left town at about eleven to get there for four when it all kicked off,’ Peder supplied.

‘Exactly,’ said Fredrika eagerly, putting the print-outs on the desk. ‘Have we got anything to fix when the phone left Stockholm?’

‘No, there’s no registered activity after eight in the morning,’ Peder said, thinking it over.

‘Okay, doesn’t matter,’ said Fredrika. ‘We know that at ten he was in Kalmar, ringing his mother, at any rate. We can assume that by then the whole thing was over and he was on his way home.’

She looked at Peder.

‘In that case, he can’t have taken Lilian from the train,’ she said, summing up what they had just pieced together. ‘Not unless he was in a car on his way to Kalmar at the same time.’

Peder squirmed.

‘Or,’ he said, ‘it could have been that he decided to arrive at the “event” late and took Lilian with him.’

Fredrika shook her head.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it could have been. But wouldn’t that make it a very muddled story? First he has to take Lilian and get her into the car. Then he drives down to Kalmar and… goes to some sort of sick club, or whatever you want to call it. Then he drives back home with Lilian, scalps her, sends the hair to her mum, murders her and gets someone to drive up and dump her at the entrance to Umeå Hospital? The records from Tele2 say the phone wasn’t active north of Stockholm during the period in question, don’t they?’

Peder drew himself up. Fredrika could see that the new information was stressing him out.

‘Correct,’ he acknowledged, ‘and it certainly does sound a bit too much when you put it like that.’

He thought for a moment and then thumped his fist on Fredrika’s desk.

‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘everything’s happening too fast in this goddamned mess! How the heck did he manage it all? It just doesn’t fit! Maybe he gave his phone to someone else?’

Fredrika put her head on one side and looked briefly into the distance over Peder’s shoulder. She thought she could hear Alex out in the corridor.

‘Or,’ she said slowly, ‘it could be that these two stories have nothing to do with each other.’

Alex Recht left Umeå just after four. Lilian Sebastiansson’s body was to be flown air freight down to Stockholm later that evening.

‘Let’s hope you find that evil person before he murders any more children,’ Hugo Paulsson said darkly as he took his leave of Alex.

‘Murders more children?’ repeated Alex.

‘Yes, why should he stop now? If he sees that he can get away with it, I mean,’ said his colleague.

That little conversation hardly did anything to dispel Alex’s sense of disquiet.

He landed in Stockholm an hour or so later and went straight back to HQ.

Fredrika, Peder, Ellen, the National Crime Squad analyst and two people Alex had never seen before, but assumed to be the new backup staff, were waiting for him in the Den.

‘Well, my friends,’ began Alex as he sat down. ‘Where shall we start?’

It was late. He wanted a short, efficient meeting. Then he wanted to go home and think the case through, undisturbed.

‘What do we know? Let’s start there.’

Most of the information that had come to light that day had already been shared among the team members by telephone. Alex had not, however, heard the latest details about Gabriel Sebastiansson’s email and telephone activities. He saw Peder and Fredrika exchange a few quick looks when he asked someone – anyone, as long as they were quick – to update him on that point. Then he would run through what little he had not already told them about what had happened in Umeå.

Peder gathered his thoughts for a moment and then told them. He handed out copies of the email correspondence between Gabriel and ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ to all those present. Then, to Alex’s genuine amazement, he showed them an overhead transparency showing two timelines.

Alex glanced at Fredrika.

This must have been her idea, he thought.

To judge by the look of satisfaction on her face, he had guessed correctly.

It wasn’t a bad idea, just a bit different. Sometimes it was good to have something different, Alex admitted to himself.

‘So,’ said Peder, indicating the timelines. ‘We, well, that is, Fredrika and I, have come up with two possible theories on the basis of what we now know.’

He ran rapidly through his own theory. Then he handed over to Fredrika, who spoke without leaving her seat.

‘The alternative to the theory that Gabriel drove to Kalmar and back with Lilian, which is fully possible if a bit tight time-wise, is that we’re dealing with two completely different stories here, two completely unconnected crimes.’

Alex frowned.

‘All right, let me clarify,’ Fredrika said quickly. ‘We know Gabriel has abused Sara, we know he looks at child porn at work, and I think we can assume from this email traffic that he’s an active paedophile. He’s part of a paedophile network we know nothing about, and he’s been meeting up with them regularly since the start of the year. Then an extra event is suddenly announced, in Kalmar. He applies for some leave straight away and – understandably enough – decides to lie about it to his mother and tell her he’s going on a business trip on the days in question. He promises to be back in time for dinner with Lilian when Sara and Lilian get back to Stockholm from Gothenburg.’

Fredrika paused for a moment to assure herself everyone had followed so far. Nobody sitting at the table looked confused.

‘So,’ she said, aware of being so worked up that she was blushing. ‘So, he drives to Kalmar some time on Tuesday morning. Just after two, Lilian goes missing. An hour or so later, people start ringing to ask him about it. His mobile is turned off. Gabriel happens to be unavailable just then, and stays unavailable until ten that evening, when he switches his phone back on.’

Fredrika paused for added effect.

‘The man’s just been committing the most disgusting crime our society can conceive of when his daughter goes missing and he’s wanted by the police in connection with that. He probably knows we’ve already found the records of his reported abuse of his wife, and imagines we’ll also have had contradictory statements from his mother and his company about where he is. It’s late and he’s hours from home. Maybe it’s panic, pure and simple. He doesn’t want to drive home and he doesn’t want to talk to the police. He knows he didn’t take Lilian, but he really doesn’t want to say where he was when she disappeared.’

Fredrika took a deep breath before going on.

‘But he’s wedged himself into a really tight corner, because his old mum who usually conjures up alibis for him finds it tricky this time, because he lied about where he was going to be. Naturally it’s still her he rings; there’s nobody else who’ll offer him such unconditional help. It’s hard to say exactly what plan they cook up between them, and exactly how much he tells his mother, but presumably they decide to assume Lilian will soon be found and they’ll lie low until then.’

‘And when Lilian’s safely back, the police won’t be interested in where he’s been?’ Alex added.

‘Just so,’ said Fredrika, taking a drink of water after her long exposition.

The room fell silent.

Alex looked through the emails Peder had handed out, reading a passage here and there.

‘Christ almighty,’ he said, putting the papers aside.

He leant forward across the table.

‘Has anyone come up with information of any kind to make Fredrika’s version seem unfeasible?’ he asked softly.

Nobody said anything.

‘In that case,’ Alex said slowly, ‘I’m inclined to believe that our friend Gabriel, who we’ve been hunting so frantically, most probably isn’t the one who took Lilian.’

He looked at Peder, who was now sitting beside Fredrika.

‘I agree it’s not impossible for Gabriel to take Lilian and pay his visit to Kalmar all on the same day, but as Fredrika pointed out: it would be a terrifically tight schedule.’

Alex shook his head.

‘But in that case,’ Peder said, ‘what about Ingrid Strand’s evidence? The woman who was sitting by Sara and Lilian on the train. I mean, she saw Lilian being carried off…’

‘… by someone who “must have been her daddy”,’ Alex supplied calmly. ‘I know, it’s all as clear as mud. Who else would Lilian let herself be taken by? Unless she was already drugged, but we’ll have to wait for the tests before we can know that.’

Fredrika swallowed.

‘Was she…,’ she started. ‘Could the pathologists tell if she’d been assaulted in any way?’

Alex shook his head.

‘They think probably not, but that’s something else we’ll get a formal report on tomorrow morning.’

Alex lapsed into silence. Regardless of whether Gabriel Sebastiansson could be linked to Lilian’s disappearance, a whole bundle of information about a paedophile network had suddenly landed on his desk. Goodness knows it wasn’t his problem; it would have to be handed over to the regional or even national crime squad.

‘Does this mean we’re right back to square one?’ asked Peder doubtfully.

Alex smiled.

‘No,’ he said, pondering. ‘It just means that the information we’ve got doesn’t hang together quite the way we first thought. But as I said, I do think we can write off Gabriel as chief suspect, at least for the time being.’

Peder sighed and Alex held up a warning finger.

‘But,’ he added, ‘that doesn’t necessarily mean Gabriel didn’t know whoever took his daughter. We can’t rule that out, knowing the circles he moved in.’

Fredrika raised a tentative hand to request permission to speak.

Alex gave her a nod.

‘But we do know,’ Fredrika said softly, ‘that the person who took Lilian directed his attentions to Sara and not – as far as we know – to Gabriel. The hair was sent to Sara’s address, not his.’

‘So you think the murderer has links to Sara rather than Gabriel?’ interpreted Alex.

‘Yes,’ came Fredrika’s straight answer.

‘Have we got any other information to back that up?’ Alex asked, surveying those assembled.

Fredrika asked to speak again.

‘Yes, we have,’ she said, and flushed. ‘You see, I went on a little visit to Flemingsberg today.’

Alex and the others listened to Fredrika’s brief account of what she had found out in Flemingsberg and from Swedish Railways. She concluded by assuring them she didn’t think any of this was proof, but she still maintained that too many things had happened at the same time for it to be pure coincidence.

Alex absorbed this in silence. Then he furrowed his brow.

‘I ought really to say you shouldn’t be sending yourself off on little missions of your own when I specifically asked you to do other things, but I’ll let that pass for now.’

Fredrika gave a sigh of relief.

‘If we assume the information you gathered to be true in the sense that it indicates this was a minutely planned series of actions, directed at Sara, then we’re dealing with a real sadist,’ Alex said quietly. ‘And a very intelligent and successful one, at that. There’s just one thing I wonder: why haven’t we found an explanation for this? Why isn’t Sara aware of who she could have upset to that degree?’

‘Maybe because she didn’t notice,’ Peder put in. ‘If it was some real psycho who took Lilian, and it seems like it, the reason might well not seem logical to anyone except the perpetrator himself.’

‘We’ll have to sift through all the information again,’ said Alex, with audible tension in his voice. ‘We must have missed something. When will the identikit of the woman with the dog be ready?’

‘It already is,’ said Fredrika, ‘but we just want the girl at the ticket window to see if it needs tweaking, and she’s doing that tonight.’

‘Right, let’s move on,’ said Alex, thanking Fredrika with a quick nod.

Fredrika tried to interrupt, but Alex stopped her.

‘Can I just run through what I found out from Sara and her parents in Umeå?’

Fredrika nodded, as curious as everyone else.

Alex was aware he was disappointing them.

He repeated what had been said in his interview with Sara and her parents after the formal identification. He saw Fredrika giving him a penetrating look as he told them about Sara’s time in Umeå after she left school.

When he had finished, Fredrika was the first to comment.

‘I’ve been talking to quite a few of Sara’s friends and colleagues today,’ she said, ‘and it’s struck me that she basically has none of her old friends left.’

‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘I understand she broke off with them when she met her husband.’

‘That’s right,’ said Fredrika eagerly, ‘but it means that when we try to chart her social network, our timeline’s starting quite late. That is, we’re not taking account of anything that might have happened in Sara’s life before she met Gabriel.’

‘And you mean that might be it? That someone who might have been brooding and plotting vengeance for decades snatched Lilian?’

‘I mean we can’t rule it out,’ clarified Fredrika. ‘And I mean that if that is the case, we’ve no chance of unearthing it as things stand, because we’re looking at completely the wrong timespan.’

Alex nodded thoughtfully.

‘Right, my friends,’ he said, ‘let’s rest our brains tonight. Everybody go home and do something they enjoy. And when we meet tomorrow, we’ll start again in the sense that we’ll go through our material again. All of it. Even calls from the public we discounted previously. Okay?’

Alex had surprised himself by using the word ‘friends’ twice in one meeting. The thought made him smile.

Ellen Lind was feeling a touch disappointed as she left work. She’d really been working hard since the girl went missing, and though she was only an assistant, the boss ought to remember to give her credit for her contribution, too. Alex wasn’t always very good at that. Not to mention the way he treated the poor analyst. Did he even know that Mats’s name was Mats?

All such thoughts evaporated when she got out her mobile and saw she had several missed calls from the man she loved. He had left her a short, concise voicemail message saying he would very much like to see her that evening at Hotel Anglais, where he was staying the night. He also apologized for the stupid way things had gone between them last time.

Ellen’s heart missed a beat for sheer joy.

At the same time she felt a little stab of irritation. She didn’t like these sudden temperature changes in the relationship.

For a price, Ellen’s niece agreed to look after the children in the end. She was actually already round at Ellen’s to lend a general hand, since Ellen had had to work late.

‘Do they really need a babysitter?’ asked the girl, who was nineteen and had just left school.

Ellen’s thoughts went to Lilian Sebastiansson and she said a firm:

‘Yes.’

Then she hurried home so she would at least have time to say goodnight to the kids and change.

Ellen’s niece watched her as she dashed around in her underwear looking for something to wear.

‘You look like a teenager who’s just fallen in love,’ she giggled.

Ellen smiled and blushed.

‘Yes, I know it’s a bit silly, but I feel so happy every time he says he can see me.’

The girl gave her a warm smile back.

‘Wear the red top,’ she said. ‘Red really suits you.’

Before long, Ellen was in a taxi on her way to the hotel. She didn’t realize how tired she was until she sank into the back seat of the taxi. It had been hard work and tough going these past few days. She hoped Carl wouldn’t mind listening while she told him about all that dreadful stuff, because she really needed to get it out of her system.

Carl met her in the lobby. His face broke into a warm smile when he saw her.

‘Just think, twice in one week,’ Ellen murmured as they embraced.

‘Some weeks are easier than others,’ replied Carl, holding her tight.

He stroked her back, praised her choice of top and said she looked radiant, even though she felt shattered.

The hours until they fell asleep passed in a haze. They drank wine, had a bite to eat, and a long, earnest talk about all that had happened, and then made passionate love until they decided it was time for some sleep.

Ellen relaxed in his arms and was almost dropping off as she whispered:

‘I’m so glad we met, Carl.’

She could feel his smile tickle the back of her neck.

‘I think exactly the same,’ he said.

Then his hand cupped her left breast, and he kissed her shoulder and said:

‘You truly give me all I need.’