Unwanted (28 page)

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.’

P
eder 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.’

F
redrika 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.