The police had thrown a ring of steel around Stockholm, and roadblocks were also set up outside the city. The media quickly ran the story as headline news, and the switchboard was inundated with calls from journalists demanding answers that Alex just didn’t have.
‘The parents,’ his colleague said. ‘Do they have an alibi?’
‘Obviously the Eisenbergs do, because they were talking to me and Fredrika when Polly disappeared. I don’t know about the Goldmanns yet.’
It was always the same when the situation was serious: they knew too little, had too many unanswered questions. Alex thought about the different impressions in the snow, on the roof and on Lovön. Small shoes and big shoes. On the same feet? The same gun had been used both times, after all.
He picked up his notes, took the lift down to the basement and walked into the interview room where Saul Goldmann was waiting. Daphne would be questioned up on the ground floor in a room with both curtains and a view, but not Saul. Alex wanted him to realise the gravity of the situation. Saul had given the impression of being quite cocky the last time they met; on this occasion, Alex was determined to make sure he had the upper hand.
‘Thank you for taking the time to come in.’
Saul Goldmann looked exhausted. A man who had lost too much in such a short period of time.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Needless to say we will do all we can to help you.’
But his eyes told a different story. His expression was wary, bordering on hostile.
Alex understood, to a certain extent. The last time they met, Saul had been on home turf, secure in his role as a victim. After the meeting with Carmen and Gideon, Alex was determined not to make the same mistake again. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel sorry for the parents, because he did. Immensely sorry. But as long as he was convinced they were withholding information, he had to be hard on them. He was the one who decided what the police needed to know in order to do their job – not the Eisenbergs or the Goldmanns.
He began with the most important question.
‘Where were you between one and two p.m. today?’
For a moment Alex thought he had misjudged the situation, and that Saul Goldmann was about to attack him. The other man was far more disturbed by the question than Alex had expected him to be.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘I mean exactly what I say, and nothing else. Please answer the question.’
‘Am I suspected of some crime? Do you think I’ve taken Polly? Is that why I’m here?’
Alex slowly put down his pen.
‘In less than a week, three children have gone missing from the Solomon Community here in Stockholm. Two of them have been found dead. One of them was your son. It’s my duty to find out what their close family and friends were doing when those children disappeared. Because however much I wish it wasn’t the case, the perpetrator is usually someone known to the child. So answer the bloody question!’
Adults who feel under pressure often start to behave like children. Alex had seen the phenomenon many times, yet he was still surprised when he saw Saul’s reaction. The man’s eyes shone with defiance.
What was it that he found so infuriating?
‘I was out for a walk. A circuit around Djurgården.’
The most classic of all walks in Stockholm.
‘With Daphne?’
‘Alone.’
‘Did you meet anyone you knew while you were out walking?’
‘No.’
‘Did you make or receive any phone calls?’
‘No.’
So he had no alibi.
That was why he was so angry. Because he was afraid. Afraid of looking like a suspect.
‘I’ve just lost my only child. I needed to be alone. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Alex moved on; he didn’t want to waste time on the issue of Saul’s alibi at this stage, so he pretended to let it go. It was clear that Saul was surprised. Alex sat calmly opposite him, waiting.
Eventually Saul broke the silence.
‘So was there anything else?’
Alex glanced at his watch. Wished the time wasn’t going so fast. Not just for his own sake, but mainly for Polly Eisenberg’s. Because in spite of all the roadblocks, all the officers who had been called in to work overtime, in spite of the fact that every media outlet in the country was following Polly’s disappearance, Alex had the horrible feeling that he was in the middle of a chain of events over which he had no influence whatsoever.
The chances of finding Polly alive weren’t just small, they were infinitesimal.
And sitting opposite Alex was a man who, like certain others, had chosen not to tell the police everything he knew.
A man who didn’t have an alibi.
That wasn’t enough to make him a suspect, of course. They had to understand the motive in order to find the perpetrator.
‘Yes,’ he said to Saul. ‘There was something else. I have several more questions. Let’s start with something that should be comparatively simple. Do you know a man by the name of Efraim Kiel?’
In the world of fairy tales, limitations were set only by the bounds of imagination, which appealed to Fredrika Bergman. The impossible became possible; the happy ending was obligatory. And as a reader she always had the option of setting the book aside if the story got too unpleasant.
Which was what her daughter did when Fredrika tried to read to her.
‘Yuck,’ she said, knocking the book out of her mother’s hands.
Fredrika picked it up, looked at the dark images. Saga was right. It was a dark and scary story, not the kind of thing she should be reading to a child who was only three.
Her thoughts turned to the tale of the Paper Boy. The story Gideon had grown up with, told with the aim of keeping the children at home in the evenings. In a country like Israel, there was probably good reason to frighten a child in that way. The problem was that the Paper Boy seemed to have come to life – but not in Israel, in Stockholm.
Fredrika had searched online, but no one seemed to have heard of him. Nothing had been written about him. Perhaps her lack of success was due to her inability to read Hebrew; her searches in English and Swedish got her nowhere.
But something told Fredrika that even if she had been able to speak Hebrew, she wouldn’t have found many hits. Carmen had heard of the Paper Boy through Gideon, when she was an adult; he hadn’t featured in her childhood.
The Paper Boy.
Fredrika shuddered. The very concept was too abstract to stimulate the imagination. Why boy and not man? The Paper Man would be more logical. Using a child to frighten a child was tasteless, and surely ineffective: who would be scared of someone called the Paper Boy?
Me. I was scared of everything when I was little.
Fredrika gazed at her daughter, who had already forgotten about the story and was playing with a car instead. A blue car that Spencer had bought for their son. In his rather conservative view of the world, little girls couldn’t possibly be interested in such things. She laughed quietly to herself. Spencer was a good man, in spite of his shortcomings. Almost perfect. And he was perfectly capable of backing down when he was wrong. If his daughter wanted to play with cars, that was fine.
Beyond the fairy stories and the fun lay her trip to Israel. Without Spencer. He wasn’t up to it, that was obvious. She hated the thought of travelling alone, even though it was only for a couple of days.
She tried to shake off her feeling of unease. What could go wrong in such a short time?
Everything. The cataclysmic changes don’t happen over a long period, but from one second to the next.
The sound of her mobile interrupted her thoughts.
‘Could we meet up before you go?’ Alex said.