Unwanted (33 page)

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.’

F
redrika 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.