He broke off his train of thought.
What the fuck was he doing?
He wasn’t going to ‘get anywhere’. He was no longer an investigator, he was head of security. It was time to get to grips with his new job, familiarise himself with his team. The general secretary had had a long conversation with him, explained how the community viewed Peder’s role. He had also explained how the security team worked and what their working routine was.
There was a knock on his door. The sound made him jump and shout ‘Come in’ rather too loudly.
The general secretary came in.
‘I’m extremely concerned,’ he said, closing the door behind him.
Peder listened.
‘Tell me honestly, do you think either of the dreadful crimes that have shaken our community over the past twenty-four hours could be motivated by anti-Semitism? Or could there really be completely different reasons behind them?’
It was a straight question, and it deserved a straight answer. Had Josephine or the two boys been killed because they were Jewish, or not?
‘I can’t tell you that,’ Peder said. ‘I don’t know enough.’
‘What do you think about the police’s main line of enquiry with regard to Josephine? The idea that the murder is linked to her boyfriend?’
Peder didn’t hesitate.
‘I think there’s a different explanation. But once again – I have too little information to draw any conclusions.’
The general secretary gazed at him.
‘In that case I hope you will come up with a way of acquiring more information, because many members of our community are terrified.’
Terrified?
‘Of what?’
‘They are terrified that they or their children are next in line to be executed. Because Josephine, Simon and Abraham were killed by a murderer who will return to our community to seek out further victims.’
So the boys were dead. Hunted down and shot. Alex Recht knew that he couldn’t do anything useful until he had the preliminary report from the forensic pathologist.
Which should tell him how the boys had been killed. And what they had been subjected to before they died.
He thought about the impressions their feet had left in the snow. How far could you run if you were ten years old, barefoot, frozen, and had been awake for hours on end? If you could trust the tracks in the snow, they had got quite a long way.
Alex tried to set aside his own emotional reaction to the case that had landed on his desk. Fredrika had mentioned Lilian Sebastiansson, a little girl who had gone missing from a train one summer’s day a few years ago. Several children had disappeared, and only one had survived, with severe burns. Alex would never forget, because he had been there. Seen the flames burst into life, raced towards the child to save him. His hands still bore the scars.
Was this something similar? Another bloody lunatic going after the youngest, the most vulnerable? Alex looked at the photographs from the edge of the golf course. A fractured pattern of footprints in the snow. Two boys lying on their backs, with paper bags on their heads.
Those fucking bags.
What did they mean?
If it hadn’t been for the faces drawn on them, Alex might have thought the bags were there simply to alleviate the murderer’s sense of regret, or whatever the hell you felt when you had killed two children.
But the faces.
Eyes, nose, mouth. A large mouth. Impossible to tell if it was laughing or screaming.
The paper bags worried him, because they made the whole thing even more sick. And if it was sick, then it was also irrational, which meant there was no way of knowing what to expect.
A ghostly voice whispered in Alex’s ear.
Serial killer.
Were they dealing with a serial killer? If so, there would be more victims. With paper bags pulled over their heads.
But serial killers were unusual. Not even unusual, to be honest. They were virtually non-existent. Not in real life, anyway.
Alex stared at the material in front of him. What did they know, and what could they rule out? To begin with, the gun put paid to the idea that the whole thing could have been a game that had gone wrong. So did the fact that the boys had been missing for a whole night before they died. Nor did it seem like a kidnapping that had gone wrong; the parents hadn’t been contacted. Unless of course they had been contacted, but hadn’t informed the police.
But why would that happen?
Which left two alternatives.
Perhaps the whole thing was a terrible coincidence. The boys had somehow bumped into a killer who had selected his victims on a whim, which meant that any child could have been abducted.
Or those two boys had been deliberately chosen. This seemed more likely to Alex; there was some kind of personal motivation, either directed at the boys themselves, or with the aim of punishing someone else. Their parents, for example.
He dug out his notes from the conversation with Abraham’s friend; Abraham had told him he was getting a lift to his tennis lesson. They were assuming that the killer had picked Abraham up on the street, but it was possible that something had gone wrong, and that Abraham and Simon had been dropped off somewhere else altogether, not outside the tennis centre. And that the person who killed them had picked them up from wherever that might be.
They had so little concrete information.
Alex glanced at his watch. By now the parents would have been informed; he and Fredrika weren’t due to see them until the following day. This would give them more time to formulate the right questions.
He went back to the issue of how well Abraham must have known the driver to jump into that car. It would simplify matters considerably if the boys had been picked up by an acquaintance, because that would almost guarantee that their parents also knew that person.
A teacher, perhaps, or a family friend.
Or one of the parents.
That was another key piece of the puzzle: they needed to check whether all the parents had an alibi for the time when the boys went missing.
Alex’s phone rang, and he felt something akin to relief. He was in danger of getting lost in the labyrinth of his thoughts.
It was Peder Rydh.
‘Am I disturbing you? Have you got five minutes?’
He sounded hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea or not.
‘Sure,’ Alex said.
‘Are you still investigating the murder of the teacher at the Solomon school?’
So Peder wanted information.
‘No, it’s been passed on to the National Crime Unit.’
‘Right. To the team dealing with hate crime?’
‘To Organised Crime.’
Silence.
‘You don’t think you’re jumping to conclusions, just because her partner has a criminal record?’ Peder said eventually.
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘In the light of the fact that the boys have now been found dead, I’m just wondering if we can rule out the idea that there might be a connection.’
Had they ruled it out? Alex wasn’t sure. They knew too little; they hadn’t even got details of the murder weapons yet.
‘We’re not ruling anything out,’ he said. ‘But we need more concrete evidence before we can link the two. Both the MO and the choice of victim are very different; there doesn’t have to be a connection.’
‘It depends on your point of view,’ Peder said. ‘You could say there are several similarities between the two incidents. The boys were abducted on the day Josephine was shot. All three were members of the Solomon Community. They were all part of the Solomon school. And all three were shot dead.’
Alex was all too familiar with the energy in Peder’s voice. The hunger, the desire to be right.
‘So you think we’re looking at a hate crime in both cases?’ he asked, sounding angrier than he had intended. ‘I think that’s one hell of a long shot.’