Saga came racing after her little brother.
‘Daddy’s reading us a story,’ she said.
Fredrika bent down, put an arm around her and kissed her cheek.
‘Lovely,’ she said.
Saga took her hand, pulling Fredrika towards her bedroom.
Spencer was sitting on his daughter’s bed with a book of fairy tales on his knee. He looked abandoned. His silver-grey hair was sticking up, and his shirt was creased.
A mature parent of two small children.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hi yourself,’ he said, looking up.
They smiled at one another.
She moved towards the bed, and Saga immediately scrambled up and onto Spencer’s lap. Fredrika put down her son, who crawled under his daddy’s arm. Fredrika joined them on the edge of the bed.
If I wasn’t around, would he be able to bring them up himself?
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten?’
It was only six thirty, but the children ate early.
‘We had macaroni and sausage an hour ago. There’s some left if you want it.’
She did. She got up and went into the kitchen, took out a plate and filled it with food from the pans on the hob. As she warmed it in the microwave, she allowed herself to reflect on the small things that they had lost since having children. There had been a time when they ate only delicacies and drank obscenely expensive wines when they got together. On the other hand, back then they had had nothing else apart from the food and wine.
If she was forced to lose her current life…
If someone took her children away…
Would she be able to replace them with a good cheese and a glass of fine wine?
She swallowed hard. Some things couldn’t be changed; it went against nature. These days she couldn’t care less what she ate, just as long as her family was alive and healthy.
She tried to make sense of all the images that had come crowding in during the day. The boys who had died, their grieving parents. And she still couldn’t shake off the feeling that they had overlooked something, that the material they had to work on was somehow too much and yet at the same time, too little.
We’re missing something, she thought again. Something fundamental and important. Something to do with the Eisenberg and Goldmann families. And the paper bags. The killer’s calling card. Suddenly Fredrika was convinced that there would be more victims. She just didn’t know when.
Alex wasn’t really a fan of unwritten rules, particularly as they usually passed him by and made him appear clumsy and insensitive. Which he wasn’t. But there was one rule that he always observed to the letter: the one that said he wasn’t allowed to talk about work at home if the case involved children or young people who had died or been mistreated.
The background to this rule was both simple and painful. That was how he and Diana had met; he had been investigating her daughter’s disappearance. He had promised Diana that he would never stop looking, that he would make sure she got her daughter back. Which she did. But it took three years before he found the place where her killer had laid her to rest.
So Alex didn’t mention the two boys when he got home.
‘Have you had a good day?’ Diana said as they stood in the kitchen with a glass of wine.
‘Absolutely,’ Alex said, taking a sip.
She stroked his arm.
‘Could you make a salad?’
‘Of course.’
If his children could see him now… Over all the years he had been married to their mother, they had never seen him make a salad. Or anything else, for that matter. Lena had taken care of all the cooking, along with everything else in the household.
At an early stage Diana had made it clear that she didn’t want things to be that way. She wanted them to build and look after their home together. They had never argued about it; he had simply fallen in with her wishes. He was still embarrassed to think about how he had let Lena fight to keep the home and family running smoothly while he worked.
‘It doesn’t matter whether you get home at six o’clock or ten o’clock,’ Diana had said. ‘I’ll wait for you, and we’ll eat when you get in. And it will be a meal that we have prepared together.’
Simple and fair. A routine he had grown to love.
But the boys with the paper bags over their heads refused to leave him in peace. They were in his thoughts as he washed rocket leaves and sliced tomatoes.
Just before he left work he had received the news he had been dreading. The news he didn’t want to hear.
The boys had been shot with the same gun as the preschool teacher. Therefore there was an undeniable connection between the two cases.
And outside the snow began to fall once more.
CONCLUSION: FRAGMENT III
It is time to remove the bodies. The child who is still alive has already been taken to Karolinska Hospital in Solna, but her mother refused to go with her.
‘She won’t need me until she comes round,’ was all she said when someone pointed out that there was room for her in the ambulance if she wanted to go with her daughter.
The inspector is in hell.
The air in the apartment is thin, lacking in oxygen, and he has to fight for every breath.
Eventually he goes over and opens the bedroom window.
The dead are placed on trolleys, ready to be wheeled out of the room.
Then at last the woman moves; until now she has remained standing by the doorway as if she has been turned to stone.
Slowly she walks over to her husband and looks at his lifeless body.
‘He will never come back,’ she says.
It is impossible to tell whether this is a question or a statement. The inspector decides to act as if it is the former.
‘No, he won’t.’
The inspector watches as the woman processes what he has just said. But what can he see in her face?
Relief?
Of course not. Why would she be relieved because her husband is dead?
Then she turns to the child.
‘I will miss you until the day I die,’ she says.
She bends down and kisses the child’s forehead, then she straightens up and moves back a step.
The scene is so upsetting that the inspector doesn’t know what to do with himself.
And he cannot take his eyes off the violin. Music can have a healing power, but the inspector isn’t sure it will be enough in this case. Particularly if the child who has been taken to hospital dies.
If that happens, it will all be over.
When the trolleys have been wheeled out, he goes over to the woman who has been robbed of her family. He doesn’t touch her, but stands close.
‘How can I help you?’ he says. ‘If there’s anything at all… I’ll do whatever you ask.’
Her gaze is fixed on something outside the bedroom window.
‘Thank you, but I don’t need anything.’
And so they stand there. All around them the CSIs work silently and with total concentration. You get the feeling that if they interrupted their task for just one second, they would burst into tears. The inspector feels as if he is walking on brittle glass. One false move and the ground will collapse beneath his feet.
During his entire career, he has never known a greater tragedy. Never.
But that is not the worst thing.
The worst thing is that he doesn’t understand what has happened. Why the Paper Boy came to this particular address and took fresh victims.
He daren’t ask. Not right now.
He doesn’t need to; she tells him anyway.
‘You’re wondering why he came here,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s my fault.’
‘None of this is your fault.’
She nods slowly, and then he sees them. The tears. Welling up in her eyes and spilling over.
‘It’s my fault,’ she says again. ‘I have always known that I wouldn’t get away with what I did.’