Unwanted

FRIDAY

It was dark in the flat when Jelena came to. She opened her eyes and found she was lying on her back. One eye didn’t want to open at all. She just had time to wonder why that eye was so heavy before the wave of pain washed through her. Through her and crashing against her. Impossible to ward off, impossible to endure. It coursed through her body and made her shake. When she tried to turn in the bed, the sheet stuck to the skin of her back in the places where the blood had clotted and dried.

Jelena almost immediately abandoned her efforts not to cry. She knew the Man would not be at home. He never was after a Reprimand.

The tears could run freely down her cheeks.

If only he had let her speak, if only he had listened and not rushed straight at her.

Such fury.

Jelena had never seen anything like it.

How could he do this? she thought as she cried into the stained pillow.

That was a forbidden thought, really. She was not to question anything about the Man, those were their rules. If he reprimanded her, it was only for her own good. If she could not understand that, their relationship was doomed to be weakened and destroyed. How many times had he told her?

But still.

Jelena was a woman who had lost her faith in herself and those around her bit by bit. She was alone, and that was because she deserved to be. That was why she had become the person who felt grateful and cherished when someone like the Man wanted her.

But there was still a vestige of strength in her that the Man had not managed to wipe out. Nor had that been his intention: without strength, she could never become his ally in the war that lay ahead of them.

Lying naked on the bed, alone and abandoned with wounds all over her body, Jelena used that last drop of strength to dare to sample the salty taste of protest. When she was younger, in a time she and the Man had done everything to make her forget, her whole being had been one big protest. The Man took that out of her. The kind of protest she indulged in was to be condemned. He had told her that the very first time he picked her up in the car. But there were other kinds of protest. If she wanted to and dared to, he could help her move forward.

Jelena wanted nothing better.

But the road to perfection, which the Man claimed was imperative for the fight, was far longer and darker than Jelena had ever imagined. Long and painful. It nearly always hurt somewhere. It hurt most of all when he burned her. Though really that had only been a few times, and only right at the start of their relationship.

Now he had done it again.

Jelena was hot and feverish. Her chest hurt when she breathed and she had burns on more parts of her body than she dared to think of. The pain was driving her insane.

A desperate thought flashed through her mind.

I must get help, she thought. I must get help.

Summoning all her willpower she slipped off the edge of the bed and slowly began to crawl out of the room. Seeking help for her injuries was another infringement of the rules, but this time she was sure she would die if she didn’t get medical help.

The Man always came home sooner or later and helped her. But this time Jelena did not have time to wait for him. Her strength was draining away too quickly.

Got to get to the front door.

Somewhere inside her, the panic was growing. What would this betrayal mean for the relationship between her and the Man? What would be left of it, in fact, after she had gone behind his back?

Of course the Man would never accept her showing enough independence to leave the flat in her present state. He would come after her, and he would kill her.

Time, thought Jelena, as she kneeled up, trembling, and gripped the handle of the front door. I’ve got to think.

She struggled to raise her other hand so she could reach the lock. Unlock the door and open it. She remembered nothing more.

The door swung open and cold marble met Jelena’s face as she hit the floor.

Alex Recht began his working day by dispatching Fredrika to Uppsala to question Sara Sebastiansson’s former friend Maria Blomgren, who had been with her on the writing course in Umeå.

Then he sat behind his desk with a cup of coffee in his hand. Quiet and alone.

Later on, Alex would wonder just when had this case turned into a wild animal that paralysed his whole team by stubbornly and persistently choosing its own path. The case seemed to be living a life of its own, with the sole purpose of confusing the team and leading it astray.

Don’t you dare control me, came a whisper inside Alex. Don’t you dare tell me which way to go.

Alex sat stiffly at his desk. Although the night had only allowed him a few hours’ sleep, he felt full of energy. He also felt pure, livid anger. There was such insolence to the perpetrator’s whole plan. The hair was couriered to the child’s mother. The child was dumped in a car park outside a big hospital. Somebody even rang the hospital to make sure the child would be found. Without leaving a single trace behind them. Or at least nothing personal, like fingerprints.

‘But nobody on the planet is invisible, and nobody is infallible, that’s for sure,’ Alex muttered doggedly to himself as he lifted the receiver and dialled the forensics unit in Solna.

The pathologist who took Alex’s call sounded surprisingly young. In Alex’s world, skilled doctors were usually over fifty, so he always felt slightly anxious when he had to work with someone younger than that.

Despite his prejudices, he found the pathologist to be a very competent person who expressed himself in terms that even an ordinary police officer could understand.

That was good enough for Alex.

The pathologist up in Umeå had been right in her preliminary assessment. Lilian had died of poisoning, an overdose of insulin. The insulin had been injected directly into the body, high at the back of her neck.

Alex reluctantly found his anger now mixed with surprise.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the pathologist, sounding concerned. ‘But it’s an effective and – how shall I put it – clinical way of killing someone. And keeps the victim’s suffering to a minimum.’

‘Was she conscious when she was jabbed?’

‘Hard to say,’ the doctor said doubtfully. ‘I found traces of morphine in her, so presumably someone had tried to keep her calm. But I can’t swear she was unconscious when she was given the lethal injection.’

He went on:

‘It’s hard to say what the murderer hoped to gain by injecting the insulin straight into her skull, or the back of her neck. At that concentration it would have been lethal even if injected into an arm or leg.’

‘Do you think he’s a doctor? The murderer?’ Alex asked quietly.

‘Hardly,’ said the pathologist tersely. ‘I’d call the way the needle was used amateurish. And as I say: why did he initially try putting it straight in the girl’s head? It almost seems like some kind of symbolic act.’

Alex wondered at what he had just heard. Symbolic? How?

The cause of death seemed as bizarre as the rest of the case.

Had she eaten anything after she was abducted?

The pathologist took a few moments to answer.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No, it doesn’t look like it. Her stomach was entirely empty. But if she was kept drugged for a period, that’s not so surprising.’

‘Can you tell us anything about where the body’s been?’ Alex asked wearily.

‘As they noted in Umeå, the body had been at least partly washed with alcohol. I looked for traces of the perpetrators under her nails, but I didn’t find anything. In a few places I was able to secure the remnants of a particular kind of talc, which shows they wore rubber gloves, the sort they have in hospitals.’

‘Can they be got hold of anywhere else?’

‘We’ll have to do some more tests before I’m completely sure, but they probably are hospital gloves. And they’re not difficult to get hold of if you know somebody who works at a hospital, but you can’t just buy them at the chemist’s.’

Alex nodded thoughtfully to himself.

‘But if the murderer had access to hypodermic needles and hospital alcohol and gloves…’ he began.

‘Then it’s likely one of the people involved moves in health service circles,’ the doctor finished for him.

Alex went quiet. What had the pathologist just said…?

‘You always talk about the murderer as if it was more than one person,’ he said enquiringly.

‘Yes,’ said the pathologist.

‘But what are you basing that on?’ asked Alex.

‘I do beg your pardon, I thought you’d been given that information when you were up in Umeå,’ the pathologist apologized.

‘What information?’

‘The girl’s body is completely undamaged apart from the lesion to the scalp. She hasn’t been subjected to any kind of external bodily harm and nor has she been sexually abused.’

Alex sighed with relief.

‘But,’ the pathologist went on, ‘there are distinct sets of bruises on her arms and legs. They were probably the result of a struggle as someone tried to hold her down. One of the pairs of hands that made them was very small, probably a woman’s. Further up the arms there are also larger bruises, which appear to have been inflicted by much larger hands. Probably a man’s.’

Alex felt his chest tighten.

‘So there are two of them?’ he said. ‘A man and a woman?’

The pathologist’s hesitation was audible.

‘Could be, yes, but I can’t be entirely sure, of course.’

He went on:

‘But I can say that the bruising must have occurred several hours before the child died. Possibly when they were shaving her head.’

‘The woman held her down while the man shaved her,’ Alex said softly. ‘And Lilian put up too much of a fight, so they changed places. The woman shaved and the man held her down.’

‘It’s possible,’ said the pathologist again.

‘It’s possible,’ said Alex under his breath.

By the time Fredrika Bergman got to Uppsala, the picture of the woman who had held up Sara Sebastiansson in Flemingsberg was already all over the media. Fredrika heard it on the radio as she pulled up outside Maria Blomgren’s.

The police are now looking for a woman who is thought to have been…

Fredrika switched off the engine and got out of the car. The media were now following the Lilian case extremely closely. They didn’t know all the repulsive details yet, but sooner or later they would get their hands on them. And then all hell would break loose, that was for sure.

It was warmer in Uppsala than in Stockholm. Fredrika remembered she’d always thought so when she was a student as well. It was always a bit hotter in Uppsala in summer, and a bit colder in winter.

As if you were travelling to an entirely different part of the world.

Meeting Maria Blomgren soon shook Fredrika out of her reverie. Maria Blomgren looked unmistakably as though she came from exactly the same part of the world as Fredrika herself.

We even look a bit like each other, thought Fredrika.

Dark hair, blue eyes. Maria was perhaps a little fuller in the cheeks, a bit taller and slightly darker-skinned. Her hips were broader and more rounded.

She must have had a baby, thought Fredrika automatically.

And Maria gave an even more earnest impression than Fredrika, if that was possible. She did not smile until she had seen Fredrika’s ID. Then she smiled a thin little smile showing not even a glimpse of her teeth.

But there was not much reason to smile, when it came to it. Alex Recht had called Maria Blomgren in advance to explain what the visit was all about. Maria said she didn’t think she had anything particular to tell them, but of course she would cooperate with the police.

They sat down at the kitchen table. Sand-coloured walls, white mosaic tiles, modern kitchen units. The table was elliptical in shape, and the chairs were hard and white. Apart from the walls, almost everything in the kitchen was white. The whole flat was pedantically tidy and looked clinically clean.

So different from Sara Sebastiansson’s, thought Fredrika. It was quite hard to imagine the two women once having been best friends.

‘You wanted to ask me about that summer in Umeå?’ Maria said straight out.

Fredrika delved in her handbag for her notebook and pen. Maria was demonstrating unequivocally that, while not unwilling to talk to the police, she wanted it over and done with as soon as possible.

‘Maybe you could start with how you and Sara became friends? How did you get to know each other?’

Fredrika detected distinct hesitation in Maria’s face. Then scarcely perceptible irritation. Her eyes darkened.

‘We were friends in upper secondary,’ said Maria. ‘My parents separated around then and I had to change schools. Sara and I happened to be in the same German group; we were with the same German teacher for three years.’

Maria fiddled with the vase of beautiful flowers on the table in front of her. It struck Fredrika that she had not been offered so much as a glass of water.

‘I don’t really know what sort of things you want me to tell you,’ Maria said slowly. ‘Sara and I soon became close friends. Her parents were going through some sort of crisis just then, too, and arguing a lot. We understood each other, both being in the same boat. We were both typical model pupils, the kind who lend their pens to everybody and don’t like the sort of classmates who disrupt lessons.’

When Maria raised her eyes, Fredrika saw moisture glinting in them.

She’s grieving, thought Fredrika. That’s why she’s being so buttoned up. She’s grieving for the relationship she and Sara once had.

‘In the last year at secondary school, Sara changed,’ Maria went on. ‘She wanted to rebel. Started wearing make-up, drinking and messing around with boys.’

Maria shook her head.

‘I think she got tired of it. That phase ended pretty quickly, round about the time her parents got back together again. I think they’d separated for a while, but I’m not sure. Anyway, on the whole things were fine again. And then we went on to college and made sure we were on the same course. We’d already decided what we wanted to be: interpreters at the UN.’

Maria laughed heartily at the thought, and Fredrika smiled.

‘You were both good at languages?’

‘Yes, oh yes, our German and English teachers couldn’t praise us enough.’

Maria’s look turned grave again.

‘But then Sara had more trouble at home. Her parents changed church and Sara didn’t get on with the new, stricter rules they suddenly expected her to follow.’

‘Church?’ Fredrika echoed in surprise.

Maria raised her eyebrows.

‘Yes, church. Sara’s parents were Pentecostalists, and there was nothing odd about that. But then a group of them broke away and started a Swedish branch of an American Free Church movement. They called themselves Christ’s Children, or something like that.’

Fredrika listened with growing interest.

‘And what was the conflict with her parents about?’ she asked.

‘Well it was so stupid, really,’ Maria sighed. ‘Her parents had always been quite liberal although they were such believers. They didn’t mind us going out or anything like that. But in the few years they were part of that new group, they changed, got more radical. They were much more restrictive about clothes, music, parties and so on. And Sara couldn’t cope with the change. She refused to take part in anything to do with the church, which her parents accepted even though the pastor tried to force them to be stricter in their parental role. But that wasn’t enough for Sara; she wanted to push the boundaries even more.’

‘With more booze and boys?’

‘With more booze and boys, and sex,’ sighed Maria. ‘It wasn’t too early for it, really, we must have been seventeen when she got going, so to speak. But it was a bit worrying that she seemed to be trying to go with boys just to annoy her parents.’

Fredrika found herself crossing her legs under the table. She hadn’t been with a boy until she was well over eighteen.

‘Anyway,’ Maria went on, ‘she met a really nice boy the year after that. And I got together with the boy’s best friend, so we were like a little gang, always going round together.’

‘How did Sara’s parents take it? Her having a boyfriend, I mean.’

‘They didn’t know at first, of course. And when they found out… Well, I think they thought it was quite okay. Sara calmed down a bit, and they genuinely had no idea about all the boys she’d been with before that. If they had known, I think it would have been a different story.’

‘And what happened?’ asked Fredrika, who was really caught up in the story.

‘Then time passed and spring came,’ said Maria, who was a good storyteller and knew when she had a good listener in front of her. ‘Sara suddenly felt a bit unsure about the relationship. They were spending more time apart, and our little group wasn’t together so often. Then I split up with the other boy, and after that Sara didn’t want to be with hers, either.’

Maria took a breath.

‘He made a bit of a fuss at first, Sara’s boyfriend. He didn’t want it to be over. Kept ringing her and wouldn’t give up. But he found a new girl not long after, and then he left Sara in peace. It was only a few weeks before we finished college, and Sara had already booked us on the writing course in Umeå. There were so many things I was looking forward to. College-leaving celebrations, the writing course, starting at university.’

Maria bit her lip.

‘But there was something worrying Sara,’ she said softly. ‘At first I thought it must be because that boy wouldn’t leave her alone, but then he backed off. And then I thought she must have fallen out with her parents again, but it wasn’t that either. I could see there was something, though. And I was terribly hurt that she wouldn’t confide in me.’

Fredrika made some notes on her pad.

‘So you went off to Umeå?’ she prompted quietly, realizing Maria had lapsed into total silence.

Maria gave a start.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘We went off to Umeå. Sara kept saying things would be better once she got away. And then she just came out with something on the way: said it was all arranged that she would be staying up there all summer, and we wouldn’t be coming back together. I was really upset; it felt like an insult and a betrayal.’

‘You didn’t know she’d applied for a summer job up there?’

‘No, I had no idea. Nor did her parents; she rang them a few weeks later to tell them. Made it sound as if it was an opportunity that had just come up, when it wasn’t at all. Sara knew when she left that she’d be there all summer.’

‘Did she explain at all?’ Fredrika asked reflectively.

‘No,’ Maria said with a shake of the head. ‘She just said it had been a difficult year and she needed to get away. Told me not to take it personally.’

Maria leant back in her seat and folded her arms on her chest. She looked steely.

‘But I couldn’t really get over it,’ she said, sounding almost defiant. ‘We did the course and then I went home by myself. We’d planned to share a flat or something in Uppsala when term started there, but over the summer I decided I’d rather be on my own, in student accommodation. Sara got in quite a state about it and thought I was letting her down, but she let me down first. And then…’

She lapsed into silence. A big red car went past in the road outside. Fredrika’s eyes followed it while she waited for Maria to go on.

‘And then everything was sort of fine again,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Not really, not like it had been before. We saw a lot of each other in Uppsala, and we shared the same interests and confided in each other to some extent, but… no, it was never like before.’

Fredrika felt a strange, gnawing feeling inside her. How many people had she grown apart from over the years? Did she grieve over it the way Maria seemed to regret the loss of Sara?

‘Let’s just go back to the time in Umeå,’ Fredrika said briskly.

Maria blinked.

‘How were things there? Did anything particular happen?’

‘Things were… Well, fine, I think. We stayed at a course centre and got to know some people.’

‘Anyone you’re still in touch with?’

‘No, no, no one at all. It felt like drawing a line under it all when I came home. The course was over and I was going to work for the rest of the summer. Work, and then move to Uppsala.’

‘And Sara? Did she have anything to say for herself when she got back?’

Maria knitted her brow.

‘No, scarcely a thing.’

‘Was there anyone else she was as close to as she was to you?’

‘No, I’m sure there wasn’t. She had friends, of course, but no one that close. It felt to me as if there were lots of things she just wanted to put behind her when we moved to Uppsala. Before she met Gabriel, then she was pretty much on her own again, I suppose.’

Fredrika snapped this up at once.

‘Were you seeing much of Sara when she met Gabriel?’

‘Yes, we seemed to be starting to find each other again properly just about then. It was a few years since the Umeå thing, and we were soon going to be taking our exams and looking for jobs. We were on the brink of a new phase in our lives, a more adult one. But then Sara met Gabriel and everything changed again. He took over her life completely. At first I tried to stay in touch to…’

Maria stopped, and Fredrika was in no doubt this time. Maria was crying.

‘To… what?’ Fredrika asked quietly.

‘To save her,’ Maria sobbed. ‘I could see how she was getting knocked about in that relationship. And then she got pregnant. After that we lost contact completely, and we haven’t been in touch since. I couldn’t bear seeing her with him. And to be honest, I couldn’t stand seeing the way she just gave up and died when she was with him, and didn’t lift a finger to break free.’

Fredrika instinctively disagreed with Maria about Sara Sebastiansson not lifting a finger to break free from Gabriel, but she kept it to herself. Instead she said:

‘Well, she’s definitely broken free now. In fact, she’s desperately alone.’

Maria wiped away a tear from her cheek.

‘How does she look?’

Fredrika, who was just packing away her things to get up and go, raised her head.

‘Who?’

‘Sara? I wonder how she looks today.’

Fredrika gave a slight smile.

‘She’s got striking red hair, long. Beautiful, you could say. And her toenails are painted blue.’

The tears rose in Maria’s eyes again.

‘Just like before,’ she whispered. ‘That’s the way she’s always looked.’

Peder Rydh was reflecting on life in general and his marriage to Ylva in particular. He scratched his forehead, as he always did when he was stressed and unsettled. He discreetly scratched his groin, too. He itched all over this morning.

An inveterate fidget, he dashed out into the corridor for his second coffee of the morning. Then he slunk back into his room again. To be on the safe side, he shut the door. He wanted a bit of peace.

Yesterday evening had been a nightmare.

‘Go home and do something you enjoy,’ Alex had said.

Enjoy wasn’t really the way Peder would describe how he felt about last night. The boys had been asleep when he got home. It was several days since he had got home early enough to play with the boys and spend some time with them.

And then there was Ylva. They started by talking to each other as ‘grown-up human beings’, but after a few short exchanges, Ylva went completely crazy.

‘Do you think I don’t know what you’re up to?’ she shouted. ‘Do you?’

How many times had he seen her cry this last year, for Pete’s sake? How many?

Peder had only one weapon to defend himself with, and he almost died of shame recalling how he had used it.

‘Don’t you get how serious this case is?’ he shouted back. ‘Don’t you get how bloody awful I feel with dead kids popping up all over Sweden when I’m a dad myself? Holy shit, is it that odd if I sleep over at work now and then? Eh?’

He won, of course. Ylva had no concrete proof of her suspicions, and she was so worn down by the past difficult year that she didn’t really trust her own intuition any longer. It ended up with her sitting on the floor, crying and saying she was sorry. And Peder took her in his arms, stroked her hair and said he forgave her. Then he went in to the boys and sat silently in the dark between their beds. Daddy’s home now, guys.

Peder’s face went hot as he remembered it.

Arsehole.

He had been a complete arsehole.

The memory of it made him start to shake. God al-migh-ty.

I’m a bad person, he thought. And a bad dad. A useless dad. A disgusting man. A…

Ellen Lind broke into his thoughts with her insistent knocking on his door. He knew it was her although he couldn’t see her. She had a special way of knocking.

She opened the door before he had a chance to call ‘Come in’.

‘Sorry to barge in,’ she said, ‘but a detective from Jönköping has just called, asking to speak to someone in Alex’s team. Alex wants you to take it, because he’s on the phone to someone in Umeå.’

Peder, confused, stared at Ellen.

‘All right,’ he said, and waited while she went back to transfer the call.

He heard a woman’s voice at the other end. It sounded pleasant, assured; Peder guessed he was speaking to a middle-aged woman.

She introduced herself as Anna Sandgren and said she was a DI with the crime squad in the Jönköping county force.

‘Uhuh,’ said Peder, mainly just to have something to say.

‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,’ said Anna Sandgren.

Peder squirmed.

‘I’m Peder Rydh,’ he said. ‘DI with the Stockholm police, and I’m one of Alex Recht’s special investigation team.’

‘Ah, right,’ said Anna Sandgren, still with that slightly singing intonation she had. ‘I’m ringing about a woman we found dead yesterday morning.’

Peder listened. That was the same morning Lilian was found.

‘Her grandmother reported her missing. She said her granddaughter had rung on the Wednesday evening and said she was coming to stay. She apparently had protected identity status after some violence in an earlier relationship, and she also used to come and hide up at her old granny’s when things got difficult.’

‘Right,’ said Peder guardedly, waiting for an explanation of how this could possibly have anything to do with him.

‘But there was no word from her that evening as she’d promised,’ Anna Sandgren went on, ‘so the old lady rang the police and asked us to go round there to see if anything had happened to her. We sent a patrol car and everything seemed normal. But the grandmother insisted we ought to go into the flat. And when we did, we found her murdered in her bed. Strangled.’

Peder frowned. He still could not fathom why the call had been put through to him, of all people.

‘We made a brief search of the flat and found her mobile. There weren’t many numbers in it and it hadn’t been used much. But one of the numbers she’d saved was yours.’

Anna Sandgren stopped.

‘Ours?’ gulped Peder, not really understanding what she meant.

‘We checked all the numbers on her phone, and one of them was the number the Stockholm police issued to the media for anyone with information about that missing child who turned up in Umeå.’

Peder sat up straighter.

‘As far as we can see, though the number’s saved there, she didn’t ever ring it from her mobile. But we thought you ought to know. Especially as we have so little to go on at our end.’

Peder swallowed. Jönköping. Had Jönköping come up in any context in the investigation?

‘Do you know when she died?’ he asked.

‘Probably a couple of hours after she rang her grandmother and told them she was coming to stay,’ Anna Sandgren replied. ‘Forensics will be getting back to us with a more exact time, but preliminary observations indicate she died around ten on Wednesday evening. She’d bought her ticket online for the train up to Umeå where the grandmother lives, and was meant to…’

‘Umeå?’ Peder interrupted.

‘Yes, Umeå. She was meant to be catching the train from Jönköping the morning we found her dead. Yesterday, that is.’

Peder’s heart was beating faster.

‘Does the grandmother know who he is? The man who abused her so she needed a protected identity?’

‘It’s a terribly complicated story,’ sighed Anna Sandgren resignedly, ‘but the short version is this: Nora, that’s the victim’s name, got together with a man when she was living in a small place not far from Umeå, six or seven years back. It wasn’t what you’d call a healthy relationship. Nora wasn’t very well herself at the time. She was off work with depression, seems to have had it very tough growing up in a series of foster homes. Both her parents are dead.’

Peder took a deep breath.

‘You ought really to talk to Nora’s grandmother face to face,’ said Anna Sandgren. ‘We’ve only spoken to her on the phone, and she was very shaken by the news of Nora’s death. But she was able to tell me that she’d never met the man in question, and that Nora suddenly felt the need to get away from the Umeå area and just went. She was able to get protected identity without having to identify the man, because she had such well-documented injuries. I don’t think the police made any particular efforts to find him. It would have been the same here, if we hadn’t even had a name to go on.’

‘And here,’ Peder said without thinking.

‘Well now you know what’s happened, anyway,’ said Anna Sandgren to wind up the call. ‘We’ll keep you informed on the progress of our investigation, of course, but as things stand we’ve no leads on the murderer at all.’

She gave a dry laugh.

‘Well no, that was a slight exaggeration. We have got one, and that’s a footprint we found in Nora’s hall. A man’s Ecco shoe, size 46.’

Fredrika Bergman got back to HQ about lunchtime. She was mystified to see Alex sitting alone at the table in the Den. His brow was knitted, and he was writing furiously on a sheet of paper in front of him.

He’s woken up now, Fredrika thought to herself. He lost his bearings early on and wandered off in the wrong direction, but now he’s back on track.

‘Are we having a meeting?’ she asked out loud.

Alex jumped.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m just sitting thinking. How did it go in Uppsala?’

Fredrika reflected.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. But there’s something weird about that writing course.’

‘How do you mean, “weird”?’

‘Something happened up there, or just beforehand, that made Sara decide to stay up there much longer than her friend.’

Alex stared ahead, pondering what she had said.

‘I’d like to go up to Umeå,’ said Fredrika, taking one step over the threshold.

‘Umeå?’ Alex repeated, surprised.

‘Yes, and talk to whoever was running that course, ask them if they know what it was that had that effect on Sara.’

Before Alex could reply, Fredrika added:

‘And I thought I’d have another word with Sara herself. If she’s up to it, that is, and assuming she’s back in Stockholm.’

‘She’s back,’ said Alex. ‘She and her parents got back this morning.’

‘Did you know the parents are very religious?’

‘No,’ said Alex. ‘No, I didn’t. Could that be relevant here?’

‘It could,’ said Fredrika. ‘It could.’

‘I see,’ said Alex. ‘Well then, you’d better come in and tell me more about it.’

He ventured a smile as Fredrika came into the room. She sat down at the opposite side of the table.

‘Where’s Peder?’ she asked.

‘On his way to Umeå,’ said Peder, right behind her.

He had come into the meeting room with a holdall slung over one shoulder.

Like a boy, thought Fredrika. Like a boy on his way to football practice.

She raised her eyebrows.

‘What’s happened?’

Peder surveyed the room irritably.

‘Are we supposed to be having a meeting now?’

Alex gave a chuckle.

‘No, not really. But since you’re both here…’

Peder sank onto a chair. He had already told Alex everything, so he briefed Fredrika in a single sentence.

‘They’ve found a murdered woman in Jönköping who had our public hotline number stored in her mobile, and her grandmother lives in Umeå.’

Fredrika gave a start.

‘In Jönköping?’

‘Yep. We’ve no idea of course why she had it in her phone, especially as she doesn’t ever seem to have used it to make a call, but…’

‘But she did make a call,’ Fredrika broke in.

Alex and Peder stared at her.

‘Don’t you remember? Ellen told us about a woman who wanted to stay anonymous, who thought she knew the perpetrator and had once lived with him.’

Alex was suddenly tense.

‘You’re right,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re right. But how do you link that to the woman in Jönköping?’

‘The call was made from a public telephone in Jönköping,’ said Fredrika. ‘Mats, the analyst, checked it out.’

‘How long have we known that?’ asked Peder indignantly.

‘We dismissed the call as unimportant,’ Fredrika retorted, equally indignantly. ‘And Jönköping wasn’t in the picture at all at that point.’

Alex raised a hand to stop them.

‘And it’s all there in Mats’s database, for anyone who asks,’ Fredrika swiftly added.

Peder’s face dropped.

‘I didn’t check this with him,’ he admitted.

He glanced in Alex’s direction.

Alex gave a couple of dry little coughs.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s assume it was the murdered woman who rang. Is there any written record of what she said?’

Fredrika gave an eager nod.

‘Ellen made a note; I think that’s in the database, too.’

Peder leapt to his feet.

‘I’ll go and talk to Mats,’ he said, and was out of the room before either Alex or Fredrika had time to say anything.

Fredrika gave an almost imperceptible sigh.

‘Wait a second,’ called Alex, and Peder came back into the room.

‘Fredrika apparently needs to go to Umeå as well. But I don’t see any point in sending you both up there just now.’

Fredrika and Peder listened, both on tenterhooks.

‘We’ve already had several calls about the woman with the dog in Flemingsberg,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve been with the analyst, er…’

‘Mats,’ supplied Fredrika.

‘Yes, Mats, and we went through them all, and there are two that definitely need following up. One was from the proprietor of a car hire place. He thinks he hired out a car to a woman who looked a bit like the one in the picture. And then a woman rang and said she was the girl’s foster mother some years ago. She gave us a provisional description to go on.’

Silence descended on the room. Fredrika and Peder glanced at each other.

‘It might just be,’ Alex said slowly, enunciating every syllable, ‘that it would be more appropriate for Fredrika to go to Umeå to take care of a poor old grandmother and a writing teacher. And for you, Peder, to deal with the car hire man and the foster mother.’

Peder and Fredrika nodded to each other in agreement.

‘Is there anything else I should know about the dead woman in Jönköping?’ asked Fredrika.

Peder stuck a memo under her nose.

‘Here’s everything we’ve got,’ he said curtly.

Fredrika began to read.

‘A pair of Ecco shoes size 46,’ she said softly.

‘We mustn’t get our hopes up,’ said Alex, who had already seen the memo, ‘but it’s certainly a coincidence, isn’t it?’

Fredrika read on, frowning.

‘Good, that’s decided then,’ said Alex.

A sceptical Fredrika watched Alex and Peder as they hurried out of the room.

Chaos, she thought. These men live at the epicentre of chaos. I honestly don’t think they’d be able to breathe anywhere else.

At that moment, Alex turned round.

‘By the way,’ he said very loudly.

Peder and Fredrika both listened. Ellen put her head out of her office.

‘I contacted the National Crime Squad with what we got from Gabriel Sebastiansson’s emails,’ he said. ‘Apparently “Daddy-Long-Legs” is well known in those circles. The Crime Squad is gearing up for a major move against him and his network and was very glad of our input. I was to pass on their thanks.’

Peder Rydh had had certain preconceptions about the police world when he applied for a place on the training scheme ten years before.

The first was that the police force was a place where stuff really happened. The second was that being a police officer was an important profession. And the third was that other people looked up to the police.

That third point had been a crucial one for Peder. Getting respect. Not that he wasn’t used to people showing him respect. But this was a different kind of respect, one that went deeper.

And he certainly did find himself respected. The only slightly strange thing was that since he had left the uniformed branch and was in plain clothes, people perceived him as less of an authority figure and treated him accordingly.

The proprietor of the car hire firm who had rung in to say he recognized the picture of the girl at Flemingsberg station was a case in point. When Peder arrived the man regarded him very suspiciously until he showed his ID. He then lowered his guard a little but still wasn’t entirely satisfied.

Peder glanced around him to get the measure of the place. It was a little office in the heart of Södermalm. The posters in the windows offered both car hire and driving lessons. Not a very usual combination. And there was nothing in the office to indicate that any kind of driver instruction was conducted on the premises.

The other man saw Peder surveying the scene.

‘The driving school’s downstairs,’ he said peevishly. ‘If it’s them you’re looking for.’

Peder smiled.

‘I was just taking a little look round,’ he said. ‘Good place for a car hire firm, I should think.’

‘How do you mean?’

What a bloody misery guts, thought Peder angrily, but kept his smile on and said, ‘I just meant there can’t be too much competition round here. Most of the car hire places are at the big petrol stations, aren’t they, so they’re a fair way out of the city centre?’

When the man did not respond, and went on looking annoyed, Peder decided not to waste any more energy trying to be pleasant.

‘You rang and said you thought you’d seen this woman,’ he said briskly, putting the drawing of the Flemingsberg woman on the counter separating him from the other man.

The man studied the picture.

‘Yes, that looks like her, the one who was here.’

‘When was she here?’ Peder asked.

The car hire man frowned and opened a large desk diary he had in front of him.

‘Is she the one who murdered the kid?’ he asked insensitively. ‘Is that why you’re looking for her?’

‘She’s not under suspicion for anything,’ Peder said rapidly. ‘We just want to talk to her; she might have seen something of interest to us.’

The man nodded as he looked through the calendar.

‘Here’, he said, stabbing a fat finger onto the open page. ‘That’s when she was here.’

Peder leant forward. The man turned the calendar round. He had his finger on the left-hand page. June the seventh.

Peder’s spirits fell.

‘What makes you remember it was that day?’ he said dubiously.

‘Because it was the day I was having my goddamned wisdom tooth taken out,’ said the car hirer, looking very pleased with himself as he drummed on a straggly doodle on the page. ‘I was just going to close the shop and go to the hospital when she came in.’

He leant over the desk with a glitter in his eye that made Peder feel very uncomfortable.

‘Petrified little beggar,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘Stood staring around her like a little animal caught in the car headlights. Those ones that never shift even though the danger’s right on top of them. That’s the way she looked.’

He gave a short, coarse laugh.

Peder ignored the other man’s attitude, though he suspected some of what had just been said ought to be stored away in his mind for future reference.

‘Which car did she hire, and how long for?’ he asked.

The man seemed nonplussed.

‘Eh?’ he said, eyeing Peder in confusion. ‘Whaddya mean, which car? She didn’t want a car.’

‘Didn’t she?’ said Peder, looking foolish. ‘What did she want, then?’

‘She wanted a driving licence. But that was before I’d started that business, so I told her to come back at the beginning of July. But she never turned up again.’

Peder’s brain was working overtime.

‘She wanted a driving licence?’ he echoed.

‘Yep,’ said the car hirer, slamming his desk diary shut.

‘Did she give her name?’ Peder asked, though he already knew the answer.

‘No, why should she? I couldn’t put her down for lessons. I hadn’t got the paperwork sorted by then.’

Peder sighed.

‘Do you remember anything else about her visit?’

‘No, only what I’ve already told you,’ said the car hirer, massaging his beard with one hand and his belly with the other. ‘She was scared shitless, and she looked washed out. Her hair must’ve been dyed, it was so dark it didn’t look natural. Almost black. And someone had been knocking her about.’

Peder pricked up his ears.

‘There were bruises on her face,’ the man went on, indicating his left cheek. ‘Not new ones, more the sort that’ve been there a while, know what I mean? Looked quite nasty. Must’ve been painful.’

Neither of them said anything. The door behind Peder opened and a customer came in. The car hirer waved to the man to wait.

‘I’m just going,’ said Peder. ‘Anything else you can remember?’

The car hirer gave his beard a vigorous scratch.

‘No, only that she talked strangely.’

‘Talked strangely?’ repeated Peder.

‘Mmmm. It was kind of disjointed. I s’pose it was because she’d been beaten up. Women usually learn to hold their tongues then.’

Once Peder and Fredrika had left HQ, the same feeling descended on Alex that he used to get when his children still lived at home and had gone round to a friend’s for the evening. It was so quiet and peaceful.

Peder and Fredrika were not the only ones who worked on the same corridor as Alex, far from it, but he still had a palpable sense of their absence, which he sometimes found a positive blessing.

His wife rang him on his mobile.

‘So what about this holiday?’ she asked. ‘In view of this case you’re working on, I mean. The travel agent rang about confirmation and payment.’

‘We’ll get our holiday, don’t worry,’ was all Alex said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Do I generally lie about things like that?’

He smiled, and knew she was smiling back.

‘Will you be late home this evening?’

‘Probably.’

‘We could have a barbecue,’ Lena suggested.

‘We could go to South America.’

Alex was surprised to hear himself utter the words. But he didn’t take them back, just left them hanging there between them.

‘What did you say?’ asked Lena at length.

Alex felt his throat go dry.

‘I said we should go and visit our son, who lives there, sometime. So he knows we still want to be part of his life.’

Alex’s wife took a little while to respond.

‘Yes, we certainly should,’ she said softly. ‘This autumn, perhaps?’

‘This autumn, perhaps.’

Love for a child wasn’t like anything else, thought Alex when they had rung off. Love for a child was so fundamental, so unnegotiable. Alex sometimes thought it was actually love for the children that had made it possible for him and Lena to be married for nearly thirty years. What else explained the way they’d come through every setback, every spell of dreary, day-to-day boredom?

Admittedly Alex was the boss, but he was aware of the gossip circulating in the corridor. He knew what they said about Peder, that he had a woman in the Södermalm force. Alex had never been unfaithful to his wife, but he could still visualize quite easily how a situation like that could arise.

If you were really, really down. If you were really, really weighed down with a huge burden of problems.

But not when you had young children at home, as Alex knew Peder did. And definitely not with a work colleague and so indiscreetly that other people noticed. That was low and irresponsible.

Alex felt a stab of irritation. Young people were so spoilt these days. He knew he sounded old-fashioned and even a bit reactionary, but he had some genuine objections to young people’s way of viewing the world, and what they expected from it. Life was supposed to be one long walk in the park with no obstacles in your way. The world had turned into an enormous playground where anybody could play wherever they fancied. Could Alex have done what his son was doing? Could he have moved to South America? No, he could not. And that was just as well, because if you had options like that open to you, how could your spirit ever settle? You would be bound to end up like Peder.

Alex was starting to feel guilty about sitting there, thinking. He had no business having opinions on how his colleague lived his life. But still. He was thinking of Peder’s wife and children. Why wasn’t Peder doing that?

His gloom was dispelled somewhat by a call from Peder. There was at least something driven in that voice, something to tell Alex that Peder liked what he did in his days at work. It was hard to see that as anything but positive.

But this time his young colleague sounded less than happy.

‘The only new thing we’ve found out is that she tried to get a driving licence,’ he said morosely. ‘Even assuming it’s her.’

Alex stopped Peder in his tracks.

‘We also know she gets beaten up at regular intervals, which indicates pretty strongly that we’ve found the right girl. And the right man,’ he said firmly, and went on rather more eagerly. ‘Just think about it, Peder. The girl who was murdered in Jönköping had had protected identity since she broke up with a man who abused her. When she was on the phone to Ellen, she talked about some kind of campaign, about the man wanting to punish certain women. Just suppose that lunatic’s found himself another girl as a partner and assistant. Another girl whose life has gone off the rails – way off – and who for some reason falls for this man. If, and I mean if, it’s the man who took Lilian that murdered the girl in Jönköping, then we also know he must have had help to get Lilian – dead or alive – to Umeå, since he can hardly have been in two places at once. And that means it would have been very handy if his sidekick could pass her driving test in time.’

Peder was thinking and took a while to respond.

‘Shall I go round to all the driving schools I can find in Söder and show them the picture, while I’m here? She might have tried another one when that car hire place couldn’t do it.’

‘Good idea, as long as we don’t overlook the woman who thought she might have fostered the girl.’

‘I’ll get that sorted, too,’ Peder said swiftly. ‘Heard anything from Fredrika yet?’

‘No,’ sighed Alex. ‘I think she’s on her way to have an extra little chat to Sara. She was going to call before she went on to the airport.’

Alex was about to hang up when Peder said:

‘There’s one more thing.’

Alex waited.

‘Why did he go to Jönköping and murder that girl just then? I mean, he must have had his hands full with Lilian. Why would he draw even more attention to himself?’

Alex nodded to himself.

‘I’ve been thinking about that, too,’ he said unsurely. ‘There seems to be some plan behind it all. First he holds up the train and Sara in Flemingsberg; then he sends the box of hair and clothes. Maybe the Jönköping murder was part of the ritual, though we can’t see it yet?’

‘I thought the same,’ said Peder, ‘but it doesn’t fit. It feels more like the Jönköping murder was an emergency measure. He didn’t even wipe the floor. He’s been so bloody careful everywhere else, and then suddenly he leaves evidence behind him.’

‘Well he did that on the train, too,’ Alex objected.

‘Because he had no choice,’ said Peder. ‘He couldn’t go cleaning the floor in there, and he could hardly get on the train barefoot or in his socks. That would really attract attention. And anyway, he probably felt relatively safe on the train, where there’d be lots of other footprints.’

‘So you think he murdered the woman in Jönköping to shut her up?’

‘Yes,’ Peder replied after a brief pause. ‘That seems the only plausible explanation.’

Alex pondered this.

‘All right, but how did he know?’

‘Know what?’

‘How did he know she needed shutting up?’

‘Yes, that’s the thing,’ Peder said uneasily. ‘How the hell did he know she’d rung the police? Or can we assume he would have topped her anyway?’

Ellen Lind felt happy, elated even. She thought about the previous evening and night and felt all warm inside.

‘Perhaps he loves me,’ she murmured.

She was so glad she had been able to see him last night. He had been such a good listener, just when she needed to get all that wretched Lilian stuff off her chest. Even though he had no children of his own, he really seemed to understand how traumatic it was for everyone involved.

Then they had talked about new films they might go and see. Ellen felt a tingle of excitement. They had never been to the cinema together before. Their socializing had always been geographically confined to whatever hotel he happened to be staying at on the evening they met, and the pattern of their dates was always the same: they had a meal, they talked, they made love, they slept.

It would be good for us to do something new, thought Ellen with a roguish smile.

If she was able to get him to a film, then it ought not to be a problem to persuade him to meet her children, too. If he really did love her, he would understand that the kids were part of the package.

Ellen smiled as she took out her mobile. She had just sent a text and was waiting for him to answer. But she had no new messages.

When they parted that morning, Ellen had asked when she would next see him. He had hesitated for a few moments and then said:

‘Soon, I hope. We’ll have to see when I can make it.’

‘When I can make it,’ Ellen repeated silently to herself with a wry smile. Why was it always on his damn terms?

The sun had finally made Stockholm quiver a little in the heat, Fredrika Bergman noted, as she hastily parked outside her block of flats. She raced up the stairs, key at the ready, and was inside her flat in what felt like seconds. It would not take long to pack an overnight bag for her Umeå trip.

Her case was on the top shelf of the walk-in wardrobe. Fredrika caught a glimpse of the violin in its case, tucked in behind. She tried not to see it, not to remember. But the usual thing happened. The speed of her thoughts won out over the strength of her will not to remember. The words flew through her head as automatically and painfully as ever.

I could have been somebody else, I could have been somewhere else today.

Fredrika’s mother had brought up the subject a while back.

‘The doctors never said you couldn’t play at all, Fredrika,’ she said softly. ‘They just said you couldn’t play professionally.’

Fredrika shook her head obstinately, tears burning her eyes. If she couldn’t play as much as she once had, then she didn’t want to play at all.

The message light on the telephone was flashing when she went out into the kitchen. Surprised, she played the message.

‘Hello. Karin Mellander here,’ said a rather throaty, elderly-sounding female voice. ‘I’m ringing from the adoption centre, about your application. I’d appreciate it if you could call me back, whenever it’s convenient, on 08…’

Fredrika stood dumbly as the woman recited a number. The figures flew across the room and into Fredrika’s head, where they dissolved into thin air.

Shit, thought Fredrika. Shit, shit, shit.

Panic and stress had a way of making Fredrika very rational. This time was no exception.

She went swiftly back to the wardrobe and started packing. Knickers, bra, top. She hesitated over an extra pair of trousers; would she really be away more than one night? And couldn’t she wear the same trousers two days running, if it came to it? Her brain was far too busy concentrating on other things to worry about such trivia. She threw in the trousers.

Fredrika tried to concentrate as she packed her sponge bag. For some reason, she couldn’t get Spencer out of her mind.

I’ve got to tell him, she thought. I’ve really got to tell him.

Her case was ready and the door slammed shut behind her.

Air, she thought. I need some air.

Hot tarmac breathed warmth onto her legs as she stood outside on the pavement.

Shit, what was all this about? If the adoption was so badly thought through that she was reacting like this, maybe she should give up the whole idea.

Fredrika swallowed hard.

One look at the billboards of the kiosk in the next block brought her back to the here and now.

‘Who murdered Lilian?’ shrieked the billboards.

That’s what I ought to focus on, Fredrika thought, gritting her teeth. I ought to focus on Sara Sebastiansson, who’s just lost her child.

She wondered what was worse. To have a child, and then lose it. Or never to have a child at all.

For some reason, Fredrika had not been expecting Sara herself to open the door, and was surprised to find herself standing face to face with her. Fredrika had not seen Sara since Lilian’s body had been found. She knew she ought to say something. She opened her mouth but then closed it again. She had no idea what she was expected to say.

I’m a monster, she thought. There’s no bloody way I should be allowed to have children.

She took a breath. Again she tried to speak.

‘I’m truly sorry.’

Sara gave a stiff nod.

Her red hair flamed around her head. She must be exhausted.

Fredrika took a few hesitant steps into the flat. The light hall began to look a little familiar, and the living room off to the left. That was where she had interviewed Sara’s new boyfriend that first evening.

How long ago it felt.

Sara’s parents filed in behind her. Like a fighting unit, ready to attack. Fredrika said hello and shook their hands. Yes, that’s right, they had met before. When the box of hair… yes, then.

Hands pointed, indicating where Fredrika was to go. She was to sit in the living room. The settee felt hard. Sara sat in a big armchair, her mother perched on one of its armrests. Her father took a seat on the settee, a little too close to Fredrika.

Fredrika would really have preferred not to have Sara’s parents in attendance. It was wrong, and broke all the rules where the art of interrogation was concerned. She felt instinctively that there were things that could not be said in their presence. But both Sara and her parents were demonstrating very clearly that either Fredrika spoke to all of them together, or to no one.

A big, old grandfather clock dominated one corner of the room. Fredrika tried to recall whether she had noticed it there before. It was two o’clock.

I’ve been efficient, thought Fredrika. I’ve been to Uppsala and HQ and home to pack.

Sara’s father cleared his throat to remind Fredrika she was not making very good use of her time.

Fredrika turned to a new page of her notebook.

‘Well,’ she began cautiously, ‘I’ve got a few more questions about your time in Umeå.’

When Sara looked blank, she clarified:

‘When you were on the writing course.’

Sara nodded slowly. She tugged at the sleeves of her top. She still did not want the bruises to be seen. For some reason, this brought a lump to Fredrika’s throat. She swallowed several times and pretended to read through her notes.

‘I interviewed Maria Blomgren this morning,’ she said eventually, raising her eyes to look at Sara again.

Sara did not react in any way.

‘She asked to be remembered to you.’

Sara went on staring at Fredrika.

Maybe she’s on tranquillizers, thought Fredrika. She looks drugged up to the eyeballs.

‘Sara and Maria haven’t been in touch for years,’ Sara’s father said brusquely. ‘We told your boss that, in Umeå.’

‘I know,’ said Fredrika quickly. ‘But a few things came up in my chat with Maria that mean I need to ask a few more questions.’

She tried valiantly to catch Sara’s dulled eye.

‘You were going out with a boy just before you went up there,’ she said.

Sara nodded.

‘What happened when you broke up?’

Sara shifted in her seat.

‘Nothing much happened,’ she said slowly. ‘Nothing at all, really. He sulked and made things awkward for a while, but he let me go once he realized we weren’t compatible.’

‘Was he ever back in touch later? After the summer maybe, or did he even turn up in Umeå?’

‘No, never.’

Fredrika paused for thought.

‘You stayed on in Umeå longer than Maria,’ she began. ‘Why was that?’

‘I got a summer job there,’ Sara said listlessly. ‘It was too good an offer to refuse. But Maria was cross. And jealous.’

‘Maria says you knew before you went to Umeå that you weren’t coming home to Gothenburg when the course was over, and that you fixed up the summer job before you went.’

‘Then she’s lying.’

Sara’s answer came so rapidly and vehemently that Fredrika almost lost her thread.

‘She’s lying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would she lie about something like that that happened so long ago?’ Fredrika asked warily.

‘Because she was jealous of me getting that chance when she didn’t,’ Sara said fiercely. ‘She never got over it. She even used it as an excuse for backing out of our plan to share a flat in Uppsala.’

Sara seemed to shrink in the armchair.

‘Or maybe she misunderstood the whole thing,’ she said wearily.

‘Maria told me she had a summer job waiting for her back home in Gothenburg,’ said Fredrika. ‘Hadn’t you?’

Sara appeared not to understand.

‘I mean, hadn’t you got anything planned for the rest of the summer? The course in Umeå was only going to last a fortnight, after all.’

Sara’s eyes had a shifty look.

‘Once I got the chance to work there, I couldn’t just throw it away,’ she said quietly. ‘That had to take priority.’

Sara’s mother shifted uneasily on the arm of the chair.

‘But it’s just come back to me that I ran into Örjan who ran that guest house where you used to work in the summer holidays, and he said you’d turned down the job he offered you that year, because you were going to be out of town all summer.’

Sara’s face darkened.

‘I can’t help what that old man went round saying,’ she hissed.

‘No, of course not,’ Sara’s father put in. ‘And our memories let us down at times like this. We all know that, don’t we?’

He knows, thought Fredrika. He knows Sara’s trying to hide something, but he doesn’t know what it is. He knows it’s something worth hiding, and that’s why he’s helping her out.

‘All right,’ said Fredrika, trying to find a more comfortable position on the settee. ‘What happened when you got there, then? How come you were the one to be offered this job?’

‘They needed an assistant for the writing tutor,’ Sara said quietly. ‘And my creative writing was so good, they thought, so they made me the offer.’

‘Sara’s always been good at writing,’ her father added.

‘I don’t doubt that,’ Fredrika said honestly. ‘But I imagine it must have felt quite competitive in the writing group. We all know what it’s like at that age…’

‘No one else seemed put out,’ Sara said, tugging at some strands of her hair. ‘They said when we arrived that they were looking for an extra staff member for the rest of the summer, and that anyone interested could let them know.’

‘And then they chose you?’

‘And then they chose me.’

It went quiet. The hand of the grandfather clock took another peck forward. Outside, the sun went behind a cloud.

‘She’s lying,’ Fredrika said indignantly into the phone when she rang Alex to report on her way out to the airport.

Alex listened to her story and then said:

‘I’m not saying there’s nothing there worth getting to the bottom of, Fredrika. But Sara’s very sensitive at the moment, and her parents are watching over her like hawks. See what you get from the Umeå trip and then we’ll decide how to take this forward.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about that boyfriend she had,’ Fredrika went on. ‘According to Maria Blomgren, he went a bit crazy when Sara chucked him.’

‘He must have been more than a bit crazy if he was angry for fifteen years and then got even by killing Sara’s little girl,’ sighed Alex.

‘I’ve got his ID,’ said Fredrika. ‘I rang and asked Ellen to run a records check, and he seems to have had a finger in various pies since he left school.’

‘Like what?’ Alex enquired dubiously.

‘He was found guilty of beating up his ex’s new boyfriend,’ answered Fredrika. ‘And receiving stolen goods. And car theft.’

‘Certainly sounds like the criminal type, but not exactly capable of carrying out something as well planned as Lilian’s abduction,’ Alex objected.

‘But still,’ Fredrika persisted.

Alex sighed.

‘Where does this crook live nowadays, then?’

‘He seems to move about a lot, but at the moment he lives in Norrköping. He moved away from Gothenburg after he finished his military service.’

Alex sighed again.

‘Jönköping, Norrköping, Umeå,’ he said crossly. ‘This investigation’s getting totally farcical. It’s far too spread out.’

‘But at least it’s moving!’ Fredrika persevered.

‘Okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll see how Peder’s fixed. He’s on his way to Nyköping at the moment to interview the woman who claims the Flemingsberg woman was her foster child.’

‘Nyköping!’ exclaimed Fredrika. ‘Well, that’s on the way.’

Alex took a deep breath.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Peder straight away. Has Ellen got the crook’s details?’

‘Yes,’ Fredrika confirmed.

‘Fine. Let me know when you’ve landed,’ said Alex.

Then he just sat there with the receiver in his hand. For the first time since Fredrika Bergman had joined his team, she was displaying a bit of enthusiasm for her job. Until now she’d just sat there looking self-conscious, full of objections. Alex thought she even sounded as if she was enjoying what she was doing.

It went against the grain to admit it, but the fact was, Fredrika had been the first of them to see the lead that had got the investigation to where it was now. Not that the others couldn’t have found it without her, but she had actually been faster. She was quick to identify connections in the vast array of information that Alex generally needed longer to digest. On the other hand – if Gabriel Sebastiansson had been the culprit, Fredrika would have been the last person in the group to pick it up. And that was hardly encouraging.

Alex peered at a diagram he had made of what they knew, and felt his spirits sink.

Regardless of how they had got to this point in their enquiries:

What did they really know for certain?

Alex felt they could be virtually sure that there were two perpetrators, not just one. The woman with the dog in Flemingsberg, and the man with the Ecco shoes. He looked at Ellen’s note of the call from the woman in Jönköping. Nora. If it was the same woman. Alex gave a sigh of frustration. What the hell, he’d work on the assumption that it was.

Ellen had written that the woman seemed confused. She was scared, and she rang in a hurry, Alex interpreted.

The woman had said she thought the perpetrator was someone with whom she had been in a relationship. Someone who often hit her. Alex’s thoughts went automatically to what Peder had said after his visit to the car hire firm. The Flemingsberg woman had been knocked about, too. Ellen had also jotted down a few little quotes. The woman had said the man was waging some kind of battle and wanted the woman to be part of it. ‘The women weren’t to be allowed to keep their children, because they didn’t deserve to.’ Hmm. Alex read on. ‘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.’

No beating about the bush there, Alex thought grimly.

He did not understand what he was reading. What did it mean: ‘if you don’t like all children’? It goes without saying that people don’t like all children equally. And above all, that there are no children you like better than your own, Alex reasoned.

He read Ellen’s note again. The women had to be punished, the women couldn’t be allowed to keep… The women? His stomach knotted.

‘You’re wrong, Fredrika,’ he mumbled to himself.

The man’s fury was not directed only at Sara Sebastiansson. Not if what the woman in Jönköping said was true. The man’s fury was directed at a number of women. Women who didn’t like all children equally. And if the woman in Jönköping was telling the truth, the man had tried to put his plan into action earlier, but not carried it through.

What’s this madness, thought Alex. And who are the other women?

It had taken Magdalena Gregersdotter several years to start feeling at home in Stockholm. So she and her husband had put off having a family until she felt a bit more settled in her new hometown.

‘I don’t want any children until I feel as if I’ve got a social network of my own to fall back on,’ Magdalena said firmly.

Torbjörn, her husband, went along with it of course. For one thing, he always did, and for another, he knew better than to insist on starting a family when the prospective mother didn’t feel ready for it.

But things did not really go the way they had planned. When they eventually did launch their baby project, it turned out they could not have any children. They tried on their own for a whole year – oh how they hated that word ‘tried’ – and then spent the following year having tests. Then another year of ‘trying’. They endured eleven rounds of IVF treatment in all. Then Magdalena suffered an ectopic pregnancy.

‘To hell with it,’ she wept in her hospital bed. ‘I can’t take any more of this.’

Nor could Torbjörn, so they took some unpaid leave and went round the world for six months. Then they decided to adopt.

‘But then it won’t really be yours,’ Torbjörn’s mother said.

It was the only time in her life Magdalena considered hitting another person.

‘Of course she’ll be ours,’ Magdalena hissed emphatically.

And of course, she was. Torbjörn and Magdalena travelled to Bolivia, returning one March day with Natalie, and not a single day had passed since without Magdalena waking with a smile on her lips. It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud, but it was completely true, all the same. It was also true that she was now no longer dreading her imminent fortieth birthday, not even a bit.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Torbjörn had whispered into her ear that morning.

‘Of course I am. I’m young, you know,’ she had responded.

Anyone with young children must be young, too, the way Magdalena saw it. And little Natalie still hadn’t turned one, so by that token, Magdalena must be especially young.

In retrospect, she could not remember why she had suddenly felt the urge to look at Natalie. Though Natalie was growing fast, she still slept outside in her pram every day. First Magdalena would take her out for a walk in the pram to get her off to sleep, and then she would park it in the little patch of garden that went with the ground-floor flat. The garden was shielded from view by a tallish hedge that Torbjörn had fortified still further with a little fence.

So Magdalena felt comfortable leaving Natalie asleep in her pram. She always left the garden door open, and she always had a baby monitor in the pram. Through it, she could hear if even a tiny bird hopped near the pram, and the faintest sound that should not have been there. Maybe it was such a sound that suddenly alerted her attention and caused her to worry. Maybe it was such a sound that made her cover the distance between the kitchen and the garden so quickly.

She saw the pram through the glass door as she approached and slowed her steps.

A little gust of wind crept in at the open door and the long, linen curtains stirred. A flower petal dropped from a potted plant and floated gently to the floor. Later, it was these two details she would remember most vividly, and never forget.

Magdalena bent over the pram. It was empty. As if in a trance, she straightened up and ran her eyes along the hedge and beyond. There was nobody to be seen.

Where was Natalie?

Peder Rydh trekked round Söder from one driving school to the next. He found two other people who thought they could identify the woman in the picture, but nobody could say for sure. Peder, however, felt pretty confident they had all encountered the same woman, since their accounts were identical. For one thing, she had seemed nervous. For another, she had bruises on her face and arms. And for a third, she wanted to know the quickest possible way to get a driving licence. Both driving school proprietors had suggested an intensive course, but when she realized it was a residential course, several days in length and in another town, she had immediately lost interest. She couldn’t get the time off work, she said. And left.

What the hell did she need a driving licence for? Peder thought, feeling frustrated. So she could take the body to Umeå while her sick boyfriend went off to Jönköping to snuff out an old flame?

He glanced at his watch as he got into the car to head for Nyköping for his appointment with the woman who thought she had fostered the Flemingsberg girl. He’d have to make sure he didn’t run too late.

Ylva had said she was taking the twins to the swimming beach at Smedsudde on Kungsholmen. He had felt like saying he didn’t think it was a very good idea. She always found it too much when she was on her own with the boys. She hadn’t really thought through what taking them to the beach would involve. But on the other hand, Ylva could hardly be accused of being the irresponsible one in the family.

Peder hardly dared look at his mobile. If he saw he had a missed call from Ylva or Pia, he would drive off the road. He started wondering if he might be ill. Hadn’t he read an interesting article about men with extra-strong sexual urges? It seemed unlikely that everybody felt as driven by them as he did. The only problem was, it hadn’t been like that before the twins were born. What had gone and happened to his old life? And what sort of person had he turned into?

Ylva and Peder had tried for a baby for nearly a year before it finally ‘worked’. They had been so happy. Terrified, but happy.

‘Holy shit,’ Peder said when Ylva did the pregnancy test. ‘There’s someone growing in here.’

Then he put a warm hand on her bare belly and tried imagining what life must be like in there. They had made love at every possible opportunity until the results of that bloody ultrasound scan. There certainly hadn’t been anything wrong with Ylva’s urges. She couldn’t get enough of him. One time, she had even rung to summon him home in his lunch hour.

‘Must be the hormones,’ she giggled as they got dressed again afterwards.

The notion of Ylva calling him home over lunch for a good screw seemed so distant that a dry laugh burst out of him. It wasn’t even about the sex, really. It was about closeness, and feeling needed. And being allowed to have needs yourself. The times she did ring him at work had to do with strange, other needs. Difficult needs that were impossible to meet if you had a job to hold down. Peder’s needs had ceased to exist. One night he got home from work after he and some other officers found two pensioners who had been robbed and murdered. Shot in the face. He tried to sleep close to Ylva that night. She had wriggled and squirmed.

‘Do you have to lie so close, Peder? I can’t sleep with you breathing in my face.’

He retreated. So Ylva could sleep. Though he shut his eyes as tight as he could, sleep did not come to him. Either that night or the next.

Peder had cried so few times in his adult life that he thought he could remember them all. He cried when his grandfather died. He cried when the twins were born. And he cried two weeks after they found the pensioners who had been shot. Like a child he cried, in his mother’s presence.

‘It just goes on and on,’ he whispered, referring to his problems with Ylva. ‘It just goes on and on.’

‘Things will change,’ his mother replied. ‘Things will change, Peder. Misery has its natural limits. There comes a point when you know for certain that things can’t get worse, only better.’

This from a woman who had once believed she would bring up two healthy boys into adult manhood, and had then had to accept that one of them would never be anything other than an overgrown child.

Peder somehow felt he had now passed beyond that misery limit his mother had talked about. Above all by taking up with Pia again. Something was on its way towards ending. Peder’s whole body could sense it. His marriage. It genuinely hadn’t been his intention, and he certainly wasn’t following any conviction that this was the way to extract himself from his hell. But there was a risk it would happen.

At least if he went on seeing Pia.

The road to Nyköping felt much shorter than he had expected. It didn’t take long to get there at all. Had he already missed the turning off, in fact?

He had just found the right address and parked outside when his mobile rang. He answered as he climbed out of the car. It was still quite hot, though the sun had once again stubbornly taken cover behind heavy cloud. Peder surveyed the houses around him. Middle class. No brand new cars, but no dented old ones, either. No new bikes, but decent, used ones. Some clean, wholesome looking children were playing a little way along the road. The safety and security many a Swede hankered after.

Alex’s voice put an end to his impromptu analysis of the neighbourhood.

‘Are you there yet?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Peder. ‘Just got out of the car. What’s up?’

‘Nothing. It was just… if you were still on the road. I had a thought. But we can take it later.’

Peder saw out of the corner of his eye that the door of the house he was heading for had opened.

‘Sure it can keep?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Alex replied. ‘I’ll carry on refining my little theory, and call you later. Though there was one other thing, too.’

Peder guffawed. ‘A theory?’ he said. ‘You ought to be ringing Fredrika, not me.’

‘I will, naturally. But as I said, there was another thing. Sara Sebastiansson’s got an ex in Norrköping. A small-time crook she was with just before she went on that writing course in Umeå. Think you could have a quick word with him before you come back to Stockholm?’

‘In Norrköping?’ Peder said dubiously.

‘Yes,’ Alex said cautiously, ‘it’s on your way…’

‘Okay,’ Peder said. ‘Okay. As long as you can fill me in on the background.’

Alex sounded relieved.

‘I’ll get Fredrika to give you a ring later,’ he promised. ‘Best of luck!’

‘Thanks,’ said Peder, and ended the call.

He smiled at the lady standing on the front steps of the house and went towards her.

Birgitta Franke served homemade cinnamon buns and coffee. Peder couldn’t remember when he’d last been offered such delicious looking buns. He took two.

Birgitta Franke seemed a kindly but no-nonsense sort of woman. Her voice was gruff, but the expression in her eyes was warm. She had grey hair, but a fairly young-looking face. She was, in short, a woman who had learned from what life had thrown at her, Peder surmised.

Peder asked discreetly if he could check her ID card, and saw then that she had just passed her 55th birthday. He wished her a belated happy birthday and praised her baking again. She thanked him and smiled. Her smile made little wrinkles appear round her eyes. They suited her.

‘You rang the police hotline about an identikit picture we’d issued,’ he put in at last, to get away from the small talk about buns and kitchen furnishings.

‘Yes,’ said Birgitta. ‘I did. And what I’d like to know first of all is why she’s wanted.’

Peder drank some more of his coffee, looked at Birgitta’s curtains and thought of his grandmother for the first time in years.

‘She’s not wanted as such, nor formally under suspicion. It’s just that we’d like to have a talk to her, because we think she has information that has a crucial bearing on this case. I’m afraid I can’t go into what sort of information it is.’

Birgitta nodded thoughtfully.

For some reason, Peder’s mind went to Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother. That old hag had plenty to learn from Birgitta when it came to how to communicate with other people.

Birgitta leapt up from the kitchen table and went out into the hall. Peder heard her open a drawer. She came back carrying a large photograph album, which she put down in front of Peder, and then turned over a few pages.

‘Here,’ she said, indicating the photographs. ‘This is where it starts.’

Peder stared at the pictures, which showed a younger version of Birgitta, a man of the same age who Peder could not identify, and a girl who with a little stretch of the imagination could be said to resemble the Flemingsberg woman. There was a boy in two of the shots, as well.

‘Monika came to us when she was thirteen,’ Birgitta began her story. ‘It was rather different being a foster parent in those days. There weren’t as many children in need of a new home as there are nowadays, and the general view was that a bit of love and tolerance could solve most problems.’

Birgitta gave a slight sigh and pulled her coffee cup towards her.

‘But it wasn’t like that with Monika,’ she sighed. ‘Monika was what my husband called damaged, not entirely normal. To look at these pictures, you might think she was almost like anyone else. A blonde girl with lovely eyes and delicate features. But inside, she didn’t function. Wrongly programmed, you might say these days, if you worked with computers.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Peder, leafing through the album.

More pictures of Monika and her foster parents. Monika was not smiling in a single one. But Birgitta was right. She had nice eyes and fine facial features.

‘Her background was so dreadful that looking back, we hardly understood how we could have taken her on in the first place,’ said Birgitta, resting her head in her hands. ‘Though I can honestly say we weren’t given the full picture until after disaster struck. And by then it was too late. More coffee?’ she said.

Peder looked up from the album.

‘Yes please,’ he said automatically. ‘Where’s your husband, by the way?’

‘He’s at work,’ answered Birgitta. ‘But he’ll be back in an hour or two if you’d like to stay and eat with us this evening.’

Peder had to smile.

‘That’s kind of you, but I’m afraid I won’t have time.’

Birgitta smiled back.

‘What a pity,’ she said, ‘because you seem such a nice lad.’

She reached for the coffee jug and poured some for them both.

‘Where was I?’ she said, and supplied the answer herself. ‘Oh yes, the girl’s background.’

She got up and went out to the hall again. She came back with a file.

‘This is where my husband and I kept all the information we were given about our foster children,’ she said proudly, putting the file in front of Peder. ‘You see, we couldn’t have any children ourselves, so we decided to foster instead.’

She had a rather satisfied expression as she flicked through the file for Peder.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘this is what social services sent us before she came. The rest was classified, so I’ve no copies of that.’

Peder pushed the photograph album to one side and read the papers from the social service department.

13-year-old girl, Monika Sander, from a very unsettled background, requires immediate placement with a loving family within a stable, structured framework. The child’s mother lost custody when Monika was three, and has had very limited contact with her since.

Monika was taken into care as a result of her mother’s alcohol and drug addiction problems. The mother has had a succession of male sexual partners since the girl’s birth, and is probably a prostitute. The father disappeared off the scene at a very early stage when he was killed in a car crash. The mother’s problems began after the father’s accident.

The girl was in her first foster home for three years. The foster parents then separated and the girl could not be kept on. She went through a succession of short-stay fostering arrangements until she was eight, and then lived in a children’s home for a year. She was then placed in a foster home that was expected to offer her a long-term solution.

The girl’s schooling has been disrupted from a very early stage by her difficult circumstances. There were suspicions that she had been abused, but investigations could not substantiate this. Monika has found it difficult to socialize with other children. From her third school year, she has been receiving individual remedial tuition, and has been placed in a special class with only six pupils. This has worked relatively well, though it is still not entirely satisfactory.

Peder read two more pages detailing how the girl’s schooling had fallen by the wayside. By the time she came to live with the Frankes, she had already been arrested once, on suspicion of shoplifting and theft.

His thoughts flew at once to the woman in Jönköping. Hadn’t she, too, grown up in a succession of foster homes?

‘I see,’ he said when he had finished reading. ‘And you mean there was other information you and your husband should have been given, apart from all this?’

Birgitta nodded and took a few sips of coffee.

‘We meant so well,’ she said, looking Peder in the eye. ‘We thought we could be the support the girl needed in life. And God knows we tried. But it was all futile.’

‘Did you have other foster children here at the same time?’ Peder asked, thinking of the boy in some of the photographs.

‘No,’ said Birgitta. ‘If it’s the young man in the photos you’re thinking of, that’s my nephew. He was the same age as Monika, so we thought they might enjoy each other’s company. And they were due to go to the same school.’

Birgitta gave a faint smile.

‘It didn’t work, of course. My nephew was very tidy and organized even at that age. He couldn’t stand her, said she was nuts, disturbed.’

‘Because she stole stuff?’

‘Because she was frightened of odd things,’ said Birgitta. ‘She found any kind of social occasion difficult and made herself scarce. She could be angry and all over you one minute and collapse into a tearful little heap the next. She had violent nightmares about her past; she’d wake up in the middle of the night, yelling. Drenched with sweat. But she never told us what she’d been dreaming, we could only imagine.’

Peder felt weary. That was the obvious drawback to police work: you hardly ever got to talk to, or about, easy-going, unproblematic people.

‘How long was she with you?’ he asked.

‘Two years,’ Birgitta told him. ‘Then we’d had enough. She gave up going to school almost entirely; she would disappear for long periods and then turn up and not tell us where she’d been. And then there were her various illegal activities: stealing, smoking hash.’

‘Boyfriends?’ Peder asked.

‘I never met any, but of course she had boyfriends.’

Peder frowned.

‘And what was it you wish they’d told you before you took her on?’

Birgitta crumpled.

‘That she was originally adopted,’ she said quietly.

‘Sorry?’

‘That the woman who was identified as her mother in the social services report you just read wasn’t Monika’s biological mother. Monika was adopted.’

‘But how on earth could a woman like that get approval to adopt?’ Peder asked in bewilderment.

‘Because what the report says is true: the adoptive mother’s problems only started when her husband died. Or quite possibly they started much earlier, but until then she was living a perfectly normal life with a home, a job, a car. Then things went rapidly downhill. The mother had apparently moved in some pretty socially unacceptable circles when she was younger, and she drifted back to them when she was left alone with the girl and lost her job.’

‘Where did Monika come from originally?’ asked Peder.

‘Somewhere in the Baltic states,’ replied Birgitta, and then shook her head. ‘I don’t quite remember which country, or the exact circumstances of the adoption.’

Peder’s brain was working furiously to process all this new information.

‘Who told you? That she was adopted?’

‘One of the case workers,’ Birgitta sighed. ‘But I never saw it in black and white. The social service department really mismanaged the whole Monika case. They should have intervened much sooner in her life. You could say she was doubly let down: first by her biological mother and then by her adoptive one.’

Birgitta hesitated.

‘And then maybe by another foster family, too,’ she said, ‘but that isn’t clear.’

Peder read the social services report again. Then he flicked randomly through the album. The photographs showed the little family in various settings. At Christmas and Easter. On holidays and outings.

‘We tried,’ said Birgitta Franke, her voice faltering. ‘We tried, but we just couldn’t.’

‘Do you know what happened to her afterwards?’ asked Peder. ‘After she left you?’

‘She went into some kind of residential treatment centre for six months, but she must have run away, oh, ten times or more. Once she even came back here. Then they tried to place her with another family, but that didn’t work out, either. And then all of a sudden she turned eighteen and wasn’t a minor any longer, and since then I haven’t heard a thing about her. Until I saw the picture in the paper, that is.’

Peder gently closed the album in front of him.

‘But how did you recognize her?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I can see some similarities between the drawing and the girl in your photos, but…’

He shook his head.

‘How do you know it’s the same girl?’

Birgitta’s eyes shone.

‘The necklace,’ she said with a smile. ‘She’s still wearing the necklace we gave her at her confirmation, just before she moved out.’

Peder grabbed up the identikit picture of the woman at the station. He had not registered the fact before, but sure enough she had a necklace on. It was a silver lion on a chunky silver chain.

Birgitta opened the album again, and flicked through to the middle.

‘See?’ she asked, pointing.

Peder did see. It was the same necklace. The necklace in conjunction with the photo was enough to convince him. It must be the same girl.

‘She was obsessed with star signs,’ Birgitta told him. ‘That was why we gave it to her. At first she didn’t want to get confirmed at all, but we tempted her with a course at a lovely centre out in the archipelago, and said we’d give her a nice present, too. We thought that kind of social group might be good for her. But she made trouble, of course. She stole things from the others, it emerged later.’

Birgitta began clearing the table.

‘That was when we decided we’d had enough, really,’ she said. ‘If you steal when you’re on a confirmation course, then there can’t be much decency in you. But we let her keep the necklace, since she liked it so much.’

Peder started noting down Monika’s details from the social services report. Monika Sander. Then he had a better idea.

‘Could I take this with me and make a copy?’ he asked, waving the document at Birgitta.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You can post it back to me. I like to keep tabs on which foster children I’ve had.’

Peder nodded.

He took the papers and got up slowly from the table.

‘And if anything else occurs to you, do give me a ring,’ he said in a friendly tone, putting his card on the table.

‘I promise I will,’ said Birgitta.

She added, ‘I must say, we never thought she would turn up in such ghastly circumstances.’

Peder stopped.

‘However could she have got drawn into such a web of horrible events?’

‘That’s what we’re wondering,’ said Peder. ‘That’s just what we’re wondering.’

Fredrika Bergman reached Umeå late in the afternoon. By the time the plane landed, her whole body was aching with fatigue. She turned on her mobile to find she had two new messages. It would be too late now, unfortunately, to interview Nora’s grandmother and Sara’s course tutor before the next day. She looked at her watch: it was almost half past five. Her flight had been delayed. She shrugged. There wasn’t really any rush. As long as she got the interviews done tomorrow, everything would be fine.

Fredrika had not had a chance to ring Peder with the background story on Sara’s ex as she had promised. She hoped he had somehow managed to get the information he needed before the interview.

Though she was tired, Fredrika felt strangely buoyed up. The investigation had finally broadened out, and in some peculiar way, she felt it was now on the right track. She wondered briefly where their first main suspect Gabriel could now be. It seemed likely his mother would have helped him leave the country. Fredrika gave a shiver at the thought of Teodora Sebastiansson’s house. There was something creepy about the whole property.

The evening sun was caressing the tarmac as Fredrika left the terminal building. While she waited for Alex to answer his phone, she allowed herself to stand with her eyes closed, basking a little in the sunshine. A warm breeze stirred the air.

Spring weather, thought Fredrika. This isn’t summer weather, there’s spring in the air.

Neither Alex nor Peder were answering their phones, so Fredrika resolutely picked up her case and walked towards the nearest taxi. She had booked a room in the plush old Town Hotel. Maybe she could treat herself to a glass of wine on the verandah while she drew up the outline of the next morning’s work. Maybe while she was there she could have a proper think about the phone message from the adoption centre, too?

Fredrika almost panicked when the message came into her mind. Was she going to be called on to a decision at last? Was it time to start planning for life as a single mother? She suddenly found herself sobbing.

She tried to take a few deep breaths. She did not know why the call had upset her so much. There was no reason to be reacting like this. It was ludicrous for everything to come to a head this very minute, at a kerbside outside the terminal building at Umeå Airport. She looked about her in confusion. Had she ever been here before? She didn’t think so. She could not recall it if she had.

Fredrika’s phone rang as she got to the taxi. She and the driver slung her bags into the boot and she climbed into the back seat to take the call.

‘Another child’s been taken, a baby girl,’ Alex said, the strain audible in his voice.

Fredrika’s whole attention was suddenly focused. There wasn’t enough air in the back seat of the taxi. She pressed the button and the glass slid down.

The driver protested from in front.

‘You can’t just open the window like that!’ he barked. ‘What about my air conditioning?’

Fredrika hushed him with an urgent gesture.

‘How do we know it’s got anything to do with our case?’ she asked Alex.

‘About an hour after the baby went missing, the police found a parcel on the edge of the flowerbed near the front door of the block, and it had the baby’s clothes and nappy in it. And he’d chopped off a tiny tuft of hair that her mother had put a hairslide in.’

Fredrika did not know what to say.

‘What in God’s name…,’ she began, and was taken aback by the force of her own language. ‘What do we do now?’

‘We work round the clock until we find whoever did this,’ Alex answered. ‘Peder should be in Norrköping to talk to Sara Sebastionsson’s ex just about now, and then he’s coming straight back to Stockholm. I’m on my way to the car to go and see the missing baby’s mother.’

Fredrika swallowed hard, several times.

‘Check if she’s got any links with Umeå,’ she said in a weak voice.

‘I most certainly will,’ said Alex.

Fredrika could tell from the sounds at the other end that Alex had reached his car.

‘It all seems to be happening faster this time, if it’s the same man,’ she said slowly.

She heard Alex pause.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Sara didn’t receive her parcel of hair until the day after her daughter went missing. But you’re telling me these clothes and hair were delivered to the parents almost as soon as the baby had gone.’

Alex said nothing for a moment.

‘Shit, you’re right,’ he whispered.

Fredrika shut her eyes, the phone clamped to her ear. Why was the perpetrator suddenly in such a hurry? And why take another child so soon after the first? And… if the clothes and hair had already been given back to the parents, did that mean the baby was already dead?

What’s driving him, Fredrika thought to herself. What on earth is driving him?

Peder Rydh was heading back to Stockholm at the speed of light. Alex had rung with news of the second child’s disappearance just as he got to Norrköping. They agreed that the interview with Sara Sebastiansson’s ex-boyfriend should still go ahead. There was a microscopic chance, in spite of everything, that he was behind Lilian’s abduction, and had now taken another child to make it look as though Lilian had fallen victim to a serial killer rather than her mother’s former boyfriend.

But the instant Peder saw Sara’s ex, his hopes were dashed. In short, there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance that the man Peder had before him in Norrköping could have kidnapped, scalped and murdered a little child. He had a few offences to his name, to be sure, and he admitted he had felt bitter about Sara for a surprisingly long time after they broke up, but it was a huge step from there to the murder of Sara’s child fifteen years later.

Peder gave a weary sigh. This was another day that hadn’t turned out the way he’d envisaged. But he was very glad indeed that it was Fredrika and not him who had been sent to Umeå. For one thing he felt too shattered for the journey, and for another it was good to have Fredrika out of the way now things were hotting up with another missing child.

Peder was not at all happy about the way the case was developing. It seemed to be moving beyond the stretch of his imagination. As long as they were working on the hypothesis that it was Lilian’s own father who had first taken and then murdered her, Peder had known what he was doing. The guilty party in cases like this was nearly always someone close to the victim. Nearly always. This was an indisputable fact that should inform every normal policeman’s thinking. There had been no other circumstances to take into consideration. There were no other children missing; there was no one else Sara was in conflict with.

Fredrika had been more flexible in her thinking virtually from the word go. She had identified Sara, rather than Gabriel, as the parent who must be linked to the murderer, and had tried to get them to consider alternatives to Gabriel as Lilian’s kidnapper. The fact that nobody had listened to her had unfortunately cost the investigation valuable time. Peder knew this to be the case, but he also knew he would never admit it out loud. Least of all to Fredrika.

But Peder was still doubtful whether they had ever had any reasonable chance of saving Lilian from her death. He didn’t think so. Even Sara Sebastiansson had not thought there could be anyone in the world who hated her so much that they would murder her daughter to punish her. So how could the detectives possibly understand the course of events?

And now another child was missing. Peder felt his guts churn. A baby. What normal person could possibly bring himself to hurt a baby? Naturally there was a simple answer to Peder’s question: anyone who you could imagine killing a baby or a child was not normal.

It distressed Peder to have to think it, but it did not seem likely that the investigation team would be able to find or save this child, either.

Peder slammed his fist down on the steering wheel.

What the hell was he thinking? It went without saying that they would do their utmost to find the child. But he felt instantly deflated again. Unfortunately it also went painfully without saying that if the murderer intended to kill child number two within fewer than twenty-four hours, too, then the team was not going to find it in time.

We’ll find it when he wants us to, Peder thought dejectedly. We’ll find it where he puts it, when he wants to show it to us.

The police could be heroes, but they could also be helpless. Peder wondered what he’d actually achieved that day. He thought he had the identity of the woman who had helped the man with the Ecco shoes. But what did that connect her to, in fact? She had behaved oddly with a dog at Flemingsberg station. Maybe to delay Sara Sebastiansson. She had tried to get a driving licence. Maybe to drive Lilian’s body to Umeå. There were too many maybes for comfort.

Peder swallowed. If she was who they thought she was, and had played the role in all this that they suspected she had, then it was absolutely vital to the investigation to find her and talk to her.

Alex had decided straight away to release Monika Sander’s name and picture to the press and issue an appeal for her to get in touch. Or anybody who knew who she was. And where she was. They would also ask Sara if she recognized the name or picture; there was always a chance that she might be able to confirm it was the same woman. They would ask the parents of the missing baby, too.

But both Alex and Peder were convinced that Monika Sander could hardly have been behind the baby’s disappearance. If the picture her foster mother had painted of her was not misleading, the plan was too precise and sophisticated for Monika to have conceived it and made everything happen at the right time. Yet she was still clearly a key figure in the story.

Peder shook his head. There was something he should have thought of, something he ought to be remembering.

The dryness in his throat persisted. He was thirsty but there was no time to stop to buy something to drink. Priority number one had to be to get back to Stockholm and get underway with the new investigation, to see if they could link it into the existing one.

There must be a connection. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the baby’s clothes and hair had been put in a box and left in the garden, or wherever it was. The details of Lilian’s abduction were still not known to the press; the team had not released them.

Peder had only one thought in his head as he neared Stockholm and saw the silhouette of the Globe Arena away to the east. If only they could find Monika Sander. And quickly.

The nurses in Ward Four of the Karolinska University Hospital in Solna, just outside Stockholm, had been instructed to be very gentle with the patient lying alone in Room Three. The young woman patient had been brought to A &E by ambulance during the night. Her neighbour had been woken by strange noises in the stairwell and had looked through the spyhole in his front door to see if it was burglars making the most of everyone being away for the summer. What he actually saw was the girl in the next-door flat lying on the landing floor, badly beaten up, with her feet still inside the flat and her body resting on the hard, marble floor.

He immediately rang for an ambulance and then sat on the landing to keep watch over the little slip of a girl, who was barely conscious as the ambulance crew lifted her onto the stretcher and carried her down the stairs.

The neighbour was asked what the girl was called.

‘Jelena, or something like that,’ he told them. ‘But the place isn’t hers. The actual owner hasn’t lived here for several years. The girl’s just the latest of all his sub-lets. There’s a man who stays here sometimes as well, but I don’t know his name.’

There was no name on the door of the flat. The injured woman mumbled something scarcely coherent when a paramedic gave her a gentle slap on the cheek and asked her what her name was. A nurse who had come with them thought she could make out a name. It sounded as if she was saying Helena.

Then the battered woman slipped into unconsciousness.

When she was seen on arrival at A &E, her injuries were assessed as extremely serious. Examination revealed her to have four broken ribs, contusions to her cheekbones, a dislocated jaw and several broken fingers. She had bruising to her entire body, and when an X-ray of her skull showed that her brain was swollen as a result of all the blows to her head, she was put in intensive care.

The hospital staff were taken aback by the sheer number of bruises, cuts and broken bones the patient had. What shocked them most of all were her burns. There were more than twenty, inflicted with what they assumed to be lighted matches. The thought of how painful the burns must be made the nurses’ flesh creep as they took it in turns to keep watch at the bedside.

At about ten o’clock the woman, admitted under the name ‘Helena’, began to come round, but she was still groggy from all the morphine they had given her for pain relief. The intensive care consultant determined that she was now well enough to be moved to a general ward, and her bed was wheeled up to Ward Four.

She was initially in the care of nursing assistant Moa Nilsson. It wasn’t that there was a lot to do, but Moa found it quite traumatic watching over the slim figure, her face a patchwork of bruises. It was impossible to say what she normally looked like. They hadn’t found an ID card. But Moa thought she had some idea how the girl had lived, anyway. Her nails were bitten right down and she had small, amateurish tattoos on her arms. Her hair was red, but anyone could see it was dyed. Moa hazarded a guess that it had only just been done, too. The sad, dry hair spread across the pillow around the woman’s head. Her hair was so red that it looked as if her head was resting in a pool of blood.

Moa’s nursing colleagues kept popping along to see how things were going, but the situation was still unchanged by the time the dinner trolley clattered past the door. Then the patient slowly opened the one eye that was not swollen shut.

Moa put aside her magazine.

‘Helena, you’re in Karolinska University Hospital,’ she said gently, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

The girl said nothing. She seemed very, very frightened.

Moa cautiously stroked her arm.

The girl murmured something.

Moa bent closer, frowning.

‘Help me,’ the girl said faintly. ‘Help me.’

SATURDAY

Spencer Lagergren had many good points, but one thing Fredrika Bergman had always missed in their relationship was any element of spontaneity and surprise. To some extent, of course, this was because Spencer was married; scope for spontaneity was rather restricted. But she attributed the absence of surprises more to Spencer’s rather limited imagination in that area. Spencer could only surprise you with the help and guidance of fate.

But every rule has its exception.

Fredrika gave a little smile as she hurriedly tried to put her dark hair up. She had visualized herself spending the evening in Umeå alone with a glass of wine and her notebook. And that was indeed how the evening had started. But as she sat in the verandah of the Town Hotel drinking her over-priced wine, she suddenly heard a voice behind her.

‘Excuse me, is this seat free?’

Fredrika was so amazed to hear Spencer’s voice that her jaw literally dropped, and the sip of red wine she had just taken dribbled down her chin.

Spencer looked dismayed.

‘Are you all right?’ he said in some agitation, grabbing a serviette from the table and wiping her face.

Fredrika, struggling with her hair, blushed and laughed at the recollection.

Spencer’s bold move had impressed her. They had a very clear agreement, and it said in principle that their relationship did not bind either side to any particular obligations, or promises to support each other. In that respect, Spencer’s role in her life was unambiguous. Yet he had still come. Probably not just for her sake, but also for his own.

‘You have to seize chances when they come your way,’ Spencer said as they raised their glasses to each other, not long after his unexpected arrival. ‘It’s not every day one gets the opportunity to go to Umeå and live in style at its top hotel.’

Fredrika, completely knocked sideways, tried to thank him and explain to him simultaneously. It was wonderful to see him again so soon, but did he realize she had to work the next day and then fly back home? Yes, he did. But he had found himself missing her too much. And on the phone she had sounded really down, really frayed.

Fredrika thought that Eva, Spencer’s wife, must know about his relationship with her. That would explain how he could so easily get away from home one night a week. And Eva had had affairs of her own over the years.

Spencer had once brought up the subject of why he didn’t intend to get divorced. There were various sensitive relationships on the fringes of his marriage – the one between him and his father-in-law, for example – that made a divorce unthinkable. And the fact was, Spencer added, that in some strange way he and his wife felt quite strong ties binding them together, in spite of everything. Ties that could be stretched even more than they had been, but still they would never break entirely.

And that wasn’t really a problem, thought Fredrika, because she wasn’t sure she would appreciate sharing her day-to-day life with Spencer full time.

They had a quiet but memorable evening. Wine on the verandah, then a meal at a nearby restaurant where a young pianist crowned the warm evening with live music. At one point, when Fredrika – light-headed from the wine and the temporary peace of mind – was sitting staring at the pianist a little too intently, Spencer reached out across the table and gently stroked the scar on her arm. Wondering. Fredrika carried on observing the man at the piano and avoided Spencer’s gaze. But she did not pull away.

A serious expression came into Fredrika’s face as she slipped her hairbrush into her handbag and pulled her jacket straight. The only source of anxiety triggered by Spencer’s visit was the fact that she still hadn’t brought herself to tell him about the call from the adoption centre.

I’ve got to tell him, she thought. Regardless of the state of our relationship, I’ve got to tell him. And soon.

It was nine o’clock before Fredrika left the hotel and set off to the home of the tutor from the writing course Sara Sebastiansson had attended all those years ago. Parting from Spencer was quite a complicated ritual. They never knew for certain when they would next see each other, but that didn’t matter; the main thing was that they knew they wanted to. They would just have to see when it turned out to be.

Fredrika had a quick word with Alex on the phone before she got out of the car to ring at the tutor’s front door. The media were going mad, he said, a fact that had not escaped Fredrika when she caught sight of all the newspaper headlines that morning. No dead baby had been found, for which everyone involved was truly grateful, even though they knew they probably had very little time.

‘Report back as soon as you get anything,’ Alex said at the end of the call. ‘We followed up a few leads last night, but to be honest…’

Fredrika could visualize him shaking his head.

‘To be quite honest we’ve drawn a blank on all fronts,’ he sighed.

Fredrika left the car and walked swiftly to the front door of the little house. It reminded her of the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel. Pretty, with sweet little decorative details that looked almost painted on. It seemed a quiet, rather elegant neighbourhood. No children or young people. The words ‘retirement homes’ flew through Fredrika’s mind before the door opened, and she found herself eye to eye with a man with thick, ginger hair.

Fredrika blinked in surprise.

‘Magnus Söder?’

‘That’s me,’ replied the man, holding out his hand.

Fredrika was relieved to find she recognized the voice from their earlier phone calls, and took his hand. She gave a tight little smile and looked into his hard eyes. Was there something faintly aggressive about him?

Magnus Söder, recently retired, with coffee stains on his hand-knitted waistcoat, was so far removed from anything Fredrika had imagined he would be that she almost blushed. For some strange reason, she had expected him to be younger, darker and more attractive. And not as tall. It always made Fredrika nervous when she felt small in the company of someone she did not know.

Magnus went ahead, right through the house and out to the back, where he had a lovely terrace. He did not offer her anything to eat or drink, but simply sat down opposite her and looked straight at her.

‘As I said on the phone, I don’t remember much of those years,’ he said curtly.

And before Fredrika could comment, he added:

‘I’m a recovered alcoholic, and the time you’re asking about was a bad patch for me.’

Fredrika gave a slow nod.

‘As I tried to explain,’ she said, ‘my questions aren’t particularly detailed.’

Magnus put up his hands as if acknowledging defeat.

‘I found some paperwork from that summer,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve always been terrible at throwing out old papers.’

He put a green file on the table between the two of them. The sound of the file banging down on the tabletop made her jump.

‘Who is it you want to know about?’ Magnus said gruffly.

‘Someone called Sara Lagerås,’ replied Fredrika quickly, congratulating herself on remembering Sara’s maiden name.

Magnus stared at a document in the file.

‘Yep,’ he said at length.

Fredrika’s brows knitted.

‘Yep,’ he said again. ‘I’ve got her here. She was from Gothenburg, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s right,’ said Fredrika.

‘And now she’s lost her kid? The one that was on the news?’

‘Yes.’

Magnus uttered an indeterminate sound.

‘I’ve just got a few questions,’ said Fredrika, adjusting her blouse as she sensed Magnus’s eyes on her cleavage.

Magnus gave a slight smile and raised his eyes. He said nothing.

‘Can you see from your paperwork whether Sara stayed on as an employee of the centre when the writing course was over?’

Magnus leafed through the file.

‘Yes. We asked her to stay on for the rest of the summer. We always asked someone to do that; the other tutor and I – he lives in Sydney now, by the way – needed some help with the admin and so on.’

‘How did you decide who got to stay?’ Fredrika asked.

‘It was either decided in advance, or by us once we could see if any of the students were particularly gifted. I mean, they all wanted to stay on; I suppose it was seen as some kind of feather in their cap.’

‘And how did you come to pick Sara Lagerås?’

Magnus consulted his file again.

‘She wrote to us beforehand,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the letter here. Says she wants to work in Umeå for the summer, and she sent in some stuff she’d written, for us to see. She seemed capable, so we gave her a chance.’

‘May I see the letter?’

Magnus passed her the file.

There was nothing interesting in the letter from Sara. It was just a straightforward application for a summer job at the centre.

‘She didn’t mention any other reasons she might have had for wanting to stay?’ asked Fredrika.

‘None that I can recall,’ sighed Magnus.

Seeing Fredrika’s expression, he went on:

‘The thing is, though I do honestly remember this girl, she was only one of the many summer-job students we’ve had here. She lived at the centre and used to hang out with some of the students from previous courses. I can’t remember even talking to her all that often. We definitely didn’t discuss anything personal. We talked work and creative writing.’

Magnus reached for the file, and Fredrika passed it back automatically. She sat in silence as he leafed through it again.

He suddenly straightened up.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said under his breath.

He looked at Fredrika.

‘There was one thing a bit out of the ordinary: a fuss about a particular date.’

Fredrika pulled an enquiring face.

‘The girl, Sara, suddenly told us she absolutely had to have a particular day off, and it happened to be the day we’d planned a seminar that we really needed her to help with. But she wouldn’t budge; claimed she’d given us plenty of notice. My memory was pretty poor even then, so even if she had told us well in advance, I didn’t remember. I was bloody cross with her, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.’

Magnus peered at the contents of the file again.

‘The twenty-ninth of July, it was.’

Fredrika made a careful note.

‘And what was the upshot?’ she asked.

‘She took the day off, of course. She evidently couldn’t reschedule this activity of hers. But it was a bit odd, we all thought so. And the seminar was totally chaotic without her there to help.’

Magnus shook his head.

‘You never asked her where she was that day?’ queried Fredrika.

‘No, she just said she really had to see someone,’ Magnus said. ‘Someone who was only in town that one day. I don’t think she said anything about it to anyone else, either. She was a bit standoffish. I remember I made some note about her being rather antisocial. Her thoughts were always somewhere else.’

Fredrika gave a slow nod.

‘Anything else you can remember?’

Magnus gave a short laugh.

‘I remember I ran into her later on that day, in the evening. She was so white in the face it wasn’t true. Really put the wind up me. But she said she’d be fine if she could go and rest. I assumed it was something to do with whoever she’d been to see, and things not going the way she’d hoped.’

He shrugged.

‘She wasn’t a minor, I couldn’t damn well force her to go to the police or a doctor.’

Fredrika gave a rather stiff smile.

‘No, you’re right,’ she said.

Then she put her card on top of Magnus’s green file.

‘In case you remember anything else,’ she said, and got to her feet.

‘Or feel like a bit of company,’ said Magnus with a wink.

Fredrika managed another stiff smile.

‘I’ll find my own way out,’ she said.

Alex Recht felt miserable. Miserable, and infuriated. In the course of his long police career he had made mistakes, of course he had. No one was perfect. But this. This whole child abduction thing. Sitting there in his office, Alex felt like punching somebody – anybody. He had completely disregarded the possibility of more children being snatched. They all had. Even after the investigation had ruled out Gabriel Sebastiansson as its prime suspect, he had been quite sure that all the events revolved round Sara’s life. Not for one second, until it was too late, had he considered that they might be dealing with evil personified. And by then it was too late – again.

Alex’s chest hurt as he breathed out. His anger was aching somewhere deep down in his throat.

He fiddled with the desk diary in front of him. It was Saturday, and five days since Lilian had been reported missing from an X2000 train from Gothenburg. Five days. That was hardly any time at all. That was what had thrown the police investigation, more than anything else: the speed at which the case had developed. Just as they felt they were in control of the situation, the case was already heading in a different direction entirely. Alex turned over the expression ‘one step behind’ in his mind. He and the team were not one step behind – they were miles behind.

Alex listened to the sounds from the corridor outside. Generally there was hardly anyone there at weekends, but now everything was bustling. The analyst from the National Crime Squad was working himself to death with all the tip-offs coming in on the police hotline. Alex vaguely wondered if there was any point in feeding them all into a database. It hadn’t done them any good at all so far. Admittedly that was to some extent because of the way his team of investigators chose to work. Peder, for example, had not talked to the analyst when the call came through about the woman’s death in Jönköping. If he had, they would have made the link to their own case more quickly. But Fredrika had supplied the necessary information soon enough. That confirmed what Alex had maintained ever since computers started taking over more and more of the paperwork – they had a limited range of applications, because there was always somebody who kept the facts in their own little head. If a team was welded closely enough together, information flowed as it should, even without the help of computers.

Alex heaved a sigh and looked out into the blue sky, flecked with cloud.

Maybe he was getting old and grumpy. Maybe the spark was going out of him. Or still worse – maybe he was turning into the sort of reactionary DI no newly qualified police officer wanted to work with. How long could you carry on being known as a legend if you didn’t deliver the goods? How long could you live on your reputation?

He shuffled the papers on his desk. Fredrika had just rung from Umeå to confirm that Sara Sebastiansson had been lying about when she first knew she would be staying at the course centre after her friend left. Alex frowned. It was depressing that Sara was lying about her Umeå links. He felt the anger flare in him. He would go out to his car and go round to Sara’s himself. He didn’t give a damn that she was suffering the deep hurt of bereavement. She was obstructing the work of the police, and that could never be permitted. No matter how distressed a person felt.

Then Alex retreated into his room again. Sara hadn’t really lied about her links to Umeå, she’d lied about one particular detail. A detail she had thought she could conceal from the police, but which the police, by contrast, believed to be an important piece in the jigsaw. The team had been working on the assumption that something happened in Umeå which decided the future course of Sara’s life, but that must be at least partly wrong. Something must have happened before Sara went on the course that summer, something Sara had tried to remedy by staying away longer.

And now she was being punished for it by someone murdering her child. Possibly the person she had claimed she had to see that day.

Alex rooted through his papers to find the horrible pictures of the dead Lilian. Why had someone marked her with the word ‘Unwanted’? Why had someone decided she was a child no one wanted? And why had she been found outside A &E? Was the location important? Could she just as well have been dumped somewhere else in Umeå? Or in any old town?

Alex fidgeted uneasily. The obvious question was whether the next body would also turn up outside Umeå hospital.

Alex tried valiantly not to think about the missing baby. He hoped Fredrika’s interview with the Jönköping woman’s grandmother would produce something. And he hoped they would soon find the mysterious Monika Sander. Without her, everything for the moment looked pretty hopeless, he was afraid to say.

He got to his feet with fresh resolve. A cup of coffee was what he needed. And he must shake off all this anxiety. If he was already speculating about where the next dead child would be found, then he had lost the battle.

Peder Rydh had slept incomprehensibly well the previous night. He and Ylva hadn’t had much to say to each other when he got home just after ten. The boys were asleep, of course. He stood at the end of one of their beds, watching the sleeping child. Blue monkey pyjamas, thumb in mouth. A slight twitch in his face; was he dreaming? Peder gave a wan smile and ran a gentle hand across the boy’s forehead.

Ylva asked questions about the second missing child, and he gave minimal answers. Then he had a glass of wine, watched TV for a while, and went to bed. Just as he put out the light, he heard Ylva’s voice in the darkness.

‘We’ve got to have a proper talk one day, Peder.’

At first he said nothing.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ she continued. ‘We’ve got to talk about how we feel.’

And then for the first time he told it like it was:

‘I can’t take any more. I just can’t.’

And he added:

‘I don’t want this to be my life. No way.’

He was turned towards her in the bed as he said it, and despite the darkness he saw her face fall and heard the change in her breathing. She was waiting for him to go on, but he had nothing more to say. Then he fell asleep, strangely relieved but not a little concerned by the fact that he felt nothing. No regret, no panic. Just relief.

In the car on the way to work, he tried to think clearly about the abducted children case.

Initially his thoughts were distracted by remembering that he hadn’t rung Jimmy to say he wouldn’t be able to come and see him as planned. They would have to have their posh cake with marzipan another day, because Peder was busy. How much Jimmy understood of what Peder told him was always hard to gauge. His brother seldom got the subtler points in conversations, and Jimmy related to time in an entirely different way to other people.

There was something nagging at the back of Peder’s mind, something he’d overlooked. Some simple but crucial detail that had vanished out of his head. The newspapers had dutifully printed Monika Sander’s name and picture and said she was wanted by the police. The identikit drawing was published again, along with a passport photo taken some 10 years before. Alex and Peder had asked themselves whether it was a good idea to publish the old photo they had got from Monika’s foster mother. It bore little resemblance to her current appearance and there was a strong risk that all sorts of people from her past would dash to the phone to report things from a time that had no bearing on the life she was living now. They were also aware of the need to share every last scrap of information they had. The investigation could not afford any more gaps in its knowledge. Monika Sander had to be dragged into the open – at any price.

Peder had spoken to Alex that morning. Nobody had rung in with any sensible information to date. Peder felt a sudden weariness and dejection. How far did they really think they were going to get with an ancient photo, a useless identikit drawing and a name that Monika Sander might not even use any longer?

Then it suddenly came back to Peder what he had overlooked when they released the information about Monika. He parked outside HQ and rushed up to the department.

Alex had just come back to his room with a cup of coffee when Peder came hurtling through the door.

Alex hardly got his ‘Good morning’ out before Peder started.

‘We’ve got to issue a double name,’ he gabbled.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked a bewildered Alex.

‘Monika Sander,’ Peder blurted. ‘We’ve got to ring the tax people and find out what her name was when she first came to Sweden. She was adopted, wasn’t she? She might have found out the name she was born with and be using it as an alias or something.’

‘Well we’ve already gone public with the name Monika Sander, but…’

‘Yes?’

‘I was just going to say that it’s a very good idea, Peder,’ Alex said evenly. ‘Get Ellen on the case; she can ring the tax office.’

Peder dashed out of the room and sprinted off in the direction of Ellen’s room.

Alex gave a wry smile. It was amazing to see a human being with that much energy.

In another part of Stockholm, two people with considerably less energy than Peder Rydh were also busy. Ingeborg and Johannes Myrberg were down on their hands and knees at either end of their large garden, weeding conscientiously between the shrubs and flowering plants. The rain had kept them from any sort of work in the garden until now, but at least summer seemed to have arrived. Admittedly there were a few clouds loitering around the sun, but as long as it was still shining and shedding its warmth, Ingeborg and Johannes Myrberg were more than happy.

Ingeborg took a quick glance at her watch. It was almost eleven. They had been out there for nearly two hours. Without a break. She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked across to her husband. Johannes had had a few prostate problems in recent years and was usually hurrying off to the toilet all the time. But not this morning. No, this morning they had both worked on undisturbed.

Ingeborg’s face broke into a smile as she watched her husband weeding round the rhubarb. They still took a childlike delight in their domain. In their heart of hearts, they had never really believed the house would be theirs. So many properties had passed them by. Either they were too expensive, or they turned out to have mould in the basement or damp patches on the ceilings.

Ingeborg surveyed the big, white house. It was attractive and a good size. There were enough rooms to accommodate all the children and grandchildren when they came to visit, but was still compact enough to retain its charm and the sense of really being someone’s home. Their home.

‘Johannes!’ Ingeborg called into the quietness of the garden.

Johannes almost overbalanced at the sound of Ingeborg’s shout, and she laughed.

‘I was just going to say: I’m going in for a minute to get a drink. Would you like one, too?’

Johannes gave that slightly lopsided smile, so familiar to her throughout their married life. For thirty-five years, to be exact.

‘A glass of the strawberry cordial would be nice.’

Ingeborg got slowly to her feet, her knees protesting slightly. When she was young, she had never considered that her body would feel weaker and frailer one day.

‘What a summer we’ve had,’ she said under her breath as she stepped into the house from the terrace.

Then she froze. Afterwards she couldn’t really explain why she had stopped just there, just then. Or how she had sensed without going any further that something was wrong.

She walked slowly through the guest room that gave onto the terrace, and out into the corridor between the four bedrooms. She looked left, where the bedrooms were, but nothing was moving. She looked right, towards the main hall, the kitchen and the living room. She could see nothing strange or out of the ordinary there, either. Yet she still knew that someone had been there, that her home had been violated.

She shook her head. What a ridiculous thought; was she getting paranoid in her old age?

She regained control of her thoughts and her home by striding off to the kitchen and making two big glasses of cordial for herself and her husband.

She was just on her way out with the little tray when she decided it would be as well to pop to the toilet while she was in. She just couldn’t fathom how Johannes had managed to go for so long without a pee.

The bathroom was at the far end of the house, beyond the bedrooms. Afterwards, she couldn’t really remember how she got there. She only remembered putting the tray down and being aware that she needed to go to the loo. Whether she remembered it or not, she must have gone from the kitchen to the hall, and along the corridor to the bathroom. Put her hand on the handle, pressed it down, opened the door, turned the light on.

She saw the baby straight away. It was lying naked on the bathroom mat, curled up in a foetal position.

For a few seconds, Ingeborg did not really understand what she was seeing. She had to step forward and bend down. Automatically her hand went out to touch the baby. It was only when her fingers made contact with the hard, cold body that she started to scream.

Fredrika Bergman got the call about the discovery of the dead baby at the elderly couple’s house just as she was being served tea by Margareta Andersson, grandmother of Nora who had been found murdered in Jönköping. Fredrika had to excuse herself and go out onto the balcony.

‘On a bathroom mat?’ she repeated.

‘Yes,’ said Alex grimly, ‘in a house in Bromma. With the same word on her forehead. I’m heading there now. Peder’s on his way to see some psychologist.’

Fredrika frowned.

‘All this must have really got to him, then?’

Alex gave a chuckle of surprise.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s for the case. He decided we could do with the help of one of those profilers, and it would be good if he could get us one.’

Alex was expressing himself so badly and casually that Fredrika thought he must have been drinking. ‘One of those profilers’ and ‘some psychologist’. They didn’t grow on trees.

‘He read about him in the paper,’ Alex explained. ‘That’s what gave him the idea.’

‘Read about who?’ Fredrika asked, at a loss.

‘An American profiler who works for the FBI is over here lecturing to some behavioural science scientists at the university,’ Alex said, more controlled now. ‘Peder was going to try to arrange a meeting with him through some friend of his who’s on the course.’

‘Okay,’ Fredrika said slowly.

‘Is everything all right your end?’ Alex asked.

‘Yes, fine. I’ll get back to Stockholm as soon as I’ve finished here.’

She was silent for a moment.

‘But why ever should the baby turn up in Bromma?’ she went on.

‘You mean he’s breaking the pattern?’

‘I don’t know about any pattern,’ mumbled Fredrika. ‘Maybe we’ve just been imagining there was a clear link to Umeå.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Alex. ‘But I do think we need to find a better common denominator.’

‘A common denominator of a bathroom in Bromma and a town in Norrland,’ Fredrika sighed.

‘Yes, that’s our second challenge,’ Alex said firmly. ‘To try to understand the connection between the bathroom in Bromma and the A &E department at Umeå hospital. Assuming the geography has any relevance at all, that is.’

If the situation hadn’t been so grave, Fredrika would have allowed herself to laugh.

‘Are you there?’ Alex asked, when she said nothing.

‘Sorry, I was just thinking. What’s our first challenge?’ Fredrika responded. ‘You said the connections were the second one.’

‘Finding Monika Sander,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t think we’re going to understand a bloody thing about this whole mess until we talk to her.’

Fredrika couldn’t help smiling, but immediately felt guilty. She felt awful, smiling when a baby had just been found dead.

‘Okay,’ she said soberly. ‘We’ll just have to do our best.’

‘You bet your life we will,’ Alex said with a sigh.

Fredrika put her mobile away and returned to the flat. She apologized to her hostess.

‘I’m sorry. I had to take that call.’

Margareta nodded to show she accepted the apology.

‘Have you found the baby now, as well?’ she asked, to Fredrika’s astonishment.

‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly, after a pause. ‘Yes, we have. But it isn’t official yet, so I’d really appreciate it if…’

Margareta gave a dismissive wave of the hand.

‘Of course I won’t say anything,’ she said. ‘And I don’t talk to anybody anyway, except Tintin.’

‘Tintin?’ Fredrika echoed.

‘My cat,’ grinned Margareta, and indicated a seat for Fredrika at the table laid with teacups and a plate of sliced bun loaf.

Fredrika liked Margareta’s voice. It was deep and throaty, dark yet still feminine. Margareta herself was as broad-shouldered as a wrestler. She was not fat or heavy looking, but simply stable in the purest sense of the word. Safe was another word that came spontaneously into Fredrika’s mind.

She automatically ran over all the information she had had from the Jönköping police about Nora, the murdered woman. Spent her childhood in various foster homes; mental problems; recurring periods of sick leave. In a relationship with the man suspected of having murdered her, Lilian Sebastiansson and now the baby. Moved from Umeå to Jönköping. Held down a job, looked after a home, but had no family and few acquaintances.

Fredrika decided to start from the beginning.

‘How did Nora come to be in a foster home?’

Nora’s grandmother grew very still. So still that Fredrika thought she could hear Tintin purring as he lay there in his basket.

‘Do you know what, I wondered that, too,’ she said slowly.

Then she took a deep breath and laid her wrinkled old hands in her lap. She plucked at the hem of her frock. The fabric was red and brown. To Fredrika’s mind, it was definitely a winter frock.

‘You always try not to have too many expectations of your children. Well my husband and I did, at least. And when he died, I carried on the same way. But… But you do have certain basic expectations, you can’t help it. Of course you want your children to grow up and be able to look after themselves. But Nora’s mother never really did, I’m afraid. And we didn’t have any more children.’

Margareta tailed off, and Fredrika did not realize until she raised her head from her notebook that the other woman was crying.

‘We can take a break if you like,’ she said uncertainly.

Margareta gave a weary shake of the head.

‘It’s just that it hurts so much to think I’ve got neither of the girls left now,’ she sobbed. ‘I felt so wretched when Nora’s mother died. But I knew what sort of life she’d lived, how hard it had been for her. There was really only one way it could end. But then I could console myself that at least I had Nora left. And now she’s gone, too.’

Tintin came out of his basket and approached the table. Fredrika quickly pulled her legs aside. She had never liked cats.

‘Things went wrong for Nora’s mother early on in her life,’ Margareta told her. ‘Very early on. When she was still in secondary school, just after her dad died. She got into bad company and brought home one boyfriend after another. I was beside myself when she decided to leave school as soon as she could and go out to work instead. She got a job in a sweet factory; it closed down years ago. But she didn’t stick to the rules, and she got the sack. I think that was when she turned to prostitution and the more dangerous drugs.’

In Fredrika’s family there was a very conservative saying that went: ‘In every woman of every age there lives a Mother.’ She wondered if she herself was harbouring one. And she wondered what she would have said in that position, if her daughter had dropped out of school, started work in a factory and gone on the game.

‘Who was Nora’s father?’ Fredrika asked cautiously.

Margareta gave a bitter laugh and wiped away her tears.

‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘It could have been literally anybody. Nora’s mother didn’t register a father’s name when Nora was born. I was with her for the birth. It was several days before she would even hold little Nora.’

The sun vanished briefly behind a cloud and it went darker inside the flat. Fredrika felt cold, sitting there.

‘Nora was as unwanted as a child could possibly be,’ Margareta whispered. ‘Her mother hated her even when she was still in her stomach; she hoped for a long time she might have a miscarriage. But she didn’t. Nora was born whether she liked it or not.’

Fredrika felt the floor lurch beneath her.

‘Unwanted,’ she repeated softly.

She immediately saw the pictures of Lilian Sebastiansson’s body in front of her eyes. Somebody had written ‘Unwanted’ on her forehead. ‘Unwanted.’

Fredrika swallowed.

‘Did she know about this when she was growing up, about being unwanted I mean?’ Fredrika asked, trying not to sound too eager.

‘Yes, of course she did,’ sighed Margareta. ‘Nora lived with me for most of the time until she was two, since her mother didn’t want her, but then social services found out about it and they said it would be better for Nora to be in a foster home, “A real family,” as they put it.’

Margareta gripped the edge of the table hard.

‘The girl would have been much better off with me,’ she said in a shrill voice. ‘It would have been much better for her to live with me than to keep being moved from family to family. She could always come and visit me, but what good did that do? There was no chance of making something decent of her with so many other people allowed to mess her up.’

‘Did you both live here in Umeå while all this was going on?’ asked Fredrika.

‘Yes, the whole time. It’s hard to believe one person can have lived at so many addresses in the same town as Nora, but that’s what she did. The only thing that cheered me up a bit was that she stuck with school right until the end of upper secondary. She chose an odd course, social this and social that, but at least school gave her a bit of structure.’

‘Did she get a job when she left?’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ sighed Margareta. ‘Just like her mother: she started going off the rails, too much booze, too many parties, too many men. She could never hang on to her job. She always looked haggard and drawn. And then she met that man.’

Fredrika held her breath.

‘I remember, because it was the same year my brother got married for the third time. That was seven years ago.’

Tintin the cat took an agile leap from the floor to Margareta’s lap. She put her tired hands on his back and started stroking his fur.

‘At first I thought she’d found something decent for herself,’ Margareta recalled. ‘He got her to stop drinking, stop taking drugs. At first I thought it was wonderful, a sort of Cinderella story. The girl in the gutter got her prince and was saved from her horrible life. But then… everything changed. And I was terrified, to put it bluntly.’

Fredrika frowned.

‘I never met him,’ Margareta suddenly asserted. ‘I might just as well tell you that straight away, so you don’t go expecting me to whip out a pile of photos for you or anything.’

‘But what you can tell me is important, all the same,’ Fredrika said quickly, but with a growing sense of disappointment.

Part of her had hoped she might be coming away from Margareta’s with at least a description of the suspected murderer.

Margareta looked quite pleased with herself. Fredrika could see she liked being the centre of attention.

‘She met the man in early spring. I’m not sure how they first met, but I think he saved her from some awkward situation in the street one time.’

‘Was Nora a prostitute, too?’

‘No, no,’ Margareta said indignantly, ‘but you can still find yourself with that sort of people, can’t you?’

Fredrika was not so sure about that, but she said nothing. She wished Margareta would get a move on with her story. Her wish was instantly granted.

‘She told me about him right away. Said he was a psychologist, very clever and good-looking. Then she told me he was always saying she was “chosen” and “special”, and together they’d achieve great things in this world. She became a completely different person. For a while, I thought it must be some kind of sect she’d joined. I mean, it was a good thing of course for her to get a bit more sense of order in her life, but she was going through bad depression just then, and the man’s message to her was basically “pull yourself together, you can sort this out if you really want to”. And when she didn’t get better quickly enough…’

Margareta stopped. She took several deep breaths.

‘When she didn’t get better quickly enough, he lost patience with her and started beating her up, very violently.’

Big tears began rolling down Margareta’s cheeks again. They dropped from her chin onto Tintin’s fur.

‘I pleaded with her to leave him,’ Margareta sobbed. ‘And in the end she did. It was after the time he burnt her so badly. She left him when she was discharged from hospital.’

‘Burnt her?’ whispered Fredrika.

‘He burnt her with matches,’ replied Margareta. ‘He tied her to the bed and lit them, one after another.’

‘But didn’t you go to the police?’ persisted Fredrika, sickened by what she was hearing.

‘Of course we did, but it didn’t help. That was why Nora moved away and got protected identity status.’

‘You mean he wasn’t committed of the crime, in spite of Nora’s terrible injuries?’

‘I mean we didn’t know who he was,’ screeched Margareta, her voice almost cracking. ‘Don’t you see? Nora didn’t even know his name. He’d told her just to think of him as “The Man”. And they only ever met at Nora’s flat.’

Fredrika tried to comprehend what she had just heard.

‘She didn’t know what he was called, where he lived, or where he worked?’

Margareta mutely shook her head.

‘But what was this thing they were going to achieve together, what did he say they were going to do?’

‘They were going to punish all the women who weren’t capable of loving their children and who rejected them,’ whispered Margareta. ‘And that was exactly what Nora’s own mother had done, after all – reject her and then refuse to love her.’

They say Stockholm is one of the loveliest capital cities in the world. But that was lost on Alex as he stared out of his office window. He had no idea how many minutes he had spent sitting there, gazing out. It was what he liked to do when he was thinking. And since Fredrika had rung in her report, he undeniably had plenty to think about.

‘He’s punishing them, like Nora said when she rang us,’ Fredrika shouted down the phone to make herself heard despite the poor signal. ‘He’s punishing them for harming their children. For rejecting them, in some situation. And the girls go along with him, because they’ve been badly treated themselves. It’s revenge, Alex.’

‘But,’ said Alex, nonplussed, ‘we’ve no data suggesting that any of these parents harmed their children. Neither Lilian nor the baby suffered any kind of mistreatment at home.’

He shuddered.

‘Assuming Gabriel didn’t abuse his own daughter,’ he added quickly.

Fredrika protested.

‘It still wouldn’t fit. It’s the mothers he’s punishing, not the fathers. It’s the mothers who’ve done something wrong.’

‘But if a mother chose not to save her daughter from a father who was violating her, surely that would count as a crime?’

Fredrika thought about this.

‘Perhaps. But the question is still: where does he find them?’

‘Find them?’

‘How could he know that Lilian, specifically, had been harmed? There are no official reports. And the baby? How could he know it had suffered any harm, assuming it did?’

Alex felt his heart start to thump.

‘We must have missed somebody close to the families,’ he said.

‘Or maybe not,’ said Fredrika. ‘Maybe he’s so far out on the fringes of their lives that he’s invisible to us.’

‘Could he work at a school?’

‘But the baby who died had never been to school,’ Fredrika objected.

Alex drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk.

‘Is Peder back from the psychologist yet,’ asked Fredrika.

‘No,’ replied Alex with a shake of his head. ‘But I think he’s due to see him any minute now.’

‘It seems we might need to talk to Sara again. And to the baby’s mother,’ said Fredrika.

Alex stared angrily out of the window. He’d had more than enough of all the weird elements in this case.

‘We need to get a grip here,’ he said, addressing Fredrika. ‘A proper grip. And it’s high bloody time we found ourselves that common denominator.’

But it wasn’t that easy, Alex saw as he ended the call from Fredrika. What did they really know? What didn’t they know? He collated all the information Fredrika had just given him. It all needed passing on to Peder before he invested time in talking to the American profiler. There was nothing wrong in coming up with new ideas, but Alex was sceptical about bringing new parties into the investigation.

He surveyed the material in front of him. On a blank sheet of paper he had tried to construct a sort of diagram, setting out various hypotheses. It hadn’t turned out as well as he hoped, but as long as he didn’t have to show it to anyone else, it would serve its purpose of backing up what was in his mind.

Revenge, Fredrika had said.

Revenge? Was that the thread they were looking for?

‘Right,’ Alex murmured to himself. ‘Right, let’s take it nice and easy. What do we know? And what do we need to know?’

They knew that two children of different ages had been murdered. They also knew there was no obvious link between the children. One little girl, Natalie, was adopted, and the other wasn’t. The adopted girl’s parents seemed to be in a trouble-free relationship, whereas Lilian’s parents had separated while waiting for their divorce. And then Natalie’s family was middle class, whereas Lilian was the daughter of a man from a well-to-do family and a woman who could at best be described as middle class.

The investigative team was currently putting all its energy into identifying any junctions where the paths of the two families might have crossed in the past, but their efforts had so far yielded nothing.

Alex wrote on a sheet of paper: He is punishing the mothers. Probably because they let their children down in some way. Probably because they rejected them.

It was the mothers they needed to focus on, not the children. It was the sins of the mothers that had led to the children’s murders. Alex brooded on the phrase ‘because they rejected them’ until his brain ached. In what way could Sara Sebastiansson be said to have ‘rejected’ Lilian? And if she had, why punish the child with death, rather than the mother?

Another perplexing thing was the location where the bodies had been found. One outside an A &E department up in Umeå, and the other in a bathroom in Bromma, outside Stockholm. The choices of location seemed bizarre in the extreme. Firstly, they were both very difficult places in which to dispose of a dead body unobtrusively. And secondly, the choices seemed illogical. Neither of the children had any apparent connection with the places where they had been left.

The only thing, thought Alex, the only thing the two have in common is the mode of operation, both the abduction and the murder itself. First the child is kidnapped, then the clothes and hair are sent back to the mother, and shortly after that, the child is dumped in some strange place where it will readily be found.

‘I don’t get it,’ Alex said aloud to himself. ‘I just don’t get it at all.’

Then there was a knock on the door and one of the young DIs who had been transferred to the case stuck his head round the door.

‘We dropped in on Magdalena Gregersdotter and her husband, like you suggested,’ he said.

Alex had to give his head a shake to clear it before he could understand what his colleague was on about. The DI had come with Alex and Peder to break the news of Natalie’s death to her parents that morning. The parents had been in a state of utter shock and despair, so Alex had decided one of them ought to go back and see the couple later in the day. The DI and another member of the team had apparently now done so.

‘We showed them a picture of the house and told them where it was,’ he said, gabbling so fast that Alex had to concentrate hard to keep up. ‘And Magdalena, the mother, knew exactly where we meant.’

‘How?’ asked Alex.

‘She grew up in that house. She lived there until she left school and went away to college. Do you see, this ice-cool bastard dumped her dead kid in her parents’ old house, which they sold over fifteen years ago.’

Peder Rydh was sitting in his car, seething with rage. It was Saturday lunchtime and he was stuck in a traffic jam on his way back to Kungsholmen. It made no difference if it was a Saturday or a weekday: a major road accident quickly generated long tailbacks.

Looking back over the past week made him feel almost giddy. He had never for the life of him thought that the Lilian Sebastiansson case would grow into the monster it was now. Two dead children in under a week. Had he ever been on a case like it before?

Exhaust-belching vehicles passing far too close to the paintwork of Peder’s car stressed him out. So did the fact of having achieved so little over the past hour. The only good idea he had come up with all day was to declare Monika Sander wanted under the name she had before she was adopted. She had apparently been called Jelena Scortz.

After that, Peder had briefly interviewed baby Natalie’s parents and both sets of grandparents. None of them could think of anyone who might wish them ill.

‘Think hard,’ Peder told them. ‘Go right back in time. Try to think of even the slightest grudge that was never sorted out.’

But no, none of them could remember even the smallest thing.

And then his round of interviews had been interrupted by the discovery of Natalie lying dead in a bathroom in Bromma. Peder had to go back to Natalie’s parents first, and was then sent to supervise the first phase of the crime scene investigation in Bromma. This time, just like last time, they were without a murder scene.

But they did at least already know how their murderer killed his child victims, so they knew roughly what they were looking for. The duty pathologist at the scene ascertained almost at once that Natalie had a small mark on her head, probably from the lethal injection. The autopsy would confirm it later, but the group was working on the initial assumption that this child, too, had been murdered by an overdose of insulin, this time injected into the child’s head through the fontanelle. Was that what the murderer had tried to do to Lilian as well, but found he couldn’t get through her skull?

There were also other parallels with the way Lilian had been arranged when they found her. Natalie was also naked and had been washed with some kind of spirit. She had the same lettering on her forehead as Lilian, ‘Unwanted’. But she had been lying in a foetal position, not flat on her back like Lilian. Peder wondered if that was significant.

He also wondered about the word ‘Unwanted’. He and Alex had just been talking about it. Words like ‘Unwanted’ and ‘Rejected’ kept cropping up in this investigation, though neither of the children seemed to have been either.

The queue of cars inched its way forward, slowly dispersing. Peder felt lousy. The idea of trying to make contact with the American profiler had seemed so obvious. And his friend had offered the ideal way in. Or so it had seemed. In retrospect, Peder doubted it had been worth it. The time it had taken him to drive out to the university and back felt wasted. Peder’s friend had thought the psychologist would be prepared to have a word with him after the guest lecture, but he had in fact turned out to be extremely chilly and dismissive. Despite the potency and calibre of the current case, the psychologist intimated briskly that Peder had overstepped the mark by simply turning up and trying to pick his brains. He really had no wish to get involved with some strange Swedish case, when he was expected at Villa Källhagen for a lunch.

The psychologist unfortunately confirmed all Peder’s preconceptions about psychologists, and Americans. Dim and slow, with no social graces. Not the pleasantest of people. Peder virtually threw his card at the man and made his exit. Idiot.

The traffic jam finally cleared. Peder put his foot down and headed for HQ.

Then his mobile rang.

He was not a little surprised to find it was a call from the psychologist.

‘I’m so sorry I had to turn you down so publicly,’ he said apologetically. ‘You see, if I’d offered my services to you and your colleagues, every single psychology student there would have thought they were free to ask me to do the same. And to be honest, that’s not what I give my guest lectures for.’

Peder, unable to work out whether the psychologist was ringing to offer assistance or merely to apologize, said nothing and wondered frantically how best to respond.

The psychologist went on:

‘What I’m trying to say is that I’ll be glad to help you. Maybe I could come to see you and your colleagues sometime after this damn lunch I’m obliged to attend?’

Peder smiled.

Alex did not really know what to say at first, when Peder rang and told him that the psychological profiler had agreed to come and see them later that day. Then he decided it was quite a good idea, after all. They needed all the help they could get. And what was more, Fredrika would be back from Umeå in a couple of hours’ time.

Alex turned his little diagrams round, looking at them from all angles. At least they had a pattern, now. The murderer kidnapped and murdered children, and dumped them in places their mothers had some sort of link to. With savage speed.

Why had there been only a few days’ gap between the two abductions and murders, Alex wondered. The murderer was taking an enormous risk by committing two such serious crimes in swift succession. Three, if you counted the woman in Jönköping. There were some real psychos, of course, who never expected anything other than that they would be caught. Though ‘expected’ wasn’t the word: they wanted nothing better than to be caught. But was the murderer they were pursuing disturbed in that sort of way?

Alex went back to considering the locations in which the children had been found. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t found out exactly what Sara Sebastiansson had done or who she had met in Umeå. The main thing was that they were sure the place had some kind of significance for her, which explained why her child had been taken to that particular location and not left anywhere in Stockholm.

The truth was often much simpler than you first thought. Alex had learned that over the years. That was why it had seemed so obvious to focus on Gabriel Sebastiansson from the start. But this time, everything was different. This time, the truth seemed a vast distance away. It wasn’t a close relative who was to be held to account for what had happened, but something as uncommon as a serial killer.

How many serial killers have you actually met in all your years with the police, Alex? whispered the ghostly voice in his head.

Ellen interrupted his reverie with a hard knock on his open door.

‘Alex!’ she called, so loudly that it made him jump.

‘What is it now?’ he muttered.

‘We’ve had a call from Karolinska Hospital,’ said Ellen excitedly.

Alex looked quizzical.

‘They’ve got a woman there they think might be Jelena Scortz.’

Alex Recht briefly contemplated going straight out to Karolinska University Hospital on his own to talk to the woman the staff thought might be Jelena Scortz, but he decided it wouldn’t be fair to Peder. It was thanks to Peder they had identified the woman, after all. So Alex decided they would go together. He was in buoyant mood. He had just heard that Sara Sebastiansson thought she recognized Jelena as the woman who had delayed her in Flemingsberg. She couldn’t be entirely sure, since the picture they had shown her was so old, but she thought it might well be the same girl.

Peder felt a surge of euphoria when he arrived back at HQ and was told to get straight out to Karolinska to conduct – if at all possible – an initial interview with Jelena Scortz, or Monika Sander as she appeared in the files of the National Registration Service. He raced to the car with Alex on his heels, and drove to Solna breaking several speed limits on the way.

Peder had never made any secret of what he liked best about his profession. He lived for those unique adrenalin rushes that can only result from a breakthrough in an investigation. He could see Alex felt the same, even though he had been in the job so much longer.

Peder couldn’t help being slightly irritated by the fact that Fredrika seemed immune to such pleasures. While everyone else was caught up in the excitement, she turned in on herself and became one big ‘Is this really the solution?’ and ‘Couldn’t it equally well be that?’ On this occasion it was in fact partly thanks to her that they had reached the breakthrough, so she could at least have allowed herself a hint of a smile when she heard the news. He liked smiley people around him at work.

Alex and Peder did not really know what to expect when they got to the hospital. They had been told, of course, that the woman presumed to be Monika Sander had been very badly knocked about and was still in some form of shock. But nothing they had been told in advance prepared them for what they saw when they went into the patient’s room.

Her whole face was a mess of lacerations and bruises. Long bruises disfigured her neck. Her left arm was in plaster to above elbow level, and her lower right arm was bandaged. Her forehead was covered in dressings, right up to her hairline.

‘Poor thing,’ were the words that flew through Peder’s head. ‘Poor, poor girl.’

A young nursing assistant was sitting by her bed. The nurse’s face was grave. Peder guessed he wasn’t the only person to be appalled by the extent of the woman’s injuries.

The discreet clearing of a throat made them turn round smartly.

A man in a white coat, with thick grey hair and a dark moustache, was silhouetted in the doorway. He introduced himself as Morgan Thulin, the doctor responsible for Monika’s care.

‘Peder Rydh,’ said Peder, squeezing the other man’s hand.

The handshake felt solid. Stable. He guessed Alex was making the same judgment.

‘I don’t know how much you’ve been told about her injuries,’ said the doctor.

‘Not a great deal,’ admitted Alex, stealing a glance at what was left of the woman in the bed.

‘Well in that case,’ Morgan Thulin said firmly but kindly, ‘I consider it my duty to inform you. She is still, as you see, in a very serious condition. She’s drifting uneasily in and out of consciousness, and finds it hard to speak when she tries to. The whole jaw area has been damaged, and until this morning her tongue was so swollen that it almost entirely filled the oral cavity.’

Peder swallowed, and the doctor went on.

‘Your police colleagues who are looking into the assault were here earlier to ask who did this to her, but she wasn’t able to tell them anything coherent or comprehensible. My guess is that she’s still in a state of shock, and then there’s the effect of the pain relief we’re giving her. Apart from the injuries you can see, she’s got several broken ribs. She doesn’t seem to have been subjected to any kind of sexual assault, but she has a number of severe burns.’

‘Burns?’ echoed Peder.

Morgan Thulin nodded.

‘Match burns, about twenty of them all over her body, including the inside of her thigh and the front of her neck.’

The room shrank, there was no air, and Peder wanted to go home. All his enthusiasm evaporated. He stared listlessly at the leaves of a plant on one of the window ledges.

‘The burns will leave her with permanent cosmetic scarring, but no functional impairment, clinically speaking. As for the mental scars, it’s too early to say, but I’m sure she’s going to have a long road to recovery. Very long indeed.’

Strange, the plant seemed to be moving. Was it the draught from the open window making it sway like that? Peder’s eyes followed the plant from side to side several times before he was brought back to reality by the fact that everything had gone quiet. Why wasn’t the doctor talking any more? Alex gave a little cough.

‘Sorry,’ said Peder in a low voice. ‘Sorry, it’s been a mad couple of days, that’s all…’

He could scarcely believe he was hearing his own voice. What was he saying?

Morgan Thulin patted him on the shoulder. Alex raised one eyebrow, but said nothing.

‘There’s more I should tell you, if you’re sure you can take it?’

This made Peder so embarrassed that he wished he could hide behind the goddamned pot plant.

‘Naturally I shall listen to everything you can tell us,’ he said, in an attempt to sound in command of the situation.

Morgan Thulin eyed him dubiously, but was charitable enough not to say anything. Alex followed his example.

‘There are signs of previous injuries, too,’ the doctor said. ‘So it seems this was not the first time she was beaten up.’

‘Not the first time?’

‘No, definitely not. The X-rays of her fingers show scarring on most of them indicative of fractures left to heal by themselves. Both arms have been broken, and there are signs of previous injuries to the ribs. She also has marks left by previous burns. We’ve counted about ten, so the assault this time seems to have been on a whole new scale.’

When Morgan Thulin had finished his account, they stood there nodding. Morgan Thulin nodded to show his story was at an end, and Peder to indicate he understood what he had just been told. Alex nodded mainly because the others were nodding too.

Then the woman in the bed made a sudden movement.

She whimpered quietly and tried to sit up. Immediately the nurse was there, gently restraining her. If she could just lie still, they would raise the head end of the bed so she was sitting up a bit.

Peder rushed over to help with the bed. Partly he wanted nothing more than to help, partly it gave him a chance to get nearer the woman. He saw she was barely able to open her eyes, but was still intently tracking his movements, first across the room and then as he helped to adjust the bed.

Morgan Thulin left them, saying, ‘I shall be in my office if there’s anything else you need to know.’

Peder wondered where to sit. It felt too intimate and intrusive to perch on the edge of the bed. But the easy chair on the other side of the room felt much too far away. He promptly pushed the chair closer to the bed, so he was about the right distance from the woman. Alex stayed over by the door.

Peder introduced himself and Alex by their forenames and surnames, and said they were from the police. He saw the woman’s gaze change and darken. She held up her hands as if to keep them at bay.

‘We only want to talk to you,’ he said cautiously. ‘If you aren’t up to answering, or don’t want to, that’s fine. We’ll just go away.’

He restrained himself from adding, ‘And come back another day.’

‘Can you nod if you understand what I’m saying?’

The woman regarded him in silence, and then nodded.

‘Can you tell us your name first?’

Peder waited, but the woman didn’t speak. The nurse helped her take a sip of water. Peder carried on waiting.

‘Jelena,’ came a whisper.

‘Jelena?’ repeated Peder.

The woman nodded.

‘And what’s your surname?’

A further pause. Another sip of water.

‘Scortz.’

A light breeze from the slightly open window brushed across Peder’s cheek. He tried not to smile, not to show how pleased he was. It was really her. They’d finally found Monika Sander.

He felt suddenly unsure how to proceed. They didn’t even know for sure that this woman – Monika Sander – was the one who delayed Sara Sebastiansson at Flemingsberg. But they needed to know. Peder thought frantically. Mainly about why he hadn’t got this all worked out before they got to the hospital.

He decided to start from the other end.

‘Who did this to you?’ he asked quietly.

The woman in the bed rubbed her plaster cast on the sheet. Perhaps it had already started itching.

‘The Man,’ she whispered.

Peder leaned forward.

‘Sorry, I didn’t quite…’

The nurse at the bedside was clearly irritated, but made no comment.

‘The Man,’ said the woman again, and it was obvious she was making an effort to speak clearly. ‘That’s… what I… call him.’

Peder stared at her.

‘The Man?’ he repeated.

She nodded slowly.

‘Okay,’ said Peder carefully. ‘But do you know where he lives?’

‘Only… see him… my…’ slurred the woman.

‘You only see him at your place?’ Peder supplied.

She nodded.

‘So you don’t know where he lives?’

She shook her head.

‘Do you know where he works?’

She shook her head.

‘Psy-chol-o…’

‘Psychologist? He told you he was a psychologist?’

The woman seemed relieved that he understood what she was saying.

‘But you don’t know where he works?’

She shook her head, looking very miserable.

Peder racked his brains.

‘Do you know what sort of car he drives?’

The woman thought. She seemed to be trying to frown, but her face muscles refused to obey her. She must be in dreadful pain, thought Peder.

‘Diff… rent,’ she whispered at last.

Peder waited.

‘Hardly… ever… the same…’

Peder was taken aback. Did the guy go round in stolen cars, or just hire one when he needed to?

‘Work… car…?’

‘You think he uses different cars from work?’

‘He said… so…’

He’d clearly lied about everything else, so why not lie about his car, too, thought Peder in frustration.

‘Where did you meet him?’ he asked curiously. ‘The very first time, I mean.’

His question prompted an immediate reaction from the woman in the bed. She turned her head away, with a look of what seemed to be anger. Peder waited a few moments and decided not to force it.

‘Maybe you don’t want to talk about that part?’ he said tentatively.

The woman shook her head.

Alex shifted slightly on the other side of the room, but said nothing.

Peder decided to focus on the woman from Jönköping and what she said when she rang the police anonymously. It should have occurred to him at the start that she was the obvious starting point for the interview.

He began a little hesitantly.

‘We think the man who beat you up might have done the same to other women, too.’

Jelena Scortz, exhausted, rested her head back against the pillow, but her eyes were following him with interest.

‘We think he approaches women and asks them to join him in some kind of battle or campaign.’

The woman dropped her eyes but even Peder, with no medical expertise, could see the colour draining from her face. The nurse made an impatient movement and tried to catch Peder’s eye. He avoided her gaze.

‘It’s terribly, terribly important that we find him,’ Peder said, trying not to sound too stern.

After a pause, he went on:

‘It’s absolutely vital that we find him before any more children get abducted and murdered.’

The woman gave a whimper and started to toss helplessly in the bed.

‘I really think…’ began the nurse, stroking Jelena’s hair over and over again.

Delicately, delicately, so as not to hurt her.

Peder, however, felt very satisfied with the reaction he had elicited from Jelena. He knew now that she was implicated. In Lilian’s disappearance, at the very least.

He moved over and sat on the edge of the bed. Jelena refused to look at him.

‘Jelena,’ he said gently, ‘we do know you must have been forced into all this.’

That wasn’t true, either, but it didn’t matter at the moment. The main thing was to get Jelena to calm down, which she did.

‘I need all the information I can get,’ Peder pleaded. ‘How does he locate these children? How does he pick them?’

Jelena was breathing in a strange, jerky way. She still wasn’t looking at him, or at the nurse.

‘How does he pick them?’

‘Their… mothers.’

The answer came so softly that he could hardly hear what she was saying. Yet he had no trouble at all in understanding what she said.

‘Right,’ he said, hoping she would have something to add.

But she said nothing, so he asked:

‘Are they women he knew before? How does he find them?’

She turned her head slowly until she was looking straight at him again. He felt a chill run through him as he saw how dark her eyes were.

‘You don’t… choose,’ she hissed. ‘You love… all the ones… you get. Or none… of them.’

Peder swallowed, several times.

‘Don’t choose what?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand, what is it you don’t choose?’

‘The… children,’ Jelena whispered feebly, and her head lay still on the pillow again. ‘You… have to… love… them all.’

With that, Jelena lapsed into silence, and Peder realized the interview was at an end.

Fredrika was surprised to see that the investigation team corridor was such a hive of activity when she got back to HQ. She located Alex and Peder in the Den. Mats, the analyst from the National Crime Squad, was there – hadn’t he had enough yet? – along with another man whom Fredrika didn’t recognize. She said hello and introduced herself.

‘Fredrika Bergman.’

‘Excuse me?’

Rather taken aback, Fredrika said her name again in what she hoped was a less Swedish-sounding way. The man got it that time, and introduced himself as Stuart Rowland. He took a seat again on the chair that was unobtrusively positioned in one corner of the room.

Peder sprang to his feet when he saw Fredrika introduce herself to the mysterious Stuart Rowland. He explained in English why their visitor was there.

‘Dr Rowland is a psychologist, a so-called profiler,’ he explained in a voice almost quivering with reverence. ‘He has promised to give us the benefit of his knowledge at our meeting.’

As if the Pope himself were paying them a visit, thought Fredrika.

Peder turned to Fredrika and asked her discreetly, in Swedish:

‘I hope you won’t feel uncomfortable if we hold the first part of the meeting in English?’

When she realized he meant the question seriously, she felt her cheeks start to turn crimson.

‘As long as the meeting’s in English, German, French or Spanish, I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said with a stiff smile.

Peder blinked, completely failing to grasp the implication of her words.

‘Great,’ he said, and sat down again.

Alex, observing Peder and Fredrika from a distance, allowed himself a smile.

‘Fredrika, I’m glad you’re back in time for the meeting. Take a seat, and we can start.’

Fredrika, who had not realized until that moment she was the only one they were waiting for, sat down. Ellen gave her a little grin and pushed the door of the Den shut with her foot.

Every investigation has its critical moment. Alex had a distinct feeling the violent investigation in which he was currently embroiled had reached precisely that point. There were not that many more facts to be gathered, Alex convinced himself. They already had most of them in front of them.

He took a surreptitious look at the psychology professor Peder had virtually hijacked from the university. In his brown jacket with suede elbow patches and suede breast pocket, and an enormous moustache bristling under his nose like a squirrel’s tail, he looked as if he had wandered into the Den straight off the set of some British film.

But Alex knew he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Any form of help had to be seen as worth having at this stage.

‘Okay,’ he said, surveying all those present.

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Alex swallowed, hard. People this tense could hardly come up with any masterly theories. He glanced at Fredrika. She would be the exception, of course. Fredrika seemed to be able to focus her thoughts on absolutely anything at any time, as long as she was told it was important. And it didn’t get any more important than this.

He went on in English.

‘We say a special welcome to Professor Rowland,’ he said, hoping he sounded formal enough. ‘We are very pleased to have you at our meeting.’

The Professor gave a gracious nod and smiled under his moustache.

Alex had had to get approval for Professor Rowland to attend the meeting from the next level of the police hierarchy. Desperate though the situation was, there were still rules to follow and confidentiality to be observed.

As Alex switched on the overhead projector, he hoped this was clear to everybody round the table. With the help of the analyst, whose name he now knew to be Mats, he had put together an easy-to-use overview of all the material they had amassed in the course of the investigation, including the recent information supplied by Fredrika over the phone.

Alex summed up the case and their findings with exemplary brevity. He avoided looking at their foreign guest. He took it for granted that the FBI must be a lot more fun than working for the Stockholm police.

As if he could read Alex’s thoughts, the Professor suddenly spoke up.

‘I have to say, this is an extremely interesting case,’ he said.

‘Really,’ queried Alex, feeling perversely flattered.

‘Yes,’ said Rowland. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t quite see from your diagram exactly what help you need from me right now. What is it that’s not clear?’

Alex stared at his own sketch. Surely there was plenty that wasn’t clear?

‘It’s quite clear – beyond all reasonable doubt – that the same man kidnapped and murdered both girls,’ the Professor began. ‘But if the woman you’ve identified at the hospital really is the man’s accomplice, and I think we can assume that on the basis of your interview, then he must have carried the second crime through on his own, without her. The question is: did something go wrong in the first murder? Serial killers very rarely start their careers with two such major crimes in the course of just a few days, crimes that would attract such attention.’

The Professor paused, as though to check everyone understood what he said, and that he was not speaking out of turn.

Alex put his head on one side.

‘So what you mean, Professor Rowland, is that you think the fact that the woman was able to get out of the flat on her own after the attack, and went to hospital, made him act more quickly?’

‘I’m convinced of it,’ the Professor said firmly. ‘The woman was probably punished for not completing some part of her task to the letter during the first murder. The nature of her injuries seems to indicate that he was in a rage when he attacked her, wild and out of control. That in turn shows that she must have been careless about something she didn’t understand to be of crucial importance to the killer at a symbolic level.’

Alex sat down, leaving the stage to the Professor for a while.

‘We must have our picture of this couple clear in our minds,’ Rowland said emphatically. ‘Both the women the man tried to collaborate with were weak individuals in the sense that they had been in very vulnerable positions and had a hard time, even though they were young. They were probably attracted to the man because no one like him had ever shown any interest in them before.’

Fredrika’s mind went back to what Nora’s grandmother Margareta had said: that it had seemed like a real life Cinderella story when Nora met the man who was later to destroy her life.

‘You are almost certainly looking for a very charismatic, determined person,’ the Professor continued. ‘He may have a military background, but whatever his exact background, he’s well-educated. He’s good-looking. That’s how he attracts these abandoned girls and gets them to worship him to the point where they’ll do anything for him. If he is a psychologist, as both girls claim he told them, that scarcely makes him less of a threat to us.’

‘But the first woman walked out on him,’ Fredrika objected, thinking again of Nora in Jönköping.

Who had had the strength to break free and make a new start.

‘True,’ said the Professor, ‘but then she wasn’t entirely alone. She had a strong grandmother behind her. Our killer would certainly have learnt from that mistake the first time – if it was the first time. The woman he seeks has to be weak, and entirely on her own. There mustn’t be anyone in her life with any influence over her. He alone must be able to dominate her and dictate the terms of how she lives.’

Professor Rowland shifted his position on the hard chair. It was apparent that he liked talking, and would carry on as long as no one interrupted him.

‘He thought he had complete control over this last woman, Jelena, yet even she sprang a surprise and left him. His woman is important to him, practically but also mentally. She affirms him; she intensifies his perception of himself as a genius. And…’

Professor Rowland looked serious, and held up a warning finger.

‘And, my friends, he is a genius. Neither of the women knows what his name is, where he works, or even what type of car he has. They never call him anything but “The Man”. He could be absolutely anywhere. The best you can hope for is that you pick up his fingerprints in the woman’s flat, but I rather doubt you will. Bearing in mind how strategically this man seems to operate, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s disfigured his own fingers.’

There was a spontaneous murmur from his audience, and Alex impatiently hushed them.

‘What do you mean, disfigured?’

‘Oh, it’s not difficult,’ Professor Rowland smiled. ‘Nor even particularly uncommon. A lot of asylum seekers do it, to make it hard to register their fingerprints. Then they can seek asylum in a series of other countries if their application is turned down in the first one they go to.’

There was not a sound in the Den. Alex had been pinning his hopes on fingerprints or DNA from the flat providing the solution to the case, always assuming the man had a previous conviction. He straightened his back.

‘Wait a minute, you mean you think the man has been convicted before?’

‘If he hasn’t, then there’s more likelihood of your finding his fingerprints in the flat,’ said Professor Rowland. ‘If he has, and I believe that to be the case, then I would be very surprised if he’d been careless enough to leave any concrete traces behind him.’

Fredrika considered what the Professor had said about the perpetrator seeming to speed up the pace once the woman escaped from the flat.

‘Can we infer that more children will go missing?’ she asked, frowning.

‘We certainly can,’ replied Professor Rowland. ‘I think we can more or less assume he has a list of kids he’s planning to abduct. It’s not something he decides as he goes along – he already has this all worked out.’

‘But how does he find them?’ blurted Peder in frustration. ‘How does he choose the children?’

‘It’s not the children he finds,’ said the Professor. ‘It’s their mothers. It’s the mothers being punished; the children are just a means to an end. He’s taking revenge on someone else’s behalf. He’s putting things to rights.’

‘But that still doesn’t answer my question,’ Peder said in desperation. ‘And what’s driving him?’

‘No,’ the Professor agreed, ‘not exactly. But almost. Both women have been punished in the same way: he stole and killed their children and dumped them in a place to which they had some link. So one possible conclusion is that both women had committed the same crime. And that the answer to what’s driving him is vengeance.’

Professor Rowland adjusted his glasses and scrutinized Alex’s diagram.

‘He is punishing the women for not loving all children equally. He is punishing them because if you don’t love all children, you are not to have any at all.’

He furrowed his brow.

‘It’s hard to know exactly what he means,’ he sighed. ‘It seems as if these women, wholly or partially unconsciously, have wronged their own children, or some other child. Again, I don’t think the women themselves necessarily remember the precise occasion. They almost certainly haven’t broken any law. But he thinks they have.’

‘And so does the woman in the hospital,’ Fredrika put in.

The others looked at her and nodded their agreement.

The Professor made an expansive gesture.

‘The word he uses to mark the children, “Unwanted”, identifies the subject for us with absolute clarity, especially now we know the backgrounds of his two female companions, but we still don’t know exactly what the trigger is, so we do not know either exactly how he once encountered these women who have lost their children. But we know, we know, that he must be aware of their pasts, since both bodies were dumped in a town or a place the women have had no contact with for many years.’

Professor Rowland drank some of his now cold coffee.

Fredrika asked tentatively:

‘The places where the children were found, might they be linked to the so-called crime?’

‘Perhaps,’ replied the Professor. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the first body was not presented precisely as the man had envisaged. You’re working on the hypothesis, aren’t you, that the woman now in the hospital drove the car, while the man went to Jönköping to silence Nora? That hypothesis is probably quite correct, so we can’t assume Lilian was found exactly the way the man planned. He delegated the important final stage of the plan to the woman, so he relinquished control of the situation for a brief period.’

Alex and Peder exchanged looks. To hell with confidentiality, thought Alex.

‘The little girl was lying on her back,’ he said. ‘The baby was found curled up in a foetal position.’

‘Really? That’s extremely interesting. That could have been the detail the woman missed, and that’s why he beat her up.’

‘But how can a little detail like that be so significant in the overall context?’ asked Fredrika.

‘We mustn’t forget that although our adversary is very sharp, very intelligent, he’s far from rational. For you and me, it wouldn’t matter a damn whether the child was on its back or curled up, we’d be focused on getting rid of the body as unobtrusively as possible. But this man’s focused on something else. He’s arranging the dead children; he wants to tell us something.’

It all went quiet again. The only sound was a fan whirring in one corner. Nobody said a thing.

‘There are two gaps in your theory,’ Rowland summed up. ‘You don’t know what form of contact the man had with the women, but you can say almost for sure that it must have been a long time ago. The concrete role played by the locations he selected remains unclear, but look more closely into whether the women have any special link to those particular places that hasn’t emerged up to now. The other thing you don’t know is exactly what the women were punished for, but it’s to do with their inability to love all children equally. Look into their pasts. Maybe they worked with children, and were involved in an accident of some kind.’

Alex looked out of the window. More cloud was rolling in over the capital.

‘You all look dejected,’ said Professor Rowland with a smile. ‘But I don’t think it’ll take you long to solve this one. We mustn’t forget, either, that we can reasonably expect to find there’s a reason for his becoming such a sick person. When you do find the perpetrator, there’s every likelihood you’ll discover he had a very disturbed childhood himself, probably without one or both of his parents.’

Alex gave a wan smile.

‘Just one more thing,’ Peder put in swiftly before the meeting broke up. ‘That woman Nora met him, er, seven years ago. Does that mean there were earlier murders? And why did it take him almost ten years to find a new partner?’

Professor Rowland looked at Peder.

‘That’s an excellent question,’ he said slowly. ‘And I recommend that’s where you start. Where was our man in the years that elapsed between his first and second accomplice?’

The meeting did not go on for long after Professor Rowland had left the Den to be escorted to the exit by Ellen. Everyone in the team, whether old, new or borrowed, was on tenterhooks round the table.

Fredrika had rather the same feeling she used to get when she watched a thriller and could sense in every fibre of her body how near the plot was to its denouement, but still had no idea how it would end. Inviting Professor Rowland had been a stroke of genius. Fredrika made a mental note to tell Peder later what a great initiative it had been.

She was pleased to see everyone in the room looking equally elated. It certainly said something about the case, the fact that so much energy could be generated even on a Saturday.

Alex set out the two main lines of enquiry they were to follow from there. Their top priority was to be individuals who had served sentences and been released that year, or at the end of the previous year. Alex admitted they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but there were a number of indications as to the age of the murderer, and he was probably an educated man. He might even be a psychologist, as he had told Nora and Jelena. To get a better fix on the time, they would need to interview Jelena Scortz again about when she first met the man. They could also check with her whether he had disfigured hands or fingers.

The other priority was investigating the pasts of Sara Sebastiansson and Magdalena Gregersdotter. At what stage of their lives had they been associated with the places where their children were later found murdered?

The division of labour was covered in just two sentences: Peder would be in charge of the task of identifying released prisoners who fitted the criteria. Fredrika would be in charge of the task of mapping the two women’s earlier lives. Alex laid a heavy hand on Fredrika’s shoulder.

‘It would make things a whole lot easier if you, being so keen on cause and effect, could find a link between a bathroom in Bromma and a child losing its life.’

He gave a tired wink as he said it.

Fredrika found nothing to complain about in terms of the task she had been allocated. Quite the opposite: she was very happy with it. She gave a melancholy smile as she thought of Alex’s words: ‘You being so keen on cause and effect…’ There was nothing much she could say at times like that, she’d discovered. It was best just to go along with it.

Fredrika closed her eyes and put her head in her hands.

An A &E department in a town Sara Sebastiansson went to over fifteen years ago.

A bathroom in a house where Magdalena Gregersdotter lived over twenty years ago.

She repeated the words to herself several times. An A &E department in a town…

She tried leaning back in her chair. She was filled with a feverish kind of tension. They were missing something. Something fundamental.

Alex’s words echoed in her head again. It would make things a whole lot easier if you, being so keen on cause and effect, could find a link between a bathroom in Bromma and a child losing its life.

Then she heard Professor Rowland’s voice. The women are probably both being punished for the same crime.

A thought slowly began to take shape in her mind. Afraid of losing focus, she groped for pen and paper without changing her position in her seat.

Her pulse started racing when she finally gave the thought its freedom.

Of course.

You just had to play around with the words a bit, and they fell into place.

The common denominator of a bathroom in Bromma and a town in Norrland. That was what Fredrika had said with a bitter laugh when Alex rang and she went out onto Margareta Andersson’s balcony in Umeå to take the call. But Alex had said something else. Something about finding a link between a bathroom in Bromma and an A &E department in Umeå.

Of course. It was only when the thought occurred to her that she realized what they had overlooked, and not followed up in the investigation. It wasn’t Umeå that was relevant here, but the A&E department itself.

The wrong questions inevitably yielded the wrong answers. Bearing in mind that the other child was found in a bathroom, it seemed very odd if the intention had been for the first one to be lying outside the hospital. By that token, the baby could just as well have been left on the pavement outside the house where it was found. So the person who dumped Lilian in Umeå had made more than just one mistake. And paid dearly for it.

With the last piece of the puzzle finally in place, Fredrika felt nothing but relief. It wasn’t the children who had links to the geographical locations where they were found, but their mothers. So Alex had said the wrong thing, and thought the wrong thing, when he asked her to see a connection between a bathroom in Bromma and a murdered child. But he had been right the first time. The connection was between a bathroom in Bromma and a woman who had once lived in the house. So the equivalent connection must be between Umeå University Hospital and…

Fredrika was already reaching for the phone as she thought her idea through to its logical conclusion. There was just one more person she needed to speak to before she had a full picture of what had really kept Sara Sebastiansson up in Umeå that summer so long ago.

It was Saturday evening, yet Peder was still at work. It was summer and it was cloudy. It was cool and it was clammy. Nothing was how it should be.

Peder again felt himself being tossed between conflicting extremes of emotion. He hadn’t spoken to Ylva all day, and now he was anguished at feeling regret about the fact. He had begun the day feeling worthless and unproductive at work, and now he suddenly felt his career was practically at its peak. Inviting the American professor in had been a lucky throw of the dice. Above all for the investigation, but also for Peder himself. He felt so much more than adequate. He felt energized and ready.

The car almost found its own way back to Karolinska. This time he hadn’t rung to warn them he was coming. If it wasn’t convenient, he’d just have to come back the next day.

He tried to feel sorry for Jelena Scortz, who had suffered so much misfortune in her relatively short life. But at the same time, he was possessed of an unshakable faith in what was known as Free Will. No matter that Jelena Scortz’s life had been shit, there was a time limit on how long a lousy childhood was allowed to affect the rest of your life. And if you allowed yourself to go in for crazy things like murdering children, you were worth less than nothing in Peder’s eyes. That went for Jelena Scortz, too. That went especially for Jelena Scortz, in fact; that dark, angry look Peder had seen in her mangled face when she spoke of why the women had to be punished was burnt into his memory.

She knew what she was doing when she held Sara up in Flemingsberg, thought Peder bitterly. She bloody well knew.

Even so, Peder softened when he got up to the ward and saw Jelena. He was no fan, either, of anyone who could inflict such extensive injuries on a fellow human being.

There was a nurse at Jelena’s bedside, helping her drink through a straw. The nurse jumped at the sound of Peder behind her.

‘You startled me,’ she said, and gave a laugh when she saw his ID.

It wasn’t the same nurse as before.

Peder smiled back at her. Jelena didn’t move a muscle.

‘I’d like to have a little talk to Jelena, if she’s up to it,’ he said. ‘I was here this morning, as well.’

The nurse frowned.

‘Well I’m not sure…’ she began.

‘I’ll be quick,’ Peder added hurriedly, ‘and only if Jelena doesn’t mind.’

The nurse turned to Jelena.

‘Do you think you can talk to the policeman for a minute?’ she asked uneasily.

Jelena said nothing.

Peder slowly approached the bed.

‘I’ve got a couple of follow-up questions,’ he said softly. ‘Only if you feel up to it.’

Jelena still said nothing, but she kept her eyes on him and didn’t shake her head in protest. Peder decided to interpret that as tacit consent.

‘Can you tell me how long you’ve known the man?’ he asked.

Jelena turned her head very slightly on the pillow. Was she starting to regret having run away from the man? Did she feel she had betrayed him by quitting the battle? If so, she was unlikely to say a word more to anyone in the investigation team.

‘Since… New Year…’

She spoke so quietly that Peder could hardly hear what she said.

‘Since New Year,’ the nurse interpreted, enunciating more clearly than she needed to.

Peder nodded eagerly.

‘How did you meet? Please tell me…’

He was pleading. A thing he very rarely did.

Small, solitary tears began slowly rolling down Jelena’s bruised and battered cheeks. Peder swallowed. The job could never be allowed to get personal, but you could never let yourself be so aloof that you lost your human touch.

‘The street,’ Jelena said, quietly but so clearly that both Peder and the nurse heard what she said.

But the nurse still opened her mouth to clarify the woman’s words again. Peder indicated to her to be quiet.

‘The street,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Were you… Were you working as a prostitute when you met the man?’

Yes and no questions were easier. Then she could just nod or shake her head. This time she nodded.

Is he a kerb-crawler? wondered Peder. Is that how we’re going to find him?

Jelena seemed suddenly very drowsy. The nurse began to look very concerned. Peder got up to go. He had the information he needed.

He said thank you and took his leave, but pulled up short in the doorway.

‘Just one more question, Jelena,’ he said.

She turned her head and looked at him.

‘Was there anything odd about his hands? Were they damaged in some way?’

She swallowed several times. Peder could see she was in a lot of pain.

‘Burned.’

Peder frowned.

‘Burned,’ repeated Jelena. ‘He said… they got… burned.’

She was utterly exhausted. Peder stared at her until he felt his eyes were going to pop out of his head. It couldn’t be true.

‘He told you they got burned?’

Another nod.

‘And they looked as if they had?’

More nodding.

Peder tried to think, though his thoughts were stampeding all over the place.

‘Where,’ he began. ‘How…?’

He cleared his throat.

‘Were the scars on the backs or the palms of his hands?’

‘Palms.’

‘Did they look old, these scars?’

Jelena gave a weary shake of her aching head.

‘New,’ she whispered. ‘New… when… we… met.’

Bloody hell. Was there anything this man hadn’t thought of?

Peder swallowed again.

‘Jelena, if there’s anything, anything at all, you want to tell us, you can do it whenever – absolutely whenever – you want. Thank you.’

Peder had turned to go, when Jelena made a sound.

He looked at her enquiringly.

‘Doll,’ whispered Jelena, who had stopped crying now. ‘He… calls… me… Doll.’

Peder thought she looked as though she was attempting to smile.

Fredrika received a call from someone who introduced herself as Dr Sonja Lundin.

For a moment, Fredrika was at a loss. She didn’t recognize the voice or the name.

‘I’m a hospital pathologist in Umeå,’ she clarified. ‘I was the one who carried out the first proper examination of the little girl who was found murdered up here.’

Fredrika felt embarrassed at not recognizing the woman’s name. But then it was Alex who had dealt with that part of the investigation.

‘I don’t think we’ve been in touch before,’ said Sonja Lundin, in answer to her unspoken question, ‘but I rang to speak to your colleague Alex Recht, and they referred me to you because he’s in the middle of an important call. One of you left a message for me about a patient file.’

Fredrika’s heart skipped a beat.

‘I can deal with it,’ she confirmed. ‘I was the one who rang.’

She was profoundly grateful that Alex was unavailable, because this was not a conversation intended for his ears.

‘Strictly speaking,’ Sonja Lundin said dubiously, ‘this sort of information is confidential.’

‘Of course,’ Fredrika hastened to say.

‘But given the nature of the crime and the fact that your enquiry is no more specific than it is, I see no problem in answering your question,’ Sonja Lundin announced briskly.

Fredrika held her breath.

‘There is a file in the name of the person you enquired about,’ Sonja Lundin informed her.

Fredrika blinked. There, she’d thought so.

‘Can you give me a date?’ she said quietly, afraid of overstepping the mark and demanding too much information.

Sonja Lundin was silent for a moment.

‘29 July 1989,’ she then said. ‘The patient was discharged the same day. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you what she was here for unless…’

Fredrika interrupted her.

‘That’s all I need to know for the moment. Thanks very much indeed for your help.’

Evening was drawing in. The sky had an almost autumnal look as the evening sun went behind a cloud. What had happened to summer this year? Alex let his eyes rest on the view from his window. It felt like a different sort of evening. An exciting one.

Alex’s reflective mood was punctured by Peder, who came galloping into the room. Alex smiled. Whereas Fredrika was forever slipping out on secret little missions and dramatically revealing her findings at group meetings, Peder liked to report back frequently on his achievements and conclusions.

‘They’ve known each other since New Year,’ he announced, sinking uninvited into the armchair Alex kept for visitors.

‘Who?’

‘Jelena and the so-called Man.’

‘And how do you know that?’

Peder drew himself up.

‘I told you I was going out to Karolinska,’ he replied, with a slightly defiant air.

When Alex said nothing, Peder went on.

‘He picked her up off the street; she was a prostitute.’

Alex sighed, and propped his chin in one hand.

‘Wasn’t the other girl, as well? The Jönköping murder?’ asked Peder.

Alex’s brow furrowed.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said uncertainly. ‘You’ll have to check with Fredrika, but I don’t think so. She was in with that sort of crowd, though, so she might very well have met him on the street, come to think of it.’

Peder made an impatient gesture.

‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘What would she be doing on the street if she wasn’t a prostitute?’

‘How the fuck do I know?’ Alex said tetchily. ‘It’s what her grandmother said. And if Grandma wants to varnish the truth a bit, that’s up to Grandma. But she might also be right. Nora isn’t on our files in connection with any prostitution rackets.’

‘But how does she fit into all this?’ asked Peder. ‘I just don’t get why he bothers at that critical stage to shoot over to Jönköping and bump off an ex-girlfriend.’

‘An ex-girlfriend he long since let in on all his plans,’ Alex reminded him.

‘Sure,’ said Peder. ‘Sure. But still… What the hell was the point?’

‘I’m with you on that, but I say we leave it aside for now,’ Alex said doggedly. ‘I’ve spoken to the Jönköping police. They didn’t manage to secure a single clue to the identity of the killer except that Ecco shoeprint. The Jönköping line of enquiry isn’t going to get us anywhere.’

‘But we suspected for a while that he had some way of knowing what stage we’d reached in the investigation,’ began Peder.

‘That must have been a coincidence,’ Alex broke in. ‘At that point we scarcely knew ourselves that she’d rung in and tipped us off about him.’

Peder shut his mouth. Then he said:

‘The reason they can’t find anything is that he’s sabotaged his own fingers.’

Alex stared at him.

‘Are you joking?’

Peder shook his head.

‘Christ almighty,’ groaned Alex. ‘What kind of pervert are we dealing with here?’

Peder was quick to supply the information.

‘Could he be a kerb-crawler?’

Alex was brought up short.

‘Kerb-crawler?’

‘That’s how he finds his girls.’

Alex put his head on one side.

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ he said slowly. ‘Not a bad idea at all. And there are kerb-crawlers from all social classes, as we know.’

‘Right, I’ll start looking there, then,’ Peder declared.

‘You do that,’ Alex said with equal determination, adding: ‘And check out particularly anybody who’s been had up for gross violation of a woman’s integrity, or any other crimes of violence directed at women. This might not be the first time he’s assaulted a woman.’

Peder gave a keen nod.

Then they both just sat there, trying to summon the energy to stand up and get to grips with everything that needed to be done.

‘She said he calls her “Doll”,’ said Peder, breaking the silence.

‘Doll?’ echoed Alex.

Any bereavement is hard to bear.

But the grief of losing a child is not just heavy: it is as dark as night.

Fredrika tried to hold that thought in her mind as she got out of the car outside Sara Sebastiansson’s flat. Once she had had the phone call from Umeå, there was no reason to delay, so she had come straight round. She wondered if she was overstepping the mark by coming to see her on a Saturday evening, and found the answer to be an emphatic no. No, given the circumstances it wasn’t wrong. Not in the slightest.

Fredrika tried to keep her anger in check. She tried to understand, and above all she tried to convince herself there was a reason why Sara had behaved as she had done.

But she could feel the frustration pounding away inside her. A piece of the puzzle had been missing all this time, and Sara had been coolly sitting there with it in her hand. She had not just obstructed the investigation of her own daughter’s death; she had also obstructed progress in the baby Natalie case.

Fredrika wished instinctively and with all her heart that Sara would be alone in the flat when she rang the doorbell. Otherwise she would have to ask the parents to leave.

Sara opened the door at Fredrika’s second ring. She looked pale and haggard, with such dark rings under her bloodshot eyes that all Fredrika’s anger and frustration melted away. Reality landed right in front of her: this was a woman who had just experienced her worst nightmare in real life. Criticism had very little place here.

‘I’m sorry to turn up unannounced,’ Fredrika said in a low but steady voice, ‘but I need to talk to you.’

Sara stepped back from the door to let Fredrika in, and showed her through to the living room. It seemed to be serving as an extra bedroom; there were mattresses on the floor. Presumably her parents hadn’t gone home yet, though to Fredrika’s relief they weren’t anywhere to be seen.

‘Are you on your own?’ asked Fredrika.

Sara nodded.

‘Mum and Dad are out doing some food shopping,’ she said in a thin voice. ‘They’ll be back soon.’

Fredrika unobtrusively took out her notepad.

‘Have you found him?’ The words burst out of Sara.

‘You mean…’ Fredrika began, rather confused.

‘I mean Gabriel,’ replied Sara, and when Fredrika met her gaze she felt cold all over.

Sara’s eyes were blazing with pure, unadulterated hatred.

‘No,’ said Fredrika, ‘we haven’t found him. But we’ve issued a nationwide alert and arrested him in his absence.’

She swallowed and paused.

‘But we no longer suspect him of Lilian’s abduction and murder. In purely practical terms, he can’t possibly have done it.’

Sara gave Fredrika a long look.

‘I don’t think he murdered our daughter either,’ she said. ‘But now I know he had his computer full of disgusting child porn, I can’t wait for you to find him and lock him up for all the time he’s damn well got left to him.’

Fredrika did not even consider getting into a discussion of the sort of sentence that might be waiting for Gabriel Sebastiansson when they found him, if they ever did. She kept it all inside her, and tried to say something comforting instead:

‘There’s nothing to indicate he abused Lilian.’

Sara stared straight ahead through empty eyes, and said on a rising note:

‘So I was told. But that’s no guarantee he didn’t touch her, the total arsehole.’

She shrieked the last words so loud that Fredrika began to wonder if it had been such a good idea to come alone and unannounced, but she held her apprehension in check. Her business with Sara was vital to the investigation.

‘Sara,’ she said resolutely, ‘we need to talk about Umeå.’

Sara wiped away a few tears that had found their way down her cheeks.

‘I’ve already told you about Umeå,’ she said.

‘But I wonder if you’ve any idea why Lilian ended up outside the hospital,’ Fredrika said.

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ Sara said, but she avoided looking at Fredrika.

‘We, the police, think she was left there for a special reason,’ Fredrika went on implacably. ‘We think you might have some connection to the place, which the murderer knew about, and that was why he chose that precise location.’

Sara stared uncomprehendingly at Fredrika.

‘Is there something you haven’t told us?’ asked Fredrika. ‘Something you thought wasn’t important, that couldn’t possibly have any bearing on the case, so you didn’t need to tell us about it? Something private that you’d rather not talk about?’

Sara dropped her eyes and shook her head. Fredrika suppressed a sigh.

‘Sara, we know you have a patient file at Umeå University Hospital,’ she said firmly, ‘and we’re convinced there’s a link between your visit and the fact that Lilian was left there.’

‘I had an abortion,’ whispered Sara, after a long hesitation.

Fredrika did not take her eyes off Sara’s face. That was what she had suspected, but she had needed confirmation.

‘I got pregnant about the time I broke up with my boyfriend that spring, and of course I couldn’t tell them about it at home. So I decided to have it done when I was up in Umeå on the course. It wasn’t very difficult to arrange. I told the course tutor I had to have a day off to meet someone I knew, and then I went to the hospital instead.’

What was the loneliest thing imaginable? Going through a covert abortion had to be high on the list. And more importantly, was that why Sara was now being punished so cruelly?

‘I’m really sorry we have to drag up this old business,’ said Fredrika, ‘but we have to know for the sake of the investigation.’

Sara nodded and shed silent tears.

‘Did anyone – anyone at all – know what you had done in Umeå?’

Sara shook her head hard.

‘Nobody knew,’ she sobbed. ‘Not even Maria who came on the course with me. I didn’t tell a single person. I’ve never spoken about it until now.’

Fredrika’s body registered pain. Sara’s living room felt as if it was closing in around her.

‘And that was why you made sure you stayed on in Umeå longer than Maria?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I couldn’t very well have it done while Maria was still there,’ said Sara, suddenly very tired.

Then she pulled herself together.

‘It would be extremely unfortunate if my parents found out about this,’ she said, her voice shaking.

‘I can assure you that we won’t be letting the information go any further,’ Fredrika swiftly assured her, and very much hoped she wasn’t lying.

Then she asked again:

‘You’re sure you didn’t tell anyone? Not even your boyfriend? Wasn’t there anyone who knew or could have suspected something?’

Sara shook her head.

‘I didn’t tell a soul,’ she said doggedly. ‘Not a soul.’

But somebody knew, thought Fredrika. Some evil person knew.

And then, without thinking what she was doing, she leant forward and laid a warm hand on Sara’s shoulder. Almost like the pastoral carer she had said she didn’t want to be.

Ellen Lind didn’t feel guilty about going home earlier than the others in the team. Her role wasn’t the most vital, after all.

All the time she was growing up, Ellen had been the classic overshadowed child. She lived permanently in the shadow of her older and more successful siblings. She also lived in the shadow of her attractive, successful parents. She was very aware of being the unplanned afterthought, while the other children had been very much wanted. Ellen wasn’t even a family name, unlike those her two elder brothers and sister had been given.

Her sense of exclusion intensified and became permanently ingrained. Ellen was different. She even looked different. She was differently proportioned, with blunter facial features. Her sister and brothers were tall, good-looking, and self-assured from an early age. But not Ellen.

Ellen, however, had put all that behind her long ago. Now that she was a grown-up woman with a family of her own, she viewed her parents and siblings as little more than distant relations.

Past experience meant Ellen felt fairly resigned to the sense of exclusion she experienced at work. She was used to being the outsider, used to not fitting in. She and Fredrika had had a few discreet chats about it – everything about Fredrika was discreet – when Fredrika first joined the team, but they hadn’t exactly become close friends. Ellen thought that was rather a shame, because she was sure she and Fredrika would have made ideal friends.

But neither Fredrika nor work was uppermost in her mind as she went home that Saturday night. She was thinking about Carl, and about her children. Most of all, she was thinking about Carl.

She was concerned that he hadn’t replied to her text, not yesterday and not today either. Nor had he answered when she rang him. She didn’t even get through to his voicemail, just to a robotic monotone telling her syllable by syllable that ‘this subscriber is currently unavailable. Please try again later.’

It was as if he had gone to ground.

Ellen tried not to worry. It had all gone swimmingly last time they met. She knew she’d been over-sensitive about relationships since her marriage fell apart. She easily got a touch paranoid, and there was undoubtedly no less desirable quality you could possess in the marriage market. She felt her chest tightening and a sort of pressure building there. A few deep breaths made her feel better. But a bit later she found her stomach aching instead.

She knew it was idiotic, of course. There would be a perfectly natural explanation for Carl’s silence. She couldn’t expect him to be permanently available for her.

Ellen tried to laugh at herself.

She had really got it badly. She was seriously in love, for the first time ever.

The pathologist who carried out the autopsy on baby Natalie finally managed to get hold of Alex. She told him in brief that the procedure appeared identical to the way Lilian Sebastiansson had been killed. Insulin had been injected into her fontanelle. No fingerprints and no traces of another person’s DNA had been found on the body.

There had been no trace either, however, of the talc product found on Lilian.

‘Which is rather strange,’ the pathologist remarked. ‘It means the murderer decided he didn’t need to wear gloves for this murder.’

‘There’s nothing strange about it,’ Alex said bluntly. ‘Our man doesn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints; only the woman, and his previous female accomplice, needed gloves. And the woman didn’t handle the second child.’

‘Why doesn’t he need gloves?’ asked the pathologist in surprise.

‘He burned his own hands to make sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints.’

‘Incredible,’ the pathologist whispered, mainly to herself.

Alex asked whether she could tell him anything else.

There was silence while she thought.

‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘No, nothing at all. Well yes, actually.’

Alex waited.

‘We found no traces of sedative in the baby like those we found in Lilian.’

Alex pondered this.

‘The baby was asleep when she was snatched from her pram,’ he mused aloud. ‘The murderer probably didn’t feel the need to sedate her.’

‘Of course,’ said the pathologist. ‘Of course.’

Then she added:

‘There’s nothing more I can tell you about the baby. No violence was done to her other than the lethal injection, and I found no bruising on her body, new or old.’

‘Old?’ queried Alex, frowning.

He could sense the pathologist blushing at the other end of the line as she answered:

‘There are so many sick parents. It was just as well to check…’

Alex gave a sad smile.

‘Yes, you’re quite right.’

It had initially surprised Alex to find how often the executioner was to be found in the victim’s immediate vicinity. It had taken him years to understand how it was even possible. He could comprehend how someone might lose their head in the heat of the moment and hit out at another person. But the step from there to the cold-blooded killing of another human being, often fully conscious of what you were doing, was too big for him to take. What was more, people seemed capable of killing each other for the most bizarre reasons.

‘It’s a mad world,’ Alex whispered to his wife one evening when they were newly married and about to go to sleep.

She had chosen that moment to tell him they were expecting their first baby. Her timing in breaking the news had done nothing to dispel his conception of the world: it was mad.

But however hard Alex struggled to make the Lilian case fit the mould of all the other missing children cases he had dealt with in his career, however hard he wished it would end in some way he would later find hard to call to mind, he knew that the case of the abduction and death of Lilian Sebastiansson was quite unique, and that he would never forget it.

He peered at the clock. How long were they going to carry on? Was it really worth their while to work all night? How would everyone feel tomorrow if they did? The team had got to be able to stay the course.

The pathologist gave a little cough. The sound interrupted Alex’s thoughts and made him feel foolish.

‘Excuse me,’ he hastened to say, ‘but I didn’t quite hear that last bit.’

The pathologist seemed to be hesitating.

‘The fact that he injects the toxic substance into the child’s head,’ she started slowly.

‘Yes?’

Further hesitation.

‘I don’t know, maybe I’m completely wrong and it’s got nothing to do with the case, but… in some countries that’s an entirely legal method of carrying out a late abortion.’

‘Sorry?’ said Alex, raising his eyebrows.

‘Yes, it’s true,’ said the pathologist, rather more sure of herself now.

When Alex said nothing, she continued.

‘It was practised in a number of countries where very late abortions were allowed. It was really more of a delivery than an abortion. When the baby’s head appeared, the lethal substance was injected straight into the skull, so the child was by definition stillborn when it came out.’

‘Good God,’ said Alex.

‘Well that’s how it was,’ the pathologist said in conclusion. ‘But as I say, it may not be relevant to this case at all.’

The thoughts went chasing round inside Alex’s head.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he told the pathologist. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

Alex returned with renewed energy to the material spread out in front of him.

The atmosphere in the Den had been magical when the American psychologist was talking. It was actually a long time since Alex had encountered someone who spoke that much sense. He had practically laid out the whole structure for the investigation from that point on.

Alex grabbed the report he had just had from the squad that had searched Jelena Scortz’s flat. It had been hard work, very hard work, extracting a search warrant from the examining magistrate. Jelena was considered to have admitted far too little to confirm that she was implicated in Lilian’s murder. It was only when Alex made the point that regardless of the degree to which they could prove she was an accessory to murder, she had at the very least admitted that the main suspect had stayed in the flat. That was enough to justify a search warrant.

But just as the psychologist had predicted, the search of the flat yielded nothing to help them identify the killer. They naturally found huge numbers of fingerprints in the flat. And when they were checked against the National Police Board’s fingerprint register, they nearly all turned out to belong to Jelena herself. Her fingerprints were stored in the system because she had been arrested and charged with theft and receiving stolen goods some years before.

None of the other fingerprints had matched anything in the register. And the perpetrator himself left no fingerprints at all, of course.

Alex felt ill looking at the photos taken in the bedroom where Jelena had been left after the assault. Blood on the sheets, blood on the walls, blood on the floor.

The search team had not found a single object that looked as if it could belong to a man. There was only one toothbrush in the bathroom, and that had been taken for analysis. Alex was absolutely certain they would find no one’s DNA on it but Jelena’s. They found no men’s clothes, either.

There were in fact only two items of potential interest that the police had brought from the flat. One was some individual strands of hair, found on the bathroom floor. With luck they might prove to be Lilian Sebastiansson’s, and then there would be no need to worry any more about linking Jelena to Lilian’s murder. The other was a pair of dark Ecco shoes, size 46. They had been standing neatly in the hall.

Alex was entirely nonplussed. How could anyone as strategic and intelligent as the murderer clearly was make such a blunder?

Then he realized there could only be one answer, and his pulse rate accelerated to an almost dangerous level.

It was obvious – obvious – that the murderer must have returned to the flat after the assault on Jelena. Returned and discovered her gone. It must have been quite easy for him to work out that the police would link Jelena to the crime sooner or later, especially if he had seen the appeal for information about her in the national press.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’ shouted Alex, thumping his fist on the desk.

He stared at the picture of the Ecco shoes, which seemed to be jeering at him. The sheer cheek of it made him feel weak at the knees.

He knew we’d be able to identify Jelena sooner or later, and that would eventually lead us to the flat as well, Alex thought. So he left the goddamn shoes as a greeting.

It was almost half past seven and Fredrika Bergman was wondering whether to drop in on Magdalena Gregersdotter before nightfall or to leave it for the next day. She decided to go back to the office and talk it over with Alex before making up her mind.

Fredrika was so worked up that she could hardly sit still in the car. Music blared from the loudspeakers at top volume. Swan Lake. For the briefest of brief moments, Fredrika was back in the life she had lived before The Accident. Music that made her feel alive, an occupation to which she devoted herself passionately.

And then her mother’s voice:

Play so somebody could dance to the music; always remember the Invisible Dancer.

Fredrika could almost see the Invisible Dancer dancing Swan Lake on the bonnet of her car. For the first time in ages, she felt alive. She hadn’t the words to describe how glorious it felt.

From pure euphoria, she texted Spencer as soon as she had parked outside HQ and thanked him again for a wonderful night. Her fingers wanted to write something more amorous. Reason won as usual, and she slipped the phone into her bag without firing off any declarations of love. But she had that feeling again. That feeling of something being different, something having changed.

We’ve been pushing the boundaries recently, she thought. We see each other more often and we’ve started putting how much we mean to each other into words.

There were still people working at their desks as Fredrika offloaded her handbag and jacket in her little room. In the police world, success was measured in terms of the number of square metres of office space you were given. Rumour had it that the security services were planning to move out of HQ and house their staff in a new building with open plan offices. Fredrika sniggered at the thought of the outcry there would be if a plan like that were ever put forward in her department. She could hear her colleague Håkan raising his voice in protest:

‘You expect me to work in an open plan office? When I’ve waited twenty-two years to move into the office next to mine!’

Fredrika was in a good mood, to put it mildly. But as she stood in the doorway of Alex’s room a moment or two later, she felt all the energy and appetite drain from her.

‘Has something happened?’ she asked automatically when she saw the grim look on Alex’s face.

She immediately regretted her choice of words. Two little girls had been murdered in under a week – that alone made the phrasing of her question ludicrous.

But Alex wasn’t one to notice the choice of words. Fredrika more than made up for him in that respect.

‘So did your sudden flying visit produce anything?’ was all he said.

Fredrika had surprised him several times in recent days. He had high expectations of her now.

‘I think I know what crime the women had committed, and the reason why he’s punishing them,’ she said.

Alex raised his eyebrows.

‘I’ve got a theory, too,’ he smiled. ‘Shall we see if they match?’

Peder started by looking at all the men serving sentences for violation of a woman’s integrity who had been released since the previous November. There were far too many of them. He refined his search to a particular age group, men between forty and fifty.

He saw that most of the men had only served very short sentences. It was seven years since Nora had known the man; what had he been doing since? Were there other women who had been through the same thing, but who they just hadn’t found yet? Worse still, were there more children who had died in similar circumstances? Peder felt close to panic. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why had they assumed these were the murderer’s first victims?

Then he calmed down a bit. If there were any police officers in the country who had worked on similar cases over the past twenty years, they would undoubtedly have been in touch with their Stockholm colleagues by now. Unless the murderer had tried, and failed? Maybe he had abducted a child, but not gone through with the actual murder?

Peder shook his head in frustration. They had to take the risk of concentrating their efforts, had to dare to choose which line to pursue first. Peder jotted down the options he had ruled out. ‘Glad to see you prioritizing!’ Fredrika would have said if she’d seen him.

Peder decided to ask Alex to delegate to some other member of the team those lines of enquiry he still considered important, but less pressing.

He looked at the lists he had collated. There were altogether too many people on them with sentences way too short. If he bore in mind what the team had agreed on:

1. that their murderer had for some reason been inactive since he lost control of Nora, and had ‘recruited’ Jelena in her place;

2. that he was probably on their files and might have been convicted of some grievous crime of violence that had kept him locked up for most of the period since Nora left him;

3. that he was in all probability mentally ill;

4. that he possibly visited prostitutes

then there shouldn’t be that many names left on the list. But how did you sift out that kind of information?

Peder worked frantically at his keyboard.

Police files weren’t damn well designed for this kind of investigation, he thought angrily.

He’d had help in retrieving the first set of data he had worked on. But the help, that is to say Ellen, had finished for the day, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Perhaps it was time for Peder to call it a day, too, go home and get some sleep.

The very thought filled Peder with anxiety. He didn’t feel the least bit inclined to go home and be confronted with his crumbling marriage. He missed the children. But he was intensely tired of their mother.

‘What the hell shall I do?’ muttered Peder. ‘What in fuck’s name shall I do?’

He’d heard nothing from Pia Nordh since he left her flat. He was thankful for that. He felt thoroughly ashamed of the way he had behaved that morning. And it scared him that it felt like several years ago, when it fact it was only a few days.

Peder looked down at his conscientiously scribbled notes. He read through them. He read through them again.

He opened his filing cabinet and got out the diagram he and Fredrika had drawn up with timelines for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s movements the day his daughter was kidnapped. He took a blank sheet of paper out of his desk drawer and started drawing a new timeline.

It’s all too rushed, he thought as he drew. There are too few of us with too much to get into our heads too quickly; that’s why we keep missing little things.

Magdalena Gregersdotter’s parents had sold their house in Bromma over fifteen years ago. If Natalie’s murder had anything to do with Magdalena’s family home, then the murderer must have had contact with Magdalena – in some unfathomable way – before her parents sold the house.

So let’s see. First the murderer was in Stockholm for a time. Somehow he became aware of Magdalena, probably when she committed the ‘crime’ that she was now being punished for. Then he moved – temporarily or permanently – to Umeå. He stayed there long enough to come across both Sara Sebastiansson and Nora from Jönköping, now deceased.

Peder paused for thought, then decided to try refining his search through the bulk of material still further. The man they were looking for had probably committed the crime for which he served his prison sentence in Umeå, or somewhere nearby.

Peder went through his list. Then he added a final bullet point:

The man had not necessarily been in prison for seven years. He could have been sentenced to psychiatric care.

There was a knock at Peder’s door.

‘Can you come along for a very quick meeting in the Den before we call it a day?’

‘Sure,’ answered Alex, as he fired off his email request to Ellen.

She would have to deal with it in the morning.

‘Abortion?’ Peder said in amazement.

‘Yes,’ replied Fredrika.

Peder’s drooping eyes were suddenly wide open.

‘Did Magdalena Gregersdotter have an abortion, too? Remember the psychologist said the women had probably both committed the same “crime”…’

Fredrika gave an eager nod.

‘I remember,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t had a chance to talk to Magdalena yet. I’ll get round there tomorrow morning.’

‘Could he have been the doctor who performed their abortions?’ Peder wondered aloud.

‘We mustn’t get ahead of ourselves,’ warned Alex, holding up a hand. ‘First we need to establish that Magdalena did have an abortion. And if so, we must try to clarify why he crept in and put her dead child on the bathroom floor of her parents’ old house, and not at the hospital where the abortion was carried out.’

‘In the old days, women did their own abortions,’ began Peder, but was silenced by both Fredrika and Alex.

Peder decided to keep his mouth shut.

‘And we must certainly find out,’ said Alex in a businesslike tone, ‘why we weren’t told this earlier.’

‘Because you think in the way you just sounded,’ Fredrika said frankly.

Peder and Alex looked blank.

‘What you just said was: “why weren’t we told this earlier?”’ she explained. ‘“Weren’t told”, rather than didn’t find out. If we thought of facts as things we have to uncover – by asking the right questions, for example – then we wouldn’t be so vulnerable and reliant on the information other people feel like giving us.’

Alex and Peder exchanged glances. They both wore a faint smile.

‘Don’t you think?’ asked Fredrika, suddenly unsure.

Alex laughed out loud for the first time in days.

‘You could well have a point,’ he grinned.

Fredrika flushed.

‘Sara didn’t want to say anything about the abortion, but we all kind of assumed that if she had some specific connection to the hospital and not just Umeå in general, she’d tell us about it of her own accord,’ Alex said thoughtfully, looking serious again. ‘That was a mistake. We should have stuck to our guns, pressed her harder even though it didn’t feel quite right.’

He gathered up his papers.

‘We’ll carry on in the morning,’ he said. ‘It’s late and we’ve come a long way today. I’d even say a very long way.’

‘That’s why it doesn’t feel right to go home just now,’ Peder said grumpily.

‘I know it seems tough, but we all need a bit of rest,’ Alex insisted. ‘We’ll reconvene in the morning. I’ve already rung round to warn everyone it’ll be a full day’s work tomorrow. We’ll have to take our days off some other time.’

Fredrika glanced out of the window at the dull grey, cloudy summer sky.

‘We can take them when summer comes,’ she said drily.

THE LAST DAY

Ellen Lind was the first one in on Sunday morning. She was the first to arrive and the first to leave. She liked working that way.

She sent a text to her daughter as she turned on her computer. She had asked the children about a hundred times if they really thought they’d be all right at home on their own without a babysitter. They had assured her at least as many times that they’d be absolutely fine.

Peder’s request was at the top of Ellen’s inbox. She opened the email. Good grief, what sort of searches did that man think you could do in the police files? He still hadn’t registered that he wasn’t on the set of some American TV crime series, but in the real police world.

Ellen decided to give it a go anyway. She rang her contact at the National Police Board for help. The woman sounded cross and moaned about having to go in.

‘Bloody hell, on a Sunday,’ she muttered.

Ellen made no comment. For her, these were exceptional circumstances. And though they were downright grotesque ones, she had to admit she thought it was all rather exciting.

Less exciting, and more frustrating, was the fact that she hadn’t heard a word from Carl. She had kept her mobile switched on overnight in the hope that he’d be in touch, but he hadn’t sent so much as a line. Ellen didn’t really think there was any reason to doubt Carl’s love, and felt it was more likely that something had happened to him. If she had heard nothing by that evening, she would start ringing round the hospitals.

And yet.

And yet there was something not quite right. A scarcely perceptible feeling of anxiety began to grow and creep over Ellen. However hard she tried, she couldn’t shake it off.

Feeling restless, she went to empty the fax machine, which had been receiving messages during the night. Fredrika had a number of faxes from Umeå University Hospital. Ellen frowned as she leafed through the pile. It was clearly the medical record of somebody called Sara Lagerås. There was a short message for Fredrika, too.

‘Patient file herewith. Permission received from Sara Sebastiansson by phone. Regards, Sonja Lundin.’

Ellen was immediately curious.

Whatever had she missed by going home first last night?

Fredrika Bergman’s head was as heavy as lead when she woke up on Sunday morning. She reached wearily for the alarm clock. It wasn’t due to ring for another ten minutes. She burrowed her head as far into the pillow as it would go. Must rest, must rest.

Leaving the flat an hour later, she remembered she hadn’t devoted much attention to the phone message from the Adoption Centre. Not enough attention, at any rate. Fredrika excused this by concluding it was far too big a decision to make while she was caught up in such a weighty and far-reaching police investigation.

Fredrika focused on the job in hand. She drove straight round to Magdalena Gregersdotter’s and rang on the way to say she was coming. She stressed that she would need to speak to Magdalena alone.

A tall, dark-haired woman opened the door when she rang the bell.

‘Magdalena?’ asked Fredrika, realizing she hadn’t the faintest idea what Natalie’s mother looked like.

‘No,’ replied the woman, holding out a cool hand. ‘I’m Esther, her sister.’

Esther showed Fredrika into the family living room.

Neat and tidy, she thought. This family has no truck with any kind of messiness or disorder. A very appealing characteristic, in Fredrika’s world.

She stood alone in the middle of the living room. So many homes were opened to you when you rang at the door in your professional police capacity. What an enormous stock of trust her employer enjoyed in ordinary domestic settings. The thought almost made her head swim.

Then Magdalena Gregersdotter came into the room, and Fredrika was dragged back to reality.

It struck her that Magdalena was not at all the same kind of woman as Sara Sebastiansson. A woman who would never paint her toenails blue; you could tell by the way she carried herself, by the impression of integrity she gave, that her experiences were far removed from those of the more exuberant Sara. If she admitted to seeing through an abortion in her parents’ bathroom, Fredrika was going to have a bit of difficulty believing it.

‘Shall we sit down?’ she prompted gently.

At least she hoped it sounded gentle. She knew all too well how abrupt she could appear in certain situations.

They sat down. Magdalena perched on the edge of the sofa, Fredrika in a huge armchair. It was upholstered in a multicoloured fabric that contrasted starkly with the white walls. Fredrika couldn’t make up her mind if she thought it was attractive or disgusting.

‘Have you… got anywhere?’

The look in Magdalena’s eyes was plaintive.

‘I mean… in the investigation, that is. Have you found someone?’

Someone. The magic word that hounded every police officer. Find someone. Pin someone down. Hold someone responsible.

‘We haven’t identified an individual, but we’re working on a theory that could prove very fruitful for the investigation,’ Fredrika said.

Magdalena nodded and nodded. Good, good, good.

‘And it’s our theory that brings me here today,’ Fredrika went on, now she had been given a starting point. ‘I really only have one question for you,’ she said, catching the other woman’s dulled eye.

Fredrika deliberately paused to make sure she had Magdalena’s undivided attention.

‘It’s a terribly private question, and it feels grotesque to have to ask it, but…’

‘I’ll answer anything you ask,’ Magdalena broke in. ‘Anything at all.’

‘All right,’ said Fredrika, feeling oddly reassured. ‘All right.’

She took a deep breath.

‘I wonder whether you’ve ever had an abortion.’

Magdalena stared at her.

‘An abortion?’ she repeated.

Fredrika nodded in confirmation.

Magdalena did not drop her eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said huskily. ‘But it was a long time ago. Almost twenty years.’

Fredrika waited with bated breath.

‘It was just after I left home. I was with a man almost fifteen years older than me. He was married, but he promised to leave his wife for me.’

Magdalena gave a hollow laugh.

‘But he never did, of course. He went into a total panic when I told him I was pregnant. He shouted at me, told me to get rid of it straight away.’

Magdalena shook her head.

‘It wasn’t a lot to ask,’ she said curtly. ‘I got rid of it, of course. And I never saw him again.’

‘Where was the actual abortion done?’ asked Fredrika.

‘Here in Stockholm, at Söder hospital,’ Magdalena said quickly. ‘But it was so early in the pregnancy that I had to wait several weeks before I could have it done.’

Fredrika could see the other woman’s eyes clouding again.

‘It was all very weird. You see, the abortion didn’t work, but they didn’t realize. So I went home thinking the baby was gone, when in fact it was still inside me. A few days later I felt very ill, and miscarried. My body completed the abortion by rejecting the baby, as it were. I think that’s why I never managed to get pregnant again. The infection I got afterwards made me sterile.’

She fell silent. Fredrika swallowed and looked for the right words to formulate the vital question:

‘Where was the abortion completed?’ she asked in a low voice.

Magdalena looked troubled, as if she did not understand.

‘Where did you lose the baby?’ whispered Fredrika.

Magdalena’s face dissolved and she put her hand to her mouth, as if to smother a scream.

‘In the bathroom at Mum and Dad’s house,’ she wept. ‘I lost the baby where he left Natalie.’

Peder Rydh was in a bad mood when he got to work on Sunday. The only bright spot was that he’d managed to make Jimmy’s day when he rang him on the way in.

‘Posh cake soon, Pedda?’ cheered Jimmy on the phone.

‘Posh cake very soon,’ Peder agreed. ‘Maybe even tomorrow.’

Assuming there’s anything to celebrate by then, he added silently to himself.

Peder’s early morning grumpiness was not improved by the fact that Ellen still hadn’t been able to get the results from the files that he’d asked for.

‘That sort of thing takes time Peder; just be patient, please,’ she begged.

He couldn’t stand that phrase, but he had no grudge against Ellen and didn’t want to fall out with her. So he went back into his room before he said something he’d regret.

That night had not afforded him the same peace of mind as the one before. He had slept on the settee, and that had never happened before. He had briefly considered driving to Jimmy’s assisted living unit and bedding down there instead, until he realized how confused and anxious it would make his brother.

Lack of sleep made Peder less than rational, and he knew it. That was why he hadn’t exchanged a single word with Ylva before he left home that morning, and had started his working day with two big cups of coffee.

He sat down at his computer and looked up a few things at random in various registers, but found the task beyond him. He didn’t have full access to the files, and there were some to which he had no access at all.

He opened his filing cabinet and got out all the material he had amassed. He repeated the phrases they had all been trotting out in recent days. What do we know? What don’t we know? And what do we definitely need to know to solve this case?

They thought they knew why: the women were being punished because they had once had abortions. That fitted with the words ‘women who don’t love all children equally are not to have any at all’. To begin with, Peder had interpreted the phrase to mean that the man somehow wanted to punish all women who didn’t literally love all children equally, but now he knew that to be wrong.

What the team did not know, however, was how the man selected these women from among all those in Sweden who had had abortions and then gone on to have children. Could the murderer actually be the father of the ‘rejected’ children? Peder didn’t think it very likely. The murderer was, or had been, on the margins of the women’s lives when they had their abortions. So he could be a doctor, for example. Unless he came across their names later, in old case notes or something like that. In that case, he might not even have known them at the time of the abortions.

Peder sighed. There was an almost infinite number of alternatives to choose from.

He returned doggedly to his notes.

There were several indications that the man they were looking for could be linked in some way to a medical setting, like a hospital. There were the traces of talc from hospital gloves; there were the drugs to which he seemed to have access. Sedatives, but also more lethal substances.

Peder reflected. The drugs weren’t that uncommon in themselves. They were no doubt to be found in every hospital in Sweden. But not all hospitals had staff members who had served sentences for serious crimes of violence. Was that sort of thing checked up on? And if it was, could the man they were looking for have been working in a hospital under a false identity?

Peder doubted it. Surely hospitals kept tabs on that kind of thing? Unless of course the change of name had been done entirely legally.

Peder shuffled his facts this way and that. All the while, the phrase ‘There must be a way of checking this’ was echoing in his head. It became a mantra, a life-buoy to cling on to. Somewhere out there was the man they were looking for. All they had to do was find him…

Peder had no idea how long he had been sitting there, deep in thought, when Fredrika rang to confirm what they had suspected, namely that Magdalena Gregersdotter had also had an abortion years ago. For Peder, the link to the bathroom in Bromma was both tragic and fascinating.

Half an hour later, Fredrika walked into his room. She looked different, in jeans and a cord jacket, with a sleeveless top underneath. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a tight ponytail and she had scarcely any make-up on. Peder was surprised to find how pretty he thought she looked.

‘Have you got time?’ asked Fredrika.

‘Sure,’ he replied.

Fredrika sat down on the other side of the desk. She had a sheaf of papers in her hand.

‘I’ve had the women’s hospital records faxed over,’ she said, brandishing the papers. ‘From the time of their abortions.’

Peder felt reinvigorated.

‘You think the murderer works at a hospital, too?’

‘I think the murderer works, or worked, in some part of the healthcare system,’ Fredrika said guardedly. ‘And I think that’s where the women might have met him. They didn’t necessarily meet him in person, but I still tend to think they did. And I think the reason they don’t remember him today is that his role in their treatment was a very minor one.’

‘A man on the margins,’ Peder mumbled.

‘Just so,’ said Fredrika.

She tossed half the pile of paper onto Peder’s desk.

‘Shall we do this together, while you’re waiting for Ellen to get you your results? Who knows, maybe it could be the shortcut we’ve been looking for.’

It was getting hotter and hotter in Ellen’s office. She could feel her deodorant evaporating and the sweat prickling her skin. She knew this was yet another sign that she was nervous. She always sweated at times like that.

Why had she still heard nothing from Carl? And why had she decided to wait until the evening before she started ringing the hospitals? It felt an indescribably long time away.

Ellen was so anxious she was close to tears. What had really happened? She touched the bouquet of flowers Carl had sent her a few days before. She had so much love to give; why did he have to make it so hard?

My emotions are all over the place, thought Ellen, smiling at what she was finding harder and harder to see as a coincidence.

Then she felt her anxiety and dejection turning to sheer frustration. Not hearing from Carl was one thing, but why weren’t the children answering her texts? Didn’t they realize she’d be worried?

It was late morning, so she was sure they wouldn’t still be asleep. She lifted the receiver of her desk phone and tried ringing the landline instead. She must have let it ring twenty times, but there was no answer.

Anxiety gnawed inside her. The children certainly wouldn’t be asleep at eleven in the morning, but they could hardly have gone out, either. Or was she so stressed she’d forgotten one of their activities? Some gym display or football training session?

Ellen tried to work for a while. She was still waiting for Peder’s results. After a while she rang home again. Still no answer. She rang both children’s mobiles. Neither answered.

Ellen sat silently at her desk. She was worried about the children. She was worried that Carl hadn’t been in touch. She looked at the flowers on her desk. She thought of all the confidences she and Carl had exchanged. She remembered him saying that she was so important to him. That she gave him ‘everything he needed’.

Then Ellen realized how everything fitted together. Suddenly she wasn’t worried or irritated any more. She was terror-stricken.

Alex Recht barely had time to hang up before Peder and Fredrika came into his room and lined up in front of his desk. Like two schoolchildren. Alex smiled to himself.

‘I assume you two have heard the good news?’

Peder and Fredrika looked at each other.

‘That we’ve got him?’ Alex clarified.

Fredrika and Peder both stared at him.

‘But how’s that possible?’ exclaimed Fredrika.

‘Simple,’ Alex said delightedly. ‘He tried to take a flight from Copenhagen to Thailand and was stopped at passport control. We were just in time getting Interpol on side, to block his passport.’

‘Sorry, but who are you talking about?’ asked a confused Peder.

Alex frowned.

‘Gabriel Sebastiansson, who else?’

A heavy sigh escaped Fredrika and she was obliged to sink into Alex’s visitor’s chair.

‘We thought you meant the murderer,’ she said under her breath.

‘No, no,’ Alex said irascibly. ‘We’ve scarcely even identified him yet.’

Peder and Fredrika exchanged looks again.

‘Well, we might have,’ said Peder.

Alex gestured to him to take the other chair.

Fredrika was about to say something when Ellen came rushing in.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a choked voice, ‘but I’ve got to go home for a little while. I’ll be back soon.’

‘What’s happened?’ asked Alex, concerned. ‘We really do need you here just now…’

‘I know,’ sighed Ellen, ‘but the children aren’t answering any of the phones and they’re not used to being left on their own at home. I rang their dad as well, and friends they sometimes go to. Nobody’s seen them. I just want to pop home and check everything’s all right. And give them a good telling off for not answering when their poor, worried mum rings.’

‘Okay, but hurry back,’ said Alex.

Alex had raised children of his own. He would have done exactly the same thing in Ellen’s place. And he would most certainly have told them off. In no uncertain terms.

‘Tell them you’ll send me round next time,’ he called after her.

Then he turned his attention back to Fredrika and Peder.

‘We think he’s a psychologist, just like he told Nora and Jelena,’ Fredrika began eagerly, her eyes gleaming.

‘And we think it was his work as a psychologist that brought him into contact with the women whose children have been murdered,’ Peder went on.

Alex hoped they weren’t going to carry on with this double act. It would only end up confusing him.

‘It’s standard procedure, you see, for women to be offered counselling when they have an abortion,’ Fredrika explained. ‘And we’ve found entries in both women’s hospital notes saying they accepted the offer.’

Peder flicked through the sheets of paper he was holding.

‘According to her file, Magdalena Gregersdotter had a session with a psychology student who was on a placement at Söder Hospital at the time. Because of the trauma that resulted from the complications she had after the abortion, she also saw a fully qualified psychologist later on. But initially, when they thought the abortion had gone to plan, she spoke to a youngish guy who was still in training. According to her notes, his name was David Stenman.

Alex frowned. David?

‘Sara Sebastiansson’s abortion was done some years later, in Umeå. She had a counselling session, too,’ reported Fredrika. ‘According to her file, she saw a psychologist, but unfortunately there’s no name, just some initials: DS. I rang Umeå Hospital and they confirmed it was the same person.’

Alex looked from one to the other.

‘Did Ellen have time to give you the list of potentially interesting people from our own files?’ he asked Peder.

‘No,’ said Peder. ‘And we’ve looked up David Stenman in the National Registration Service records, and there’s nobody of that name.’

‘But we did find he had a criminal record,’ Fredrika put in. ‘He was sentenced to psychiatric care in early 2000 for arson, and released last autumn. There were extenuating circumstances: the person who died in the fire was his grandmother, who apparently abused him dreadfully when he was growing up in her care. For example: she used to burn him with matches to punish him if he’d done something stupid.’

‘And now he’s punishing others the same way,’ Alex said quietly.

‘Yes,’ responded Peder. ‘There are various other interesting details. Such as the fact that he was never meant to be born. His mother was an addict and tried to abort him herself with a knitting needle.’

‘Hence his hatred of women who allow themselves the luxury of choosing and thus – in our murderer’s eyes – commit a sin,’ Alex said matter-of-factly, and leant across the desk. ‘But if you found he had a criminal record, you must presumably have found his personal ID number and been able to check it against the registration records? Perhaps he’s changed his name?’

‘That was exactly what he did on his release,’ said Fredrika, putting a computer print-out in front of Alex.

‘He changed his name to Aron Steen. According to the National Registration Service records, he’s registered at an address in Midsommarkransen. And here’s an old passport photo, too.’

Fredrika put another sheet of paper on the desk.

Alex felt his heart pounding as he scrutinized the photograph of a rather distinguished-looking man.

‘What do you say then, Alex?’ asked Peder uneasily.

‘I say we’ve bloody well found our murderer,’ Alex replied grimly.

He clapped his hands.

‘Right,’ he said firmly. ‘Here’s how I suggest we proceed. Peder, you contact our friends in the emergency response unit. I want them to go to that address straight away and bring him in. With any luck, he may not have realized how warm we’re getting and not had time to go underground.’

Alex cleared his throat and went on.

‘Gather all the information about this bloke you possibly can on a Sunday. Talk to Magdalena and Sara again if you need to. Ask them if they remember him. It’s vital to be thorough. We mustn’t leave any stone unturned here. We need to chart every step he’s taken since they let him out. And don’t forget to report to the examining magistrate asap. Get hold of the poor bugger who’s on call today. He’s going to have plenty to do today. And go through the list as soon as you get it from Ellen. I don’t want to exclude the possibility that it’s someone else we’ve got on our files.’

Fredrika and Peder nodded eagerly, hardly able to contain themselves. Even Fredrika had been swept up in the excitement this time.

‘We’ve managed to locate his probation officer,’ she said. ‘Our friend Aron Steen’s been behaving impeccably since his release, and he’s even managed to find a job. With a cleaning company. It wouldn’t surprise me if that company happened to have had a contract with a hospital these past six months. Then we’d know where he got hold of the drugs and the surgical gloves.’

Fredrika was smiling as she spoke. Her voice was insistent, her body language full of pent-up energy.

She’s got it in her, thought Alex. I was wrong. And so was she. She’s deluding herself when she says she hasn’t got the hunger for it.

They heard quick footsteps in the corridor outside. Ellen stuck a flushed face round his door.

‘I’ll forget my own head next,’ she said, clearly under pressure. ‘Left the car keys in my room.’

She stopped when she saw their exhilarated expressions.

‘What’s happened?’

The question made them all start to laugh. It was the laughter of relief, Alex noted.

‘We think we’ve got him, Ellen,’ he said with a grin.

‘Are you sure,’ asked Ellen, blanching.

‘Well,’ said Alex. ‘You can never be a hundred per cent sure, but we’re as sure as we can be at this stage.’

He pushed the sheet of paper with the print-out of the passport photo across the desk to her.

‘Let me introduce…’ he began, but then stalled. ‘What was this joker’s name again?’ he asked irritably.

Fredrika and Peder smiled.

‘Well, if you’re not going to listen to what we tell you, we’d better start reporting to some other boss,’ sighed Peder with a flamboyant sweep of his hands.

None of them noticed how Ellen reacted as she took two steps towards the desk and stared at the man in the photo. None of them noticed her cheeks turning pink and her attempts to blink away the tears that were blurring her vision. But they all heard her murmur:

‘Thank you God.’

They all fell silent.

She pointed a trembling finger at the picture.

‘I thought for a while it was… I thought it might be the man I was…’

She gave a laugh.

‘What daft ideas we get into our heads sometimes,’ she said with a sob, smiling through her tears.

Then her mobile rang. Her son was gabbling at the other end, his voice strained.

‘Mum, you’ve got to come home right now.’

‘What’s happened, love?’ asked Ellen, still with the smile on her lips.

‘Mum, please come now,’ her son repeated nervously. ‘He says you’ve got to come now. Come home as quickly as you can. He doesn’t seem very well at all.’

It came like a bolt from the blue when the last child disappeared. They got the news just as they were making final preparations for the swoop on Aron Steen.

Alex charged out into the corridor and found Fredrika and Peder in the Den, the latter in the middle of strapping on a bulletproof vest. Fredrika was poring over some papers, frowning.

‘He’s taken another child,’ Alex said. ‘A four-year-old boy’s gone missing from a children’s playground in Midsommarkransen, near where Steen lives, half an hour ago. The parents rang in and said they’d found his clothes and what looked like tufts of his hair left behind a tree on the edge of the playground.’

‘But we’ve got his place under surveillance,’ exclaimed Peder. ‘They reported seeing him through the window of the flat, and they haven’t seen him come out.’

‘Well he must have done,’ said Alex tersely, ‘because another kid’s been snatched.’

‘Well he can’t have got very far,’ said Fredrika, fiddling with a piece of paper in front of her.

‘No, we don’t think he can,’ Alex said urgently. ‘And this time he must have been in a real fucking hurry. The clothes were just chucked down in a heap and he hadn’t scalped the boy but just chopped off a few chunks of hair at random.’

‘He knows we’re on his tail,’ said Peder resolutely, fixing his service pistol to his belt.

Fredrika looked askance at the gun but said nothing.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

‘We carry out the operation as planned,’ Alex said firmly. ‘We need to get into the flat and see if we can pick up any leads to where he might have taken the boy. But he won’t get far, as I say. We’ve got roadblocks on all routes out of town and a nationwide alert’s gone out for him.’

Fredrika looked troubled.

‘I assume we’re interviewing the boy’s parents?’ she said. ‘About the background to the abduction, I mean.’

‘Of course,’ said Alex. ‘We’ve got a couple of detectives round there now. This time we know what we’re looking for. The mother will need to be asked where the final stage of her abortion took place, and then we’ll have to be there when he shows up with the child.’

Fredrika nodded, but her brow remained furrowed.

‘If it’s not already too late. If he’s in as much of a hurry as he seemed to be in the playground, the boy could already be dead. We can’t rule it out.’

Alex swallowed hard.

No,’ he said. ‘No, of course we can’t. But we can work as hard as hell to prevent it being that way.’

Peder was thinking.

‘But if we assume he knows we’re looking for him?’ he began tentatively.

‘Yes?’

‘Either he’s as off his head as we thought, in which case he’ll cut it short with the kid, even though the whole thing’s a lot less tidy than he planned it to be. Or parts of him are still rational in spite of everything, in which case he won’t dispose of the boy at the very start.’

‘But use him to bargain for his freedom,’ Alex added.

‘Exactly,’ said Peder.

The Den went very quiet.

‘Has anybody heard how Ellen got on, by the way?’ asked Fredrika.

Alex shook his head.

‘She was adamant she wanted to go home on her own, said she’d be fine, but I sent a patrol car round anyway. There was something about that story that didn’t feel right.’

Enthusiastic rays of sunlight were finding their way into the Den, spreading heat. Little balls of fluff went rolling across the floor. The air conditioning had spluttered into life.

Rapid steps were approaching. A young DC came rushing in.

‘The surveillance team at Steen’s place just rang,’ he blurted. ‘He’s back home again.’

‘Who’s back home again?’ asked Alex in irritation.

‘Aron Steen. He’s just got back to his flat.’

‘What about the kid?’ asked Peder.

‘He was carrying him naked in his arms. As if he knew we were watching but didn’t care.’

For a few short hours, Ellen had fully believed the reason she hadn’t heard from Carl was quite simply that he was the child murderer they were hunting. And that the reason her children weren’t answering the phone was that Carl had kidnapped them.

But it wasn’t true.

Ellen couldn’t fathom how she’d let her private and professional lives get entangled to that extent. When had she lost control of her own imagination? When had work become such a major part of her existence that she couldn’t distinguish it from other important parts any more?

I’ve really got to think this through, Ellen decided. I need to work out what’s truly important to me.

The children hadn’t answered the phone because they’d been round at a neighbour’s enjoying a nice brunch. And forgotten the home phone lines. It was no stranger than that.

But as for Carl.

Ellen peered sideways at him as she sat there on her living room floor. The children had immediately retreated to their rooms when she got home.

‘He was sitting on the front steps when we got back from brunch,’ her daughter had told her, nodding towards Carl who was sitting on the bottom step with his legs stretched straight out in front of him. ‘You’d better talk to him. He seems totally out of it.’

Ellen was initially dubious.

Should she let him into her home?

A patrol car went slowly past her house and pulled up.

Ellen invited Carl in, but left the front door open. The patrol car waited.

The first thing Carl did was to collapse onto Ellen’s old chesterfield sofa and burst into tears. Ellen decided to sit on the floor at a slight distance. And that’s the way they had been ever since.

Life was so peculiarly unpredictable. Who could possibly have foreseen that this somewhat rigid and self-controlled man, who always chose his words carefully and always seemed so strong, could break down in such an unconstrained way? Since Ellen had no words for occasions like this, she remained mute. She could hear her son talking on the phone through his closed bedroom door, and her daughter getting out her guitar.

‘I’m married.’

Ellen jumped as Carl broke the silence.

‘I’m married,’ he said again.

‘But…,’ began Ellen.

‘I told you I was single, but I lied. I’ve been married to the same woman for over fifteen years, and we’ve got two children. We’ve a house in Borås.’

Ellen slowly shook her head.

A knock on the open front door interrupted them.

A uniformed police officer came into the living room.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

Ellen nodded.

‘Because if it is, we’ll be moving on,’ the policeman said hesitantly.

‘Everything’s fine,’ she said in a monotone. ‘Everything’s absolutely fine.’

The policeman left, the front door closed behind him. Her daughter played the opening chords of ‘Layla’; her son gave a loud, shrill laugh into his phone.

How remarkable that everything just carried on as if nothing had happened.

‘That was why I didn’t want to meet your family, Ellen,’ Carl said in a softer voice.

He blew his nose on a handkerchief with his initials embroidered on it. Was it his wife who was so handy with the needle?

‘I was desperately unsure about this,’ he sighed. ‘About us. What it was. What we had. What it could turn into. And whether I was brave enough.’

Ellen’s chest rose and fell as she tried to breathe without the air getting stuck anywhere on the way.

‘Brave enough to do what?’ she asked in a low voice. ‘Brave enough to do what?’

‘To do what I’ve just done. Leave my family.’

Ellen remembered afterwards that she had never lost eye contact with him in the course of the conversation.

Carl began to speak faster.

‘I know I’ve done everything wrong; I know I’ve behaved badly. And I realize you must have wondered where I’d got to when I didn’t answer your calls. But I’ve still got to ask…’

Silence again. Silence beyond Eric Clapton on guitar and hoots of laughter into a telephone.

‘I’ve still got to ask, whether you think… Whether you think it could be the two of us.’

Ellen met his dark eyes. For a brief moment she saw him the way she had seen him when they first met. Life-affirming and whole.

But that had been then. What could become of what she saw ahead of her now?

‘I don’t know, Carl,’ she whispered. I just don’t know.’

The emergency response squad found the door of the flat ajar when they got to Aron Steen’s flat. Alex and Peder held back, firearms at the ready. They had made Fredrika stay at HQ. Alex had no intention of being responsible for unarmed, civilian personnel in a critical situation like this.

‘Aron Steen,’ Alex shouted in a commanding voice.

No answer.

The officers kicked the door back on its hinges.

No one to the right, no one to the left.

The squad advanced into the flat.

A dark hall. Dark, undecorated walls.

Alex was aware of a pungent smell assaulting his nostrils.

Petrol. The flat stank of petrol.

They found him in the kitchen. He was sitting on a kitchen chair with the drugged and unconscious child in his arms, soaked in petrol, with a lighter in his hand.

Subdued voices among the officers. ‘Take it easy’ and ‘Hold it right there’ and ‘Keep back; there’s petrol all over the floor.’

They did not enter the kitchen.

Nor did Alex.

But he put away his gun and stood there, balancing on the threshold that marked the end of the hall and the start of the kitchen. Where Alex’s field of play ended and Aron Steen’s began.

They regarded each other. Aron Steen smiled a placid smile.

‘So we meet at last, Alexander,’ he said, breaking the tense silence.

‘Yes, we do,’ Alex said quietly.

Aron shifted the child slightly on his knee. The squad monitored his every movement. Aron smiled again.

‘I really think we ought to be able to sort this out without a lot of unnecessary violence,’ he said, his head on one side. ‘Can you ask your companions to wait in the hall, Alex? So we can talk in peace.’

It was the voice of a teacher. He was talking to Alex as if he were a child, a pupil. Alex felt a surge of anger. Aron Steen had nothing to teach him. That would have to be made very clear to him.

Peder was suddenly at Alex’s shoulder. He had his gun in his hand. Alex waved him away and signalled to the men behind him to fall back into the corridor and hall. They would still have a line of sight from there, but be less obtrusive.

Aron watched them. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were ablaze.

‘There’s something special about fire, isn’t there?’ he whispered, fingering the lighter. ‘I learnt that at a very young age.’

Alex held off. Later, he would wonder why.

Aron looked at Alex and the men behind him.

‘I’ll exchange the boy for free passage out of the country.’

Alex gave a slow nod.

‘Okay.’

‘This is how it’s going to work,’ Aron Steen went on in a smooth voice. ‘The boy and I are going to leave the flat and get into a car and drive away. You are not going to follow us. Once I’ve gone far enough, I’ll ring and tell you where to find the boy.’

Sunbeams were dancing on the window ledge behind Aron and the boy. Alex let his eyes follow them and then looked back at Aron.

‘No,’ he said.

Aron looked startled.

‘No?’ he repeated.

‘No,’ said Alex. ‘The boy’s not leaving the flat.’

‘Then he’s going to die,’ Aron said calmly.

‘He’ll do that if he goes with you, too,’ countered Alex in the same calm tone as Alex. ‘That’s why we can’t let you take him with you.’

Aron seemed exasperated.

‘But why should I kill him? I told you, I want to exchange him for free passage.’

‘And I said okay,’ replied Alex. ‘But the exchange happens here. You give me the boy and then we leave the flat.’

Aron laughed out loud and then got up so abruptly from the kitchen chair that Alex took an involuntary step backwards. The squad members moved forward from the hall, then stopped and waited. An utterly absurd sense of security beamed through Alex’s body as he felt the kinetic energy behind him. As if their presence made any difference to the situation.

‘I’ve shown you how I work, haven’t I?’ asked Aron, raising his voice. ‘I’ve shown you the precision I apply to my mission?’

Alex heard the raised voice and felt very concerned. It was crucial for everyone’s safety that things did not escalate.

‘We’ve noted your way of working,’ he said softly. ‘And we’re very impressed, of course.’

‘Don’t try to flatter me,’ Aron hissed.

But it worked.

Aron sat down again. The child was limp and heavy, and the petrol had made him quite slippery. Alex could see a little trickle under the boy’s nose. Aron shifted to get a better grip.

Alex could feel the smell of the petrol making his own head heavy.

He opened his mouth to say something, but Aron got there first.

‘The child and I leave the flat together, otherwise there’s no deal,’ he said in a low voice.

‘We can negotiate,’ said Alex, squatting down on his heels. ‘We’re both completely clear what we want to achieve; I want the boy and you want your freedom.’

Alex threw his arms wide in a gesture of appeal.

‘We should be able to come to some agreement, shouldn’t we?’

‘We certainly should,’ Aron said placidly.

There was a moment’s silence. A cloud moved across the sun. The flat was cast into shadow.

‘But the boy can’t leave the flat?’ Aron said eventually.

Alex shook his head.

‘No, he can’t.’

He scanned the room. The only way out of it was through the door where Alex was standing. An urgent sense of anxiety found its way through the petrol fumes and gripped him. Why wasn’t Aron sitting in the living room with the boy? There was an unguarded balcony door in there to escape through. Why had he backed himself into a corner?

Aron provided the answer to Alex’s unspoken question.

‘Just as I thought,’ Aron said with a smile. ‘You never had any intention of letting me leave the flat.’

Before Alex could reply, the lighter flared, and in a second the whole kitchen was on fire.