‘I don’t know; I’m in the middle of a new investigation and…’
‘I saw you on TV; your jumper looked great!’
The jumper he had been given for Christmas. The worst Christmas in living memory.
‘Are you coming?’
‘Mmm, if I can fit it in. You know how it is, these cases take time, and…’
‘Dad.’
‘Yes?’
‘Just come over. OK?’
She was so much like her mother. The same voice, the same drive, the same stubbornness. She would do well in life.
He ambled past Fredrika’s office; she was absorbed in the documents from the investigation into Rebecca’s disappearance. When she heard his footsteps, she looked up with a smile.
‘I thought you were supposed to be working part time,’ Alex said.
Half joking, half serious.
Don’t be like the rest of us – don’t forget your family as soon as you come back to work after your maternity leave.
‘I am,’ Fredrika replied. ‘I just wanted to read for a while before I go home. What an active person she must have been.’
‘Rebecca? Indeed she was, to say the least. The investigation was a mass of dead ends. Part time jobs, student life, the church choir, friends, the world and his wife.’
‘We need to speak to that friend of Diana’s, and her daughter, about the rumour that Rebecca was selling herself on the internet.’
‘We do.’ Alex smiled. ‘But not you, Fredrika. It’s time you went home.’
She returned his smile.
‘In a minute. One question before I go: What was she studying when she disappeared?’
‘The history of literature, as far as I remember.’
‘What level? How far had she got?’
‘I’m not really sure. I think she was writing her dissertation. We spoke to her supervisor; he was a bit odd, but hardly her new boyfriend, and definitely not a murderer.’
‘Alibi?’
‘Just like everyone else we spoke to.’
Fredrika leafed through the papers in front of her.
‘I wonder who he was, this new boyfriend. I mean, it could be someone she met on the internet.’
Alex nodded in agreement.
‘You’re right. But in that case, why didn’t one single person tell us she was meeting men online? Girls talk about that kind of thing, don’t they?’
‘They do.’
Fredrika looked pensive.
‘The child,’ she said. ‘Someone must have know she was expecting. She must have contacted a pregnancy advisory centre.’
‘Must she? By the fourth month?’
Fredrika rummaged through the piles of paper.
‘I’ve looked very carefully at the list of items the police took away,’ she said. ‘You turned her student room upside down, made a note of which fluoride tablets she used, her preferred brand of tampons. There’s nothing about contraceptive pills.’
Alex came into the room, walked behind Fredrika and read over her shoulder.
‘They made a note of every item of medication found in Rebecca’s room.’
‘Cough medicine, Alvedon, Panodil,’ Fredrika read. ‘Believe me, none of them work as a contraceptive.’
‘Perhaps she’d run out?’ Alex suggested. ‘And because she wasn’t in a relationship, she didn’t renew the prescription?’
‘And when she did have sex after all, they didn’t use any protection. That sounds odd to me, given how careful she had been in the past.’
Fredrika turned to face Alex.
‘I’d like to speak to Diana Trolle again. Ask if she knew where her daughter got her prescription for the pill.’
‘OK. Hopefully, that will enable us to find out when she stopped taking it.’
‘Exactly. And it should give us more information about her pregnancy, at least if she usually had her prescription filled at a clinic. There’s no reason to think that she would go somewhere completely different to discuss her pregnancy.’
‘If she did actually discuss it with anyone.’
Fredrika gathered up the documents on her desk and handed them to Alex.
‘I’ll ring Diana straight away. Then I’m going home. Have you heard anything about Håkan Nilsson from the surveillance team?’
Alex clutched the folders to his chest.
‘Nothing so far. He’s still at work. Peder and I will probably bring him in for a chat this evening.’
Fredrika nodding, trying to remember what Håkan Nilsson had looked like in the pictures she had seen in the files. Pale, thin, a lost look in his eyes. His expression seemed angry in some of the photographs. How angry do you have to be to kill someone, then dismember their body? Put the pieces in plastic bags and bury them? She shuddered. Death was never pretty, but sometimes it was so ugly that it was completely incomprehensible.
Diana Trolle knew exactly where her daughter got her contraceptive pills from: first of all from the youth clinic in Spånga, then later on – when she was too old to go there any more – from the Serafen clinic opposite City Hall.
‘She said a lot of positive things about that place,’ Diana recalled. ‘But I’ve never been there myself.’
Fredrika decided to call in at the clinic on her way home, partly because she felt like a walk, and partly because she was curious.
She tried to phone Spencer as she was leaving work. They had already spoken twice during the day. She could hear from his voice that he was tense, and she wondered if he had taken on too much. If that was the case, she would have to stay at home for a while longer, that was all there was to it. At the same time, she was frightened by the direction her thoughts were taking.
What would happen to Saga if Fredrika died, and Spencer was unable to look after his daughter? Would she go and live with Fredrika’s brother?
No chance. Spencer would never abandon his only daughter, Fredrika was sure of that.
Spencer interrupted her brooding when he finally answered his mobile. Saga was asleep, he informed Fredrika. It was fine if she came home a bit later than they had agreed.
The walk from police headquarters in Kronoberg to the clinic opposite City Hall was short but invigorating. Fredrika decided to go via Hantverkargatan, and enjoyed breathing in the fresh spring air. It always seemed lighter and cleaner than the air at any other time of year. Good for the soul.
The clinic was located on the first floor of the magnificent building that resembled a British stately home; it was right by the water. Fredrika gazed at all the mothers-to-be, sitting in the waiting room with their big bellies, several of them with older children in buggies. How could people cope with more than one child? She just didn’t get it. Neither she nor Spencer wanted any more children; at least that was how they felt at the moment.
‘One is more than enough,’ Spencer had muttered one night when Saga had a cold and kept on waking up over and over again.
Fredrika showed her ID to the nurse on reception and explained why she was there. The nurse hesitated when she asked to see any notes they might have on Rebecca.
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she said, and returned after a short while with an older colleague.
Fredrika explained the situation again, and the midwife listened attentively. With long fingers she searched through the suspension files in the filing cabinet. She nodded silently to herself as she took one out.
‘I was the one who saw her the last time she was here,’ she said, pointing to a note in the margin. She screwed up her eyes.
‘I see so many women every day, it’s difficult to remember them all.’
You don’t have to remember them all, Fredrika thought. Only this one.
‘But I think I know who you mean,’ the midwife said, much to Fredrika’s relief. ‘She was here to renew her prescription for the pill, but suspected she might be pregnant. She was terribly upset, if I remember rightly.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She was pregnant, of course. I think we worked out she was probably in the third month. She was terrified.’
‘Then what?’
‘She left, saying she was going to get rid of the baby. I have no idea whether she did or not; she never came back.’