Carmen was a shadow of the woman Fredrika had met before.
Pale and gaunt.
She had never seen a more weary expression.
‘How are you feeling?’ Fredrika asked when she had sat down.
Carmen didn’t answer immediately. This isn’t going to work, Fredrika thought. We’re going to have to ring the emergency psychiatric service and take her over there.
‘Terrible,’ Carmen said. ‘I feel terrible.’
‘We understand that, but as I’m sure you realise, we have questions to which we need answers. Right away.’
Silence.
‘When did you find Gideon?’
‘When I got home from work. I was only in the office for a few hours. I couldn’t stay there. People just sat there staring at me; they didn’t know what to say.’
‘A lot of people find it difficult to deal with another person’s grief,’ Fredrika said. ‘Which means they sit and stare instead. What time did you get home?’
‘Five o’clock.’
Which meant she had been alone with the body for over two hours.
‘You didn’t try to get him down? To save him?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I could see that he was dead. I’ve seen dead bodies before.’
‘So what did you do?’
Carmen ran a hand through her hair. She looked as if she was about to burst out crying, but had run out of tears.
‘I don’t really remember,’ she said. ‘I went and sat on the sofa. Looked at him. Kept him company.’
Fredrika was edging her way forward, unsure of how to move on.
‘Were you surprised when you found him?’
‘Not really. Gideon hasn’t been feeling too good. He never has, to be honest. You know what happened to him when he was a child?’
Fredrika nodded, and Carmen looked relieved. No doubt she was glad to be spared the ordeal of putting the indescribable into words.
‘I don’t think he was ever normal after that. When we met I didn’t notice it at first, and we had so much in common. Fun. We had fun. I saw the scars when he took off his clothes, of course; there were so many of them, like the runs in an anthill, all over his skin. But he said he was okay, he told me he’d had help. It wasn’t until we had children that he changed.’
‘In what way?’
‘He suffered from periods of depression. He was never really happy; he always seemed anxious and miserable. Overprotective. He got worse and worse, in spite of the fact that we were living in Sweden, where I thought we could feel perfectly safe.’
Fredrika remembered what Saul Goldmann had said, according to Alex: that Gideon had shown an interest in young boys.
‘You didn’t suspect that Gideon had been damaged in other ways by what had happened to him – psychologically, I mean?’
Carmen looked blank, then she got angry.
‘I know what you’re talking about. There were rumours that he liked little boys, but none of that was true. It was just something Saul spread around. He’s the very antithesis of a good friend. He’s a complete bastard.’
‘Why would Saul say such a thing if he didn’t believe it was true?’
‘How should I know? To turn the spotlight on someone else, perhaps. A lot of people looked at Saul and wondered if he had emerged unscathed from his own childhood, or if he was as sick as his father. But there was nothing wrong with Gideon, not in that way. That wasn’t what Saul’s father subjected him to.’
Fredrika decided to change the subject.
‘Do you know where Gideon was when the boys went missing?’
Once more Carmen was silent.
‘I know he said he was at the bank,’ she said after a little while. ‘But he wasn’t.’
‘No?’
‘No, he’d gone for a walk.’
Fredrika and Alex looked at one another.
Gone for a walk?
‘At least that’s what he told me,’ Carmen whispered. ‘And I believed him, because he often did that to shake off a migraine. But we didn’t think you would understand, or believe him, so we agreed to say he’d been at the bank as arranged.’
Carmen took a sip of water from the glass in front of her.
Alex stepped in.
‘Carmen, do you know where Polly is?’
She gave a start.
‘Polly? No, how… Why are you asking me that? Polly’s missing!’
Indeed she is.
‘Perhaps you were afraid of losing her too,’ Fredrika said. ‘So you hid her away?’
Carmen shook her head so violently that Fredrika was afraid she might hurt herself.
‘No, no, no! No, I don’t know where my Polly is!’
She started crying, quietly at first, then louder and louder. Until the crying became a scream, filling the entire room.
‘Please, help me. Help me to get my daughter back. Because I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her too.’
Fredrika and Alex exchanged despairing glances. They were in agreement.
Carmen didn’t know where Polly was.
And nor did they.
CONCLUSION
It wasn’t the coldest evening he had ever experienced, but it was the longest. He was hidden in the shadows behind the entrance to the underground station, which gave him a clear view of the stairs he was watching. If everything went as expected, he would soon have company. The thought of what he had to do filled him with horror.
It was only a question of time before she appeared.
Nadia.
The woman who had been recruited by Efraim for Mossad as a secret source on the West Bank. Who had been known as the Paper Boy. And who had given birth to Efraim’s child.
Benjamin.
He had reached the age of ten by the time he rushed into a house and activated an explosive device hidden under the floor.
He had been running away from Gideon and Saul, while Efraim stood to one side, phoning for reinforcements. He had never been able to forgive Gideon and Saul for what they had done. He had sworn that one day they would pay. The fact that they didn’t know Benjamin was his son and therefore wouldn’t understand why their sons had to die was irrelevant. Revenge was still necessary.
It had seemed so simple. If Efraim Kiel looked back, he had made only one mistake: he had told her what he intended to do.
‘Next year a decade will have passed,’ he had said. ‘And then I am going to go to Stockholm and end the lives of Gideon and Saul’s sons, in return for what they did to Benjamin.’
He had wanted to leave Gideon’s second child, Polly, out of the whole thing.
And that was where it had all gone wrong.
Because Efraim had told Nadia, who called herself Mona Samson these days, that there was another child. And she wanted him to take both, because she had no children left. The discussion had turned into a full-blown quarrel, but he had thought he had emerged as the victor. Until the day he received a message from the Paper Boy at his hotel.
He had been stupid. Unbelievably stupid. He realised that now. He had sent her a message before he left Israel, said he was on his way to Stockholm to put things right. That his plans were in place, the time had come.
He had hoped the message would bring her peace.
But it hadn’t.
She must have put a considerable amount of effort into her own preparations. Set up a new identity, created a dummy company. And, if you believed the media reports that had reached Israel by now, she had also embarked on a relationship with the father of one of the dead boys. They didn’t mention her name, but Efraim knew.
Nadia with Saul or Gideon. The very thought made him feel sick.
It couldn’t be true.
Efraim’s preparations had been rigorous and time consuming. He had got in touch with the boys via Super Troopers, an online forum he had heard about on a visit to Stockholm the previous autumn. If he hadn’t found them there, he would have contacted them some other way. He wanted to make sure they came along voluntarily the day he abducted them; he didn’t want to kill them on the spot. That would destroy half the point of the murders.