Unwanted (5 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so she did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He cleared his throat.

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

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

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

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

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

Alex turned to Peder.

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

Peder sighed and flicked through his notebook.

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