He hated lying to Fredrika. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly lying, but he was deliberately withholding information which he really should have passed on to her. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her what had happened, besides which he assumed the matter would soon be resolved.
He immediately realised that he had made a series of errors. Bringing Saga with him didn’t look good; she lay there asleep in her buggy, the very personification of his sinful life. Nor did the meeting appear to have the aim of putting an end to a regrettable misunderstanding. Spencer very quickly became aware that in fact the opposite was true.
‘Spencer, we have conducted a significant number of lengthy interviews on the situation with which we are faced,’ Erland Malm began. ‘And believe me, it hasn’t been an easy exercise.’
He paused and looked at Spencer as if to check that he was really listening. Which he was.
‘Tova’s accusations are so serious that we feel we have no alternative but to take the matter further, so that any uncertainty can be removed once and for all.’
Erland appealed silently to his colleagues, hoping that someone else would feel able to carry on. No one spoke.
‘What uncertainty?’ said Spencer.
‘I’m sorry?
‘You said you wanted to remove any uncertainty, but I don’t understand what you mean.’
Erland pursed his lips and glanced at the woman representing the university board, who took over: ‘When a student comes forward to report the kind of experiences Tova has outlined, it is our duty to take that person seriously,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, our reputation would be damaged, and student confidence in us would be eroded. The matter has been raised within the student body, and we are under considerable pressure to act.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Spencer said. ‘I’ve said it’s all nonsense. You’ve spoke to Malin, who was also Tova’s supervisor. She can confirm that Tova is lying.’
‘Unfortunately, that is not the case,’ Erland said. ‘Malin doesn’t know what happened when you were alone with Tova. In addition, other points have emerged which we must now take into account.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like your emails to Tova, for example.’
Spencer blinked.
‘Emails?’
Erland removed a sheet of paper from a plastic folder and pushed it across to Spencer, who read through it with mounting astonishment.
‘What the hell…?’
The woman from the board agreed.
‘That’s exactly what I said. What the hell has got into Professor Lagergren? You just can’t take liberties like that!’
Spencer looked in disbelief at the printed messages.
‘I didn’t send these,’ he said, pushing the sheet of paper away. ‘For a start, I don’t communicate with my students by email, and secondly I would never express myself in that way.’
‘They come from your email account, Spencer.’
‘Bloody hell, anybody could have sneaked into my office and sent them! This isn’t the CIA; my computer is open for anyone to use if I forget to lock my door when I leave!’
‘Let’s just calm down,’ Erland said in a desperate attempt to assert his authority. ‘You have to understand that we cannot simply assume that someone else sent these messages. And given the gravity of the content and the concrete nature of the accusations, we have decided to advise Tova to make a formal complaint to the police.’
Spencer felt the colour drain from his face.
He looked at the messages again. Three of them.
‘Tova, it’s unfortunate that you have chosen not to accede to my demands. Sadly, it looks as if your dissertation will suffer if you do not do what I have asked you to do. Come up to my office after 7 p.m. tomorrow and I’m sure we can reach an agreement. Spencer.’
In spite of himself, he laughed out loud.
‘This is absolutely ridiculous. I’ve never seen these messages, and I certainly didn’t write them. I…’
He broke off.
‘Let’s go to my office and check my messages,’ he said. ‘If they really did come from my computer, they should be in the “Sent” folder.’
‘And if they’re not?’ said the board member. ‘That could simply mean that you’ve deleted them.’
Spencer was already on his way out of the room, heading towards his own office down the corridor. The rest of the group followed hesitantly. Spencer was limping, because he had left Saga behind in her buggy; without a stick or the buggy to lean on, his leg ached more than usual.
It took a couple of minutes to log in, but it was long enough for him to start feeling extremely nervous. He used email far too infrequently to bother organising his folders. The messages someone else had sent could easily be sitting there in the ‘Sent’ folder waiting to be discovered, he realised as he clicked through the menus with a trembling hand.
But they weren’t there. There wasn’t a trace of the messages that had been sent to Tova, and nor were they in the ‘Trash’ folder.
‘This doesn’t prove anything,’ Erland said.
Spencer swallowed hard.
‘What do you actually want? What can I do to get out of this mess?’
‘Prove that none of this ever happened,’ Erland said. ‘But to be honest, I think that’s going to be very difficult.’
Once, when Peder was a child, a classmate had started a rumour about him.
‘Peder sucks up to Miss, that’s why she always gives him a gold star for his Maths tests.’
It made no difference that Peder could show he had got all the answers right in the tests; the other children still chose to believe the boy who said the stars were a result of Peder sucking up to the teacher. That was the first time Peder realised how soul-destroying the battle against a rumour can be. It is impossible to shake off certain things; they acquire a life of their own and cannot be suppressed.
The suggestion that Rebecca Trolle had been selling sex over the Internet seemed to be just such a rumour. All her friends had heard it, but none of them knew where the information had come from. And when the police started asking questions, they became evasive. No one wanted to be held responsible for passing on the gossip, no one was prepared to admit that he or she had started it.
The interesting thing was that the rumour had begun after Rebecca’s disappearance. As if it were an answer to the question why. Why did she disappear? Because she was selling sex over the internet, and one of her clients killed her.
Peder met Diana Trolle’s friend and the friend’s daughter in reception.
‘We’d like to speak to you separately,’ he explained.
Diana’s friend went off with another officer while Peder took the daughter, Elin. She looked scared when he opened the door of one of the bright interview rooms; she hesitated, and for a moment he thought he might have to chase her along the corridors of HQ.
‘Please sit down.’
They sat down on opposite sides of the table. He considered how best to tackle the conversation. On the one hand, he would quite like to give the girl a good shake, pin her up against the wall and ask her how the hell she could say such a stupid thing about a dead classmate. On the other hand, he didn’t really think this would achieve the desired effect. Elin looked as if she was on the verge of tears, more like a fourteen-year-old girl than a woman of twenty-five.
‘It wasn’t me,’ she said before Peder had even opened his mouth.